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Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting
by JiM
Walter Skinner has learned something new again. He has learned that Hell is chilly and very quiet and starts on the weekend.
The bottle clinks against the lip of the glass and the sound is too loud in his empty apartment. That, and the sound of his own breathing, have been all that he has heard since he left work yesterday. So the echoes of his own words are still clawing at him from inside his head.
Mulder. I can't do this any more.
He presses his thumbs into the unyielding ridge of bone above his eyes. So much he can't do any more. He can't stand the silences in his life. He can't forget how it feels to have someone hold him all night long. He can't send Mulder out and watch him come back a little more bloodied every time. He can't wait for the day when all the warmth will spill out of his life, the day Mulder won't come back at all.
So he ended it.
He hadn't meant to. It had been a simple case meeting, a final wrap up on the face-melting crowd who had kidnapped Mulder weeks ago; that day he had begun with a faceless body on a cold slab. Skinner knew he was acting strangely. He was more remote than Scully and Mulder were used to, his questions curt, abrupt. He had been unable to tear his eyes away from the two splinted fingers on Mulder's left hand, another minor wound bandaged in passing as Mulder roared after the truth.
Even as Skinner signed the report and dismissed the two agents, he had begun to shiver. And when Mulder turned back at the door to ask if he were all right, eyes warm and gentle, the avalanche had come. Mulder was reckless, obsessed, suicidal, paranoid, unstable. Skinner had never raised his voice as he buried them both in cold words, harsh-edged truths that neither could deny.
The worst had been that Mulder, so good with words, had never spoken at all.
Now, sitting and shivering in his cold apartment, listening to the winter rains just outside, Skinner knows that Mulder's silence had spoken for him. He wonders vaguely, as he takes another swallow, why he is not able to cry.
Darkness has fallen when the door to his apartment opens and closes. Mulder comes into the room and Skinner bites his lip; he'd forgotten the key he'd given him weeks ago. When he will not look up, Mulder comes to stand before him. Skinner still won't look up. Mulder shoves the bottle and glass out of the way and sits on the coffee table in front of him. Their knees touch and Skinner shivers again.
Finally, he has to look up. Mulder meets his gaze and his eyes are dark and full and Skinner is appalled to think that he has taken the light from them. He still doesn't speak and Skinner suddenly knows why. Weeks ago, lying in bed, wordlessly wrapped around one another, he had met Mulder's teasing remark about his taciturnity with a small bit of his own truth.
Words are easy for you. Truth can be found in the silences, too.
So Mulder sits on his coffee table and looks at him and doesn't speak. After a time, he reaches up and begins unbuttoning his own shirt. He pulls it open, then reaches for Skinner's hand. Still holding his gaze, Mulder presses Skinner's fingers to the shallow scar in his left shoulder. The scar left from where Scully shot Mulder to save him. Skinner remembers the evening he finally coaxed the story from Mulder; he remembers holding him tightly for hours afterward, without words. Mulder's fingers dig into his wrist as he holds Skinner's hand in place.
Then Mulder reaches out with his other hand and slides it under Skinner's tee shirt, fingers coming to rest on the ridges of scars on his abdomen, wounds from a war that killed him, yet left him behind. His fingers are so warm. Skinner's mouth opens to say something, anything, to rob Mulder of this moment. Mulder presses his fingers more firmly into Skinner's abdomen; his hand tightens on Skinner's wrist. His eyes burn and Skinner is silenced.
The truth is that they both have scars. The truth is that they have both been dead and will be again and some day it will be true forever. The truth is that the cold is no longer numb, that it hurts more than it ever did before Mulder and he can't live with it again. The truth of Mulder's warm hands on him hits harder than a gut punch and he folds slowly over Mulder's hand until he is doubled up and gasping, forehead resting on Mulder's knee.
Mulder's hand is gentle on the back of his neck, rubbing slowly. The other arm circles his shoulders, pulling him closer. Mulder is whispering now, the soft words soothing him as they fill up the silence that Skinner's terrified words had blasted out the day before.
Skinner's left arm slips around Mulder's waist; his other hand slides up to the back of his own neck and his fingers mesh with Mulder's. It is too soon to smile, but he feels it begin again, somewhere deep inside him.
Walter Skinner has learned something new again. Hell is cold and silent and he will never go there again. He can't.
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