Title: MISSING TIME Author: Gwinne Distribution: Please contact me Rating: R Classification: MSR Spoilers: post-ep for "Requiem" (isn't everything these days?); references to "all things," "Hollywood A.D.," "Je Souhaite" Disclaimer: Non, mais je souhaite... Author's Note: I vowed I'd never write a first-person story, since that's not the point of view we get on the show, with the exception of monologues. I did it anyway...I hope it works. Let me know at gwinne@yahoo.com MISSING TIME Mulder and I have driven thousands of miles, on interstates and highways and backwoods rural roads. We have eaten at D.C.'s finest restaurants and the sleaziest diners from Washington to Florida. He has bought me more side salads from McDonalds than I can count and fed me mango slices in bed. I have fallen asleep with my head against his shoulder in hospital waiting rooms, in airplanes and Lariat rental cars, on his couch and mine. But I have spent less than fifty nights in his bed. Far less. We have watched some of the worst movies ever made and some of the best, but never my favorite. I'm not sure I ever even told him what it is. At Skinner's request, I'm taking a few days off. Time to heal, he says, but I think he just hasn't figured out what to do with a pregnant agent from the bureau's most unwanted department, an unpartnered agent at that. So I'm in bed, wearing a gray t-shirt of Mulder's, cataloguing things we have done and things we haven't. If I'm feeling optimistic, the second list is comprised of things I would like to do with Mulder, when he comes home to me. He always comes home. Honestly, I'm feeling better. Not fine, but better. I've spent most of my time off curled next to the toilet, to the point that I vomited up blood. The technical name for my condition is hyperemesis gravidarum. In other words, excessive pregnancy induced puking. What I didn't tell Mulder the night I knocked on his motel room door, shivering and nauseous, was that I'd thrown up both times I'd used the restroom on the plane, once after my meeting with the auditor, and again right after dinner. That's why I didn't give him a hard time when he suggested--ok, insisted--that I forget about the missing deputy and go home. I'd like to think that if Mulder were here, he'd be playing the role of supportive partner, in the more intimate sense of the word, something I've only recently come to enjoy. I'd like to think he'd pour me tall glasses of Gatorade (for the electrolytes) and hold me until the room stops spinning, that he'd go to the store at two in the morning when I decide I actually am hungry and we have nothing worth eating in the kitchen. I've spent most of the morning constructing intricate, sappy-as-Hallmark scenarios in my head about the day Mulder comes home and I get to tell him about the baby. Sometimes I'm not even showing and sometimes I'm huge as Moby Dick and sometimes there's a baby girl with his brown hair and my blue eyes sleeping in a bassinette in our room. But every time I imagine telling him, we both begin to cry. And then we make love. That's a scenario I'd like to experience sooner rather than later. In all likelihood, this baby was conceived the first time Mulder and I made love, the night he returned home from England and I told him about Daniel. There's something magical in that, and I love thinking about that night, captured in a series of snapshots in my mind. The one I cherish most is looking down at Mulder, whose large hands tenderly hold my hair back from my face, the moment I come. I've seen that look before, whenever Mulder witnesses something amazing, like the spaceship in Antarctica, but this time there is a tenderness I never imagined. That was all the proof I ever needed. I regret few things in my life, but I do regret leaving him asleep that morning, even if it was only to go home and change before I picked him up for work, coffee and bagels in hand. At that moment, zipping my FBI regulation skirt in Mulder's bathroom, I was already a few hours pregnant. If only we'd known, what would we have done differently? For one, I wouldn't have gotten drunk with him watching Caddyshack or downed glasses of wine in a Hollywood bathtub. I wouldn't have let him talk me into trying sushi on our first real date. I wouldn't have gone with him to Oregon and I wouldn't have let him go back. But there's not much point speculating about what might have been, what could have been, what should have been. It's the future I have to think about now, his and mine, tangibly interwoven in the strands of DNA replicating in my womb. Still, I can't help but miss him, miss our time together, both the time that was and the time that could have been. I never told Mulder that T.S. Eliot is my favorite poet, and I think often of these lines from his "Burnt Norton": "Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present." The present is my missing time, my grieving time, my hopeful time. Mulder and I have played baseball and Battleship; we have gone shopping for pomegranates and avocadoes at three in the morning; we have made love in the bathtub and made out like teenagers on his couch. We have never fucked on our office desk or in the backseat of a rental car. We have never spent an entire weekend naked. We have never even spent an entire weekend alone, without the pretext of a case. We have colored outside the lines with a dying three-year-old but we have never changed a dirty diaper or given our newborn daughter a bath. We have shared seven anniversaries but celebrated none of them with champagne. We have slow danced to "Walking in Memphis" but never to random oldies from a jukebox. I never taught him to tango. I never told him how much I love him. I never told him I wanted more than anything to be the mother of his children, for him to be the father of mine. I wanted this long before I learned I was barren, since a conversation on a park bench on a crisp autumn in Home, Pennsylvania. Maybe I place his hand on my belly. Maybe I whisper in his ear. Maybe I hand him the results from the amniocentesis. Maybe Frohike tells him. Maybe Skinner tells him. Maybe he just knows. I'd like to think he just knows.