Multiverse 3: Coalescence

It's only ten a.m., and already I'm working on dinner. Filet mignon with Portobello mushrooms and twice-baked cheddar-cheese potatoes. An expensive meal -- mostly because I had to buy twice the amount of meat; I just know I'm gonna burn it the first time out, I always do. I'm not, shall we say, an expert cook.

But today is a very special day.

My partner has gone off to procure the most important item: the cake, complete with candles. Five of them. Strange, how five years passed in the basement and neither of us thought much about it -- but in these five years, a human being has grown from a small muddled mass of cells into a person.

And what a person. Reads and speaks like someone twice as old. Are we surprised? A Mulder squared is... sometimes scary to behold. Even for me, the original source material. I've spent the last few months giving careful, detailed instructions on how to cope with kindergarten: don't act too smart, don't give too much away -- education can and will come from the home; school is for socialization, and child prodigies don't usually cope overly well in the public school atmosphere. I sure didn't.

Today is our child's fifth birthday; and in only a few short months, Gizmo will be going off to school, taking the first small steps toward independence and adulthood.

God, I feel suddenly old.

Why Gizmo? Partially for the infant version's uncanny resemblance to a Mogwai of the same name, from an old Spielberg movie. Partially because said child was disassembling toys, and building better ones, even before achieving the power of speech. But mostly because we couldn't call our child by name... Stupid, stupid me: saddling my child with a name I can't bear to speak or hear. I'll make better choices, next time...

Except that there won't be a next time. My partner, my beloved one-and-only, is infertile -- Gizmo is our only child.

Well, almost. But alternate universes don't count. Or so I tell myself, frequently.

The potatoes are in the oven, baking; I wipe my hands on the ridiculous pink frilly apron that my partner bought me as a gag gift last Christmas, and head off to see what Gizmo's up to. A quiet Gizmo is a dangerous Gizmo: I never know what that kid's going to do next...

In the bedroom at the end of the hall, I hear a voice. Voices. And I know that there is -- or shouldn't be -- anyone in the house but my child and myself... Unbidden, frantic thoughts of kidnapping and murder sketch frightening pictures on my brain. It's been so long since we worked openly on the X-Files, so long since we've lived under the threat of persecution, that I forget how long a carefully-nurtured grudge can survive...

I believe in privacy; I always knock. Always. But this time I kicked the door open, busting the thin plywood around the doorknob, wishing desperately for a gun I no longer carried, ready to take on whatever might be threatening my child, my baby, and kick it squarely in the groin...

Startled eyes met mine. Two pairs. Gizmo's, and... and another Gizmo, a child so alike that it took me a moment to discern which was which, and in that moment, I knew...

As I watched, the second child faded away, growing more and more transparent until there was nothing there but the memory.

And Gizmo burst into tears.

"Why'd you do that?" came the angry, anguished cry. "It took so long, and it was so hard to bring him here... Daddy, why'd you do that?"

I came into the room, sat down on the bunny-rabbit bedspread and took my daughter into my arms. "I'm sorry, honey," I said softly. "I didn't know. I heard voices, and I thought you were in danger."

"You should have knocked!" Gizmo raged, slamming tiny fists into my chest. "I worked so hard... we should've had more time... he's my brother... and it's my birthday!" and her tirade was choked by a fresh onslaught of sobbing.

She might have been angry with me, but still she clung to me; and I held her, stroked her hair, thinking of how different it might have been if I'd eased the door open gently, instead of shocking the tenuous connection between worlds into shattering. I might have been able to see him, to talk to him; I might have been able to ask him how his parents were doing, might have been able to ask about his mother...

I might have had the chance to meet Vixen's half of the transdimensional twins. My son.

By the time my wife came home, carrying birthday cake and candles, we were sitting at the kitchen table together amid the wreckage of cocoa-with-marshmallows and chocolate-chip cookies. Gizmo's tears had dried, her face had been washed, and she'd arranged her expression into a blank mask that reminded me painfully of myself -- but anyone with a working knowledge of a Mulder could tell she'd recently been crying.

Scully's been with me for ten years, one way or another; she knew something was wrong before she even caught a glimpse of our daughter's face.

