Chapter 1-Mad Season
“Now—I’m cryin’—isn’t that what you want?
I’m tryin’ to live my life on my own
But I won’t
At times—I do believe I am strong
So someone tell me why, why, why
Do I feel stupid?”

Walter Skinner was sleeping on the porch of his small house when the call came.

No one had ever phoned him. Walter didn’t mind. Every day that the phone had stayed mute was one more day that he didn’t die, so…

He’d made the decision, there in that tiny room that day, the only decision he knew he could make: The options had been crystal clear: Take a bow, take a walk, take nothing but a pittance for a retirement package to live on. Oh, and if you talk, you’ll be killed. Option B was simply be killed.

Even now he admired Kersh. The man had taken the choice away from those bastards, driving himself through that office window with enough force to ram shards of broken glass as long as his hand through his throat. He’d been dead long before his body hit the pavement five stories below.

Skinner remembered shock, and then a sudden longing to follow him, to take his own plunge, and his own revenge on the sons of bitches. But then, like a drumbeat, like his own heartbeat, a dark refrain, both somber and hopeful: ‘Mulder…Mulder…Mulder…’

And he knew he was going to beat these murdering thugs. Somehow, someway, he was going to beat them. Because if he quit now, they’d win…

Walter Skinner was an excellent assistant director, had been a remarkable agent, and was once an outstanding marine. And so he knew immediately what he had to do. The chips were down, the deck was stacked against him, the odds were nearly insurmountable.

Walter Skinner knew to go to ground.

Tail tucked convincingly between his legs, he had slunk away. He took what they gave him with a completely bogus ‘yah-suh!’ and an idiot’s grin; if he’d had a cap, he would have been wringing it.

With the money from the bureau, and his own savings, he’d held his own while waiting for the house to sell. He didn’t have to wait long, and he knew that he wouldn’t. But when the time came, it pained him just the same. *His* name on the lease, maybe, but *their* home just the same. Their first home. And every corner, every nail and beam and bit of furnishing called out to him. ‘Mulder…Mulder…Mulder…’

He had himself a good cry on the last night, and was completely dry-eyed and urbanely sweet when the young couple came to take possession the next morning. He was grave, yet charming; obviously a widow, they thought.

He walked away and didn’t look back.

He knew he was being tracked, and he didn’t care. Let ‘em watch, he thought. Better those inhuman eyes on him than on his lover.

He found an old house in a modest neighborhood, one that he could tinker with, and soon discovered his inner handyman.  He fixed leaky pipes and put in a security system. He refinished the wooden porch and added video surveillance. He built a swing for the porch, and took pictures of the soldiers taking pictures of him.

He didn’t unpack much.

Weeks passed. He drank scotch to excess and ate just enough to keep the engine of his body going.  Hard work and low appetite combined to burn calories and tone, and he grew lean and hard.  When the fringe of hair that was all he had left grew in thick and white, he said to hell with it and shaved himself bald. And when the memories of his lover’s fingers ruffling that band of hair tried to protest, he dumped scotch on them and built an island in the kitchen.

Weeks passed. He was on the Internet a lot, keeping up, learning new things, trading information the way Mulder would on a case, if Mulder were—

He learned of apparent UFO activity in Montana, unexplained deaths in Minnesota, and took an online course in electronics.

Weeks passed. He let the hair on his face grow, decided it made him look too much like the wild man of Borneo, and opted to keep a neatly trimmed goatee instead. And when he rewired the phones, the phone company continued to bill his unused line, and neither they nor the spies were any the wiser.

He started more personal inquiries then. One call a night, late, when they’d be less likely to be actively watching. He found out through an old marine buddy that Doggett was back in New York, busted down to background checks and wiretaps. Another call on another night revealed that Agent Reyes had disappeared. He hoped that it had been her own choice.

He found three dead men he could trust, sent boxes of candy lined with money to them, and they began their own discreet inquiries on his behalf, although they had no small stake in matters themselves.

The days grew long and warm, and he started spending his evenings on the porch, drinking scotch, or sometimes iced tea, though that was harder to swallow. He ate sunflower seeds that he hated, and watched the stars.  Sometimes he read, old war novels mostly, the ones that Mulder had always made fun of.  He wore out old Omni magazines with re-reading. There was a box of file folders in the crawlspace under the house, but he didn’t touch them.

