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hellzyeahwebwieldingreviews · 4 years

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Untold Tales of Spider-Man 02: After the First Death… – by Tom DeFalco

A story that has me debating the nature of these stories.

A soggy Spidey swings through rainy Manhattan looking for crime shots for the Daily Bugle. He comes upon Kent and Wayne Weisinger on the roof of Stockbridge Jewelers, planning to rob it. Confident that he can end the fight anytime he wants to, Spidey stretches it out so that his automatic camera can take as many photos as possible. Kent and Wayne have a longstanding sibling rivalry marked by Kent's resentment of being the "muscle" to Wayne's "brains" along with feeling that his brother always cheats him. During the fight, Kent appears to charge at Spidey but when the web-slinger leaps out of the way, Kent doesn't stop, charging into Wayne and knocking him off the roof. Wayne falls five stories to his death and all the by-standers think Spidey did it. Guiltily, Spidey flees, forgetting about Kent altogether.

So, Kent goes to Wayne's estranged wife Jeannette to tell her the news. "Solid ice," Jeannette could care less about Wayne's death except that she's lost her meal ticket. When Kent blames the death on Spider-Man, Jeannette gets an idea on how to cash in.

In fact, Peter Parker seems to be the only one emotionally affected by Wayne's death. He has a sleepless night, trying to cope with the situation. Unguarded, he admits to J. Jonah Jameson that he has photos of the incident. His resolve to not sell the photos is beaten down by Jameson's arm-twisting and his own need for money. He sells the pictures and is then introduced to Jeannette, now the grieving widow of Wayne, who has come to JJJ for help in instituting a civil suit against Spider-Man. At school, Peter's conscience makes him counter Flash Thompson's avowal that "Spidey's no murderer" with "Maybe the wall-crawler didn't actually kill the man... but that doesn't mean he shouldn't be held accountable for what happened." Back in action, Spidey hesitates over stopping a purse-snatcher, fearful that he may cause another tragedy. Back home, Peter doesn't know what to do. He recalls that Uncle Ben's death made him swear, "that no innocent person would ever again be made to suffer because Spider-Man had failed to act. It had never occurred to him that anyone would suffer because of Spider-Man's acts." And while Wayne wasn't exactly innocent, "he had suffered because Peter had acted irresponsibly." He ends up having one of those vague discussions with Aunt May where he can't tell her any details because she doesn't know he's Spider-Man, yet she manages to hit the nail on the head, telling him in this case, "Everybody makes mistakes, Peter. You just try to learn from your failures as best you can, and you move on. You'll always get another chance to do better as long as you keep at it."

Meanwhile, Jeannette decides to kick Kent out of the deal and keep any anticipated profits for herself. So even as Spidey sucks it up and gets back into action, proving himself a hero, Kent decides he's not going to be kicked around anymore, buttonholes a TV reporter and gives an interview in which he reveals "that he deliberately pushed his elder brother off the roof of Stockbridge Jewelers because of numerous past frustrations." At Midtown High, Flash crows over Spidey's exoneration but Peter won't let the web-slinger off so easily. "A real hero would have found a way to save Wayne Weisinger" he says, "He would have acted smarter, reacted quicker, or behaved more responsibly... And that's something Spider-Man will have to live with for the rest of his life."

Because these are untold tales, prose stories and utilize the comic book continuity you can analyse them from several different angles and their worth changes depending upon those angles.

Chiefly this boils down to whether I judge this as a story unto itself or within the context of comic book continuity as it existed back then? What about the fact that I’m here in 2020 evaluating a prose book written in 1990 that’s trying to synch up with comic book stories written in the 1960.

It boggles the mind. All I can do is write about how I feel.

I liked this story unto itself and within the context of this book. I think, kind of like the last story, that it doesn’t really integrate into Spider-Man’s comic book history.

The emotional journey of Peter in this story involves learning that he needs to be careful about how he acts. In this regard it’s rather similar to his lesson from Gwen’s death, which is kind of my problem. This story’s title implies this is in fact the very first time Spider-Man has experienced death ‘on the job’ as it were.

