Midnight Mass

by Shannon

Pairing:  M/K

Rating:  NC-17

Summary:  Krycek goes on sabbatical from the war for colonization and finds his destiny.

Spoilers:  Various and sundry.  I know you've all seen the show, right?

Date First Posted:  12/24/04 to the Mulder/Krycek Christmas Zine.

Disclaimer:  They are owned by 1013 and FOX, but I love them more I think.

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

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Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2004...


I left in the middle of the war.  All that time spent selling souls for profit, selling myself for a higher percentage of the spoils...  In the end, I opted for a beach with ivory sand, a pair of headphones, and a bucket of cold beer bottles sparkling in the late afternoon sun.

Some would say I gave up.  They're probably right.  I saw everyone I'd ever known fall around me.  One after the other.  It wasn't just that I didn't want to be next.  It wasn't even that I thought we absolutely could not win.  It was that the fucking fight went out of me.  All of it.  I just went to pull the trigger one day and couldn't.

I sank into my couch, lit up a joint, and spiraled into nothingness.  I sat and listened to a war going on despite my inertia.  Bombs went off in the distance and I did nothing.  People went on dying without me there to order it done or stopped.  I was useless.  I was relieved beyond measure.  I laughed aloud to my water-stained ceiling.

Then I caught a charter plane down to South America.  I'd always wanted to see Rio.  I avoided the city at first.  I bought a little place outside of town.  Just a hut really.  I just smoked and drank and sat on my ass.  I marveled at the star-lit skies.  The unimpeded view.  No ships here yet.

It wasn't long before I ventured into the throng of people, the intense heat, as it was summer below the equator.  The beach was stunning.  The place throbbed with life.  

I hit the gay clubs and found myself in the arms of dark men, eyes closed, head back, high and coming.  Maybe a week I'd go to the clubs at night.  There was always somebody there to suck my cock.  Then after, I'd go out to the shore and look out over the bay, glittering with the lights like fallen jewels drowning in black ink.

I don't know if I was avoiding Corcovado or if I just never thought to look up there.  But it was days before I saw him.  His alabaster arms, drenched in robes, outstretched, the catcher in the rye.  His head was bowed, looking down on me.  I wasn't high for once.  I wasn't drunk.  But I felt the tears warm on my face, and I couldn't look away.

I knelt in the sand.  Music paraded down from the city.  The ocean waves built behind me, then fell in on themselves, rushing up to meet the soles of my feet, trying to wash me clean.  I cried all night.  I buried my face in the cooling sand as the tide went out and sobbed the sand wet.

I didn't go to the clubs after that.  I gave nearly all my herb to the kid who delivered my groceries.  His smile lacked a front tooth.  He was beautiful and open and tan and smelled always like salt water.  He was made of ocean.  Made of stars.

In the daytime, I stripped off all my clothes and went into the water, a sloppy, arcing dive into its intoxicating spray.  My body had become tan, except for my ass, and it was milky white.  Nobody was around to care, but I didn't sun in the nude anyway, mostly because it was anathema to me not to be ready to run.  

I dried off in the hot sun, shorts pulled up my legs, lying on my small stretch of beach bought for a high price but worth more.  I drank and put my headphones on, listening to my tapes.  The Beatles, Jane's Addiction, Al Green...  I took them off and listened to the surf until the sun went down.  I went in, letting the screen door bang shut.  

I stayed awake always until three or four and then fell into the relentless realm of nightmares.  Every night.  

I stand with bodies all around me and an empty gun.  Their eyes are open.  Some are blinking, not quite dead.  They plead with me.  I drop the gun, panting, and look up, only to find him high above me, arms out-stretched.  And sometimes, often, it's Mulder's face.  

I woke shaking, clammy with sweat.  I blinked my eyes in the new daylight.  I caught my breath.  The dream was gone.  Mulder was gone.  Long since taken by the war.  I ran my hands through my hair.  I closed my eyes for a long moment.  I started the daily process over, going for my swim, loosening taut muscles and rinsing off the fearful sweat.

I'd been there a couple of weeks when I started walking down my beach away from the city and didn't stop.  I figured I'd know when to turn back.  I walked for maybe four miles, sometimes having to climb over large rocks and skirt the incoming tide splashing strong against rising monolithic cliffs.  

Even though I couldn't see him, I felt the statue of Christ looming over my every step.  I've never been a religious man, but all the time I walked, I felt his presence.  I felt it like a warmth suffusing my body.  I wanted to turn around and scream at him until I was hoarse, "Don't you know who I am, mother fucker?!  Don't you know I'm EVIL?!"

The warm feeling persisted and I decided it was just the sun on my back.  I blinked the stinging salt out of my eyes, squinting to see down the glittering coast.

It was then that I saw the boat.  A medium-sized sail boat dragged inland along the sand.  Its tied down sails still flapped in the strong breeze, and I could see a man climbing over its surface, graceful and tan, his intent purely focused on the vessel.

His back was to me as I approached.  It was a narrow back, smooth and brown.  But not native, as I could see a stretch of white not unlike my own at his low back.  He hammered at the stern, bent to his task, and I thought about turning back.  But something about him transfixed me.  Maybe the strip of pale skin.  Or the beauty of the boat itself.  Maybe it was the idea of this man out here alone.  Like me.  Alone on his own stretch of sand.  For whatever reason.  All alone.

But maybe it was the drop of sweat I watched etch a path down his spine.  The anonymous sex in the clubs was one thing.  This...yearning I now felt surpassed that and settled deep in my groin, my chest, and a part of my mind normally left unengaged.  I began to wonder if he'd mind so much my coming up behind him and pressing my body to his hard.  If he'd let me roll him into the sand, pull down his shorts, baring his white ass against the ground and his cock to my hungry mouth.  

I had the oddest sensation that I'd been missing him.

Then he turned around.

His lips parted in surprise as did mine.  He looked ready to say my name.  I wasn't near ready to say his.  He was dead.  Every avenue I'd pursued (and tried to convince myself was necessary) had turned up nothing on him.  Yet here he was.  Turning toward me, sliding off the side of the boat, hammer in hand.  His hands were brown.  Long, thin, and brown from the sun.  How long had he...?

"What are you doing here?" I heard him say.

What was I doing here.  I blinked as though he were a mirage caught in the damp of my lashes.  His look was wary, cautious, yet shockingly non-violent.  I flinched anyway.

"Krycek?" he tried.  It sounded like he felt as I did:  that it couldn't be.  That he was mistaken.  That none of this was real.  That we were sharing in some dream-time recollection of what could have been.

He took a step toward me and I bolted back, gasping.  My hand came up to ward off an attack.  My stump twitched in the cup of the prosthetic which I'd worn to help leverage me over rocks.  My thoughts took a bizarre turn off of linear, off of sane, and I felt relieved that the scars were covered from his prying eyes.  For a moment, the shock of him standing there before me on a deserted beach near Rio faded and the familiarity of fear swept over me.  I had to stop myself from going for a non-existent gun.

I watched him swallow, his Adam's apple lifting seductively.  He looked suddenly calmer, but he said, "Are you here to kill me, Alex?"

For the first time, I spoke, and it was completely off the cuff.  "No!" I growled, though he would have no reason to think I'd be there for any other reason, I realized.  I shook my head, breath short.  "No," I said again, softer.  

His grip on the hammer tightened.  "What do you want with me, then?" he asked, and for the first time, I saw the little lines drawn gracefully at the corners of his eyes.  Subtle indications of both age and stress.  I wondered which lines I'd put there, which belonged to me.  Were mine to trace with the tip of my tongue, lightly, claiming.

"I..."  It was all I could manage.  My throat was dry.  I blinked, trying to see through him again, this vision I'd conjured.  An imaginary...enemy.  I nearly started laughing then.  I'd spent enough time alone with those crazy outbursts going uncensored.  I saw him see it almost happen.  His eyes narrowed.  His suspicion and the grip on that hammer finally got me to talk.  "I live here."

Inane as it sounded, it was the barest truth I could give.

"What?" he asked, as incredulous as I'd expect.

"I...live here," I said again.  

He peered at me for a moment.  Then, to my shock, he began to smile.  Slowly, as though the thoughts behind it had to build themselves into something more and more substantial.

"You live here," he said dryly.

I just stood speechless before him.  It occured to me that he should have been hitting me by now.

"You live here," he said again.  "Of course, you do."  And then he laughed.  Big and loud and real.  Mulder laughed.  And I knew he was alive.  And I knew I still was.

..........


He didn't kill me with his hammer that day.  He told me to go to hell.  But he didn't kill me.  He turned around to finish work on what I had to assume was his boat, and I turned toward home.  My chest hurt with damp like loose blood as I walked away from him.

Later that night, he busted in my screen door, self-same hammer in hand.  "What do you want with me?" he seethed.

I offered him a beer.

After a few moments of heavy breathing and a perplexed frown, he accepted.  There was no place to sit, so we took the bottles out on the sand.

"What are you doing here?" he asked again.

I had no sane way to answer that.  So I didn't.

"Has the war moved?" he suddenly asked fearfully, though, as always with Mulder, his voice didn't really change to indicate that fear.

"No," I told him, frowning and looking down into my bottle.

There was a moment where it felt like he might be holding his breath, then he said, "Are you here about my work?"

