From: Kirsten Kerkhof Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:21:45 +0200 Subject: "A Mother's Tale" by Kirsten Kerkhof Source: direct TITLE: "A Mother's Tale" AUTHOR: Kirsten Kerkhof * CLASSIFICATION: MSR KEYWORDS: S R A RATING: PG SPOILERS: This is not Happening, DeadAlive, One Breath, Redux II SUMMARY: Scully and her teenage daughter Katherine have a serious mother-daughter conversation. DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Why would I be the lucky one, huh? They belong to CC, DD, GA, 1013 and Fox and no infringement is intended. ARCHIVING: Sure. I'll do Gossamer myself, all others: you're welcome when you tell me where it's going, 'kay? FEEDBACK: Cherished and worshipped at . Mulders on offer for those who write, seeing that CC doesn't need him anymore! NOTE: William was returned to them, a daughter was born, 2012 never happened -- it's just a normal day in the future. XxXxXxXxX Mulder family home June 16, 2020 "Hey, honey, what is it?" She shrugs. Classic 17-year-old behaviour, I guess. If mom asks if anything is wrong, nothing usually is. I smile as I continue peeling and cutting the apples. "Nothing, mom. What are you making?" "Apple pie. Uncle Bill and his family are coming over tomorrow, remember?" "Oh, yeah." She pulls up a kitchen stool and sits down, watching me. I was right, something is the matter. I don't push though. She's more like her father than he is and I've learnt how to deal with Mulder behaviour over the years. If I want her to clam up, the best way to go there is to push it. "Can I help?" I smile and hand her a pie mould. "That would be lovely. Can you grease the moulds for me?" She hops off the stool, gets the butter and the pastry brush, and starts greasing the pie moulds. She's fixated on her task and I get a bit concerned. Still, I hold my tongue. She may already have talked to her father about this -- Mulder and Katherine are a unity nothing and nobody can come between -- but if she's here now, it means she has something to share, and I don't want to scare her. "Mom?" "Yes?" I finish slicing the apples and pour the slices in a big bowl. "How do you and dad do it?" I raise my eyebrows and smile mischievously, making her blush. "No! Not that!" She sighs in exasperation. A dirty mind is a joy forever, they sometimes say, and Mulder and I have had too much fun over the past years to wipe that from my mind. We may be a little older now, but that part of our relationship hasn't changed a bit. Guess it came from waiting so long ... "I'm sorry, sweetheart, I shouldn't have done that. So, what do you mean?" She sighs again, putting the two moulds down on the kitchen counter. Something really bugs her. "How do you two stay so in love?" "Is this about Jason?" Jason is her boyfriend of just over a year. They met in class at the start of her Freshman year and they have been inseparable ever since. Mulder had his doubts about Jason, but I guess that comes with the daddy territory -- you try to find a father who approves of any guy his little darling daughter brings home. But Jason is a sweet, serious, intelligent young man who treats her well and I don't think we could ask for more at this point. "Yeah." "Is there something wrong with him?" She shakes her head, her hands folded in her lap. She's wearing a pair of dark jeans and a bright top, and her long chestnut curls cascade down her back. "No, that's the problem. He's perfect." I smile. "And that's a problem ... how?" "I don't want him to be perfect. It makes me feel so insignificant." I take the dough from the fridge where it had been resting, but it can wait a little longer. This conversation needs my attention. "You're not insignificant," I say. She nods. "I know. But how can I compete with perfection?" She sighs once again. "I mean, he's a straight-A student, he's kind and gentle and I'm the envy of all my friends because he's so gorgeous." I smile. "And how does this make him different from you?" She chuckles. "Yeah, well, I have to work really hard for my grades now." "Honey, so has he, and if he tells you differently, he's lying. No one gets a degree from Yale for free." I look at her. "He's not treating you badly, is he?" "You mean that he's beating me or something?" She shakes her head. "No, not at all. He's really sweet, he treats me like a princess." She frowns. "It pisses me off sometimes ..." I smile widely. I rise from my stool and put the kettle on for tea. She follows my example and takes two mugs from the cupboard. "Good idea, mom." "Yeah, well, there's not a problem in the world that can't be solved over a good cup of tea." She grins. "You sound just like Jill." Jill is one of her best friends. She's an exchange student from Cambridge University in England and I've already heard stories about how any crisis in the house Katherine is in gets solved over tea. Failed exams? Tea. Broken heart? Tea. Total mental breakdown? More tea, dammit. I pour the water into the teapot and wait a few minutes. She hasn't said a word, proving once more that she's worrying. She was a late talker as a child, but when she finally did get the hang of this talking lark, she must have decided she liked it, because she hasn't stopped talking since. I fill the mugs with tea and we resume our seats on the kitchen stools, steaming mugs of tea in our hands. It's a fine warm early summer afternoon, but tea has a comforting quality that eclipses any outside temperature. "Sometimes I get jealous of you and dad," she says softly. "How is that?" "Like, you love each other so much and it doesn't seem to get old or anything. Even Will said so