Morning Sickness
Rating: Teen
Word count: 1.2k
Notes: Post-ep for season 11. That “season finale” inspired me to try to make sense of the nonsense, and maybe give Mulder and Scully a chance to start to deal with the shit they’ve been dragged through.
Originally posted to AO3, Mar. 26 2018
It's dawn when Mulder shifts the car into park. A drizzle mists the windshield, muddying the house’s looming form, the dim glow of the porch light their only welcome. Next to him, Scully sleeps deeply, his jacket tucked into the crook of her neck.
He reaches across the console to touch her cheek. "We're home."
She stirs, blinking, before fumbling at the door handle in a rush. She's out of the car before he can offer to help, making her way to the house. He watches with concern as she pauses at the foot of the steps, leaning on the porch railing for a moment as if to catch her breath, before disappearing around the side of the house. He winces when he hears retching.
Skinner was going to make it, they said; a lumbar spinal fracture and two broken legs meant he had a long recovery ahead, but he was alive.
Reyes hadn't been so lucky. Mulder found her slumped in the driver's seat of Spender's car, blood pooling in the corner of her eye. Scully had moaned softly behind him, turned, vomited bile onto the pavement.
It wasn't until later that he remembered; Reyes had delivered William, had held him as he'd taken his first breath.
Mulder shudders, stumbling forward to check on Scully, finds her crouched over the overgrown garden. There's a lone rhubarb stalk struggling to greet the day, leaves beaded with rain, a survivor among the bittercress and chickweed.
"You OK?" he asks, feeling helpless.
"I need to eat," she murmurs, standing. "The nausea is worse if I don't."
He reaches for her hand, takes it, guides them inside. She shrugs off her coat, then ducks into the bathroom and closes the door.
Mulder stands in the kitchen, unsure where to begin. It had felt good -- too good -- to put aside reason, to put his finger on the trigger, aim, and let the bullets do the rest. He thinks of gunpowder residue and blood spatter, pushes up his sleeves and scrubs his hands until they're raw.
When that's done, he opens the fridge. She needs to eat. Bread, lettuce, turkey; this, he can manage. As he works, he doesn't think about the water lapping at the dock, doesn't think about watching himself fall backwards, doesn't think about the bullet lodged between his son's eyes.
He cuts the sandwich in half and sets it on the table with a glass of milk. She doesn't like milk, but it's good for the baby, right?
The baby. Christ.
He sinks into a chair as the weight of the day hits him. When she comes out, bathrobe cinched around her waist, he's staring at the table with his head propped in his hands.
"Thank you," she murmurs, sitting down, picking up half the sandwich and taking a small bite. Her expression is distant and closed, the dark circles under her eyes betraying her exhaustion. It's a long time before she speaks again, and when she does, her voice is almost inaudible.
"I had a...a vision," she murmurs, sipping her milk. "I saw William."
Mulder's pulse throbs, a glimmer of hope expanding in his chest. "You...he's alive? You're sure?"
She nods, avoiding his eyes. Bite, chew, swallow, sip. Repeat.
"How...?" he leans forward.
"I don't know," she sighs.
"If it's true, there's still a chance we could find him," Mulder says, thinking aloud. "We could--"
"Mulder, stop. Not now, I can't..." She trails off, ducking her chin, and he thinks of the warmth of her stomach against his blood-flecked palm. "He can't be another quest. You have to let him go."
Mulder swallows. "But...he's alive."
She nods, pushing the plate back. "He's weak, but he's safe. For now."
"Then he'll find us," he says, more to himself than to her. "Someday. When he's ready."
She presses her lips together. When she answers, her voice is hollow. "I'm going to bed."
"Scully..."
But she's already on her feet, moving toward the stairs. He watches her go, feeling lost, unmoored.
He's alive.
Mulder wraps the untouched half of the sandwich and puts it in the fridge, pours the leftover milk in the sink.
He finds her in the upstairs bathroom, staring into the mirror, her reflection haunted and pale. Steaming water runs into the basin, unnoticed.
"Scully?"