I looked up at him, what I could make of him in the light of the crescent moon.  "I live here," I told him again.  Then, "What work?"  My heart had begun to hammer violently.

He sighed, "Fuck," and took a long, long drink.

"Mulder," I prompted.

I was pretty shocked when that's all it took.

"With the Anasazi," he said.  His eyes glowed blue in the dark.  The ocean roared through my veins.

"What are you talking about?" I said quietly, because I couldn't find my voice.

He sighed.  "Krycek, why should I...?"  He faltered as he looked at me.  He blinked a few times.  He licked his lips.  "You gave up...didn't you?" he asked.

I scowled, breaking the gaze that had become too intense by several degrees.  I couldn't tell him no.  I tried.  But I said nothing.  I couldn't seem to say much of anything to him.  I remembered the dreams and then how his sweaty back curved under the sun and how I'd wanted...  How I'd wanted so much.  I wished I could go back and just walk away.

"Alex..."  he murmured next to me.  It felt close.  Like a ghost whispering in my ear.  "If you did...  If you gave up..."  He broke off and then swallowed.  "You did the right thing."

I looked at him sharply then.  The right thing?  I stood up abruptly.  "Fuck you, Mulder," I shouted.  "It's been what, three years since I've seen you?  And you think you know what the hell's gone on?  You think you know me?" I spat.  "Fuck off!" I shouted again.  Then I stalked back toward my hut, slamming the broken screen door for good measure.

I half expected him to come charging after me.  More than half.  But he didn't.  I sat on my bed with my head in my hands, angry tears flowing down my face, and he left me with nothing but his silence.  He left.  He must have left.  The sun came up, finally.  And the beach outside was empty.  I punched the wall and sat on the floor.  Empty.

..........

I tried to swim.  I tried to drown.  I went under and stayed there.  Everything was soft.  Everything was peaceful.  I came up gasping for air, unable to put an end to something so painfully unfinished.  I swam back to shore, pulling with the one arm as I've learned to do quite efficiently.

I took two days.  The first, I got dressed and went to the city.  I went to the base of the mountain and crouched at the immovable feet of something drastically bigger than myself.  I tried to feel the relief I'd first felt when I'd let all of the bullets shower from my gun like so many frozen tears, when I realized I wasn't this essential element designed to propel the war forward into more and deeper chaos.  That I may be chaos inside, as well, but that I could remove myself and self-destruct all on my own.

The relief didn't come.  All I felt was a gaping hole where my stomach was.  It was a familiar feeling, like I was hungry but too sick to eat anything.  I did eat.  I went to the Old Town and ate fish.  I couldn't fill myself up, though.  And as long as I looked up at Him, he never said a word to me.  No judgment and no absolution.

I went home and found a note on my still-broken door.

    We need to talk.  Come by the boat.  I have beer, too.
    
        M.
        
I went to tear it up.  Something held my hands, fingers tight on the fragile paper.  I set it aside in a drawer and went out for a night swim.  

I didn't go to see him.  I slept fitfully and with torrents of nightmares raining down on my heart.

I didn't go the next day.  I looked at his note, though.  His mother fucking note.  Since when did we need to talk?  We hadn't talked for three years.  We'd talked plenty before that.  Nothing would ever change between us.  I just wanted a place to lie down and sleep, real sleep, before the world ended and took me with it.  

I just wanted the fucking sun with its heat, its indestructability.  I wanted endless beer, some pot, and maybe some attention to my occasionally hard dick.

He was going to bring me back into it.  I knew Mulder.  He would never give up.  Not really.

And he didn't with me, either.  I went out to the bars that night.  I drank and watched beautiful men dancing together.  A pretty, young, shirtless boy offered to service my cock out on the beach.

"I'll suck you under the stars," he said in delicious Portuguese.

But I declined.  I pushed off the bar, a little tipsy, and headed home.  

There was another note.

    There's something I think you should see.  Come to the damned boat, Alex.
    
    M.
    
I sighed.  I held the note in my hand for a long time.  Then I got up and put it in the drawer with the other.  

The next morning I got up and pulled open the drawer, rereading both his notes.  There was a sharp, horrible pain in my chest that I couldn't deny.  I crumpled the notes, but I took off down the beach to where I knew he'd be waiting anyway.

When I got there, there was just the boat.  No Mulder.  I looked all around, my heart beating wildly, like something hungry out of the Brazilian forest.  Like something unfed.  

I climbed up on the boat, but he wasn't inside.  I peered down hesitantly and looked through the door into the companionway.  An unmade bed.  A dresser.  

"Hey!" I heard behind me.

I stood up fast.  He was walking down the sand in loose neon green shorts.  His hair was light and ruffled by sea wind.  He was squinting up at me.

"You came," he said, hands on hips.  Slim naked hips, so blatantly bare under his long fingers.  "Well, let's go," he said.

It took me several seconds, but as he turned away, I jumped down from the boat and followed.

I caught up to him and he turned his head as he walked, telling me, "It's about a two hour walk.  I don't own a car anymore."

I followed him up the beach and into the tall trees where he found a path so easily I knew he'd taken it often.  

"How long have you been here?" I asked skeptically.

I watched his bronzed shoulders shrug.  "Dunno," he said.  I heard the smile in his voice, then.  "I've lost track of time."

For some reason this made me angry.  "What did you do, fake your death?"

He laughed.  "Wouldn't you?"

It was so illogical and rational at the exact same time that I couldn't answer.  Instead I asked, "Where are we going?" in a huff.

He looked back at me, palming a tree casually as he passed.  "It's a surprise."

I hated that answer, but I refrained from snarling.  Though with the silence came a renewed awareness of not only his near nakedness but my own.  I'd gotten so used to dressing down in only shorts and maybe shoes, and I'd been so engrossed in Mulder's lack of clothes, that I'd failed to remember my own state of dress and how it mirrored his.  Native-brown, I followed him, peeking down covertly to see if the pale skin I'd seen before would reveal itself...remind me of our sameness.

"Is this a trap?"  I thought to ask, less out of survival instinct and more because I needed the distraction.  

He laughed again.  "To what purpose?  This isn't Washington D.C. now is it?"  He looked back again.  "And it isn't war."  Our eyes met briefly before he turned back around.

"Then what work are you doing out here?" I asked, frustration imminent.  I don't enjoy surprises.  The forest ceiling was pressing down on me, high and green but long in shadows dangling down like spider legs.

"Would you believe me if I said growing hemp?"  It was that characteristic Mulder monotone that did nothing to disguise his teasing.  And he must've seen my stash when he'd left the notes.  I'd thought it looked a little meager.

"Prick," I muttered beneath my breath.

"Lighten up, Krycek," he said.  And I felt something happen inside.  Something truly dangerous.  Something I would have to stop immediately.  I was warm inside.  And I felt that yearning again.

I thought that would be it, but his voice threaded back to me through the humid air once more.  "Do you believe in coincidence or fate?"

I wondered if it was a trick question.  Then I wondered what I believed.  "I believe in free will," I told him.

"So do I," he reassured.  "But do you believe there are probabilities?"  I opened my mouth, yet no sound came out, then he said, "Or that something is so probable that we almost can't escape it.  Like free will from the spirit world.  Our spirits," he finished.  

I didn't know if he meant our spirits as in humankind or...our spirits, his and mine.  Plus, I had no idea what he was talking about even in general.

"Just keep walking, Alex," he said, and the smile was back in his voice.

With that I was set free from his bemused scrutiny, a sort of pervasive good humor that seemed to waft to me from the back of his sun-lightened head.  I felt relieved and disappointed to be loose.

In the promised two hours the narrow path that had inclined steadily opened up to reveal a large clearing amidst the palms round and weathered as grandfathers.  The clearing was backed by a steep cliff face and was full of small huts, each lit with a torch out front, like a welcome lamp.

"We're here," Mulder said.  And he smiled back at me.  I frowned but followed him.

He walked right up to one of the huts.

"Mulder," I cautioned in a whisper.

He glanced at me with a "Shh."

I was too taken aback to retort in any significant way.  Before he could knock or call out, the little door opened and a child peeked out.  I couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl, but they smiled, showing white teeth.  

"I brought him," Mulder told the child, and the child nodded vigorously.  Mulder looked back at me, in the process of ducking into the hut.  "Come on."

I was becoming increasingly wary, but I followed, unsure what I would do instead.  Inside, I was greeted by what I counted to be ten more children, all rather androgenous, all seemingly happy.  It set my nerves on end.

"Where are their parents?" I asked Mulder.

"They don't have them," Mulder said.  At my frown, he gestured, "Sit.  You'll see."

"This is your work?" I whispered, begrudgingly sitting in an already formed circle, the only space left enough for two adults.  Three kids were drumming and a fourth was singing unintelligible lyrics.  "Baby-sitting tribal orphans?" I pushed him.

"Shut up, Alex," Mulder sighed matter-of-factly.  "You don't have to figure it out.  Just sit and don't kill anyone."

I scoffed at that but then stayed quiet and listened to the eerie music.  

It went on for a while and I found myself wanting to close my eyes.  I worked to keep them open.  Someone lit a fire in the middle of the dirt floor and I looked up to see an opening in the ceiling like that of a tipi.  The sparks crackled upward and drifted out into the dusk.

