JUST A FAN of FAN ART & FANFIC, XFiles

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Just my thoughts:

When the IVF fails, she tells Mulder "it was my last chance" and not "it was my only chance", so I take it as they have tried before. This gets me thinking that there might have been a time when the IVF did take, but then she miscarried, and why they have a pregnancy book in the office. Not a medical book on IVF or other medical research book. For a moment, they were looking forward to a pregnancy together.

He says "don't give up on a miracle" which suggests that she could still get pregnant without IVF because they were already doing it. He wouldn't suggest a "miracle" with another man. No way.

I think you're looking for the "Pregnancy, Birth, and Family Planning" book, credit to @dreamingofscully.

The still is from Brand X (or earlier?), credit to @fashionbooksboozefeminism):

You could also argue it was present in Amor Fati:

But to answer your last question: Scully could have had multiple attempts, of course.

Personally, I think not. Because--

Parenti's pressure when Scully consulted him: a "good chance" he called it, with the caveat, "it's not out of the realm of possibility if we start soon." I'm no medical doctor, but I don't believe he'd say that if her remaining ova could be preserved and stored reliably.

I believe the writers were referring to Emily (since Frank Spotnitz not only had a large hand in her fate but also in Scully's pregnancy.) As Scully said in A Christmas Carol: "I feel like I was given a second chance." Her language in Per Manum ("It was my last chance") was in keeping with and building on (and concluding) past sentiments.

Mulder's face. If this had been the final of a series of attempts, his reaction would have been different: more worn, weary, stricken. Instead, he rises nervously, rambles about sleeping on her couch, and tries to read her expression to know if the attempt was successful. Those are first timer responses: he's unused to this new side of his partner (and them.) By the second, third, or etc. time, he would have known within a glance ("that unspoken.")

Meta and Resources

“Pregnancy, Birth and Family Planning” (and Emily's photo?)

All IVF Roads Lead Away from The Unnatural and to Millennium

"Life on This Planet" Before the IVF Arc

Biogenesis-The Sixth Extinction and Scully's healed fertility

Mulder Didn't Use Scully's Apartment Key Until He “Belonged”

The Scully Family In-Depth (Part XIV Home and Part XXV: Existence.)

The X-Files (In-Depth): Scully's Pregnancy, Mulder's Abduction, and the Truth Behind Requiem and Season 8

Bonus

Fan Theories on the IVF Arc's Placement

@settle-down-frohike's Treatise on the Intimacy of IVF

@carefulfears and @gabby-msr on Mulder's IVF parenthood

Scully looked almost like she’d seen a ghost, and he should know; he’d seen her after she’d seen one. Her fingers flexed on the back of one of her high wooden chairs. “It’s because I haven’t been getting enough zinc.” She swallowed. “Isn’t it.” 

When he stepped toward her she kept the chair between them. She could break his heart if she weren’t so busy scaring the shit out of him.

He tried, “Scully.”

The low, sibilant way she used to take to like a body to water, in the middle of the night, in the flail of some nightmare: Where is my weapon. Did I take enough zinc. And -- Scully, till she sagged with it. Her muscles going long against her bones, which had gone still against his. Scully, alright Scully. Asleep in his arms untense as an exhausted swimmer. 

But now she was rigid. And her eyes were so open, he could see straight to the very blue bottom of her confusion, which was something terrible and true.

“No,” she said. “Don’t do that.” One hand went to her mouth and the other to her chest. Like she was going to throw up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time. “Oh my god,” she said, all but doubled over with it. “Please don’t do this to me.” 

She hadn’t answered the door when he’d knocked, though he’d hardly knocked. The buzz of anonymous highway had been in him, dirt still in his hair, and he’d realized on the walk up to her apartment that he was wearing a rather nice suit, probably Armani.

It was all too strange, even by his generous measure. He’d woken up under a slice of clear blue rectangle in North Carolina that morning. In his gums, it made his teeth ache.

And then there was Scully.

Don’t do this to me, that’s what she’d said when he’d come in the door, too, bolting upright on her couch, scrabbling for her service weapon. Had she been asleep? It was two o’clock in the afternoon. It was, per the gas station calendar as he’d hitched statelines, a Tuesday. Her hair had been a fright. There were bruises under her eyes as purple as any cadaver’s little finger.  

He’d thought — what had he thought? What was he supposed to think? She was Scully. The steps were quite simple: If things were strange, he found Scully. Sometimes, yes, it took a moment to travel from point A to point B. Sometimes there were many smaller steps between those two essential ones. But the fact remained that, in ketamine dreams or the throes of self-imposed psychodemetia, the buck stopped with Scully. Once he found her, some broader leap toward not-strangeness, or at the very least a better kind of strange, could almost always reliably be made. 

Except this was worse, undeniably. Scully cornered across her kitchen where she’d flown after failing to locate her gun. It was not so much that she seemed afraid. The first thing she’d said, before imploring him that she could not take it, had been his name. And she’d said it just like she always had, with a tugging in it, a slur that was like closing a distance. It sounded exactly like the buck still stopped at her front door. 

“Please,” she was saying still, but she had stopped looking at him, sobbing to the hard wood and pale tile floor. “I don’t know—”

“Scully,” he said, in a different way, older and more urgent. “It’s me. It is me.” 

And damn if her face didn’t snap right up to his again. Yes. The echo and aftershock of recognition. His Scully of the basement office and the connected motel room door. Since forever, his assigned seat-mate, his stalwart, his level best. The dutiful daughter whose eyes had looked like that — Christ, just like that — when her father had died. 

Still, she was shaking her head. Her chin in that self-loathing crimp. “I can’t,” she said. 

“Yes,” he told her, though he didn’t know what, really. Anything. “Sure you can, Scully. It’s alright.” 

Scully took a deep breath. When she tore loose of herself it was with a shudder. The same rent-apart way she'd looked when she recalled burning spaceships with her hands open, or when she’d stepped through the doorway into his room, that first time. 

Upon him then, across the room, the dig of her forearm into the flesh of his neck like an incision, like that was how close she wanted to be: to the bone. The chair rattled.

“Hey,” he said, “hey, oh —” He put his arms around her ribs and spine. He put a hand in her hair to hold her and mean it. He said her name one more way, a way that wasn’t worth describing. 

Scully cried like to bring down high heaven. She cried like when she’d nearly had her heart torn out on his ratty living room floor. She cried in a way he’d never heard her cry before. 

AU ficlet for the end of The Truth because William should have been there with them.

This was meant to be written for the X-Files Bingo. Then everything went to hell, and I didn't finish it in time. I've decided to finish it and put it out in the world as it is.

Tagging @today-in-fic

~

The rain patters against the roof outside, but inside, it’s quiet. Mulder barely dares to breathe too loudly, to move too quickly, to make a single mistake. He’s made too many of those already. His hand is on his son’s stomach, rising and falling with the boy’s even breathing. It’s everything he’s dreamed about these last couple of months. What kept him going.

When he closed his eyes at night, he pictured Scully and their son, just doing everyday life things. All the things he was missing. He pictured them smiling, just living. And that’s what kept him alive, too. Hoping that one day he could return, be with them again.

His son has grown into a solid form, bigger than Mulder expected. When he left, when William was only a few days old, he felt light in his hands, but took up all the room in his heart. His reddish tuft has turned a darker shade, as have his eyes. The ghost of Scully’s features is there on the boy’s face. As well as his own. They’ve always been a perfect team, working well together. Their son, however, is their masterpiece.