From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 11:38:56 -0500 Subject: Silence by Jssangel Source: direct Reply To: Jssangel@aol.com Title: Silence Author: Jssangel (Jssangel@aol.com) Rating: R for language and sexual situations Spoilers: Requiem, SR819, The Blessing Way Classification: V/ANGST Keywords: Skinner POV / MSR-ish Archive: Gossamer is fine, anywhere else just ask. Disclaimer: I sure didn't think these people up. Feedback is always nice. Summary: How does Skinner feel about Mulder's disappearance and Scully's pregnancy? Question: Ok, I just figured out that the way to avoid posting a REV version of every story I write would be to find a beta reader. How does one go about doing that? Author's notes: This story takes place in the same universe as "Submerged" and "All That Glitters". In terms of a timeline that the characters experience, "All That Glitters" happens after this story, but I think they should probably be read in the order I wrote them in: 1)"Submerged", 2)"All That Glitters", 3)"Silence". *********************************************************** The arc of land beneath him shimmered in icy silence, reflecting the dim sunlight of a polar noon. He imagined that he could feel the metal shell of the plane becoming brittle in the bitter cold, as brittle as his soul. He had originally planned to stay close to Scully, in order to protect her and the baby. His admission that he had seen an alien ship should have made her trust him, and he had counted on her loneliness and their already established relationship to make her turn to him for help. Her choice to confide in him about her pregnancy was a genuine cry for help, he was sure, and he had been equally sure that her confession was his invitation into her well-guarded inner circle. He had been wrong. For his efforts, all that had happened was that her mother had started calling him by his first name, and Scully had become even more silent. The plane dipped abruptly, and he turned to the window again. There was certainly something down there. Was it the remnants of an alien ship? A dock? A valley of human skeletons that were the discarded shells of alien reproduction? Reproduction. Scully's tits were getting bigger. He had tried not to stare, but there was no way to avoid their liquid presence in the corner of his mind. He listened to her reports, to her demands and to her fears, and then flew to Antarctica to escape her breasts. That wasn't the whole truth. Actually, he had volunteered for this mission and refused to let her accompany him because he was desperate to be doing something which would contribute to the search, but which would not necessarily turn up his missing agent. He looked down at the pile of ice gathered at the bottom of the world. The odds here didn't seem to be good. If Krycek wanted Mulder found, Skinner wasn't sure that Mulder should be found just yet. He didn't know how to tell that to Scully; his advice and his opinions were muted by the alliance she had chosen. She and Krycek were working together, and she had made the deal without even thinking of consulting him. If he had ever had any doubts about her loyalties, they were shattered completely when he watched her calmly make a pact with the man who held his heart in his hand, on the off-chance that it could help Mulder. The sensation of actually being able to feel his arteries, to know their exact location under his skin as they turned into a finely woven network of mortality, was still vivid. He constantly wondered what Krycek's plans were, and what had happened to the little machine that controlled the pace of his blood. Sometimes he silently admitted to himself that he had been broken. Funny. He had often thought (almost fantasized) when he was a brand new Marine, about what he would do if he was captured by the enemy and tortured. In his own mind he was sure he would be a hero, holding out in silence against the most gruesome assaults, aware that his men depended on him not to betray their location. In his dreams he had been prepared to die in honor and in glory and in pain. The reality was so humiliating. He was weak. He didn't want to suffer. He didn't want to loose his arms. He didn't want to die. He made every effort he could to cooperate with Krycek, terribly afraid of the nanyte pollutants in his blood stream. He felt sick and helpless and he wished he could get some clear idea of whether Krycek was really helping Scully or was using her for his own nefarious purposes. Shit. Maybe the purposes weren't even that nefarious. He was jealously certain that Krycek wanted posses her too. Hell, probably even that blond woman from the UN wanted her. He needed to stake some kind of claim so that the world would know that he was second in line. If Mulder never returned, Scully belonged to him. She had sent him to the South Pole. She had wanted him to go. Was it to get him away from her so that she could concentrate on the rest of her search? Was it because she actually believed that Mulder was somewhere other than light years away? Was it because she was as agitated by his presence as he was by hers? He pretended to himself that he had high hopes for them on his return. Perhaps he believed that in a rush of gratitude for his help and silent strength she would fling her arms around his neck and cry into his chest. She would let him comfort her the way he hadn't been able to the night she lay in the hospital bed and confessed her pregnancy. She would resign herself to Mulder's absence, and then