Lightning Crashes III: Darkness
Fandom: X-Files
Title: Lightning Crashes III: Darkness
Author: Rye
Rating: R
Pairing: Mulder/Skinner
Summary: An interlude in the Lightning Crashes universe. How do
you protect something that was never yours to begin with? A missing
scene from SR819.
Disclaimer: Still not mine. Wish they were, though....I'd only rumple them slightly....
Thanks to CGS, who is the Absolute Editor.
Walter Skinner's Apartment
Crystal City, VA
11:47 p.m.
The hallway was empty, and humming with that barely perceptible pitch that florescent lights emit in the silence of uninhabited spaces.
The door was simply one more door in the hallway--the same as anyother. Remarkable only in its complete lack of any personalization. No ornate knocker, no wreath (god forbid), no nameplate. Just a beige door, and yet it was a barrier that suddenly seemed to loom large and unbreachable. Mulder knocked anyway.
Skinner had been released from the hospital two days ago, and aside from a curt voicemail jointly sent to him and Scully informing them that he would return to the office the following Monday, Mulder hadn't heard a word from the AD.
Not that he'd expected one.
But still, here he was. Wondering at his own foolishness, and understanding at the same time that he had no choice but to stand here and wait...
He heard the footsteps behind the door. The pause that told him Skinner was eyeing him through the peephole and probably reholstering his gun. Then a longer pause that carried endless moments of wondering if the door would open, or if he would simply hear the footsteps receding.
The sharp ache that cut through his gut when the door opened could have been either relief or terror.
"She told me, you know." It wasn't what he'd planned on saying. But it was the only thing he could find the words to utter, his voice surprisingly rough and uncertain in his own ears.
Meeting the steady brown gaze only partly concealed by the glasses, Mulder plunged on, heedless to the further tightening in his gut that warned him this might be a mistake.
"She told me what you said to her--about not being enough of an ally for us, about not being pulled in. How could you believe that?" He could hear a thin undercurrent of desperation in his voice and wondered if Skinner heard it, too.
Shit. This had been a mistake. The brief clenching of Skinner's jaw signaled that he was ruthlessly suppressing some impatient remark - calculating exactly what to say to make Mulder go away as quickly as possible. He couldn't let that happen. He needed to be here.
Skinner regarded him impassively for a long moment, seemingly reading the conflict roiling through his agent's eyes, and finally stood aside and gestured him wordlessly into the dimly lit living room.
"Drink?" The offer was unexpected, as was the quietly resigned tone.
But god he was alive, Skinner was alive.
"Yeah."
Skinner handed him a glass of scotch and then settled into one of the leather armchairs at the end of his coffee table. He looked so painfully alone. Isolated by all that had happened in those horrible 24 hours and all that had happened after.
The AD had been held at the hospital for 3 more days, undergoing tests that Mulder could only begin to imagine. Even Scully, stoic for herself and for the world at large, usually, had met him in the corridor one of the afternoons and simply said, "Let's leave him be for a bit. I think he needs some time to recover." Mulder never asked her what procedure had just been done, he didn't have the courage. When he went back a couple of hours later, Skinner was lying there--pale, a light sheen of sweat evident on his forehead, his eyes naked and empty. It had terrified Mulder.
He'd visited Skinner each day, of course, joking lightly during their time together, aware that there was a guard present, aware of their audience. Had tried to convey something else entirely with his eyes, but had no sense if the message had been received. The need to see Skinner, alone, had finally overwhelmed him today, and he'd found himself at the front door of the nearly anonymous apartment, cursing himself for a fool, and yet recognizing the darker truth that underlay the tightness in his gut.
It was even harder than he'd expected. Standing here, a place he'd been at least a dozen times before, looking at the man sitting in the chair, he was at a loss. Trying to find the words to reach through Skinner's armor of silence. He needed to touch him; reach him.
The scotch burned a path to his gut. He sat on the end of the couch closest to Skinner, still searching for words.
A small huff. "Why are you here, Mulder?" Skinner wasn't looking at him....was staring out into some middle distance that seemed to hold unnamed horrors. The middle distance that seemed to occupy him more and more.