yesterday, and you know he never notices anything!" I chuckle. I know she hasn't exactly got it right in this judgement of her older brother, but I don't correct her. She's opening up to me so I'm not going to disagree on something so trivial. "Well, we went through a lot in the first ten years of our friendship," I say, understating the facts. "It wasn't all plain sailing, but it did cement our love for each other." "Yeah ..." She stirs, then sips her tea. She drinks her tea with milk, something she must have picked up from Jill. Mulder didn't know whether or not to be pleased with that, as it brought back memories, both good and bad, from his time in Britain. But Katherine soon won that issue as she usually does. She has her father wound securely around her finger. "You know, mom ..." "What?" "Sometimes ... sometimes I wish I could go through the same with Jason as you did with dad." I choke on my tea. She cannot be serious. I shake my head. "No, you don't." She looks at me, her hazel eyes large and wondering. "But you just said it made your relationship into what it is now, and as far as I can tell it's pretty much perfect!" I sigh. "Honey, how much has your father told you about the years before you two were born?" "Well, he's told me about your cancer, but you got cured and as far as I know that was a time you two were incredibly close throughout the tragedy. He said that the day he had to go for that hearing, he was tempted to just skip it to stay with you and deal with the consequences later. And when you were taken and disappeared for three months -- that was three months, right?" I nod, but I don't comment. It's 25 years ago, but the wound still hasn't healed completely. Of course it never helped that it got torn right open and worse eight years later. "Anyway," she goes on, "he said that he nearly went over the edge with worry. That's pretty intense, mom." I nod again. I take a deep breath. We've never told the kids, or at least I haven't, about what happened when I was expecting William -- how can you possibly tell your children that the man they know and love as their father was dead and buried for three months? -- but maybe the time has come. "What has he told you about the time I was pregnant with Will?" She looks at me. "He said he was really seriously ill and that neither of you expected him to live to see Will." She must see the pain in my eyes at the memory and she goes on. "Was it that bad?" she whispers. "It was worse ..." I reply in an equally soft voice. I look at my mug and I spot my wedding ring. Something stings inside and I let out a soft sob. She reaches out to lay her hand on mine. I marvel at her beautiful slender hand on top of my aging one. I once had hands like hers, although she has her father's long fingers, but time has moved on. "How can it have been worse?" she asks. I look up at her and shake my head. She's the spitting image of her father, of the man I very nearly lost forever, and it touches a very raw nerve. I bite my lip and try not to cry, but God knows I'm only just succeeding. "He ... he wasn't just ill ..." I whisper, looking past her in the direction of the living room where I know Mulder's watching last night's baseball game. He returned from doing the groceries an hour ago and he decided he deserved a break. Well, he's not the young man he once was so I suppose he was right. I wish he'd come over into the kitchen though, I need a hug ... "But, he said he was, like, dying," Katherine says, her voice betraying her confusion. "How ..." And her eyebrows shoot up, then fold into a frown. "He was already dead," I say, my voice shaky. I lick my lips and frown too. 19 years and it still hurts like hell. Will I never get over this? She gasps. "You ... I mean ... but he's ..." She shakes her head in disbelief. "I don't understand, I ..." I nod slowly, feeling a lone tear drip down onto my hand. "But he's ... he's in the living room! How can you have buried him when he's over there in the living room?!" She's quite upset now and I can't blame her. I can almost hear the gears in her head spin as she tries to process what she just heard. She's inherited her father's genius IQ, but even for someone as intelligent as she is, this is hard stuff to handle. "Please, don't tell me he's ... that he's not ..." Her voice trails off in a tear-filled whisper. I know what she wants to say and I hold up my hand. "He's your father, and there is not a doubt about it." "But if he died when you were pregnant with Will, and I'm two years younger, how can I be his daughter?" "He was returned to me," I say, unable to hide a small smile. As traumatic as those months were, the moment I got him back is one of the highlights of my life, along with the birth of our two children and our wedding day. It's clich?, but only because it's true. "How?" she whispers. I take a deep breath. The tea in my mug has gone completely cold and I rise to get some fresh tea, but she stops me with a gentle hand on my arm. It's a gesture that's so much like her father's that to me it only reinforces the notion that she truly is his. "No," she goes on, "first tell me how. Please." Her eyes are pleading with me and I cannot help but give in. She's right, she deserves an answer now. I sit back on the stool. "How did you get him back?" "He was abducted when we were on a case," I start, taking deep breaths to keep a cool head. Be business- like about it, Dana, I tell myself. No need to get more emotional about it than is necessary. "We'd returned to the place where we'd had our very first case ..." "You met in 1994, right?" she asks. I