TITLE: Sad Lovers and Giants 18/? - Parachute of Love
NAME: Mik
E-MAIL: ccmcdoc@hotmail.com
CATEGORY: M/Sk
RATING: NC-17. M/Sk. This story contains slash i.e. m/m sex. So, if you don't like that type of thing - STOP NOW! Forewarned is forearmed. Proceed with caution. Of course if you have four arms you can throw caution to the wind.
SUMMARY: A blizzard. A power cut. Finding their way in darkness.
ARCHIVE: Only with my permission.
FEEDBACK: Feedback? Well, yes, if you insist.
TIMESPAN/SPOILER WARNING: Nnnnnnnnnope.
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 20^th Century Fox Broadcasting. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made from their use. I'd rather say that they really are mine, but I've been advised to deny everything. But when I become king...

Author's notes: Sad Lovers and Giants, the two things hardest to conceal.

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.

Sad Lovers and Giants 18/? - Parachute of Love

by Mik

Mulder slept, finally.

I did not.

After the roller coaster of disclosures the previous twenty four hours had wrought, I wasn't sure I would manage sleep again for a very long while. I was wired and on guard for the next and more horrifying fact to appear. It reminded me of my nightmare of existence in Viet Nam. Again I was literally shell-shocked, lying in the midst of a war zone, this time psychological, and I couldn't risk sleep, couldn't risk letting the enemy catch me defenseless.

The reality was that there was no defense, not even awake. No caliber of gun could stop the demons running loose in Mulder's memory now. I'd had too many frightening revelations about him, from him, to comprehend, in the last rotation of the planet, how on that same planet was he going to cope? He had described it as waking up a stranger to himself. How had he contained these monsters and done the job he had done all these years? How could he now?

The most painful revelation of all was that he would not. Convinced, as he was, that he'd murdered his father, he'd be in prison soon. He'd die there, a repressed, almost Catholic guilt preventing him from defending himself. Conviction and prison were inevitable. Loneliness, despair and death his ultimate fate.

Still, his recollections of the crime just didn't make sense to me. It would never be acceptable to see him surrender to life in a steel cell, but I would be able to accept it more easily if I had some conclusive answers to the how and why it happened.

Mulder was not a violent man. In the years that I've known him, I've seen him endure a lot – in fact, too much for any one human to have to endure. Physical and emotional battering, grief, fear and rage and while he could struggle against bureaucratic restraints, rail against injustices and fire his weapon in defense of others, I had never seen him react violently toward anyone ... except the man he had always maintained was responsible for his father's death. In witnessing his regressions to the wounded child he once was, I had only seen retreating submission, nothing to indicate he'd ever been capable of being provoked to violence, even in his own defense. In short, it just didn't seem conceivable that Mulder would shoot his father deliberately, even if under attack.

My memory of the investigation was somewhat hazy at that point, but I did recall that there was no indication of a struggle in the small space where the shooting took place. If it had not been for a paint chip in the bathtub, which matched the peeling paint outside the window, there would have been nothing to support Mulder's original claim of an intruder in the house.

The gun that fired the fatal bullet had been found next to Bill Mulder's body, and the powder burns and splatter patterns on his shirt and the wall were consistent with a close range shot, but nothing about his son's demeanor or person could support the initial supposition that Fox Mulder killed his dad. In point of fact, I could not recall any mention of a towel on or near the body to explain how Mulder could have picked up the intruder's gun, as he now believed he had done, and killed his father. But no other weapon was present in the house or on the property, except Mulder's own gun, which was ultimately ruled out. So, how did Mulder get the weapon, how did he manage to aim it at his father, get that close to him, without a struggle, and fire it without any powder burns or blood splatter on himself?

Mulder stirred again, rolling toward me, opening his eyes. Perceiving that I was awake, he lifted his head and frowned. "What's wrong?" he muttered, rubbing his eyes.

I patted his shoulder. "Nothing," I lied. "Go back to sleep."

"They're going to fire you for coming down here, aren't they?" There was a slightly less than pragmatic note to his voice.

"No, they can't fire me," I insisted a little too forcefully.

"They're going to discipline you in some way," he concluded.

It was pretty clear he wasn't going to let it go. "Yes," I admitted finally, "that seems likely."

He leaned into me. "I am so sorry," he murmured fervently.

I slid my arms around him and locked my hands behind his back. He was leaner than I remembered. "Hush," I said, not gently. "It's going to be all right."

"Yeah," he agreed with a bitter laugh. "It'll be dandy. What a great, romantic pair we'll make. You'll be suspended and I'll be in prison." He sighed and shifted slightly as he meant to break the embrace. "You were better off when you told me to get lost."

"No," my arms tightened around him, "I was not."

