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Walter Skinner checked his watch, looked at the surprisingly small pile of unfinished work on his desk and sighed heavily. It was six pm. If he got his head down and cracked on he could probably clear at least half his in-tray before 10. He’d actually see the color of his desk for the first time in weeks.
Instead, with a growl of irritation, he rose to his feet and reached for his overcoat.
“Sir?” Kim asked, her eyes as wide and startled as a deer’s as he stepped out of his office and slammed the door behind him with a resounding crash.
“Haven’t you got a home to go to?” he snapped.
For a moment she remained frozen in place, her brain obviously struggling to process the evidence of her eyes and ears, then she turned off her PC and jumped to her feet with the alacrity of someone convinced they’d fallen into the twilight zone but who still fully intended to enjoy the trip.
“I’m leaving right now, Sir,” she babbled, as she grabbed her coat and purse and hurried after him towards the elevator.
He just offered her a surly glare and told himself it was time to get himself a new PA. How the hell was he supposed to ever get any work done if the only way he could get the stubborn woman to go home on an evening was to leave the building himself?
As the elevator descended, he sneaked a look inside her open purse. Yup. The lavender-sheathed offering was inside. She was obviously intending to use it to blackmail her boyfriend into treating her better. The bastard clearly needed *something* to kick his selfish ass into gear since Skinner couldn’t imagine Kim being so willing to work over every night if she were in a *good* relationship.
He hoped Scully was doing the same, though he held out little hope of the prospect. For one thing he didn’t think she *had* a boyfriend to make jealous and, now she was posted at Quantico, most of the office Romeos had probably forgotten her existence. Poor girl probably didn’t *ever* get a Valentine’s card except his own.
Well, unless Mulder… no… patently ridiculous thought. Mulder wouldn’t recognize a romantic gesture if it bit him in the ass.
Though Skinner was realistic enough to accept that both Kim and Scully probably both *thought* their anonymous Valentine cards came from the Armani-clad Agent rather than their stone-faced boss.
Which was fine by him. Hell, with a bit of luck even Sharon would think her card had come from some tall, dark-haired stranger and imagine her luck had changed. He sure wished his *own* card had come from a tall, dark-haired stranger rather than his estranged wife. If only so that he dared ignore the words written in anonymous black print inside it.
“Delilah’s. 8pm. Be there, if you dare.”
Delilah’s.
God. Never marry a woman with a sense of black humor. Or, if you do, give her the goddamned divorce she keeps asking for so she doesn’t use every Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to embarrass you to death. Yeah. Maybe that was it. She’d given up on the idea of a divorce and was working on getting her hands on his life insurance policy instead.
Or maybe she was simply trying to be ‘understanding’. Sharon wasn’t a cruel woman and subtlety had never been one of her strengths. Hell, she probably thought Delilah’s was one of his usual pick-up haunts and was trying to make him feel ‘at home’. He’d be insulted by the implication, if the whole situation weren’t so damned ironically funny.
And, just in case he wasn’t already miserable enough, whom the hell should he bump into in the parking lot except Agent Fox Pain-in-the-ass Mulder himself, who did an exaggerated double take, checked his watch and offered him a shit-eating smirk.
“Leaving early, huh? Got a hot date tonight, Sir?”
Skinner just growled deep in his throat and stepped around him… only to collide into Agent Alex
puppy-dog Krycek who’d been lurking invisibly behind Mulder’s power suit.
“Sorry,” he barked, sounding anything but, as the flustered young man tried to detach himself without letting go of the dog-eared lavender envelope clutched in his left hand.
Some devil took possession of Skinner, twisting his face into a knowing smirk as he nodded at Krycek’s hand. “Secret admirer, son?”
Krycek blushed a truly magnificent shade of scarlet and backed away, mumbling something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like “Oh, god, oh, god, why not trip and fall flat on your face, Alex, and make the humiliation complete?”
Skinner walked away, whistling silently, his equilibrium totally restored. Hell, he might be on the way to the evening-from-hell with his soon-to-be ex-wife but at least he’d managed to cop a feel of a tall, dark-haired stranger en route.