So we told her what had happened -- my brief and unrevealing side of the events, and Gizmo's version -- which, despite her incredibly advanced intelligence, came across as mostly, 'bad Daddy made me cry'. Talking about it upset her all over again; and as she teetered on the brink of tears, Scully made one of those wonderful, wise decisions that cause me to realize how lost I'd be without her. "You know," she said gravely, to our daughter, "it occurs to me that it's almost afternoon, and you haven't opened one single birthday present yet..."

Shortly thereafter, Gizmo sat in the middle of the living room floor, happily building a castle with her brand-new Medieval Legos; and Scully came to stand beside me as I mixed potatoes with shredded cheese and bacon bits to make our birthday girl's favorite dinnertime side dish.

"We knew," she said softly. "We've always known."

True enough. From earliest infancy, we'd noticed that our daughter had a pronounced tendency to focus her attention on what seemed to be thin blue air... We'd had her eyes tested a half-dozen times and ways to be certain; in the end, we'd simply concluded that Gizmo was watching things that neither of us could see.

But we couldn't have known that things had progressed so far... Giz had always spent a lot of time alone in her room; I'd always been a solitary person myself, even as a child, so that hadn't sounded any warning bells in my head. Sometimes she'd talked to what I'd assumed were imaginary friends, and even knowing the odd circumstances of her birth, it had never occurred to me to wonder...

"We didn't know this," I murmured. "What we have here is a child who can bridge the gap between realities, seemingly at will."

My partner considered this, and I saw alarm spring to life in her eyes as she realized... So I said it for her; so that she didn't have to. "If anyone finds out about this, our little girl is in serious danger."

"Shit," Scully muttered, and I nodded in agreement: her succinct evaluation of the situation summed it up pretty well.

Then I took a closer look at her, and suddenly it hit home -- Scully had lost one daughter already, to the Forces Of Evil. Now she stood to lose another... not hers genetically, but what the hell does that matter? Scully's been her mother since the day she was born... Damn it, I never have learned to keep my big mouth shut.

Too late to take back the words, so instead I abandoned the potato mixture I'd been mashing and took her into my arms. "It'll be all right," I told her -- not an empty platitude; I was determined to make sure it would be all right. Somehow.

Somehow.

At the same time, we became aware that Gizmo was talking to someone in the living room; at the same time, we moved -- carefully, quietly -- to see who she was talking to. Nobody, or at least no one we could detect... which didn't mean that nobody was listening.

"You got to open presents last night," she was saying, "that's not fair. How come you got to, and I didn't?" A pause, while she listened to whatever was being said to her; then, "I'll have to try that. So what'd you get, Spike?"

Spike? They called our son Spike?

"It's no worse than Gizmo," Scully murmured, reading my mind the way she does sometimes.

"Can you see my castle? I like Legos, don't you?" our daughter said gravely. "You go get yours, and we'll build a big castle." And for a moment, I thought I saw it: a shimmer, barely detectable, more subliminal than solid...

Like an echo of our daughter. Like an echo of me.

Damn.

Something was making my face itch. Scully reached up and wiped away the tears I hadn't been aware of shedding. "It'll be all right," she echoed back at me. "Everything's going to be fine, Mulder."

When my Scully says things like that, I believe her. So I nodded, and went back to making dinner.

So long ago. Five years, now.

"What the hell?"

"...Hi, Scully." I managed a weak smile; it faded quickly.

She was staring not at me, but at what I was holding, with a look that told me she'd already figured it out... "Would you care to explain?"

"I, uh, I'm not sure where to begin..." My mind was racing, trying to come up with some sort of plausible explanation for having materialized in the middle of my living room, right before her eyes, holding a newborn infant still streaked bloody from the womb...

"Why don't you start at the baby," she said, with exaggerated patience, "and work your way backwards."

I sighed. This was the one thing I'd hoped to never discuss with her. "I got myself pregnant," I admitted.

My partner's face softened slightly. "How is Vixen?"

"She's fine." And, watching Scully's face closely: "She and Daniel are married, now."

An odd, inexplicable shifting of her expression. What was she thinking? Did the news have the same impact on her that it had had on me? "Congratulations," Scully said softly, to no one in particular. "And you are in possession of the baby because...?"

"There were two of them," I said, "one of them real and one of them not; and this one came back with me," hearing my own words, hearing how bizarre they sounded, wondering if Scully would understand.

But of course Scully would understand. She was Scully.