He absorbed that and lowered his head tentatively until his lips met mine. He did not necessarily kiss me, not in an active, erotic way. He just kept his mouth on mine. It was not a gesture of hunger, just a need to be connected.

I wanted him. I wouldn't even deny it if he asked. But he didn't ask. He just stayed close. We both understood, without actually articulating it, that any further attempts at intercourse were impossible. At least, for a very long time. It was almost unbearable to consider that this might well be the last embrace, the last kiss. I wanted to make it so much more than it was, and yet I could only make it what it was, a need to be connected; to be understood, cared for, held fast.

When he broke the kiss, he rested his cheek against mine. "I'm not gay because he raped me, you know," he said very quietly.

I brushed my fingers over his back. His skin was warm and smooth. "I know that."

"So...being in love with you...that's not an attempt to romanticize my relationship with him."

"I know." I stilled. "In love with me?"

He blushed. I felt his cheek grow hotter against mine.

"Mulder?"

He didn't answer for a moment. Then he whispered, "Everything's going to be all right."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

We were among the last to board the plane. We slept through the alarm. It was only the sound of my mobile ringing that woke us. I did not return the call until Mulder had stumbled into the bathroom. I needn't have bothered. It was nothing more than a not so subtle warning that stepping outside my jurisdiction was going to prove detrimental to my cause. I did not bother to share my feelings on the subject. The powers that insist on being could not possibly conceive how trivial it was to me.

Mulder looked terrible. Every moment of the last few days, every horrific revelation was etched on his face. It was clear he was terrified of what lay ahead of him, but no more so than what he'd found looking over his shoulder. For one long, desperate moment, I wanted to grab him and run. Take him away from any need to confess, any penance to pay. For a long, desperate moment, he wanted to go. But the moment passed. It was not in either of us to run. Even if I could, Mulder couldn't. Now that he knew, his innate sense of justice demanded retribution for his father's life, even at the cost of his own.

Still, that didn't make either of us dash for that plane. I borrowed an iron from housekeeping and pressed his soiled shirt and slacks. He borrowed my razor and toothbrush. We didn't discuss what steps we would be taking once we stepped off the plane in D.C., but we missed no opportunity to touch, caress or just stand close to one another right up to the moment we boarded.

At that hour of the morning, it was the usual mix of commuters; businessmen, kids returning to school, a couple of mothers with babies, and a few men and women in uniform who'd missed the transport. Several of them cast us seemingly knowing looks as we scrambled aboard. Perhaps it was some latent guilt on my part but contempt seemed to be written all over their faces. I wanted to smack sneers away and announce to the entire planeload that the man next to me was a hero; children were alive because of him. I wanted to add that in fact, if it had occurred to either of us, one call to a no doubt rejoicing Senator Nolan would have gotten us a private plane.

Mulder scanned the plane, finding no two empty seats together and said, "I suppose we could ask someone to shift over."

I said something stupid. It wasn't stupid when I formed the words in my head. There it made perfect sense. But outside my head, where he could hear, it became the second most foolish thing I'd ever said. "No, it's all right." My voice even dipped down to a foolishly hushed tone. "We probably shouldn't sit together anyway."

Now, what I meant was that seated together, hurtling toward disaster, one or both of us might behave inappropriately; running the gamut from clinging and crying to trying to dissuade him from his chosen course of action. What he heard, I'm sure, was a desire to hide or deny our relationship in public. He gave me a kaleidoscope of a look, from disbelief to pain to anger before it became a blank slate. "Fine," he murmured, "I'll sit here." He slid, rather rudely, in between a chaplain and a woman with a baby.

I had no choice. I moved back three rows and took a seat on the aisle, where I could see the back of his head, and hoped I'd get a chance to move closer once we were in the air.

We never got into the air.

I did not notice him right away, but I did notice that Mulder noticed something. Something about the incline of his head and the way, when I caught his profile, his eyes were narrowed so that anyone who knew him would recognize as intent concentration.

I pulled my gaze from him to follow the direction of his concentration and then I noticed his target. Caucasian, well groomed, large, bordering on husky, the size of his hands and torso making the dark suit and trench coat look unnatural on him. He gave every outward appearance of being focused, even calm, his face was a mask of indifference, but his large hands revealed agitation, clenching and unclenching, occasionally sliding over the front of his coat as if reassuring himself that something was in place.

By the time I looked back at Mulder, he was looking at me. He had also shifted himself, slightly but decidedly, into the personal space of the woman next to him. She was clearly annoyed, but as yet not recognizing the danger or that Mulder was shielding her child.

Mulder and I exchanged looks, looks that weighed and discarded options. Unlike most air passengers, law enforcement agents are not required to relinquish their weapons when boarding, however, the small, overfull cabin of a commuter plane was the very last place for a firefight. If this guy could be taken down without gunplay, more people had a chance to survive.

