Home-->Mom, Don't Go Here
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It's Not Unusual
“It’s not unusual to be mad with anyone.
Walter Skinner walked into his apartment with heavy steps that spoke of fatigue bordering on exhaustion. He groped for the lightswitch with eyes closed while dropping his suitbag and briefcase to the floor where they landed with a soft thud. The conference had been a three day kiss-ass-a-thon, and Skinner had spent most of those three days biting his tongue and barely being polite as he listened to speeches, lectures and drunken rambling debates over the integrity of the Bureau and the men and women running it. He was glad to be home, and not just because the stark structured quality of his apartment was a haven for his more-often-than-not-these-days chaotic thoughts and feelings, but because, once ensconced in this, his space, he could relax in a way that was totally impossible at work. It wasn’t a mansion, but the Crystal City one bedroom was his home, and he relished being in total control of his tiny castle. Dimly he realized that music was playing quietly, and he almost shut the light off, a half-formed thought of Fox Mulder sleeping on his couch coming to mind. Fox Mulder was not sleeping on his couch. The music was not speed metal, but it certainly wasn’t to Skinner’s taste, and he wondered again at his lover’s eclectic nature as he slowly crossed the room to cut off Neil Tennant’s voice. “I don’t know you, you don’t know me
He stopped the CD player and turned the power off on the stereo. He was just slightly annoyed to find the case for the CD on the floor rather than placed back in the CD tower, and just slightly grew to even more when he discovered more CDs on the floor with it, some of them not even in their cases. His jaw clenched as he stooped to pick up the discarded music, sorting and replacing them in the CD tower, thinking a place for everything… The last case was empty, and he felt a spark of real anger when he couldn’t find the classical CD that was its mate. He stood and glanced around his living room, really noticing it for the first time since he had entered the apartment. An open pizza box sat forlornly on the coffee table, with an equally forlorn half a pizza inside it. He didn’t think the pizza had been sitting there long enough to rot, but he opted not to try and save it when he discovered a pile of sunflower seed shells gracing the top of the crust. A few shells were strewn across the table as well, and a crystal rocks glass was half-full of the discarded husks. A second glass still held a finger of scotch. No coasters were evident. Walter sighed and picked up the pizza box with one hand, then used the CD case he was still holding to sweep the errant shells off the table and into the box. Trudging towards the kitchen to dispose of the offending item, he nearly tripped over a stack of file folders balanced precariously on top of one of the couch cushions, which, for some inexplicable reason, was sitting at the halfway point between the living room and the kitchen. Papers went sprawling, and Walter clenched his jaw again, thinking I am not anal-retentive, I am not anal retentive… Not feeling so tired now, Walter dumped the pizza into the garbage, which, while not overflowing, certainly hadn’t been taken out lately, as the jumble of juice boxes and candy wrappers in it could attest to. “We’ve talked about recycling,” Walter muttered under his breath. He could feel a headache wanting to take up residence in his temples, and he decided to head it off at the pass, reaching for a bottle of ibuprofen sitting on top of the fridge. He didn’t know why it was there; he didn’t want to know. He decided to live dangerously and try and find some water to wash down the pills. Opening the fridge, he found the water pitcher (empty), the milk container (almost empty) and a Petrie dish with something odd and fuscia growing in it (wish it was empty). He shook his head, dry swallowed the pills and closed the refrigerator, wondering how much longer he could put up with his own personal version of chaos theory. As the door closed, he caught site of a note held to the fridge by a small magnet shaped like a classic alien head. He didn’t think it had been there before he left for the weekend-he was sure the magnet would have offended him on and off for the entire conference if he had seen it on Friday. The magnet half obscured the note, so Walter pulled it off the fridge to get a better look. He felt something that had wanted to be cold and angry melting away inside him as he read: THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND:
Thrusting the note into his pants pocket, Walter turned and left the kitchen, pausing only to turn out the light. He dropped his jacket and the CD case he was still carrying onto the couch in the living room, took a moment to leave his gun, I.D. and change on the table by the door, then turned out those lights as well. He took the stairs two at a time, loosening, then removing his tie as he did so, letting it drop on the last stair next to another tie, this one slightly more garish in nature. More music was issuing from the bedroom, and blue television light spilled out of the doorway. Walter paused at the entrance of the room, and the last of the tension, which he generally carried constantly in his jaw, faded away. Mulder was sprawled across the bed on his stomach, face turned towards the door, snoring softly. He was clad only in gray cotton boxers, and was completely uncovered, the quilt and sheets having apparently been built into some kind of liver-eating-mutant-nest on the far side of the bed. One arm lay supine at his side, the other was wrapped loosely around one of the pillows. Walter just gazed at his lover for a long moment, then stepped into the room, kicking aside stray bits of Armani suit as he did so, and not minding at all. He pushed up the sleeves on his half-unbuttoned shirt, then crouched next to the sleeping man and softly brushed back an errant lock of hair, which had tumbled forward over Mulder’s untroubled sleeping brow. Mulder shifted sleepily under Walter’s hand, then his eyes opened and he announced abruptly “I was drugged!” Walter laughed and pulled 170 lbs. of confused half-asleep agent into his arms, falling onto the bed with him and covering his face in kisses. Mulder was trying to say something, perhaps an apology for the mess, perhaps an explanation, but Walter just kissed the words away. Don’t ever change he thought.
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