(I apologize for Spotify I'll see if I can get a download file for y'all)
If You Can't Fix It// You Gotta Stand It -
A Walter Skinner fanmix with something akin to a narrative.
Set list breakdown
Songs 1 and 2 - growing up in nyc (queens) pre Vietnam war
Songs 3 and 4 - marine deployment at 18
Songs 5 through 7 - return home to Queens at 21, addiction, recovery, meeting Sharon
Songs 8 through 11 - Sharon, first flirts, love through 17 years of marriage, to divorce
Songs 12 through 16 - beaten into submission at the FBI, habits are formed but he's still the old dog with too many teeth and now? Unmentionables in the basement complicating things
Songs 17 through 25 - Skinner takes on a new role come s6 I'd argue, he's finally found more grounded understanding in himself even if it's in loneliness and isolation. He's seen so much and while he may not understand or accept it all, he cant disregard it, or what he's learning from Mulder and Scully, eventually Doggett and Reyes. It's chosen loneliness, he knows in some way his purpose now, guiding the others, keeping the lights on, loving in what ways he knows how. These are to sum up the growth and the guidance.
Song 26 - grief
Songs 27 through 29 - general thesis statements esp for the end of the show
Song 30 - self explanatory
Happy to discuss I spent an immense amount of time over the last many months building too many playlists for projects and the xfilescule but this is the first character focused and limited setlist so. I hope you enjoy.
Love you big guy ❤️
And a thousand thank you to @goshdoggett for the help and emotional support through the process 💕✨ you are the best you awful enabler
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
(tw for conversations regarding psychosis, death, medical trauma, child loss) rating Gen
Words: 3326
SUM- After a case leaves Skinner recovering from neurological trauma and the fallout of a kidnapping, Scully asks to meet and review the Medical reports before she submits them to the Bureau, concerned over Skinner's honesty and the reason's for his abduction. (set vaguely in a weird variant of s7 before mulder's abduction and the baby i guess who knows certainly not me).
___
Georgetown, DC
Midnight
Her expression was drawn with the effort to seem calm when he arrived at the apartment. It didn’t sit well with Skinner, though nothing really had since he’d been discharged from the hospital earlier that week. He’d grown accustomed to so little being answered in the cases Scully and Mulder pursued, but to be at the center of it, with little to no explanation as to why or the resulting outcomes left a bitter rotting taste in his mouth.
“Thank you,” Scully said softly, closing the door behind him, “for coming. I know it’s late.”
“It’s fine.”
“Are you still not sleeping?” A shake of the head as she helped him out of his coat. “Is it getting worse?”
“No more so than usual. What did you want to see me about, Scully?”
The coldness wasn’t intentional, and he hoped she knew that. The exhaustion had long since surpassed bone deep by that point, gotten it claws into his soul.
Missing for a week. Suspended coma state with prolonged psychosis for an estimated three days. Neurological tests performed to an as yet to be determined goal. Further exposed to a variant of the MKNaomi gas first introduced to his system in 1970.
What could she possibly expect of him now?
It wasn’t like her to be nervous, to be hesitant with him. He was used to her being the firm presence in the room, all direct eye contact and the naval posture taught to her by her father. Now, though, she kept her distance, seemingly unable to meet his eyes.
“Do— maybe we should sit. There’s coffee?”
“Scully.”
She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. He noted the redness around her eyes, the way she bit at her lip, already raw.
“I finished the medical reports this afternoon. I— I wanted to review them with you personally. Before we determine whether they should be submitted to the bureau.”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
“Because they concern you, Sir.” Scully’s upper lip curled in anger. “And I’m not comfortable with them— with the bureau simply—” she exhaled hard. “You and I both know certain individuals are likely implicated in this. We submit this report and let it stand one of two things happen. It vanishes and we risk losing it and the back up. Or we give them what they want, exact documentation of their work, whatever they didn’t manage to save before the raid.”
Skinner pulled off his blazer, draping it over the back of a dining chair. “So what? You want to just keep it squirreled away in the basement? Start building a little personnel file on me? Cute little dossier?” it was petty perhaps, but the exhaustion had eroded his capacity for kindness it seemed.
