by jordan
"One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble--
Not much between despair and ecstasy."
--Chess
Something's wrong.
Walter Skinner pauses at the threshold of the anteroom to his office with a week's worth of travel vouchers in his hand hanging loosely at his side, the other hand about to reach for his breast pocket for some reason he's already forgotten, and suddenly he raises his head sharply and freezes in position.
He knows it in his bones, in all the flight-sensing parts of his body. It's the razor edge of the knife he feels, the chill of a man who senses a sniper in the trees, or a snake coiled to strike. Just a little ruffle of the hairs at the back of the neck, a tightening of the belly, a sting of adrenalin in the calf muscles in case he has to abruptly run for his life. Just enough to stop him dead in his tracks and bring a certain wakefulness to all his senses.
Eyes narrowed, he scans the corridor, looking for anything out of the ordinary. A few doors down, a secretary is typing on a keyboard in her office, the blue glow of her computer screen outlining the back of her head. By the water fountain, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are talking in low voices the way they do, Mulder leaning against the wall looking bored while Scully reads to him from an open manila file and points at something for emphasis. Mulder bends to get a drink, Scully still talking to his back. A janitor with his squeaky wheeled cart is punching the button and looking up to follow the lighted progress of floors on the panel as the elevator rolls down on great silent steel bearings.
Gut feeling: danger. Serious, immediate, deadly.
But nothing even slightly out of the ordinary is happening in the hallway. Skinner gives a minute shake of his head and turns to his office again.
Hesitates again.
It's like coming home after a really good maid has done the weekly cleaning, everything the same, but somehow different. A chair moved at a slightly different angle, a book out of place on the shelf, the pattern on the bedspread facing in the wrong direction. Nothing anyone could point at and say, this is odd, but perceived on some deeper, primal level that Skinner has learned to trust absolutely.
He jams his free hand in his pocket, troubled and annoyed. At that moment Scully looks up and sees him and says something to Mulder, who straightens and looks around. Scully backs away; Mulder lifts his fingers in a silly little wave. They turn and flee the few yards to the end of the hall where the exit opens to the stairway, and vanish around the corner.
For a long moment he frowns into space, until the woman at the computer seems to feel him there, and looks around, then widens her eyes in alarm at his fierce glare and reaches out and gently closes the door. The elevator bell rings. The doors slide open. The wheeled cart rattles its way inside, and the doors close again.
Skinner breathes. The hairs on his neck begin to smooth down; the pressure lifts from his nerves. His pupils contract back to normal size. Startled out of his reverie,he turns and goes into the familiar safety of his anteroom, where his secretary glances up and then goes on with her work. By the time he sits down at his own desk and spreads out the travel vouchers in front of him, Skinner has lost the tingle, and even the memory of the sensation has faded away. Once in his paneled office, outside noises muffled by carpet and oak and brass and the muted but distinct aura of authority, it's barely a memory at all. Flashback to Nam; it happens now and again to even in the sanest of survivors. Doesn't mean a thing. He never gives it a second thought. Not now, anyway.
Much later, in that vague order of memory people label as "afterwards," he will think of this day again, and wonder if there was something he could have done to affect the outcome of the events that had already begun. But by then it will be too late, and he will work hard to convince himself that there was nothing he could have done to prevent Scully from shooting Mulder in the downstairs parking lot less than twelve hours later.
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