Work Text:
Mulder could remember his fathers shoes before he could ever remember his father’s face. Black leather, always polished, always pointed toward the front door.
He could remember hearing them on the hardwood floor in the early mornings, the quiet clink of keys, the scrape of a briefcase dragging across the entryway table. The front door quietly opening with a practiced care so it wouldn’t wake anyone. Sometimes it did anyway.
Fox would crack one eye open from the couch where he’d fallen asleep after watching television too late or from a spot on the floor where he’d built a fort with Samantha.
He would always hear his mother’s sleepy voice. “Bill?”
A soft murmur. The door closing. The silence that followed almost deafening. And then the house would belong to the three of them again.
His father had loved them. In adulthood, Mulder believed that much. As a boy, however, he hadn’t really.
Children don’t understand complicated love. They understand who is there to tie their shoes or read their bedtime stories, who is able to place each stuffed animal in the exact spot it belongs on the mattress or risk upsetting the universe at bedtime.
Bill Mulder provided for his family. He’d paid for their home on the Vineyard. For Sam’s ballet lessons. For Fox’s telescope and stacks of science fiction novels and baseball cleats. He brought home gifts from places he’d never explain and he’d kiss the tops of their heads when he thought they were asleep when he’d return home late into the night.
But in the light of the day, he’d rarely been… present.
Most of the afternoons of his childhood belonged to Samantha, who was forever dragging him outside on some mission.
“Fox, come on!”
“I’m reading.”
“You always say that,” she’d whine.
“Because I’m always reading,” he’d reply flatly, turning a page but glancing up at her from the corner of his eye when she’d appear in his doorway with her hands on her hips.
“I’m the princess.”
“So?”
“So you have to rescue me, it’s your job. And there are dragons.”
“I don’t,” he’d sigh, giving her one of his patented looks of annoyance. “And anyway, maybe the princess should be a little more independent. Women’s lib and all that. Eradicating patriarchal ideologies. Also, there are no dragons.”
She’d roll her eyes at him. “There are today.”
And somehow, there always were, even when he felt especially annoyed with having a little sister hanging around.
Woods became kingdoms, the beach the surface of a far away planet. The sand dunes became mountains they had to climb before imaginary creatures managed to catch them. Hours disappeared as they invented entire worlds that lasted for the afternoon.
They would come home muddy, hungry, and slightly sunburnt. Their mother would sigh dramatically and declare them “feral” while Samantha easily explained away the dirt and grime.
“We discovered Atlantis today,” she’d declare while scrounging for a snack. “Fox got eaten by a sea monster.”
“I got almost eaten.”
Their mother would laugh. Their father was rarely home to hear any of it.
Sometimes he was home, though. On those days, the house felt… formal.
Fox remembered trying to sit up a little straighter at dinner, wanting to tell his father everything. The sea monster. The spaceship they’d built from driftwood. The secret cave they’d discovered near the shore.
His father would offer a faint smile. “Sounds exciting.” The phone would ring or work would call and he’d excuse himself, heading into the den and closing the door behind him.
Fox stopped trying after awhile.
His father wasn’t cruel, not exactly, just distant. As though he was forever standing behind invisible glass, close enough to see but never to touch.
It wasn’t until years later - after Samantha, after so much time at the Bureau, after conspiracies and lies and decades spent chasing a truth he could barely comprehend sometimes - that Mulder understood something terrible.
His father had carried impossible secrets. Impossible guilt. Maybe impossible fear. He’d been trying to protect them, maybe. But children couldn’t tell the difference between a father who couldn’t be present and one who simply chose not to be.
Long after becoming a father himself, those thoughts would haunt Mulder. Sometimes at one in the morning. Sometimes while watching William sleep. Sometimes for no reason at all.
He would stare at his small boy curled around a stuffed fox - Scully had laughed herself nearly breathless when Mulder brought that home - and think to himself, “What if I don’t know how to do this?”
William was two, nearly three, and old enough to ask questions, to run everywhere, to discover that gravity existed and make the adults around him panic on an hourly basis.
“Daddy!”
Mulder glanced up from the report he was reading at the small kitchen table to see William standing in the doorway, naked but for a pair of Spiderman underwear and one of his own ties looped around his neck and brushing the floor behind him.
“Daddy work.”
Mulder glanced behind him. “Scully, look.”
Without looking up from her spot at the cutting board, she answered, “I already told him he looks very professional. Just like his dad.”
William proudly puffed out his tiny chest and Mulder slid the report back into the folder in front of him.
“Well,” he said seriously, “I suppose Special Agent William Mulder should probably inspect headquarters.”
“Okay!” William gasped and took off for the living room, Mulder hot on his heels.
Ten minutes later, they were crawling behind chairs and searching for imaginary evidence while Scully leaned against the kitchen doorway, trying unsuccessfully not to smile.
There were some mornings when the small boy would crawl into their bed long before sunrise and place a small, warm hand on Mulder’s face.
“Daddy?”
“Hmm?”
“Wake-up time?”
“I respectfully decline.”
Tiny fingers would poke at his cheeks and try to pry his eyelids open. “You awake.”
