History

Book One

Author:  Shannon Kizzia (first posted under the pseudonym, Sage Fyre)

Graphic Artist:  Satina

Pairing:  M/K

Date First Posted:  5/04/07

Archive:  Yes to any list it's posted to, any others just ask.

Rating:  NC-17

Spoilers:  Every episode with Krycek (plus Young at Heart.)

Summary:  I wanted to write a story where Agent Mulder and Agent Krycek were lovers, but every episode/interaction between them thereafter stays true to canon (up until a certain point when it will have to take its own course.)

Status:  WiP

Disclaimer:  I don't own anything.

---

Chapter One:  Disarm

The killer in me
Is the killer in you, my love.

~Smashing Pumpkins

You should have seen his face.  Sweat like tears shining on his cheeks.  He looked to me with wide eyes.  I felt the responsibility bind my skin tighter around the muscles, the weak bones.  Up to that point, I'd thought he was lying to me.  In that moment, I knew he wasn't.  I took him out for a beer.

"First time?" I asked.  

He was staring at his glass of beer, still full.  I knew the feeling.  First kill.  You know you're with the FBI, know the badge vindicates you, but you still feel like a murderer.

"You did the right thing," I said again.  He blinked weary eyes up to my own.  They had to be green, some bright, fresh color I've never been able to see.  I remembered him telling me I didn't know the first thing about him.  Grey like autumn fog on wet cement.  Three rapid blinks, almost compulsory.  His suit was wrinkled.  He looked like hell.  I drank my beer and looked away from all that innocence scarred.

"How'd it happen with you?"

The question seemed sudden to me even though it was perfectly understandable that he'd want to know.  That the comfort I offered him wouldn't be something under my control but bent to the will of his need, answerable to his craving for benediction.

I swallowed and watched his hands fold together like a child's in church.  I cleared my throat and started to tell him about John Barnett.  He listened, his face clearing as he forgot about himself and focused on my story.

"But you didn't kill Barnett," he protested when I was finished.

I swallowed more beer, cold and strong.  "No," I agreed.  My head ached, a searing accusation right behind my eyes.

Krycek frowned at me.  "You didn't kill Agent Wallenberg."

It was the first and only time I really had to have a reckoning with that particular demon.  If I didn't, I was going to give the kid a complex, a twin to my own.  I shook my head, the shaky sigh leaving my lips.  I saw it play out in the black of my mind, Barnett taking the shot, me taking him down.  "No," I replied, and it felt like a hundred shadows falling away from me, a fraction of the cloak I tend to wear.

Krycek finally took a drink of his beer.  We didn't say anything more for a long time.

We closed the place.  I put our drinks on the company VISA.  I looked across at Krycek, now blurry and pink, tie gone, shirt unbuttoned at the collar.  I blinked slowly.  "It's late," I told him.  He nodded and stood up from the booth.  He had his tie balled tightly in his hand.

We were staying at some dive near the Bronx station.  It felt like everything was dirty, down to the clean towels.  I would have preferred to get back to D.C., but Krycek looked like he was ready to drop into bed and hibernate till late morning.  His hair was falling into his eyes.  His shoulders sagged forward.  I felt an inexplicable desire to brush my hand over them and feel them trembling.

"I've got Scotch," I found myself saying, my key in the lock on my door, his key in his.

He looked at me from under a lock of dirty hair.  Coals, sooty black, kept lit from some unseen fire, not yet banked.  It made me catch my breath.  He nodded.

We drank with the bottle between us, the center piece, the divide.  A single burning lamp dangled over the small, round ply-wood table.  Its reflection shone in the amber nectar.  The room was a mass of dirty shadows.  

"Thanks," he said after his second glass, eyes cast down.  I felt myself nodding.  The room spun a little.

"I think..."  I began.  "I need to..."  I was suddenly more drunk than I'd ever intended to get.

I think Krycek nodded.  I know he stood and pulled the covers down on the bed for me as I staggered over to it and fell, legs still hanging off the side and no energy to rectify my position.  The ceiling undulated, water stains dark like blood over my head.  I felt my shoes slide off my feet.

Suddenly he was standing over me.  His hair dripped down over his forehead; his eyes were drenched in darkness.  I felt fear envelope me.  I squinted and tried to say his name.  I saw his lips part and his tongue sweep over them, making them shine with purpose.

I closed my eyes, unable to keep them open.  He could let himself out.  I swallowed thickly and tried to at least tell him good-night.  I opened my mouth.  I was gonna tell him he was a good agent, a good kid.  

Before I could, his fingers trailed gently over my fly.  

Everything stopped while he traced my cock through my slacks.  I spun in my darkness for a moment, grasping for a simple thing like breath, like time and identity, his and mine.  Then, when I couldn't find those things, when my inability to breathe stole even the panic from my body, I gave up, exhaled, and my whole awareness shot down between my legs.  

He squeezed me there, the root of my hardening cock and my balls.  I arched into the impossible warmth of it.  I think his breathing shuddered.  It might have been me.   I could blame it on my drunkenness.  And yet I wasn't too drunk to come up with the rationale.

My cock felt him tug at my zipper;  it cried a drop of pre-cum.  I groaned.  We were so quiet otherwise.  I heard the neighboring room's television and our breathing, an erotic composition.  Blind fingers stroked into the pouch of my briefs and took hold of my cock.  I watched him do it...let him do it.

I was so lonely.  I was so untouched.  His hand felt incredible.  I was shoving my dick through his fist before I knew I wanted to.  He let me fuck my hips desperately on the bed for a minute...two...and then he brought my cock out.  When he released it, it stuck straight up.  I peered down my body at it, red and bobbing, and Krycek going to his knees at my feet.

I turned my head away, afraid to watch his mouth latch onto my cock, afraid of myself.  Words wandered through my head.  Words like charges, censure, dismissal, consorting, flagrant violation, fraternizing.  Words like faggot.  Words that stung.  Words that elated.  Wicked words.  And my hand came down on the back of his head to guide him down to my dick.

Sexual harassment, junior partner, suspension...

I pressed harder and felt myself slide between soft, opening lips.

Board review, allegations, OPR...

Thrusting my hips up, sinking my cock into his wet heat, him sinking down onto me, sucking it farther in.  

Trial, hearings, ignominy...

I started fucking his face.  I held him in place and I fucked him, all the way down his throat.  

I grunted, tossing my head.  The Scotch evaporated, my mind cleared, everything made sense, everything was in color, even green.   His mouth was the fire I'd tried to dampen in myself.  His hot, velvet throat was the place inside me flaring open.  I dug my heels into the mattress and fucked myself wide open.  I stayed deep, hips lifted, eyes screwed shut, his hair tangled in my fingers, and I came inside him, the rules breaking all around me.

I felt the ribbons of semen filling his mouth, my own juice and his tongue hot around my hard shaft.  I felt him swallowing, taking the head of my cock back into his throat and letting its tight channel milk me.  He pulled tears from my eyes and a desperate cry from my throat.  I shook with pleasure and then felt my hips fall back down to the bed, his mouth gentling, licking, then leaving altogether.

I remember feeling ashamed that I felt too ashamed to look at him afterwards.  Then I slept, deep and heavy, irretrievable.

---

Chapter Two:  Today

Today is the greatest
Day I've ever known
Can't wait for tomorrow
Tomorrow's much too long.

~Smashing Pumpkins

No matter how many files on him they gave me, Mulder refused to be labeled.  I've studied reams of dossiers on his childhood, background, relationships, cases...  I knew his eyes were flecked like Goldschlager before I even saw them blink up at me.  

I didn't know the first thing about him.

His cock tastes like heavy cream.

They told me he was borderline rogue, but then I watched him go home alone every night and order in, flipping TV channels, beer in hand.  They told me he was crazy, but he made more sense than they did.  They told me he was a misanthropic geek.  But he was beautiful.  

Thick, rich cream, not quite sweet, not sugar.  Just foamy and luscious and buttery soft thrusting hard inside my mouth.

They told me he was celibate.

But I brought him off in my throat.

It wasn't in my instructions to suck Mulder's cock.  Nor to kill Cole, get drunk, go with Mulder to his room.  Nothing about that night happened like it was supposed to.  But everything happened perfectly.

I told myself I could handle it:  their punishment, (if there was one), a brief entanglement with Mulder, some release for both of us...  I could give him what he wanted, some solace, some pleasure, some sex.  Someone to share the loneliness with.

I didn't expect him to taste like that.  Like the road not taken.  Like junk in the syringe and me sucking at the needle.

I left him there, went to my room, and watched the sun come up behind the buildings.  I took a twenty minute shower, not budging when the water turned to sleet, piercing my skin like a full-body tattoo.  

I was dressed and ready when he knocked on the door.  The first thing I saw were his eyes.  Like something recently burned, still hot, but inevitably cooling.  I made a mistake then.  I smiled at him.  It was unconscious.  It was impulsive.  Completely and stupidly dangerous.  I saw it change him like wind over wildfire.  

"Ready?" he asked me, his deep breath audible.  

I swallowed, suddenly wanting to cry.  I nodded and turned away.

Two weeks went by after the night in New York.  Two weeks in which Mulder called me Alex twice, stood inordinately close, touched me whenever possible, smiled at me occasionally, and thanked me for getting him coffee.

Two weeks of paper work and easy cases that led nowhere special.  I went from daily reports to the Group to weekly.  I saw less of Them, more of Mulder.  I saw less of myself, more of someone I'd created from ash becoming flesh.  I let him touch me.  I let him stand close and breathe on my neck.  I let myself shiver.  I was weak.  I was living the lie.  I started looking for opportunities to get him alone. Opportunities to self-destruct.

I got one.

We were called to assist the VCU.  It was gruesome.  Five murders in as many days.  I'm sure they would have liked to 'keep it in the family' but they didn't have time for anything other than invoking Spooky Mulder.  I watched them flay him with split tongues even as they sought his help.  I saw the burden of being the bigger man weigh on his body, his mind completely preoccupied with the facts of the case.

We worked it together, and I fought to keep up.  He stopped touching me.  He barely looked at me.  Like a ghost, his voice channeled his intuition and the man was left to starve, lack, and husk over like a corpse.   He lived on whatever food I managed to get him to eat.  He wasn't sleeping.  All the victims were young girls.  Their pictures were a cancer on his soul.

He had it profiled in a day and a half.   We'd tracked him to Oklahoma.  He was on the run, headed to Mexico.  He'd made the mistake of using a credit card at a motel.  That's where Mulder and I stayed when we got there.  He got the same room.  He spent half an hour just running his fingers over the sparse furnishings;  I watched him through the connecting door before he noticed and closed me out.

There was a storm, in fast from the west.  I stood at my window and watched the black take over the sky.  The air lit up and the hairs on the backs of my arms stood on end.

I went to the vending machines, knowing Mulder had not eaten in possibly fourteen hours.  I got chips and donuts and 7-Up.  The rain pelleted me on the way back, starting fast and violent.  The wind whipped the trees.  They looked like angry medusas with green snake hair.  By the time I got to his door, I was dripping.  

I knocked hard to be heard over the gale.  The door opened fast and the barrel of a gun thrust through the dark gap at me.  In the second it took me to understand I'd been found out, Mulder lowered the gun with a heavy sigh and the door opened wider.  I frowned, heart still racing, and pushed gingerly into his room.  

He sat on the edge of his bed, hunched over.  He still had the gun clutched in his hand.  

"You all right?" I ventured.  It was a silly question but one of those things you say when nothing else works, when blunt truth could light like a powder keg and explode into a million stars in your face.

I got no response.  He didn't even look up.  

"Mulder?"

Lightning crackled outside.  The window panes shook with thunder a second later.  He still had the gun.  Despite my own fear, despite his evident inner torment, I felt myself getting hard, wanting him.

I walked over cautiously, licking rainwater off my top lip.  His fingers traced the gun's hard contours, oiling his fingerprints onto its flesh.  I swallowed.

"We're close," I told him.  "We'll have him tomorrow."

Under the barrel, soft like comfort.

"We have him on the run.  He won't..."  I stopped.

He was suddenly looking up at me, his eyes imploring.  "Kill any more?" he asked me.  He knew the answer, and I knew that it didn't matter.  That it wasn't the five girls Mulder mourned, but the one he might never find.

I frowned at his open face.  Open for the first time in days.  And only for me.  Only here.  I held out my hand for his gun.  He looked at it.  "Unless you wanna kill me," I said.  A drop of rain fell from my fingers onto his leg.

He closed his eyes and swallowed.  The metal fell flat into my palm.  Thunder and lightning simultaneous.  Blue light and bone-rattling sound.  I set the weapon aside.

"You should sleep," I told him.

He laughed softly, bitterly, but looked up at me with pleading eyes and a sweet curve to his lush mouth.  I hesitated for a moment but then slid to my knees in front of him.  I don't think he gasped until I pushed his legs apart with wet hands and crawled between.

Fierce light illuminated my fingers working his fly open.  I felt the rolling thunder in my balls.  My shirt stuck to my chest. He spread his thighs further, inviting me deeper.  I looked up at him. He was still watching me.  I pulled his cock out through his underwear like I'd done before.  It was big and soft and it twitched in my palm, alive.   

Lightning crashed outside, almost masking his moan.  I lifted his flaccid cock to my mouth, bending down.  I sucked it in and it began to get hard in my mouth.  I pulled it into me, straight as an arrow, red as blood, my mouth the ripe wound.

Mulder stayed upright.  I felt his nearness, his body bowed over me, almost protective while I took care of his need.  I stroked his rigid cock with my tongue.  The rain started hitting the window hard.  I slid my hands up Mulder's thighs and he slid a hand into my hair.  I think he got me to purr, my mouth wrapped tight around his thick shaft.

God, I wanted to suck the pain out of him.  I wanted to lick his wounds, keep him lodged in my throat for hours, exhaust him inside of me, dash his angst to dust.

I wanted to taste that cream, that fat, firm cock, and fill myself up with something I could already feel disappearing.