she would absolve him of his guilt with her gravid body. Ha! As though he could somehow fill her so completely that he could make himself the father of her child. He hoped that Mulder was gone forever, and that eventually she would see that she could belong to him instead. He hoped that Mulder would return in his absence, and that the two of them would retreat together to the basement so that he could sit perched in his office waiting for them to elope. He was torn. He was bleeding. He was mute. If she knew he felt this way, she would believe that he had lost Mulder on purpose. She would believe that he was part of whatever plot she was currently favoring or whatever conspiracy she was currently suspecting. He couldn't think of a way to explain to her that this abiding lust, this simmering jealousy, had been beating in his traitorous heart for years. She had charmed him the moment she walked into his office, so small and so sturdy. He felt almost indulgent towards her, and towards the teenage crush he saw written all over Mulder's face. He felt powerful with her working under him. She was his subordinate. She was good at her job. She had sunset colored hair. She hadn't mesmerized him until he stumbled, just a bit, in the web of conspiracy around him, and she pulled a weapon on him for the first time. The sight of her with a gun, huge and heavy in her china doll hands, was the most powerfully erotic thing he had ever seen. Mulder was missing then too. They were the most intense thirty seconds of Skinner's life. He wanted to shoot her. He wanted to let her shoot him, He wanted to throw her down on her partner's musty couch and fuck her. Then Mulder burst in. Later, in his mind's eye, he would conjure the reunion that his two agents would have had if he had not been standing there with a gun trained on Scully. It was shocking; a quick conflagration and consumption. Her hands kept running over Mulder's face, his lips, his neck. Her short puffs of breath vibrated against his skin, making his whole body shiver like a tuning fork in perfect pitch. Pitch. Pitch. He pitched forward onto her, knocking her back into the cushions of the worn couch, landing squarely between her legs and drawing a sharp cry from her, even as he struggled to find his zipper and the hem of her skirt. Had she been wearing a skirt? He imagined Mulder's hands spread across her perfect ass, cupping her, lifting her, and forcing his way inside. Skinner could never decide if the sounds she made in his head were cries of protest or pleasure. Sometimes, when he thought they might be the former, he went mad with the desire to posses and protect her and steal her away from Mulder; the latter made him imagine himself alone with them, somehow invisible, sharing the trembling magic of their first kiss and the shimmering heat of their first sex. Sometimes he remembered the rush of anger that he had felt when she pulled her weapon on him, although it was mostly anger at himself for underestimating her. Sometimes he thought of plunging inside her while holding the gun to her head. He would know and she would know that he could never harm her, that he belonged to her, but sometimes he dreamed of drawing the cold metal between her legs and feeling her shiver. Her barren body would blossom under him as she recognized his power over her, and he would put his fingers on her in place of the gun and she would go still and let him posses her. Mulder must have been fucking her the entire time, of course. Every secretary in the building would be willing to swear to it. He felt like a betrayed husband. He had been sure, so sure, that Mulder was too chicken shit to ever actually make that kind of move. He had believed that it was a kind of a silent covenant between them, begun when Skinner had offered his soul to the Smoking Man in exchange for a cure for Scully's cancer, and sealed when Mulder had read his mind those many months ago, and found that the passionate worship that Skinner held for Scully was the last clean thing left in his life. Apparently he had been wrong about that. Apparently she had not been barren. The plane hiccuped as it began its spiraling descent onto the sheet of ice below, and he imagined for a moment that the plane would crash. He would survive the crash alone, the pilot and the co-pilot killed, and he would struggle to survive on the empty glacier, marooned without a palm tree in sight. He imagined that she would hear the news that he was missing, and that she would search for him, her spirit pining away without him. He would fight his way to her from the empty underbelly of the world, and when she welcomed him back, his ears would ring with her declarations of love and her passionate welcome home into her heart. Then he remembered that her heart had no space for him, and he remembered that she would not mourn his absence or search for him. All her loyalty and passion and searching and mourning and welcoming home were reserved for Mulder. She was barely accepting his help with her search. She would turn him away the second he tried to claim anything that was Mulder's. She would turn him away and continue the search without him, without anyone to look over her shoulder, without anyone to protect her from Krycek, without anyone to fly to Antarctica or smile at her mother. If she knew of his love she would turn him away, and he was selfishly sure that she couldn't survive without him. She wouldn't take his love, so he would give her his silence. It was all he had to offer. the end.