Work Text:
Frost
by JiM
Skinner is still asleep when I suddenly realize where we are going. He is a neat sleeper, arms folded loosely, head pillowed on the glass beside him. A stranger wouldn't know how terrified this man is as he finds the fractures in his own soul. That knowledge fills with me with a curious tenderness. I want to help him, to ease that fear somehow, to bring him to a place where he can sort through the shards and determine what it is he wants to keep of himself.
He ceded me the car keys at the last rest stop, somewhere in western Massachusetts. I had glanced through the racks of tourist attractions for nearby Vermont and New Hampshire, not really interested in glass factories or wholesale shopping centers. I find myself not particularly worried that we have no clear destination in mind. For once, the journey is enough for me. But every journey is bound to end somewhere and I think I have finally figured it out.
I have turned off the main highway and onto a small state route when he wakes. He sits up and arches his neck to work the kinks out. He stares at the heavily wooded slopes rising above us for a while, then asks, "Where are we?"
"Franconia, New Hampshire."
"What's here?"
"Trees."
He nods, eyes still fixed on the line of mountains that marches away on both sides of the road. There is precious little else on this road -- any restaurants or hotels we pass have a bleakly abandoned air to them. He doesn't ask any more and that tired trust is a balm on some old wounds that I still carry. After all we've been through, all I've done to him, all that's happened to him because of me, he can still give me this.
The Cannon Inn is only another two miles and Skinner is still rubbing his eyes as I park in the gravel lot before the 19th century building. He follows me silently, our shadows bleeding together on the fieldstone path as a raw wind nips at us. It is dim and warm inside; the door bangs shut behind us and a sleepy golden retriever wanders over to sniff at each of us as we stand and blink in a large common room. The long oak admission desk directly in front of us is empty.
There is a round granite fireplace in the exact center of the room with a small fire burning cheerfully in it. There are a few battered couches around it and some armchairs. A middle-aged woman uncurls herself from one of the armchairs and crosses to us, smiling.
"Are you gents here for lunch? We don't serve it during the off season, but I could probably slap together a few sandwiches and a pot of coffee. You look like you've been on the road for a while."
It is impossible not to smile back at her. "Sandwiches sound good, ma'am, but we were hoping you had a couple of rooms for us."
"We were?" Skinner mouths at me as she opens the battered leather ledger. I shrug at him.
"Oh dear," she murmurs. "We're not really set up for guests just now. It's the off season, so we're renovating a lot of the rooms, papering and painting and that sort of thing." She looks up at both of us, assessing. "I have a couple of singles open in the west wing, but those narrow beds would be torture for tall men like you." She stares at the book again and makes a pleased chirp. "Ah! I've got one room with a pair of queen-sized beds that we weren't planning to get to until next week. If you don't mind doubling up, I think you'd sleep more comfortably there."
There is no question in my mind that I will sleep better knowing that I can keep an eye on Skinner. I look at him and he shrugs. I guess I'm still driving. In short order, I have handed her my credit card and she is showing us upstairs to a huge sunlit room at the end of a long corridor that creaks as we pace down it in her wake. There are two beds, placed perpendicularly to one another, both covered with hand-stitched cotton quilts. Two large windows look out towards the mountains, gray-brown in the weak spring sun, streaks of deep green pines and firs filling in the hollows, highlighting the bleak beauty of their slopes.
Our hostess takes us back downstairs and into a cheerful back parlor, where she feeds us some thick hand-cut ham sandwiches and coffee. Skinner still doesn't say anything but this isn't like the calm silence of breakfast. He is holding himself together with that same old iron control that's been slipping away from him for months. He feeds his crusts to the dog and I can see his fingers tremble.
"Skinner," I say suddenly and he looks at me. "A breakdown isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes, you're just clearing the debris of the past out of the way, clearing the way for something new."
His jaw clenches and he goes a little paler than before. "And what if there isn't anything new, Mulder?" He stands up and strides out before I can say anything else.
