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CATEGORY: MSR |
Oxytocin by Ambress
"The neurohormone oxytocin
is responsible for
initiating childbirth and the let-down reflex in
lactating women and is released during sexual orgasm.
Oxytocin has been thought of as an affiliation hormone
because research on nonhuman mammals has demonstrated
that it plays a key role in the initiation of maternal
behavior and the formation of adult pair bonds."
--"Preliminary research on plasma oxytocin in normal
cycling women: investigating emotion and interpersonal
distress" Psychiatry 1999 Summer; 62(2):97-113.
"Love's mysteries in
souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book."
--John Donne, "The Ecstasy"
"It's not over yet."
Mulder, staring down into
the face of what is
unarguably his daughter, doesn't understand what Reyes
means. The baby's face is so tiny, he is unclear how
exactly a nose that size could fit on it.
It is so strange. Before,
he had always thought that
babies all resembled one another, more or less. But
this one: he would recognize her anywhere. He has never
seen a baby that looked so much like a person.
At first, he had been worried.
When he'd first seen
more than just the reddish bulging top of her head, she
hadn't looked quite human. Bluish-grey, and it had been
hard to tell her features exactly, because she was
covered in white goo, and some greenish black goo, and
blood.
Reyes had been busy attending
to Scully, so Mulder had
taken it upon himself to clean the baby up.
Her face had emerged from
beneath the washcloth, fairly
human in appearance, and she had started to turn a
slightly pinker color, relieving Mulder of his most
pressing worry.
"Is he okay?" Scully
had called to him, her voice
thready, but laced with fear.
He had smiled across the room
at her, "Rocko is a
Roxanne," he had answered.
"A girl?" Scully had sounded both hopeful and tearful.
"Yeah. " He had grinned at her.
He's cleaned Roxanne up as
well as possible in their
limited accommodations. Still, she resembles a red
little troll, festooned in bodily fluids of various
shades. She doesn't cry. Her eyes just move about the
room, as yet unable to focus. They are bluish green,
and Mulder hopes they will stay that color. The little
arches of her eyebrows are astonishing, just like her
mother's.
He has a difficult time forcing
his gaze away from the
baby's face to address Reyes, but he manages.
He clears his throat, which
suddenly seems to need it.
"What do you mean?"
"The birth, Mulder."
Reyes says. "It isn't over." Reyes
appears a little harried herself. Hair disheveled, and
circles under her eyes, the desire for a cigarette is
written all over her face.
Mulder focuses his gaze on
Scully, on the only bed in
the one room cabin. Pale, and with exhaustion coming
off of her in waves, sweat shines on her face and
chest, and tendrils of damp hair stick to her face. He
glances down at the baby in his arms, and back at Reyes
with a quizzical expression. "She's not having twins,"
he comments dryly.
Reyes shakes her head. "She
hasn't passed the placenta
yet." Reyes has been massaging Scully's abdomen, under
Scully's instructions, since the baby arrived. She has
been trying to stimulate the expulsion of the
afterbirth.
"Don't talk about me
like I'm not here." Scully speaks
in a heavy tone. She doesn't take her eyes off Roxanne,
watching Mulder hold her.
"Sorry, Dana," says
Reyes. She looks genuinely sorry--
soft and sympathetic--and that starts to make Mulder
nervous. This is the woman who stomped all over
Doggett's sorest psychological spots very recently.
Even more recently she has hollered "PUSH!" at Scully
in tones that would have impressed a Marine drill
sergeant. How bad must things be, to inspire that tone
in her voice?
"It hasn't been that
long," Mulder protests, wanting to
believe that everything could be fine for just five
minutes, dammit. He wants time to be thankful that this
little girl is human, and that she is here.
Surely it has only been a
short time since Scully had
pushed that final time, making the most amazingly
primitive noise he had ever heard as she did it. Maybe
fifteen minutes.
"How long has it been?"
Scully asks Reyes. The room had
been lit by daylight when this process had first begun.
Now the night has begun to be replaced by day again.
Streaks of dawn cross the room. Mulder thinks he can
hear birds singing somewhere.
Outside, Doggett has been
patrolling the perimeter like
a German shepherd since they got there. He is
determined to let no one get to Scully. Mulder likes
that about him.
Reyes checks her watch. "It's been forty minutes."
"How much blood have
I lost?" Scully asks next. He can
see, and he wonders if Reyes can, how much
concentration it requires for Scully to run through her
checklist right now.
Reyes and Mulder both inspect
the bed and the floor.
There are bloody towels everywhere. Mulder can smell
the iron in the air.
"A lot," Reyes finally says.
Mulder feels a flare of anger,
and worries that she is
frightening Scully, but Scully just nods, a tiny
inclination of her head.
