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Title: Scout Summary: She almost missed the phone call. She almost missed the phone call. The trip upstairs for more coffee filters took longer than expected, with Jennifer from human resources pulling Scully aside to fill out some medical insurance addenda. Twenty-seven minutes after having left the basement, she returned to the muffled sound of the cell phone. The caller ID number was unfamiliar. With trepidation borne of a hundred anonymous, threatening calls, she pressed the "send" button, the backlit keys glowing around her finger. "Scully," was an impatient bark. A new pot of coffee's siren song was too strong to resist. A pause. She held her breath. "Scully, it's me." Blessed familiarity. She exhaled for the first time in what felt like forever. "Where are you?" Muted sounds of shrieks and grinding metal filtered through the earpiece. "At a park near the apartment." That would explain the noises, then. "Which one?" she asked, wishing she were there, breathing fresh air instead of stale, recycled oxygen. Another pause, too long for comfort. "Mulder?" she prompted. "Sorry, I had to adjust the straps on the baby swing." She wished Will were old enough to laugh, so she could hear him, but settled for picturing his first-stages-of-teething grin. "How is he?" she murmured, her tone wistful. "Just beautiful, Scully. All the moms here at the park are giving him jealous glances. Obviously they must be craving a little Mulder DNA of their own." He didn't laugh, but she did. In her mind's eye, she could see the small dimple he'd developed next to his eye. Will's baby smile had the same dimple, along with another dotting his cheek near the place of his father's mole. "What are you two up to?" She sank into his old desk chair, the cushions having slowly molded to fit her own frame. He had been absent from this office for far too long. She wanted him back here with her. "Right now?" "Yeah," she replied, still shivering at the sound of his voice. He always had a visceral effect on her. He made her blood sing. "Well, let's see." His voice took on a bemused tone. She heard the grinding metal again, probably from two children on a see-saw. "After I fed Will his breakfast, we cleaned up the apartment. He's quite handy with a mop -- did you know that?" "A mop, Mulder? At this age, he can barely even hold a rattle." "Just you wait, Scully." She startled at the promise in his voice. "First a mop, then a baseball bat. And if we're really lucky, he'll have a great driver grip. Have you seen Tiger Woods' career earnings lately?" That earned him a belly laugh, and she finally relaxed. Mulder certainly was trying his damnedest to raise a champion. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Mulder. Right now," she sobered, "I just want him to see him hold a sippy cup and fork when he eats his first birthday cake." A pause. "But maybe that's too much to hope for." His voice sobered too. "Developmentally, you mean?" She closed her eyes. "Yeah. Developmentally." Both were silent for a moment, and she listened intently for any sounds that might be coming from the baby. Instead, she only heard sounds of children far too old to be William. "Guess what?" "What?" she replied, loving the spark in his voice. "When we stopped at the drugstore on the way over, I bought one of those disposable cameras. I'll take some pictures of him in the sandbox, if I can get him to stop squirming long enough." Her face lit up and excitement made her match William's squirming. "More snapshots for the baby book, huh?" "Yeah," he chuckled. "They'll go nicely with those photos of us at the beach last month." She traced the back of her teeth with her tongue, and murmured, "Mmm, my two handsome men, shirtless and covered with sand." One of the framed snapshots was on her desk, everything trimmed away but a close-up of fine black eyelashes matching wispy brown hair, and a gummy grin with a small dimple. Next to it was a photo of William at three weeks old, snuggled in her arms as Mulder holds them both close to him, the gold of his bare chest outlining her shoulders. Maggie had caught them lolling around in pajamas one morning, and smiled as she took the photo. He must have noticed her silence, because Mulder asked, "Are you okay?" "I'm fine," she replied by rote, but she missed her boys. She wanted to be the one pushing him on the swing set, instead of suffering fruitless investigations and a paper cut from licking an envelope to send off yet another document request to a faraway police department. She wanted to be anywhere but in the basement. He cleared his throat. "Anyway," he continued, "I'll finish this roll of film and drop it off for developing on the way home. You'll love 'em, Scully. Six months old is a wonderful age." "Yes, it is," she murmured. Another pause, then he said, "Hang on a sec," followed by scuffling sounds that she assumed were him putting the phone in his pocket. A few moments later, she heard snuffles and whines. "Say 'hi' to your mommy, Scout," Mulder urged, and the baby's fussing abated. "Hi, Scout," she whispered in reply. Her heart leapt, then broke just a little bit. Mulder had begun calling him 'scout' after her own childhood nickname. She listened to his tiny babbling, matched by Mulder's "There you go, boy." Her son's cooing suddenly shifted into a full-throated wail, and Scully heard his father's low, wordless comfort. She drank in the sounds. The baby would not be calmed. He wanted his mother. And she wanted him too. "Sorry, Scully," Mulder said with regret in his voice. "I'm going to have to cut this call short. He needs to have his diaper changed, and I'd better do that before we attract too much attention." "That's all right. Take care of him, Mulder." She couldn't summon more than a whisper. He paused, and Will's tiny wails echoed through the connection. "We'll be home before long, okay?" "Okay." Before disconnecting, she whispered, "I love you two." She heard a sniffle that might have come from Mulder. "We love you too." The connection was severed. Phone