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Title: Tempus Fugit (As Does William) Summary: How life could have been... Author's Notes: Please forgive me this craziness. Its just not like me. Hehe. His visit to her apartment had been a surprise. Not the best approach, Mulder realized. He almost wished that he hadn't bothered as he opened the door to find his son exercising his two month-old lungs. The sound coming from the bedroom made him feel slightly ill as he stood on the mat by the door, waiting to be noticed. Three minutes passed and the screaming went on. He gazed at the mess, unsure of when the hurricane had touched down and how he missed it on the drive over from Alexandria. Nope. Surprise had not been the best approach at all. The door-knob was cool beneath his palm before he had even really entertained the thought of leaving. He paused for just a second too long. Busted. Scully rounded the corner from the bedroom, carrying the squalling pink bundle that appeared to be the new child. "Oh, so nice of you to show up." Mulder wished he could send the Thing back to whichever circle of hell it had issued forth from. As was the case with so much of his life, fatherhood was not going entirely according to plan. "Hey Mummy." Mulder turned, grinning, and released the door handle. "It's too late to be cute, Mulder." "Could he be teething?" Mulder was beginning to sweat, wondering how the room had become so hot so damned quickly. "Maybe he's teething." "He's two months old, you moron." Scully wondered, not for the first time, how many babies she was actually dealing with. "Here. Hold this." The hot worm-child was dropped into his arms, wriggling and howling. She watched Mulder set his jaw against the howling, a wince creeping up to crease his eyes. He stood in the centre of the rug, cringing and holding the tiny child away from him. He felt sick. Scully retreated a step, feeling calmer as she saw Mulder was even less at ease with the baby than she was. If she was going to be a bad mother, she found some consolation in the knowledge that he was going to make a worse father. A week later, things hadn't improved. Mulder found himself standing in the doorway, brushed aside by a pacing Scully. Though he had cleared up the mess from Hurricane William, a bomb appeared to have dropped since his last visit. Was he getting used to the noise, or had he sustained permanent damage to his inner ear? He vaguely recalled some snippet of information about humans being inherently averse to the sound of a crying child. Mental note to self, look it up in the baby-manual. Damned baby-manual. Cover to cover and he still knew jack shit. "God, Mulder, why won't he stop?" The tone of voice suggested that Scully had surpassed anxious and entered the desperate stage of new-parent hysteria. It made Mulder glad that they argued too much to ever live together. "He hasn't stopped since the day he was born." "I know, I know." Sigh. Here we go again. "Have you changed him? Fed him? Burped him?" "I'm not stupid, Mulder. I'm not a bad parent." Her pause dared him to contradict her. "Of course I've done those things. And a hundred others." "Have you considered just leaving him for a while?" She looked sheepish. "I ignored him for nearly an hour last night, just left him in his crib while I hid in the corridor." Sympathetic nod from Mulder. He hadn't stayed beyond the two a.m. feed since Scully had been home from the hospital. One of the advantages of being a bad father. "And...? "The neighbors begged me to put a pillow over his face." "Oh." Mulder managed to answer the phone without actually waking up. Scully's urgent voice drew him upright, but his eyes were still closed. "Mulder, I did something terrible." "Lottie, its four a.m." "William doesn't care what time it is, neither should you." "I'm the bad parent, remember. I get to sleep at night." "Mulder listen to me, I did something terrible." "Okay, I'm listening." Perhaps he should have been more alarmed by the fact that the mother of his child had left their son outside the front door for thirty minutes that night. As it was, he couldn't really blame her. God, the kid cried a lot. "He isn't the same Mulder..." Eyes still closed. "You mean you think our two-month-old baby is mentally altered by the fact that you left him in the corridor outside your apartment? Or as in, Mrs. Etherington from 26B has exchanged him for her pet Pomeranian?" "Not funny Mulder, I need you to come over." "Can't you just describe to me over the phone?" "Can you hear that?" "Hear what Lottie? All I hear is your voice. At four in the morning." "Exactly." "Christ. I'll be right there." That night had been the end of the crying. Though he had bawled for the first two months of his existence, William never uttered a sound for the next five. Scully was as unsettled by her silent, watchful son as she had been by the howling monster. Having consulted his baby-manual, Mulder came to the logical (and highly scientific) conclusion that their son was 'all cried out'. He was growing a little tired of Scully