Mulder knows that expression.
That's Scully's look when
she is going to screw her courage to the sticking place
and go on. "Yes, you're right. It's been too long. It
has to come out."
Mulder's eyes move back and
forth between the women.
Not for the first time, he wishes that he had found out
a little more about this whole process. He had stifled
the urge to research obsessively--though he had pored
through What to Expect When You're Expecting--afraid
that to micro-manage Scully's pregnancy would be
presuming too much. He wishes he had focused a little
more on what could go wrong from within, instead of
worrying about forces without.
Leaning back against the pillows,
Scully's look of
dazed exhaustion is replaced by tense determination.
She drags herself a little bit further up on the bed;
Reyes moves over to help her. Scully takes a deep
breath, visibly putting her back up against something.
She looks at Roxanne, in Mulder's
arms, giving her a
long hungry look, as though drinking up the sight of
her, storing it like a camel for a long journey.
"Can you do it?" Scully asks Reyes.
Lead coats the inside of his
belly. Scully and Reyes
are both so tense. Scully seems to be barely
suppressing the urge to panic, and Reyes looks afraid
to ask what precisely Scully is asking her to do. "What
the hell are you talking about?" Mulder demands.
Both women turn their heads
in synchronous motion to
stare at him as if a creature from another world has
just landed in their midst. Finally, Scully says,
"You'll have to give the baby to Agent Doggett to hold,
Mulder. Reyes will need you to hold me down." To Reyes
she says, "You have a smaller hand, and arm." Reyes'
eyes widen, but she gulps, and nods.
"Hold you *down*?" Mulder's mouth drops open.
Scully is already giving Reyes
instructions: "Wash your
arms, all the way up to your biceps, and then put on
the latex gloves. We should really have long gloves,
but it's too late . . . for that now." She pauses,
seemingly to catch her breath.
"You need to--do it in
one sweeping stroke. You just
need to detach it from the walls of the uterus and then
scoop it out. It's important that it come out whole, or
I could develop septicemia."
Mulder has turned as pale
as Scully. His brain is still
back at "hold me down." He sees her face, and realizes
that no matter how hard she is trying to hide it, she
is truly frightened. That scares him more than the
blood, than her words.
He can't even bring himself
to think about how exposed,
how wide-open this procedure will leave Scully--the
likelihood of infection. . . The air in the cabin seems
suddenly too thin. Mulder is lightheaded, and tells
himself not to be a dickhead and faint now.
Catching his breath, "Isn't
there something else we
could try?" he asks her, gently, trying not to make a
difficult situation worse. He really doesn't want to be
involved in any situation where he has to hold Scully
down, but he will do it if it has to be done.
She starts to shake her head,
"If we don't do it, I
will bleed to death."
Mulder can't stop his recoil,
doubling over slightly as
though he's been punched in the gut.
Scully goes on, "If we
had Pitocin," and then stops,
her expression indicating consideration of sudden
inspiration.
"Oxytocin sometimes will
stimulate contractions," she
says finally.
Mulder gives a short shake
of his head in a demand for
explanation.
"It's a hormone, Mulder."
Scully reads his nonverbal
cues accurately, in spite of her exhaustion. "It's
stimulated by nursing, and it makes the uterus
contract. It might not work. Pitocin doesn't always
work either." Mulder suspects that she is warning
herself, trying not to get her hopes up.
Reyes grasps the situation
right away. "Let's try the
baby," she says.
Scully had offered the baby
her breast after Mulder had
cleaned her up, but Roxanne hadn't seemed ready to
nurse. Now, Mulder hands her back to Scully, strangely
reluctant to let her pass out of his arms. He doesn't
know who he is to this child. He is her father, but is
she his child?
Doggett comes in the room
then, and there is a
whispered consultation between him and Reyes. Mulder
assumes that she is explaining the situation to him.
Mulder pities Doggett when he sees him looking at
Roxanne. He can only imagine what memories are working
in the other man when Doggett reaches over to touch her
fuzzy head.
Scully adjusts the child in
her arms, touching her
cheek softly with her index finger, gently stimulating
the reflex that will cause her to turn her head and
discover her mother's nipple. She doesn't seem to know
what to do with it when she finds it though, making no
attempt to latch on.
After a few minutes of gentle
encouragement, Scully
concedes defeat. "She's just not hungry yet, or she's
just not ready. I don't know." Scully looks to Mulder
as though she is about to cry. "Okay, let's do it
fast."
End Part One
Oxytocin, Part Two
"Wait, Agent Scully," Doggett interjects.
"There's another possibility."
Reyes glances at Mulder,
and then back at Scully.