smile. "'92," I correct her. "March 6th, 1992." "How old were you when you met dad?" My smile grows a little more as I fondly remember those early days. I wonder if she's doing this on purpose, to make me feel more at ease and to give me the strength to carry on talking about it. It wouldn't surprise me. "I was 28, your father was 31." I chuckle lightly. "God, we were so young ..." "I saw pictures," she grins. "Dad was really quite handsome." I nod, smiling with the happy memories. I'm twisting my wedding ring round and round as I recall those first heady cases when we were testing the boundaries of our relationship. "He was gorgeous. He drove me nuts, but he also ... well, I don't think you want to hear that about your parents." She grins. "He turned you on, right?" I look up at her. I'm sure my eyes are sparkling. "Honey, he's never turned me off." She blushes a little. "I still think Jason is better-looking," she says and I smile. "Sweetheart, your guy is God's gift to women." She smiles a little ruefully. "Yeah, and he knows it!" "Thank God he has an equally gorgeous girlfriend." This makes her grin and she tosses back her long glossy curls. She knows she's beautiful, but thank God she's quite level-headed about it. This time it's her who gets up and pours us both some more tea. When she's handed me my mug and we're both seated again, I notice that her smile has gone. "So you were back in ... what state was it?" she says. I nod, my smile well and truly gone now too. "Oregon. We'd come full circle," I say, "back to where we'd once started. He needed answers, closure, but I was petrified. I'd let him go by himself in the past, and of course he'd taken off on his own before, but this time ..." I sigh. "... I think I had a premonition of doom. We were back in Oregon and somehow I had a feeling that where it had once started would be where it was going to end. But I wasn't ready for it to end." "Did you tell him?" I shake my head. "It made no sense, there was no reason whatsoever to think that we wouldn't just investigate what was going on, write that report and then go back home. And we had Skinner with us." "You mean uncle Walter?" she asks and I nod. She twists a curl of her hair. "I miss him." I nod again. "Me too, honey, he was a good man. We all miss him." "So, uncle Walter was there with you?" "He needed to know," I go on, "and he was going to come with us. Only, your father wouldn't let me go into the forest with them. I was furious." "Why?" "I thought it was --" "No, why wouldn't he let you come?" I frown. "I think he was trying to protect me. We'd only just ... well, we'd only just become lovers-" "You waited nine years?" I chuckle. "Yeah, well, I'll tell you about that later if you want." I feel the smile drain from my face. "I was outraged that he'd even think about pulling that kind of chivalrous bullshit on me, but he wouldn't budge. He said he couldn't risk it." "Maybe he did it because you were pregnant. You were pregnant with Will at the time, weren't you?" "I was, but I didn't know it yet. We'd made love only the night before, I may only have been pregnant for a day, God knows, and I really doubt whether he knew, I mean, he couldn't know. No, I think it was just him being him, ditching me to protect me. And I couldn't stand it." I take a few breaths, collecting my thoughts, calming my emotions. God, 19 years have passed and it still feels like yesterday. "And the next thing I remember is Ski- uncle Walter coming back, telling me that ... that your father had been taken." "By whom?" I shake my head. "He'd been abducted, by the same extraterrestrial beings whose existence he'd defended for all those years. And I knew this could not end well, but I didn't believe for a moment it would end as badly as it did." "What happened?" I take a deep breath and once again look in the direction of the living room. I hear footsteps and then Mulder appears in the doorway. I smile at him. 'You okay?' he mouths and I nod. He must notice the distress in my eyes, but he doesn't say anything. Katherine, meanwhile, has of course noticed something is going on and she turns her head. "Oh, hi dad." Mulder enters the kitchen, smiles widely at his daughter, then bends over a little to kiss me. "Are you okay?" he repeats, this time saying it out loud. I see the concern in his eyes. Again I nod. "I'm fine. We're having a mother-daughter conversation." He smiles, searching my eyes, then nodding once. "Must be a serious one. I'll leave you to it then." He takes a can of beer from the fridge and smiles at me again. Then he walks into the living room again and disappears from our view. "See, that's what I meant!" Katherine says. "That's what I want between Jason and myself, that thing you and dad have. That kind of love and care! God, he cares so much about you!" I smile. "I know." "So, when dad was abducted, what happened?" she asks, dragging me back to my story. I bite my lips. "He went missing for months. And all the while I was pregnant with your brother, his first child, and he didn't even know about it. But I was confident, or at least I tried to tell myself I was, that he'd be returned to me and I'd be able to tell him, or maybe even show him his first-born." "He came back, right?" I nod. "Yes, but when I found him, he'd died." She gasps softly. "He was dead when you found him?" I nod again. "I think he may still have been alive when they ... dumped him, because when uncle Walter and I found him his body wasn't completely cold yet. But it was winter, and he was naked when I found him, and I don't think he had a chance ..." My voice trails