TITLE:
E-MAIL: ccmcdoc@hotmail.com
CATEGORY: M/Sk
RATING: NC-17. M/Sk.
This story contains slash i.e. m/m sex. Not suitable for
children, Baptists or Republicans.
SUMMARY: First time M/Sk. Do you need any more information? Well, I guess you do. I know what this story appears to be...but please, please bear with me. It's gonna' be okay. They promised.
ARCHIVE: Only
with my permission.
FEEDBACK: Feedback? Well, yes, if you insist.
TIMESPAN/SPOILER WARNING: Okay...hmmm...no specific spoilers for specific eps. Back in the good old days when Skinner was still their
boss, nothing had been burnt and no one's best friends
had died needlessly for the sake of ratings or to jump sharks.
KEYWORDS: story slash angst Mulder Skinner NC-17
DISCLAIMER: Fox Mulder, Walter Skinner, and all other
X-Files characters belong to Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen Productions and 20th
Century Fox Broadcasting. No copyright infringement is intended
and no profit is being made from their use. I personally think Chris Carter, et
al, should just give them to me, since they're not
using them anymore, and anyway, I treat them much, much better, but there you
are.
Author's notes: See Chapter One for assorted notes, credits and ramblings. They will be omitted henceforth to save virtual trees.
If you like this, there's more at https://www.squidge.org/3wstop
If you didn't like it, come see
me, anyway. Pet the dog.
by Mik
He was so angry he was shaking. He seemed to vibrate his way up to his condo. His hands shook so hard that he couldn't manage the key in the door. I was surprised that I could. I didn't plan to. I just reached out and grabbed without even trying to put it into thought, much less effort. The door swung open and instead of crossing the threshold, he turned that angry glare into one of betrayed accusation. "I thought you couldn't leave," he hissed.
"I can't." I followed him inside even though he didn't want me there even more than before.
"You didn't seem to have any trouble just now." He went into the living room, and I expected him to go directly to the bar. Instead, he went to the sofa at the far wall, and sat, carefully. He seemed to be breathing slowly, shakily, and he pressed his palms to the knees of his jeans to keep them from trembling. "What..." rage made his voice as brittle as a politician's promise, "the hell were you thinking?"
I wanted to have an answer for him. I wanted him to understand. But how could I explain it when it was only a sense of something, something ephemeral in my brain, without a shape I could grasp and describe? "I don't know," I confessed. "I needed to know."
He was looking at the back of his hands, placed so precisely upon his knees. "And do you know now?"
Did I? I knew how it felt to stand in a perilous position, but I'd always known that. I knew how it felt to be in a situation where the merest breeze could have torn me away from any security I had, but that had been a feeling as intimate as a brother most of my life. I knew how it felt to hurl toward certain doom, gravity sucking me in and resistance pulling me out, but that defined my entire career. I knew how it felt to slam against inexorable reality, firm, concrete and unmovable, but that was almost like working for Skinner all these years...granted without the sensation of skin bursting open and teeth practically dissolving in my mouth.
But I never felt life slip away. I never really felt any pain. My soul, if such a thing existed, never hovered above my broken body. I hit the ground, picked myself up and sat down on the nearest chair to wait for Skinner to arrive and take charge. "I don't think so."
He was still shaking. He was trying to contain it but he almost looked as if he were going to fly apart with feeling. I wanted to reach out, to try providing some kind of comfort, but I suspected I was the biggest reason he was a little bit fragile. In typical Skinner fashion, he was trying to pull himself together and take control. Control was 'normal', control was the status quo. Slapping his hands against his thighs, he stood. "Are you hungry?"
"I could eat." That was just a statement of fact. I was capable of consuming food. "What do you want?"
"I have things..." He wasn't completely himself yet. He gestured broadly toward the kitchen, as if the word escaped him. "...in there."
"Can I help?" I offered. It seemed the polite thing to do.
"I don't know." He sent a look over his shoulder. "Can you?"
"I'm pretty sure I can." I followed him into...'there'. He was already looking in cupboards, pulling out pans, looking as if plans were coming together just as they ought. I wanted to consult his agenda and see if it said 'Friday pm, funeral, shower, pasta with ghost'.