She startles, meeting his eyes before reaching for a cloth, but doesn't answer.
"Talk to me, Scully," he says, wishing for a church, for the ease they found over a prayer candle.
"Everything," she frowns, rubbing at her face with the cloth until the freckles across her nose burn pink. "Everything I tried to prevent for him, everything -- it came true."
She dabs lotion on her chin, under her eyes, punctuating each word with angry, jerky movements. "I lived with the guilt of his adoption, but there's nothing I could have done," she says, turning and striding past him to stuff the cloth into the hamper. "I never had a choice."
"Scully--"
"They used me, Mulder," she whirls on him, voice rising. "They used my body to make monsters. And I loved them, and they were taken from me. How can I bring another child into the world with that on my conscience? What hope do I have of keeping them safe, when everything that's come before has been ripped from my hands?"
She breaks off, her breath ragged, swiping at the corners of her eyes.
"What they did to you is unforgivable," he says, approaching her. "But this...this is different. You have a choice."
"I can't do it again," she breathes, eyes pressed shut. "Damnit, Mulder. It's not fair."
"No. No, it's not. But you don't have to do it alone," he whispers, taking her face in his palms, searching her eyes. "Do you want this, Scully?"
"I do," she says, her voice cracking as the tears pool in the whorls of his thumbs. "I do, so much. But I wish I didn't."
He wraps his arms around her, pulling her close. "So we'll make it work."
He imagines he can feel her eye-roll against his chest, but she softens. "Just like that, huh?"
"Just like that. I'll trade in the Mustang for a minivan, we'll get a Baby Björn--"
She sniffs. "What the fuck is a Baby Björn?"
"I have no idea," he admits, chuckling. "But if the number of missed calls on my phone from Kersh is any indication, we'll have a lot of free time to figure that out."
"I'm fifty-four, Mulder," she sighs, her voice small.
"And your breasts will be the envy of every grandma at the AARP."
She barks a laugh into his chest, fists gripping the fabric of his shirt as her laughter dissolves into a sob. He nuzzles the hair at her temple, kisses it, sways with her until the storm passes.
"What can I do?" he murmurs when her breathing has calmed.
"Just...hold me."
"That's what got us into this mess," he says, nudging her cheek with his nose, eliciting a tired smile. He pulls back the covers and follows her into bed, pulling her back against his chest. His fingers trace the line of her hip.
Tentatively his hand slides forward to her abdomen, barely touching, asking permission. She places her palm over his in answer, pressing down, guiding him to the spot just above her pubic bone where a gentle swell has already formed. He swallows hard, overcome with love and sadness and fatigue.
"I don't have it in me to hope for this, Mulder," she murmurs, her voice rough.
He kisses her cheek, whispering a prayer to the nape of her neck. "Sleep. I'll find enough hope for the both of us."
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Mel 🔆, Viktor 🌌, and Jayce 🔥 symbolism
SUN 🔆
Mel's association with the sun is self-evident and still mostly shrouded in mystery, though her love scene with Jayce is notable, which is overlaid with starry imagery, where her silhouette and her freckled face are compared to the cosmos. The sun is also a star. It's just the star that's closest to Runeterra and has the most influence over the world.
Mel and the Hexcore are the POVs of the scene.
Hexcore and starry imagery is more strongly and consistently associated with someone else, though!
STARS 🌟 / THE COSMOS 🌌
Viktor's blue to purple pipeline is real
But seriously, the starry/swirly shapes point toward distant stars, the cosmos, a galaxy. There is no moon in Viktor's night scenes throughout the season, only stars.
Viktor's character regresses as the season goes on (blue to purple, ready to fall into Shimmer-like magenta as his corruption nears its peak).
His hubris opens him up to some kind of corruption by the Hexcore, or by whatever - or whoever - is using the Hexcore as a gateway, like what Jinx points out. Singed as his mentor plants and encourages the lie that Viktor believes, that he's better off alone and that the ends justify the means.
These perfectly ruinous circumstances lead to him getting Sky killed (Sky like sky blue, like Inspiration, lost as Viktor has lost sight of good in his pursuit of great).