Surely such a thing would weigh on his mind more, surely it’d crop up when he dwells on the list of people he’s seen die or feels guilty about dying. Or at least he’d be reminded of Wayne’s death when Gwen dies.

In the comics of course Wayne has never ever been mentioned. Duh, because he didn’t exist until DeFalco invented him for this story. Of course we could draw comparisons with Sally Avril, a character from AF #15 who died in the comic book version of Untold Tales but whose death went unacknowledged in stories from the 60s-90s.

I think the critical difference there is that (IIRC) Peter wasn’t particularly responsible for her death whereas in the case of Wayne, whilst he didn’t push him off the building, his arrogance really did directly contribute to his death. Plus seeing a man die in such a horrible way, especially if it is the first time he’s ever seen a dead body, would likely leave a bigger impression upon Peter than the nature of Sally’s death, although I must admit it’s been a long time since I read that issue so perhaps I am wrong.

From a continuity stand point this is the minefield you always walk, but at the same time it’d be difficult to generate drama if you didn’t step on those mines occasionally.

I feel DeFalco here wanted to tell a dramatic story that had Peter grapple with a genuinely emotional situation and also took advantage of the nature of this story as a flashback tale.

And frankly he succeeded. If you view this either out of continuity or essentially within an incredibly generalized canon of Spider-Man (i.e. Gwen Stacy died, whether Peter did or didn’t think about Wayne is ambiguous though) the story very much works. I doubt DeFalco or anyone else was honestly feeling any of these stories were going to strictly be canon anyway. However for the record this story happens at some point after ASM #9 because when we get a list of Spider-Man’s opponents they all appeared up to that issue.

Looking at the story itself its flaws are incredibly minor.

Some of the dialogue feels old fashioned, but I argue that is likely by design since this is set in an older time period. We go over exposition related to Peter’s origin again, which is more the editor’s fault since we got those details in the first story of the anthology. In fairness revisiting it does serve a greater purpose here because the story is directly ruminating upon the nature of responsibility. In that sense it would’ve been more logical to open the book up with this than the Ant-Man story and I see little reason as to why this couldn’t have in theory happened at an earlier point chronologically. Yeah the Ant-Man story claims Spider-Man’s a new figure on the scene but the passage of time in the first 10 issues of ASM is so vague it’s really not unbelievable that even by issue #9 Spidey might still be considered ‘new’.

Not only does the story explore (and successfully at that) the theme of responsibility, approaching it from the opposite direction from the lesson Ben’s death imparted, but it also features the supporting cast more. Flash, Aunt May, Jameson, the Bugle and public distrust of Spider-Man are all given notable roles to play in the story, again proving that THIS should’ve opened the book.

To go back to the theme of responsibility for a moment, perhaps the most nuanced bit of writing in the story is when Peter is on the phone to Jameson. Peter has a really great ethical dilemma. Would it be irresponsible to profit off of Wayne’s death or would it be irresponsible to not profit off of it and use the money to support his Aunt May?

DeFalco more than any other writer GETS Spider-Man and his depiction of Peter’s internal debate, whilst short, rings utterly true. What gets me is that most of the time whenever I’ve seen this sort of thing done with Peter he’s actually made a different decision, but here DeFalco recognizes that in actuality Peter WOULD consider his responsibilities as the bread winner outweigh what boils down to him merely feeling bad about profiting off a man’s death. It’s not all that different to when he faked photos of Electro to help Aunt May. Yes it’s unethical, but there was a higher responsibility, a greater good at stake.*

Kent and Jeanette’s subplot, whilst arguably wrapped up unsatisfactorily, does a neat job of evoking something of a daytime drama or even noir story, and in that light fits wonderfully into the brand of stories Lee and Ditko churned out way back at the start.

In fact of the two opening stories this one more successfully captured that era and by extension the approach of the comic book version of UToSM. Whilst the Ant-Man story was fun, it was the prose equivalent of a typical MTU super hero yarn complete with dodgy pseudo science.

This story though? Now this is a Spider-Man story. It has a singular main character (Kent is ultimately a supporting player) and whether he’s in or out of the costume the story is driven by the emotional and human problems faced by the character, not the fantastical super human issues. In classic Spidey manner those two halves of his life bleed over into one another and lack a clear cut divide.