Why indeed? How to answer that question that contained so many hidden traps?
"I just thought I'd say 'hey'?" The attempt at humor probably a mistake. Too facile, too easy for this situation. Trying to make light of that horrible night when it had all began.
Dark laughter, and something that might have been a smile briefly twisted Skinner's lips. "Hey? I think we've been here before."
"Yeah--I know." A sigh he couldn't hold back. "But not with the same outcome, I hope." Voice now very small. "I don't think I could go through that again." Staring down at the beige anonymous carpet, unable to look up to see the reaction.
A surprisingly strong, wry reply. "I don't think I could, either." Then a pause. "Why are you here?"
He closed his eyes, and tried to find again the courage that had brought him here in the first place. "I had to talk to you. Had to see you. She told me what you said to her in the hospital. That you regretted not making our quest your own. That you never let yourself be pulled in. But you have, you did. You have been there for us, you have risked your life and your career for me, for us more times than I can count." It wasn't all that he needed to say, but it was a start.
A long, difficult pause this time.
"But I haven't done everything I could have, and I still ca--..." Skinner's voice broke off, something almost like pain in it.
Mulder's head jerked up. "You have done what you could--more sometimes. She still doesn't know about your deal, you know. I didn't tell her what you tried to do with your bargain with that smoking bastard."
"Scarcely matters. We both know that it got me, and her precisely nowhere." The bitterness of that knowledge flaring cold and bright through the darkened room.
"But you tried, you risked everything."
Skinner drained the last of his drink and deliberately placed his tumbler on the table before taking off his glasses and scrubbing his face with his fingers. Suddenly Mulder could see weariness in every line of the AD's body.
Face still buried in his hands, his voice was muffled. "I'm not going to argue with you about this, Mulder. Why are we having this conversation?"
It was late and this was going nowhere. He knew why he had come, but being here, in this room, with this man, he found his motives and reasons becoming confused and snarled.
"Because I had to tell you--"
Skinner's head jerked up, an unnamable tension radiating throughout his body.
Mulder plunged on, desperately trying to ignore the danger that seemed to emanate from the man across from him. "I wanted to tell you...." He didn't even have the words to say what he needed to, the language failed him utterly. There was no vocabulary to describe the feelings that gripped him.
He stood, and walked over to Skinner, crouched down in front of him, took his hands. Felt Skinner suppress a small movement--not sure if he was fighting the urge to twine his fingers with Mulder's or to take his hands away.
And finally there were no words for what he wanted to say. What he needed the other man to understand. How do you express a need that is so dark it has no name? How do you say to someone 'I had to watch you dying. It nearly destroyed me, because I realized wasn't sure what would happen to me if you died'?
Because the simple truth was that he had felt torn in half during that day. Half of him had been racing heedlessly, recklessly from possible lead to desperate hunch, trying to find any trace of something or someone that could stay the hand of the slow execution that was killing Walter Skinner. The other half of him had stayed in that hospital--by Walter's side, hovering, waiting, longing to do something, needing simply to be there.
He had trusted Scully, without word, without question to do everything in her power to save Skinner. Knew that she would throw her formidable spirit and talents and intelligence into deciphering and defeating the thing that Skinner at its mercy. But still, he had wanted to be there. To simply stay with him.
The whole thing had been all too reminiscent of other desperate, hopeless chases in his life--the chase across the arctic wastes for answers about Samantha, the race for the chip that even now seemed to be both saving Scully and threatening her, his endless chase for answers that were always close, but always just beyond his grasp.
And yet, and yet, here they were. Alive, and perhaps not without hope.
Skinner continued to regard him almost impassively. A strange light lurked just below the surface of his gaze, a guttering candle.
Realizing that he would never have the words, Mulder did the only thing he knew to do. He leaned forward and kissed Skinner.
The hard, familiar mouth resisted him for just a moment, before softening just slightly. For a time, there was only the heated reality of their mouths mating. Lips pressing, parting, the sinuous wet movement of the tongue across his own, the casual possession of his mouth, his soul.
His hands tightened around Skinner's, a necessary grip to maintain sanity and pure physical balance. This kiss alone was sending him spiraling outward, already sinking fast into a siren call of lust, need, and jagged, tight tenderness.