I squeezed his thighs and took him deep.  It felt like the walls would tear and crumble around us.  The storm howled and Mulder gripped my hair while I fucked my throat open with the blunt head of his cock.

He started to moan.  His hand dropped from my head to my back and pulled at my shirt desperately.  He gripped it, nails scratching through the cotton before returning to my head, stroking once and again and then making a fist in my hair and groaning as he started to come.

I shut my eyes tight and suckled hard.  I felt the pinprick of tears.  Through the crack of thunder, I heard Mulder struggling not to say my name.

I slid his wet, hard cock slowly in and out of my mouth, gentling the last of his cum out and letting it lubricate the way for my lips.  He untangled his fingers from my hair.  I sat back on my heels, pulling off finally, regretfully.  I wanted to force him hard again, wrench more cream from the tired flesh.  I missed him already.

I wiped my mouth and stood as Mulder tucked himself back inside his pants.  

The storm raged on without us.  Somehow it felt like Mulder's release should have culminated with its end.  Or rather that without his need to stoke it, the wind and rain and thunder should die.  But the maelstrom continued, filling the silence we created.

Mulder ran a hand through his hair.  Fear once again tightened my lungs.  "You should sleep," I said once more.  I felt like a coward.  But then he looked up at me, and I blinked at him, his eyes so full of me.  My expression softened, turning a shade of tender I don't think I'd ever experienced up to that point.  

He looked down, finding my trapped erect cock with his gaze.  He looked like he was about to reach for me.  I took a step back and he peered back up at my face.

I backed up, darting my eyes away in a flash of lightning.  I turned to the door and opened it, letting the rain lash inside as I turned back to tell him good-night before closing the door behind me.

........

The case was over, the perp caught because of Mulder, the next day, and two days after we got home, I got the call.  I barely heard his voice on the other end of the line.  I got the essentials.  Barry.  Hostages.  Key to elimination of the threat.

"What about my proposals?" I asked.   My stomach sank, knowing the futility of trying that angle again.  

They were going to take her, and I was going to help.

"Krycek, what's up?"

Wet, lean, unknowing.

"There's a situation going down.  They want you out there right away."  I couldn't believe how calm I sounded, how calm I was, with him there shining possible, nearly naked, reminding me of his cock in my mouth, his groans, his body shaking, because of me.  And Scully, a pawn for her liability, lined up with destiny, waiting for a future already manufactured for her.  Because of me.

"What kind of situation?"

Turned away, trusting, dripping, sex itself, vulnerable.  I inhaled and saw a knife drawn down his spine, the thin red wake just a prelude before I'd have to plunge it in deep and twist.  What kind of situation?  The kind where I fuck you, Mulder.  Fuck you good.  The kind where I steal your breath away and never give it back.

"Hostage negotiation," I said.  Give them your soul and they'll let you live.  Simple.

"And they want me?"

Want you.  "Yeah."  Want you.  

"What for?"

He picked up a towel and scrubbed it over his head.  I faltered, blinking.  And then I told him the first of many half-truths that when added to the others would amount to a landfill of lies.

.........

I was sweating.  I watched the smoke waft over Mulder's head and realized no one was going to answer but me.  I swallowed and spoke the words that were once again so close to the truth.  I felt his eyes on me the whole time, cold and measuring.

Finally, Mulder took over.  He looked terrible.  He looked saveable, yet every second left unsaved I damned him.  She got closer to hell.  I got closer to relenting, even with his Morley burning off the moments against the far wall.

"I'd like to brief them myself..."  Mulder said.  

"Go home, Agent Mulder.  You've been up all night.  Get some sleep,"  Skinner replied.

I sat there as Mulder stood.  One word coursed through my body.  My ears rang.  Judas.  Judas.  I looked at the man smoking on the other side of the room behind Mulder's tense back, saw my thirty pieces of silver shining in his eyes.

"Sir, I know Duane Barry.  I've been in his head," Mulder pleaded.  "I know how he thinks."

*You don't know the first thing about me.*  Judas.  The man across the room exhaled.  I swallowed.  Heavy cream dripping from my lips...

"You're too close to this case," I heard Skinner say.  Judas hung himself.  Why was I the one feeling nailed down?  "If we can use you, we will."

Use you.  We will.

"Sir," Mulder tried once more.  Slide in, slide out.  His lust running over my lips as he thrust...

"That's an order, Agent Mulder."

Skinner looked at me and I blinked.  I heard my real boss blow smoke out through his pursed, wrinkled lips, dried out with nicotine and denial.  Watching this.  Watching me like I, too, was a pawn.  

"Make sure he gets home safely."

Judas stood, leaving me there, dull with murdered hope.

---

Chapter Three:  Lying From You

When I pretend everything is the way I want it to be
I look exactly like what you always wanted to see.
When I pretend, I can forget about the criminal I am
Stealing second after second just 'cause I know I can but
I can't pretend this is the way it will stay
I'm just trying to bend the truth.
I can't pretend I'm who you want me to be
So I'm lying my way from you.

I remember what they taught to me
Remember condescending talk of who I ought to be.
Remember listening to all of that and this again.
So I pretended up a person who was fitting in,
And now you think this person really is me
And I'm trying to bend the truth.
But the more I push, the more I'm pulling away
'Cause I'm lying my way from you.

~Linkin Park


He was quiet as I drove him home.  I knew he was raging inside.  I knew he wouldn't rest.  I couldn't help him anymore.  I'd long since passed that turn-off.  I was sunk down into the muck as much as Scully, as much as Mulder tirelessly, fruitlessly searching for her.  And there I was under his nose.  There I was, stained with his truth.

"Come on," I said again when I'd pulled up to his curb and cut the engine.

I led him up the steps, inside, onto the elevator.  I touched his arm and it was like he would have flinched had there been energy left to commit to anything besides finding her.  I let my finger drop and hit the four button.

I got him inside his apartment.  It smelled like someone had been sick there.  I went in search of candles.  Mulder went into the bathroom and shut the door.  I heard water in the sink.

I found his emergency candles in a kitchen drawer and lit a few in the living room.  The bathroom door remained shut even after the water turned off.  I stared at it, willing it to open.  I felt trapped.  I felt utterly accountable for the stricken sadness Mulder emnated from his pores now.  I wanted it over.  I looked around the room, almost in a panic.  My gaze lit on his fishtank.  The fish inside was dead.  Floating in the soft waves, hitting the side of the glass.  I heard the bathroom door open.  I felt sick.

I turned, ready to utter some flimsy excuse and flee the scene.  Mulder's depression took all the air in the place, leaving anything other than hopelessness to suffocate, assimilate.  I watched him go from the bathroom to his bedroom, disappearing through the doorway.  I stood still, eyes finding the dead fish once more before I followed Mulder, my feet reluctant to take me so close to him, so near something that dangerous to me.

He was standing in the middle of the room, aimless and silent.  I watched him for a moment, warily.  I stepped in and laid a hand on his shoulder.  "I'm gonna..."  I started, fully intending to leave him there, unfettered and perhaps lethally damaged.

But he turned to me and quite suddenly pulled me to him hard.  We collided and his hands clawed at my back.  I felt his lips quivering against my neck.  His undoing tugged at something inside of me fighting to swim to the surface.  An ache unfurling, seeking to touch him back, touch an anguish that seemed to mirror itself so completely.  He hurt me.  

I took a breath and felt him burrow deeper into my chest, his hair tickling me under the chin.  I felt him inside of me and briefly panicked at the sensation.  Mulder inside me, breaking things loose, prying things open, injecting himself into atrophied tissues.  I closed my eyes, my center of gravity tilting for a moment, my heart painfully full of him.  Then I began to lead him to the side of his bed.

I pushed him to sit, but he resisted.  He ripped the jacket from my shoulders and worked to get my tie loose.  My hands were slower with his clothes.  I felt the urgency of fear, everything screaming at me to push him away, to go.  Everything but Mulder himself.  And my body, the ultimate traitor.  My cock was so hard I would have come if he'd but asked me to.

I closed my eyes again, letting a sick sigh leak out of me in surrender.  I pushed Mulder down to the bed, and he pulled me on top of him.  His hands worked to get my pants down.  I rolled to the side, opening his shirt and pulling it off his arms.

When we were both in our underwear, I reached for his cock, still docile-soft.  He stopped me, inching his hips back, whispering, "No..."

I frowned and pulled away.  

"No," he said again, eyes closed, body shivering.  "Just..."  He swallowed but said nothing more.

*Just kill yourself, Alex.  Just die for me right here.  Let me lie in a hot pool of your blood.*

I took a breath, his hurt too pronounced to comfort and too immense to deny.  I moved back in.  I felt his body fevered as it touched my cool skin.  I dragged him up against me.  I pulled the covers over us both.  I let him bury his face in my neck.  I pressed my lips into his hair.  He curled deeper into me.  I bled from my eyes.

I held him for hours.  Held him through sunset and dusk.  I felt his breath even out, and I should have left then.  But I didn't.  I stayed and kept him in my arms.  This was for me.  This was the rest of my life, right here.  

When it was finally fully dark, I let him go.  He turned away from me, wrapping himself in the sheets.  I backed out of the bed and dressed, watching the cello curve of profile.

I watched him lying there for another five minutes.  Each second was like a whip across my back.  I felt like his pain should have been seeping out of me then.  But it wasn't.  It made a home in me, sensing my inability to exorcise it.  When I turned and left, I blew out every candle but one, and I took that into the bedroom and left it on a table beside the bed.  Then I closed my eyes on him and walked out the door.

.........

They picked me up as I knew they would, as they'd have to.  I didn't resist.  They wrestled my compliant body into a car and I closed my eyes as the tires squealed.  I wanted it almost as badly as they needed to give it to me.  It was inevitable.  Fighting wasn't an option.  And once it was through, I'd have him out of me again.  They'd bleed him out of me like no amount of tears into his hair could manage.

"Take him to Realignment," he said as I dangled in their hold.  It was better if I just relaxed.  If I tried to stand, to shake them off and walk down that long hall on my own, I might decide to run.  I might decide a few bullets in the back wouldn't be so bad.  

They were going to remind me why I was in this in the first place.  And they were right.  I needed reminding.  I wanted it.  I needed all this to make sense again.  It used to.

I got thrown into a chair and buckled in.  Just the metallic smell was enough to elict a nostalgic groan from me.  The hedonistic pleasure of going to sleep and waking up new, revived, stronger.  Waking up asleep.

I turned my head, baring my neck for the needle, and when it sank in, I shed the last tear I ever wanted to cry again in my life.

---

Chapter Four:  From the Inside

I don't know who to trust, no surprise.
(Everyone feels so far away from me.)
Happy thoughts sift through the dust and the lies.
Trying not to break, but I'm so tired of this deceit.
Everytime I try to make myself get back up on my feet.
All I ever think about is this, all the tiring time between,
And how trying to put my trust in you
Just takes so much out of me.

Take everything from the inside
And throw it all away
'Cause I swear for the last time
I won't trust myself with you.

~Linkin Park


"Maybe it's after effects from Dudley," Scully said.  

I swallowed and tried to make the room stop spinning. There were suddenly three blotters on my desk.  "Very funny," I told her.  "Besides, you were the one who sampled the local delicacies, Scully, not me."  I winced.  Every word brought a new pain.

She sighed.  "You haven't been sick in ages, Mulder.  I mean, not anything that wasn't job related."  She got up from her chair and came over to feel my head.

"I'm okay," I told her, leaning away.  "I just...I think I'll go home a little early."  I looked at her, the worried frown she wore like make-up.  "I'll be fine.  Maybe it *was* the soylent green chicken," I tried.  "Or this stack of expense reports."

She rolled her eyes.  Her smile was humorless.  At least it was something.  I stood up and tried not to sway tellingly.  "Just need rest and plenty of television.  I'll be fine in a day, Scully, you'll see."  I grabbed my suit jacket off the back of the chair.  The idea of putting it on brought with it a hot flash and dizzy spell.  I squeezed my eyes closed and swallowed convulsively, fighting it off.  

"Drink plenty of liquids," she said as I dragged myself toward the door.  

I stopped, holding onto the doorjam, feeling like I just might need to make a pit-stop at the basement men's room to puke on the way to the elevator.  Still, I looked back at her.  Eight months she'd been back, but it was still hard to walk away from her at the end of the day and trust I'd see her again the next morning.  I gave her a wan smile that she returned.

"Get better soon, Mulder," she said in parting.  "Half these expense reports are yours."

I made myself turn back around and trudge down the hall.

I made a night of sinking as far into my couch as possible.  I found myself watching MTV for hours on end, drinking glass after glass of water and never feeling anything but endlessly thirsty.  

And that was the primary thing that set this night apart from all the others.  In every other way, it was quite average.  Same dull headache.  Same listless monotony.  Same thoughts chasing themselves around in circles, concluding only when they'd fall into one of two places I absolutely refused to let myself go.  Both were deadly.  Both meant pain.  My cock in his mouth, or his knife in my back.  I could abide neither.  I never let those thoughts surface for very long before cutting them down or drowning them when applicable.  I was getting good at avoiding them all together.  For the most part.

This night was both blessing and curse.  Because I couldn't seem to think of anything.  Everything blurred together.  Nothing hung around for review or recrimination.  Nothing but the frustrating thirst.  Everything else was MTV.  Color and sound and bytes and images.  Nothing permanent.  Nothing so drastic as memory.

Couch, water glass, flashing screen, me.  Sometimes I felt like I was the one flashing.  And then the dull, unnameable anger.  If I'd been aware enough, I'd have been relieved that for once it didn't seem to have anything to do with...anything or anyone in specific.  It just...was.  The irrationality of it would have been refreshing if my head hadn't hurt so damned much.

I was refilling my bottomless glass when the knock came on the door.  It was the guys.  I told them I hadn't been sleeping and, truthfully, I wasn't even sure what day it was anymore.  I might have missed work, even, except that I was pretty sure I would have gotten a call from Scully.  They told me about Kenneth Suna.  It was enough to clear my head a little.  The gunshot from down the hall cleared it considerably more.