His question hangs like cobwebs in the pale sunlight. I want to go after him and beat the shit out of him for voicing my deepest fear. What if there isn't anything more to me, to my life, than the rusty, tainted, half-empty husks of belief that I've been winnowing through for years? I drop my head and run my hands through my hair. What if neither of us can change?
When I call Scully, I get more pieces of the puzzle. The halls of the Hoover building are slippery with rumors about Skinner's absence. He walked out yesterday afternoon, leaving an envelope for the Director on his desk. The Director has announced that Skinner is on a six month medical leave of absence, but Scully has seen Skinner's assistant Kimberly crying at her desk. Part of the Bureau thinks that he's got cancer and has gone for chemo; the other half thinks it's alcoholism. No one appears to think that he's suddenly fallen apart and decided that his life is so empty that the open road looks better to him.
"Yeah, I'm OK, Scully. Yeah, he's OK. We both just needed some time away. To think."
And there's nothing else for me to say to her. I don't know why we're here, only that neither one of us will be the same when we leave here.
I find him out on the porch, staring up at the mountains. His head is thrown back and he is taking deep breaths of the pine-scented air and he looks less likely to vibrate into splinters now. He meets my gaze without flinching; I jerk my head toward the car and he nods, still content to let me choose the road.
It's a short drive; I got directions from the innkeeper before I left. The dirt road we turn up hasn't been graded smooth again after the winter and the ruts and frost heaves jar and rattle us. He doesn't say a word, but I hear him make a short, breathy sound as we pass an old gray mailbox that has the word "Frost" painted on it in solid black letters. The house is nothing special to look at, really. We have passed hundreds of such farmhouses on the way here; plain white, a deep verandah, a solid angled roof. This is a place for work still, not pilgrimages.
It's closed, the sign says that we can return on Memorial Day for a tour of Robert Frost's farm. I am not in the mood to wait and neither is Skinner. We park the car and get out, then duck under the chain and walk up the road. Still following our hostess' directions, I lead him past the weathered barn, to the start of a small trail. At the very edge of the woods, I pause and let him take the lead. I can't read the expression on his face and I hope to hell I haven't screwed this up. But he nods, then steps into the shadow of the trees along the poetry trail and there is nothing to do but follow.
It is quiet and cold under the shadow of those bare trees; they are dormant but not dead. Here and there, wooden plaques are attached to tree trunks and we stop to read the poems written on them. The wind mutters in the tops of the evergreens as if reciting the words we don't speak aloud. Skinner has moved on, his stride sounding hollowly up the trail when I catch sight of a plaque half-hidden by the deep green branches of a fir tree bent down too far with last winter's snow, perhaps.
We dance round in a ring and suppose
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows
Earlier, I wanted to hit Skinner for carelessly giving my fears voice; now the blow has been struck. Everything that's happened to me since I was twelve years old has been bleeding toward this moment in time. The moment when I finally realize that there is no answer, there never was one, there never will be. Samantha is dead, so are Scully's sister and Skinner's wife, the aliens are somewhere else, my family are all gone, I am alone and I will never know the reasons for any of it. Some secrets are known only to themselves. Why was I never able to hear anyone say this to me before?
My laughter sounds harsh and a little offkey even to my own ears under these trees and it brings Skinner back to my side with his brows knit. I can only shake my head at him and shove my shaking hands in my pockets. "Let's go, I'm cold."
I follow Skinner back to the car and hand him the keys. He doesn't ask, but he knows that something happened to me, back there under the trees. I'm not sure I even have the words to tell him what I know now, the new wisdom that is condensing in me, something he has known and accepted all along without question. Sometimes there are no answers. But the sun still shines, the wind still blows, the trees will bud someday soon and a friend will come out of the night and ask you to travel a road with him, not knowing where it may lead but knowing, somehow, that you are the one who will go the distance with him.
I thought that we had come here to help Skinner find something new for himself and instead, I have found the one thing that everyone has been shouting at me for years and which I never heard before today.
Every journey is bound to have an end, even those we don't realize we have taken.
end