“I’m pretending. Grown-ups are very tired, Will.”
The small boy considered this and then planted a wet kiss on Mulder’s forehead. “All better.”
“...did you just fix me?”
“Yep,” William replied, popping the P on the word proudly.
Mulder allowed one eye to sneak open to peer at his son. “I think it worked.”
He learned every favorite book, every favorite dinosaur, every bedtime song that would one hundred percent (well, maybe like eighty-percent on a good day) have William asleep within minutes. He knew which cup William preferred (the blue one with a tiny crack in the handle), how to wash his hair without tears (“We have to hold our breath like we’re exploring the ocean!”), what shirt would immediately put everyone in a good mood (the one with a bright yellow sun exclaiming “GOOD DAY!” that William always said was “made of happy”).
When William fell and scraped a knee, he wanted Daddy. When something scared him, he wanted Daddy. When he built something out of blocks…
“Daddy, look!”
And Mulder looked, every time.
Scully noticed, because of course she did. She noticed everything.
One Saturday, she found Mulder sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding their son and wrapping a long length of gauze around the stuffed fox’s matted arm.
“He broke his elbow,” he explained.
“Again,” William added seriously and Mulder nodded solemnly. “Needed medicine.”
Scully smiled wryly. “I’m glad our child knows which one of us is the medical professional.”
“Lady, I don’t make the rules.”
Her smile softened and she rested a shoulder against the doorway. “You know,” she said softly as he looked up at her again. “You never miss it.”
He frowned. “Miss what?”
“Anything.”
He looked genuinely confused and she smiled.
“The milestones, Mulder. The moments.”
When William had taken his first steps, Mulder had cried harder than she had.
His first word? “Dada.”
Mulder had insisted he’d won, they argued over the fact that William had merely found the easiest sound to pronounce and he didn’t actually know what he was saying while the child mumbled "da da da da" to everything he touched. Mulder had accepted defeat - mostly - just a month later when William had very clearly said “Mama” while looking straight at Scully.
The day William discovered rain puddles, Mulder jumped in them too.
Scully had sighed. “You’re encouraging him.”
“I absolutely am.”
When William had his first nightmare, Mulder had stayed awake until dawn because the boy finally slept only if his tiny fingers could stay wrapped against one of his larger ones. His arm had gone numb and he hadn’t been able to move, but it was also one of the most contented he’d ever felt.
On the first Christmas where William truly understood presents, Mulder had spent hours the night before assembling a wooden train set. He’d put one piece on backward, which William never noticed.
Scully did. She kissed Mulder anyway.
One evening, William fell asleep sprawled across Mulder’s chest while they watched an old documentary on the History Channel, the television droning softly.
Scully covered them both with a blanket and lowered herself down to the floor near Mulder’s head, reaching up to run her fingers through his hair.
“I was thinking,” he murmured, his eyes still closed.
“Dangerous,” she replied.
“It usually is.”
She smiled up at him, resting her cheek against the couch cushion near his face. “What were you thinking?”
“Just about my father.”
Her hand stilled in his hair. “What about him?”
“I spent so many years afraid I’d become him, Scully,” he sighed.
She was quiet for a moment and then let her fingers slide from his hair and rest on his cheek. “You haven’t, Mulder.”
“I know. But I still think about it sometimes.”
Scully lifted her head and looked at their boy, one of his tiny hands clutching Mulder’s shirt like a safety blanket.
“He adores you.”
Mulder swallowed hard. “I adore him.”
“I know you do,” she whispered.
He opened his eyes and looked at her then, his face pained. “I don’t want him ever wondering if I chose something else over him.”
Scully’s eyes softened and she gave him a tiny smile. “You won’t do that.”
“You can’t promise that. Not after everything we’ve been through.”
“No.” She smiled sadly, shaking her head. “But I can promise that he will never question whether you loved him.”
Mulder looked down at the sleeping boy, the little face that somehow carried both of them. Her stubborn chin, his curious eyes, that curly mop of bright orange hair that hadn’t yet darkened with age like it had on his mother.
Their impossible miracle.
“I wasted so much of my life chasing what I’d lost, Scully,” he said sadly.
Scully intertwined her fingers with his free hand. “And then?”
He smiled. “Then I realized what I’d found instead.”
She leaned over carefully, kissing William’s soft curls then Mulder’s forehead.
“I love you so much,” she whispered against his skin.
The words caused him to catch his breath, not because he doubted them, but because after everything, they still existed and she still reminded him of that every single day.
“I love you, too,” he whispered back, the words always too small for what he truly meant.
Years from now, William probably wouldn’t remember these evenings, at least not individually. Memory was strange that way.
He wouldn’t remember the train set or the puddles or pretending to investigate invisible monsters behind the living room furniture. He might not remember the bedtime songs his father quietly sang to him while rubbing a gentle hand across his back until his eyes finally closed.
But he would remember something infinitely more important.
That when he looked up, his father was already there. Watching. Listening. Smiling. Present.
The kind of father Fox Mulder had needed so much as a child himself - the kind he’d chosen to become in spite of it all.