TITLE: The City and the Stars: Skinner
AUTHOR: stellar_dust
EMAIL: stellar_dust_x@yahoo.com
WEBSITE: http://katycat.net/xfiles/
ARCHIVE/FEEDBACK: Just let me know/Of course.
SPOILERS: The Truth?
RATING: PG
CHALLENGE: First Lines (The War of the Worlds)
WORD COUNT: 440
DISCLAIMER: Not mine.
SUMMARY: A contemplative moment with Skinner.
DATE: 10/04/2004
NOTE: This story starts my post-col drabbleverse.


No one would have believed in the last years of the 
twentieth century that this world was being watched 
keenly and closely by intelligences greater than 
man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men 
busied themselves about their various concerns they 
were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as 
narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise 
the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a 
drop of water.

How fitting, then, that it was, finally, a woman with 
a microscope who discovered the key to their 
destruction.

For years I didn't believe it.  I was surrounded, 
hemmed in by men who knew the truth; only with a 
minimal shred of credulity, a back-up plan, if you 
will, did I find and nurture one man with an infinite 
capacity for belief.  

And thank God, thank God, that I did.

When I finally saw, with my own eyes, and understood 
- it was nearly too late.

In the distance, the city smolders, like the sleepy 
regard of a watchful red eye, or the dying gasp of 
one man through his last cigarette.  Reyes is in 
there, somewhere, cut off from the others in their 
mad dash back to safety.

She'll be back.  It won't be long now.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, no 
one can afford not to believe.

I swipe my sleeve across my brow; it's hot out here.  
It's hotter still in the tent behind me, where Mulder 
and Dana, John and Alvin and Will and the rest are 
holding a subdued celebration, anticipating the chaos 
when the effects of Scully's virus begin to manifest 
themselves in the Overlords.  No, it won't be long.

They've let Will have a beer.  He's a man now, a 
soldier at thirteen, veteran of his first campaign, 
and for an instant, that saddens me.

"Have a drink, Walter?"  It's Mulder at my elbow, 
hand on my shoulder, passing me a bottle.  Trust him 
to know when a man wants to be alone.  I snort and 
accept it.

"Hard to believe, isn't it?" he gestures, 
encompassing, well - everything.  There's a breeze 
that stands his hair on end, flash-dries the sweat on 
my neck.  If I had a poetic soul I might say changes 
were a'comin'.  I take a swig.

"I don't know, Mulder.  I was just thinking that I 
believe in more tonight than I ever have before."

He looks at me closely for an instant, then away.  "I 
know what you mean."

We stand there, in companionable silence, suspended 
in the darkness between the burnt city and the stars, 
until Scully appears and herds us off to bed.

Tomorrow's another big day.