He drove home, wasted an hour trying to decide the appropriate attire for a middle-aged guy to wear to a place like Delilah’s, decided it would serve Sharon right if he turned up in drag, then dressed in a conservative black turtle-neck and matching pants.
Delilah’s was almost deserted when he entered, making it impossible for him to creep in surreptitiously through a crowd. Not that it was easy to do surreptitious when you were as broad and tall as he was in *any* crowd. So he just pumped out his chest, set his face in a surly ‘don’t even think of it’ expression and sat down at the bar.
“Oooh, girlfriend, big bear at three-o-clock,” someone squealed.
“Oooh,” the indeterminately sexed barkeep agreed, mincing down the bar in Skinner’s direction with a flutter of false eyelashes. “Whatever it is, it’s on the house.”
Skinner glowered at him/her and pointedly slapped a twenty on the bar. “Coors,” he snapped.
“The strong silent type, huh? That’s okay. It’s not your over-sized personality I’m interested in. I’m Lola.”
“I’m waiting for my wife,” Skinner retorted dryly.
“Kinky,” Lola replied, with a wink, before gliding back down the bar on legs *far* too good to belong to a female.
Skinner decided he was going to *kill* Sharon for this.
At precisely 9.50, he decided he’d had enough. He reached into his jacket, withdrew his cell phone and rang her.
“Where the hell are you?” he barked
There was a long silence on the end of the phone before Sharon took a deep breath and said, “And Happy Valentine’s Day to you too, Walter.”
He blushed, averted his eyes from Lola’s curious stare and lowered his voice several decibels. “You said 8 o’clock,” he pointed out. “I’m an AD in the FBI, and I’ve been sitting in the most notorious drag-queen bar in DC for nearly two hours now.”
Another long, curious silence followed by, “I said I’d meet you there at 8 o’clock?”
“That’s what you wrote in the card,” he snapped. “You said ‘Be there, if you dare’,” he reminded her irritably.
“Ah,” she said. “Of course.”
“So are you planning to turn up or is this just your idea of a joke?”
“I never sent you a card, Walter,” she laughed gently. “I mean it’s nice that you still send *me* a card every year, but let’s face it you send one to every unattached woman you know, so I’ve never mistaken it for more than a sweet gesture on your part. So whoever sent you *your* card is either a practical joker or a secret admirer. I’m sure it’s the latter though,” she added hurriedly. “And they obviously know you well, since they sent you to a ‘gay’ bar.”
“It’s not a ‘gay’ bar. It’s a ‘drag-queen’ bar,” he growled. “There’s a difference.”
“Of course there is,” she agreed blithely. “You get to have your cake and eat it.”
“What?”
“You drool over a babe in a dress and bed a guy with a dick. Seems like the perfect set-up for a closeted queer like you, Walter,” she snickered.
“I can’t believe you said that.”
“Oh lighten up, Walt. This is your *wife* you’re talking to here and you’re the last guy in the world who can claim your wife doesn’t understand you. Live a little. Take a chance. Maybe you’re finally about to meet Mr. Right.”
“Not if he’s wearing a goddamned dress, I’m not,” Walter snarled.
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” she laughed.
“It drowned five beers ago when I met ‘Lola’.”
“Lola?”
“Never mind. Any minute now they’re going to start the ‘show’, so I’m going home.”
“Coward.”
“What did you call me?”
“Think about it, Walt. What if this *is* a joke? Maybe whoever sent the card is sitting somewhere in that bar laughing their ass off at you, just dying to see you turn purple with embarrassment and storm out in a temper. So stay there, watch the show, and pretend to enjoy yourself. Then the joke’s on them, isn’t it?”
Skinner decided it made sense, though after five beers on an empty stomach maybe *anything* would make sense – and he wasn’t sure he liked the fact that Sharon clearly found the whole thing so amusing.
“Are you sure you didn’t send the card?” he asked suspiciously.
“If it makes you happy, I sent the card, okay?” she laughed. “Now I’m hanging up before *my* date decides he’d have more chance of getting lucky at Delilah’s.”
Walter pocketed his cell-phone and frowned with suspicion. He hadn’t mentioned the name of the bar, had he? So how had Sharon known he was at Delilah’s? Lucky guess or proof she *had* sent him the card? Hell, maybe she was trying to be romantic. Maybe sending your gay husband to a drag-queen bar was considered an appropriate Valentine gesture in the crappy liberated women’s magazines that Sharon subscribed to.