He shifted, prelude to moving up and forward, to taking this to the next level. Deeper, closer intimacy. And was left gasping and bereft as Skinner suddenly stood up and stepped around him, stalking soundlessly over to stare out into the nightscape that lay outside his living room window.
"What...?" His voice thin, reedy.
"Go away, Mulder." Skinner's voice was level, uninflected, but Mulder could see from the jerky movements of his shoulders that the AD was barely in check.
He crossed to stand behind Skinner, seeing their dual reflections in the plate glass of the window. The lights from the urban centers below them merging and distorting their images.
He was close enough to feel the heat from Skinner's body, to smell the unmistakable musk and clean, dry scent that was Skinner's alone. But he didn't touch him. Some primal instinct kept him just far enough away to allow space for breath and reason.
"What the hell was that?" Mulder was vaguely dismayed by the near petulance in his voice.
"Nothing. Just....nothing. This isn't a good idea." The growl dropped to something almost inaudible. "It probably wasn't ever a good idea."
At that he had to reach out, to touch, to try to connect through the nightmare-sense of unreality that threatened to pull him under. Hands on Skinner's shoulders, trying to turn him around to face him, he might as well have been trying to turn a marble statue.
"Don't say that. God, don't say that. What's going on?"
Silence alone answered him for unbearable eon. But something in his tone must have reached Skinner, because after a shuddering sigh, he turned around to meet Mulder's eyes. The younger man was shocked by the desolation he saw.
"Shit." The wind almost knocked out of him with sudden dread. "What is it? Scully said you were going to be fine.."
"That's not it." Curt dismissal of his concern.
"Then what?"
Another sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his being. "It's nothing. Just, please go." The closest he'd ever heard to pleading in that voice.
"Why? Did I do something...."
"Dammit, Mulder!" The familiar growl apparent again. "Let it go. I've already told you--not everything is about you."
Hurt and concern now warring with an undeniable instinct that something was wrong. But he could also read the set of the jaw, the rigid squaring of the shoulders. Knew that even now his time was running out.
It had taken him a long time to learn it, but Mulder had learned to recognize when strategic retreats were good decisions.
A step back. Not outright capitulation--still well within Skinner's space--but a small concession. "I think I should stay." Still testing, even as he was backing down.
"Go." The voice softer now, not gentle, but not barking commands.
"I'll be back."
"Yes, I imagine you'll try."
The words did not go unnoticed. "I can be pretty fucking persistent."
"So can I." A challenge that seemed unnecessary, and therefore dangerous.
For a brief moment he could feel the heat of their kiss again. Replayed it though his quirky memory, trying to taste the moment he had lost the connection, trying to understand this man in front of him.
Skinner simply watched him with bemusement.
"I'm going." Turning, getting his coat, realizing that Skinner had never moved.
At the door, looking back for one second. "I'll be back."
As the door closed behind him, he could have sworn he heard an almost inaudible response. "I'll be here."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Skinner watched the door close with a grim satisfaction. Felt the click of the lock echoing in the hollow spaces of his gut.
Empty. Deserted. Alone.
Again.
Always it came to this. Always he was cut off from those to whom he would reach out. Depend on. Trust. And seek to be trusted by.
Alone.
He'd looked at the surveillance photos. Had gotten them from Agent Anderson, who didn't realize that he shouldn't be bringing evidence to the AD in the hospital. He knew the adversary who held the controls on these things in his blood. Knew the name and face that
would now haunt all his darker hours.
There is always a price for knowledge. Once you know, you must act.
He couldn't have this any longer. He'd had to send Mulder away. There was no choice.
No choice.
He had been poisoned. He was poison now. And he'd be damned if he'd allow his....connection to Mulder be poisoned, too. The connection had sustained him through so much already, but he would not allow it to be taken. To be tainted. So Mulder had been sent away. Because it was the only way to save him.
Skinner waited in the darkness. Waiting for the darkness.