"Weirdness," Frohike said and disappeared around the corner.  The fact that he left a trail made me worry about exactly how much sleep I'd really missed.  The woman's despairing cries followed me back to the apartment where I dressed as quickly as I could for my meeting with The Thinker.

.........

The hours fell in on me.  I was given the Holy Grail; it was encrypted.  I punched Skinner.  I yelled at Scully, my impatience brimming, spilling over, the unnameable anger needing an outlet, finding it anywhere it could.  I felt crazy...sick.  

Scully asked me why I attacked Skinner.  Honestly didn't know.   Didn't know.  Soundbytes louder, overpowering reason.  I held on to any thread I could get my fingers around.  Oceans of water.  To clear my head.

Dad called.  I went there, and he hugged me.  I saw the years on his face.  Every one.  I started to count in my head.  One, three, ten, fifty, infinity, infinity...  Trembling arms around me.  He looked raw and sad.

Gonna tell me something.  That fact even seemed to overshadow the pain of holding his dead weight in my arms.  Just before, seconds ago maybe, year-long minutes, he'd been the one holding me.  Baby boy...

And now...looking down on him...  BREATHE!   Thought I screamed it.  Willed him to look at me and tell me what had made him look so pitiful and so scared.  To tell me why he had never hugged me before.  To tell me about the merchandise.  To tell me if he ever felt anything other than disdain and the deepest shame for me.

The hours fell in on me.  Drove back to D.C.  Left him there.  Like something unloved.  He was dead now.  He was going to know I'd always hated him even when I loved him.  Did I shoot him?  I could feel the gun warm in my hand.  Could see it.  Oh God.   Had I done it?  I'd told Scully I hadn't.  But had I?  Hadn't I wanted to?  No.  Trying to tell me something.  I swerved onto the shoulder of the freeway and threw up in the grass.

I went to Scully's because she told me to.  Made me lie down.  Closed my eyes, saw him bleeding from his mouth and his head.  I slept like I was awake.  No rest.  Woke alone...angry.  I called her.

"You took my gun.  You think I did it, don't you?"  And I did, I thought.  I'm the one who hated him most.  Room went green.  Like forest light.

Accused her.  She told me I was sick.  Sick.  Guilty and sick and sorry.  I hung up.  Had to get a cab to take me home.

Flash of something dark...darker.  Made me run to find it. It was around there.  Could feel it.  Heart furious.  Backed up against the wall.  I peered around the corner.  Time stopped.

He looked different.  So different, with longer hair.  Jeans.  Jacket.  Not my partner.  Not the man who left me a year ago.  But...was him.  I couldn't mistake him.  Would have liked to.  I wanted to be looking at anyone but him in that moment.  Baby boy ready to cry.  

Hated him most.

Killed my father.

I flattened out against the wall again.  Waited for him.  Been waiting...   I still remembered what his breath on my face felt like.

Killed my father.  Knew so certainly.  Knew it bad.  The knowing filled the hole he left in my chest.  I felt it rotting with spoiled venom.  Right there with him getting closer.

The quiet rage needed out.  Rage stoically burning for the man I'd once let hold me while I slept.  Hugless baby boy...

Went for my gun.  Wasn't there.  Looked for a brick.  Nothing.  I held still, felt him nearing.  Don't know how.  I knew his frequency.  I felt him.  His warm mouth.  His cold cigarettes.

I waited until I could see his face.  Eyes alert and darting, lips parted.  So close I could have kissed him.  We'd never kissed.

Rage.  Not quiet.  I grabbed him, catching him off guard, and threw him up against the wall as hard as I could.

I had him under my hands and all I could do was HURT. Inside and out.  Hurt him hurting me.  I held his wrist.  He dropped his gun.  His thumb in my eye.  I hauled him away from the wall and threw him down onto the hood of a car.  Hithimhithimhithim.  I hit him until I felt his blood spatter my knuckles.  In the mouth.  That same mouth.  Sucked me off.  I busted those lips.  

Pretty.  Pink.  Fat.  Lying.  

Effortless lies.  Raping lips.  So brutal on my trust.  Fragile trust.  Couldn't believe I gave him that.  Gave him me.   

I was seething.  Animal.  Had to have his gun in my hand.  Had to feel what he must have felt when he pulled the trigger and fired the bullet that shattered my father's skull.  I left him there bleeding, moaning in pain, and picked up his gun off the ground.  

Fell on him again.  Hours falling.  Fell between his legs.  I held the gun on his face, urgent with fear.  He feared me.  It wasn't enough.  
"I'm gonna kill you anyway, Krycek, so you might as well tell me the truth," I spat.  Blinked up at me.  Pushed him down into the car so hard I was bruising myself.  "Did you kill my father?"

Rocking on him, between his legs.  Ground my body down to dust on top of him.  I found a new way to hate myself when I realized I was fully erect.

I gritted my teeth.  "Did you kill him?"  He just laid there, eyes rolling back, bleeding from the mouth, pliant.  Arms open.  Like an angel's.  Never hated anyone more than him looking like that.  "Answer me," I growled.

When he didn't, I hauled him up and back-handed him.  He fell to the ground at my feet and my excited dick throbbed.  I kicked him in the stomach.  He grunted.  It wasn't enough.  Pulled him up again.  Leather thick in my hands.  I wanted him naked.  Scratch his bare flesh, watch bruises form, see blood drip over pale skin.  I held the gun on him, feeling like my own pain might kill me before I had the chance to fire.

Her voice.  "Mulder, don't shoot him.  Just back away."

And I hated her, too, just then.  "He killed my father, Scully," I said.  He was looking at me, looking into my eyes.  I was looking into his.  He was shaking.  I shook when I came inside his mouth.

It wasn't enough.  Not enough to stop him.  Not enough to stop me.

"I have him, Mulder!"

"No, Scully!"

Rage washing through me as I started to pull the trigger.  Tears in his eyes.  Tears in mine.

Don't remember the shot.  I landed on the ground, pain in my chest, my arm.  I heard running.  Black.  Getting away.  Wasn't me who fired.  Krycek...getting away.  

I groaned, rolling on the ground.  No Scully.  Away from her.  Took him.  He was flying.   So close to having him.  Like needing to come.  Willing to sacrifice breath for orgasm. Then denied.  Left alone.  Untouched.  Unfulfilled.  

He was gone.  And there was nothing I could do to get him back.  

---

Chapter Five:  Getting Away With Murder

Somewhere beyond happiness and sadness
I need to calculate what creates my own madness.
And I'm addicted to your punishment.
And you're the master.
And I'm waiting for disaster.

I drink my drink and I don't even want to.
I think my thoughts when I don't even need to.
I never look back 'cause I don't even want to.
And I don't need to.
Because I'm getting away with murder.

~Papa Roach


I didn't flinch as I shot him.  It was easy.  Even with Mulder in the next room.  Knowing what I knew made it easy.  I was out the window before I even heard him start running.

I showed up back in D.C. for my meeting.  He blew his smoke into my face.  I didn't flinch.  I breathed it in.  He smiled.  

"You're to go to Hegal Place," he told me.  "Remove the device and then report back."  I nodded and he ground his cigarette out.  "Remember Alex," he went on, feeling inside his suit pocket for the soft pack of Morley's.  He tapped one out.  "Mulder is a hinderance to the Project."  He used the pure measured tones I was used to, had learned to crave.  Sugar and vodka and heroin and sex.

"I understand," I said.  I walked out with long strides and tunnel vision.  

The streets were dark.  No moon.  It was the perfect night for what they wanted.  Everything had been set up and where it wasn't subtle, it was final. You didn't need subtle when you had the ultimate power of denial.  It was a heady feeling.

I had a free ride from here.  I'd carried out my orders up to this last.  I'd fulfilled my duty and staked my claim on the spoils of the Project.  They owed me.  More money and more power than I'd ever have the time to quantify.  I was in.  It was done.   Just the blood of one man spilled and I'd saved the world.   It was nothing.  It wouldn't hurt for long...

The smoker's words filtered through, resounding in that place I went back to again and again to remember.  It was a necessary sacrifice.  It was all necessary.  

This was necessary.  Keeping Mulder down.  Keeping him off-balance.  Nobody was more dangerous.  Mulder was a danger to the Project.  A danger to the continued existence of humanity on this planet.  The words ran together, became a low hum, absorbed into the recess of my mind.

He'd been in the next room.  It was almost a sexual rush.  Pulling the trigger felt almost like coming.  Except for that brief moment...  The one where I saw the body ready to drop and knew I could never go back.  It was written.  I saw the look on his face mirror mine before the low hum of words recovered me from the edge of some gorge I'd just glimpsed carved in the earth before me.  I fell back into the unquestioned safety of what I knew to be the truth and fled the scene.

Now I was here.  I was irrevocably one of them.  Finally.  After months of grooming, endless sessions of realignment when I faltered, I'd finally done it.  And I didn't even have to see his face when he saw what I'd done to his father.  

I'd spent forty-eight hours in the chair to help prepare me for that.  And it didn't even happen.  I'd escaped.  Him.  And myself.  That old version of me, useless, pathetic, and bound to the covenant of ridiculous human desires.  I was unbound now.  I was fully myself, more powerful than I could have ever been, tied to his side, an underling, his slave.

They'd freed me.  I was better now.  I was done with him.  After tonight.  It was all over.

I was so busy with the feelings of imminent freedom that it wasn't until he had me down on the hood of the car that I even recognized him.  And everything shrank down to that second.  

Mulder.  

This person I'd relegated to memory, this man who'd become no longer physical, an abstract equation I'd thought I'd solved.  And there he was, on top of me, hitting me, touching me.  I was full of him.  And, unbidden, came the memory of his taste.

"Did you kill my father?"  

His voice, not theirs.  So long without his voice.  His breath, strong and acrid.  His anger, hard.  His eyes, piercing with anguish.  Anguish.  I'd given him that.  And he was erect.  I could feel it prodding my thigh, sliding over my crotch.  I'd forgotten.  

"Did you kill him?"

I couldn't answer.  I had an answer prepared.  One they gave me.  One I'd practiced to death.  He wasn't supposed to touch me, though.  Not like this.  With his whole body, with his rage and his cock stiff against mine.  He wasn't supposed to be on top of me like this, to feel so familiar.  His pain wasn't supposed to matter.  It was only a variable, a number, something unable to impact the greater truth.  

But there it was, over me, leaking into me.  I saw the raw despair in his eyes.  And it was undeniable.

"Answer me."

It was the last thing I could do.  He hit me again, knocking me to the ground.  He jerked me up, the violence of it kin only to the way he had used my mouth before, comparable only to that.  I'd simply forgotten.  And everything about him reminded me.

I was about to die, my own gun in my face, and all I could think was that maybe they were wrong.

Then she shot him.  And I ran.  I was terrified.  More of what I'd seen in him and what I'd seen inside myself than of the fact that he'd almost killed me.  I was shaking as I drove.  I missed the turn to get back to the meeting place.  It occured to me that I could keep driving, not go back.  I could go think about what I'd done.  I could just go think.  I could just go.

My cell phone rang, then, and my stomach tightened.  I answered it.

"Get back to the office," his voice said, something a note or two off from calm.  "You have a new assignment."

I remembered Mulder's face over me.  I remembered what it felt like to forget that face.  I swallowed and gripped the wheel.  "Yes, sir,"  I managed to whisper.  Then I took the next left turn and fought my own thoughts.

---

Chapter 6:  Figured You Out

I like your pants around your feet.
I like the dirt that's on your knees.
I like the way you still say please,
When you're lookin' up at me.
You're like my favorite damn disease.

Now I know who you are.
It wasn't that hard.
Just to figure you out.

I love the way you pass the check.
I love the good times that you wreck.
I love your lack of self-respect,
When you're passed out on the deck.
I love my hands around your neck.

I hate the places that we go.
I hate the people that you know.
I hate the way you can't say no,
Too many long lines in a row.
I hate the powder on your nose.

And now I know who you are.
It wasn't that hard.
Just to figure you out.
And now I know who you are.
It wasn't that hard.
Just to figure you out.

~Nickelback


So we took a trip to California.  It couldn't have come soon enough.  I was hung-over from a case I'd gone too deep inside.  I'd become the killer and found out he was an old mentor of mine.  It got kind of ugly.  

When a case involving the salvage of what I suspected to be a UFO popped up, it was more than a relief.  For me anyway.  My last case had brought up issues for me.  Paternal ones.  The fact that all my father figures turn into monsters in the end.  That it's somehow perversely inevitable.  Four months lay between me and my father's death.  Enough time to scab over, not enough to not think of him everyday.

With this new information, Patterson locked away and my own demons subdued, I felt clean again.  It had all the trappings of a good ride:  radiation burned sailors, secrets kept, paper trail.  It felt safe enough.  And California is sunny, I thought.  Scully was even joking about me in the desert with a shovel and/or backhoe.  And I didn't take it personally.  We'd been better, but we'd been worse.

She looked good.  I'd started to think I might never find anyone better suited to me.  She'd stuck it out three years after all.  She seemed to like me enough to put up with my shit.  We flirted.  Subtley.  She was, of course, beautiful.  I started to think it was possible.  That she couldn't hurt me.  And that was pretty monumental.

So what if when I made comments about extraterestrials in front of other people she looked like she'd enjoy imploding just to get away from me.  She didn't call me Spooky and she watched my back.  I couldn't ask for more.  I didn't dare.

She wasn't openly calling me crazy, and she was doing her part contributing to the case.  Hell, she knew it was a P-51 Mustang through all that kelp and shit.  When I said I just got very turned on, I was pretty convinced I meant it.  It sounded good.  I think Wayne Morgan of the Navy's invesgative services unit bought it at least.  It felt good.  Being perceived as normal for once.