A new song started, slower and more melancholy than the first.  I looked at Mulder and he had his eyes closed.  I frowned.  It was too weird.  I started to get up, my insides twisting in discomfort.  His hand landed on my knee gently, but his eyes didn't open.  

"Stay, Alex," he murmured.  "I know it's hard for you."  He looked at me then, hand still warm on my bare leg.  "But stay."

I didn't nod.  I didn't say anything.  But I didn't move.  And Mulder removed his hand.  I don't think I remember closing my eyes.  But I remember voices in my head.  The singing and then a soothing kind of narrative.  And the visions started.  Like dreams, they ran without my conscious thought across the dark of my eyelids.  

I saw the war.  The bright lights of explosions made me flinch as they came out of the pitch night at me.  I heard the song behind it, telling the story of it.  The language was something ancient.  Maybe Native American or something like it, but somehow I understood every word.

The song was telling the story of something I'd just come from.  This skin I'd just walked out of.  It was too new.  I sat wounded, skin prickling as  though recently burned.  My breath became panicked.  Somehow I became aware of Mulder's continued nearness, though I looked around frantically and couldn't find him in the acrid smoke.  I heard his steady breathing and didn't try to run.

Suddenly, the song erupted and a great light appeared in the eastern horizon.  I watched, dumbfounded, as it neared, impossibly fast.  It swept over the war-torn earth, gaining on me, growing more fierce, a white-blue burn ripping over the land.  

I felt tears prick my eyes and nearly panicked once again.  I wanted to get up and run.  Get up and leave this place.  It wasn't right.  It was beautiful, but it wasn't true.  Yet it felt true.  The voices sang of its truth.  Harmony edging closer with the light.  Voices twining and threading the pain with hope.

It hurt.  God, it hurt so much!  I couldn't look at the light.  I tried to close my eyes, but they already were, and still I could see.

It hit me.  Strong like sound in the chest and gut.  It filled me, raged through me.  I felt it take my cells and burn them.  Burn them bright again.  I didn't know how dark they'd gone.  Then it was through me, moving on.  I turned to watch it go, skin brushed glowing in its wake.

Visions of the war faded behind the light as it raced to engulf the world  As it passed and I watched it go, the skies cleared of smoke.  Trees grew again, slow motion and fast, both.  I blinked and felt a warm presence next to me again.  I felt him gleaming there like a demi-god, powerful with his truth.  I looked and saw him, gently smiling.  

His lips mouthed (though I couldn't hear), "You are, too."

Villages sprang up behind him, then next to me, like something growing, organic and profusely alive.  People came out of the trees and turned round themselves, smiling.  They began to dance.  It was a beautiful thing, bold with joy, pounding the new dirt of the new Earth and sending up dust to swirl gold in the sun.  Bare feet, coated with earth.  Bare skin brown with health.  Bright eyes, undulating torsos, full hips, lean thighs...  Sensual and strong, their bodies were breathing.

And the children, emerging from the dense forest holding hands, making a circle, like the one I was now a part of.  The smiled knowingly, responsible.  Their song continued, no longer melancholy at all, but joyous.  I felt myself trembling.  Trembling and weak and scared and weeping.

And then I woke, eyes flying open to see the fire in the room being doused and the children smiling at me as they began to leave.

I turned my panicked gaze on Mulder next to me, soft and calm.  I shook my head.  I got up.

"Alex," he called as I pushed out of the hut and saw that it was full dark with the moon nearing the west.  It was most likely nearing midnight.  I'd been there hours.

"No," I murmured, already stumbling toward the path peeking out of the dark trees.  

"Alex!" Mulder called, and some children giggled.

I hit the forest and fell down the path.  I could hear him calling out to the children and then beating into the undergrowth behind me.

"Alex!" he called again.  "Wait, it's okay!"

"Bullshit!" I returned, unsure why I felt so strongly afraid.

He caught up to me.  "I know what you're feeling."

I turned to him.  A flashlight shone between us.  "How could you?" I spat at him.  I was breathing hard, still shaking.

Then he said, soothingly, "It scared me, too.  The first time."

I must have been looking at him like he'd lost his mind.  I shook my head and turned back to the path, this time walking.

"Take this," he said, nudging me with the flashlight.  I wasn't quite stubborn enough to refuse it.

Strangely, he didn't try to talk to me the rest of the way back, and I found I was still too shaken to let my fears out into the open.  I didn't want his explanations.  I wasn't ready.  I didn't know that I ever would be.

I broke into the clearing as though I'd held my breath all the way there.  Mulder stood next to me, silent.  The white surf falling in suds on the sand was unbelievably reassuring.  Again something bigger than me, stronger than me, something that could take me and break my bones apart and relieve the world of me.

"Want a beer?" Mulder offered casually.

My mouth watered and I could nearly feel my skeleton melting with the warmth of tying on a good one.  I nodded.

Mulder gestured with his chin toward the boat.  "C'mon."

It was a warm night and I leaned at the stern as Mulder brought a six pack up from the companionway.  He handed me one and leaned his hip against the side of the boat.  Two vague, unseen metal things banged together in the breeze high overhead.  (I know nothing about boats.)  My beer was already opened so I took a long drink, looking up at the restless sails and dewy stars past them.

"Cheers," Mulder said and drank as well.

When I felt I could speak, I finally uttered hopelessly, "What was that, Mulder?"  Not that I was ready to hear it, but what else were we going to talk about?  I supposed I could just drink and not talk at all, but some crazy part of me thought that might be unconscionably rude.

"You sure?" Mulder asked.  His sensitivity to me had me supremely uneasy.  

I looked at him askance.  He drank again and moved closer, slowly though.  He sat on the edge of the boat and hunched.  I couldn't help noticing the unselfconscious slant to his sensuality.  The smooth back and bare nipples, red like clay.  The lean biceps relaxed.

Then he began.  "Those children are channels.  Crystal children with their own spiritual knowledge, but beyond that, they also channel the Anasazi.  They are one of many groups around the world channeling different non-physical or off-world entities."  Here he stopped.  Maybe because I looked petrified.  "Alex?"

I wanted to ask, Why are you calling me that?  But I refrained and went with, "Go on."  At least I knew that off-world entities probably meant aliens.  I congratulated myself wryly and listened, drinking the rest of my beer.

"What you saw was the future."

And when he said it a fear choked me that had nothing to do with the all-too certain war and everything to do with not wanting to have to learn hope once more.  "No, it wasn't," I said hoarsely.

"You, uh..."  He gestured down to my empty bottle.  "Need another."  He handed me one and I drank it halfway down.

"Mulder..."  I started.

"What are you doing down here, Krycek?" he interrupted.

I was caught, then, unable to tell him anything.  Part of why I was here was to figure out why I was here.  To figure out what I was without this war to name me.

"Do you know?" he then asked spookily.  "You don't have to answer," he went on.  "You don't have to understand any of this for it to happen."  His pause was seemingly more to study me than that he needed time to think.  "But I want you to understand."

His eyes held something for me.  Maybe it was understanding, though I couldn't hold that inside my head for long lest it travel through my blood to my heart where it could be judged false.  Where that judgment could hurt and maybe forever.  

"Why?" I couldn't help but ask.  My voice seemed to get whisked away on a strong wind, but Mulder shifted, spreading his legs and taking a draught of beer.

He shrugged, surprising me.  "Why do you think you were brought here, Alex?"  His eyes drilled me.  "I don't believe in coincidence.  And I don't believe you're here so that you can get a nice tan and die of a jellyfish sting."

"A sting can kill you?" I had to ask.

He rolled his eyes.  "I don't know," he admitted.  "My point is..."  Then he stood.  And walked closer.  I could feel the heat of him.  "I haven't seen you in three years...and here you are...and here I am...and..."  He shrugged again and turned, finishing his beer.

We stood then, both watching the water, the black swells crested with foam.  I had an insane thought about Starbucks and had to stifle an eruption of laughter.  Maybe I just didn't know how different this life was here until something familiar showed up to contrast it.

I downed the rest of my second beer, feeling the wind on my body, raising the hairs on my arms, my stomach.  I let my eyes drop to Mulder's butt.  I swallowed.  "I need to go," I said.

He turned to watch me, only nodding his assent as I fled.  

"Thanks...for the..."  I gestured toward the bottles standing on the stern like sentinels.

"No problem," he replied.  "Take this."  And he tossed me his flashlight.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I think I scampered over the side to get away.  I know it was fear that propelled me over.  I took a big sigh as my feet hit the sand and Mulder had disappeared from view.  But his voice, disturbingly calm and assured, followed me:  "See you tomorrow, Krycek."

I walked away quickly, not answering and feeling his gaze on my back even after I melted into the darkness.

..........


The next day I was back just after sunset.  I was there as a ghost, not knowing why or how I'd gone there, only that I found myself looking at Mulder's boat again with Mulder on it, crawling around the mast like a big, hairless monkey.  Like a boy.  He looked as young as years ago, climbing up out of that pool.  

I think a part of me was back just so I could stare at him some more.

And I'd returned with the flashlight, something in me intending to stay long enough for dark to fall.  I pushed at the knowledge, willing it to recede, to become meaningless in this world so choked with layers of meaning I could hardly see myself in it anymore.

Mulder saw me finally, raising his hand to shield eyes I couldn't yet make out.  He called, "Well, come on," and I went.