“Well it would be a block down from mine,” Scully reminded him, throwing it right back.
“I’m— sorry.”
“…It’s alright. I know this is hard.”
The folder sat on the table, like a corpse for autopsy.
“We can put it with the others,” she continued. “You can keep it. We can burn it. Mulder has made a short hand account for his own records but this— He’s agreed to let me do what I see fit. What you see fit after we go through it.”
“Kind of him,” Skinner mused, bracing his hands on the table, staring down the folder.
“Sir, I—”
“Just get on with it.”
Scully sighed and reached for the folder, the sound of it echoing in the too quiet apartment. Skinner kept his eyes lowered, tracing the grain of the table wood with his eyes. Ultimately none of it mattered, his life would continue on before him, his purpose and priorities were laid out plainly. This would just be another nightmare for the collection, one he would have to learn to stomach.
He just wished it didn’t have to involve so many people he had to face on a daily basis.
“As discussed in the hospital, a series of neurological tests were performed in hopes of determining the extent to which the MKNaomi impacted your brain’s processing centers,” Scully explained. “While you’ve spent the last twenty odd years getting by there’s a not insignificant number of documented cases of sightings attributed to you sir.”
“Sightings?”
“Apparitions, sightings. Mulder might use the term poltergeists, ghosts, the like. You’ve been on record more than once since the war—”
“You can’t be serious—”
“That is Mulder’s strongest theory,” Scully pressed gently. “That they believed the MKNaomi variant impacted your visual and auditory processing centers to such a degree that you are the only successful living test subject from that experiment. That this was an attempt to determine if that was the case.”
Skinner was silent, hands braced against the table.
“There’s nothing else that holds as much weight. You know it as well as I do, sir.”
He said nothing.
“It— it did include further exposure to a modified variant of the chemical contagion. Based on my findings they modified it into a serum and a more efficient gaseous compound, harder to detect, less odor, less viscous in the air. The re-con team managed to collect the remaining samples from the lab but it remains to be seen if there’s further samples of the chemical at large.”
“Scully.” Skinner’s voice was tight. “Please.”
With a sigh, Scully moved to sit at the head of the table, flipping to the middle of the report— the medical report on Skinner’s condition at the end of the tests, where he stood currently.
“Your memory. Short term is going to suffer some over the next few weeks. Gaps in facial recognition, depth perception, sleep disruption. Things that are ultimately typical for this sort of thing. Overall Cognitive decline doesn’t seem likely, which is what we’re hoping for. You’re on the mend in that regard. But if I can be frank with you sir.”
She looked at him finally. “I don’t believe that you can’t remember anything. At least, not entirely.”
“And why is that?” Skinner said around the nausea rising up in the back of his throat.
“I…” She looked away again. “I won’t make you take a polygraph but… the way you responded in the hospital. When Mulder and I asked you questions. The evasiveness? The way you wouldn’t meet my eyes?”
“Would you be able to look me in the eyes after something like this?” Skinner asked.
“No. But I would try.” She paused. “Have tried.”
“That's hardly fair.”
“Sir— I’m not trying to be cruel.”
“Don’t. Don’t coddle me, Scully. If I say I don’t remember, I don’t remember. I’m not lying to you for amusement. For pleasure.” He dropped into the chair in front of him and took the file from her, flipping through the pages. “I don’t remember you all even finding me. What I have are— fragments. And even then I can only hope those will fade as quickly as possible.”
Mulder’s account of the affair was near the back of the dossier, a three page write up of the kidnapping, the efforts to find him, and the final 24 hrs that lead up to his rescue. Skinner had no memory of being found, of Mulder apparently being the one to lead the team into the compound, to find him and release him. He could only remember the painful, blinding lights of the hospital coming into focus the next day, having been moved to Northeast Georgetown.
Scully watched him read for a moment, eyes flitting here and there nervously. “I followed Mulder’s team with the medics. He claims you were surprisingly coherent for the state they found you in. Most people experiencing that state of prolonged psychosis aren’t able to be on their feet for very long once they’re taken off the stabilizing medications.”