All in all, it was a pleasant enough evening. Oh, sure, it was awkward. Not much to talk about once you've passed the 'how's the weather in hell?' and 'how does it feel to be splattered over the pavement?' After that, politics and sports seem kind of trivial. And there was that moment when I was contemplating the pristine blade of a carving knife, and wondering if it would hurt more going in or coming out, and he just took the knife out of my hand before I could find out.
We talked about Scully, mostly. How hard she was taking it, and did I think I could find a way to reassure her I was all right...well, aside from being dead. I said I didn't think so, unless I gave him a message for her that she would recognize as coming from me. I had a few in mind, things I had said to her when we were alone, silly, meaningless things but things I remembered and I was pretty sure she wouldn't have forgotten. But they were personal, almost intimate, and I wasn't ready to open that part of myself up to Skinner.
"What about..."
I looked at him. His face was sort of grey-green as if he was thinking about being sick again. His eyes twisted up at the corners, as if he was trying to remember something he didn't know he knew. "About?" I prompted.
"What about 'If there's an iced tea in this bag, it could be love?'"
I felt as sick as he looked. "How did you know?" How dare he know? That was probably the most emotionally intimate thing I'd ever said to her. The closest I'd ever danced around the edges of confessing my feelings...he had no right to know about it.
He looked at me, shaking his head slowly, silently pleading with me to explain how he could know the unknowable. "I...don't know."
I jumped up from the chair, circling him, hands fisted, thinking I might hit him, thinking I might shake him, thinking I could risk touching him. "How...did...you...know?"
"I just knew." He looked up at me.
I had to laugh. Out loud. Angry and betrayed as I felt, I had no choice. The laughter rushed out like sparrows from a barn. He was as disturbed as I was to have been inside that part of me that I didn't even go into without a warrant. "It appears that I left some luggage behind while I was your...guest."
"Well, I don't want it. Take it back." He stood up, moving around me carefully. "Tell me where to ship it." He got all the way to the bar before something stopped him. "You were in love with her."
"Oh, and you weren't," I mocked.
We whirled and faced each other like cowboys in a gunfight, only our only weapons were the twin expressions of incredulity. "You were," I whispered when I could find my voice.
He tried to shake his head. But he couldn't deny it. I knew. "She never wanted me," he said, finally, painfully. "She wanted you."
"No." I settled back in my chair, feeling as if I had fallen off his balcony again, and this time it hurt. "She wanted something somewhere between the two of us."
"How did...how do...? Mulder," his jaw was clenched in that fearsome patient impatience, "what the hell is going on?"
"I don't know. I don't know!" I shouted. "I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask to come back, I didn't ask for a second chance. I'm here and I don't know the reason. But I'm not just here. I'm here as a part of you, and I, no offense, Sir, but I sure as hell didn't ask for that." I stood, pacing, hurting, wanting the pain to stop. I looked over my shoulder at the railing almost longingly.
Suddenly he was there, looming up in my field of vision, blocking my path of escape. "I didn't ask for you, either, Mulder, but you're here, and we have to deal with it. At least...at least until I wake up in the morning and find out this was an alcohol induced nightmare."
"I'll spare you the trouble." I started to push past him.
He put his hands on my shoulders and gripped hard. "Stop it."
"If I'm just a nightmare, why are you stopping me?"
"Because..." he pushed hard and I tumbled backward, "it doesn't work."
He looked at if he would hit me if I tried to get to my feet, so I stayed down. But I didn't stay quiet. "Well, if I'm just a nightmare, we should probably get to sleep so you can wake up and be done with me."
He huffed out a breath and backed up...uncoiling the knots in his fists, letting his muscles go to standby. "Yes," he agreed. "Yes, that's a good idea. There's a bed in the study. You can sleep there."
"Okay." There was no point in shattering his delusions so soon after he'd considered strangling me with those big meat mitts. "Thank you."
He pushed a door open. "Do you...ah...need any..." he gestured over his torso, "thing?"
"Nah." I pushed myself upward. "I'm good."
"Okay." He reached for the banister. "Goodnight."
"Yeah. 'Night."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
When he emerged from the shower he did not look happy to see me. "What the..."
I settled back against the stack of pillows. "Is this your side? I didn't see any books or anything, so I wasn't sure."
"No." He was shaking his head. "This is where I draw the line. You are not sleeping in my bed."
"Aww, c'mon," I wheedled, "it'll be fun. After your mother goes to bed, we can sneak downstairs and fix popcorn and watch porn on cable, and..."