Our suspicious looking individual did not move down the aisle, but remained at the front, his eyes scanning right and left, as if he was looking for an empty seat. There were a few, one, in fact, just opposite me, but he ignored it and remained standing.

Mulder scratched his ear with two fingers and then let his fingertips rest on his cheek. It took me just a moment to realize he was saying there were at least two of them on board. That ratcheted up my anxiety exponentially. My routine flight home now had two suspicious persons and at least one of them appeared to be heavily armed. I know that my fears were based on suppositions, maybes and conjectures but all of them were sitting squarely on the shoulders of Mulder's feeling for phenomenon. That was enough for me.

One of the flight attendants moved up the aisle toward the man. I wanted to catch her attention, not let her get within reach of him, but she passed me without looking my way and approached him. "Sir, please take a seat, we're about to depart."

He continued to scan the cabin as if she had not spoken, indeed, as if she was not there.

I sat forward in my seat, pulling my feet up under me, ready to jump. The young woman gestured back down the aisle. "Sir. Please. Take a seat." She pointed in my direction. "There's one, now."

As she spoke, the passenger door was pushed shut and locked, with that heavy thud, like a giant Tupperware seal. With her attention directed toward the seat opposite me, she didn't see him finally acknowledge her, and reach for her arm. I don't think most of the passengers even saw it, and those who did observe the action weren't really aware that something dangerous was about to happen.

The flight attendant didn't even seem to understand she was in peril. She twisted in his grasp with a little gasp of indignation, and repeated her request that the man take a seat, or she would be forced to call the captain.

The mask of indifference that was his face broke then, and darkened. His eyes narrowed, and his lips tightened, and he said something harsh up close to her face. I didn't need to hear the words to know exactly what he said. The way she paled and recoiled from him was enough to know he stated his threat to her.

Mulder started, but he was stuck between the chaplain and the mother. He shifted around in his seat to me. I couldn't make any overt moves for my holster, not when I hadn't identified the position of the second hijacker, so I slid forward slightly more in my seat, watching the struggle at the front of the cabin, while I let my hand rest on the release of my seatbelt, ready to jump when I had to.

Another flight attendant noticed that there was some kind of altercation taking place and started up the aisle. She was out of my reach before I let my attention be pulled from the couple in front, so I couldn't stop her, either. She had started a protest in a brook no arguments voice but skidded into silent stillness at the sight of the large, serrated blade that was now held to her colleague's throat. Then she screamed.

And then others woke to the danger we were in and they screamed. Men and women. People began scrambling to get out of their seats; or over them, or under them. A volcano of newspapers erupted into the aisles. Children cried, there was a great deal of pointless movement, and shouts and epithets and predictions of doom were hurled around the cabin. Homeland Security's color coded propaganda made certain terror was no respecter of gender. One man even fainted.

Mulder must have seen something in the hijacker's face that compelled him to act, because he unbuckled his seatbelt and levered himself up and turned to face the rest of the cabin. "Quiet!" he shouted, waving his hands for attention. "Everyone. You're not helping." He waited a beat and added, "Panic is going to get us killed. Everybody." He lowered his hands slowly. "Sit down. Be quiet." He sent a look over his shoulder. "Let's find out what's going on."

Even that didn't settle things immediately. It was the flight attendant's squeal as her captor tugged the knife up tighter against her, and his snarled, "Listen to the man," that settled silence over the cabin like a heavy blanket. People forced themselves back into their seats rigidly, and save for some woman sobbing "Oh, my God, oh, my God," in a choked voice somewhere at the rear of the cabin, no one made another sound.

The hijacker then began speaking softly to the woman he wore like a shield. The expression on his face was calm, composed and sincere, almost suggesting romantic intent, but her reactions were clearly not those of a woman being wooed. She listened, and nodded and whimpered. Together, in an almost comical backward shuffle, they moved toward the cockpit.

Mulder and I exchanged looks again. We agreed, within those looks, that the hijacker couldn't be allowed inside that cockpit. Mulder wasn't yet ready to surrender his position in front of the woman and her child, and I was already on an aisle, so it was down to me to take action when action absolutely had to be taken. I let my seatbelt release as carefully as I could, but even still, the click was dangerously loud to me. I tried to move in slow motion so as not to bring any attention on myself as I worked my hand around to my gun. I had no intention of drawing my weapon, I just wanted access to it if I should need to draw it. It was more along the lines of what Mulder would call self comforting. Just the reassuring knowledge that I had lethal force within my reach, should the need arise.

Still, the act of going to one's hip for a weapon is a singular and therefore telltale movement, and it evidently caught someone's attention because, before I could fully form the plan for my next action, there was another singular and therefore telltale movement, not my own. I didn't see it, but the result of it, also singular and therefore telltale, was unmistakable; the sensation of a gun barrel pressed behind my right ear.

End 18