“The Heart of the Matter,”
by Mort

A post-colonization story from Skinner’s pov.

Written for the 13th X-files Lyric Wheel



‘…the receiver…the other party has disconnected…please replace the receiver…the other party has disconnected…please replace the receiver…the other party has disconnected…please replace the receiver…the other party has…”

I don’t know how long I’ve sat here listening to that mechanical voice droning in my ear. I literally don’t know. But the room had been bathed with the orange glow of the late afternoon sun when the phone had first rung and the abrupt cessation, as the handset is taken from me and slapped back into its cradle, has woken me to a room so dark that I can see my reflection in the windowpane.

Though it hardly seems possible that it *is* my reflection.

That stark white, tear-stained countenance surely belongs to a stranger. A clone. An alien impersonator. 

Or, perhaps, a ghost.

The ghost of a Christmas that now will never come to pass. 

I am staring at the face of a fool.

An old fool.

Sitting alone, two hundred miles and a thousand light years from the place I should be. The place where I want to be. The person I want to be with. Alone, except for my memories and my regrets and the dark, soul-stealing shadow that never leaves my side.

And my shadow shifts and speaks.

“Bad news?” 

I’m not sure whether he’s being solicitous, sarcastic or simply polite. I never am.

“Unexpected,” I allow, and let him stew and ponder on that lie for a while.

A lie it is.

I knew the call would come. It was as inevitable as death and taxes.

Or at least taxes. Death seems to be a particularly subjective state these days. Just ask my shadow. But, in our brave new world, as civilization struggles to rebuild itself over the ashes of conflict, as the old structures regroup and reassert over the initial lawless panic, taxes were reintroduced even before power and communications were restored. The price of survival is high. 

We once had a battle cry; ‘resist or serve’. 

It sounded good at the time. We resisted. 

Now we serve.

But at least we serve at the alter of Mamon rather than at the feet of aliens.

Weapons keep us safe. But the necessities of life, like purified water and food, can’t be bought with force. Only with good old-fashioned trade. Everyone is forced, albeit reluctantly, to be ‘neighborly’. Everyone is expected to hand over one tenth of their income in taxes to maintain the soldiers who do that ‘forcing’.

Even if the ‘income’ is no more than crops or eggs or other items of simple barter.

It was one of our most memorable arguments. Mulder hated me for helping to set up a military infrastructure. He loathed the idea that, in the wake of the invasion, we would simply revert to the same-old, same-old. He says the only difference between the world before and the world now is that we have the technology to ensure that the government is human.

For what little that’s worth.

In the final hours of the battle we finally discovered the truth. The truth wasn’t ‘out there’ It was *in* Fox Mulder. The knowledge programmed inside his genes, first woken by the alien artifacts, finally came into its own. Like someone switching a vast computer on line, Mulder’s mind slipped into gear at the moment when our defeat seemed inevitable and, suddenly, he became more than the sum of his programming. 

Mulder was everyman.

He was living proof that we so-called humans are no more native to this world than the grays.

For just a moment, for a split-second in time, he somehow managed to harness the dormant genes in *all* of us, and we struck the aliens with a blast of communal consciousness. They fled, tails between their legs, not from who we were but from what we had the potential to become.

Unless, as Mulder suggests, their aim was only *ever* to teach us that we are more than we believed we are.

He believes they’re waiting for us now. Waiting for us to rebuild our civilization so that we might venture forth to *their* worlds. Waiting for us to cast away our earth-bound forms and rise like butterflies breaking free from cocoons. Waiting for us to go *home*.

Perhaps he’s right. I don’t know. It seems to me that the more I know, the less I understand.

All I really understand is that the very thing he needs me to do for him is what’s driven us apart. Even with his peculiar gifts and the alien technology scavenged from the war, it’s going to take decades to restore our society to a stage where we can look to the stars again rather than concentrating purely on survival. 

It’s ironic that my power to help stitch this battered world back together comes from him. That this visage reflected in the cold glass is the trusted face of the resistance. That I, Walter Sergei Skinner, formerly of the FBI, am now known only by two words.

Mr. President.

Ironic because by the time I set aside my doubts and believed in him implicitly, it was almost too late. Ironic that I spent all those years sitting on the fence, balancing precariously between sides as Mulder tilted alone at his windmills, and yet history will write me as the hero while Mulder, the true hero, will eventually be remembered as no more than the voice crying to herald my arrival.