"Anything," says
Mulder. He doesn't want her to hurt
anymore, or be afraid.
It is Doggett who answers,
not Reyes, surprising
Mulder. His voice sounds especially harsh when he
speaks. "Sometimes. . .couples, attempting to bring on
labor, will, in order to stimulate labor--"
Doggett stammers, and Mulder
doesn't want to think
about how he knows so much about this. "Will, um, use
nipple stimulation to make that hormone," obviously
Doggett doesn't want to try to pronounce it, "do its
stuff." He stops, clearly embarrassed. "Sometimes it
works," he finishes gruffly.
"Whatever it takes,"
Mulder wonders what the problem
is. He has no qualms about anything that would save
Scully the pain of Reyes reaching up inside her to
scoop out the placenta like the inside of an avocado.
Reyes shakes her head, and
then: "*I* can't do it,
Mulder. I don't think it works like that." She looks
pointedly at him, as if she is willing the little light
bulb to go on in his head, then speaks again. "I like
Dana, but I think it might be more effective if you do
it."
Scully speaks up from the
bed. "It's produced as a
emotional-sexual response to physiological stimuli, the
same hormone that is released in female orgasm. Monica
isn't my type," she ends dryly.
"Oh," he says, "Oh!"
A little shock goes through him as
he realizes what she is asking him to do.
He looks at Scully, and her
eyes are so tired. She is
still holding the baby, and she looks like she just
wants this to be over so she can hold her and hold her,
and not worry anymore.
But--"It's all right.
You don't have to, Mulder,"
Scully tells him. She is flushed, and he wonders if she
feels like she has revealed too much.
Reyes startles him when she
speaks. "Perhaps Agent
Doggett would be willing to help." Her tone is flat,
not humorous at all, but Mulder suspects she is yanking
his chain.
"No," he growls.
He is embarrassed, but he can't help
the sharp anger that rises up in him. "That won't be
necessary."
He doesn't miss the smirk
Reyes tries to hide, but he
doesn't care. Doggett just looks amazed.
He covers up with a smart
remark. "Hey, what's a little
nipple stimulation between friends," he quips. The
truth is: he is hers, and she is his, and no one else
can save her.
Reyes leans over and takes
the baby out of Scully's
arms. She and Doggett step with her over to the door,
keeping their backs to the two of them. Doggett goes
outside again, but it is too cold for the baby, so
Reyes stays just inside the door. There is nowhere else
for her to go, but she tries to give them a modicum of
privacy. She hums to the baby, her sense of pitch only
slightly better than Scully's.
Mulder is conscious of Reyes'
imminent presence, but
Scully has chosen him again, and he can't say no. He
doesn't want to. He wants to be essential to her, and
he wants Reyes, Doggett, and everyone else to know it.
He sits down on the bed and
looks at Scully's face for
a moment. She can't quite look him in the eye. "Hey,"
he says, pushing a lock of hair out of her face. "It's
going to be okay."
She shakes her head. She's
embarrassed, he realizes. He
regrets his flippant comment a moment earlier. "It's
just--I'm sorry about this."
"Don't be sorry,"
he tells her, touching her cheek.
"There's nothing to be sorry for."
She tries to smile at him.
"Don't you know I would do anything for you?"
Then her eyes fill up with
tears. "Yes, I do. I just
hate to keep asking you--"
He realizes how vulnerable
she is right now. "It's no
hardship," he tells her. He tilts her chin up so he can
say it into her eyes. "None at all."
"Okay." She nods.
"Fingers or mouth?" he finally asks.
She looks relieved. "Mouth,
please," Then seemingly to
justify her preference, she says, "fingers are too
rough right now."
"Okay," he says,
and, with a gentle hand, he pushes
aside the edges of her shirt, which she had pulled
closed again after the baby had declined to nurse. He
strokes his fingers along the placket of her blouse. He
thinks how sometimes such small things can be so hugely
significant.
He leans forward, as time
slows down, and inhales the
sweaty, bloody, hot, adrenaline-tinged smell of her.
She smells good. She smells real.
Careful not to put any of
his weight on her, he braces
his left arm on the bed on the other side of her hip.
He pushes her blouse farther apart with his nose, and
opens his mouth slightly, trailing down the slope of
her breast to find her nipple. She tastes salty.
He opens his mouth wider and
sucks the pink nipple in.
He hears her inhale above him and is somehow relieved.
Her nipple hardens on his tongue, like hard candy
reversing the melting process. A fierce sense of
possessiveness surprises him with its intensity.
He remembers the night they
conceived this child, the
night he came back from England and a fruitless crop
circle search. She had slid into bed with him after
sleeping for a few hours and he had slid into her with
as little fanfare. Then, in the morning, she'd slid as
easily away.