He found himself crying less and jerking off more. The anger, though, that never wavered, never changed.  A frozen coal was banked in his heart, always burning, always freezing.

When the package from Columbia House arrived, he wondered briefly about his alcohol consumption.  Then he decided there was no way he could have been drunk enough ever to join a record club—there wasn’t enough scotch in the world.

He signed for the package, and glared suspiciously at the mailman. Then he set the package on the porch and went into the house.

The plain wrapped box was still there the next morning. He had gone down to the crawlspace and spent twenty-four hours there with his emergency kit, a flashlight, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky… and the face of his lover in his heart and in his mind.

The next day there was still a house over his head, so he brought the package into it.

More examinations, and then his first clue, which he berated himself for missing in the first place:

Still cautious, death and loss having had a profound effect on his ability to trust (funny how that worked), he donned latex gloves and sliced open the box with an exacto knife.

Elvis Presley grinned up at him from inside the cardboard container. Skinner closed his eyes, sighed, and re-opened them.

Elvis was still smiling. From Hawaii, apparently. His lei was yellow.

“Aloha,” Skinner muttered, lifting the cd from the box.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” said a somber Elvis on the cover of the next disc. “Golden Records!” exclaimed the next one, and “Best Of!” bragged the one after that. “Burning Love” made Walter grin and think of his lover. A “Hayride Show”, a “’68 Comeback Tour”, and “Maybellene’s” “Top 10 Hits” later, and Walter wanted nothing more to do with the king of rock and roll, no matter how enamoured J. Edgar had been with the guy.

“Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me!” the last cd in the box proclaimed. It was Joey Ramone’s post-humus solo album, and the factory shrink-wrap on it had been removed. Walter took a deep breath, glared once at the Elvis discs lying everywhere, then eased the dead punker’s disc out of the box. He found the invoice under the disc, clutched it tightly, and took both items into the living room, where the computer sat in one corner, a generic maze screen saver moving restlessly around the monitor.

A quick paranoid glance at shades that were perpetually drawn, a longing look that he didn’t even notice giving to the fish tank as he passed it, and then he was sitting at the desk, and carefully removing the cd from its case with hands that only shook a little.

When he opened the cd-rom drive, the screen saver was replaced by FBI seal wallpaper. Only close inspection would have revealed that the ‘I’ in this FBI stood for INTOXICATION, and the eagle was clutching a bottle in its talons. But Walter Skinner wasn’t letting anyone get that close.

His computer read the disc, undoubtedly disapproved, and a moment later, Joey Ramone was wailing “What a wonderful world!” at the top of his lungs, and a box had popped up on the screen:

With a scowl, he clicked on the ‘yes’ with more vehemence than was necessary, but no damage was done. This third mouse in as many months was stronger than its predecessors, and was used to the heavy-handed manipulations of its owner.

said the next box.

“Aw hell,” he muttered, ran a hand across his scalp, and fought the urge to turn down the volume. He suspected there was more going on with the disc than punk anthems, and he didn’t want to mess with any extra programming that might be keeping his actions from the wrong sets of prying eyes.

“Damn.” He thought fiercely for a moment, quickly typed:

It was a good guess. It was also a wrong one, and a bright red DENIED flashed across the screen, then TRY AGAIN.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

“Bastards!” he hissed. He walked away, nearly tipping over the chair in his haste. He was sweating, nervous, angry now.  He paced around the room, a caged tiger coiled and ready to spring on any unsuspecting gazelle that might decide to wander uninvited into the living room in search of fresh grass.

“Think, dammit, think!” he admonished himself.  If it wasn’t his lover, or any anagram of same, what would those idiots have used? What was it that they would expect him to know? That he was supposed to think of when he got this cryptic clue. He let his mind wander back, somewhat painfully, to any and all connection he had with the three men.  UFOs and EBEs and Mulder, and secret agendas, government conspiracies and Mulder, jail cells and sting operations and Mulder…He thought of their names. He thought of their friends. He thought of exotic dark women and stupid blonde men, and…

When he ran back to the computer, a ferocious grin was on his face, and he swiped at the keyboard to remove the screensaver, which had taken over in his absence. All he was missing was the shout of Eureka! as he punched keys and muttered prayers and threats.

