TITLE: Vacillation AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com or netscape.net) SPOILERS: SR819 CATEGORY: Vignette, with Angst frosting ARCHIVE: Gossamer OK; others please ask. DISCLAIMER: Characters and situations belong to Chris Carter / 1013 and are used in loving violation of Title 17 of the U.S. Code. THANKS: to Dahlak, beta-extraordinaire, and the Pen, who collectively can spell me into a hole in the ground. SUMMARY: I don't like you very much, says the man to his mirror. The mirror replies: but I'm all you've got. SPECIAL: for MCA, a true original Skinnerista. * * * * * * * Vacillation by Vehemently * * * * * * * If it please God, let less happen. -Kay Ryan * * * * * * * He is standing in his empty living room and laughing at his own first name. He is standing still in his suit minus the jacket, a heavy glass mostly empty in his hand, dismissing the myriad nicknames he has been called in his life. He finds it bitterly appropriate that he should be saddled with a name for which there is no version which sounds affectionate. He is standing in his living room, which is, after all, decorated in a way he approved of at one point -- the masculinity of a leather couch, the useful desk, open space, muted pale walls. The carpet is soft under his feet like a muddy riverbank and endless- ly, dreadfully gray. To spout his word-fragments into this space is to try to fill the Grand Canyon with feathers. It is what he has chosen to do, incantations over his tumbler, "Wally, Walt, Watermelon, Walleye --" he stops before he gets to his middle name; long ago he compressed it down to an S and discarded any of its meanings. He can't remember whether he did it before or after deciding to major in American history, but he is somehow amused to think that Harry Truman would be proud. It has been weeks, months almost, that he has expected a late night visit. I could kill him and be free, he thinks savagely, and then: I could kill myself and free us all. The twin possibilities sit pregnant before him, the likely consequences veiled by a hundred uncertain choices. He has felt the contours of those two items in his mind, like a blind man examining a stone statue, without coming to any conclusions he can trust. He has never been very good at taking orders. No -- that is wrong; that is wish fulfillment. You'll take it and you'll like it, said somebody once, maybe John Wayne. Skinner can take it and take it and take it, but he can never make himself like it. He spent more than a year in the Marines discovering his flaw, and when the enormous hole in his guts bought him a discharge, well, he didn't cry over it. His wingtips make flat marks on the carpet -- he has not bothered to kick the shoes off, to relax into slippers or wander around, curling his bare toes. The failing evening light still illumin- ates his shadow, unevenly, to one side, pointing at the door. Late now, as the planet rotates further into spring; heretofore he has arrived at home in the dark. His mood tries to make something significant of that and fails. In the long tradition of lonely people, he is in the habit of the radio as constant accompaniment: sometimes the news station, or muted jazz, or sometimes when he is feeling fey he turns it to the soul station for the luscious ballads. Tonight he leaves his stereo silent, listening only to the vague urban sounds of Crystal City ridding itself of its office workers. This high up, his own breathing can drown out the faint cars below. And so he stands quietly, swallowing the dimness, now that his glass is empty. His wife used to mock him, angrily; would turn to him as their fights simmered to a close with tears in her eyes and rage at him, demanding that he lose his composure. 'Silence is strength,' she would growl in disgust, and slam the bedroom door, leaving him helpless in the den. But he could never act the way she wanted him to, and all the sarcasm in the world could not change it: silence isn't strength. Silence is the last lacquer of dignity over an unsalvageable situation. That was another house, and another life. Skinner still allows himself to think of her as his wife, dead these three years. He took her shouting, conceded a fight when she started crying, and resented her asking for more. There will be a night when the visitor comes, and then Skinner will begin again, conceding what he cannot protect, chewing on the insides of his cheeks to keep from angry outburst. There is nothing to be done, after all. Again, in his mind, a goblin dry- washing its hands: I could kill him, and be free. I could kill myself and free us all. Its simplicity tempts him terribly. Sitting on his couch, looking around -- the sun set while he has been thinking and he hardly noticed. Now everything around him is gray, colorless in that assimilating vagueness of late evening. He should turn on some lights. He can see through his curtains to the balcony, the balcony he never, ever uses, a prohibition he does not understand but imposes on himself the way he has accepted unwanted orders from superiors. He stares at it, sometimes, but he never unlocks the sliding door. He is staring at it now, with a startled recognition: evening, the lights of National Airport, the endless reflection of empty office windows on the dark. By some accursed trick of the light he can see the flaws on the balcony railing, angled patterns of scoring like animal scratches. The chips of paint, uncollected on the floor of the outcropping, dark on the pale concrete -- meaningless as tea leaves, really. Krycek worried at the cuffs, struggling balefullly more than two years ago, and still the chips are there. Skinner remembers the unearthly gleam in that man's eyes, who did not seem so much a prisoner as a coiled spring, waiting for release. That babyish, empty face watching him ready for work in the morning with all the calm and killing joy of a pit bull in the ring -- Skinner wonders who was giving the orders during those few hours, and who was taking them. Krycek remained behind an inch of glass door, vulnerable to the elements, and still terrifyingly dangerous. Krycek, who forgets nothing and forgives nothing. There is no justifying the actions he will take; he is without defense. Again, he takes the orders he is given, and grits his teeth as if to fake a smile. All his life, he has chosen by not choosing, allowing opinions to be fed to him, both from the hated superior and from passionate subordinates. Skinner tries to distract himself with a history lesson, account- ing who wronged whom first, but the events will not order themselves in his memory. Revenge is regrettable -- he has seen millstones at work, revolving endlessly -- but revenge is inevitable. He can't even remember whose turn it is in his intermittent war of attrition with Krycek. He doesn't really think it matters, after all. They will kill each other some day and Scully will stand over a service in a second-rate national cemetery and make him sound better than he really is. He is a little bit in love with Dana Scully, or rather, he is in love with her toughness, her relentlessness, her solitude. He doesn't really know her very well, having avoided the petty intimacies of coworkers. His attempt to save her life resulted in nothing but a mess, the only time he has acted to try to change things. He recalls Mulder's face, in this very apartment, his hypocritical horror at lawbreaking and dirty-dealing. Mulder, who had brought the green-eyed creature to this, Skinner's only place of sanctuary. Mulder, whose eyes glowed when Skinner succumbed to his own anger. I don't really know them, Skinner thinks, a cold little thought in a dark living room. I don't know them at all. There is more to that thought, but its development into any sort of ideology is killed by the little sounds that break Skinner's own silence. He is here. Skinner can hear it, the small noises of a living body, just inside the front door. There, the heartbeat, sussurating breaths, and only one person in the world who would dare. Even Mulder knocks first. He is here, come to demand, and Skinner realizes he has left out an extra glass on the sideboard. Despite having finished his regulation single glass of whisky, the bottle is still open. It is as if he invited his visitor the way a friend would. Skinner doesn't look towards the front door. He stands as he has been standing, facing outwards towards the balcony, and swills his glass in his hand as if there were any liquid left to swill. "So," he says, seeing his reflection in the balcony's glass door. "So." A voice behind him, softly resonant. In a hot moment the thought comes: I could kill him and be free. And then the second, yoked to the first: I could kill myself and free us all. He allows himself to blink and examine the twin concepts again, letting his curiosity glide leisurely over them both, before he turns to face the man in his apartment. * * * * * * * O prolong now the sorrow, if that is all there is to prolong. -Donald Justice * * * * * * * END