Really in the Ant-Man story Peter’s personal life would’ve gone mostly unaffected whether he had gotten involved or not. It wasn’t about Peter Parker, it was about Spider-Man. This story is about both.

Peter needs money to look after himself, his home and Aunt May. So he looks for trouble as Spider-Man and pads out a fight. That gets someone killed which haunts Peter and makes him hesitate to BE Spider-Man, even whilst he reluctantly profits off it as Peter Parker which in turn contributes to his being falsely accused as Spider-Man and kids as school hating on him because he will not defend Spider-Man from these accusations.

Wham, Bam, DeFalco is the Man. THAT’S a fucking Spidey story right there!

The only thing for me which really and truly did let this story down wasn’t the fault of the book, but the audio production.

I’m hoping DeSantos was just off his game for this story, but between this and his prior efforts I think he’s achingly miscast as the narrator of this title. He worked better narrating Stan Lee and Busiek’s forwards than the actual stories. As Aunt May, Kent and Jeanette he wasn’t that bad (actually pretty good as Kent), but his Peter/Spider-Man fails. He can’t even sell the emotion of the non-dialogue bits. He’s not a bad narrator, but not right for this book.

Over all taken strictly within comics canon there are a lot of contradictions. But taken as it’s own thing or (I suspect) within the context of this one book, this is a knock out story.

*By the way DeFalco also seamlessly blends humour and tragedy in the scene. Peter’s internal debate and horror at the prospect of profiting off of Wayne’s death leaves him in silence which in turn is misinterpreted by Jameson causing him to raise his offer which in turn causes Peter more internal strife. Just brilliant!

#Tom DeFalco #Ron Frenz #Gwen Stacy #Spider-Man #Peter Parker #Untold Tales Of Spider-Man #Stan Lee #Kurt Busiek #Aunt May #May Parker #J. Jonah Jameson

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poeticsandaliens · 6 years

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Miracle

Rating: M because Will curses like a truck driver.

Timeline: Post-MS IV (I know, I know. If you look closely, you can see my middle finger pointing directly at Chris Carter.)

Summary: Six times Dana Scully called Will a miracle and what that word really means.

Tagging @today-in-fic. This fic has been my pet project for the last two weeks and was interrupted repeatedly by the porn I’ve been writing. If you squint it can be read as the same universe as my other post-finale fics, namely Morning Hour, but that’s not really relevant.

‘Miracle’ is a dirty word, dirtier than ‘fuck’ used to be and much less versatile. When you work miracles, you set a precedent. You promise you can save people the next time.

Reading his own files in a government database, long-dead typists call Jackson Van de Kamp a miracle or a monster, savior of the world or bringer of the apocalypse. It’s a tired Superman story, and he’s read every possible ending in his childhood comic books.

He’s not the government’s mail-order Jesus, here to die for their fucked-up sins.

He can prove it, too. He didn’t forgive his murderers; he popped off their heads. And he didn’t die to absolve anyone of blame; he died for the very thing God didn’t want anyone to get ahold of—Knowledge. The Truth with capital T. He died because he taunted some chain-smoking bastard on a bridge. He didn’t mean to get shot, and he didn’t mean to come back to life.

* * * * * * *

The first time Dana calls him a miracle, Will leaves. He’s used to the word—which makes it worse but easier to hide. Still, he packs up his duffel and promises he’ll be back. He pretends it has nothing to do with them, everything to do with the itch of the road. It’s not her fault miracles make him sick.

He leaves them the adirondack chair. It’s a derelict piece of shit he picked up from some guy’s garage sale, but it’s his piece of shit. He hammered it back together, painted it the color of the Wyoming sky, and planted it in their yard. He hopes they take it as a sign that he’s making them his home, so he doesn’t have to say it out loud.

He drives South and lets the humidity suck him in. He picks a bucket of figs outside Inman, South Carolina with an ancient African American woman who embroidered the entire solar system into her jean jacket. She is an elm tree of a woman, engraved with all the wrinkles of ninety-two years. Then, he buys a bag of boiled peanuts and three honey-sticks from the ramshackle fuel station next to a railroad overgrown with kudzu. The attendant calls it a miracle that a customer has come ‘round. Then he tells Will that honeysuckle is free.