He put out a hand to help me over the side.  I hesitated but took it.  His pull was strong, the palm of his hand warm and moist.  He smelled like wood stain and...

He held out a lit joint to me.  "Thought we could try your poison tonight."

"You prick, that's my weed!" I growled at him, but my heart wasn't in it;  it was in my crotch, beating drumlike, just looking at Mulder offering me a joint and smiling.  

"Yeah, and I'm giving it back now," he shrugged.

I put down the flashlight with Mulder watching, and I took the joint, still maintaining a good scowl.  But I took a nice, deep drag and held it in, feeling it circulate to all the raw places first, all those spaces between the fortresses of muscle and blood.  Those spaces exposed and vulnerable.  I exhaled and let the smoke soothe me.  I handed the joint back to Mulder, trying to make it look grudging.  He took it and dragged.

I watched his face screw up, eyes disappearing and cheeks going hollow.  I found him fascinating, irrational, unfamiliar.  Something occured to me in that moment watching Mulder toke up that should have hit me days before.

"You quit the FBI," I said in honest wonder.

He just blew the smoke out, vaguely smirking.  Then he shrugged and tilted his chin up to show the long column of his throat, looking up at the mast high overhead.  "Well, I died.  They kind of quit paying you after that."

I stared at him, this version of him, until he spoke again as easily as if we were but neighbors.

"She'll be ready to take out tomorrow night," he said.  It took me impossibly long moments to figure out he was talking about the damned boat.  I guess I had taken a monster hit.  "Tea?" he offered.  I saw the jug resting on the hatch and nodded.  Pot always gave me cotton-mouth and the tea beckoned, so sunny and golden and...wet.  "Best view's over here," he called, juggling joint and tea glass as he maneuvered to the bow, sitting facing the water.

I followed again, getting comfortable only close enough to take the joint when it was my turn.  For maybe fifteen minutes nobody said anything.  We just got stoned and watched the water.  The tea was obscenely sweet.

"How do you know that's the future?" I finally blurted.

He sighed, hugging his shins like a teenager.  I watched his profile through the coiling smoke.  He squinted.  Then he looked right at me.  "Didn't it feel like truth to you?"

Seemed like a flimsy arguement.  Except that it did feel that way.  Very distinctly as I remembered.  In the work, I always trusted my instincts and they kept me alive.  The only time they failed me was in the Siberian forest, but I have the reminder on me at all times so that I haven't made the same mistake twice.  Point is...if it had been anything else and felt like that, I wouldn't have questioned it.  I'd just know it was real.  But somehow, I could believe in car bombs more than peace on earth.  

The thought was enough to make my lip curl.  "That's a shitty answer, Mulder," I told him.

"That's a shitty attitude, Krycek," he countered.  But he offered me the joint, perhaps though only to help correct my 'attitude.'  I took it a little roughly from his fngers and ash dropped between us.  I pulled the smoke deep into my lungs and kept my eyes on the sea.

Mulder went on.  "I was skeptical, too, at first."

I couldn't help a challenging look.  He met my gaze without rancor.  In fact, he seemed a little amused with me.  With himself.

"I left the Bureau and my entire life to come down here and pow-wow with interdimensional kids who channel the Anasazi.  I'd be crazy not to think I'm crazy once in a while."  He took the joint back and inhaled.  He spoke with the smoke held in his lungs. "Just don't tell Scully I said that."

I found myself absently shaking my head in silent conspiratorial agreement.  I took a drink of tea for something to do, and Mulder lit a second joint.  I was becoming happily buzzed and worried that I might let something go in front of him, with him.    

"What makes you believe?" I asked after the question turned in my head a few times;  it was only going to leave through my mouth apparently.

He looked at me again, and I tried not to watch a bead of fragrant sweat rolling down his shoulder.  "Time," he replied.  "And intuition."  He looked away then, squinting out at the water.  "You know what that's like, don't you, Alex?"

"Why aren't you mad at me?"

It was a question I'd never intended to ask.  Not just because I thought it was be unwise to look a gift horse in the mouth, but because it would invariably come out sounding whiney.  And it did.  I may as well have simply asked, 'Why don't you hit me anymore?' with a big tearful pout.

He sighed.  He was quiet so long, I thought maybe I'd only thought the words.  Or that he didn't want to answer.  That I'd pushed him too far and the mere question would snap him awake to himself and I'd feel the crushing blow of his fist into my jaw in the blink of an eye.

Instead, he asked thoughtfully, "Did you ever watch cartoons, Krycek?"  I waited, sure it was rhetorical and derivitive of his pot high rather than a logical train of thought.  But he continued without me.  "I was a morose little fuck as a teenager.  You probably knew that from the files they gave you on me.  Anyway," he dragged and then handed the joint back to me.  I frowned and took it, his long fingers brushing against my own.  

"I spent a lot of time on the couch watching cartoons.  And there was this one on the Bugs Bunny n' Road Runner Show."  He gestured out to the ocean as if the characters were performing on a stage for me to see.  "There was this dog.  Sheep dog.  Think his name was George.  And there was a wolf.  Name of...Ralph.  Anyway, they were mortal enemies in-so-much-as the dog's job was to guard the sheep herd and the wolf's job was to steal and eat the sheep.

"Anyway, they'd clock in at this tree everyday and everyday they'd do their jobs."  He started glancing at me as he spoke, but suddenly I felt hot and nervous and I couldn't look him in the eye.  He kept going.  "Then...just as something horrible was about to happen, as in the wolf getting a sheep and the dog having to kill him, the quittin' time bell would go off.  And you know what they'd do?" he asked me.

I remembered the cartoon, but I said nothing.  I needed to hear him say it.

"They'd stop what they were doing, go clock out, and they'd say goodnight to each other, all the while knowing they'd have to come back the next day and do it all over again."  He took a drink and sighed again.  "You've done some horrible things.  You've hurt me, Krycek.  I'm not saying you haven't."  Then he looked at me, and I looked at him.   I had to.  "We're not exactly the dog and the wolf."  

His eyes were more tired now.  I saw the man who, in the final days, seemed too exhausted, too hopeless to hit me.  That man blinked at me.  Then he held his hand out for the joint, trusting me to give it to him, this simple, remarkable thing.  I handed it over, the exchange nearly tender as we tried not to burn our fingers.  

He looked back out at the water as the light truly began to fade.  "Not exactly," he said again softly.

We finished the joint, and I don't know if I sat there with him for a few more minutes or a few more hours, but it was dark again when I left.  

I stood and he looked up at me, then he blinked his eyes back to the surf, only visible now when it crashed in on the sand.  "Tomorrow," he said succinctly.  I think I nodded.  I started to walk away when he called me back, "And Krycek?"

I turned.  "Yeah."

He wasn't looking at me...was turned completely away so I couldn't see his face.  "I never said I wasn't mad at you."

I frowned, waiting for him to say more, but he didn't, so I grabbed up his flashlight again before I started the long, thought-plagued walk back home.

..........


I dreamed of Mulder's future.  One where the war not only ended but got swept away on a wave of light so that its scars faded to nothing.  I felt myself fading to nothing.  A relic, useless as any missile, archaic as hate.  I tried to hold onto the war.  I felt the wisps of black smoke curl in my fingers as my fist shook.

Mulder's hand landed on my shoulder.  "None of that is you," he said.

I wrenched away.  "Yes, it is!" I shouted.  I screamed.  "It IS!"

I woke sweating, clawing at the one sheet.  I searched around me for some fossil to prove me to myself.  No gun anymore.  Nothing of the too-dark, too-recent past.  Nothing but the plastic and metal strapped onto my shoulder and across my chest like an inanimate albatross.  And looking at it, I had to wonder what I was trying so hard to hold onto.  

I nearly ran to Mulder's boat.  It wasn't out of some realization I'd made.  I hadn't come to any drastic conclusions.  And I was afraid to see him, more so than I'd ever been.  But I ran anyway.  Because he seemed to want to see me.  He seemed to see in me something I couldn't find in myself.

When I got there, I was panting, and the boat wasn't in the sand.  I followed the drag marks into the gentle tide and looked out to sea.  Not far from shore, Mulder's boat rode the swelling water.  I couldn't hear him, but I saw him waving.  I looked around the beach, frowning.  I was going to have to swim.  And leave my arm.  No one was around, nor had anyone ever shown up while I'd been hanging out with Mulder on his boat.  It seemed deserted enough, but the idea of leaving it was...petrifying.  I stood on the hot sand, indecisive, for a long while.

Mulder waved again, and I had the presence of mind to wave back.  Then with an indrawn breath, I took off my arm and hid it in the brush up the beach.  I felt the sun around the old scars and cupped the abraded stump in my hand.   I watched Mulder standing on his boat, body shifting with each wave, watching me.  I took another breath and took a running dive into the next large crest.

I felt the water bring parts of me alive that usually forgot to feel on land anymore.   My skin prickled with the warm salt.  I let my mouth fill with it and the taste was electric.  My cock became buoyant, flaoting in my shorts, slapping my legs as I kicked.  

I reached the boat and climbed the ladder.  Mulder was there at the top reaching out a hand to me.  I shook my head no, avoiding his eyes as I hauled myself into the boat, my one arm tired and straining a little.  I felt ashamed that I'd declined his offer, both out of stubborn pride and distrust.  

