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

"I thought you were going to back me up." Mulder came out from behind his desk as Skinner walked in.

"It's not as simple as that, Agent Mulder." Skinner stopped, folded his arms over his chest, leaned onto one hip. In the dim light, his face was shadowed, grim.

"It's not?" Sitting on the edge of his desk, Mulder crossed his ownarms.

"You know it's not." Skinner looked away for a moment, then fixed his eyes on Mulder. "You want everything to be black and white. Right and wrong. Hero and villain."

Standing, Mulder stepped closer. "And which are you?"

Skinner moved in too, hands on his hips now. "I am on your side, Mulder. Can't you believe that?"

"That doesn't do me any good if you don't *do* anything," Mulder hissed into Skinner's face.

"You don't know what I do." The words had a dangerous edge to them and Mulder wondered if he'd regret this later. But he was too far gone now to stop.

"Exactly. I don't know. So how can I trust you?"

"Mulder--"

"So far as I know, you do nothing."

"Mulder--"

"Do nothing, reveal nothing, tell me you're on my side, and leave me to twist in the wind." He saw the hand rising in his peripheral vision, knew he was going to take it on the chin, he could take it, not like some...

Skinner grabbed Mulder's jaw, yanked him closer, and kissed him. Fierce, probing, inescapable. Mulder pulled back, but Skinner's other hand gripped his shoulder. Blackness came up and swallowed him and he realised that he had closed his eyes.

The hands dropped. Mulder opened his eyes. Skinner spun on his heel and walked out, turning at the door. "It didn't happen," he growled. The door slammed and he was gone.

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

A moment of stunned hesitation, missing the press of Skinner's fingers on his face, then he was barrelling out into the corridor, listening for the retreating tread.

A few yards along a door was closing its last pneumatic inch and he was through it and hearing his own breath in the echoing stairwell before he'd made a conscious decision. Someone was climbing and he prayed it wasn't just one of the filing clerks as he took the first flight two at a time.

Peering upwards he saw heavy polished shoes first, then long legs, finally, hauling himself round the intervening turn in the stair, the whole critical mass of Walter Skinner. Critical, suddenly, to his being able to breathe, or think, or function.

His fate turned and waited for him, one hip against the rail, resigned to a rematch. Mulder climbed level and halted, a Christian before the lion. Then he rushed at Skinner, pushing his full height against thighs and pelvis and chest. Skinner spread his arms, prepared for anything and Mulder forestalled the headlock with a bearhug. Hard body but ambushed by unlooked-for passion. In the angle of the rail he bent Skinner back, hipbones bruising together, feet scuffling for purchase on the tiles. His mouth undisciplined, inept, insatiable, his mouth hard, then soft, then melting.

He was being allowed this kiss. That muscle could have upended him into the void with a flex of biceps. Instead, while he feasted on a shaven cheek and a stretched throat, pencils slid from his pocket and ricocheted back to the basement, while he licked at firm lips and tender earlobes, caution and willpower followed the pencils into oblivion.

Smugly, he pulled back long enough to breathe: "Deny that."

THE END

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