He wasn't scowling. He was looking at me with a kind of pained disbelief. "What kind of childhood did you have, anyway?"
Well, at least he got my lame attempt at humor. "That's not exactly bedtime material." I patted the undisturbed side of the bed. "Now, come on. It's time all good little Assistant Directors were in bed."
"Get...out...of...my...bed."
He was trying so hard not to kill me again. He really was trying to be reasonable. I felt sorry for him. "Sorry. Can't."
"Who says?" he demanded. "Show me where it says you have to sleep with me?"
I shrugged. "If I knew, I would show you."
He snatched up pillows and dragged one of the blankets from the bed.
"Won't do any good," I called as he stomped out of the room.
It was true. He skidded to a stop at the door of the study. "What the hell did you do? Multiply?"
I didn't have the heart to laugh anymore. It had stopped being amusing even to me. "I'm sorry," I said again. I stood. "Since this is inevitable, you may as well sleep where you'll be most comfortable." I pulled at his arm. "Let's go to bed."
He jerked away, crimson faced. "Don't ever say that to me again."
"Oh...okay." Frankly I was a bit startled by the reaction. "I didn't...you know, mean anything...I'll tell you what, I'll...I'll..." I grabbed a collapsible chair from the corner, "I'll put this in the corner and sleep on that." I waited for him at the door. "Coming?"
"You can't sleep in that."
"Bet I can." I seemed stalled at the door. "Come on. Do you want to stand here all night?"
"No." He seemed to sense my problem and moved past me and into the hall. "You'll break your back in that."
"Nah. I'll be fine," I promised following him up the stairs. Eternity was so not going to be good for my lumbosacral region.
Inside his room, he smoothed the snatched bedclothes back into place while I unfolded the chair and settled in the corner I anticipated being the furthest out of his field of vision. He paused to check on me more than once, as if he expected me to be poised to pounce into bed the moment he let down his guard. Once he was in the bed, smoothing bedclothes out around his body, he took his glasses off, folded them and settled them neatly on the bedside, just the way I imagined he would...I mean, if I'd ever imagined him in bed.
He reached up into the lamp and switched it off. "Goodnight, Mulder."
"'night, Sir," I said, rocking on the two back legs of the chairs, wondering if shades sleep.
The room got quiet. There was no white noise, no black noise, no noise of any hue. It was just dark and silent...like a grave.
I sat up abruptly, with a clatter...something, my heart, I suppose, thudding in my chest. I reached out, testing the boundaries of the blackness, wanting to claw, to kick, to escape.
"Sit still, Mulder."
I settled back...that pounding still in my chest, my ears, but the desperate tenseness in my arms and legs began to ease. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a mistake. I wasn't buried.
"Mulder." He sounded very impatient. "Can't you be still?"
"Sorry."
And I tried. I really did.
A moment later, the bedside light snapped on, and he threw the bedclothes back, with a disgusted sigh. "Oh, all right. Will you lie still if you lie down?"
I stood up and came around the empty side of the bed. "Thank you." I toed off my shoes, and slid out of my jacket.
Across the bed, he pulled open a drawer and produced a paperback book. It wasn't a sudden urge to read. Even I knew that. He just needed to look at something other than me.
I worked my tie loose and slid it from my collar.
He settled his glasses primly on the bridge of his nose.
I bent the bars of my cufflinks and pulled them free.
He cleared his throat and stared at a page.
I unbuttoned my shirt.
He turned a page.
I let my shirt fall to the floor.
He adjusted his glasses.
I unbuckled my belt.
The tips of his ears were getting pink. It reminded me of that day. It made me smile. It made me sad.
He looked up. "Yes?"
I put my belt next to my tie and cufflinks and pulled the sheet back.
He stared into the book quickly. "Trousers, Mulder."
One knee on the bed I stalled. Maybe my ears were getting pink. "Ahhh, no."
He looked up again.
I smiled helplessly. "I seem to be...missing...uh..." I gestured faintly, "I guess they don't consider underwear necessary for the afterlife."
He jerked the bedclothes back hard. "Get in. Shut up. Be still." He tossed the book on the floor and turned the light out. "Good night."
I tipped my head back into the pillows and wondered if I had any memory, any sense of actually being in a coffin? No. I turned my head to look at him. I could feel the tension in his body pouring off of him like smelted steel. "I suppose a cuddle would be out of the question."
"Good night, Mulder."
End 07