I felt sure he read the emotion off of me flawlessly, but all he said was, "Shit, Alex, you're a better swimmer than I am."

I shook the water out of my hair, and the droplets hit him in the chest.  I didn't know what to say to that or how to feel.  I wanted to get pissed, to accuse him of patronizing me. Only thing was, I knew for a fact he wasn't.  Mulder would never throw me a bone like that.  Never.  It probably cost him more to say it than it did me to hear it.  And that made it feel kind of...good.  So good I forgot about the naked stump until he walked away having not blinked an eye at it.

He picked up a towel and looked back at me, eyebrows raised. I shook my head, licking the salt water off my upper lip.  He nodded and I got the sense he let himself sun-dry as well.  I allowed myself to look him up and down, unable not to picture that newly tan body wet, dripping, shining in the sun.  I felt my shorts clinging to my cock as it began to get hard.

"Beer?" Mulder asked.

"Yeah," I replied, for the first time smelling the grilling fish.  I nearly moaned.  I hadn't eaten yet.

"Hope you're hungry," Mulder said then, mirroring my thoughts.  

"You fish?" I asked, and though I really didn't want it to sound that incredulous, it did.

"Uh, no," was the answer.  "They help me."

"The kids?" I asked, now actively striving for incredulity.

"Hell yeah," Mulder said.  "They're good at it.  And with this little Hibachi here..."  He trailed off and half turned to me.  This time his eyes took in the view, yet his somewhat guarded expression didn't let me see if he had an opinion of what he saw.  I noticed that he did finally briefly inspect my stump of an arm, but it got no more attention than anything else and very soon he was brushing imaginary dust from his hands and sighing, walking away.

He fished a beer out of a cooler next to the grill and handed it to me.  I nodded my thanks.

"It'll be done in a few more minutes," he told me.  Then softer, "You have good timing."

And though I found the remark ironic if not downright tongue-in-cheek, I refrained from commenting.  It could only be to my detriment, and even though he wasn't acting like it, he had insisted that he never said he wasn't mad at me.  For the hundredth time since he'd said it, I wondered what the hell was going through his mind.  He seemed changed.  And I couldn't tell if it was more because of the war we'd both been in or the serene lack of one here and now.

His newness, his own pensive serenity, had me off-guard.  He had me never wanting to exhale, afraid I'd blow him away like a facade and reveal the darker truth underneath, our shared memories, shadowing us even in the sun.

He sat on the lid of the cooler and motioned for me to take the seat across from him.  It was a lawn chair, one that had not been on deck before.  One he must have brought out for this.  For me.  I swallowed hard and sat, feeling the sway of the boat and listening to the sizzling fish and flapping sails.  He watched me.  Like I was taking the witness stand to receive the crossfire of prosecution and defense.

With each passing moment that I didn't feel the blow of accusation from him, my unease grew until I was nearly ready to confess all my sins to him, kneel at his feet, and beg to be beaten.  As the smoke from the grill wafted over my face, I used the excuse to wipe at my eyes where confused tears clung to my eyelashes hazardously.

We each had a beer, and I watched Mulder tilt his face up to the sun, receiving it with a rather sedate smile on his lips.  We didn't talk.  I was beginning to think he expected me to start, maybe sensed the thoughts brewing inside me and was simply waiting for me to vomit them out in a fit of pressurized guilt.  I began to get edgy with a touch of righteous anger.  If he was going to play it that way, he could fucking well wait for his confession till hell swept over this paradise, too, and took us under with it.  Arrogant prick.

But he was the one to break the silence.  "It's no accident you saw the visions," he said out of the blue.  

"What do you mean?  They drugged us?"

He laughed then, in the relaxed way normal people do.  I coiled with tension.  "No.  They didn't drug us, Krycek."  He said my name as though it were a state of being, some place I went when I was darkest, some person he could qualify through the weight of my paranoia.  Maybe he was right.  God, had I become so predictable?  Had he moved on without me?

He continued, more serious, "The only plot you'll find there is one in which they're attempting to manifest heaven on earth."  

"You mean it's not a done deal?" I asked snidely.  I regretted my tone immediately for no apparent reason I could gather.  I kept it to myself, keeping my expression suitably...predictably...closed.

"Free will isn't just a myth, Krycek, you know that," he replied.  "But yeah, critical mass is near."

"Critical mass?" I parroted.

He took a drink of his beer then leaned forward, more intent.  He nodded.  "The point at which is is a done deal.  When enough souls gather with one pure intent."

"Peace," I said.  Or rather tried to say.  I lost my voice on the foreign word.

"You can imagine a world taken over by a tyrannical, at best, alien race but you can't conceive its opposite?" he asked me.  "I'm talking about sovereignty, Krycek.  Something I thought you were mortally invested in."  

"Freedom isn't the same as perfection," I spat, leaning forward as well.  He had me seething with hardly contained heat, bristling with frustration borne of his incessant idealism.

"What world are you working to try and save?" he asked me, voice unaccountably soft.  "You're obsolete, Krycek.  You knew that or you wouldn't be here.  You aren't trying to save it anymore.  It's the smartest thing you've ever done."  

I balled my hand into a fist, but his face gentled, a sympathetic smile grazing his overly full lips.

"I didn't ask for your medal of honor, Mulder," I snarled.

He breathed a laugh, the cursed smile not yet evaporating under my anger.  "That's not what I'm offering you," he murmured.  I frowned at the look of utter confidence on his face.  He held a secret under there.

"Since when are you the poster boy for defeat?" I prodded, knowing he was right that I gave up, but it still didn't feel all rose petals and fuzzy kittens to be called on it.  It was childish, but I felt like dealing out a dose of, 'I know you are, but what am I?'

"Not defeat," he corrected.  "Just no war."  His answer held a tired relief that I begrudgingly identified with.  I nearly ached to ask him how it had felt for him, if it had gotten him as it had me, that death blow to my will to fight.  Is that what he felt?  Is that why we were both on his boat in Brazil rather than taking bullets on the frontlines?

"You weren't called here to fight," he told me.

"I wasn't called-" I began.

"You were," he insisted.  "Alex...everything happens for a reason."  He blinked and I found myself staring into his eyes.  Deep foamy green like the ocean after a storm.  Like turning over a wet leaf, exposing the fresh veined underside.  "They need your help."

I blinked and came back to myself more, out of his thrall.  "What?"

But he just sniffed the air and smiled.  "Done," he proclaimed the fish.  And with that, our conversation as over.  He got up and made us up plates of hot fish and grilled vegetables, handing mine over with another beer as well.  I frowned at my plate.  "Eat up, Krycek," he said.  "It's not poisoned."  The smirk on his face as I watched him take a large bite of fish and red pepper was more insolent little boy than hard-core nemesis.  I continued to frown, unsure why anyone here would need someone like me,  but I ate a bite as well.

And it was, quite plainly, divine.  I would have said so if we were something more like friends.  I no longer knew what we were.  I felt like a failure in both worlds and he seemed to shine on despite everything, despite me.  

"Good, huh?" Mulder prodded with his mouth full, completely uninhibitedly fishing for a compliment.  From me of all people.  Maybe, though he once would have rather shot me dead than see me take another breath, he trusted my culinary opinion.

I nodded my head and managed to tell him, "It's delicious."  My voice was rough with unshed emotion, sounding not at all sane since for all he knew we were discussing his aptitude as a chef, not mine as a human being.

A human being...  I realized I hadn't thought of myself as one for a very, very long time.  

"These utensils are corn-based," he said.

I swallowed.  "What?"

"They're made out of corn instead of plastic.  Cool, huh?"

I didn't answer him.  As if I'd been programmed only to engage in discourse directly relating to something that could mean life or death.  And then, half the time or more, I'd be lying.  I started wondering what my life was made of.   Half-truths, denials, manipulations, head games, hide and seek, guns and ammo.  Metal shells and a well-placed word.  I was shadows.  I was less than my own reflection in the mirror.

He chewed and watched me, and I dropped my eyes, forcing the food down despite its incredible flavor and my hunger for it.  I had a deeper hunger.  Although I was reasonably sure salvation was years and miles out of my reach by now.

When we were finished, Mulder belched and took my plate.  

"Why did you ask me here?" I asked, catching him off-guard.  He paused with the plate in his hand then threw it in the trash bin.

He put his hands on his hips.  Narrow hips hardly holding up his shorts once more.  He looked down at me calmly.  His eyes held that synthesis of rebuke and bemusement.   Ash and jewel, clear blades and precious metals glinting sagely at me, outlined with time but beautiful.

"Because I don't believe in coincidence."

I scoffed and stood.  "You think this was all some ordained movement of the universal ethers and electrons and... jungle fairies to somehow put us in the same place at the same time to effect some ultimate peace mission to save the world?"

"Give the boy a prize."

"I'm not a boy," I growled, feeling my shoulders stiffen.  The leftover biceps on my left arm clenched hard.  Mulder looked at it, making the muscles coil tighter even, trying to recede back into the bone, afraid, ashamed, furious.  I was furious.  I had no control over those muscles anymore.  They felt like meat.  Just this numb, dead thing hanging onto me.  Inhuman.  Kin to the bloody muscle beating in my chest.  Unredeemable.

"You're not what you think you are," Mulder said, infuriating me further.

"Is that why you brought me here, Mulder?  To tell me what I am?"

