Work Text:
I Don't Like Mondays
by JiM
Mondays. It wasn't so much that he hated Mondays with the standard mindless sullenness of the working stiff. It was more that Monday always seemed like the beginning of a long gray stretch of paperwork and polished conference tables. Of course, that was barely a contrast to the plain vanilla beige of his weekends, most often filled with the paperwork generated by those long iron gray meetings. And nothing else. No one else. Some weekends he had gone for two days straight without hearing the sound of his own voice.
But last weekend, it had all changed. Which made this Monday something entirely new and different. He wasn't particularly comfortable with "new and different." In fact, he wasn't very comfortable about anything having to do with this past weekend. He shifted in his chair again and tried hard not to fidget or wince when his lower back and ribs reminded him that he hadn't had a work out like that in a long time. He couldn't help the idiot grin that stole onto his face. It was ludicrous, a man his age risking the little he had left of his career and self-respect just to feel like hell on a Monday morning.
But Hell was warm, so damned warm....
The starched collar of his shirt was rubbing against a bite-bruise and he fingered it surreptitiously, trying to look fascinated at the ongoing discussion of the Director's new personnel policy as it related to same-sex bathroom facilities. Damn the man. It was bad enough that he'd stormed his way into Skinner's apartment, battered down all his defenses and then curled up in Skinner's bed as if he had always belonged there. Did he have to stake his claim, boast of his victory by marking him publicly, too?
Looking around the room, Skinner was mildly pleased to find that several of his colleagues looked as bad as he felt. Misery loves company, he thought snidely. Mulder in particular, was looking like the assault on Everest. There were dark shadows under his eyes, he was pale and he looked like he'd shaved with someone else's razor in the dark. His shirt hung off him and his tie was uncharacteristically understated. Mulder was staring glassily at the Human Resources geek who was droning on about sexual politics and the implications of micturation on office productivity. Skinner wondered if Mulder was thinking about introducing the HR guy to the sea monster he and Scully had come back from Florida muttering about.
Skinner sighed and shifted again, wincing openly this time. When he looked again, Mulder was staring straight at him. The glassy disconnected look was gone. His gaze was direct and searing. I want you now.
Oh yeah, Hell was warming up again.
But Skinner was an old hand at not allowing any emotions to show on his face, no matter how sharply or how deeply they cut through him. He blinked once, slowly, ino Mulder's hot gaze, then rested his chin on the thumb of his right hand and looked back toward the front of the room.
Now Mulder was the one to shift and fidget, lips pressed together, the fingers of one hand drumming a pencil on the tabletop. Skinner almost allowed himself a smile. It was good to know that he didn't burn alone.
Burning. God -- that long, slow slide into heat and madness, feeling Mulder sliding into him.... No one could do that to him, no one ever would again except for this man. He didn't realize that he was staring at Mulder until the man's pencil slipped and clattered to the table top. Skinner suddenly knew it was written on his face for Mulder to see. You have me. Yours. Only you.
Mulder was staring back at him, eyes so hot and bright that Skinner wondered that no one else noticed them. But they might have been alone in that gray Monday morning room, full of gray Monday morning people.
A long, slow smile was curling onto Mulder's lips. He saw. He saw it all. Skinner knew suddenly that Hell was not someplace hot and shadowed -- it was gray industrial carpetting, polished oak tabletops, pitiless chairs and unforgiving flourescent lights. And it was Mulder sitting across the table, knowing that Skinner was his.
Hell was a numb-gray Monday morning and it stretched five days until his world would burst out into fire and color again.
Now Walter Skinner hated Mondays.
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