Southerners, he has noticed, toss around ‘miracles’ like they’re cheaper than cigarettes. He likes it.

Will crawls back to Virginia after a couple weeks spent on the road, where he wasted monsoon nights smoking his head away in the Everglades and keeping an eye on the unborn kid. He’s not an idiot; he knows it’s a high-risk pregnancy. If something goes wrong, he’ll know before Mulder and Dana do. He even knew it was a girl before they did, but he’s good at keeping his mouth shut.

He’ll be around for his sister, and they all know it. He’s attached to the kid, even if he tries to hide it. The baby is something untainted by his death count, his back-from-death count, his bloody miracles.

* * * * * * *

The second time Dana calls him a miracle, he lets it slide. Slip of the tongue, mumbled in between bites of croissant. He’s laughing for the first time in God knows how long, laughing his way through autumn.

Dana sits cross-legged in the grass, sipping tea. She sits in the grass a lot, he notices. Maybe it’s a side effect of being an ex-city-dweller, the way grass relaxes her and she shushes him to hear the cicadas. Will was always a trail-and-cliff kind of boy, raised in the shadow of Wyoming Rockies, but he can appreciate the rickety solitude of this home.

He pads barefoot through the dying lawn and sits down next to her. He’s been home for a week now, longer than last time. Tomorrow, he will shove two hoodies into a backpack and drive to the Appalachians. He will leave behind a companion to his adirondack and a bucket of pine-green paint. This time when he says ‘itch of the road,’ he means it. But for now, he holds up a paper bag from the bakery. “I brought croissants.”

Dana’s eyebrows shoot up; her face splits into a grin. “Thank you Will,” she says as he passes her the bag. The scent of melted chocolate wafts from its wrapping. She bites into the croissant with a contented sigh as he reaches into the bag for his own, butter and chocolate sticking to his fingers.

“You’re a miracle,” she says through a mouthful of buttery goodness.

Time stops.

Will doesn’t register it until he has swallowed. When he looks at her, she’s bright red, her eyes wide and all of a sudden younger than her face. He smiles as reassuringly as he can and lies back on the lawn. She didn’t mean it like that, and even if she did. It’s not her fault.

* * * * * * *

The third time doesn’t really count. Spring goes out with drums of thunder, and June bleeds into their lives. One morning, Dana cups a naked, watermelon-pink creature in the palm of her hand and stalks urgently across the patio.

“It’s a baby robin,” she informs him. It lies panting on a paper towel. Before he can protest, she slides it into his hands.

He must have startled at the sight of it, the intersection of hideous and adorable, because Dana apologizes for the lack of warning. Turns out it dropped from its nest, and she’s too short to reach the branch. He is pleasantly surprised by this side of her, the tender side that rescues birds and folds bandannas around her neck on sunny days.

Dana leads him to the birds’ nest, sitting seven feet up a tree and already brimming with hatchlings. An alarmed screech from a nearby tree alerts him to the mother robin. He cradles the baby bird in his hand, admiring it for a moment. But just before he lifts it to the nest, he hears—

thud-thud-thud-thud-thud, the newborn’s rapid heart rate strumming his eardrums. This again.

“Are you okay?” Dana watches him, her brows furrowed.

“Uh-huh,” he assures her. “Just got the bird’s heartbeat stuck in my head for a second.” He smacks his ear as if he’s caught water in it, and the sound fades.

“You can do that?” Amazement sparkles in her eyes. Also, he discerns, maternal pride.

“Yup.” He tries for nonchalant, ends up sheepish, scratching the back of his head and avoiding her eyes. Should he tell her? He studies her—tiny and wound up like a sharp violin, bearing an impressive collection of pantsuits and an even more impressive collection of scars. All taut muscle except where a small-for-now baby bump blossoms beneath her t-shirt.

“You know, I can hear the kid’s heartbeat too,” he says, gesturing to her stomach. He tries to ignore her quick intake of breath.

She stands up straighter, gaging how much he wants to tell her. “What does it sound like?”