He is my John. My Baptist railing in the wilderness.

He is the unpopular face of the resistance. Our Cassandra. Our prophet of doom.

And, as always, the messenger is blamed for the message. 

He is feared. Whispered about in the corners of the corridors of power. Old women cross themselves when his name is mentioned. Children huddle, wide-eyed, as Fox Mulder’s name is invoked in some bizarre marriage of Santa Claus and the bogeyman. ‘If you don’t behave, *he’ll* know. He can read your mind. He can see inside your heart. He knows if you’ve been good or bad.’

I, meanwhile, have become the most powerful man on the planet. Coasting into this office on the shirt-tails of his sacrifices. Accepting the burden of this responsibility out of guilt, not greed. Out of a determination to make amends. To restore the world to some semblance of what it was before.

What it might have remained, had I listened to him early enough. Had I trusted him soon enough. Had I jumped off that damned fence in time.

Had I admitted, sooner, that he was the sun that my universe revolved around.

That I loved him.

It was my love for him that finally made me take that leap to join the active resistance. It was my love that kept me fighting when it seemed that defeat was inevitable. It was my love for him that made me accept this office when it was all over.

Irony, again, that the only person people trusted at that stage was Mulder yet they were so damned frightened of his abilities that they all sighed with relief when he refused the office himself.

Ironic because the only person who *can* be trusted with power is someone who doesn’t want it.

But they gave the power to me. Believing, perhaps, that Mulder’s love of me proved I was worthy of trust. Awed, perhaps, that I was allowed the privilege of touching a man who was rapidly becoming legend. 

Though, I suspect, the truth is more sordid and basic than that.

On the night the aliens left, when Mulder was still somehow linked to the collective consciousness of all the survivors, when he was mute and unresponsive, lost somewhere inside his head, I did the only thing I could think to do. I took him to my bed and fucked him until he came back to me, until he howled my name, until he remembered that he was human after all, and that I loved him. 

Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect that his feelings for me were transmitted through that link to every living being on this planet because the next day I was voted, unanimously, into office.

And now my work stands between us. 

The final irony.

That our love was why I became who I now am. And being who I am has driven us apart.

The work I do, to restore this damaged world, is necessary. 

But it doesn't keep me warm at night.

I’ve been learning to live without him for a long time. I’ve been expecting this call. Sometimes I’ve even *hoped* for this call. Just so I’d know, for certain, that it’s finally over. That I have no choice except to move on.

Selfish wish. Selfish thought. Not a prayer for his happiness. Just a prayer for my own.

What kind of love is that?

If I *truly* loved him, I’d be happy for him. Wouldn’t I? Happy that he’s finally found a place, a peace, a contentment.

“That was Scully. She says that Mulder’s with her. He’s finally made his choice.”

I can’t say anymore. It’s not so much that the words catch in my throat. It’s more that the idea itself seems to clench and tighten around my heart, making coherent thought impossible.

My shadow shifts, takes a ragged breath and, though he doesn’t dare to meet my eyes, I see a vein throbbing in the side of his neck and his shoulders stiffening with fear. I reach into my pocket and his breath becomes a gasp of terror. He drops to his knees, a silent plea for a mercy he knows better than to expect from me.

I withdraw the palm pilot and tap it thoughtfully, ignoring his involuntary whimpering, as I stare at the ghostly face in the window.

And I wonder.

About everything.

About the future.

About the past.

About Mulder.

I want to hate him, for not loving me anymore. I want to hate Scully for finally being the one that he’s chosen. I want to hate William, for being the tie that’s finally bound them together.

But I can’t.

I gave him my heart, but I couldn’t give what he truly needed. The world has survived because of his unremitting belief in aliens, in his insistence that they were a real and present danger. But it wasn’t aliens he was truly searching for. He was looking to recapture the love he shared with his sister. His one, brief, experience of family love.

*That* was what drove Fox Mulder. His need for a family.

He loved me, because… oh shit, let’s finally admit it, our relationship was based so heavily on his need for paternal approval that when I became the President, became effectively *everyone’s* father-figure, he couldn’t handle it. He was like an only child who suddenly found he had to share my love and affection with countless other ‘siblings’. Every time I put his own needs aside to deal with an affair of state, he took my decision as a personal rejection.

As a proof that I didn’t love him *best*.

It wasn’t conscious behavior on his part.

He didn’t *mean* to act like a spoilt brat.