Still, when I left Scully in San Diego and left myself for the Gauthier residence in San Francisco, I felt awash with relief.  I told myself that was a normal symptom of a solid partnership, the fact that we could exist without one another.  I found sitcom-like humor in the fact that I was getting out from under the ol' ball and chain for a while.  It was natural.  This freedom I felt outside her presence.

I knew when I got to J. Kallenchuk's office that I was onto something.  I felt the thrill of the chase and it led me to lie in wait once I'd spoken to his secretary.  She reeked of power, and sure enough, after my visit, she found it necessary to peel out like the place was on fire.  I followed Geraldine to Hong Kong.

There was some Chinese food, some gender typing, and a pair of handcuffs.  It was turning out to be a decent ride, after all.  She was going to meet a buyer for intel she was moving for a seller.  I needed documentation on all of them for a good bust, so I told her to take me to her office.  All the while, what I really wanted was the UFO.  I would have paid her in blood, risked the radiation to see it.

"Open it," I told her when we got to her office.  My palms were sweating, as though I knew what was waiting for me on the other side.  Something beyond proof, beyond logic.  Some preternatural awareness had my stomach in knots.  Premonition is a funny thing.  I had no idea what to expect, only that I felt I'd been waiting for it for months.

Jerry with a J did nothing, so I kicked in the door.  "Pardon my gender type, but after you," I said.  I followed her in.  "Where are the lights?"

It wasn't she who answered.  "Right here."

His gun was the first thing out of the shadows.  Then his face, sweaty, gaunt, fevered.  He was shaking.  Despite months of training, of relentless practice, my chest seized at the sight of him.  

"Krycek," I said, showing nothing of what was happening inside my body, the coiling pain just seeing that face.  "I thought guns were against the law here."  It was a calm sarcasm that hid the millions of stress fractures lining my heart like veins of poison pointing the way to the source of all pain.

"You know what they say.  'When guns are outlawed...'"

He was pathetic.  Trembling with anger or withdrawal or fear, I couldn't be sure which.  With eyes unable to reconcile this vision, I took in the details written on his body, in his expression, needing to catalogue this moment, label what he was now, cement him as evil within my mind once and for all.  He was haggard, his gun arm unsteady, aimed too high, as the sweat dripped into his eyes.  He seemed unable to breathe.

He was repulsive.  His eyes were red and appeared clammy like his sallow skin.  The red neon did nothing to hide the drenched pile of bones he was.  

And I wanted him.  All the restructuring I'd done around the memory of him for shit.  I wanted him.  Fiercely, grotesquely.  I wanted him.

"Why don't you take that gun and shoot yourself in the head like you shot my father?" I said to him.  The hatred I felt for myself came spilling out my mouth.  I gave it to him.  He was its rightful keeper.  Though he looked like if he took on one more ounce of karma, of the plague his soul already suffered, he'd die of it.  I didn't care.  I wanted him dead.  He was worse than worthless to me.  
"Great.  High Noon in Hong Kong," Kallenchuk chimed in.

I resented her immediately.  She had no right to sum up this thing she was hopeless to understand.  Nobody did.  I realized I'd far from exorcised this man from my life.  I'd taken possession of him...his ghost.  My very own poltergeist, my albatross.  My secret pain.  My most secret desire.

"Why don't you SHUT UP!!!" Krycek erupted.  I saw in him a glimmer of what must have been me when last we met:  shivering, sick, on the edge of utter insanity.  We'd traded places.  I could only guess what had brought him here.  But I knew the root of what he was now.  Survival.  He was the barest hint of a man.  He was his fear, ever propelling him onward, and he was nothing else.

He pushed Kallenchuk out into the hall, slamming the door on the chain reaching between her wrist and mine.  He'd seen so much so quickly.  His eyes were darting like a persecuted beast.  And we were alone.

"That's no way to treat your business partner," I told him, defying the in-born logic which told me engaging him was the worst kind of mistake.  Emotional suicide.  "Especially since she's been moving those secrets you've been selling so well."

There were shots outside the door and a tug on my wrist that pulled me down to the ground.  I felt Kallenchuk's body hit the floor.  When I turned back, Krycek was already at the window.  He'd known.  And I was still alive.  For the time being.

"Looks like she's your partner now," he said.  I saw both fear and triumph in his face before he scrambled out the window.  I felt that word tossed between us -- partner -- like a granade.  I fumbled for the key I'd dropped as I heard them yelling outside in the hall.

I got myself free from the dead weight of Krycek's ex-partner, wondering even as I vaulted through the window he'd left open, why I was still breathing.  Why I wasn't in the hall with her.  Why he'd spared me.

Why he could look so powerful and so weak at once.  And why the briefest sight of him could fill me with so much more than hate.

I resolved to find him again if I had to tear apart Hong Kong's underworld to do it.  Though I was reasonably sure that wouldn't be necessary.  He'd be wanting to leave the country as soon as possible.  All I had to do was be at the airport.  

I raced there.  I felt sure he'd take the next available flight out.  He wouldn't risk a screwed-over buyer hunting him down.  He'd risk me first.  And he had to know I'd be hounding him.  He had to know a meeting was inevitable.  Maybe that's why he hadn't shoved me out into the hall with Kallenchuk, I reasoned.  It was all I had that made even the slightest sense.  Just that he knew the death of a federal agent wouldn't go on second page news.  And that if I thought he'd made some effort to spare me, I might go easy on him if apprehended.

The only other explanation was that he was either high out of his mind or jonesing so bad he'd taken leave of his senses.  There was nothing he could gain by keeping me alive.  

And he sure as hell looked fucked up.  As I made my way via cab through the choked streets of the city, I watched the steam rise out of the manholes and thought about what he must've been on.  Meth?  Coke?  Speed?  All of it?  He'd looked like he was starting to crash.  He probably wasn't sleeping at all.  The DAT tape and its intel, plus regular doses of whatever his drug of choice was, were the only reasons he wasn't dead yet.  Like a shark, he had to keep swimming, floating the information for a nice price and then medicating so he wouldn't fall asleep and wake to his throat being slit.

How many people besides me wanted Alex Krycek dead?  

*Did* I want him dead?

God, I didn't even know what I would do if I did encounter him again, even though it had already become a forgone conclusion that I would.  That I had to.  I had no plan, other than hunt him, find him.  

So I did.  He showed up at the airport as expected.  How he got past security with his gun, I didn't know, but I had to get it.  Everything about this second meeting was going to go my way.  I'd bend him to *my* will.  I'd make him look me in the eye and account for what he did.  More than my father.  What he did to *me*.

As I waited for his approach, back turned, phone to my ear, I stopped breathing.  I'd seen him from far away.  No one else looked like that.  No one else could.  He was all in black, a fact I hadn't assimilated before in the neon-tinted shadows of Kallenchuk's office.  He was even in black gloves.  Leather and denim from shoulders to feet.  And under the fluorescent lights, his pallor was even more pronounced.  Jesus, his cheeks were completely sunken in.  Dark circles under his eyes paired a sadness with the sweaty paranoia I'd seen before.

I waited for him, certain I wanted to hurt him.  Completely uncertain how much.

He walked toward me quickly, eyes cast all around, skirting over every tourist and business executive.  He tugged at one of his gloves.  I stuck out my left arm, blocking his way, and punched him in the face with the phone's receiver.

Every effort to catalogue the occasion was in vain.  From the moment I got a grip on his worn leather, I went to that place just outside myself, that reactionary adrenaline space they teach you to deal with and subdue at the Academy.  I wasn't cool or controlled.  I was barely conscious of my actions.  I think I head-butted him. I felt nothing.  I know I was accusing him of killing my father.  This moment I'd dreamed about since I last saw him, that I thought would be so clear...so uncomplicated, my question, his answer, and I could hardly see him right in front of me.  

I'd taken his gun.  I'd reached around him and slipped it from the waistband of his jeans.  I'd felt the heat of his body against me and the warmth of the gun metal from where it had been touching him.  I shoved the weapon into his gut.  He wasn't fighting me.  He opened up and let me in.  I wanted to rip him apart.  I saw his bloody face and breathed in his stale breath.  I saw some form of fear glinting in his eyes.  I saw him across the table from me, beer half gone, still trembling slightly from killing Augustus Cole.  Saw myself sitting on a motel room bed, spreading my thighs to let him in and take my cock in his mouth.  

"Do it to me..."

I blinked, unsure for a moment if the Krycek of my memory was blinking up at me from his place on his knees and whispering those words or if it was this one, this...unmasked thing I was holding fast; this hollow, false deceit breathing the words and daring me to end our shared pain.

And for one instant, I saw that fresh, hurt kid again.  Underneath my own hate, under his own pall of lies.  Still there.

I shoved him away from me hard, putting a few feet between his fear, his warmth, and my impulse to tighten my finger on the trigger.

I took a breath through my teeth, watching his sprung-tight body angle away from me then, wary, ready to bolt.  

"I want that digital tape," I told him.

I moved away from my father, away from things like hate and sex, toward something with an import only slightly less personal.  But it was enough for the time being.  

He lied again.  "I don't have it."

I hated how quickly that's all he was becoming to me:  a liar.  But it was a relief.  Krycek was a liar and a hired killer.  I could bring him in like any other perp or I could use him and his questionable intel like any other covert source.  His memory turned in my head, ripe and strong to weak and rotten.  Maybe his eyes were never green.  Maybe they've always been this steely gray.  Maybe those were never his tears.  Maybe it was simply the glimmer of betrayal.

He agreed to give me the tape if I let him go.  

"You put that tape in my hands and we'll talk about it," I told him.  The blood had run from his nose down his lip. It was all I could do not to rush him again and take a taste.  To hold him up against the phones and take what he was offering, the evidence of his weakness in my mouth.  Maybe that's all he did with me:  my semen going down on his tongue, proof of his ability to undo me.  "Why don't you go to the bathrooms and clean yourself off? If you're not out of there in three minutes, I'm coming in there to kill you," I said, more smoothly than I'd thought I could.

And then he gave me this look, that trembling fear melting off of him instantly to reveal something more like disdain, more like him knowing that if he took more than three minutes, I'd hesitate to take him down.  It was almost a smile.    And the entire time he was in the bathroom, I thought about how likely it might be that Scully would find out.  Not that I'd killed him; that would be pretty hard to hide.  But that I'd raped him.  I saw myself slamming him up against the wall, then throwing him down over the sink, maybe his head down in a dirty toilet, and then fucking his asshole.  Fucking it bloody.  Fucking it full of me and my hate.  Fucking that smug quarter-smile off his lying face, maybe pissing in him once I'd come.

It was enough to make me check my watch.  Two minutes.  I was ready.  I could keep it off the record.  I could shut him up.  He'd just have to take it.  I could have him.  I could rape the son of a bitch and no one would know.  Except him.  And me.  And I could live with it.

And just as I was shifting my weight, taking my right foot off the floor, swallowing down my principles, I saw his shadow creeping down the wall.  I took a breath, feeling like both the relief and the pit of naked regret shown on my face as he emerged.  But he walked past me, not even looking at me.

"Feel better?" I asked, ignoring the rage inside.

"Like a new man," he answered calmly.

I breathed away the fantasy and followed him out into the terminal.

---

Chapter Seven:  Bullet With Butterfly Wings

The world is a vampire, sent to drain
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames
And what do I get, for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game

Even though I know - I suppose I'll show
All my cool and cold - like old Job

Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage
Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage

Now I'm naked, nothing but an animal
But can you fake it, for just one more show?
And what do you want?
I want to change
And what have you got, when you feel the same?

Tell me I'm the only one
Tell me there's no other one
Jesus was the only son for you

And I still believe that I cannot be saved.


~Smashing Pumpkins


I had this dime in my pocket.  I picked it up off of the frozen ground somewhere between a fate worse than death and getting my hair buzz cut.  When I stroked it inside my jeans pocket, no one saw.  They didn't know that it was worn with my fingerprints, the year nearly rubbed off:  1961.  They wouldn't know, if they saw it, that it's the year I was born.  They wouldn't even guess that I'd been considering my birth into this body, into this life, the unwanted conception that I was.  The unwanted man I'd become.

Nobody knew, even though I'd been telling them about the Black Cancer, what had happened deep down in that hole in the earth.  Nobody could possibly know.  Because it was unthinkable.  

They kept saying how they'd liberated me.  The word 'Liberty' was printed on my dime.  The only true liberty would have been if that shit had killed me.

The militia group took me in.  When I could speak, when my tongue had stopped burning like I'd swallowed acid, I made sure to let them know how valuable I was, how well I could fit in.  I told them about the alien-possessed oil.   I don't know if they believed it, but they couldn't figure another reason why I might be locked in an abandoned missle silo.  And they figured they'd better keep me alive just in case it was true.

When they sat me in the chair and started up the clippers, I had the dime clenched in my fist.  I watched my reflection in the mirror change, my scalp start to show through, the planes of my face seeming to become more angular, symetrically framed by short, coarse, bristly hair.  

I wondered for the hundredth time why he hadn't recognized, in what had to be a painfully long trip back to D.C., that it was no longer me.  I wasn't there.  One minute I was pissing in the Hong Kong airport restroom, and the next I was puking crude oil onto an alien craft.  There was no Mulder, no digital tape.  I was alone, freezing, sick, filthy...  And there was no way out.

I was the very thing Mulder had been chasing.  Housed in me, behind my eyes, was this thing, cold and single-minded, and he hadn't known.  As the hair fell to the floor at my feet, I wondered if Mulder had hit it.  If he'd cursed it for killing his father.  If he'd touched that vile presence, running so shallow under my skin, and felt...what?  Nothing?  No difference?  No dawning realization that this man beside him wasn't the man who he loved to make bleed, wasn't the man he'd come to hate.  Wasn't, couldn't possibly be, the man who'd gone down on him, sucked his prick deep, drank the hot milk of him....

