From: fialka@t-online.de (Fialka) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 10:25:16 +0200 Subject: NEW: Soliloquy II: Walter Skinner (1/1) by Fialka Source: xff Title: SOLILOQUY II: WALTER SKINNER Author: Fialka Summary: Skinner has a few things to say to Scully. Spoilers: post-Tithonus Category: V, A Rating: G Archive: Auto-archives, Gossamer OK. Others please write for permission, though I generally give it. Disclaimer: Don't own them, just borrowing, promise to put them back in a reasonably unmutilated state. First Posting: 26 Oct 99. Feedback: Yes. Feed me. More candy - http://home.t-online.de/home/fialka/fiction The real meal - The Annotated X-Files - http://smart.issexy.com -------------------------------------------------------------------- SOLILOQUY II: WALTER SKINNER by Fialka I hate hospitals. Did I ever tell you that? No, I suppose I haven't. When would I? You and I never talk about things like that. Actually, you and I have never talked. That's not an accusation. It's simply not in the job description, though every day you go beyond the mere demands of your job. Beyond the demands of partnership, professional responsibility. You had my respect for that, right from the start. For the most part, I enjoyed supervising you. Both of you, though I couldn't oppose the Attorney General's request that you and Mulder be transferred to someone who might be able to exert some control. I almost laughed at that. Mulder is beyond anyone's control, except possibly yours. You and I were allies from time to time, but it took years for that trust to grow and it was never certain. Not from your side. But I almost laughed because I knew Alvin Kersh didn't stand a chance of controlling Mulder, because he didn't stand a chance with you. Some things, Scully, should be left alone. You and Mulder were one of those things, but we work in a bureaucratic organisation. There's no room for heroic quests. But you might still prevail. I have faith in both of you. But I bartered the X-Files for your partnership, and I know you and Mulder are both cursing me for selling you out. It was the only way to keep you two together, to keep you, Scully, in the Bureau. I had no doubt after last summer that you'd resign if transferred and believe me, you wouldn't have liked some of the postings that were being discussed. Though you were faring better than Mulder. He, thanks to his apparent desire to frolic in icy places, looked to be headed for Juneau. Speaking of Mulder, he's still here, don't worry. He's just outside, on the waiting room couch, trying to get an hour's sleep on my orders. He's left you in my care. You don't know how proud that makes me. Mulder doesn't trust just anyone to hold your hand and try to keep you here. He told me I had to talk to you and I said I would. I never imagined it would be so difficult. I've known you a long time, Scully. What is it now, five, almost six years? It wasn't until I sat down in this chair, still warm from Mulder's vigil, that I realised I had nothing to say to you. No, that isn't right. Plenty to say, I just don't know how to say it. I'm not much of a talker Scully, and neither are you. Or at least, you and I never tried to talk, not once in those six years. That's not your fault. If you were awake now I might smile, might even squeeze your hand, but basically I would wish you well and be on my way back to DC within the hour. That's just the kind of man I am. You might wonder why I'm even here this time, since I never made it policy to rush to your bedside before. Actually, I think the last time I went to visit you in the hospital was a happy time. It was the night your family was having a very illegal and very overlooked celebration beside what had turned out not to be your deathbed after all. You called me sir that night, as you always do. I, in deference to your mother, called you Dana for the first and possibly only time. Your name felt strange in my mouth, like a word from another language, a word with a sound pattern my lips and tongue could not adequately form. It was soft and too malleable, like Vietnamese, like puffed rice chips, melting and gone before I could taste it. I was grateful to you for inviting me in, for allowing me to participate, even for the few brief minutes I could stand to be there. I think I felt as Mulder did. We were intruders. This was the other side of you, the one you kept carefully away from the cesspool that we work in. We shouldn't muddy those clear waters with too much of our presence. Maybe you and Mulder don't know this, but taking you off the X-Files was a punishment directed as much at me as at the two of you. The concensus was that I had allowed your illness to make me too soft on the both of you. I had gotten involved on a personal level, lost perspective, lost the respect and fear that command must have in order to be effective. Discipline was in order. So they gave you to Kersh, the hardest in a large group of hard