still in hand, she rested her forehead on the edge of the desk and tried not to weep. When she finally raised her head, Doggett was standing across from her, a thinly-veiled look of pity on his face. She didn't have the heart to ask how long he had been watching her, nor did she really care. "Mulder called again." It wasn't a question, though his brows raised in an extension of his pity. She nodded. He pulled over a chair and sat opposite from her, shifting a file from his hands to the top of the desk. "This is, what, the fourth time he has called?" She nodded again, and steeled her voice to keep it from breaking. "He and the baby were at a park. He didn't say where." Plucking a tissue from the box that had recently taken up residence on her desk, she dabbed the moisture away from her eyes. Her partner was silent, but she knew he'd soon say the same thing he always said after these calls. Proving her right, Doggett said, "I don't know why you two are putting yourselves through this, Agent Scully." As if by rote, she replied, "We're doing this because we can't take any chances." Each word was carefully measured, more for the sake of her composure than to refute his point. "But we haven't heard anything else since we first got that threat a few months ago. None of the leads have panned out, and those hacker friends of yours haven't come up with anything. Hell, you yourself said you haven't perceived anyone following you or keeping tabs on your location. Same goes for Mulder in those e-mails he sends." Doggett paused to take a breath. "For all we know, that warning could've just been someone blowing smoke." Bad choice of words, she wanted to tell him, but didn't. Men blowing smoke was exactly why they were in this position. "Your son is in danger," the note slipped under the apartment door three months ago had said. Two hours later, she kissed her lover and her son goodbye. "Whether it was an idle threat or not," she replied, wanting to spit out his name even though she did like him most of the time, "we are talking about my son's life." Doggett sat back in his chair, a defeated look replacing the pity on his face. After a moment, he said, "Well." The word broke the silence. She did not reply. He picked up the framed photograph on her desk -- the one with William playing in the sand of whatever coastal town Mulder had taken them to. "Mulder said he's taking some more photos today," she finally said. Her voice felt rusty. "I guess he'll e-mail me in a few days and let me know that they're available on whatever website he uploads them to." "That's good." Both of them sounded hollow, timeworn. Old. Her partner had become emotionally invested in William and Mulder's flight, taking it to heart nearly as much as she had. Perhaps he was projecting his own experiences with a missing child, Scully thought. His second-guessing wore on her nerves, but she appreciated the sympathetic and understanding ear. As much as he frustrated her with his assertions that she and Mulder were overreacting, his support helped. Returning the photograph to her desk, Doggett stood and smoothed down his suit jacket, a nervous gesture she'd never before seen him make. "Well, I only came down to drop off the file. I'm due back upstairs to go over the ballistics data from the Hartford case." She sat up a little straighter, but felt her shoulders sag. "Thanks. I'll look over the file in a minute." "All right." He walked toward the door, but turned around before stepping through it. "Take care of yourself, okay?" She nodded, and he left. "Three months," Mulder had said as she nursed William for the last time. Tears fell on silky strawberry-blond hair that the most recent photographs showed had turned darker as he grew. "We'll give it three months and see if the threat pans out. If nothing happens, Scout and I will come back here." He hadn't wanted to take such a drastic step, protesting that they could keep him just as safe together, with all the resources at their disposal. But she'd been convinced that they had to get William as far away from the threat as possible, that they couldn't take any chances. They discussed it for a half-hour, exploring every possible scenario, before finally choosing to have him leave with William. He wouldn't tell anyone where he was going, but he would keep in contact via e-mail and a series of pre- paid cell phones, discarding each after using it once. Privacy was the key. It seemed like such a perfect plan. Painful for both of them, but safe. She hadn't realized then how deeply the absence would gouge her heart. As Mulder hastily packed some bags and called the Gunmen to arrange for cash to be withdrawn from a special bank account they'd set up months before, Scully paced around the apartment, holding William close to her heart. He'd stopped nursing a few minutes earlier, and now stared up at her with a smile on his tiny face. Although it was probably due to gas, she wanted to believe he was giving her his love so she could keep it close even when she couldn't hold him. She hadn't let go of the baby until she had to put him in his carrier and take him down to the car. Mulder said his goodbyes with a long, deep kiss. William began to cry. That was ten weeks ago. Scully turned to her private computer and opened two browser windows, first activating the proxy firewall the Gunmen had set up. In one of the windows, she went to the website to which Mulder uploaded the photos he scanned of William. She stared at them for a long while, watching her child grow up in absentia. In the second browser window, she went to one of the five web-based e-mail accounts she'd created, and typed in the most recent address she had for Mulder. She started to write. "Almost three months. All quiet on the Potomac." Scully sent the e-mail, then began the long wait for Mulder's reply. Perhaps the time for overreacting had passed. The two of them could protect their child together. At home. William needed both his father and his mother. She needed her lover and her son. End
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