Or maybe the thing pretended to be me.  Maybe it approximated my racing pulse, parodied my speech patterns, my breathing.  Maybe it sucked him off, too.  And maybe he couldn't tell the fucking difference.

I needed to make sure I saw him again.  I needed to get out of North Dakota.  I needed to make contact with the only people I knew of who could vaccinate me against the oil.  Or rather, from whom I could steal the vaccination.

I found a quick and seemingly easy way to do it all when I started sending Mulder the receipts.

I'd never seen Mulder all in black before.  Somehow the riot gear didn't seem as dangerous as his Armani.  But with the gear came a bigger gun, and it found its way into my gut first thing.  I lamented that he didn't use his fists.  Maybe he'd moved past that.  Maybe he no longer wanted my blood on his hands.

I fell to the dirt at his feet and tried to remember who really had the upper hand here.  His eyes found me in the dark, my body lit from the search light on his weapon.  His face was almost calm, not like the last time I could remember seeing him.  There may even have been a small pleasure there, now.  Possibly some measure of satisfaction based on knowing I'd been nearly dead in a hole in the ground a few months ago.  But I couldn't be sure.  It all happened so fast.

He questioned me in the warehouse.  Scully was with him, but she stood off to the side, letting Mulder take the lead with me.  I guess she felt it.  That I was his territory.  

Mulder got in the first shove, but to my surprise Scully got the first question.  Mulder just stared down at me, where I landed on the powder keg, that same new calm of his making me itch.

"How'd you get involved with these men?"  Scully asked.

I figured the truth could get me farther than a lie at that point.  I told them about my "liberation."  Mulder looked vaguely accusatory.  He looked like he had no idea, or couldn't care less, what I'd gone through in that silo.  Like my getting out was just his bad luck.  And like it was just like me to get rescued by a government-hating militia outfit.  As if I had any control over who found me!  As if it were probably all my orchestration anyway.

"Hey, you go underground, you gotta learn to live with the rats," I told him.  I was aware as he was, maybe more so, of the absurdity.  I was the one who'd been found underground, stinking of my own shit.  

Mulder slapped my cap off my head then slapped my head back.  It was the second time he'd touched me.  His hand was warm and sweaty.  He left my scalp stinging a little.  I could smell chlorine on him, just like the day at the pool.  I looked up at him.  His hair had grown longer.  His jaw clenched tighter.

"I'm sure you had no trouble adapting," he said.

I felt something peculiar then.  Something like bruised pride.  The truth is I *didn't* have any trouble adapting, but it had absolutely nothing to do with any similarity between myself and them.  We couldn't be more different.  If I was the rat then they were sheep, content to follow a worn-out ideology with short-sighted and unquestioning enthusiasm.  If Mulder thought of me in the same terms, he was in for a rude awakening.

"These men are pathetic revolutionaries who'll kill innocent Americans in the name of bonehead ideologies," I couldn't help but spit at him.  And if he thought his father was innocent, he was really fooling himself.

"You're full of crap, Krycek," he said down to me.  "You're an invertebrate scum-sucker whose moral dipstick is about two drops short of bone dry."

I felt a surge of defiance rush through me.  He didn't have a fucking clue.  He *still* after all this time didn't know the first thing about me.  He didn't know about Realignment.  Didn't know what I'd been through in the name of protecting this country, this planet.  And how the very people who taught me the only morals I'd ever known had finally fucked me over and left me for dead.  How dare he take the moral high ground?  He didn't even know enough about me to recognize when an alien was sitting next to him instead!  Didn't know how, by the fourth day without food or water, without any hope of doing anything but slowly thirst to death, it was his fucking name I cried in the dark.

I stood up, in his face, dizzy from breathing too hard, angry at how calm he was, how clean he smelled.  "I love this country," I growled at him, and remembered a time when that was true.

He let me get close.  Closer than I expected.  I felt his breath on my face.  My body tingled, ready for contact.  His hands came up and landed on my chest.  For the split second before he pushed me, I felt his palms, hot, against my body.  And then I was falling backward, landing on the box again, and Mulder was turning away from me, disengaging.  I swallowed, sighing.

It was Scully who asked the next question.  "What do you want, Krycek?"

I told them the truth.  One truth.  Just not the whole truth.  "Same thing you do. To find the man who tried to kill me."  I looked at Mulder, turning back toward me now.  I took a chance and said it.  "The same man that was responsible for your father's death..."  I turned to Scully.  "Your sister's."

The rest of the conversation went about as I'd expect, with Scully focusing on justice and Mulder on his Truth.  They were both so goddamned naive about the whole thing.  If Mulder had just once talked about something real like results, like revenge even, I might have actually considered really allying with him.  His white knight idealism and worn-out commitment to the Truth were non-negotiable at this point.  I wondered what it would take to get him to see the real truth:  that if he wanted to save the world, it was going to take getting his hands dirty.  He'd see that soon enough.  He'd have to.

I thought maybe I could appeal to his worse nature, to that same desire for revenge he felt around me.  I told him I could get the Smoker and his Syndicate for him.  I heard myself say it, "I can get them for you, too."  Heard the breath that crept into my voice.  I became aware in an instant of what I was truly offering.  What I'd give him in a heartbeat.  I found myself hoping Scully would find some reason to leave us alone, maybe even that Mulder would send her out.  Would he bite?  Did he even remember?  Surely he could hear it in the silence, inbetween the words I'd spoken.  Surely he could still feel, as I could, his swollen cock sliding through his own cum inside my mouth.

I tried to decipher the look that took over his face then.  As he looked down at me, he smiled.  Mulder smiled at me.  And yet there was no humor in it.  Nothing good inside. 

"We can't help you, Krycek," he said, turning away from me.  We.  He'd included her.  As if my offer had had anything to *do* with her!  As he turned away, I realized he had to know that.  It was just his way of saying no.  What I wasn't sure of was the reason.  Did he not *want* my mouth on him again?  Or did he just think he couldn't handle it?  It started to dawn on me that maybe he wasn't the only one.  

I swallowed, almost relieved that he hadn't accepted.  Getting another taste of Mulder was the last thing I needed.  I needed perspective, to stay the course.  And I needed him to not walk away.  This was about getting the vaccine.  This was about getting to show him 'The Truth' on my terms.  It was my only chance to maybe get him to see the scope, to surrender his quest and take up mine instead.  But he had to see.  He had to come.

"Mulder," I called to him, a different kind of seduction going on now, maybe one he'd actually respond to this time.  "This is just one bomb I'm sitting on here. You didn't ask me how many more I know about."

And with that, I had him.  It was done.  

---

Chapter Eight:  Hazy Shade of Winter

Time, time, time
See what's become of me...

Time, time, time
See what's become of me
While I looked around
For my possibilities
I was so hard to please

Look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky
Is a hazy shade of winter


~Simon and Garfunkel (as performed by The Bangles)


The thought cycled once more.  *I'll never sleep again.*  

Not that it was going to matter.  They weren't going to want my other arm.

I contemplated rolling to my side.  The right one, of course.  The energy needed, not only to move my body but also to endure the pain without vomiting or blacking out, seemed drastically out of my reach.

Out of my reach.  I wanted to laugh.  I think the only reason I didn't was because that, too, would have been excruciating.  

There was seepage on the cot again.  It was starting to soak into the mattress.  Again.  The smell of it made me gag.  Again.  I considered calling for the nurse, but I heard the man in the next room wailing, again, and decided against it.  She'd be in there at least another half an hour and wouldn't be able to hear me calling over his melodramatic screaming anyway.  I'd screamed myself into silence.  Now I didn't have a scream left.  If I got an infection, they'd just have to take more off.  I stared at the brown ceiling and thin tears leaked out of the corners of my eyes.  No.  I'd run first.  Die first before anybody touched it.  I hadn't even let them change my bandages.  I'd torn her white blouse, and when the three men showed up to hold me down, I broke one's nose and another's wrist.  I'd heard them talk about trying to get me into restraints.  They were afraid to get that close with the straps.  

When the nurse had come back with water, I saw the syringe concealed in her pocket.  My eyes widened and I whispered around my torn throat, in Russian, of course, "Ban...dages."  

She frowned at me, looking back at the different three men ready to risk me if I hurt her.  She looked back at me and I swallowed.  "Do it...my...self."

Her frown had deepened, like now I was more than dangerous; I was crazy, too.  Maybe I was.  But she'd placed the roll of bandaging near my right hand cautiously and set her water, cloth, and antiseptic on the table next to my small bed and she and the others had left.

That was two days ago.  I wondered how long I would continue to ooze this revolting combination of pus and blood.  I started to think I'd never heal.  At least not properly.  Even though they'd assured me by its coloration that this was 'healthy pus'.  I knew as soon as I could stand without passing out, I'd be gone.  I'd been changing my own bandages once a day rather than every three hours as I should have.  They just didn't bring the bandaging often enough.  Fucking rural Russian peasants.  They were the ones, or ones like them, who had taken it off in the first place.  And their surgeons had made the best of what was left.  If I'd been able to even stumble any further at all, I would have passed this small, mal-equipped hospital all together.  As it was, I'd passed out against their doors covered in my own blood and puke.

The man's screams in the next room started to fade to keening whimpers, my ears picking up the Russian words for 'please' and 'no more'.  I reached up, biting back the pain, and pushed the pillow up tight to my right ear.  I squeezed my eyes shut.  It made no difference.  I could still hear him, for obvious reasons.  I opened my eyes and turned my head.  I grabbed the empty plastic water pitcher by my bedside and threw it hard, grimacing.  It hit the wall with a dull thud, nothing anybody would be able to hear.

I blinked the moisture from my eyes, training them on the solidity of the ceiling again.  I compressed my lips.  I choked on the sound of agony that wanted out of my throat.  I squeezed my eyes shut again but felt panic at the black nothing that met me there.  I opened them again, willing the ceiling to open up, to become sky, a blue sky with wispy clouds floating by, not the white winter sky of Russia, but the enveloping, vast, warm sky of Summer somewhere else.  I willed some angel to come.  Anything.  Something not of this world.  Something that didn't know me, that would see me here and fly down, pick me up and carry me away.  I prayed.  Prayed to Saint Lucifer, Patron Saint of Disfigured Assassins, Dark Angel of Lost Limbs and Lost Souls...  My prayer consisted of one word:  Please...!  

But the ceiling didn't open up.  The sky didn't show itself, wintery white or otherwise.  I waited an hour.  Two.  No angel came.  

Finally, after about three hours, long after the man next door stopped screaming, I heard the nurse's footsteps in the hall getting closer.  I lifted my remaining hand, wiped the coarse wet tracks from my cheeks, and waited for my bandages.

---

Chapter Nine:  Terrible Lie

Hey God, why are you doing this to me?
Am I not living up to what I'm supposed to be?
Why am I seething with this animosity?
Hey God, I think you owe me a great big apology.

Terrible lie.

Hey God, I really don't know what you mean
Seems like salvation comes only in our dreams
I feel my hatred grow all the more extreme
Hey God, can this world really be as sad as it fucking seems?

Terrible lie.

Don't take it away from me
I need someone to hold on to
Don't take it away from me
I need someone to hold on to

Hey God, there's nothing left for me to hide
I lost my ignorance, security and pride
I'm all alone in a world you must despise
Hey God, I believed the promises, the promises and lies

Terrible lie.

You made me throw it all away
My morals left to decay
How many you betray
You've taken everything

Terrible lie.

My head is filled with disease
My skin is begging you please
I'm on my hands and knees
I want so much to believe

I need someone to hold on to
I need someone to hold on to
I need someone
I need someone to hold on to

I give you everything
My sweet everything
Hey God, I really don't know who I am
In this world of piss

~Nine Inch Nails


So much shattered for me after I got back from Russia.

Scully's health.  My faith.  And he was very likely dead.  Not that I cared.  It was the fate he deserved.  Not her.  Not Scully.  As the nose bleeds became more and more frequent, as the pounds dropped away and her hair lost its luster, I came to terms with the fact that I might just lose everything.  

Cancer.  They'd given her *cancer*.  And for what?  

So that the very government I worked for could own the people it was supposed to exist to serve.  So it could amass the wealth and the weapons undetected because we were all too busy gazing at the sky and looking for little green...  God, I couldn't even think it.  I knew I'd be sick.

They'd given Scully cancer so that I'd believe.  So that I'd give my heart and soul to proving the existence of extraterrestrials.  So that, not only would I be looking the wrong way when the real shit hit the fan, I'd actually be pivotal in advancing their agenda.

I considered quitting.  Let's face it, I considered dying.  I may have used the death of the agent surveilling me to fake my own death so that I could work underground, but a part of me wondered what I was still searching for.  What I was living for.

*You go underground, you gotta learn to live with the rats.*

No shit, Krycek.  

It's what I thought as I stood on the corner, waiting.  After the Cancer Man had shown me my sister in that diner.  After he promised that putting the implant back could cure Scully.  So many promises.  And here I was.  Remembering the man who pulled the trigger on my father.  Feeling myself succumbing to the vertigo as I stood on the line Krycek himself must have made the choice to cross once upon a time.

I smelled his cigarette smoke before I turned and saw him.  We started walking.

"My apologies for the rather hasty departure last night," he said, slowly.  As though he left the dinner party before dessert was served.

"What do you want from me?" I asked, needing so desperately to get to the point.  I felt the weight of Scully's survival, having my sister back, the FBI's investigation into the death of my surveiller...all of it with each measured step.  The Cigarette Man's disposition matched the sunny day.  I clenched my jaw.

"Want from you?" he intoned with fake innocence.

"You give me these things, the only things I ever wanted and I can't think of any reason for you to do so."  It was so naive, really.  After four years of this shit, more if I counted the time I was on the X-Files before Scully, but I hardly could since all it was then was Sasquatch and telekinesis.  So much time spent running.  Running after their shadows, grasping nothing.  And now to be offered...what?  The grail?  Or their packaged bullshit.

