RATING: R (just hints, really)

CATEGORY: V,R (Mulder/Skinner friendship/UST)

SPOILERS: None

SUMMARY: Mulder gets up early and learns more about his feelings and about his boss.

DISCLAIMER: These dear people don't, unfortunately, belong to me.Walter Skinner and Fox Mulder are the property of CC, MP, DD, 1013 Productions and Fox Television. No infringement is intended. Stan Dorrell is my creation and may not be used elsewhere without my consent.

THANKS: To Hal, for constant encouragement, endless patience, good humour, intelligent comments and inspirational beta-reading - you're irreplaceable!

THE SERIES SO FAR:

The Walk (Rarest Man: Prologue)

Rarest Man: Test of Endurance

Rarest Man: Wet Dream

Rarest Man: Resolution

Rarest Man: Famine & Feast

Rarest Man: Duty Before Pleasure

Rarest Man: Body of Evidence

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"He is simply the rarest man i' th' world"

Shakespeare - Coriolanus 4,v,161

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

At 5.14 in the morning the Hoover building is pretty much deserted apart from security and the skeleton night-duty staff, but I know one person who's already signed in for the day. There were three cars on the top level of the parking garage where I left my Taurus and I recognized Skinner's dark grey sedan at once.

I know where he'll be, too - in the gym complex, working out. In fine weather he runs before work and works out after, on wet, dark mornings such as this, he usually hits the gym first thing and plays squash or swims in the evening. I've made it my business to find all this out, but I've never before done what I'm about to do: seek him out so I can watch him exercise.

Of course, I'm justifying it to myself by listing all the sound, work-related reasons I need to get in touch with him now: the new development in the Hammond Hills case that seems to tie in with the disappearances in Wisconsin, the time-factor because of Adamson's latest threat and my flight to Green Bay at 8.00... Oh, I can make a great case for why I have to see my boss here and now, but the real reason is that I'm obsessed with the man, I'm addicted to the sight and sound of him, and like a junkie, I need my fix before I get on that plane and have nothing but my torrid dreams to warm me for however long I'm stuck in the frozen north.

I don't know exactly when my obsession reached the point where I dream about him every night, where I can contemplate doing what I'm about to do. I've spent several blissful hours over the past weeks trailing him around the corridors of the JEH watching him do that part of his job that isn't written down, the informal conversations with his people that keep him aware of so much more than written reports ever could. I used to think he was remote, cold, even uninvolved, that I'd never really get to know him. I still recall my amazement the first time he came down to the basement just to talk.

I was suspicious, unwelcoming, probably insolent, but he just fixed me with that calm gaze - the one you can't look away from - and I found myself talking about the last awful case, what I did on weekends, a diner I knew that did outstanding chili, a book on reincarnation I'd just finished... It was extraordinary, even as a psychologist I was impressed. And it worked - I felt better afterwards.

Since then, I've watched him with a new eye, with a growing respect and admiration, and lately, with something much more than admiration.

The first time I realized which way my mind was heading was in a case conference, of all places, when I watched him stretch across the table to pass Scully a file and something about the line of his lean body brought the previous night's dream flooding back to me with such blush-making intensity that I had to drop my notebook and duck down to retrieve it, giving myself time to compose my face if not my feelings.

I'd dreamt of flying with him, clinging to his broad back as he carried us up through clouds into sunlight, my naked body pressed to his, my arms wrapped around his muscled chest, feeling tireless, full of hope, exhilarated.

The dreams have gotten more and more frequent and I cherish them shamelessly - so many nights exploring Walter Skinner, so many days telling myself it can never happen, even while I torture myself by thinking about what I ache to do...

Which brings me to this moment: walking through the silent corridors of the Hoover building, trying to convince myself I'm only here for the sake of the case.