off to a mere whisper. God, this hurts. "And then?" she whispers. I fold my hands before my mouth, looking away, and I feel tears stinging in my eyes. "I buried him. What else could I do?" Tears are now running down my cheeks. I can't stop them. "It was the worst day of my life, and when I reached through the snow to take a handful of soil to toss onto his coffin ..." I'm panting as the memories come flooding back. I look at her and I see tears in her eyes too. It's enough, I break down. I feel how her arms come around me as I cry. I wonder if I ever cried for this before, and I doubt it. I'd cried in Skinner's arms after the funeral, and I'd spent hours in my mother's embrace as I mourned the death of the man I loved so much, but I don't think I ever cried for losing him in the first place. "I think William saved me," I say after a while. She gently lets go of me and we simultaneously reach for the box of tissues on the kitchen counter, causing a smile in both of us. "How?" She asks when we have our tissues and are mopping up the tears we've shed. I sigh. "After I'd buried him, I didn't feel any reason to stay alive, except for the fact that I was carrying his child. If I hadn't been pregnant, I have little doubt I would have killed myself." "What? But you couldn't ... I mean, Father Andrews said ..." I nod. "I know, God doesn't want us to kill ourselves, it's not up to us humans to decide when our life is over, but ..." I look down. "... after I buried your father, I lost all faith. I could not believe there was a God, if this was allowed to happen. And if there was no God, there was no faith. And if there was no faith, there were no rules for me to abide by. I was lost, it was as though I was a ship, torn away from the shore and adrift on a vast ocean of darkness. And I just wanted to be with him, wherever he was. I couldn't be without him. So suicide seemed the only option -- if it wasn't for the fact that, even if my own life was now worthless in my eyes, the budding life within me was so precious. I couldn't destroy that, and it kept me going, knowing I would at least have part of him with me ..." I see her nod. "So Will saved you?" "He saved all of us. I wasn't supposed to be able to have children, I mean, your father and I had tried IVF and that hadn't worked, so the fact that I got pregnant the ... old-fashioned way so to speak, was a miracle in itself. I couldn't sacrifice that." "How did you know dad wasn't dead after all?" Ah, the million-dollar question ... I smile ruefully. "I didn't. Not with any kind of certainty at least. He'd been dead for three months and ..." I sigh. "Let's just say I had a hunch." "A hunch? And they agreed to do an exhumation based on that?" I smile a little. "I would never have gotten the permit if it hadn't been for Walter Skinner. He still had access to some strings he could pull, and I got my way." "Did you expect to find him alive?" I bite my lips. "Honestly? I expected to find a rotting corpse ..." Her face is a picture of disgust, but then it relaxes and she nods slowly. "Yeah, after three months ..." "But when we opened the casket things were quite different, and I found out my hunch had been correct. We rushed him to hospital where he woke up soon afterwards." She nods. Then a thought seems to hit her and she freezes. "Mom, if you hadn't exhumed him ..." I nod as well, knowing where this is heading. "Would he have been buried alive?" She gives another nod and I sigh. "I don't know, sweetheart. I don't even know what brought him back. I mean, I've seen plenty of dead bodies over the course of my professional career, and your father displayed most definitely all the signs of death when I found him. But could it have been a kind of coma we were not familiar with? I honestly don't know. It may have been. All I know is that I got him back and in the situation I was in, that was all I cared about." "So everything was fine and you two lived happily ever after, right?" I chuckle. "Well, not really. We had a couple of rough years ahead, but after we retired from active service things certainly took a turn for the better, especially after we had William and you and we got married. You may want to keep this quiet to your brother, but Will was a miracle and your father's always claimed you were the answer to our prayers." She smiles widely. "Awww, mom ... You really think so?" I give her a hug. "I know so, sweetheart." I look up at her, our gorgeous young grown-up daughter. God, I'm proud of her. And of William, wherever he is right now. Probably with his girlfriend. Thank God neither of the kids inherited their parents' anti-social streak. "I think you're forgetting about the pies, mom," she says with a smile. "Oh, darnit," I say, picking up the dough. It has warmed up a little, but I think it's salvageable. She chuckles. "Here, let me help you. I think I can figure out how to bake an apple pie." She takes the rolling pin and starts rolling out the dough for the two pies. Meanwhile I return to the apple slices which have turned brown. Oh well, they'll taste no differently when we're all done. I add cinnamon, sugar and sultanas and give the mixture a good stir. "Mom?" "What is it, honey?" "If, you know, dad and you only got that love because of ... you know ..." "Mm-mm?" She puts down the rolling pin and looks at me. "Maybe I should settle for a little less." I chuckle. "Don't settle for anything but the best you can have, sweetheart. God knows your father and I never did." I lean over and kiss her on the cheek. Then we return to the pies. Loads to do before Bill arrives tomorrow. THE END