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Chapter Seven: Bullet With Butterfly Wings
The world is a vampire,
Sent to drain
Secret destroyers,
Hold you up to the flames
And what do I get,
For my pain?
Betrayed desires,
And a piece of the gameEven though I know
I suppose I'll show
All my cool and cold
Like old JobDespite all my rage
I am still just a rat in a cage
Despite all my rage
I am still just a rat in a cage
Then someone will say
What is lost can never be saved
Despite all my rage
I am still just a rat in a cageNow I'm naked,
Nothing but an animal
But can you fake it,
For just one more show?
And what do you want?
I want to change
And what have you got,
When you feel the same?Tell me I'm the only one
Tell me there's no other one
Jesus was the only son for youAnd I still believe
That I cannot be saved.~Smashing Pumpkins
I had this dime in my pocket. I picked it up off of the frozen ground somewhere between a fate worse than death and getting my hair buzz cut. When I stroked it inside my jeans pocket, no one saw. They didn't know that it was worn with my fingerprints, the year nearly rubbed off: 1961. They wouldn't know, if they saw it, that it's the year I was born. They wouldn't even guess that I'd been considering my birth into this body, into this life, the unwanted conception that I was. The unwanted man I'd become.
Nobody knew, even though I'd been telling them about the Black Cancer, what had happened deep down in that hole in the earth. Nobody could possibly know. Because it was unthinkable.
They kept saying how they'd liberated me. The word 'Liberty' was printed on my dime. The only true liberty would have been if that shit had killed me.
The militia group took me in. When I could speak, when my tongue had stopped burning like I'd swallowed acid, I made sure to let them know how valuable I was, how well I could fit in. I told them about the alien-possessed oil. I don't know if they believed it, but they couldn't figure another reason why I might be locked in an abandoned missle silo. And they figured they'd better keep me alive just in case it was true.
When they sat me in the chair and started up the clippers, I had the dime clenched in my fist. I watched my reflection in the mirror change, my scalp start to show through, the planes of my face seeming to become more angular, symetrically framed by short, coarse, bristly hair.
I wondered for the hundredth time why he hadn't recognized, in what had to be a painfully long trip back to D.C., that it was no longer me. I wasn't there. One minute I was pissing in the Hong Kong airport restroom, and the next I was puking crude oil onto an alien craft. There was no Mulder, no digital tape. I was alone, freezing, sick, filthy... And there was no way out.
I was the very thing Mulder had been chasing. Housed in me, behind my eyes, was this thing, cold and single-minded, and he hadn't known. As the hair fell to the floor at my feet, I wondered if Mulder had hit it. If he'd cursed it for killing his father. If he'd touched that vile presence, running so shallow under my skin, and felt...what? Nothing? No difference? No dawning realization that this man beside him wasn't the man who he loved to make bleed, wasn't the man he'd come to hate. Wasn't, couldn't possibly be, the man who'd gone down on him, sucked his prick deep, drank the hot milk of him....
Or maybe the thing pretended to be me. Maybe it approximated my racing pulse, parodied my speech patterns, my breathing. Maybe it sucked him off, too. And maybe he couldn't tell the fucking difference.
I needed to make sure I saw him again. I needed to get out of North Dakota. I needed to make contact with the only people I knew of who could vaccinate me against the oil. Or rather, from whom I could steal the vaccination.
I found a quick and seemingly easy way to do it all when I started sending Mulder the receipts.
I'd never seen Mulder all in black before. Somehow the riot gear didn't seem as dangerous as his Armani. But with the gear came a bigger gun, and it found its way into my gut first thing. I lamented that he didn't use his fists. Maybe he'd moved past that. Maybe he no longer wanted my blood on his hands.
I fell to the dirt at his feet and tried to remember who really had the upper hand here. His eyes found me in the dark, my body lit from the search light on his weapon. His face was almost calm, not like the last time I could remember seeing him. There may even have been a small pleasure there, now. Possibly some measure of satisfaction based on knowing I'd been nearly dead in a hole in the ground a few months ago. But I couldn't be sure. It all happened so fast.
He questioned me in the warehouse. Scully was with him, but she stood off to the side, letting Mulder take the lead with me. I guess she felt it. That I was his territory.
Mulder got in the first shove, but to my surprise Scully got the first question. Mulder just stared down at me, where I landed on the powder keg, that same new calm of his making me itch.
"How'd you get involved with these men?" Scully asked.
I figured the truth could get me farther than a lie at that point. I told them about my "liberation." Mulder looked vaguely accusatory. He looked like he had no idea, or couldn't care less, what I'd gone through in that silo. Like my getting out was just his bad luck. And like it was just like me to get rescued by a government-hating militia outfit. As if I had any control over who found me! As if it were probably all my orchestration anyway.
