Home · Quick Search · Advanced Search · Submissions · F A Q · Contact
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 bathroom 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.
To Be Continued...
Post a comment
or read posted comments on this story.
Series Name: History
Title: History, Chapter Six: Figured You Out
Author: Sage Fyre [email/website]
Details: Series | NC-17 | 15k | 05/16/07
Pairings: Mulder/Krycek
Category: Drama, Angst
Summary: See previous.
[top of page]
|
Home · Quick Search · Advanced Search · Submissions · F A Q · Contact |
|