"Well that's true, no act is completely selfless," he replied philosophically.  "But I've come today not to...not to ask, but to offer. To offer you the truth that you've so desperately sought. About the project, about the men who've conspired to protect it."

"I know the truth," I said bitterly.

"Do you?"

"I spoke to one of your men."

"And you know that he's not a liar."  

I felt the dull, ulcerous doubt at his words.  "I've seen enough to know he's not a liar, yeah."

"He's seen but scant pieces of the whole," the Cancer Man said, then, reminding me of all the times I'd glimpsed that painful truth.  Pieces.  Always, only pieces, in and of themselves worse than nothing.  But like the bird pecking at the feeder that doled out a morsel every thousandth time, I'd been so very, humiliatingly, morbidly persistant.  Was Kritschgau a pawn like me?  Were we predestined to meet and fight it out for the truth?

*The truth, the truth...there's no truth! These men, they make it up as they go along.*

I looked at the man next to me, inhaling, and remembered the words, the breathless voice, the smell of dirt on him, the stains across his cheek.

*I can get them for you, too....*

I shook the memory off.  "What more can you show me?" I asked, ready to tell him to go fuck himself and take my chances.  Chance Scully's life...

"This man you spoke to, Michael Kritschgau, he has deceived you with beautiful lies. He's told you that everything you've ever believed about the existence of extraterrestrial life is untrue."

"What are you saying?" I asked impatiently, the thought of Scully's pale body lying in that bed waiting for me potent, a spiritual toxin.

"As I said, I'm offering you a chance to know the truth," he said so easily.

"In exchange for what?"

"Quit the FBI, come work for me. I can make your problems go away."

Yeah, so can a good shot of heroin, I thought.  So can choosing never to be held accountable, denying everything.  

"No deal," I told him.

"After all I've given you?"  His reply held a predictable amount of hurt.  It did nothing to hide his continued confidence.  So confident.  Like he already had me;  I merely had yet to realize it.

I swallowed the bitter hatred I suddenly felt for him.  I'd always held it in check around him...always felt it would only betray a weakness.  I started to let it seep out.  "What have...what have you given me? A claim of a cure for Scully.  Is she cured?! You show me my sister only to take her right back! You've given me nothing!"

"I intend to keep my promises; I just need something from you."

The thought of him, of anyone, and to my disgust this included Scully, ANYONE needing ANYTHING more from me, of taking yet again, of draining all I had after I'd given my life's blood to find her, to save her, to expose the truth...  It all came out at him, the words, the actual accusations, shocking me.  "You murdered my father.  You killed Scully's sister.  And if Scully dies, I will kill you. I don't care whose father you are, I will put you down."

All this time...  I'd been hating, blaming, fighting...the wrong one.  The devil was in front of me and offering what looked like salvation in his withered hands.  Was this how Krycek had felt?  What offer had he accepted finally?  What bittersweet elixir was placed at *his* parched lips?  Because, God help me, I was aching to fall under the guise of this monster's protection, to ally with him to save her life, even as I knew, unerringly, that he might as well have pulled that trigger and blown my father's skull apart himself.

The smoking demon spoke words, then, that cut into the heart of what I truly feared, what I'd yet to understand until that moment.  "Well, you're certainly capable, so I've been told. I understand you have a hearing tomorrow where you'll have to testify to these murderous impulses of yours."  Murder?  Me?  I felt the gun fill my hand, empty the moment before.  It was self-defense.  He'd pulled a shotgun on me.  And yet I'd overtaken him.  The shot I took was at his temple.  It was a killshot.  There was no mistake.  The shotgun blast that took off his face was just an insult at that point.  

I walked away from the man standing on the street corner, calmly taking a deep, satisfying drag.  His words followed me. "When you reconsider, the offer still stands!"

........

It was dark.  I'd been walking for hours.  My mind was made up.  Hadn't it been all along?  I'd never fall in with that bastard.

*Your politics are yours.  You've never thrown in.*

I closed my eyes on my father's words, nearly his last, and swallowed hard.  I opened the door to her room.  

The frail light fell in across her face.  She slept heavily, without moving, breathing softly.  I walked slowly, quietly, until I stood over her, shoulders round with exhaustion and grief.  

God...  She looked like she was already dead!  Oh my God...  Scully...

I knelt by her hospital bed and lay my cheek on the rough sheets.  It took a moment to realize what was happening to me:  that the sadness had reached this degree somewhere behind my back, somewhere in the closed room of my subconscious.  It welled in my chest and began to overflow.  

No.  Not sadness.  I wished it was sadness.

It was guilt.  It was guilt, goddamn it.  So much black, fucking guilt.  The pain of it ripped a hole in my ribs, built in my throat...  And still I couldn't let it loose.  I stopped it as it rose and bloomed on my palate, a sour wine.  My mouth reflexively opened, only to become an aching, empty hole, the scream caught and held, strangled, as I made a fist and fought myself.  The tears, though silent, were shut out as well.  Tightly held back from falling.  I was dying to break open, but I suspended this great despair so that even though it had already overwhelmed me, I didn't breathe a fraction of it.  I just wrestled it back down into my body, where it could cancer me, too.

Smelling her sweet shampoo just under the harsh disinfectant and feeling like I'd rather burn in hell than have to see her like this one more day, I reversed my decision.  It was easy.  The guilt demanded it, demanded this sacrifice, this blood of mine.  I'd call first thing in the morning.  It was only an ideal after all.  It paled in comparison to the flesh and blood woman asleep so close to my agony.  It could be sacrificed.  She could not.  

It was done.  Simple, really.  So much easier than the pain.  

I wept silently, rigored with everything I couldn't spill, everything she couldn't know I was about to do.  For her.

........

But first thing in the morning, I was awakened from a half-stupor, something not at all like sleep except for the reclined position of my body, by an urgent call from Blevins' secretary.  I was to be in his office in twenty minutes.  That was all, then the phone clicked dead.  I wiped my eyes.  I sighed and thought about the day before.  About the Cancer Man's offer and Scully's cancer-ridden body.  I remembered the woman who might have been my sister.  Might have been...  

I didn't shower.  I didn't eat.  I took a piss and brushed my teeth.  I changed my shirt and my tie.  I'd be in Blevins' office, but unless he had revelations on how to cure cancer, I'd still be contacting the smoking man with my agreement to the deal before I'd be attending any hearings about any murders I'd committed.

It was dark in the office, secretive.  "Agent Mulder, will you please take a seat," Blevins said as I walked in.  "Something urgently important has come to the fore."

I sat down across from his desk, feeling the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

"As you're set to testify on your own behalf later today, I've received alarming forensic evidence from the man's body found in your apartment. I have here in my hand ballistic data matching your service weapon, Agent Mulder."

I felt my stomach drop, my brain firing frantically to get to the answers I felt sure Blevins wasn't going to give me.  "Where did you get that?"

"I'm not at liberty to say," he said.  The company line.  I frowned, and he went on,  "But unless you can offer up someone else who might have fired the kill shot, everything points to you as this man's murderer. Are you prepared to give testimony about the man who fired the shot?"

The man who fired the shot.  But they knew it was me.  That's what they were saying.  But they wanted...  They wanted me to implicate otherwise.  "Why am I here?" I asked, feeling myself to be in danger somehow.

"The man worked for the Department of Defense, Agent Mulder."

Tell me something I don't know.  "The man was spying on me," I reiterated.

"Do you know for whom?"  He paused.  Nothing had changed in his voice, but something about the question, asked here and now, not at the hearing...  Something was not right at all.  Blevins continued,  "Agent Scully was prepared to name the man at the FBI who was involved in this plot against you and her. We believe she was about to name Assistant Director Skinner, whom we have learned has been working inside the FBI with a secret agenda."

Skinner?  They wanted me to implicate Skinner?  "I refuse to believe that," I answered, mind racing.

"We've accumulated some substantial evidence against him," Blevins retorted.

"Can you show it to me?" I replied.  Jesus, it was making more and more sense by the moment!  

"Agent Mulder, if you name this man today in your testimony, we can file charges against him. Charges which may very well exonerate you."

"Name Skinner and save myself?" I sneered.

"That's what I called you here to recommend," he replied.  And then he said the one thing that cemented everything I'd come to suspect:  "As a friend."

As I sat there for another moment, studying him, profiling, finally feeling awake to the awful truth, I made my decision.  "I'll see you at the hearing," I told Section Chief Blevins.  He nodded at me, confident in my buyability.  I nodded back.  And I knew I'd never deal with any of them ever again.

---

Chapter Ten:  Barrel of a Gun

Do you mean this horny creep
Set upon weary feet
Who looks in need of sleep
That doesn't come
This twisted, tortured mess
This bed of sinfulness
Who's longing for some rest
And feeling numb

What do you expect to be?
What is it you want?
Whatever you've planned for me
I'm not the one

A vicious appetite
It visits me each night
And won't be satisfied
Won't be denied
An unbearable pain
A beating in my brain
That leaves the mark of cain
Right here inside

What am I supposed to do?
When everything that I've done
Is leading me to conclude
I'm not the one

Whatever I've done
I've been staring down the barrel of a gun
Whatever I've done
I've been staring down the barrel of a gun
Whatever I've done

Is there something you need from me?
Are you having your fun?
I never agreed to be
Your Holy One

~Depeche Mode


We cured Scully's cancer.  We put that thing back in her neck.  We probably just sacrificed her in the long run to more of their tests, to abduction by our military and their doctors, in order to "save" her in the short run.  Still...  Something beneath my ribs came alive again.  Something stirred awake, inexplicable since I felt sure we were all ultimately doomed if we didn't wake up to the truth, Scully included.  But seeing her eyes light up once more, seeing her lips curve into a genuine smile...   She made me think maybe...  Maybe we'd pull through this, too.  Maybe there was another side.

Even though living with the rats was harder than it looked.  I'd come to know that I was living with them every day I walked through the doors of the Hoover building one more time.  I felt a grudging...well, maybe it was something approaching respect for Krycek's adaptability.  I was finding the whole process more than a little disgusting.  It took a certain skill to uphold the facade.  To pretend I wasn't trying to bust the system from the inside.  And really, I wasn't that good at pretending.  It was a miracle that I was still alive considering how many dirty agents and directors walked the halls above my head.

I wondered how he *ever* learned to live under any of the circumstances he found himself in.

I wondered if he knew.  If Krycek had been used as well or if he was one of the ones orchestrating my ignorance.  I supposed it no longer mattered.  He was dead.  Or worse.  So was my truth.  It was time to let it all go.  It was time to focus on what was left.  Scully was here.  She was healthy once more.  I had so much to be grateful for.  I should be so very grateful.

We had our shitty cases and our good ones.  I tried not to think about my deception and the fact that my work held significantly less interest for me now.  I focused on Scully's returning vigor.  I forgave her when she didn't trust me, didn't believe me, didn't back me up.  I was lucky to have her.  Lucky she wasn't in some hospital bed, ashen and barely breathing.  Because of me.  I was lucky.

We investigated our killer tree roots, homicidal artificial intelligence, and vampires.  I was becoming more and more comfortable with the dearth my lack of alien-related cases left.  I even took my first vacation in ages.  Memphis was hot and muggy, and Graceland was smaller than it looks on TV.  Still, it was a welcome reprieve from all that relief I was supposed to feel every morning walking into the basement office and seeing Scully's face.  I sampled the local barbeque, and when I laid down in my motel bed at night, I put on headphones and listened to Elvis croon, "You make me so lonely, baby.  I get so lonely.  I get so lonely, I could die."

When I got asked to sit on a panel at a lecturers' forum on abductee phenomenae, I felt a perverse glee, a bemusement at the ironic curve in the road my karma had taken.  Sure, I'd sit in.  Sure, I'd make vociferous testimony.  It'd be my pleasure.  They were thrilled to have me.  Until, on the day of the discussion, I actually opened my mouth and spoke.

"All this conjecture, the 'ontological shock' that you speak of, for which we are so ill-equipped, is not only false but dangerous. This woman presents no good or credible testimony apart from the feel-good message that she promotes."

It wasn't exactly what they expected or wanted to hear from me.  As I sat there and watched their faces while I spoke, exhibiting everything from dumb-struck incomprehension to stunned indignation to something that even resembled revulsion, I had to wonder if my insistence on my new belief had as much to do with the facts as it had to do with my need to constantly disappoint absolutely everyone at all times, no matter which side or theory they aligned themselves with.  I was becoming laughable even to myself.

"You think she's lying?" somebody asked incredulously.

"No, I don't think she's lying," I said.  And then I told them the truth, knowing that they couldn't see inside my guts to how they were twisting, couldn't see the revulsion I held for myself, the sickness I felt at my own gullability.   "I think that if you prepare people well enough to believe a lie, they will believe it as if it were true. And if you tell them a really big lie, like there are aliens from outer space, much more than a small one, they will believe it. And if you suggest to them these aliens are doing bad things to them, the power of that suggestion will be to make people believe that certain psychopathologies and neuroses that they're suffering from can now be attributed to that."

I told them how the truth had liberated me.  I half believed it.  My mind was liberated.  As was my life.  I was no longer tied down to a lie, committing all of my time and energy to a corrupt government's busy work.  I was free.  I found it interesting how...disappointing...true freedom felt.  I wondered why it didn't feel better.  Why it actually felt like utter shit.

"A conspiracy, wrapped in a plot, inside a government agenda," I warned them.  And that dark truth, in that moment, felt nothing even close to liberating.

And then I met Patient-X.

"Fox Mulder," she said to me like an aunt who loved me even though I hadn't visited in ages.  I was sick to death of anybody presuming to think they knew me.

*You don't know the first thing about me....*

"Hi," I replied, the dread clear in my voice.

She told me I was her hero.  I remembered six months ago, holding my gun to that man's head in the apartment above mine and pulling the trigger.  I remembered how the Strageo board shook and how I froze and only watched as my sister disappeared out of my life.  I realized Patient-X, Cassandra, whatever, was nothing more than a misguided groupie.  Stupid, really, to have ever believed in me.  Stupid like I used to be.

