Work Text:
Sunday Driver
by JiM
Walter Skinner hates hospitals. Always has.
He especially hates visiting Fox Mulder in hospitals. He's had a number of opportunities to determine exactly which sorts of hospital visits he particularly loathes; the visits in which Mulder is unconscious, fragile-looking and has various tubes and hoses running in and out of his body are the worst.
Like this one.
He sits beside Mulder's bed, holding his cool hand and watching the blinking lights of the respirator and heart monitor and god-knows-what-else in the gloom of the ICU.
Damn Mulder. The number of times he's been put here by retroviruses, thugs, alien hitmen, serial killers... and he's been taken down by simple pneumonia. Mulder's chest rises and falls in a regular rhythm that the conscious man never achieved. Nothing about Mulder's life is ever regular; he has a wild originality all his own that Skinner has grown to prize over the years. Mulder seems born to break molds and patterns and from the first moment, he has forced Skinner out of every established pattern and routine in his life.
Mulder had made Skinner question his orders, disobey his superiors, hide evidence, mistrust the government and finally, betray and expose a conspiracy that had threatened the entire human race. He had also seduced him one Friday night over beer and a football game, thereby breaking the pattern of Walter Skinner's post-divorce life for good.
And god, was it good.
Sitting there, holding Mulder's flaccid hand, wondering if he will ever wake up again, Walter Skinner knows that it has been good. Ten years of good.
And damn it, he wants more.
It was just like Mulder to completely ignore a simple cold until it became a life-threatening illness. Skinner had come home from a week's business trip to find a flushed and feverish lover who had argued with him about being allowed to go for a run. At least, he had argued until he'd collapsed unconscious into Skinner's arms in mid-snarl.
Skinner had finally gotten his way and Mulder saw the doctor -- in the ICU. Skinner had then been forced to listen to her scolding him for not bringing Mulder in sooner. As if anyone could deflect Mulder from his own blazingly erratic path -- not aliens, not a fifty year conspiracy, not the awesome bureaucracy of the DOJ -- what chance did one ex-Marine, ex-FBI, ex-lonely man have?
It is very quiet in the ICU this late at night. The staff has taken to pretending that the large silent man isn't actually here, so they won't be forced to send him away. Scully had been there earlier, watching them both with grave and gentle eyes. He knows exactly how pathetic he looks, like a lost little boy clutching at his one security.
Mulder has brought him to this. Damn him. Skinner waits to feel that lightning-strike of near-hatred that has shocked him the few times in the past when he has been forced to realize how deeply entrenched in his soul Mulder is. Those times when he finally knows how deeply Mulder's mere absence can wound him. Those times when he has finally had to confront the numb, gray, smooth places in his life and has had to choose... between the cold calm of solitude and the sparkling Hell of life with Mulder.
And he has chosen Hell every time.
But there is no lightning strike, not any more. His choices have truly been made long ago. If the price for the past ten years of light and heat and joy and noise and chaos and color has to be paid now, Skinner is ready.
But, god, he hopes not.
You'll never be bored, Walter. That's been Mulder's promise all along, since the first day. Skinner's dry lips curve a little as he hears that warm voice once again. He never has been bored. Enraged, appalled, enthralled, enraptured, endangered, amazed, delighted, beloved... but never bored.
He brings Mulder's still hand up to his face and rests his lips on the cool back of Mulder's strong hand. Like everything else in this damned place, Mulder smells of antiseptic and pine cleaner, but underneath there is a faint trace of his own, wilder scent and Skinner needs it more than oxygen. There is a long diagonal slash of scar tissue on the back of that hand that Skinner likes to mouth in the darkness of their bed, almost as a meditation. He has no idea how long he's been nuzzling it, just passing his lips back and forth across it, staring at those damned blinking lights, when Mulder's hand suddenly twitches in his.
Mulder's eyes fix sleepily on his face and he grunts interrogatively around the tube in his throat. Skinner smiles slowly and grunts back, wanting to shout aloud as a spark of humor lights Mulder's glassy eyes. There are no words to say, nothing that can be heard in the cool and dangerous dimness of this place. Flashes of light and noise will have to wait until they are back in the chaos of their real lives. Then Skinner will yell about idiocy and carelessness and stupidity and Mulder will yell back about rigidity and patronizing behavior and anal compulsives.
It will be good.
Until then, Skinner sits, holding Mulder's slowly warming hand against his lips, watching him slip into a healing sleep.
Inexpressibly comforted in Hell.
end