He didn’t *want* to stop loving me.

But he did.

And, in seeing his love for me fade I understood, even in my bitterness, that our love had never been healthy. It had never been designed for the long haul. Like a bush fire, it had raged with uncontrollable passion and then had left nothing but ashes in its wake.

He left me.

And now he’s returned to Scully.

He won’t be back.

I can accept that now.

Maybe…just maybe… I’ll forgive that.

Forgive him.

Forgive myself.

Forgive….

I slam my hand down on the desk and my shadow jerks, cringes, moves trembling fingers to his shirt and begins to strip himself, discarding his black clothing onto the eagle motif on the floor. His tears are silent. He knows better than to beg or plead, knows that none of the guards will step through the door to his aid, no matter how loudly he screams. No one questions his presence at my side. No one questions my treatment of him.

I’m the President.

He’s nothing but my black silent shadow.

My Lazarus.

My parting gift from Mulder, before he took both his terrifying abilities and his love away from me.

My shadow; his rotting corpse dug out of a grave, restored and re-animated.

He even has two arms, to match his two terrified eyes.

And a bloodstream filled with nanobots, that not only keep him completely under my control but work feverishly to repair any damage that I inflict upon him. Or damage that *others* inflict on him. 

He’s my shadow. My personal bodyguard. 

I’ve lost count of the number of bullets he’s taken for me as I’ve worked to restore some semblance of order to our nation. I’m an assassin’s dream. He’s an assassin’s nightmare.

He’s also a beautiful, unbreakable toy. 

“Think of him as the ultimate stress toy,” Mulder had quipped, as he’d handed him over. “I thought to myself, what do you give to the man who has everything? And then it came to me. So here he is. You better put it all behind you, baby. Life goes on. You keep carryin' that anger; it'll eat you up inside.”

I hated him for it. Hated him for leaving. Hated him for the *gift*. 

And my shadow has been paying for that hate ever since.

I didn’t listen. I didn’t understand. I didn’t *want* to understand Mulder’s parting words to me. What he was *really* trying to say. The gift he was *really* giving to me.

But I think I do now.

I think I’ve finally reached the heart of the matter.

I bring my hand back down on the table, so hard that I wince almost as much as the man trembling at my feet, so hard that the plastic casing of the tiny computer shatters into more pieces than my heart.

Then I look down at my naked, shivering toy. I stare hard into his wide, barely comprehending eyes, momentarily enjoying his bewildered confusion, then expelling the last of my anger in a deep sigh.

“It’s over, Alex. I forgive you.”

Like a beaten dog, his eyes remain wary and disbelieving as they flicker between my face and the closed door. He’s quivering, torn between the urge to run and the terror that this is just another cruel game that I’m playing with him.

“You’re free to go,” I confirm. 

He blinks.

I’ve never lied to him.

I’ve done many things to him. Unspeakable, vile things. Things that I fully believed he deserved. Things I’m no longer sure *anyone* deserves. Things I am suddenly bitterly ashamed of.

But I’ve never lied to him.

And he knows it.

He licks his lips, his eyes flicking to the broken palm, and a tremble runs through his body. 

“Why?” he rasps.

I shrug. I don’t have an answer. Not one I can say out loud.

Because Mulder doesn’t love me. 

Because I’m forgiving Mulder for not loving me.

And if I can forgive *that*. If I can forgive Mulder for shredding my heart into tiny pieces and throwing it away, then I can forgive *anything*. 

Because I don’t want to be angry anymore. Because I don’t want to hate anymore. Because I’m tired of using you as a convenient whipping boy for all the bastards who led humanity into the war. Because…because, suddenly it seems crazy that I could let go of my love for Mulder and yet be unable to let go of my hatred for you.

“I’m sorry I’ve hurt you,” I say, then shrug helplessly at the inadequacy of my words. They echo through the Oval Office. The air seems to shiver and the very walls seem to tremble under their ludicrous weight.

Words almost obscene coming from the mouth of a man who has beaten and raped and tortured the person they are spoken to. No matter that he once killed me. That until the wheel of fortune turned in my favor it was *he* who used the nanobots to torture and control. 

Now, with an almost audible click, the wheel has turned again.

My confession has restored his power.

Now it is *he* once more who has the ability to torture and wound.

Though I doubt, sincerely, he has any idea of how to truly hurt me. Why would he? How could he even begin to imagine that the very least of my worries is that he will turn on me physically?