Or maybe this was *Mulder’s* idea of a joke.
Yeah.
That would explain the smirk and the ‘hot date’ comment. Mulder was the only person Skinner knew who could not only discover his boss was a closeted homosexual but also believe the appropriate response was to send him a joke Valentine’s card rather than report him to OPC.
Either way, it was too late to change his mind about leaving. Somewhere between his fifth beer and the phone call, the bar had suddenly filled to capacity. There were so many heaving bodies blocking the way between the bar and the door that people were spilling out onto the sidewalk. Most of whom would probably take advantage of the darkness and close quarters to at least give him a quick grope if he tried to force his way through the throng.
Which, of course, reminded him of the brief but enjoyable moment of body contact with Alex Krycek in the parking lot. Hell, it should be a criminal offence for a man to have eyelashes *that* long. Though ‘Lola’ certainly didn’t agree. Skinner had never seen so much mascara on one face before.
Krycek, of course, didn’t need mascara.
Neither, come to think of it, did someone who looked like Krycek need the kindness of an anonymous Valentine’s card from his boss to boost his ego.
But, hell, he’d stood in that card shop, buying nonsensical cards for all the women in his life, and it had suddenly struck him that just once he wanted to send a card for real. It didn’t matter that the recipient would never know who’d sent it. Well, actually, only the fact that the recipient *wouldn’t* know who sent it had made the gesture possible. The point was that Skinner was tired of being ‘nice’.
He wanted, just once, to be truly romantic.
He wanted the face that lit up with pleasure on receipt of his card to be that of a man he was more than half in love with, rather than that of the women he felt fatherly concern towards.
Skinner smiled to himself, remembering the dog-eared envelope in Krycek’s hand. That hadn’t been an envelope that had spent the day discarded in a desk-drawer. It had been fondled and caressed, its contents furtively withdrawn and fantasized over numerous times. It didn’t matter who Krycek *thought* his admirer was. All that mattered was that he’d obviously spent the entire day with a smile on his face, courtesy of Skinner’s card.
Skinner sighed, signaled Lola for another beer and then drank a silent toast to Alex Krycek, wherever he was and whatever woman’s bed he was laying in - since a boy with a face and body like that sure as hell wasn’t spending the evening alone.
But he wasn’t having such a bad evening himself, he decided reluctantly, as he watched the show. Despite his knowledge that the performers were men, they sure *looked* like women and, after a few moments of disorientation, he decided it didn’t matter that they were miming rather than singing since they were performing with such panache.
He was a little confused by the second ‘singer’, since she performed an impromptu striptease as she ‘sang’ and ended up wearing nothing more than a skimpy bikini. He appreciated the fact that the tits could be fake, but how the hell ‘she’ was managing to hide ‘her’ plumbing while wearing so little was an X-file that made his own cock and balls ache with sympathy.
He was further confounded when ‘Lola’ disappeared from behind the bar and appeared a few minutes later center-stage. Up in the spotlight, the fake eyelashes no longer looked ridiculous and the mincing walk transformed into feminine grace. On the stage, Lola was indisputably ‘beautiful’.
And he felt ashamed of himself, suddenly, for his earlier thoughts of derision as a new and surprising truth slapped him in the face.
Just as he didn’t have to be camp to be gay, neither did he have any right to feel scorn for gay men who *did* choose to be camp. Maybe he personally preferred a man who looked like a man, but that didn’t mean these boys who were beautiful enough to pass as women weren’t truly attractive in their own right.
He decided he owed Lola an apology and so, as she left the stage, he enthusiastically and unashamedly added his applause to that of the crowd.
“Was I hot, or was I hot?” Lola demanded, as she returned behind the bar with a face flushed with triumph.
“You were hot,” Skinner agreed, with an apologetic smile for his earlier rudeness.
Lola smiled, winked at him, and then leaned across the bar to another drag queen and stage-whispered, “The granite just cracked. Tell our Princess to get her ass on stage and knock his socks off.”