And she did. Or at least, abandoned further inquiry in favor of a close examination of the newborn: a quick, professional fluttering of hands over newborn skin. "We need to get her to the hospital, have her checked..."

"And tell them what? Whose child is she, Scully? Who do I say the mother is?" I sighed. "We'd never get out of it alive. Or at least, not with custody."

"We?" Scully inquired delicately.

Damn... I began to respond, stopped, started again and faltered before emitting a single syllable, wondering why I'd simply assumed that Scully would help me raise the child.

In another universe, in another dimension, a Mulder and a Scully were celebrating the birth of their child...

...but this was not that world, and I was alone.

A small hand settled on my arm and shattered my despair before it could fully coalesce. "All right," said her familiar voice, more gentle and warm than I'd ever heard it before, "what are we going to do next?" placing just the slightest emphasis on the word I would have given anything to hear.

I'm not alone, I thought, with something like wonder.

"We're going to get her cleaned up, and dressed," Scully answered her own question, while I stood there mutely, gazing at her and marveling, "and by the way, have you thought about a name?"

"Vixen," I said, at once and without thought, for revenge was suitable in this case... looked at Scully, looked at her, and amended, very softly, "Vixen Dana?"

She looked briefly startled, then wary. "Mulder..." she began, and stopped, with a small rueful laugh.

"What?" in sudden panic. Had I misread her words, her tone; had I misunderstood her completely?

"Have I ever mentioned," she said instead, "that I hate my name probably nearly as much as you hate yours?"

"You do?" I'd never imagined... no, scratch that; I'd never bothered to think about it. Dana was a perfectly normal, ordinary name; why would she hate it?

Maybe that was why she hated it.

"Why do you think I've never objected to your calling me Scully?" spoken in a pleasantly sardonic voice, one I liked very much.

She took the infant from my arms; I felt unexpectedly bereft. And damp; belatedly, I noticed that little No-Name had peed on me. "Aaack," I said succinctly.

"Get used to it," Scully called after me, as I headed off in search of soap, water, and a clean shirt, "babies emit bodily fluids in large quantities, you know."

No, I didn't know. What experience had I had with babies? God... without Scully, I was in deep shit. And she knew it.

I washed up at the bathroom sink, leaving the door open in case Scully needed me for anything -- a joke, that; she was the competent one in this situation, I was the one who needed her -- caught sight of my reflection in the mirror and was startled all over again. Objectively, I knew that Vixen and I looked alike, more so than twins. But looking in the mirror was like looking at her, almost. Face a little softer, eyelashes a little lusher, hair straight and long and loose -- just a few small alterations in the mind's-eye, and I could have been gazing at my otherself. "I'll take good care of her," I promised the phantom. "I will."

Felt a small movement beside me and glanced sideways to see Scully standing in the doorway, watching me, absolutely unsurprised to find me talking not-quite-to-myself. "We will," she agreed matter-of-factly. "Shove over," and began cleaning the infant very carefully with a dampened washcloth. Daniel, acting as obstetrician, had gotten only as far as tying off the cord; the evidence of recent birth had been enough to make me faintly squeamish. So what if I deal with blood and guts and gore on a daily basis; that doesn't mean I like it... As Scully cleaned her, though, she began looking less like an X-File and more like a baby.

My baby. My daughter.

I'm a father.

Holy shit.

"You know, the name Vixen will make her sound like one of the stars of those movies you don't watch," my partner remarked.

"I have to name her Vixen because she named the other one Fox," I explained, pleased with the soundness of my logic.

Scully sighed. "And if she jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge," she said tiredly, not bothering to complete the old line.

"Depends on the rules of continuity between the universes," I said, in my best scholarly unraveling-an-X-File voice. "For all we know, the physics of adjacent space-time continua require the parallel."

"Bullshit," said Scully bluntly. "If that were true, we'd be married."

It must have been an acoustic effect of the tile; I could swear that her words echoed, resonant and reverberating between and around us.

Now, I knew my Scully, and I knew that any moment now, any second, she was going to change the subject... And I didn't want it changed. Seeing my otherself with her Scully, knowing that they were together, had left me with this restless, yearning ache -- not a new feeling, but one I'd never let myself acknowledge before. Keep it professional, I'd told myself, and, you're not her type; if you were, she'd have let on by now, and, we're just friends, we're best friends, why jeopardize that for a quick lay? and all of it was garbage: a cover for the fact that I was scared shitless of asking and being rejected. What I felt for her was so vivid, so powerful, that if I ever let myself feel it fully, there'd be no turning back for me...