asses. I don't like him much, but Alvin Kersh and I understand each other pretty well. We're both a couple of ex-Marines, only I was a clueless kid who went off to grow up fast in Nam. Alvin was the boot camp drill sargeant who screamed in your face and called you names designed to break your spirit. To rid you of individual thought and make you mad enough to kill. I hear he was pretty damn good at it, but I guess he got tired of yelling by the time he joined the Bureau. He's a soft-spoken man now, but I'm sure that never fooled you. The drill sargeant in him is still alive and well and thriving on humiliation. Alvin lives by orders, the getting and the giving, so they gave him the two of you. The implication was of course, that I couldn't follow orders, couldn't handle Mulder anymore. That he needed the short, sharp shock of losing privilege. And he was privileged. The rich white boy with his own private personal division. I don't know much about Alvin's history but I know men like Mulder have always rubbed him wrong. You he likes, and that was almost the death of you. You're a good soldier, Scully, the best kind, bright but obedient. You take orders, but in the absence of command you can think for yourself. Mulder he was happy to slap like a pesky little fly, but you drove Kersh crazy. Meeting after meeting he began by praising your skills and ended with the despair of ever reaching you, of ever prying you out of Mulder's thoroughly insubordinate hands. I should tell you that after Antartica the prevailing sentiment up top was that Mulder had corrupted you, that you had become as incorrigible as he was, beyond rehabilitating back into the mainstream. Kersh was convinced he could save you. Can you imagine that, Scully? Your re- assignment was actually a bureaucratic rescue mission. Bore you to death then let you back out into the field - without Mulder. Would you accept a transfer then, or willingly go back to pacing the bullpen? Was being Mulder's partner more important to you than salvaging your career? Kersh banked on your ambition, forgetting one of your most admirable qualities: your loyalty. He underestimated you, Scully. We all do, even I, though I probably have the clearest sense of who you are, what you're capable of doing when it comes to Mulder. And what he's capable of doing when it comes to you. Remember, I spent six years signing your medical claims and authorising out-of-pocket reimbursements. That he'd follow some half-assed coordinates to the middle of ice-bound nowhere to try to find you hardly surprised me. I wasn't even surprised that he actually succeeded. But because of that, I'm as tainted now as you are. If you asked me to explain how that whole inquiry started, how Dallas got turned around so that you two got blamed for finding the bomb when everyone else was looking in the wrong building...how you became pariahs instead of heroes...I can't explain that without putting my head on the block. Look to the smoke that signalled the fire in your office. But then I'm sure you already have. Yeah, so I rolled over and played dead for OPR. They wouldn't have listened if I'd tried to defend you so I told them what they wanted to hear and tried to slip a few necessary facts in there to mitigate the circumstances. Yes, it's true I wanted to save my ass, but I also wanted to save yours. And Mulder's. There were things going on last summer behind doors you two don't even know exist. I know they're there, but not what's said behind them. I know that's how the two of you wound up being blamed for Dallas. A double cut, since you were in limbo anyway after the Praise disaster. Suddenly they had both a scapegoat and an excuse to let the X-Files simply remain a pile of ash. Bury it all beneath a mound of doubletalk and false accusation. Then Agent Fowley suggested the unthinkable - transfer the division to someone else. And before anyone could say Mulder and Scully it was done. She was owed and I guess we can all surmise by whom. Now she was paid and I had agreed so I was back in place. With the wrong faces sitting across from me, sure, but there was hope that the political winds might one day blow from a different direction, might blow you and Mulder back where you belonged. Until then, the question of what to do with the two of you remained open. As I said, Juneau was mentioned, several times. So was salvaging your skills, bumping you both back to Quantico - you as a pathologist, and Mulder to the BSU. I mentioned that we didn't have much luck trying to housebreak Mulder by separating you the first time it was tried, and that's when Alvin jumped in. I think he liked the idea that he could succeed where I had failed, and I thought you and Mulder would prefer to be together, whatever the assignment. So I stood back and voted with the panel. I guess by that point I thought that Kersh and Mulder deserved each other, though I certainly never thought that Kersh deserved you. Again, you