END
AN (2006): I always felt a little bad leaving M/Sk in this place - it was much darker than I'd intended. Maybe someday I'll write part IV...(or, you know, not)
Title: Lightning Crashes III: Darkness
Author: Rye
Rating: R
Pairing: Mulder/Skinner
Summary: An interlude in the Lightning Crashes universe. How do
you protect something that was never yours to begin with? A missing
scene from SR819.
Disclaimer: Still not mine. Wish they were, though....I'd only rumple them slightly....
Thanks to CGS, who is the Absolute Editor.
Walter Skinner's Apartment
Crystal City, VA
11:47 p.m.
The hallway was empty, and humming with that barely perceptible pitch that florescent lights emit in the silence of uninhabited spaces.
The door was simply one more door in the hallway--the same as anyother. Remarkable only in its complete lack of any personalization. No ornate knocker, no wreath (god forbid), no nameplate. Just a beige door, and yet it was a barrier that suddenly seemed to loom large and unbreachable. Mulder knocked anyway.
Skinner had been released from the hospital two days ago, and aside from a curt voicemail jointly sent to him and Scully informing them that he would return to the office the following Monday, Mulder hadn't heard a word from the AD.
Not that he'd expected one.
But still, here he was. Wondering at his own foolishness, and understanding at the same time that he had no choice but to stand here and wait...
He heard the footsteps behind the door. The pause that told him Skinner was eyeing him through the peephole and probably reholstering his gun. Then a longer pause that carried endless moments of wondering if the door would open, or if he would simply hear the footsteps receding.
The sharp ache that cut through his gut when the door opened could have been either relief or terror.
"She told me, you know." It wasn't what he'd planned on saying. But it was the only thing he could find the words to utter, his voice surprisingly rough and uncertain in his own ears.
Meeting the steady brown gaze only partly concealed by the glasses, Mulder plunged on, heedless to the further tightening in his gut that warned him this might be a mistake.
"She told me what you said to her--about not being enough of an ally for us, about not being pulled in. How could you believe that?" He could hear a thin undercurrent of desperation in his voice and wondered if Skinner heard it, too.
Shit. This had been a mistake. The brief clenching of Skinner's jaw signaled that he was ruthlessly suppressing some impatient remark - calculating exactly what to say to make Mulder go away as quickly as possible. He couldn't let that happen. He needed to be here.
Skinner regarded him impassively for a long moment, seemingly reading the conflict roiling through his agent's eyes, and finally stood aside and gestured him wordlessly into the dimly lit living room.
"Drink?" The offer was unexpected, as was the quietly resigned tone.
But god he was alive, Skinner was alive.
"Yeah."
Skinner handed him a glass of scotch and then settled into one of the leather armchairs at the end of his coffee table. He looked so painfully alone. Isolated by all that had happened in those horrible 24 hours and all that had happened after.
The AD had been held at the hospital for 3 more days, undergoing tests that Mulder could only begin to imagine. Even Scully, stoic for herself and for the world at large, usually, had met him in the corridor one of the afternoons and simply said, "Let's leave him be for a bit. I think he needs some time to recover." Mulder never asked her what procedure had just been done, he didn't have the courage. When he went back a couple of hours later, Skinner was lying there--pale, a light sheen of sweat evident on his forehead, his eyes naked and empty. It had terrified Mulder.
He'd visited Skinner each day, of course, joking lightly during their time together, aware that there was a guard present, aware of their audience. Had tried to convey something else entirely with his eyes, but had no sense if the message had been received. The need to see Skinner, alone, had finally overwhelmed him today, and he'd found himself at the front door of the nearly anonymous apartment, cursing himself for a fool, and yet recognizing the darker truth that underlay the tightness in his gut.
It was even harder than he'd expected. Standing here, a place he'd been at least a dozen times before, looking at the man sitting in the chair, he was at a loss. Trying to find the words to reach through Skinner's armor of silence. He needed to touch him; reach him.
The scotch burned a path to his gut. He sat on the end of the couch closest to Skinner, still searching for words.
A small huff. "Why are you here, Mulder?" Skinner wasn't looking at him....was staring out into some middle distance that seemed to hold unnamed horrors. The middle distance that seemed to occupy him more and more.
Why indeed? How to answer that question that contained so many hidden traps?