Well, I was still scared. But now that I knew that it was possible for a Scully and a Mulder to love each other... I could close the door on that realization, tuck it away into a mental box and never let it see the light of day again. I could do that; I was expert at it.

But I didn't want to.

"Why aren't we married?" I said -- or tried to say; my voice choked up, and it came out as a hoarse whisper.

Scully looked up at me -- for the rest of my life, I will remember the way her eyes looked at that moment. Volumes spoken, with just a glance... surprise, fear, and a sudden trembling hope...

"You've never asked," she said simply, her voice absolutely calm and steady, as her eyes were not.

I reached out and slipped my arms around her, around Scully and the baby in her arms -- was struck by how incredibly right it felt, struck so forcibly that I almost couldn't speak the words that had to be said. "Will you?"

"Yes," she said, as soberly and casually as if I'd asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee.

It took a moment to hit home, that she'd agreed. "Okay," I said numbly.

That simple. After five years, it was that simple.

"So, Mulder," she said conversationally, "now that we're engaged, let me tell you how I feel about your having casual sex with other women..."

And she told me. At length, and in great detail, ending with a promise that if I ever did anything like that again, regardless of whether the woman in question was me or not, she would take great pleasure in dissecting certain parts of my anatomy with a rusty scalpel, sans anesthesia.

"Do we understand each other?" she asked me, when she was finished.

"Yes, dear," I said.

The Lone Gunmen were unexpectedly helpful. They saved us several hours of hard shopping, showing up at the door with formula and diapers and a crib that Byers had sweet-talked out of a cousin whose child had just outgrown it -- and most importantly, the promise of a very sincere birth certificate to account for the baby's origin. I answered their incredulous questions while Scully diapered and fed my -- our -- child; told Frohike that there was a female version of him running around loose in another universe somewhere, and had a wonderful time watching his reaction to the revelation.

And after we'd gotten rid of them, after our still-unnamed child had drifted off to sleep, Scully and I fell into bed together and -- not counting diaper changes, feedings, and the occasional parallel rest breaks for ourselves -- stayed there for forty-eight hours.

Three weeks later, we were married.

"Happy birthday to you," we sang. "Happy birthday to you... Happy birthday, dear Vixen-Dana-Melissa-Samantha- Scully-Mulder-GIZmo..." and the birthday girl giggled the way she always did when one of us trotted out the full nine yards of her legal name, "happy birthday to you!" and she gathered a deep breath and blew out all the candles in one fierce exhalation.

I'm a firm believer that birthday cake should be eaten before dinner; otherwise, one might get all filled up with pesky nutrients, and not have enough room for the sweets... Besides, everyone knows that you can't open birthday presents until after the cake, and who wants to wait until after dinnertime for that? So Scully plucked candles out of the cake and gave them to Gizmo to have the icing licked off, while I checked on our dinner, determined that I was not going to let several expensive chunks of meat get charred to a crisp the way I always did. Hey, miracles happen...

Gizmo loved her presents, everything from the dolls to the racecar track; ooh'ed and aah'ed over them like any normal kid. If her concurrent dialogue with her 'invisible friend' was more detailed than the average child's, well, that was nothing any casual bystander would notice. Was it?

We had a dilemma, Scully and I. On one hand, it would be wisest to discourage her from such conversations with her other-half, at least in public settings: the same way I'd been counseling her to suppress her obvious intelligence as much as possible once school began. On the other hand, it was entirely possible that discouraging this cross-universe contact might cause her to lose the ability to make contact at all -- and what would that do to her? He was her brother, after all... and if anyone knew what it meant to lose a sibling, we did.

Most parents face difficult decisions as they raise their children. This one, however, was not covered by any of the how-to parenting books I so often took refuge in. Where's Doctor Spock when you need him? ...Probably off saving the universe with Kirk and McCoy. So me and Scully would have to save this particular corner of the universe all by ourselves.

After cake and ice cream and cocoa, Gizmo went back to her tower of Legos... She'd trotted out every set she owned, and the tower was growing bigger by the moment. As she snapped the blocks into place, she kept up a steady conversation with 'Spike' -- Scully and I settled down on the couch, watched and listened. I wasn't sure what Scully was watching for; maybe the same thing I was. A glimpse of our daughter's other half...?