“Always aim to impress,” Skinner murmured. “Says here I attacked one of the doctors before they made the arrest?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“Doesn’t say much otherwise.”
“Mulder felt it was a bit unnecessary to add that you broke his sternum, dislocated his shoulder and fractured his jaw in three places. Considering the circumstances.”
“Mm.” Skinner would do his best to feel remorse at some point.
“He also omitted another point,” Scully added, glancing at Skinner’s face. “You kept asking the doctor, and eventually, well, anyone really until we got sedatives into your system, where they were.”
The sensation of nausea continued to rise, that bitter taste on the back of his tongue itching along his throat.
“Where they were. Where she was.” Scully took a slow breath. “You couldn’t explain it then. By the time you woke at northeast you couldn’t remember or wouldn’t explain. I— don’t fault you, either way. But I would hope you trust me enough, if you did remember, to share with me.”
The silence held around them.
“After everything, Sir. Everything you and I have endured. If only so you don’t have to carry it alone. It doesn’t need a place in the file,” she said, keeping her voice small. “It stands here, off the record. Just between us.”
He looked at her for a moment out of the corner of his eye. She was watching him with the firm gaze he was used to from the office, the blue of the Atlantic red rimmed with a sickly emotion he always struggled to stomach. It was rare, though, to see that emotion turned towards him. So often it was reserved for Mulder and Mulder only, now and then she spared it for herself and her own grief. But never had he seen it set aside for him.
“Please, Walter. Don’t we owe ourselves that much?”
Skinner let the silence around them hold, closing his eyes to savor it, to catalog the sounds as they came and went. It held around them so long that he began to note the ticks of Scully’s nerves— her fingers picking at the grain of the table, her slow breathing as she tried to stay calm, the heel of her shoe idly tapping against the laminate floor.
It would be so much simpler to stay silent, say nothing and walk away, the way he most often did. He could say he didn’t owe her anything, that there was no standing debt between them nor an expectation to honor.
He could continue to lie.
But the thought of carrying any more grief back to that empty apartment—
“6 lbs, 9 and a half ounces,” he said softly, “Just a few dark curls.”
“What?”
Skinner kept his eyes closed as he continued, voice feeling oddly small in the apartment around him.
“She laughed when the doctors lifted her up. It was May first, or so they wanted me to believe. I don’t remember her mother, at least, not a face. I don’t remember anything that lead up to it, just — ”
A look of horror had come over Scully’s face when he finally opened his eyes.
“Dana Lynn. S’what we named…" He cleared his throat. "Don’t have much, but I remember her.”
Another stretch of silence held, the two of them watching each other— Scully with a look of horror-stricken disbelief, Skinner the resignation of those who’ve accepted what’s before them. Then as if shaken by an unseen hand, Scully sat forward and snatched the file from Skinner, slamming it violently shut and putting it aside.
Then she sat back in her seat and stared across the table for a long while in silence, her jaw clenched tightly.
When she spoke it was in a delicate voice, one Skinner often heard in perilous situations where guns were rather close to being drawn, or someone lay in a hospital bed.
“How long did— How long?” she asked. Skinner noted her eyes were red rimmed again.
“Last four months of pregnancy, I’d guess,” he took off his glasses and sighed. “Six months after birth things began to unravel.”
“Unravel?”
“I can only guess the tests began to fail. Things… Started going wrong. The way they do in dreams. It wasn’t real, Scully.” He looked at her. “It wasn’t anything more than an incredibly complicated dream. Dreams go wrong somewhere.”
“What they did is hardly as simple as that!”
“We don’t know what they did,” Skinner snapped, recoiling with the effort to control himself. “We don’t know, we won’t know. And even if we did— it doesn’t matter.”
Scully stared at him, her expression torn between anger and something akin to disgust. “How can it not matter?”