In his running scene, Viktor runs not from left to right, filmspeak for progression - he runs from right to left, as though backstepping.
(And also for the Rocky Balboa reference called out in this brilliant post, but hey, I think it all works)
It's also worth laying the foundation that Viktor is a fantasy interpretation of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor who was fascinated with electricity, radio signals, the cosmos, and [REDACTED for another post probably lol]
If you've fallen down the rabbit hole of League lore like I have, you might have picked up that peoples and warriors who are sun-worshipers are (at least anciently) tasked with hunting down and destroying Void beings, who are eldritch beings associated with the distant stars, or are Runeterrans constructed by the Void Watchers trapped between realms. The sun fights against interlopers from other dimensions or celestial bodies.
Mel and Viktor have the same ideas about risk and the nature of progress, and they are both technically foreigners living in Piltover and pursuing that progress - in two very different (but complementary) ways. They are most likely the two characters whose literal bodies are celestial, imbued with the Arcane. Their bodies are most likely augmented with magical metals.
Yet the arcane imagery that seems to accompany them respectively are diametrically opposed - Sun vs. Void, possibly. (Also, purple and yellow/gold are opposite or complement colors on the color wheel.)
Whether they wind up working together or whether they clash (as Viktor loses himself) or if it's a mix of both, I think Mel and Viktor are destined to collide in season 2.
So where does this leave Jayce?
FIRE 🔥
Fire for Jayce means more than one thing. The first thing that should come to mind is the fire of the forge. Creation and industry. The legacy and hard work of his family.
However, his FIRST imagery with fire occurs when Elora says "Speak of the devil" and Jayce is framed in flames at Mel's fundraising party.
He's similarly framed in the flames of a Molotov cocktail on the bridge between Piltover and the undercity with Viktor, after he's just called the people of the undercity dangerous.
What I think we're being shown here are Jayce's choices. He can use his talents and influence for good - creation and industry - or he can use them for destruction and oppression. A hammer can create.
A hammer can also be a weapon, a tool of destruction:
Fire can quickly burn and spread out of control.
Hey look, blue all the way to magenta in one scene!
And if you know his original League lore, the reason why his rivalry with [REDACTED] crosses the point of no return - fire and destruction. Yeah.
Jayce is interesting because his point position in the Mel-Viktor-Jayce trifecta makes it tempting to assign celestial imagery to him, too. However, adult Jayce is only present with Hexcore, star, and sun imagery when he is sharing a scene with Viktor or Mel respectively.
The show makes it a point that Mel and Viktor are the reasons he is the Man of Progress at all:
Note that Jayce in the center of his Man of Progress posters is backed by a gear (Viktor) and the sun (Mel). If Viktor had not intervened in episode 2, Jayce would be dead or disenfranchised. If Mel had not intervened in episode 3, then Jayce AND Viktor would have been kicked out of the Academy if not imprisoned or exiled, and Hextech with Jayce and Viktor at the helm would not exist.
(This is reaching, but I like to interpret that the circle + notches in the gear shape are like Viktor's star symbolism, but even if that's the big reach that I think it is, Viktor is a machinist, engineer, and techmaturgist with Artificer parents - the gear definitely represents him on a meta level)
The imagery that I believe is Jayce's and Jayce's alone is that of fire. He is terrestrial, using magic contained within tools the way he has always wanted to bring Hextech to every household, while Mel and Viktor are influenced by magic on a whole other level.
Sure would be a shame if Jayce found a reason to choose the path of destruction and be corrupted further, diverging from Mel and Viktor's core values
Sure would be a shame if Viktor's personal choices had consequences that radiated out further than season 1 and he gets put on a disastrous collision course with everything that Jayce and by extension Piltover hates and fears
Sure would be stressful for us if Arcane decided to be a Greek tragedy about it
Though possibly the most important piece of this picture is how Mel - gold like the sun, gold that doesn't tarnish or rust, gold that is an excellent conductor - has already faced the abyss and said NO to her own corruption:
It sure would be something for her to have to watch Jayce and Viktor go down a different path, huh
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