“Like a metronome.” His short-term memory lobs Miami at him. He’s unsure why he tells her any of this, but he does. “When I was in Florida,” he muses, “I bought this shitty electric keyboard. The kind they have elementary school music classrooms, that takes like ten double A batteries and plays a bunch of out of tune instruments. I wanted a guitar but I didn’t know how to play one; plus, I thought it would be cute for the baby. Make a good first impression, y’know?”

He doesn’t give Dana a chance to respond. “Anyway, I was camping out in the everglades. Just… stretching out and sleeping in the trunk of the car. At night if it wasn’t raining, I would open the sun roof and look at the sky. And I tried to check up on you guys, in here.” He taps his forehead. “Came up with the heartbeat instead. Sometimes I tried to play the keyboard in time to it. I could play some tunes from Pirates of the Caribbean but not much else.”

A smile graces her lips. “You said you used to love those movies.”

“I did. That’s what the Everglades reminded me of,” he adds. Pirates, tropical marshes, the monsters that lurk in the deep. He remembers sitting on the roof, going through three different flavors of vape, scared to dangle his feet over the car because a gator had taken up residence beside it. He remembers watching the gator breathe, watching its slick, scaly back dry out in the heat, and its jaw hang wide open. He remembers finally climbing down the car and reaching out to touch it. His rational side was terrified it would snap, but he realized, somehow, that it wouldn’t. Not at him, at any rate. Maybe his alien blood is reptilian. Who knows. He’ll never forget what an alligator’s back feels like.

“What happened to the keyboard?”

“It broke. I tossed it before I came home.” He reaches into the bird’s nest and drops the little creature in. It mewls hungrily.

“Miracle of life from non-life,” says Dana. She gingerly touches his shoulder. He listens for the rhythmic creature unfolding in her womb. Life from non-life, skin from stones, cells from silence.

* * * * * * *

The fourth time Dana calls him a miracle, it is not Dana at all. Dana is inside, flipping three grilled cheese sandwiches while Mulder hoes a disheveled garden. A heat wave barreled violently into Virginia last week, and Dana won’t show her face outside at midday, especially since the baby made its presence clear.

Will pulls into the driveway with three bags of fertilizer and a greenhouse worth of seeds. He tucks his ice coffee in his elbow and unloads the dirt from his trunk. Already decorated in roots and silver dandelions, Mulder empties them messily into the turned dirt.

“Thanks, kiddo,” he says with a grin. A month ago, he might have rejected the nickname, but he’s trying to befriend Mulder. Bridge the gaps he already has with Dana by virtue of telepathy. It’s hard to hide from a woman who can read your mind.

“No problem.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and wanders over to the garden. “Anything I can do?”

“Can you blot out the sun?” Mulder chuckles, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Or, you know, work some human Miracle-Grow on these flowers?”

“Unfortunately,” Will says distractedly, “My talents don’t really extend to peaceable flower-growing. I don’t think that’s what the government had in mind when they cooked up my DNA.” He means it casually. He really does. The same way Mulder means ‘human Miracle-Grow,’ and he was going to let that one go.

Mulder stares at him with those regretful labrador eyes. Shit. One wrong step and he’s swimming in parental guilt. Dana knows why he took the first time. He wonders if she ever told Mulder, or if she let him believe it was wanderlust. Genetic, of course.

“It’s okay,” he assures Mulder. Will doesn’t want his parents’ teary remorse, but he accepts it. They’ve seen Hell, and that’s coming from the kid who’s blown up human heads. So he curbs his annoyance every time they hug him like he’s fine china and doubt him when he says he’ll stay.

“I’m sorry,” Mulder says, “that was insensitive.”

“Naw, it’s fine.” Casually, callously, that’s the only way Will knows how to talk about what he’s been through.

Silence thick with pollen. Mulder shakes sunflower seeds over a haphazard row.

“You were a miracle, you know. Scully wanted you more than anything.”

He knows this. He reads it like newsprint off her brain. And yet—

“I was a weapon,” Will says bluntly. Another comic book cliché to tack onto the list. Not like he’s counting or anything.