“Because it doesn’t. It wasn’t real. Based on your reports the tests failed. In time I will forget. Life moves on.” He forced himself to look at her, hold her watery gaze as best he could despite the sickening feeling that came with it. “I can’t afford to hold onto these questions and hope it brings me some kind of closure. I can’t!”
“So you’ll permit them to continue to— to violate at will?” Scully demanded, getting to her feet. “It’s not even our bodies anymore, Walter. It’s gone so far past that, and you’re willing to say it doesn’t matter? That you—”
“Then use this to prevent a next time. Use this to do what you need to in that regard. But you know damn well they’re cleaning up after themselves and snipping the loose ends. It’s not about what does and doesn’t matter, Scully. It’s not about whether we mean anything to the bigger picture, or the morality of it all.” Skinner sat back in his chair, loosening his tie. “I was a box to tic on a to do list. Because of you and Mulder I became a nuisance and a mess to clean up.”
It wasn’t a good enough answer for her and he knew it. She stared at him, jaw working over words she refused to say, eyes burning and wet. The whole of her small figure shook with a violence that would, on a normal day, make Skinner deeply nervous. Now though, he could only muster up a passing sadness, a touch of fondness.
“They gave you a chance at a different life,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady, “the possibility of one, regardless of whether it was a lie. Stole it from you. And all you can say is it was a mess to clean up?”
“It wasn’t real, Dana.”
“I know that! That’s the cruelty of it, goddamn it!” she yelled at him, her voice finally cracking, hands moving to cover her face for a moment. She let out a strangled sound and shook her head. “Fuck!”
“Mm.”
“And they knew, if you survived no one would believe you.” Scully kept her face hidden as she spoke, her voice muffled behind shaking hands. “It would be comforting, the lack of creativity, if it didn’t make me so fucking ill.”
“'That's why I didn’t say anything at the hospital.” Skinner got to his feet, moving to help himself to her small home bar. “Not because I didn’t trust the two of you. But how do you bring this to light? How do you just… say it?”
He glanced over at her, lifting the mostly full bottle of whiskey. She nodded. He poured two glasses and returned to the table.
“You could have. I— I understand why you didn’t. I do. But you could have, sir. To hell with the badges to hell with everyone you,” she shook her head, moving to sit back down. “There’s no pride here, between us, with Mulder. There can’t be, not after all this.”
“It wasn’t pride.”
Scully looked up at him with a frown, taking the glass he offered.
Skinner leaned up against the table next to where Scully was sitting, too fidgety to sit back down. “It felt like another body bag moment, coming to in that room. Mulder and the cops, you coming in like a hurricane. There wasn’t space for fragments of memory. Not even a memory— a dream. A child’s dream.”
He sighed, sipping his drink.
“I don’t know how they tapped into what they did, what dossier they dug up, what diary they unearthed, what long dead part of my brain they managed to burrow into,” he said with a shrug. “But for all the haze of rose colored glasses, the life I found myself in was one conjured up by a 17 year old kid. One who hadn’t seen war, hadn’t killed anyone. Hadn’t committed the kind of sins only conceivable by cruel, foolish men. How could I grieve anew for that kid, and the future he didn’t get to have, when I’d barely managed to skate by on the skin of my teeth again?”
“Sir—”
“How do I mourn for the future that belonged to him? The future he wanted?” Skinner couldn’t look at her, not as he admitted to this, whatever it was he was admitting to.
As he spoke more seemed to bubble to the surface, the grip on his glass tightening further with every few words, knuckles white. “The one sold to every kid alongside the apple pie and the white picket fence, y’know the wife and two kids and the good job, don’t let your father down or make your mama cry type of shit, how do you find the time to mourn for that kid’s future? Cause that— that’s what they were selling me. Wrapped up beautifully, I’ll give them that. But its a whole different world that would have allowed that boy to grow up and be a father. I’m not him, never could have been. How do I mourn for him, for all of it?”
A pause.
“For her, when she wasn’t even real?”
He heard the clatter of a glass being set down, the slide of the chair moving along the floor. He startled slightly at the touch of Scully’s hand on his knee, her other resting atop his where it held the edge of the table.
“I don’t think there are any rules for mourning, Walter.”