I have given him my apology and I have every expectation that he will kick it into the dirt where it belongs. I expect him to leap to his feet and pummel his fists into my face for even daring to say the words out loud when he is kneeling naked at my feet on the floor that I have so often tried to fuck him through.

I wait for his anger, his justifiable outrage. I brace myself for his fury and disgust. I promise myself not to call out when he attacks me. I swear, silently, that I will give no cause for the guards to race inside and protect me.

But he just quivers and clenches his fists, his eyes dark and wounded, and a flush rises on his cheeks. He licks his lips, flicks his eyes to mine, to the broken palm, to the door, then back again to the floor. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

I reel in my seat. I had been prepared for *anything*, but not this. Not this simple statement of fact. He’s risen to his feet, but his face is still staring down at the floor so that his eyes are hidden from me, and the only accusation I can see are the dark, mottled bruises on his hips where my fingers have clawed into his flesh. Multi-colored bruises, layered like a palette in silent witness of my brutality.

“You could stay,” I say gruffly.

He finally looks at me. His face is cold, expressionless. “I guess you still need a bodyguard,” he says, his voice cool.

“I do,” I agree, equally coolly.

He silently reaches for his pants and pulls them on, sliding the fabric over his butt, pulling the zipper up with an air of finality, then stares at me in challenge as he continues dressing.

I swallow heavily, surprised how shattered I feel at his obvious gesture, but nod my agreement. He’s making it clear where he stands. He’s prepared to remain as my bodyguard, but not as my fuck toy.

It’s more than I expected.

More than I deserve,

But, still, I can’t help an expression of dismay sliding onto my face.

Something flickers in his eyes. Something dangerous and dark. And then his lips twitch slightly, as though he’s struggling not to smile, as he moves into place at my shoulder.

My shadow.

Standing where he belongs.

Guarding my back.

More than I deserve, I remind myself.

And then my shadow leans down and whispers in my ear.

“No floors. No desks. No more throwing me against a wall and just fucking the shit out of me, Mr. President.”

I nod in silent agreement, my ears burning with shamed embarrassment.

“It’s either a bed or no-where,” he continues blithely. “I’m not getting any younger.”

I turn my head and stare at him in disbelief but his face is expressionless again. He’s as silent and inscrutable as the Sphinx, staring at the door, his body both relaxed and alert like a soldier at parade rest. A perfect bodyguard’s stance.

He’s always taken his role as my bodyguard seriously, but I always believed it was simply that I was the only one who knew the code that had to be entered into the palm pilot every twelve hours.

Now the palm is destroyed.

Yet he remains.

He remains.

And, finally, I think I understand what forgiveness really means.

I still miss you, Mulder.

I always will.

But…

But, I think l’ve finally gotten down to the heart of the matter.






The End




"The Heart of the Matter" by Don Henley


i got the call today, i didn't wanna hear
But i knew that it would come
An old, true friend of ours was talkin' on the phone
She said you'd found someone
And i thought of all the bad luck,
And the struggles we went through
And how i lost me and you lost you
What are these voices outside love's open door
Make us throw off our contentment
And beg for something more?
I'm learning to live without you now
But i miss you sometimes
The more i know, the less i understand
All the things i thought i knew, i'm learning again
I've been tryin' to get down
To the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak
And my thoughts seem to scatter
But i think it's about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore
These times are so uncertain
There's a yearning undefined
And people filled with rage
We all need a little tenderness
How can love survive in such a graceless age?
The trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness
They're the very things - we kill i guess
Pride and competition
Cannot fill these empty arms
And the work i put between us
You know it doesn't keep me warm
I'm learning to live without you now
But i miss you, baby
And the more i know, the less i understand
All the things i thought i'd figured out
I have to learn again
I've been trying to get down
To the heart of the matter
But everything changes
And my friends seem to scatter
But i think it's about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore
There are people in your life who've come and gone
They let you down you know they hurt your pride
You better put it all behind you baby; life goes on
You keep carryin' that anger; it'll eat you up inside, baby
I've been trying to get down
To the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak
And my thought seem to scatter
But i think it's about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me
I've been tryin' to get down
To the heart of the matter
Because the flesh will get weak
And the ashes will scatter
So i'm thinkin' about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me
Forgiveness
Forgiveness - baby
Forgiveness
Forgiveness
Forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, you don't love me anymore

(Fade)