It took a while, but there it was, finally: the faintest shimmering of the air, the slightest hint of subliminal movement. Scully nudged me silently, and I twined my fingers with hers in response -- so she saw it too. Good to know that it wasn't just me.

The tower continued to grow -- faster than one person could build it; and did Giz even own that many Legos? Almost as big as she was, now, and about as wide... and the shimmer was growing more substantial; I could almost see its face, now.

A sudden scary thought struck me like a sledgehammer -- Gizmo had been born in that other dimension. What if she was pulled back? What if... what if we lost her? I hadn't thought those thoughts since Giz was a baby; time had dulled the edge of that old fear, blunted it until it had been all but forgotten...

Beside me, my wife inhaled sharply and squeezed my hand; in the same moment, I saw it.

Him. Spike.

Not quite solid, but a tangible shadow... and the sight of him shocked me straight to the core. Gizmo looked like I had as a child -- Spike was me. Fading into existence, sharpening into focus; I sat utterly still, afraid to move, to speak...

There was a short, sharp cry that came from no one present in the room; a hand darted out from nowhere and clamped down on the boy's shoulder -- and as the boy solidified into existence, two other figures materialized in our living room right along with him.

We stared at each other, startled and yet unsurprised. Of course, it would come to this, sooner or later. "What's with the hair?" I wondered aloud.

She shrugged. "Time for a change," she said, and shook back her long -- blonde -- mane.

"It doesn't suit us," I decided, after a moment's study.

"Well, I like it just fine," said her husband, with a wry grin.

The next minutes were spent on handshakes and embraces, as if we were old friends reunited after a long absence... well, we were. More than friends: we were each other... "Finally, I get to congratulate you on your marriage," Vixen said gleefully, grinning up at me smugly.

"How'd you know?" I wondered.

Her smile widened. "I just knew," she said.

Then there was a lengthy interval spent studying each other's children -- "Hi, Spike," I said, kneeling on the floor to place us at eye level.

"You scared me," he said accusingly, looking me over thoroughly.

"I'm sorry about that," I apologized.

The boy shrugged. "So," he queried, after a moment. "You're my other daddy?"

I glanced past him, at Danny -- he and Vixen were involved in conversation with Gizmo, and either didn't notice their son's comment, or weren't bothered by it. "Yeah," I said softly, "I guess I am."

His gaze traveled to my Scully. "And you're my other mommy?"

That one surprised us both. "Yes," said Vixen, from the far side of the living room, "she is," meeting Scully's eyes with a serene smile.

Spike thought about this for a moment. "Okay," he said at last, and launched himself at me; and for the first time, I found myself embracing my son.

Not for long, though. "Come on," Gizmo said, tugging at Spike's arm, "I wanna show you my racecars! Hey, you want a piece of my birthday cake?"

"Don't spoil your dinner," Vixen said, the sort of automatic comment that parents make without ever hearing themselves say it -- then her nose wrinkled. "What's burning?"

"Shit," I said, and rushed to the kitchen to see if anything was salvageable.

"I like my pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms," Danny said, as I fished out the remains of what was supposed to have been dinner.

"You Scullys are all alike," I muttered. "Call 'em -- the number's on the wall next to the phone."

"Of course it is," he agreed. "Meatballs, peppers and onions, right?"

"Just get one large with everything," I suggested.

Daniel flashed me a grin that was too acutely Scully for words. "I was planning on it," he said, in the same irritatingly logical voice that had been one of the first things that had caused me to fall in love with my own version.

He made the call while I disposed of the wreckage of the meal; "So you're staying for dinner, then?" I said, as he hung up the phone.

"We'll stay as long as we can," he responded, with a shrug. "However long that is. We don't know any more about how this works than you do."

I found myself looking past him, at the kids playing happily in the living room. "But those two are the key," I mused. "We fell into this by accident; they can actually cause our separate realities to collide."

"Mmm. The question being... how can we keep them safe?"

"Good question," I said darkly.

Reaching into the fridge, I fished out two beers and handed him one; he accepted, with a nod of thanks. "You know," Daniel Scully said, very casually, very deliberately, "I should probably thank you for helping bring our son into existence. Either that, or beat the crap out of you for screwing my wife."