Skinner downed another two beers in quick succession, too stunned by his own change of perception to pay much more than cursory attention to the next two acts, but then one of the performers grabbed the microphone and announced, “And now what you’ve all been waiting for, the most beautiful, the most talented girl in town. Everyone give a huge round of applause for our very own Princess Alexa.”
He politely clapped his hands along with the rest of the patrons, though his mind was already escaping to a fantasy in which Alex Krycek of the gorgeous eyelashes would prance onto the stage and croon sweet valentine nothings into his ears. Damn, *Alex* was a man who’d look as good in a dress as he did in a suit, though he was sure the young Agent would put a bullet into him for thinking as much.
He blinked at the stage, looked down at his half-empty bottle and decided he was definitely drinking something more potent than beer. Just for a moment he’d thought… no…. it was just co-incidence.
Had to be.
He was drunk.
Yup.
Time to call a cab, go home and pretend he’d never even *imagined* he’d just thought what he thought he’d thought….
Because there was no way in hell that was *really* Agent Alex Krycek up on that stage looking more goddamned gorgeous than Miss America and singing with a smoky voice,
“Who would ever thought a guy
Would want a girl like me?
Who would ever thought that I
Would fall so easily?”
That voice wasn’t a mime. That husky torch tone was as familiar as sin and twice as tempting.
”Who would ever thought that we
Would finally come to be?
I guess they don't know
How much you mean to me.”
And damned if he, *she*, wasn’t staring him right in the eyes as he, *she*, glided down the steps and worked his, *her*, way through the crowd towards the bar.
”Who would ever thought that they
Would have some words to say?
We'll go on anyway
It's all right, it's okay”
Until he, *she* was stood right at the bar with a shimmer in his, *her*, unmistakable green eyes as he, *she* reached into his, *her*, impossible cleavage and withdrew a battered but all too familiar lavender envelope.
“Take whatever comes our way
Together we will stay
I got three words to say”
He, *she* paused, the smoky voice dropping to a mere whisper.
”Never say never”
And he, *she* leaned over and brushed a kiss over Skinner’s stunned mouth, then spun away through the crowd, swallowed up in a wave of rapturous applause.
“Look’s like someone wants to be your Valentine,” Lola snickered, passing Skinner a large double malt with a knowing grin.
“Is…um…I mean…um… does Alex…”
“Alexa,” Lola corrected.
Skinner rubbed his face, took a gulp of whiskey, and then nodded weakly. “Does um, Alexa, sing here often?”
“Oh no, honey. She performed just for you,” Lola confided, suddenly compassionate of his obviously shell-shocked state. “First time I’ve ever seen her in a dress, though I gotta say now I know how gorgeous she is I’m going to kick Alex’s butt if he refuses to let her play with us again.”
Skinner skittered somewhat drunkenly through her words, trying to decide whether she was saying Alex was schizophrenic or whether he’d just stumbled on some kind of mysterious inner-circle of gay etiquette. He decided to grasp the most important point. “You’re saying he, I mean she, only sang here tonight because I came here?”
“I’m telling you, girlfriend, Alex was still wearing a leather jacket until I told him you’d stopped looking at me like I was something out of a horror flick. Can you believe that girl then transformed herself into a goddess in less than ten minutes? It’s gotta be love.”
“Love,” Skinner repeated, blinking owlishly over to the dark recesses of the bar where a tall figure in jeans and black leather was wending his way through the crowd in his direction.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sir,” Alex Krycek announced, sliding onto the next bar stool and offering Skinner a nervous grin. Except for the smoky voice and huge, expressive eyes, nothing remained of Alexa.
“You are one seriously strange and fucked-up individual, Krycek,” Skinner announced solemnly, taking another gulp of his whiskey and glaring at Krycek with his best surly expression. “No wonder you get on so well with Mulder.”
A shadow of hurt flickered through the green eyes. “I’ve obviously made a huge mistake,” Krycek said tightly. “I’ll call you a cab.”
Skinner let him suffer for a moment, and then cracked a smile.
“I’d rather you called me Walter.”
“Walter?” Krycek repeated, his expression sliding into helpless confusion.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Alex,” Skinner smirked, and signaled Lola to pour them both a drink.
The End
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