I push through the heavy glass doors leading into the gym. It's relatively unfamiliar territory for me - I usually head straight for the pool, avoiding the grunts and gasps of the jocks pounding away on the gleaming Nautilus and Nordic Track machines. The corridor is dimly lit by recessed spots in the ceiling. All but one of the glass-walled workout rooms is in darkness. I should have known that Skinner would eschew the high-tech approach to fitness in favour of a more traditional, self-disciplined regime. He's in the 'mat room', a large space equipped only with benches around the perimeter, rubber mats on the floor and a few non-mechanical pieces of apparatus: a pommel horse, climbing ropes, a chinning bar and a pair of rings hanging from the ceiling. The rings are gently swinging and I curse my bad timing, visualizing how Skinner would look suspended there, shoulder and arm muscles knotted as he holds himself in a perfect cross...

What he's doing now, though, is enough to make my heart race. He's lying on one of the floor mats, wearing grey sweat pants and an old, faded red USMC tank top and doing lateral crunches. Hands clasped behind his neck, he curls smoothly up, touching elbow to opposite knee on each rep. His knees are bent, his feet flat on the mat as he raises his powerful upper body using only the muscles of his torso. The t-back of his top reveals the flexing shoulder-muscles and the line of his spine stretching on every slow, deliberate lift.

I decide I'll wait until he finishes the crunches then catch his attention and say what I came to say, but he shows no sign of stopping - fifty, sixty reps while I've been watching, and the hypnotic rhythm of his movements is mesmerizing... He makes hardly any sound, just the hiss of his controlled breathing on each curl.

Finally he comes to the end of whatever punishing number of reps he's set himself to do and I bend to take off my shoes before crossing the smooth wood floor to speak to him. But he rolls over onto his stomach and starts doing push-ups. His form is perfect as far as I can judge: body ramrod straight, balanced on his toes and fingertips, dipping to touch his nose to the mat each time. Sweat is dripping off his face, pooling between his shoulderblades and in a dark patch in the small of his back where the sweats cling to his buttocks, but still his breathing is measured. On and on he goes, while I bite my lip to keep from groaning aloud and rest my head on the cool glass of the door as the waves of desire sweep through me.

I endure this display of Marine fortitude, my imagination feeding me images of that taut, gleaming body stretched above me, that amazing stamina sustaining push-ups of quite another kind... Suddenly he powers up from his prone position on the mat into a shoulder-stand. Braced on his bent arms he is poised in perfect immobility. He looks as if he could stay like that for hours but I feel no impatience for this to end. I walk further along the glass-walled corridor until I can see his face. His eyes are closed and he is breathing deeply, in through his nose and out through his parted lips, his chest rising and falling in a slow meditative cadence. I try to slow my own racing heart as I study him and it is amazingly calming to watch such sustained stillness, but the effect on other parts of my anatomy is less soothing as I contemplate the man who is the sole object of my desire.

He drops out of the shoulder-stand with a graceful stretch of one long leg down to the mat, the rest of his body following smoothly after as he stands upright again. He moves off to a bench along the side wall and slings a towel around his neck while he drinks from a water bottle. Something draws his gaze to the doorway.

"Agent Mulder. I assume you need to speak with me?"

"Sir, I didn't want to interrupt, but there's been a development in the Hammond Hills case and I'm booked on a flight to Green Bay at 8.00..."

"Well, you talk and I'll carry on punishing the flab."

Flab!! What flab??? I watch him towelling off his face and neck as I try not to skid in my socks on the polished floor. He doesn't seem to think it at all odd for me to be pestering him in the gym and at this hour. If anything, he actually seems amused to see me - could that be a twinkle in the keen, dark eyes? Taking rather too long a stride to reach the safety of the mat, I feel my feet slide from under me and then his hand is firm under my flailing elbow and I end up, dignity more or less intact, on one knee in front of him. His lips twitch but he doesn't laugh, bless him, merely offering me the water bottle and saying:

"Since you're down there, you can brace my ankles."

He sits down beside me on the mat, flinging the towel from around his neck in the direction of the bench. I'm not sure what he means me to do until he starts sit-ups and I hastily shift to clasp his ankles, holding his bare feet down on the mat, the soles against the brace of my knees. He hardly needs the help, I can feel barely any shift of his feet in my grasp as he curves cleanly up and down, the muscles in his stomach and thighs bunching visibly under the damp clingy cotton.

"Right - what have you got for me?"