“No.” Mulder shakes his head, shoves the hoe into a fresh groove. “They tried to weaponize you, but you wouldn’t have it. Will, you’ve got a choice that Scully and I don’t have—you don’t have to be their experiment. It’s too late in the game for us; we’re old, and we served twenty-five years in the X-files, prodding and being prodded. But those men are dead now, and while the scars may never heal, you don’t have to let them open another wound. You are human, and you’re allowed to have a life. You’re only their weapon if you believe it.”

He says it so forcefully Will almost believes him. Maybe one day he will. Not yet. “I did kill people,” he reminds his father solemnly. He has inherited Mulder’s ability to suck out his own soul.

“It’ll haunt you, and it’s never okay, but sometimes that’s what it comes to.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I killed people. So did Scully.” He was dead when Mulder shot the smoking bastard. He wishes he had seen it for more reasons than one. “Just…” Mulder trails off. “Give yourself a chance. Give Scully a chance. You won’t regret it.”

He wonders if he’ll ever love someone as much as Mulder loves Dana. He wonders if he wants to love someone that much, to bear the everyday risk of losing them. He empties two bags of poppy seeds into the garden.

Mulder has returned to the open car. He lifts a shopping bag out of the trunk and peeks inside. “What’s this?”

“I found it with the sunflower seeds. They were on clearance.” Will shrugs, acts like he didn’t buy it thoughtfully.

The wooden windchimes clink when Mulder examines them—sleeves of birch wood dangling like spiders on a thread. At the top, a cardinal opens its beak to the sky. “It’s beautiful. Your moth—Scully will love this.”

Wisely, neither of them discuss the Freudian slip.

* * * * * * *

The fifth time Dana says it, they are sitting in the Adirondack chairs, watching the overdue baby struggle against her confines. He comes to rest somewhere between amazed and utterly creeped out at the sight of it, and it probably shows on his face. Things have begun to show on his face recently. Since he pulled his hair into a ponytail and let himself relax, he no longer resembles the drunken guitarist of an out-of-line undergrad rock band. That was how Mulder described the scraggly shape of him when he was on the run. Mulder recognized it in himself, maybe—trying to scare off his enemies, winds up scaring off everybody else.

Scully cocks an eyebrow at him. “You look slightly perturbed.”

“It’s a little freaky looking,” Will concedes, eyeing the bow and flex of her abdomen. Kid’ll be here any day now—tomorrow, he predicts, maybe the day after. His sixth sense will go fucking haywire the second Dana goes into labor.

“It feels even stranger than it looks,” she replies.

He settles into the chair, leaning his head on his hands and stretching his gangly legs in front of him. He listens. Songbirds, wind chimes, the desperate buzz of insects having sex before they die… his sister’s heartbeat thumping frantically against the side of his head. He half smiles.

“It’s miraculous, you know,” she murmurs. “Even if it looks and feels discomfiting, it’s still a miracle.” A weighty pause. “You’re a miracle too.”

This time, the weight of the word ‘miracle’ doesn’t make him ill. His whole life, a catalogue of unexplained events and Sunday mornings in the Presbyterian church, people called him a miracle. On the playground, he healed scraped knees, and kids called him a wizard.

Dana and Mulder, though—they don’t see him as a miracle of Biblical proportion, or a miracle of science, immaculately crafted for a destiny. To them, he’s a miracle of love. His birth is a transcription of amor omnia vincit, and his return is a testament to it. He is a miracle because he was born and because he is a person Dana Scully created with Fox Mulder in a tatty DC apartment. Not because he’s a gritty reboot of a Christ allegory.

He is okay with being this kind of miracle.

He hears a quiet, “oh…” and opens his eyes. Dana scrunches her eyebrows together and squeezes the arm of her chair. “Braxton-Hicks,” she explains. He takes her at her word the way Mulder doesn’t. (Mulder, who suspects the baby is coming every time she so much as grunts; Mulder, who couldn’t be there the three times his son came to life.)

“If she sticks around much longer,” mutters Dana as she shifts in the chair, “she’ll say her first words in the womb.”