She talked about Duane Barry.  Goddamned Duane Barry.  How I was the only one who believed him.  The only one snowed, I couldn't help but think.  The one who he trusted only to get a bullet in the chest for that trust.  And my preoccupation with, my naivete about his story, his abduction, my memories of my sister...all of it, had allowed them to take her.  Scully was taken and given cancer because I was stupid enough to let it happen.

"You might not like me as much as you like that story," was all I said.  All I could stand to say, lest it all come pouring out my mouth.

She started talking about a time of war and stress among the different races of alien.  Greens vs. Greys maybe?  It was worse than ridiculous.

"I will be summoned to a place, just like Duane Barry," she told me.

"The man you're talking about died because of what he believed in. He died in a room after I'd been interrogating him, after he received a visit from some men from our government."  Some men.  One man.  It didn't matter.  I let him do it.  I let them do all of it.

"I'm sure the government's involved. They just, they don't want us to know about it all," she said, making whatever I said, whatever argument I had to the contrary, work for her...continuing to believe the lie no matter what, to maintain her own illusion at all costs.

"Cassandra," I said wearily.  "There was a time when I would've believed what you're saying without a doubt."

She interrupted me vehemently.  "There is no doubt, Mr. Mulder."

And for a moment, gone was the smiling, feel-good sycophant, and I felt a rush of power from her.  For a split second, I missed my faith.  I felt hers and I knew its power and I mourned that in myself.   

She continued.  "I know what I've experienced. I...I have been through the terror and the tests more times than I can count. I have had an unborn fetus taken from me."  Her voice shook, her hand going to her belly.  "But they're not here for the reasons that you might think. They're here to deliver a message. Except..."  

She looked down, like she was listening to them speak to her.  I felt the disgust come back in a wave, watching her do that, watching her belief paint her as such a freak.  She went on and it was all I could do to keep listening.  "Something has gone wrong. There are...there are other forces at work. They're going to be calling me. I can feel it. And you, of all people, need to know about this because you're the one that can do something."

I ignored the fire that burned in my chest.  "I'm not," I said.  And then because it was all that there was left to do, I walked out, leaving her there to figure the harsh truth out for herself.

---

I nodded, and they pulled the chicken wire tight over his skinny body.  I watched from above, his struggles to free himself as it cut into his flesh.  The men backed away, and I waited until they'd cleared the room.  Then I nodded again.

Even from the observation room, high above the slabs, I saw his eyes widen as the valve opened, the noise it made in the dark recesses of the pipes echoing off the stone.  And then it poured down on him, covering his face, choking him.  I released my hand from the fist I hadn't realized I'd made.

When it was done and his eyes were swimming with it, I nodded to my left and the man in the surgical mask nodded back and left the room.  There wasn't much time now.  I took a deep breath and let it out.

I got him on board the ship just hours later.  We were long gone from Tunguska, Siberia even, when they realized what I'd done.  I had It.  I had what I needed.  I felt a sick exhilaration tighten my stomach as I looked at It.

"I've brought you water," I said.  "Can you hear me? If you can hear me...I need you to nod your head."

The head lolled slowly back on the boy's shoulders, revealing sewn shut and blood-encrusted eyes.  I took a deep breath and began to dab his forehead with a cool wet cloth.  

"I'm going to take good care of you."  

I flashed on myself, face mashed up against cold tile while it made a home in me, took over my mind and body, and then left me in the hole.  Then screaming, tied to the hospital bed finally, the wound infected, the bandanges peeling off the grotesque stump...the pain.  All because of It.  On behalf of It.

I smiled down at the boy tremulously, blinking, knowing he couldn't see, couldn't hear.  Knowing, though, that the Cancer could hear me.  It could hear just fine.  And it was trapped in the boy's weakened, beaten, sewn body.  Trapped in a dark hole like I had been.  I wondered if it felt fear.

They'd get on their knees to me now.  With what I had...I could fucking enslave them.

I threw the cloth down and left the room.

---

Chapter 11: Useless

All your stupid ideals
You've got your head in the clouds
You should see how it feels
With your feet on the ground

Here I stand the accused
With your fist in my face
Feeling tired and bruised
With the bitterest taste

All my useless advice
All my hanging around
All your cutting down to size
All my bringing you down

All your stupid ideals
You've got your head in the clouds
You should see how it feels
With your feet on the ground

~Depeche Mode


"Are there any survivors?" I asked her, doubtful.  The rows of yellow body bags were barely sheltered from the soft rain by the enormous tarp that had been erected.

"No. Not as of this moment," Scully answered predictably.

She let me know they'd been burned.  That part was pretty obvious.  It was hard not to gag.

"Any preliminary theories?" I asked her.

"Well," she sighed. "It appears they all came by car. Most of the dead are congregated in a wooded area a short distance off the road."

I knew what I would have been thinking a year ago.  The conclusions came, just as fast and strong as if my belief structure hadn't changed:  Skyland Mountain, mass burning, Cassandra's warning...  

*Now is a time of war and stress among the alien nations. The different races, they're in upheaval. I will be summoned to a place, just like Duane Barry.*  

Summoned.  Like Duane Barry.  To Skyland Mountain.  Where we were now.  Where we were again.

"Self-immolation?" I asked.

"There's no evidence of that right now.  There are no accelerants, no incindiary device," Scully replied.  No, of course not, I thought.  The smell wasn't the only thing making me nauseous.

"And what was their relationship to each other? Were they families?"  

*Cassandra is experiencing the sensation that she's about to be called.*

*I will be summoned to a place, just like Duane Barry....*

"There's no way to ID their bodies right now," Scully answered, frowning. "It's going to be a painstaking dental process. Mulder, why are you tiptoeing around the obvious fact here? I mean, this is Skyland Mountain. We're right back here on Skyland Mountain."

My intestines coiled tighter at her imploring tone, her frustration with me.  "And you think it's related to your abduction from the same place?" I asked her.  That'd be ironic, wouldn't it?  I bit back my anger, going hollow and blank inside and out.  

"Well, you can't deny the connection."

Sure I could.  It was done all the time.  The world was full of denial.  

"You think this is some kind of abduction scenario?" I pushed.  Maybe I wanted her to say it.  If only so that I could rip her to shreds for it.  Technically, there was nothing here to promote that theory.  God, had I just grown a brain only to be replaced in the Spooky, laughingstock hall of fame by my own partner?

"No... I'm not saying that," she insisted.  She was caving so easily.  

"Do you have any evidence of that?" I continued, knowing she didn't.  Knowing she'd have to concede that.  Knowing it's what she needed and what I'd come to accept as the basis for my own truth.

"What do you mean by evidence?"  What did I mean by evidence.  Jesus.  I wanted to tell her that if she was going to ape me she was going to have to put in a little more effort.  That is if she wanted to get anywhere close to my old level of faith in my baseless, fantastical claims.

"That's what I'm asking you," I told her.  Conversely, I felt I had a pretty good foothold on apeing Scully's stoic insistence on reality checking.

"Well, are you going to give me your theory, then?" she huffed.

"No," I informed her.  "I'm going to give you an explanation."

I turned away, wading back through the brightly colored body bags.  She could follow me and listen to the truth or not.  She wasn't going to get any more half-baked visions out of me, any more Mulder insights which turned out to be nothing more than vagaries and pretendings.  Nothing less than the brain-child of my mind-rape, planted there to discredit me and fool and enslave a planet.

No, she'd get none of that, and if that's what she now wanted, she could call the psychic friends' hotline for companionship or buddy up with Cassandra Spender.  What she'd get from me from now on, all I had anymore, was all that was left:  reality.  As ugly and non-supernatural as it really was.

---

"You're probably thirsty."  He had an unbreakable habit of politeness, an English inbred calm that I always found slightly offensive.  But it was hard to turn my rage in his direction.  Not when the bitch that deserved it was long gone.  

"Remind me to complain to the captain about the service," I quipped, still breathless.  I don't think I'd taken a breath since I'd come around the corner and seen the empty room.  Her lingering perfume was a foul stench in my nostrils.  Not that I'd trusted her for a moment.  I'd only fucked her to get her away from the boy in the first place.  

"You may have that opportunity. This ship is bound back to Vladivostok tomorrow. I gather there'll be quite an enthusiastic homecoming," he said cooly.  I wondered which side of the fence he was playing.  Theoretically, he and Covarrubius were both still aligned with the syndicate.  Of course, I was walking proof that that fact alone meant next to nothing.  

He held a cloth drenched with foul water over my mouth.  I was just thirsty enough to still want it.  It wasn't until I was about to swallow some down that it occured to me, it could be not only foul but deadly.  I spat it out, glaring at him.

"Do you have the boy?" I breathed, trying not to picture what sort of deal *they* might have struck.  I was disgusted enough with myself.

"No," he confided.  "Ms. Covarrubias took him. Your alliance with her was as misguided as ours."  It was hard to bite back the anger that swept through me, the desire to make perfectly clear, to this man whose intention was probably to have me killed as soon as possible, that I wouldn't ally with Covarrubias for all the vaccinations in the world.

The well-groomed Englishman went on, "But it appears she was unaware of the consequences of her deception. You were clever. Infect the boy to ensure infection of anyone who tried to learn what he knows, who would cheat you."

She was infected then.  She'd gotten her due.  "Then where's the boy?" I asked.

"Dead," he responded.  "Victim of another mysterious holocaust. Unable now to tell what he knew or saw."

I thought fast.  "Then you've got no choice but to deal with me."  The restraint was feeling tight.  I could feel the rage and beginnings of panic combine in my gut.  I was having visions of beating the old man to death with my prosthetic arm if I could just get out of the cuff.

"I'm afraid there's no deal to be made," he informed calmly.

"I'm the only one who knows what those incidents are.  What they mean. I know what that boy saw," I persisted.  It was the truth.  They had to deal.  He had to fucking DEAL!  Goddamn it, this *couldn't* be another Hong Kong!  The DAT, my arm, the boy...  The line of things I'd lost to the cause was lengthening.  This was IT for me.  God, this was finally my straight shot to the top of the food chain, to freedom.

"You've as much as told me what I need to know."

He was bluffing.  "You know nothing."

"If the boy was your trump card," he began, and my heart sank into my boots. "Why infect him unless you could also cure him? With a vaccine developed by the Russians. One that works. It would mean that the resistance to the alien colonists is now possible."

"You're dreaming," I snarled, sick.

"Do you have the vaccine?" he asked, and it was the first evidence of tension in him I had seen.  He did need what I had.  I was still in the game.

"You need what I know," I reiterated, unwilling to turn over the one thing that was right now making me valuable.

"Do you have the vaccine?!" he shouted, kicking the bucket and covering me with filthy water.

"Give you the means to save Covarrubias after what she did?" I retorted, stalling.

His answer was unambiguous.  "The means to save yourself."

I squinted, measuring his degree of sincerity.  How many times had his group tried to off me?  What would stop him if I handed him the vial?  And yet...  

*Save yourself.*

*The means to save yourself...*

What I wouldn't give.

I turned my head away, feeling his gaze, how it never lost intensity.  I swallowed around the heartbeat in my throat.  I looked back at him, knowing the only thing I had the power over right now was how fast or slow my death came.

"The vaccine, Alex," he said, controlled now.  "The vaccine for your life."  Then, "Maybe for your soul."

I frowned at that, but my breath caught at the seriousness with which he said it.  And in the next moment, I found myself nodding, consenting.

"Very good, Alex," he said.  "Very good, indeed."

---

I saw the red hair as the zipper began to close up the bag.  The wind whipped my tie around as I ran toward it, trying not to trip over the other bodies, some still smoking.

It all happened in a vaccuum:  Skinner, Scully alive, the helicopter, Agent Spender blaming me for his mother's abduction...  I just didn't breathe until I saw her lying there.  All I could think about was how cold I'd been.  How unjustifiably cruel.

*Cassandra Spender was abducted at Skyland Mountain.  That's where I was taken, where Duane Barry took me.*

*The woman is a nut, Scully.*

*It says here that she has an implant...in the base of her neck.*

*Where the government no doubt removed her brain...*

Jesus.

When she woke up and she asked me what time it was, I smiled for maybe the first time in weeks.  Possibly months.  God, a year?  More?  How did this happen to me?  When did it happen?  I found myself wondering if whatever I'd lost...if I could get it back somehow.  Not the belief.  That was long gone.  But was there still some purpose left for me?  Or was it just going to be moments of relief like this one replacing the constant drive I used to know on a daily basis?

"I don't know what to say," she said now, in a different hospital room, back in D.C.  She woke me from thoughts that had been plaguing me since I heard about the Pennsylvania burnings and realized my partner was there on that bridge.  I tried to tune in to what she was saying now.  "I mean, I...I don't have the first clue. There's nothing here."

"Well, at least you're not alone," I told her, the answer seeming so lame after the remarks I'd made about Cassandra Spender's implant just the day before. "None of the other survivors have been able to give a cogent account, either."

"Mulder, I have never been here. I couldn't tell you how to get here, let alone drive it."

"Do you remember when you last saw Cassandra Spender?" I asked.

"She was there, too?"

I nodded slowly.  It was all so familiar.  So many tapes I'd listened to.  So many videos I'd seen, scoured.  People's stories, all so similar, haunting.  Being called, not knowing how they got there, not remembering afterward.

But the burning was different.  It didn't fit the profile.  Not of alien abduction.  It fit, all too well, the most ghoulish tales of government experiments and agendas.  The Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition, ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe...my father...and the Syndicate I now knew he belonged to and that I had no doubt was behind these incidents.

"I ran more x-rays. I haven't told anybody yet what I found, though," I confided.

"You found more implants?" she asked breathlessly.

I nodded again.  "That would explain how you were directed to the site, and why you can't remember. It would explain the sensation Cassandra Spender was describing, her abduction fantasies. It would explain Skyland Mountain."

"Yeah, but it wouldn't explain why they would want to kill me. And it doesn't explain why I survived."

