"One Fine Day" by MJ

A hotel room in Davenport, Iowa is a far better place to stay than, say, in the cold streets of the Bowery in midwinter, or a non-air-conditioned pension in the steaming, humid tropical jungle of New Orleans in the summer. Or, for that matter, in a gray cinder-bricked new building at a modern Oxford college when all of your friends are living in century-old digs and attending centuries-old colleges, slightly amused by their American friend's getting the short end of the Oxford stick. Fox Mulder had experienced two out of the three, and the Bowery could wait.

However, when less than a week ago, the man of your dreams finally collapsed in your arms and you found yourself in his bed for the entire weekend, a hotel room in Davenport might as well be the Bowery in winter, or the asphalt of an impromptu airstrip in Vietnam in the heat of midsummer, as his lover might remember. It was not where Fox Mulder had the slightest urge to be.

He picked over the remains of a room service dinner, an incredibly overpriced steak, too small and overcooked. It had failed to fill him, but he loathed the thought of ordering one more item from the kitchen here. He wasn't likely to die of starvation, and the breakfasts here were tolerable and large. His hunger was for something else, anyway.

That something else was the aforementioned lover, Walter Skinner.

It is a disquieting thing to realize when interviewing a witness that your primary thought is that his glasses look just like your lover's. Or, when reviewing a stack of photographs taken by a local agent, to discover that you are missing the photographic details in order to recall to mind the feeling of your body entering his, the sound of his moans as you held him. In fact, love itself is a disquieting thing, as he was now realizing. He had been accused of insanity more than once in the past, by people who were observing his actions; he was rather more convinced of his own insanity now, observing the current state of his own mind. It was a mind singularly unfocused on the details of this case; it was, rather, focused on the very hunger that kept him from noticing that he really did need something else to eat tonight.

The hunger that was making his channel-surfing on the hotel television a pointless endeavor.

He turned off the remote, headed over to the corner table, where his laptop's display still glowed. One e-mail, that was all. One sentence to Walter Skinner, nothing that couldn't be read in the office, though anyone who didn't know what was going on might find it perplexing.

But then, Fox Mulder specialized in perplexing people.

It wasn't intentional—well, not always. Sometimes it really was deliberate, if he had to be honest. But he had no desire to perplex, vex, or otherwise annoy any other member of the human race at the moment. All he wanted was to get this case closed—one more set of mysterious interrelated deaths at a top-secret research laboratory—and get back to Washington. Or, more precisely, to Walter, whom he hoped wasn't going slowly insane in quite the same way that Mulder was right now…but then, boredom in a lonely out-of-town hotel room is its own form of torture; missing your lover, quite another form.

Shit. What if Walter really didn't want this? It wasn't like they'd done anything more than fucked their brains out from Friday night until just before that blasted Monday morning staff meeting. They certainly hadn't talked about it. The farthest they'd gotten along those lines was Mulder's own silently-mouthed "Friday?" when he'd been called out of the meeting to take over on this case yesterday morning.

He was finishing this up tomorrow and Thursday and flying back by Friday if it killed him. He'd said Friday, and Skinner had nodded. Well, he could have shook his head "no" if he'd wanted to, so maybe everything really was all right. Too late to worry now; all he could do was get back and make sure that he had Walter thoroughly convinced about this all over again. And again, and then maybe one more time just to make sure the message got through.

And Walter Skinner thought that Fox Mulder had a thick skull? That was the pot calling the kettle black.

He finally settled on CNN and threw down the remote. Picked up the bedside telephone, ordered a hot chocolate and a piece of cake from room service. The steak really hadn't done it, he realized. Picked up the receiver again, stared at it, put it back down. Sitting up, he unbuttoned his shirt. Yesterday's shirt, really; he'd only grabbed an overnight bag he kept stashed in the trunk of his car. Walter's shirt; he'd borrowed it yesterday morning when they'd gotten ready for work. Too large, the sleeves too long; memories of a boy dressing up in Dad's clothes. He pulled the shirt tighter around himself, as if Walter Skinner's shirt sleeves, like his arms, might have the power to drive away Fox Mulder's childhood, the power to banish the nightmares from Mulder's sleep.

He refastened the shirt slowly, and rolled up its sleeves, three buttons hanging open. It was an ordinary enough white cotton shirt, to be sure, but it was Walter's, and it was there with him. Skin has a hunger of its own, the hunger for contact. This wasn't the contact he wanted, but he'd have to make do for a few more days.

The door. Room service. He let in the uniformed post-adolescent and signed for the tab as the food went on the table and dinner's remains were collected. Remains. He looked down at Walter's shirt hanging on his lank frame. Sometimes remains are all you have to get you through.

He sat down with the hot chocolate, picked up the file, and went back to work on the case.