"I didn't bring you here," he said almost sadly, a little impatiently, shaking his head.  I stepped in closer, breathing hard, but he cut off my misplaced wrath.  "You're here of your free will, Alex.  If you're not, please."  He lifted his hand toward the side of the boat behind me.  "Go."

We stared at one another, the touch of his gaze on mine incendiary, like old times.  Like Hong Kong and Flushing and Siberia.  The map of the world reads like a cheap romance to me.  We set fire to those places.  This flame between us far from banked, though I've wished for that time and again.  Still here, I couldn't help but think.  Goddamned still here.  He blinked his eyes and I turned but didn't walk away.  Didn't take his out.

"You found me, Alex," he said, so soft and so quiet.  

I half-turned back to him.  "Why?" I finally asked, conceding defeat, ignorance, fear.  It came out a whisper.

He smiled then.  "Because you wouldn't make it to that future without me."

"Yeah?" I replied, disheartened.  It wasn't my future.  It was his delusion.  "What's in it for you?  You get to fuck with my head?"

His vague smile remained for a moment, though without an answer to my question.  Then it wavered, as though brushed with too strong a wind.  He looked down.  "You think this is easy for me?  Seeing you?"

My frown deepened.  "I think you know something I don't, and I don't appreciate being kept in the dark."  It had been years since I'd made any kind of similar assertion, but I flinched a little when he shifted his weight, expecting that same fist to split my lip yet again.

He sighed in frustration.  "Dammit, Alex..."  He turned, hands still on hips, and walked to the rail away from me.  He took the metal bar in his hands and I could see them tighten.  He turned back.  "I don't want to fight you and yet you still..."  He stopped again, exhaling loudly, and proceded to mutter to himself.  "I knew you'd do this, you little..."  I felt urgency seep into my bloodstream, making me ready for physical contact.  But he sighed again.  "Krycek...just shut up.  Okay?"

I waited for whatever he would do next.  He opened the cooler and got out another beer.  He drank down half and then handed it to me.  "Here.  There's nothing in the rules that says we can't do this drunk."

Do what? I wondered.  But I drank it anyway.  I was far from even tipsy and I felt sure he was, too.  When I was finished I looked at him darkly, panting, wishing I'd never set eyes on his boat.  Wishing I didn't have his 'future' tattooed on my brain.  Why the fuck did he have to choose Brazil?  It really was too strange...us meeting here.  What's the opposite of fortuitous?

Star-crossed?  Doomed.

He smirked at me, though it seemed more than a little self-deprecating.  "I told you," he said.  "You don't have to believe it.  Any of it."  He stepped closer.  "They want to work with you."  He nodded to the shore and the steep, forested hills beyond.  "The kids chose you.  But you don't have to join them.  You just have to be willing to lay down your weapons."

My lips parted in my confusion.  I not only had no weapons to lay down, I didn't even have a left arm with which to defend myself from him.  "Wh-?" I began.

"Shut up," he admonished, and to my surprise, I shut my mouth.  He walked closer.  "It's you, Alex."  Closer.  "You're a bomb ready to go off."  His brow crinkled, though it wasn't a frown.  It was...concern.

"I don't need your..."

"Yes.  You do," he told me.  "You need what I have to give you."  

I swallowed as he neared.  The wind picked up a chill from somewhere far out at sea and brought it inside my skin.  I shivered.  The sun was going down, but it wasn't the weather so much as his face, his nearness, my terror.

"It's not pity if that's what you think," he murmured, so close now his voice carried between us despite the rising wind.  "I don't pity you.  I never did.  Not even when I hated you."  

He reached up and brushed his fingers over my left shoulder.  I wrenched away quickly with a sharp gasp.  He dropped his hand after a lingering moment of it hanging empty in the air.  I don't know which was worse, him touching my arm or that fact that he touched me at all without hitting me.  His touch has always brought pain.  I didn't know what those fingertips could feel like...the gentle pressure finding a place much deeper and making it sore to the touch.  And there...  Where they broke me.  Touching there.  Goddamn him.

"Don't-" I tried.

"Touch you again?" he finished.  

His gaze rose in heat, plucking the warmth out of the air and using it to spear me.  It was a moment charged with the past, with the fuel of that, the remembered pain and frustration of unnamed longing.  "But you need it," he said.  "You need so much, Alex."

"I don't need anything," I snarled.  "I don't know what you want, Mulder, but-"

Then suddenly he was on me, grabbing my shoulders and slamming me back against the side of the hatch.  My eyes opened wide in surprise and I couldn't help the quiet grunt;  he shocked it out of me.  His lips mashed against mine, ripping my upper lip open on my own teeth.  He was shaking.  I was frozen, rigored with denial and fear, until his mouth opened and took mine with it, prying at my lips and sliding his tongue into my mouth.  

And then I unlocked.  I shut my eyes in abandon, mindless, and I tore at him as he did at me then.  I tilted my head and took his tongue to the back of my throat, ripping at his hair until my fist trembled with how hard I wanted him.  Then I pushed his hot tongue back inside his mouth while he groaned, and I fucked him open with my own tongue, changing the angle of the brutal kiss, breathing hard.  I felt stronger than I had in years.

His hands took my hips and hauled me in hard against his erect cock.  We both grunted.  The feel of skin on skin when our chests pressed together was a potent alchemical reaction, so amazing it was dangerous.  I licked his tongue and he forced it back into my mouth.  

I wasn't shadows if he could do this to me.  I wasn't fading.  I was a man.  A bad one.  But there it was, undeniable, my humanity.  My cock was concrete, unsentimental as it pushed up to mate the rising scent of my sex with Mulder's.  It was nothing but need.

He pulled away hard but stayed close.  "I could fuck you right here on deck, Krycek," he panted.  "But we're not square.  Not yet."

His eyes were deep black, nearly overtaken by the pupil.  And for the first time since I saw him, I was beginning to understand what he was about.

"You want your revenge," I murmured dully.  My pulse beat fast, not ready to be done feeling as horribly good as he had made me feel, was still making me feel as our bodies had not parted, subsisting even as my hope started to die.  I blinked moisture out of my eyes.  "You cruel son of a..."

"What part of shut up is so difficult for you?" he growled, still panting quietly.  Then he licked a trace of blood from the corner of my mouth, making it sting.  He whispered into my trembling lips, "There.  I've tasted your blood."  I tasted his breath, warm and tainted with me.  "Is that enough revenge to ease your wounded soul, Alex?"

I closed my eyes.  His body pressed tight to mine, so hot, was too much.  His words...too much.  I knew it wasn't blood I needed to give him, and it wasn't blood he intended to take.  This wasn't revenge.  It was a reckoning.

He backed away a step and I opened my eyes to see him look off at the setting sun then back at me.  "You're cold," he said.  I was shivering, but I wasn't cold, and I knew he knew that.  "Come with me," he instructed.  His eyes were serious now, the calm of before melted away to reveal the ragged shreds of his emotions.  Yet he still exuded strength.  Something I could never take away from him.  I found myself both envious and grateful.  "Come downstairs, Alex."  

I found myself following him as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, leaving a purple stain across the water.  Of my own free will, following him down into the warm little cave of his cabin, the one I'd seen before, except now the bed was made.  He reached around me and shut the hatch, enclosing us in the cozy space.  The gentle rocking of the waves tested my steadiness.  

"I used to get sea sick," Mulder said, coming back around in front of me.  "But that was years ago.  Before I knew you.  I was a different person then."  

His gaze was soft once more, even with the quiet accusation.  Maybe it was the task lighting, the small lamp by the bed all warm and diffused that made him appear so...tender.  It wasn't me at all.  What was he seeing when he looked at me like that?  Something not real.  I'd never before entertained the idea that Mulder might be crazy.  It was funny.  Everybody else did at the drop of a hat.  But not me.

"You're different, too," he told me.  "You must feel that," he insisted.  "Maybe you just don't know what it is that's changed.  And that's why you're dangerous."

I frowned at him, my erection almost gone.  I couldn't help looking down to see that his was flagging some but still stood out from his body proudly inside his loose shorts.  Like the rest of him, it had nothing to be ashamed of.

"It's Christmas Eve," he said then.  I was so stunned, I gasped, my wide eyes searching his face to see if it was true.  He shrugged.  "You have good timing."  Then, "We do," in a murmur.

I watched him walk over to the side of the bed and open a drawer.  He brought out candles and lit them, securing them to sconces.  Their light flickered about the cabin.  The feeling that swept over me was, at first, utterly unfamiliar.  It was warm, like being drunk, yet I wasn't.  It dawned on me that what I was probably feeling was safe.

"I'm half-Jewish and half-Christian, so we never really committed to any celebration," he went on, turning and sitting on the bed, his half-erect cock jutting up from his lap.  Mulder seemed completely unselfconscious of it.  I was vividly aware.  

"It's weird," he said.  "I never even considered that we could have done both.  We just did nothing.  And I accepted that.  I didn't have a choice anyway."  He was looking at me.  The boat groaned beneath us.  I started to speak, then remembered I wasn't supposed to.  It was all right.  I didn't know what I wanted to say.

"I like Yule," he continued.  "Do you know about Yule...Krycek?"

I shook my head.

"Come over here and I'll tell you about it."