"I just thought I'd say 'hey'?" The attempt at humor probably a mistake. Too facile, too easy for this situation. Trying to make light of that horrible night when it had all began.
Dark laughter, and something that might have been a smile briefly twisted Skinner's lips. "Hey? I think we've been here before."
"Yeah--I know." A sigh he couldn't hold back. "But not with the same outcome, I hope." Voice now very small. "I don't think I could go through that again." Staring down at the beige anonymous carpet, unable to look up to see the reaction.
A surprisingly strong, wry reply. "I don't think I could, either." Then a pause. "Why are you here?"
He closed his eyes, and tried to find again the courage that had brought him here in the first place. "I had to talk to you. Had to see you. She told me what you said to her in the hospital. That you regretted not making our quest your own. That you never let yourself be pulled in. But you have, you did. You have been there for us, you have risked your life and your career for me, for us more times than I can count." It wasn't all that he needed to say, but it was a start.
A long, difficult pause this time.
"But I haven't done everything I could have, and I still ca--..." Skinner's voice broke off, something almost like pain in it.
Mulder's head jerked up. "You have done what you could--more sometimes. She still doesn't know about your deal, you know. I didn't tell her what you tried to do with your bargain with that smoking bastard."
"Scarcely matters. We both know that it got me, and her precisely nowhere." The bitterness of that knowledge flaring cold and bright through the darkened room.
"But you tried, you risked everything."
Skinner drained the last of his drink and deliberately placed his tumbler on the table before taking off his glasses and scrubbing his face with his fingers. Suddenly Mulder could see weariness in every line of the AD's body.
Face still buried in his hands, his voice was muffled. "I'm not going to argue with you about this, Mulder. Why are we having this conversation?"
It was late and this was going nowhere. He knew why he had come, but being here, in this room, with this man, he found his motives and reasons becoming confused and snarled.
"Because I had to tell you--"
Skinner's head jerked up, an unnamable tension radiating throughout his body.
Mulder plunged on, desperately trying to ignore the danger that seemed to emanate from the man across from him. "I wanted to tell you...." He didn't even have the words to say what he needed to, the language failed him utterly. There was no vocabulary to describe the feelings that gripped him.
He stood, and walked over to Skinner, crouched down in front of him, took his hands. Felt Skinner suppress a small movement--not sure if he was fighting the urge to twine his fingers with Mulder's or to take his hands away.
And finally there were no words for what he wanted to say. What he needed the other man to understand. How do you express a need that is so dark it has no name? How do you say to someone 'I had to watch you dying. It nearly destroyed me, because I realized wasn't sure what would happen to me if you died'?
Because the simple truth was that he had felt torn in half during that day. Half of him had been racing heedlessly, recklessly from possible lead to desperate hunch, trying to find any trace of something or someone that could stay the hand of the slow execution that was killing Walter Skinner. The other half of him had stayed in that hospital--by Walter's side, hovering, waiting, longing to do something, needing simply to be there.
He had trusted Scully, without word, without question to do everything in her power to save Skinner. Knew that she would throw her formidable spirit and talents and intelligence into deciphering and defeating the thing that Skinner at its mercy. But still, he had wanted to be there. To simply stay with him.
The whole thing had been all too reminiscent of other desperate, hopeless chases in his life--the chase across the arctic wastes for answers about Samantha, the race for the chip that even now seemed to be both saving Scully and threatening her, his endless chase for answers that were always close, but always just beyond his grasp.
And yet, and yet, here they were. Alive, and perhaps not without hope.
Skinner continued to regard him almost impassively. A strange light lurked just below the surface of his gaze, a guttering candle.
Realizing that he would never have the words, Mulder did the only thing he knew to do. He leaned forward and kissed Skinner.
The hard, familiar mouth resisted him for just a moment, before softening just slightly. For a time, there was only the heated reality of their mouths mating. Lips pressing, parting, the sinuous wet movement of the tongue across his own, the casual possession of his mouth, his soul.
His hands tightened around Skinner's, a necessary grip to maintain sanity and pure physical balance. This kiss alone was sending him spiraling outward, already sinking fast into a siren call of lust, need, and jagged, tight tenderness.