I should have seen it coming... "She wasn't your wife at the time," I pointed out, measuring him with my eyes -- as tall as me, solid muscle -- and FBI training combined with Scully-toughness? Yeah, he could whip my ass straight into next Tuesday. Best not to let things get to that point.

"That's why I'm letting you live," he replied. "So tell me: do you have as much fun in bed with your wife as I did?"

For a second, I contemplated ripping out his throat. Fortunately, logic prevailed. "Touche," I mumbled.

Danny smiled at me -- Scully's I'm-letting-you-off-the-hook even-though-you-don't-deserve-it smile -- and I forgot all about ripping his throat out; he was Scully, after all. "Now we're even," he said, and extended his hand.

I shook it, and forced myself to relax.

Dinner went well. Maybe other people would find it bizarre to casually sit down to an evening meal with their opposite-gender duplicates from another reality; for us, it was no big deal. And it was a positive joy, to see the kids together -- as comfortable with each other as if they'd been a unit for their entire lives...

Maybe they had been.

At eight o'clock, we tucked the kids into bed and settled down to some serious conversation. "What are we going to do about the kids?" Danny opened up the discussion.

"They shouldn't be separated," Vixen said at once. "Even if we could sever the link between them, we mustn't." With her new blonde 'do, it was easier to see her as a separate person -- but she was still me; she'd lost a sibling just as I had, and knew what that ache was like.

"I agree," Scully said slowly, "but the dangers inherent in discovery are significant."

"Less so if the connection is something that can be consciously controlled," I contributed. "If they can determine when to activate the link, they can prevent our worlds from crossing when it would be inconvenient or dangerous..."

Vixen finished my sentence for me. "And reestablish the link if needed," she said thoughtfully, "to evade discovery or capture."

"But if our worlds are parallel," Danny pointed out, "wouldn't that be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire?"

"Not completely parallel," Scully countered. "There are significant differences." They exchanged a glance, and I wondered if my wife was remembering making love to this man... Down, boy, I said, to the Neanderthal-Man in my skull. It was a stupid, primitive reaction; and besides, we were even on that count -- and Scully hadn't brought home a baby from the encounter, the way I had. All things considered, I had no right to be jealous...

...but Neanderthal-Man cared little for logic; I sighed, and pushed the thought as far from my mind as I could.

Which wasn't far. If it had been for Scully the way it had been for me... Sometimes, I still found myself awakening at two in the morning with a raging hard-on and a vivid memory of that single encounter with my otherself. Not that it had been exceptionally passionate or perfect; we'd done it standing up, outside on a porch, in a period of time that would have embarrassed the hell out of me if I'd been screwing anyone else but myself. Not exactly the kind of encounter most people would consider memorable.

Yet it had been... indescribable. There had been a resonance between us, an unspoken mutual understanding... Scully is my soulmate, my true love, my one-and-only; there is and will never be another woman who means as much to me as she does, and making love with her is exquisite beyond measure. But with Vixen... I can't describe it. I'll never be able to describe what it was like.

But the memory haunts me still.

And I can't help but wonder if it was like that for Scully. For both of them. Did they experience the same sense of completion, of connection? Does she wake up beside me thinking of him, remembering him with the same ambivalence with which I think of my otherself, knowing that if we all shared the same universe there would be no way to keep us apart...?

It's not something I can ask her, not ever; so it's something I'll never know.

If it weren't for that night, that freak occurrence of universes crossing tracks, I wouldn't be married to Scully now. I wouldn't be the father of the most beautiful kid in all the universes. If it weren't for that night, I would probably be fading into old age as an angry, embittered shell of a man, still chasing X-Files, still alone... I very literally owe Vixen my life, in so many ways. Yet sometimes I loathe her, my otherself; because in the space of that night, I had a taste of a unity that I'll never know again, and I'll never quite be able to escape the memory...

"It's not our choice," I heard myself saying. "Or even theirs."