Trance-like, I followed the soothing echo of his voice in my head.  There was no reason to feel safe.  A war was going on.  Mulder and I weren't friends.  We had been enemies for years.  Nothing was what it should have been here.  But it was too much like what I desperately wanted.  His taste wasn't out of my mouth yet, and temptation was too great, even if this encounter, whatever it was, ended up costing me my life.

He looked up at me as I stood before him.  "Take those off," he said, nodding to my board shorts.  I hesitated, and he reached out and pulled the string himself, loosening the tie for me in one swift motion.  "I want you naked," he said.  "As naked as you can be."

With that, I could feel my dick getting hard again.  The boat swayed and took me with it, making me stumble toward him.  My shins hit the small bed.

"Do it," he said.  And then I watched him move back on the bed, leaning on an elbow.

I touched trembling fingers to the strings and pulled them apart.  My erection was already trying to escape through the gap.  I looked down to see the glistening pink head nudging the fabric.  I pulled the shorts out to clear my bouncing cock and then took them all the way off, standing straight again with my dick sticking out in Mulder's direction.  I want that, it seemed to say artlessly.

Mulder pulled the top sheet down the bed.  "Get in."

I followed his directions, but the safety I felt pitched and rolled with some other emotion akin to fear.  I marveled that I could feel both so closely together as I crawled in beside him.

He made room for me, though we lay close, bodies touching, his knees colliding with my thigh as I stretched out on my back.  I don't know what I expected but it wasn't Mulder's hand closing gently around my cock.  I stifled the gasp that came with his hot fingers squeezing tight around me, and what sounded from my throat was something strangled and beast-like, perverted with years gone by and no avenue perfect for slacking this lust except for him.

"Yule," he said, stroking his fisted hand up my cock, moving the skin over the rising shaft .  "Is about the light of the Sun returning to the earth, birthed by the Goddess."  His thumb nudged and caressed under my cockhead and I turned my face on the pillow, unable to breathe.  

"You know," he explained as he jacked me.  "The feminine aspect of Spirit."  To my cock's credit perhaps, Mulder's voice became deep and slightly labored as he continued to slowly pull up on my dick until I was bubbling pre-ejaculate.  "It's about awakening," he said, squeezing more of it out until it dripped off his fingers, ran down the base of my cock, down my balls even.  His touch was molten.   "About new things.  Letting go of old regrets."  I was panting, hardly listening.  I could only hear the hum of blood through my ears.

He pumped me a few more times until I was grabbing fistfuls of sheet to keep from pulling him to me or running away.  Then he released my fully erect cock and took my balls and rolled them in his hand as he spoke.  

"Do you think they're all yours?  The regrets?"  His face dropped to my shoulder, nuzzling the scars, eyes shut.  "Do you?"  

I felt his ragged breath there, dampening the skin.  He squeezed my balls hard.  I gasped and pressed my head back into the pillow, biting my lip.  He was terrifying me. I felt his slick, warm tongue bathe the stump and had to fight each response as it showered down on top of me: fight, cry, wilt, scream...

His face moved over my chest and he breathed over my nipple until it was tight, all the while massaging my aching ball sac with deft, knowing fingers.

"I'm going to tell you why you're here now," he said over my heart.  "And this part, you're not just going to believe...you're going to know."  He licked my nipple into his mouth, hand releasing me to push my legs farther apart, opening me.

He lifted his head as he shifted down my body.  "You betrayed me."  With that he lowered his mouth to my navel and slowly drank me, lapping around the rim once...twice...and dipping inside.  Excruciatingly slow.  He bit down on the skin of my belly below it.  "You marked me with that."  He bit harder.  My dick slapped him lightly on the chin, and I flinched with pleasure and fear.  "You'll never know how deep that went, Alex," he told me, licking the superficial wound he'd made.

"Mulder-" I began above him, all breath exhaled on his name.

"Not yet," he told me.  "Soon.  If you want to, you can scream...just not yet."  His hand found my turgid cock again and steadied it.  His mouth hovered over it.  "You murdered my father, Krycek."

Fear wrapped around my heart like a python and the boat rolled to the right, groaning.  But he licked the tip of my cock.  Pain and lust rocketed through me.  I reached for him with my left hand, forgetting.

"The list of things painful in my life mostly come stamped with your name," he went on, tilting his head and pressing soft lips under the head.  "Don't think I don't remember them.  Every single one of them."

"I..."  It was a slip, but one I couldn't help.  

"Don't defend yourself, Alex," he murmured into the thick vein running the length of my cock.  He licked it.  "It isn't required."  He licked it again, slow and wet.  "And this isn't going where you think it is."  He lifted up and positioned himself over me, lips close.  "You've never been where I'm taking you."  Then he wrapped his mouth around my cock and pushed his face down, feeling the way with his tongue and closing his eyes again.

I turned my face into the pillow to muffle the sound of my distress, my grief, the inferno he set loose on my body.  Mulder sucked my cock back up to the tip, leaving sloppy kisses all around the crown.  

He lifted off.  "You've lied to me," he said.  I looked at his face, that blushed mouth so close to my wet erection.  My hips thrust up involuntarily, and he let my cock leave its mark on his cheek.  He closed his eyes on it, nuzzling it back.  "You've manipulated me.  You've set me up.  You've engineered my pain, Alex."  

He looked up at my face then, tears sparkling in his eyes, innocent of crime yet fiery with his own forbidden want of me.  How could he say I engineered it?  I was under orders!  Nearly every time.  But not always.  Tunguska was my game, under my control.  Until it wasn't.  Until he was bound under chicken wire and no matter how many times I offered up intel, offered my own body, it was denied.  And even then...my fault.  My doing.  

I engineered his pain.  God...

He held my weak gaze as my chest heaved and he reached between my legs, behind my balls, finding the sweaty clench of my asshole.  I saw it in his eyes when he found it even before I felt the finger prodding me.  He twisted, watching for my reaction, his lips parted in lazy sensuality, and the boat gently swayed from side to side.

His voice continued, soft as he listed my crimes against him, open wounds I had landed on his soul.  "You used me."  

His finger pushed, testing the barrier, finding it elastic yet uncompromising.  A tear rolled down my face unchecked and he studied it even while he spoke.  "Nothing with you was real."  I was about to break the rules and cry out, because he was wrong.  He was so wrong about that.  But he added for me, "Except this."

And he dipped his thumb down to my anus, cradling my balls against the palm of his hand, pushing them up against my cock as he overpowered the muscle and pushed barely inside.  "But you didn't use this against me."  His thumb slid up my ass.  I squeezed my eyes tightly closed.  "You could have been in my bed that first week as my partner..."  He began langurously fucking me.  "But you didn't do it.  Because that was too true.  That would have been Alex.  That would have ruined everything."

I opened my eyes to see him, watching the muscles of his forearm flexing and feeling the result as he entered me time and again.  I lifted my gaze to his face, tan and intent.  Assymetric beauty.  He had me pinned, with his look, his hand working my crotch and ass, his truth, a near perfect profile of me.  I blinked rapidly, body rocking as he plunged his thumb slowly in and out, as the ocean took up his rhythm and swelled beneath us.

I watched his face through the haze of unshed tears.  He was damp with sweat, flushed with exertion though he was moving nearly in slow motion.  Maybe the exertion was from holding back.  I looked down at his still-clothed erection to find it larger than before, swollen long, trapped as it was against his hip.

"I've let you come in and hurt me more than anybody else ever has," he told me, cork-screwing his thumb and driving it up as far as he could.  "I've let you fuck me," he growled low in his throat.  "Fuck me raw."  His touch remained measured, though the effect on me was anything but.  I was trembling violently, losing myself, losing control.  

"But it wasn't rape," he continued.  Then he pulled his thumb out so slow it hurt and when he touched my asshole again it was to thrust two long fingers deep into me.  "Except for that first time," he clarified, impaling me.  He held still inside and held my gaze.  "You raped me, Alex.  When you left."  

He dragged his fingers out, barely tickling the spasming hole, then pushed them back inside.  I whimpered plaintively, though the sensation was hardly painful.  It was his words and the way he said them, the potential fury that might any moment erupt inside him and seek to rend me to pieces for the price of his pain.

He resituated up on his knees, fingers still slipping in and out, forcing me to open up as he took his own shorts in a shaking hand and started to unfasten them.  My breathing got shallow and a little panicked.  He'd said he didn't want my blood, but if he intended to rape me in the name of personal justice, blood was what he would get, even if he drenched it with his cum to try to wash it away.

"You've hurt me a dozen times," he said, unleashing a long, dusky cock, readily weeping from its hungry tip.  "And each of those times hurt over and over again...because I let them."  He stroked his jutting penis, working my asshole to the same rhythm.  "I let you, dammit," he whispered, eyes closing and head falling back for a moment.  It was a precious couple of seconds where his physical need overtook whatever agenda he had.  And I could look at him and see his pleasure rule over his pain.

Then he moved in, sliding his fingers out of me.  He grabbed a tube of lubricant from a shelf beside the bed and slicked up his massive cock.

"Krycek..."  he whispered, pushing my leg up and looming over me, thumb pointing his glistening cock directly at my entrance.  "It's over."  He rubbed himself over my anus a few times.  I whimpered at the feel of it.  He said over.  It was over.  I didn't know what he meant.  He was about to prove how deeply I'd hurt him by hurting me.  Nothing was over.

