“Did you kill him?”

I jumped and spun at the sound of his voice coming out of the darkness of my living room.

I’d nearly killed the man who’d nearly killed me…killed my integrity, anyway. And as for what he was doing to my agents, well, it nearly didn’t bear thinking about. The personal is political, we used to say, back in our Vietnam, pot-smoking, young and immortal days. And the politics I found myself currently enmeshed in were very dark indeed.

But now it was personal. Very personal.

At the last moment, though, I’d caved, and the man had come out of our meeting none the worse for wear, although I suspect the first thing he did after answering the phone was change his shorts.

The taking of a human life is not something that has ever been easy for me. Not in the war, not in my job, not ever. Hell, never mind even the human aspect of it. Just life itself, so precious, so important—I remember Sharon alternating between compassion and teasing at the tears I’d shed when we’d had our cat put down…

I should have put a bullet in the son-of-a-bitch. And not just for my own satisfaction. But for Scully. For Mulder…

For Mulder…

I turned on the lights and wondered if I’d ever come to a place in my life where I became the murderer that I’d almost been tonight.

Mulder squinted into the light, then gazed more frankly at me as his eyes adjusted, and I was caught for a moment by how they seemed to change colour as he looked at me, from pale to dark and back again.

I shook my head and broke away from his eyes.

“Mulder, shit! What are you doing here?”

He stood.

“The smoker. I know that’s where you were. I can smell him on you. Did you kill him?” His voice rose, demanding, yet I could hear defeat in his tone, too. And exhaustion. And something else. Something that tugged at my own tired heart and made my decision tonight, hell all of my decisions lately, taste even more bitter.

I couldn’t look at him. I studied my shoes and thought of that postal worker, her friend and their vacation. Then I thought of that cop…Scully…Mulder…

“No,” I finally said, the weight of failure very nearly crushing me, forcing the word out like an asthmatic sigh. “I couldn’t do it.”

I heard him moving towards me, and I raised my head, prepared to take the blow I figured was coming.  I’d failed Scully, and I’d failed him, and if anyone deserved to take one on the chin, it was me.

“I’m glad,” he said and his hand was gentle on my cheek, and his lips were gentle on my mouth.

He moved towards the door while I stood frozen, unable to do anything more than stare blankly at nothing, unable to think of anything beyond the tingling warmth lingering on my lips.

“I’m glad,” he said again at the door, added, “Walter”, and I spun like a badly manipulated puppet, the sound of my given name on those lips the strings that jerked me around to face him.

He said it again: “Walter.” And then, “We’ll find another way.”  And then he was gone.

‘I was just getting used to the dark,’ I thought, sparing something that could almost be called a smile for the space he had just vacated. Then I turned, exhausted, heading for the stairs and the longest, hottest shower of my life.