“No. But eventually— Eventually you run out of room for the grief.”
Slowly, Scully got to her feet, prying the glass from his hands. With immense care she pulled him against her, wrapping her smaller frame around him as if it were the way of things, her arms meant to settle around his shoulders, to tuck his face into her neck, her hand curled around his nape. He went easily too, that was the childish thing about it. He wanted to be ashamed of himself, wanted to recoil from the touch.
But he sought the slight curve of her hip and the way his arm fit so neatly around it. He found such comfort in the steady warmth of her hand on the back of his neck, nails tracing idle patterns in the short hairs along his nape. The way she allowed him to hideaway in the crook of her shoulder, his face hidden from the empty room like a little boy afraid of nightmares spoke to the way she knew him like no one else.
The way it all meant she was desperately, beautifully real.
“Then let me hold it a while.” He heard her say, fingers still moving, voice soft despite her own well of emotions. “Just— At least until morning. Then we can find a place to bury it.”
Skinner held to her tight, hoping she didn’t think less of him for the tears she could no doubt feel through her blouse. She didn’t ask for him to answer her, simply took his silence and the heavy breaths as enough reassurance he was still with her, still tethered.
Scully tightened her hold. “Did you sing to her? Any lullabies?”
“I didn’t know any.” Skinner’s voice was muffled by her shoulder. “They managed to get that right.”
He felt her soft exhale against the back of his neck, followed by the idle tickle of her fingers as they again resumed their calming petting.
After a moment, so soft Skinner could barely hear it at first, she began to hum a lullaby.
If I Ever Stray// Frank Turner for my golden boy (link to a live Wembley performance)
chorus edit addition below in a hideous collage so it would fit the 10 photo app limit
I knew at some point we'd get back to the brand of 'slugger applies fthc to all his fandoms' so this feels good feels authentic. Sorry it's an absolute mess we threw it together in a mad dash at the office with work Photoshop and the online screenshot database (🙏 a blessing thank you to those mods fr)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
For I'm startin' to learn I may never be free (9902 words) by slugger52
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: John Doggett/Walter Skinner, Dana Scully/Walter Skinner, Walter Skinner/Original Character(s)
Characters: Walter Skinner, John Doggett, Dana Scully, Monica Reyes, Fox Mulder, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Bonding Over Trauma, Gay Bar, First Kiss, Situationships, the lengths i would have to go to explain the polycule would take another 10k, i didn't expect for this to be the first xfilescule fic i posted either, so lets just roll with it ok
Series: Part 1 of x-filescule oneshots
Summary:
“You think damn loud, y’know that?” came a muffled voice from the next bed.
“Sorry.”
“Here I thought I’d be the one up all night.” Doggett stretched with a long groan, limbs gangly and uncoordinated, too much for the bed. “What’s wrong?”
Skinner shook his head. “Nothing. White noise.” He tapped his forehead, just between his eyebrows. “Like a busted radio dial I can’t switch off. Been that way since I can remember.”
“And you’re the one telling us to let it all rest.” It was said with an odd amount of fondness, so much so it caught Skinner off guard. “Anything help?”
“Usually just wait till it burns itself out. Go to the gym maybe.” Skinner waved his hand. “It’s fine. I’ll manage.”
“Well, respectfully, I ain’t going to the gym.” Doggett stretched again. Skinner tried not to listen to the groan or the way he hummed, satisfied apparently, as he rolled out of bed. “But I will go for a beer if you want.”
_
After a particularly difficult case leaves them burnt out and unable to sleep, Skinner and Doggett go for a beer at a bar owned by an old friend and the conversation gets a little heavier than either of them had hoped.
________
hi i wrote a thing its silly but i hope you like it ok love you gnight
throws another xf-oc at you tho technically Lucky (he/they) is my first he's just been the most patient dog in the whole world while I've tried to figure out where he belongs (bootblacking at a fictional amalgamation of Baltimore's old school leather bars, making friends with Frohike, getting abducted by crazy rich people for their leisure experiments. I think we're figuring it out)