And I was lying still for it.  I shut my eyes and saw the statue on the mountain, so pure and smooth in the sun, lit alabaster in the night.  This was his pound of flesh.  The arm should have been his trophy, should have gone to him in a glittering case rather than dumped unceremoniously into a bonfire, as if it had no meaning for anyone anymore.  All he had were the ripped scars on the left-over stump.  And it wasn't enough.  This was his judgment.  His Revelation.

"Alex," he sighed.  "Look at me."

I realized I'd opened my eyes and been watching him brush that perfect cock between my asscheeks, waiting for the inevitable hard push, the satisfying tear of flesh.  I lifted my gaze to his face.  It was tear-streaked like mine.  I searched him openly.  He blinked and his voice broke, wavering, "I forgive you."

And the moment he saw it register, saw it widen my eyes and catch my breath, he undulated his hips forward and sank his cock inside me.

It pierced through me, intolerant of how tight I squeezed him, unused to his size.  Yet the thrust itself was lenient, almost cautious.  I watched him press in, burying himself deep so slowly and intentionally.  This was no rape.  It wasn't even a hard fuck.

The words resonated -- I forgive you.   No...  They carved at me, wanting a home inside me.  He was giving them to me.  To me.  I groaned and took Mulder's cock inside like I couldn't take his forgiveness.  I couldn't take it.  I didn't want it from him.  He couldn't do this.  It changed everything.  It wasn't even possible.  I'd turn his forgiveness away, an unwanted gift.  When this was over...  Oh God, when this was over.

He fell over me, held up by a hand on either side of me, his shoulder pushing my knee into my stump.  His hips fit themselves up against my body, cock sheathed completely now.  I watched him shiver, eyes rolling closed.  I felt the impact of his declaration even as my body realized we had joined and my cock leapt like fire, alive.  

And as though he knew I'd question my own sanity because of it, he said it again, closer now so that I could feel his breath.  "I forgive you."  Then, "God, Alex..."

He pulled back, head dropped low, concealing his eyes.  His cock slipped away from me, letting my hole close around it, a long kiss good-bye.  But he just plunged forward again with a groan.

"I forgive you everything," he whispered while he started to fuck me.  Long, deliberate strokes.

I wanted to say his name, to call back to me that man who I'd thought had closed his heart against me.  Frantically, I fought, both the desire to recede back into the depths of my sins and to let go into the solace he provided with that one statement.  I deserved nothing, but I realized I wanted it all.

"Mulder," I finally managed.

"Everything," he insisted, opening a place for himself inside me, against my will, against the laws of nature, the very flow of the universe.

His dark body above me was lit with the gold flickering light from the candles, and his pale ass clenched to work his dick farther into me.  His eyes were sad and resolute and triumphant.  For the first time since it started, I woke to myself, if not to his absolution, to the fact that whether or not I deserved it, I craved this, and I wanted it desperately.  And I wanted him, maybe loved him.  

I lifted my leg and opened my ass for his next stroke, allowing him deeper.  His moan rumbled out of him in surprise.  He started fucking me harder, and I pulled up on my leg in time to his working hips.  

He found my eyes, and I let myself really look at him.  Let the unspoken pass between us.  The unbelievable.  And I remembered what he said:  that I wouldn't just believe it, I'd know it.  Forgiveness.  I would know forgiveness from him.  Another tear slipped out of the corner of my eye, and to my utter shock, Mulder dipped down and tasted it, taking it on his tongue like the sacrament.  I felt his arms shaking with the effort to hold himself up over me.

The close proximity pressed his belly down on my cock.  With just that, I felt myself getting ready to come.  I grunted into Mulder's ear and he answered by snapping his hips, fucking me faster, moving easily now in the slick, loosened passage.

Without thinking, I turned my head and found his cheek with my lips, the mole fitting there perfectly between them just like before.  Mulder grabbed my arm and flung it up over my head hard, holding it there, growling.  He bucked on top of me, and I felt his fist quaking around my wrist as he began to come inside me.

"Alex...fuck, Alex..." he gritted out, flooding my asshole with semen.

He pressed in hard, mashing my cock between his body and mine.  I only had time to take a whimpering inhale before I crested the wave and shook with release as well, warm ropes of cum shooting from my cock and coating our stomachs.

He rode my body, grinding down into me, fusing us together with friction and wet heat.  And then pulled almost all the way out only to drive it back in with a surrendering moan.   He started a new rhythm, not pulling out at all, but just taking long, deep, slow strokes in and out of me, closing his eyes.

"Did you think..."  he gasped.  "That I'd hurt you?"

I was panting, unsure if I should answer him now, unsure if I could.  His hand softened on my wrist but didn't leave.

"I know I've hurt you.  Physically.  It never mattered."  He opened his eyes and looked down at me while his cock, hard even after the fact, thoroughly fucked me.  "Nothing but this ever could."

"You-" I began, voice hoarse.  "You can't...forgive me, Mulder."  The words were like lacerations cutting my throat open.  

He continued to thrust, looking down into my face.  "That's not your decision to make, Alex."

I frowned, and he drove in only to stay there now.  He settled onto his elbows, my leg slipping off his shoulder.  He lay down on top of me, his eyes penetrating too deep for physical comfort.  I started to turn my face away.  He grabbed my jaw and pulled me back.

His lips crashed down on mine, bruising and cutting like before, but then his tongue was soft as he slipped it into my mouth.  Still, I fought him, tearing myself away even as his hand tightened again around my wrist, pinning down my only arm.

"I don't want it," I spat, even while my asshole throbbed around his shaft.  I wrenched my hand away hard and pushed at him.

My fighting dislodged his half-hard cock, but he came at me again, pushing me back against the headboard with both hands.  His hot breath stank of my cock as he hissed in my face, "I did this for me."  He frowned at me, tilting his head.  "I did this so I could let go.  So it didn't have to hurt so much, every goddamned day, Alex."  He took a deep breath and exhaled in frustration, "I did it so I could love you again."

I blinked at him, at the unthinkableness of that.

"Oh, don't give me that innocent face," he spat.  "I don't care if you didn't know, I only care that you get it through your thick head now," he growled.  "I forgive you.  I made love to you.  All that shit is gone, Alex.  It's over and it's done.  From here on out this," and he reached down and grabbed both of our spent cocks in his hand, holding them together.  I hissed with the stinging pain.  "This is it."  He panted in my face,  "I want your cock.  I want your heart.  And I want to trust you."  He swallowed.  "Can I?"

I looked at him in a panic, but he remained stalwart.  His hand holding my cock up against his was warm and moist with sweat.  My ass hurt in the best possible way.  I was scared.  Scared to death.  And I nodded.  I swallowed, blinking, and I nodded.  "Y-yes..."

He smiled a little then.  "I know, Alex."  He looked down and then back up into my eyes.  "I've known since I saw you here.  I just didn't know if you did."  He let go of my cock and his with a little gasp.  He sat next to me.

"Mulder," I started.  I had to tell him I didn't know anything, that it was only something I wanted but that I had no idea how to make manifest.

He was studying me.  "I know you're worried you might be lying to me," he said easily.  "If you weren't so scared, I wouldn't trust you so much."  Then he shrugged, though his eyes were moist, full of emotion.  He crawled off the bed, facing away from me, and stretched hugely.  I watched his back and tight, pale ass, feeling too raw, gutted, empty but strangely relieved.  So relieved I felt the stab of tears in my throat.

He turned back to me.  "I want you to come up the mountain with me tomorrow."  His face was set with the pain of desire.  "Will you?"  He looked down.  "Can you?"

I swallowed.  I looked his gorgeous body up and down.  The body he'd used to make love to me.  The eyes that held a tentative trust in me.  He saw a me I thought was nothing but figment.  I nodded my assent.

His eyes changed, releasing some last fear.  He smiled.  Then he looked down at my used body lying crumpled on his bed.  "Swim with me now?" he asked.  He sounded like a boy asking his crush to go to the winter formal with him.  It hurt somewhere inside my chest.

I want your cock.  I want your heart.

All the instincts I had were telling me he had both, even though just hours before I was still debating the existence of good in that organ beating away in my chest.  Mulder trusted me.  We had a clean slate.  

"How can you just...forget...?" I started to ask him.

He walked closer.  "It's not forgetting," he corrected.  "But I don't want to live in those memories.  Not now."  He smiled.  "Not when I know what's coming."

I knew he was talking about his visions of the future.  And they were my visions, too.  Visions I couldn't deny, even if I was afraid to trust that the world would give that to me.  Mulder would give that to me.  And he wanted to.

"C'mon," he said, holding out his hand.  "You could use a dip." He looked at the dried cum marking my belly.  "You're filthy."  And his smile turned mischievous...lit with sex and vitality.  

I took his hand and, naked, we walked out onto the deck.  It was full night and I gasped at the stars overhead, clear and brilliant.  Mulder pulled me to the bow and we stood overlooking the sparkling black water.  He looked at me, completely alive and full of something he'd always hid from me, perhaps from everyone.  I couldn't help but return a part of it, the only thing I could spare right then and not fall apart in his arms:  I smiled at him, shyly, warily, but real.

"On three," he said, gripping my hand tight.

I nodded.

"One," he said.

I took a breath.  "Two," I added.

"Three!" we shouted and jumped together into the waves.


END

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