From: "S.L.Kerrison" <[email protected]> Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 21:06:26 +0000 Subject: NEW:Insolitus filia Sorry, forgot to put 'new' and disclaimers in, it's the first time I've posted. Title: insolitus filia I (1/1) Author: Sarah Kerrison Email: [email protected] Rating: G Category: Vignette Spoilers: Spoilers for Emily and Christmas Carol and some mytharc stuff up to the fifth series and other bits are in there somewhere, more reference than spoiler really. Archive: If you want to, but please let me know. Keywords: Summary: This is set in an alternative timeline which diverged during the episode Emily. It is based on the idea that Emily recovered and Scully got custody and is set three years afterwards when she is seven. It's a monologue of Mulder's thoughts.. Feedback would be greatly appreciated because I have never typed up stuff to let others read it Disclaimers: Not mine, all Chris Carter's. Eheu. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is different from how I imagined. It is different and I hate myself for wishing it was otherwise. I look at her and see her happy exhausted face and think how rarely she used to smile. Even her clothes are different, the smart suits exchanged for the slightly less pristine ones, machine washable, instead of dry clean only. I know because I helped her buy a washing machine, a new combination washer dryer with a larger capacity than her old one. Every thing is larger for her these days, even the house, which by the way I helped her buy too. I spent several weekends trailing round estate agents, checking plumbing, listening while she asked about noise from neighbours, security and then finally, blushingly, almost bashfully about schools in the area. She must have asked that question a dozen times, but I don't think she ever tired of the feeling of joy that welled up in her when she spoke of her daughter. Emily Margaret Scully. The Emily given to her by the programme, the Scully a gift from her biological mother, the Margaret a gift from Dana to herself. Her child, her daughter, she had missed her babyhood, she had missed most of her firsts, she was given the task of naming the middle section of Emily's name. She talked about this for weeks beforehand with me, toying with Katherine or Melissa, Isobel, Jessica and Helen. In the end she called her daughter after the mother who had treated her so badly and who could barely bring herself to touch the sweet little girl with the blond hair and the big blue eyes. Margaret Scully has been the biggest problem in all of this. At first she denied that anything like this was possible. Dana produced the scientific proof. Then she talked about the unnaturalness of the whole thing and Scully exploded. "Do you think this is how I would have done this if I had had a choice? People took me. They exploited my body. They stole things from me. I have the chance to reclaim a little piece of me that I can't get any other way. Do you know, Mom, that I can't have any other children because of what they did to me? I have Emily. I have my daughter. She is your grand-daughter, what ever you think. You always gave in too easily, didn't you Mom, do you think that I can't see where this pressure is coming from? Well you can tell Bill from me that Emily is a child who is irretrievably part of our family now." But Maggie Scully found it hard to touch Emily and though she tried to treat her normally even I could see that she favoured Matthew and little Patrick, and Charles's twins Katie and Rebecca. Now Scully rarely sees her mother, and Bill and Tina are hardly mentioned. Charles and Bethany live across the other side of the country, up in Washington State, and Scully rarely travels these days. It is so different from the past, and I feel lost and displaced with the changes. At first it was all the same, and at least it felt like the smallest changes would be all that was necessary but then Scully started to put her foot down and I realised exactly what was meant by parenting. It was like the time she brought that dog with her on the case because her mother was away, only now it is a little girl we are talking about, and Scullys mom is way over in California with Bill and Tina and her proper, normal, legitimate grandchildren. That is another problem, you know. The other agents have all started to gossip about where Emily came from. I think the majority verdict is that Miss Ice pulled Mr Spooky and farmed the kid off somewhere. I don't know what Skinner tells people, and I don't care. Scully ignores any comments, or most likely doesn't hear them, so caught up in this "glorious cloud of motherhood". I have started to lose interest in the X-Files. It is not the same these days. I feel like a kid playing at being a G-man while Scully sits at her desk sending me out on missions and processing the results. At first I jokingly called her 'M' after the character in the Bond films, now I go off like a good boy when asked, and spend the rest of my time in the office buried under paperwork and reading junk mail. Maybe that is why whoever is behind all this let Emily recover. Maybe we were being too successful, getting too close to the truth. Maybe whoever they are knew that Scully would do anything for Emily and I would be left helpless to drift without my partner on whom I had come to lean so much. The cases we investigate these days are more dependent on locality and Emily's health than the sudden almost random drives or flights across country, those strange, often tacky motel rooms, the shared intimacy of the feeling that it was us together against the world. I think she saved my back more times than I know. She lied for me, she stood up for me, she believed in me, and now I have lost all this to a seven year old who was not meant to be. In the evenings she still sits in her kitchen typing up reports, and I still occasionally get late night calls about a case, but her kitchen is decorated with splodgy paintings on sugar paper, first grade test papers and carefully drawn figures. Somewhere there is even one of me. I think that in some ways I am the closest thing Emily has to a father. Scully registered me as the next of kin after herself and I am the guardian if anything happens to Scully. I can't help feeling resentful of the changes, of the life that we had. We are still close, but now Emily is the most important thing in her life, and nothing can ever take over that. Sometimes I imagine the three of us living together in the house they share, going to the park, taking trips to the ocean. Sometimes I want to ask Scully if we could become a whole, a family. I can't think that I ever will. I don't know what I would do if she said no. I think that maybe it is better to exist in this in-between world, than to lose Scully altogether. That is what I am afraid of, what I have always been afraid of. I need Scully, but I am not sure how much she needs me. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am thinking of writing a parallel story from Scully's point of view, what do you think? I would REALLY appreciate some feedback to [email protected]