“Tomorrow,” he promises. Immediately he regrets telling her, but she looked so uncomfortable just there. She reminded him of his neighbors in Wyoming, a dusty-haired lesbian couple who wore nothing but khakis and hiking boots. Their son must be three or four by now, but he remembers how Lilian taught him to repair his mountain bike in her last month of pregnancy, woeing incessantly about how she couldn’t ride her own. ‘If the baby doesn’t come tomorrow I’m going to lose my goddamn mind,’ she’d told him every day for a week.

Now, Dana gazes at him with ocean-wide eyes. “You know?”

He shrugs self-consciously. “Yeah.”

“How?”

“I dunno. Same way I do all the other shit, I guess.” He wiggles his fingers. “Galaxy magic.”

This time she laughs, and a little bubble of pride wells in him. He can make her laugh through her discomfort, a clear, beautiful sound. He loves her, his mother. She doesn’t feel quite like his mother, but he catches love for her like he caught it for his unborn sister. Or maybe she is something like his mother—not his mom, the titles ‘Mom and Dad’ will forever be reserved for the parents he grieves, and he’s still shaking the nagging guilt that he is somehow replacing them by loving Dana and Mulder.

Maybe this is the kind of love you feel for your parents when you’re thirty, or maybe it’s the kind of love you feel for a step parent who isn’t your mom but who does her best, asks how your day is going and offers what advice she can. Whatever it is, it is keen and familiar, and he clings to it like a lifeline on days the earth swallows him.

Mulder finds them laughing their asses off at the most beautiful sunset in months. Dana glances up at him with an ear-to-ear grin, one hand on her belly and one hand on Will’s shoulder. Weeping tears of laughter, they forget what cracked them up in the first place.

* * * * * * *

In his eighteen years on this bitch of an Earth, Will has worked two legitimate miracles:

Jerry Abernathy from his eighth grade Algebra class had an allergic reaction to a peanut butter cookie. Somehow, he survived without a single shot of the epi pen he’d left at home that morning.

Alice Mulder-Scully enters the world screaming. The volume of blood on nurses’ uniforms belies the healthy baby. Relieved, haggard doctors struggle to explain the mother’s strong heartbeat. Nothing to see here, tells the look on Will’s face as strangers pass him in the waiting room. He wipes a trickle of blood from his nose and downs an energy drink to stay awake.

* * * * * * *

The sixth time Dana calls him a miracle, he is sitting on the porch steps of the Virginia home. Alice’s baby feet kick his knees, and he grins as she struggles from his lap to crawl across the grass. Fireflies light up the gravel drive, flashing and dying, glowing with no particular pattern. They move like stars in space-time, as if he’s witnessing the lifespan of a galaxy in time lapse. Alice giggles as one blinks in front of her nose.

“Bug!” she screams happily.

“Yeah, kiddo, a lot of bugs.” A fox skittered across the property that morning, and Alice pointed at it and called it ‘Dada.’ Mulder was fake-insulted for hours.

Grinning down at her, he begins to rearrange the fireflies. To his behest, insects in mating season are shockingly tenacious, and it takes all his mental effort to control them. It’s worth it as they lazily swirl toward Alice, who bats at them and giggles uncontrollably.

“Bug! Bug!” she pops the word over and over again, snickering as one lands in her tufts of russet hair.

“I assume this is your doing?” Dana appears behind him, and he grins at her over his shoulder. The screen door smacks shut.

“She loves them.”

“More than her actual toys,” Dana snorts. She cocks her eyebrow at him, then lifts her phone and takes a picture. “I never liked fireflies.”

“Not even as a kid?”

“Well,” she chuckles, “maybe. But one of my first cases on the X files ruined them for me.”

“Seems like those files fucked you both over,” he replies.

“Someone had to do our job.” She sits down next to him and wraps her sweater tighter round her frame. “It took a lot from Mulder and I, but it brought us together. And when the ash settled, we gained two miracles.”

Watching Alice clumsily reach for glow worms, Dana wraps her arm around his shoulders. He lets her. Alice’s fireflies scatter and spiral into the stars.

#the x-files #txf fanfic #fox mulder #dana scully #msr fanfic #post ms iv #jackson van de kamp #william-centric #stupid midlife miracle baby #todayinfic

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