Encrypted data started spooling across the screen, illuminating his features, and he reached for pen and paper, immediately recognizing the code, and thanking his absent lover for a long ago rainy day game of ‘secret agent man’ that allowed him to read the information with little trouble.

Dates, places, sightings, deaths, near deaths, all of it coming so fast Walter could barely make sense of it all. Maps next, addresses, so many of them, and he worried only long enough to miss a section devoted to a quick escape somewhere in New Mexico.

They were travelling north, crisscrossing the country seemingly at random.

He wondered if there was going to be a way to contact them. He nearly laughed at the thought of going through all this trouble just to get a page from the Bumblefuck, Nowhere yellow pages with a listing for Mr. And Mrs. Dana Scully. It wasn’t likely, and he wasn’t expecting it.  So when it came up, he nearly dropped his pen.

Okay, so it wasn’t the yellow pages exactly, and it wasn’t their names. But glory; there was a phone number, and an extension. And then a time frame. A tiny window of opportunity that was a little sooner than he was comfortable with. If he had waited much longer, he would have missed it completely, and his stomach lurched at the thought. 

He wrote down the information while Joey Ramone segued into the next song. Then he wandered around the room, looking at the numbers printed in his own tight cursive, legible only to himself and Kim Cook, and his mouth moved as he memorized them.

When he was sure he knew everything that he needed, he made his way to the kitchen, opened a cupboard, found a tall green apothecary jar, meant for spaghetti, or coffee if you wanted to keep it on hand in vast amounts. But when he opened the lid of the jar, there was no coffee, no pasta, not even staples like flour or sugar. What greeted him was, about a third of the way down the jar, a second lid, this one with a tiny combination lock on it.

Feeling clumsy, he fiddled with the combination, cursed his fat thumbs, cursed the company that had made the tiny lock, then grinned in surprise and satisfaction as he did every time the dammed thing worked.

The second lid sprang open to reveal the rest of the jar, empty but for a thick, neatly bundled stack of bills—mad money, his mother would have called it. He tucked the information he’d gotten from the cd under the money, then resealed the jar and shoved it back up on the shelf between the crackers and the salt.

Making his way back to the living room, he started thinking about the awful risk that his lover had taken, that their friends had taken on both their behalf’s. And he thought there was nothing more worth it, more worth the risk, more worth anything…

As he walked back to the computer, he didn’t notice that he was smiling, but when he shut off the cd-rom and opened the driver to remove the cd, the grin suddenly became almost wolfish.

He took a moment to wipe his hard drive of any indication that the cd had ever been anywhere near his computer, then carefully, almost reverently, he loaded Joey Ramone into his stereo cd player instead. He found that hard fast first track again, pushed the pause button.

He opened just the first set of blinds, laughed meanly when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and tracked the man as he dropped behind the shrubs of the neighboring house.

“Kiss my ass,” he muttered, giving a signal so universal that you didn’t need ASL to understand his meaning loud and clear.  He was still grinning.  He turned away from the window, found the stereo, found the play button, found the volume, found the beat.

Walter Skinner danced. He danced madly, a dervish, laughing without realizing it, waving his arms above his head, shaking first his ass, then his crotch at the spies outside the window, then thrusting his hips even more suggestively and throwing in a quick grab at his dick for good measure. He tried singing along, laughed at his own foolishness, and then did a quick time step across the room. In short, he spend three minutes behaving in a completely un-Skinner like manner, then collapsed, giggling onto the couch. He knew that such a display would have had even Mulder checking the back of his neck for alien vertebrae. The eyes on him probably just chalked it up to drunkenness, which made him laugh even more.

He pulled off his glasses, tossed them un-gently onto the coffee table and wiped tears from his eyes. Not all of them were from laughter.

For a moment a wave of longing so strong it nearly doubled him over physically washed over him.

A moment was all that he allowed himself though. 

With a shuddering deep breath, he compartmentalized his feelings as he’d been doing for so long now, got to his feet, and shut Joey Ramone off with a squawk of protest, hoping maliciously that the punk anthem had shorted out at least one set of ultrasonic listening devices.

In the kitchen, he made tea, made a mess of it, and made preliminary plans.

Mopping up the tea he had spilled with a dishtowel off of the rack he had built for them, he let another of those lonely waves wash over him, then pulled it back with warm hope, like the moon’s gravity pulling at the ocean.

At last he had a place to start.