I start to explain the new findings that seem to tie my case to the one in Wisconsin. I'm amazed that I can still speak, let alone make sense as I try to marshall my arguments for why I need to go to Wisconsin, when all I can think about is the warmth and smoothness of his skin against my palms, about whether my suit pants are loose enough to hide the bulge which is swelling there...

His tank top is soaked through now, plastered against his chest, moulded to every sculpted muscle. He flops back onto the mat to consider what I've told him, his head resting on his clasped hands, the hair under his arms curling damply against the paler skin, a little pool of moisture in the hollow at the base of his throat. I have a sudden vision of myself, peeling off the soaked cotton and licking the sweat off his chest, tasting the salt on his nipples, sliding the sweats down off his lean hips and bending to... I realize with a start that my hands are still holding his ankles, though he hasn't said anything. I move them guiltily onto my lap, hoping I can disguise my burgeoning erection.

He props himself up on one elbow, unhooking his glasses with the other hand. He wipes them against his thigh and puts them back on, frowning through the smeared glass.

"Just made it worse," he says, resignedly. "OK, I think you've got enough to take up to Green Bay. I'll give Stan Dorrell up there a call and let him know you're coming. We went to the Academy together. He's a sound, no-nonsense field officer. Don't know what he'll make of your theories on demonic possession, though."

He looks at me with that almost-twinkle again,

"You'd better get going if you want to make that flight - I'll see to the paperwork."

No arguments, no admonitions to behave myself, no "Why didn't you file the 302 for this first?" All those endorphins must have a mellowing effect.

I clamber awkwardly to my feet and slither over to where I left my shoes in the doorway. By the time I straighten from tying my laces, he's sitting straight-backed in the lotus position, his wrists resting lightly on the soles of his feet where they are tucked up on his thighs. His face is serene.

I cast him one last hungry look and head off for the airport, visions of Walter Skinner in the shower making me glad that the early-morning traffic is still light on the Washington streets.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now I'm sitting in yet another seedy motel room, at the conclusion of yet another bizarre case and reflecting on the many oddities of the last four days.

The demonic possession turned out to be nothing of the kind, of course, just some very potent home-brew, a lot of mumbo-jumbo and the over-active imaginations of a bunch of bored teens. The oddest thing was that so many apparently intelligent young women could fall for the dubious charms of a drunken, verbose man like the Reverend Josiah Glebe. Another oddity was that although my idea of a link between my DC case and the events in Green Bay proved to be a non-starter, one of SAC Stan Dorrell's agents turned up something on the Internet that could prove helpful in making the paper samples we collected in DC usable as evidence. It was a neat bit of research that showed the caliber of Dorrell's team up here.

Which brings me to the oddest oddity of all. I can't imagine what Skinner said to Stan Dorrell about me, but from the moment of my arrival I felt they were actually pleased to have me here. They listened to my way-out theories, teased me a bit, but asked intelligent questions and pulled out all the stops to work the background angles I suggested - hence the Internet discovery. It was so good to have people actually take me seriously for a change.

I know it was down to Skinner because as the debriefing session broke up, Dorrell came to shake my hand and said:

"That was a fine piece of logical deduction, Agent Mulder. And some leaps of intuition I couldn't have pulled off in a decade. Walt's lucky to have you at HQ, but then he made it clear that he's very aware of that, and that we were lucky to have you working with us."

Not so long ago I'd have put some paranoid twist on that and suspected Skinner of a hidden agenda. Now, I realize that maybe I have another ally, and that gives me a more positive sense about the future than I've had in a long time.

Skinner as an ally? Perhaps I need to process this some more, explore how it really makes me feel... Hell, no - I know how it makes me feel, I've processed it and I'm already two steps ahead...

Skinner as an ally, Skinner as a friend, Skinner as... something more? I'm getting light-headed thinking of the gleam in those dark eyes when I left him in the gym.

Walter Skinner, Iron Man. Defender of the Ridiculed, Rescuer of Wounded Egos, inspiration for a thousand erotic fantasies, my hero...

I'm already planning how to engineer our next encounter outside of the office. I think all that yogic meditation, or whatever it was, is beyond me, but I wonder if the guy ever shoots hoops?

Hmmm... maybe a little one-on-one when I get back to DC... ?

THE END

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