persistently scolding him like a dog 'Bad parent, bad parent'. So, like a good boy, he had begrudgingly moved his belongings from his consecrated 'bachelor-pad' and taken his share of midnight feeds. They now had to set an alarm at hourly intervals, as the silent baby would hoist himself into a sitting position and watch his parents sleep. Mulder found this troubling. They had sought advice from a number of paediatricians regarding William's condition. Aside from two slight bony protrusions between his shoulder-blades that showed up on x-ray at seven months, there was nothing clinically wrong with him. Mulder wondered why they were complaining. After all, Scully had begged strangers in the street to take the wailing baby away. Leave that for the kid to tell his therapist. At seven months, the muttering began. With his usual scientific aptitude, Mulder blamed the child's deep voice on global warming. Nothing to do with the baby-manual this time; it was pure paternal instinct. The Latin phrases were a little harder to explain away. Though he checked the index, there was no entry for advanced knowledge of non-vernacular languages. Scully, refusing to see the funny side, once again took the boy to every paediatrician in town. Predictably, William refused to perform and the term 'Munchausen by proxy' came up more than once. That one was in the index. Meanwhile, little William's 'bony protrusions' were becoming something of a concern. Mirroring the action of his milk-teeth coming through, William soon had a tiny pair of featherless wings behind his shoulder-blades. Scully was inconsolable. Their baby had a full set of sharp little teeth and a pair of wings before his first birthday. Some might say she blamed herself. Those who knew the couple would see that she blamed Mulder. "How can this possibly be my fault?" "Bad genes, Mulder, it must be a throwback." "Aside from a need for corrective lenses in later life, I assure you that my family does not have bad genes, Scully." Mulder was indignant. Besides, he was convinced it had something to do with the power-lines over their house. In which case, there would be a multitude of wingd children at the local nursery in a few years time. Nothing to worry about. As fate would have it, William's beautiful, raven-colored wings, coordinating wonderfully with the jet-black curls he shared with Mulder's mother. Mulder took the flack for the demonic implications of such coloring; family members must have worshipped the devil in the past. The sins of the fathers and all that. William had learnt to flutter his wings before he was crawling. Add the aimless flapping to the ever-widening repertoire of Latin phrases and unyielding blue-eyed gaze. The kid was becoming creepier by the day. Her mother had stopped visiting the apartment once she had been subjected to the fat infant, sitting like a Buddha on his fleece blanket with his gaze fixed on her and his head bobbing like a stationary pigeon as his wings flapped rhythmically behind him. They had been engaged in a stand-off for the whole three hours Grandma had babysat. Never again. Mulder was still looking for a downside. The downside came at around fourteen months. The flapping had become a bum-shuffle, which eventually became a jet-propelled crawl. Mulder joined Scully on the wrong side of harried. There was simply no rest once William became mobile. At least when he was bobbing and staring on the rug they had time to catch their breath. After a minor altercation with an almost airborn baby-walker, a harness and leash became necessary to restrain the aspiring pilot. Whoever coined the term 'terrible twos' hadn't experienced an aeronautical infant. Terrible didn't come close. With a 'normal' child (a phrase that Scully had banned from the house, claiming it to be 'un-pc'), it is necessary to child-proof anything below waist-height that may be a danger to the toddler. With William, it became apparent that waist-height just wouldn't cut it. By the time he got upright, he was also able to hover above ground-level. They tried tying him down in his harness, but he would simply fly up as far as he could and wreak havoc in the small circle he could reach. When he reached the end of his tether, so to speak, the muttering would increase to a frightening intensity, until he was released and allowed to toddle/flutter around like a demented (and horrifically enlarged) butterfly. Scully insisted that his mutterings were benign, child speak, but Mulder was hearing death-threats. They considered getting a specialist in to translate, but argued about it so long they never came to a decision. His parents would chase around after him, righting his course and guiding him away from the furniture. What was left of it. His pointy little teeth had made a fine mess of the mahogany corner unit, the trim on the couches, the dining table and all four chairs. They had tried rubbing clove oil over surfaces, but apparently that only works for puppies. Small children seem to quite like it.
The End
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