He remembers it with a dream's
visceral accuracy, but
he doesn't think he paid the proper attention to
Scully's breasts that night. Now, it is hard to relax
and enjoy the feel of her skin, the taste and texture
of her, with her life riding on the outcome.
He knows he has to relax though,
and get her to relax,
if he wants this to work. He focuses on the feel
of her in his mouth and wills himself to forget the
circumstances.
His tongue slides against
the underside of her aureola,
cradling it in the heat of the flexible muscle,
stroking along the bottom in a persistent slow motion.
Pulling it farther into his mouth, he sucks hard and
tight.
The warmth of the bed sheets,
and the loose shirt
Scully is wearing, surrounds him. He feels her shake
and then hears her stifle a sob, and pulls back
slightly.
"Hurt?" he asks,
looking up. His bottom lip catches
tenderly on the underside of her nipple. He keeps his
voice low, though there is not a chance that Reyes
can't hear them. It doesn't matter, he tells himself.
She shakes her head, two tears
dropping down onto his
face. "No. It's not that kind of hurt." She smiles
a
weak smile down at him. Her lip is swollen from biting
it for hours. Her embarrassment is gone, replaced with
a softness, a limpid look he recognizes as devotion.
He pauses, unsure that he
can say anything that would
properly answer that. "Ah," he says, returning to his
work. He feels her hands in his hair, clutching his
head.
After a moment, he feels a
spurt in his mouth, a
strange sweet wetness, and pulls back, startled. Scully
looks down again, and at the same time they see a tiny
dribble of colostrum--the pre-milk milk--on her breast.
"It's working, I think."
She has a strange look on her
face. "Tingles," she explains. She indicates her breast
with a half gesture. "Feels like--when your foot starts
to wake up--after having been asleep."
Murder licks his lips, tasting
the milk with curiosity.
"Tastes sweet," is his final verdict.
He switches to the other breast,
his head diving back
down to catch it in his mouth, like a darting bird. The
breast milk leaking from her nipples makes her slick as
a mango, and he can't resist the urge to cradle her
breast in his right hand, balancing his weight on his
left, the muscles in his arm tense and tight.
Soon, he can feel her belly
harden against his arm, and
tension floods her body in response. "Uhhhh," she says,
and he can feel it thrumming through his own body. Her
body swells like a wave about to crest.
"That's it," he
murmurs against her. "You've got it,
baby," he tells her and himself, whispering it into the
soft skin of her breast. "It's going to be okay." For
them both, he knows now. This is where he fits in.
Suddenly useful again, he can finish what he started
for her.
He relaxes his mouth and lets
his tongue swirl around
her nipple, again and again. He feels the hitch in her
breath.
"Let it happen, Scully,"
he whispers to her. "Just keep
breathing."
"Uh-huuuhhh," she
agrees, groaning again. When her
contraction hits her, wrapping around her middle like a
wide belt of muscle, she grips Mulder's hair with iron
fists. He tries his best not to yell, and suckles
harder to distract himself from the pain.
He isn't sure how much time
has passed as he sucks both
fiercely and tenderly at Scully's nipples. At last, she
gasps, "Gonna push now," tugging at his shoulders.
He
pulls back to watch her, satisfied that he has done his
part, feeling something swell and contract inside of
him as he commits his gaze to her.
Her face, as she pushes, seems
to have all the layers
of civilization and sophistication peeled away, leaving
only the kernel of unencumbered Scully. It looks like
her face as she sets about solving a particularly
knotty problem. It looks like her face under hypnosis.
It looks like her face when she came, that one night.
Reyes, hearing the noise of
Scully's pushing, calls
quickly to Doggett and hands off the baby to him. He
takes her with a startled look, but a practiced air. He
rocks her lightly in his arms, making comforting
noises.
Reyes takes her place at Scully's
feet, between her
knees, and Mulder lets Scully grip his hand hard,
grinding his metacarpals together. He groans along with
her, and together they sing a little duet of pain.
Every muscle in her body is
tight and concentrated, and
she pushes as though she is lifting a Volkswagen off
the body of her child.
Minutes later, they are all
grateful to see the
afterbirth emerge, big as a dinner plate, ugly, rough,
and liver-like. Reyes looks it over as though the
secrets of the universe are in it. "It seems whole to
me," she finally tells Scully.
Mulder takes his daughter
from Doggett's arms and hands
her back to Scully.
Still shaking with effort,
Scully looks down at Roxanne
in her arms, and then up at Mulder. "Seems whole to me
too," she says. She isn't looking at the placenta.
"Thank you," she says to Mulder.
He looks back at both of them,
as full and whole as he
has ever been. "My pleasure," he replies.
**The End
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