He shifted, prelude to moving up and forward, to taking this to the next level. Deeper, closer intimacy. And was left gasping and bereft as Skinner suddenly stood up and stepped around him, stalking soundlessly over to stare out into the nightscape that lay outside his living room window.
"What...?" His voice thin, reedy.
"Go away, Mulder." Skinner's voice was level, uninflected, but Mulder could see from the jerky movements of his shoulders that the AD was barely in check.
He crossed to stand behind Skinner, seeing their dual reflections in the plate glass of the window. The lights from the urban centers below them merging and distorting their images.
He was close enough to feel the heat from Skinner's body, to smell the unmistakable musk and clean, dry scent that was Skinner's alone. But he didn't touch him. Some primal instinct kept him just far enough away to allow space for breath and reason.
"What the hell was that?" Mulder was vaguely dismayed by the near petulance in his voice.
"Nothing. Just....nothing. This isn't a good idea." The growl dropped to something almost inaudible. "It probably wasn't ever a good idea."
At that he had to reach out, to touch, to try to connect through the nightmare-sense of unreality that threatened to pull him under. Hands on Skinner's shoulders, trying to turn him around to face him, he might as well have been trying to turn a marble statue.
"Don't say that. God, don't say that. What's going on?"
Silence alone answered him for unbearable eon. But something in his tone must have reached Skinner, because after a shuddering sigh, he turned around to meet Mulder's eyes. The younger man was shocked by the desolation he saw.
"Shit." The wind almost knocked out of him with sudden dread. "What is it? Scully said you were going to be fine.."
"That's not it." Curt dismissal of his concern.
"Then what?"
Another sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his being. "It's nothing. Just, please go." The closest he'd ever heard to pleading in that voice.
"Why? Did I do something...."
"Dammit, Mulder!" The familiar growl apparent again. "Let it go. I've already told you--not everything is about you."
Hurt and concern now warring with an undeniable instinct that something was wrong. But he could also read the set of the jaw, the rigid squaring of the shoulders. Knew that even now his time was running out.
It had taken him a long time to learn it, but Mulder had learned to recognize when strategic retreats were good decisions.
A step back. Not outright capitulation--still well within Skinner's space--but a small concession. "I think I should stay." Still testing, even as he was backing down.
"Go." The voice softer now, not gentle, but not barking commands.
"I'll be back."
"Yes, I imagine you'll try."
The words did not go unnoticed. "I can be pretty fucking persistent."
"So can I." A challenge that seemed unnecessary, and therefore dangerous.
For a brief moment he could feel the heat of their kiss again. Replayed it though his quirky memory, trying to taste the moment he had lost the connection, trying to understand this man in front of him.
Skinner simply watched him with bemusement.
"I'm going." Turning, getting his coat, realizing that Skinner had never moved.
At the door, looking back for one second. "I'll be back."
As the door closed behind him, he could have sworn he heard an almost inaudible response. "I'll be here."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Skinner watched the door close with a grim satisfaction. Felt the click of the lock echoing in the hollow spaces of his gut.
Empty. Deserted. Alone.
Again.
Always it came to this. Always he was cut off from those to whom he would reach out. Depend on. Trust. And seek to be trusted by.
Alone.
He'd looked at the surveillance photos. Had gotten them from Agent Anderson, who didn't realize that he shouldn't be bringing evidence to the AD in the hospital. He knew the adversary who held the controls on these things in his blood. Knew the name and face that
would now haunt all his darker hours.
There is always a price for knowledge. Once you know, you must act.
He couldn't have this any longer. He'd had to send Mulder away. There was no choice.
No choice.
He had been poisoned. He was poison now. And he'd be damned if he'd allow his....connection to Mulder be poisoned, too. The connection had sustained him through so much already, but he would not allow it to be taken. To be tainted. So Mulder had been sent away. Because it was the only way to save him.
Skinner waited in the darkness. Waiting for the darkness.
END
AN (2006): I always felt a little bad leaving M/Sk in this place - it was much darker than I'd intended. Maybe someday I'll write part IV...(or, you know, not)