"Hey, you go underground, you gotta learn to live with the rats," I told him. I was aware as he was, maybe more so, of the absurdity. I was the one who'd been found underground, stinking of my own shit.
Mulder slapped my cap off my head then slapped my head back. It was the second time he'd touched me. His hand was warm and sweaty. He left my scalp stinging a little. I could smell chlorine on him, just like the day at the pool. I looked up at him. His hair had grown longer. His jaw clenched tighter.
"I'm sure you had no trouble adapting," he said.
I felt something peculiar then. Something like bruised pride. The truth is I didn't have any trouble adapting, but it had absolutely nothing to do with any similarity between myself and them. We couldn't be more different. If I was the rat then they were sheep, content to follow a worn-out ideology with short-sighted and unquestioning enthusiasm. If Mulder thought of me in the same terms, he was in for a rude awakening.
"These men are pathetic revolutionaries who'll kill innocent Americans in the name of bonehead ideologies," I couldn't help but spit at him. And if he thought his father was innocent, he was really fooling himself.
"You're full of crap, Krycek," he said down to me. "You're an invertebrate scum-sucker whose moral dipstick is about two drops short of bone dry."
I felt a surge of defiance rush through me. He didn't have a fucking clue. He still after all this time didn't know the first thing about me. He didn't know about Realignment. Didn't know what I'd been through in the name of protecting this country, this planet. And how the very people who taught me the only morals I'd ever known had finally fucked me over and left me for dead. How dare he take the moral high ground? He didn't even know enough about me to recognize when an alien was sitting next to him instead! Didn't know how, by the fourth day without food or water, without any hope of doing anything but slowly thirst to death, it was his fucking name I cried in the dark.
I stood up, in his face, dizzy from breathing too hard, angry at how calm he was, how clean he smelled. "I love this country," I growled at him, and remembered a time when that was true.
He let me get close. Closer than I expected. I felt his breath on my face. My body tingled, ready for contact. His hands came up and landed on my chest. For the split second before he pushed me, I felt his palms, hot, against my body. And then I was falling backward, landing on the keg again, and Mulder was turning away from me, disengaging. I swallowed, sighing.
It was Scully who asked the next question. "What do you want, Krycek?"
I told them the truth. One truth. Just not the whole truth. "Same thing you do. To find the man who tried to kill me." I looked at Mulder, turning back toward me now. I took a chance and said it. "The same man that was responsible for your father's death..." I turned to Scully. "Your sister's."
The rest of the conversation went about as I'd expect, with Scully focusing on justice and Mulder on his Truth. They were both so goddamned naive about the whole thing. If Mulder had just once talked about something real like results, like revenge even, I might have actually considered really allying with him. His white knight idealism and worn-out commitment to the Truth were non-negotiable at this point. I wondered what it would take to get him to see the real truth: that if he wanted to save the world, it was going to take getting his hands dirty. He'd see that soon enough. He'd have to.
I thought maybe I could appeal to his worse nature, to that same desire for revenge he felt around me. I told him I could get the Smoker and his Syndicate for him. I heard myself say it, "I can get them for you, too." Heard the breath that crept into my voice. I became aware in an instant of what I was truly offering. What I'd give him in a heartbeat. I found myself hoping Scully would find some reason to leave us alone, maybe even that Mulder would send her out. Would he bite? Did he even remember? Surely he could hear it in the silence, inbetween the words I'd spoken. Surely he could still feel, as I could, his swollen cock sliding through his own cum inside my mouth.
I tried to decipher the look that took over his face then. As he looked down at me, he smiled. Mulder smiled at me. And yet there was no humor in it. Nothing good inside. "We can't help you, Krycek," he said, turning away from me. We. He'd included her. As if my offer had had anything to do with her! As he turned away, I realized he had to know that. It was just his way of saying no. What I wasn't sure of was the reason. Did he not want my mouth on him again? Or did he just think he couldn't handle it? It started to dawn on me that maybe he wasn't the only one.
I swallowed, almost relieved that he hadn't accepted. Getting another taste of Mulder was the last thing I needed. I needed perspective, to stay the course. And I needed him to not walk away. This was about getting the vaccine. This was about getting to show him 'The Truth' on my terms. It was my only chance to maybe get him to see the scope, to surrender his quest and take up mine instead. But he had to see. He had to come.
"Mulder," I called to him, a different kind of seduction going on now, maybe one he'd actually respond to this time. "This is just one bomb I'm sitting on here. You didn't ask me how many more I know about."
And with that, I had him. It was done.
To Be Continued....
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Series Name: History
Title: History, Chapter Seven: Bullet With Butterfly Wings
Author: Sage Fyre [email/website]
Details: Series | NC-17 | 10k | 05/28/07
Pairings: Mulder/Krycek
Category: Drama, Angst
Summary: See previous.
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