Heads turned to look at me, and I wondered how I was going to explain what I'd said -- right up to the moment when my mouth opened, and I found myself explaining it. "We come from different universes, different planes of existence, if you will; we belong in two different realities. But these kids, our kids... they were conceived from pieces of both universes, and as such, they don't really belong to either. Whatever connection exists between them is not something that can be controlled or molded by us or by them. It's a function of who they are, of where they come from -- and of the fact that by all rights, neither of them should exist." As I spoke the words, several different corollaries occurred to me, of what might happen if the space-time continuum should decide to heal the living, breathing rift in its midst. Like, perhaps someday they wouldn't exist: maybe I'd go into Gizmo's room and find an empty bed, and no sign that she'd ever been there -- or worse yet, be robbed of both child and memory, and never know I'd been a father at all... but those were suspicions too horrible to voice; I kept them to myself.

Glanced at Vixen, and cursed the universes for crafting us in each other's image: her eyes were wide and dark and terrified, and I knew that she was thinking my thoughts along with me.

"All we can do," she said, in a voice so quiet and bleak that her husband looked at her with alarm, "is try to tether them to our respective realities as best we can, and hope that it's enough to keep them from being drawn to each other -- and away from us."

The time we'd had sex, our respective desire had echoed through both of us, magnifying and multiplying into something overwhelming. When the twins had been born, I'd felt sensations that no male body was designed to know... Now, I felt her terror along with my own, and realized why universes don't cross more often, and why telepathy isn't the norm for our species. Human beings, body and soul, were only built to house one person at a time. More than that is too much to handle; senses go into overload, straining to reject the additional input, to bring the load to a manageable level. The connection between myself and my otherself was intimate and intense to the point of pain, and I wanted it to stop...

We broke eye contact at the same time, and that helped some; I felt my Scully's arms wrap around me, and hugged her hard. Now this was the way humans were meant to be intimate -- with just enough separation to make it meaningful, to keep the closeness from being burdensome. My connection to Vixen was our sameness... my connection to Scully was our love. The awareness that I vastly preferred the latter was an immense relief.

"You think that their connection will pull them into another plane of existence entirely?" said Dana, in a small frightened voice, and my momentary sense of relief was replaced by worry."I don't know," I said -- felt her tremble in my arms, and hugged her even tighter. "All I know is that... we can't force the kids into any particular pattern of behavior as regards the bond between them. We can only hold them close -- and love them -- and hope for the best."

"Vee," Daniel said suddenly, his voice taut -- and looking up, I thought I saw a ripple sweep through the air between us, like a heat shimmer in the desert; reality wavering...

His wife nodded, reached out and took his hand. "Yes," she said, in an absurdly calm voice, "I think we must be going. Fox..."

Not even Scully calls me that and gets away with it, but Vee was me, so it was different -- I leaned forward and grabbed the hand she held out toward me, and Scully reached across me and clasped Daniel's hand, and for a long moment we all just looked at each other -- and then reality rippled again, and I found my hand closing around empty air.

For another moment, we just sat there, me and my wife, adjusting to the sudden absence; then our eyes met in a brief, frantic moment of telepathy, and we were on our feet and running down the hall...

Gizmo was just where we'd left her, sprawled in bed with the typical abandon of a very young child. Beside her, only a slight indentation in the pillow marked the space where Spike had been. I'd been subconsciously expecting to find her gone, and relief swept over me in a massive wave - - my knees buckled, and I nearly collapsed.

Almost, but not quite; Scully was holding me, keeping me from falling.

We moved together, silently, purposefully. I picked Gizmo up and carried her, and Scully opened the door to our bedroom, and we got her settled between us in the big king- sized bed without ever waking her. My nerves were jangling something fierce, and I could have used a night of passionate sex with my wife to calm me down -- but more than that, I needed to know that my daughter was safe and sound and there, in the same universe with me.

Gizmo. Spike. Paradox, the pair of them: an unhealed wound in the fabric of reality. At any moment, they could vanish, as completely as Vixen and Daniel had disappeared from the living room -- and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. Not a damn thing.

I didn't think I would ever sleep, but after awhile, the small soft sounds of breathing began to lull me into a sense of possibly false security -- Scully, one pillow over; and Gizmo, her head resting on my arm and rendering it slowly numb. My family had become more precious to me than anything else, than even the X-Files had been. I'd left behind the X-Files to protect them, and never regretted the choice -- and now there was nothing I could do to protect them from this new unpredictable fate. The only weapons I had were my love for them, and my determination...

Maybe that would be enough.

Sleep, when it came, was a blessed relief from the uncertainty.

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