wouldn't know that Mulder's little field trip to Bermuda got me censured. Well, it did. After that I wasn't given the chance to input when the subject of sending you to New York came up. I think everyone was curious to see if you could adapt yourself to another partner. Even me, though I doubted that the arrangement would either benefit or please you. No one expected this, though. Gutshot. Jesus. I know how that feels. I wouldn't wish that kind of pain on anyone, Scully, least of all you. From what I've heard, Special Agent Ritter has been suspended without pay, awaiting OPR's inquiry. His badge and gun are sitting on his ASAC's desk and he's not likely to get them back, or to get out in the field again if he does. I thought you might like to know that. It's not so much that he shot an unarmed suspect, or even that another agent took a hit by accident. It's the fact that he panicked, that he left the scene without administering first aid, left his partner to bleed to death. Even Kersh won't forgive him that. And you did bleed to death. According to the EMT, you should not have been alive by the time they got there. As it was, the blood was pumping out of you almost as fast as they were pumping it in. You're a stubborn woman, Scully, right down to your vital organs. They said your heart just kept on beating, even when it had nothing left to pump around. When I hit JFK, and found out that you were out of surgery, that somehow, miraculously, you were still alive, I made a sharp right to the airport bar and downed a Jamieson's in your honour. An Irish whisky for your strong Irish heart. I was relieved, but I can't say the news surprised me. Death keeps looking in on you, Scully, then going on his way. And I already knew about your heart. So here we are now, Mulder and I, hovering over you like two mother hens. Taking turns holding your hand and babbling nonsense so you won't slip away in the silence. They say you still could, that recovery isn't certain. I don't believe that. But I'm grateful for the opportunity. You know I did this once before, with Sharon. I said what I needed to say to her, all the things she needed to hear, but it was too late. Her brain was too damaged and in the end I told her to go because she wouldn't have wanted to live half a life, and to be honest, I didn't want to have to live with it either. You are something different, Scully, and though I guess I've disappointed you as much as I ever disappointed her, I owe you in a way that I never owed Sharon. I owe you for my life that time years ago, and the time just past. I owe you for the promises I made not a month ago and broke as soon as I was on my feet again. I'm a coward, Scully, but a clever one. I bought my life with silence, in a bargain I know that you would never make. I bought your life once too, and if you ever knew that you would never forgive me. But I didn't do it just for you. I did it for him, for that lunatic out there trying to fit six feet of Mulder onto four feet of couch because he isn't going to leave here until you wake up and tell him to. I did it for all of us, because he doesn't function without you and without the two of you we don't stand a chance against what's coming. Oh, yes. I know something's coming. Did you really think I didn't? But I did it for me, too, Scully. And not just because I owe you. You're braver than I am. Brilliant, but not clever, not tricky. You don't know how to play the game and I hope you never learn. Because as much as Mulder needs you as his uncorruptable conscience, I do too. Mulder and I are sullied by what we know, we are a poison to everyone around us. Everyone but you. You walk between us, no higher than our noses, and somehow none of this has dirtied you. You've lost your innocence, you're fed up, exhausted and you've long ago forgotten how to laugh, but you are still as clean as you ever were. You have never compromised your spirit, never allowed yourself to be used with your consent, never held your tongue when honesty was needed, or lied when you should have remained silent. You shame me, while at the same time, you give me hope. There's one person in the world that my filthy hands can touch without danger. Maybe even come away cleaner for the effort. I'm not a hand-holder, Scully, and it's time now that I let go of yours. Mulder is here. He's asking if there was any response. I tell him there was none. You see, Scully, I am also a liar. There has been response. But from a most unexpected source. ------------ ------------ << + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >> 'if it's true that the only real life is the life of the brain, then what sense does it make to hand that brain over to someone else for eight hours a day on the presumption that they will give it back in an unmutilated state...?' -FryingPan Jack, The Annotated X-Files (by way of Utah Phillips) http://smart.issexy.com << + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>=<< + >>