I Don't Want To Believe
By: X-afiliac
My name is Walter Skinner, and I used to work for the FBI. That's right, used to.
That all changed one night when I saw one of the agents under my command disappear in a blinding flash of light from the sky. Agent Fox Mulder and I had been on the hunt for something or other, I can't remember what now for some time, and we found it. Or rather it found us. He disappeared, and his partner Agent Dana Scully found out she was with child. His child. We later discovered that the child was key to the survival of mankind, and that he was no longer safe in the care of his mother, and it would be safer to put the boy up for adoption. At first Dana agreed, but she couldn't follow through with it, so she quit her job and went into hiding with young William. And I did the same.
As the days became weeks and the weeks months, we went from being "Sir" and "Agent Scully" to "Skinner" and "Scully". And as the months turned into years, Oh yes. It's been years. 10 of them to be exact. As I was saying, as the months turned to years, we became "Walter" and "Dana" and finally Husband and Wife. It turns out that Frohike (yes, they came too) well, it turns out he was licensed to marry people. Some course he did on the internet. We didn't complain, we were married.
As wonderful as this is, I would give it all up in a heartbeat to have things back the way they were the day before Mulder disappeared. It's not that I don't love my wife and son, and I do think of the boy as my son. It's that I'd rather he know his true father from more than just stories and pictures. And as selfish as this sounds, I'd love to be filing oddball requests and signing off on strange reports still. I would love to have to trek to that neglected basement office and talk to Mulder or Scully for some inane reason and have to look upon the poster behind his desk, the poster that now hangs over our fireplace. It was one of the very few items from our life before that we took with us. I would give almost anything to have things go back the way they were, and it's not because I'm not happy. I'm the most happy I've ever been. I just think that Dana would have been better off if we didn't have to fight this war. And yes, it is a war. We're fighting for something most precious. Our lives, the lives of those we love, and our planet. And the backbone of this fight is a 10 year old boy who would like nothing more than to play with other children instead of trying to save our world. It's too much for such a young boy. I would give up all of the happiness I have had over the last ten years if he could just be a normal, healthy, happy little boy with a real daddy. And Dana were safe, and Mulder were here to go off hunting the 'truth' that's out there.
I sit here, sipping my drink and looking at the poster above the fireplace. "I want to believe" it says. Well you know what. I don't. I don't want to believe that aliens are real, that they are invading our world, that if my 10 year old son can't stop it that we are doomed. I don't want to believe that everything I 'knew' while at the FBI was a lie.
I don't want to believe what I know to be the truth. Mulder once said that the truth was out there, and he wanted to find it. Well you know what Mulder. I found it. And I don't think you'd have liked it very much.
End.