"It all comes down to a question, Scully.  One that hasn't been answered or I don't even think honestly addressed." I took a breath, and at her frown, continued.  "Who made that chip in your neck? That chip was found in a military research facility. Our government made that chip, implanted it in your neck as part of a secret military project to develop a biochemical weapon, to monitor your immunity or to destroy you like a lab rat if the truth were to be exposed. Your cancer, your cure, everything that's happening to you now...it all points to that chip.  The truth I've been searching for? That truth is *in* you."

I thought she'd be relieved to hear the truth, something disturbing, yes, but tangible, maybe even provable.  Instead she looked...worried about me.  More than that.  Sad.  Resigned.

"Mulder, when I met you five years ago, you told me that your sister had been abducted...by aliens. That that event had marked you so deeply that nothing else mattered. I didn't believe you, but I followed you, on nothing more than your faith that the truth was out there, based not on facts, not on science, but on your memories that your sister had been taken from you. Your memories were all that you had."

I was becoming frustrated by her little speech.  I reminded her, "I don't trust those memories now."

"Well, whether you trust them or not, they've led you here.  And me. But I have no memories to either trust or distrust.  And if you ask me now to follow you again, to stand behind you in what you now believe, without knowing what happened to me out there, without those memories... I can't."  Her pained look turned to a stoic strength.  "I won't."

God, I wanted to strangle her.  No, not her.  Just...something.  That we could come this far, five years, as she'd taken pains to remind me, and we still could not see eye to eye, not even for a breath.  We remained diametrically opposed.  

I turned and looked out the hospital room window, seeing nothing but that I had to sway her.  To finally, in this dark hour of human history, wake her up to her own predicament, her own truth.  A truth it was my curse to carry, like a flag held aloft into battle, destined, more likely than not, to fall, unsung by anyone.

"If I could give you those memories," I pleaded. "If I could prove that I was right and that what I believed for so long was *wrong*..."

She interrupted me.  "Is that what you really *want*?"

What I wanted...  The question, and the complicated, painful answer, that I didn't even know, struck me where I stood.  What I wanted.  What I wanted no longer mattered.  It never had.  All that mattered was the truth.  And I knew of only one way to try to get at the truth inside Scully that she couldn't, or wouldn't, access.  One way to prove what I knew to her.

I placed the call to Dr. Weber.  He said he'd see her in two hours.

---

Chapter Twelve:  Land of Confusion

I must have dreamed a thousand dreams
Been haunted by a million screams
But I can hear the marching feet
They're moving into the street

Now, did you read the news today?
They say the danger has gone away
But I can see the fire's still alight
They're burning into the night

There's too many men, too many people
Making too many problems
And there's not much love to go around
Can't you see this is a land of confusion?

This is the world we live in
And these are the hands we're given
Use them and let's start trying
To make it a place worth living in

Oh, superman, where are you now?
When everything's gone wrong somehow?
The men of steel, these men of power
Are losing control by the hour

This is the time, this is the place
So we look for the future
But there's not much love to go around
Tell me why this is a land of confusion

This is the world we live in
And these are the hands we're given
Use them and let's start trying
To make it a place worth living in

I remember long ago
When the sun was shining
And all the stars were bright all through the night
In the wake of this madness, as I held you tight
So long ago

Now, this is the world we live in
And these are the hands we're given
Use them and let's start trying
To make it a place worth fighting for

This is the world we live in
And these are the names we're given
Stand up and let's start showing
Just where our lives are going to.

~Genesis (as performed by Disturbed)


"Over the past five years I've doubted you," Skinner said, and I ground my teeth. "Only to be persuaded by the power of your belief in extraterrestrial phenomenae. And I'm doubting you now, not because of that belief, but because extraterrestrial phenomenae is frankly the more plausible explanation."

Son of a bitch.

"Then I suggest you put *that* in your report," I told him, storming out of the office.

I couldn't get out of the building quickly enough, and yet it seemed the elevator was inordinately slow, the crowds inordinately thick.  It all gave me too much time to think about how alone I was.  How crazy I felt.  Which should have been a laugh.  I'd been made to feel crazy most of my life, but I'd never felt quite as crazy as lately when everyone I'd ever had the displeaure of trusting to doubt my "anal-probing, gyro-pyro, levitating, ecoplasm alien anti-matter stories" now BELIEVED them when it was most vital that they NOT.  And the shit of it was THEY STILL THOUGHT *I* WAS CRAZY.

Finally, I burst through the doors to the garage and sought the relative comfort of my crappy Taurus.

I put both hands on the wheel and just rested my head there for several minutes.  Scully's voice haunted me.  

*Oh my God!*  

It was shocking to hear the logic stripped away, all those inner censoring mechanisms sleeping, the truth as she knew it so nakedly, honestly relayed.  

*They're on fire!  Oh...my...GOD.*

I'd felt...betrayed.  By Scully?  I supposed not.  Dr. Weber?  Maybe.  The unnameable, unaccountable men who'd staged this elaborate event, who'd duped my partner as they'd once duped me.  The layers of her deception, the lengths they would go to to conceal the truth...they were staggering.

And I had nowhere else to go.  They'd buried the truth too deep.  No one would listen, and all the evidence was going to point exactly where they wanted it to.  No stone had been left unturned.  They'd corrupted my partner's memories, my own...  I was just so tired of fighting alone.  

I didn't go home right away.  I drove around until it was dark.  I thought about getting a nice bottle of Scotch for my dinner.  It wouldn't be the first time this month.  The thought of another night, on the same couch, with the same regrets...

I parked on the street and got out of the car.  No moon.  The street lights were on a timer and had yet to come on.  Everything was washed charcoal, from the shrubs to the sidewalk.  I watched my own shoes, plain, black shoes with simple laces, unextraordinary, as I climbed the steps to my apartment building.  The building's lights cast down a sick sulfur beam.

I waited in the elevator, listening to it work its way up four floors.

At my door, I got out my keys.  They felt heavy in my fingers.  I could almost smell their metal tang as the lock clicked open and the door swung in.  

The light from the hall fell on a small white square in the middle of my foyer floor.  I tilted my head and bent to retrieve it.  There was writing on it, block letters, everything capitalized:

My thoughts, a moment ago quiescent, depressed, the energy in the room...everything shifted.  It only took a moment.  Fear bloomed, a green lotus in my chest.  And pleasure.  A strange pleasure, like death might be close, like not everything was as it seemed.  The air left the room and my body.  And then I was being rushed, head-long, into my living room.

It was a bizarre ride, almost freeing.  I could glimpse my future self plummeting out the window, glass breaking all around me, a graceless, undignified dive resulting in thirteen broken bones, my blood going black in the moonless shadows blanketing the pavement.

What happened was more shocking and surreal than that.

He looked down on me, the shadows seeming to have clung to his very skin.  I was staring at my own gun.  It was familiar, every contour, yet strange and exciting, like seeing an old friend from a new angle.  I felt the light holster inside my coat, impotent against my ribs. My stomach lurched into my throat as the face over the gun barrel gelled into sharp, painful focus.

"You must be losin' it, Mulder.  I can beat you with one hand."

I registered that it was true; he'd never gotten the better of me.  Shame fought past the rush of fear.  "Isn't that how you like to beat yourself?" I retorted.

His eyes narrowed and he cocked the gun.

"If those are my last words, I can do better," I said.  A new shame enveloped me.  Memories I'd trained to silence screamed along my nerve endings. Flashes of another life, of the man over me, four years, a lifetime, younger.  Hot tongue along the underside, soft.  A desperate cry in the night, despicably mine.

"I'm not here to kill you, Mulder," he whispered.  "I'm here to help you."

"Hey, thanks," I got out, maintaining the facade.  

Some part of me that got left behind at the front door woke up in the moment.  Krycek was here.  Alex Krycek was in my house.  All those years, all those beliefs away, countless betrayals later, and he was two feet in front of me.  Two feet.  How could he have been dead to me for months, thousands of physical, and lightyears of emotional miles away, and then...  

Here he was.  

I could reach out and touch him if I wanted....

"You know, if it wasn't in my best interests, I would just as soon squeeze this trigger," he spat.  And suddenly two feet wasn't nearly enough.

"What's stopping you?"  I said it with the same taint of disgust, the same devil-may-care, "do it to me" aplomb he'd expect.  But I meant it.  I didn't know.  What the hell *was* stopping him?  Wasn't all that was between my life and my murder at Krycek's hands...opportunity?

"Hear this, Agent Mulder," he began.  "Listen very carefully because what I'm about to tell you is deadly serious."

I had to wonder if that was true.  He was so fucking good at manipulating me.  True, the last time he used guile and intel.  He'd used me.  I can get them for you, too, and all that.  This was different.  More intense.  His eyes, now years older, and lacking any of the lure he'd effected so beautifully, hand-cuffed and sitting on that bomb a year ago, were hard.  No.  Not hard.  They were wet.  Wet and sad.  Resolved.  I swallowed, angry that he seemed to be doing it all over again.  I couldn't not wonder if there was any truth there, anything to retrieve from the ashes between us.

"There is a war raging," he continued.  "And unless you pull your head out of the sand, you and I and about five billion other people are going to go the way of the dinosaur."  His voice dropped to a whisper. "I'm talking planned invasion.  The colonization of this planet by an extraterrestrial race."

And I was right; there were tears in his eyes.  I had to remind myself there were *always* tears in Alex Krycek's eyes.  The green I'd never see.  The truth I'd never know.  And again, here he was, in my face and lying.

"I thought you were serious," I laughed.

The gun slipped to my chest, pressing in just enough to make me inhale and hold it.  He went on like I hadn't said anything, unshaken, undeterred.  "Kazakhstan, Skyland Mountain, the site in Pennsylvania..."  He was adamant.  Passionate.  "They're all alien lighthouses where the colonization will begin, but where now, a battle is being waged.  A struggle for heaven and earth.  Where there is one law: fight or die.  And one rule: resist or serve."

"Serve who?" I asked, bland front holding.  But on the inside: pain.  My mind raced over the evidence, the events of the last several days.  All of it:  Cassandra Spender, the burnings, the implants, the faceless men...all of it.  Krycek was here.  Two feet away and confirming all the lies.  Comfirming everything.  Denying me the peace of my new convictions.  Throwing everything I'd denied back in my face.

He frowned at me, looking for all the world like he was wondering where the Mulder he had known had gone.  "No, not who," he said.  "What."

In a flash, I remembered my first case with Scully, arguing outside the hospital where we'd just seen Billy Miles.

*I'm here to solve this case, Mulder, I want the truth.*

*The truth? I think those kids have been abducted.*

*By who?*

*By what.*

I felt torn in two by Krycek.  Like always.  Like so few others, maybe no one, he spoke my language fluently, and he whispered it to my soul now.  We were of the same world.  God, he *knew* me.  He knew me, and I hated him.  Wanted to hate him.  Those same sooty eyes that blinked at me outside a motel room in New York, blinked down at me here.  No cheap, bad suit now.  No green agent.  Just the ubiquitous black leather that somehow always smelled brand new.  Like a car I wanted to drive.  Right off a cliff.

"Krycek, you're a murderer, a liar and a coward," I told him. "Just because you stick a gun in my chest, I'm supposed to believe you're my *friend*?"  The words hurt.  Well, to be honest, the one word.  More than liar.  More than murderer.  I had lost my fuck-you demeanor.  I had lost that thing that was most invaluable to me around Krycek: the armor of my disdain.  He had my pain now.  It was up to him what to do with it: deal a death blow, save it for a rainy day, or play my feelings to the hilt until he drained me of every last one.  He could drain me so fucking well.  

He blinked, eyes shining with moisture, like my word hurt him, too.  If only *anything* actually *hurt* Krycek.  

"Get up," he ordered calmly.

He leaned back and I levered myself to a sitting position, wondering if he simply prefered to execute me on my knees rather than in a pathetic ball on the floor.

"I was sent by a man...a man who knows, as I do, that resistance is in our grasp.  And in yours."

I'd never seen him so serious.  So intent on securing my attention.  My allegiance.  I was at odds, at once hating everything he stood for, but processing this thing he was telling me, this thing that seemed to affirm everything I'd come to loathe as the most collosal of lies.  And even while I hated him, I found myself rapt at the sound of his voice so close.

"The mass incinerations were strikes by an alien rebellion, to upset plans for occupation. Now, one of these rebels is being held captive. And if he dies...so does the resistance."

My heart was hammering.  I hadn't felt like this in...  It had been so long.  I'd been a wintered version of myself, perpetually cold, life littered with my own decayed faith, like black leaves, easily blown to dust.  I hadn't been breathing.  I still couldn't.  God, not just because Krycek was here telling me to!  He was the worst reason to trust anything!  He was made of lies; the blood feeding his body was astringent, vinegared sour by his own deceptions.  He was a vile thing.

He was squinting.  His lips parting.  I felt the change in him too late.  He shot forward, and I was ready for the bullet to splinter my breastbone to pieces before lodging perfectly inside my heart.  Instead, wet lips pressed hard against that unnamed spot somewhere between my cheek and the corner of my mouth.  I was rocked back by the force of it.

He didn't linger there.  He pulled away quickly.  But I still felt his breath on my face.  I felt the imprint of his mouth and the incredible heat of his body.

I watched him uncock the gun, my gun, letting the weapon dangle on the end of his middle finger, no longer needed.  He stood as he flicked it toward me and I caught it against myself.  The same serious frown graced his face as he backed away a step.  I curled my finger around the trigger.  My cock was half-erect.

"Udachi tebe, tovarisch," he said.  Some indecipherable Russian phrase that seemed to mean a great deal to him.  

It was only then that I saw it.  Dead against his left side.  Alien and vaguely threatening.  It stole my breath even as he turned to walk out my door, slamming it behind him.

I sat, shell-shocked, in the echoing silence and the profound wealth of emptiness and potential Krycek left in his wake.

---

END Book One

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