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Chapter Nine: Terrible Lie
Hey God
Why are you doing this to me?
Am I not living up
To what I'm supposed to be?
Why am I seething
With this animosity?
Hey God
I think you owe me a great big apology.Terrible lie.
Hey God
I really don't know what you mean
Seems like salvation
Comes only in our dreams
I feel my hatred
Grow all the more extreme
Hey God
Can this world really be
As sad as it fucking seems?Terrible lie.
Don't take it away from me
I need someone to hold on to
Don't take it away from me
I need someone to hold on toHey God
There's nothing left for me to hide
I lost my ignorance,
Security and pride
I'm all alone
In a world you must despise
Hey God
I believed the promises,
The promises and liesTerrible lie.
You made me throw it all away
My morals left to decay
How many you betray
You've taken everythingTerrible lie.
My head is filled with disease
My skin is begging you please
I'm on my hands and knees
I want so much to believeI need someone to hold on to
I need someone to hold on to
I need someone
I need someone to hold on toI give you everything
My sweet everything
Hey God
I really don't know who I am
In this world of piss~Nine Inch Nails
So much shattered for me after I got back from Russia.
Scully's health. My faith. And he was very likely dead. Not that I cared. It was the fate he deserved. Not her. Not Scully. As the nose bleeds became more and more frequent, as the pounds dropped away and her hair lost its luster, I came to terms with the fact that I might just lose everything.
Cancer. They'd given her cancer. And for what?
So that the very government I worked for could own the people it was supposed to exist to serve. So it could amass the wealth and the weapons undetected because we were all too busy gazing at the sky and looking for little green... God, I couldn't even think it. I knew I'd be sick.
They'd given Scully cancer so that I'd believe. So that I'd give my heart and soul to proving the existence of extraterrestrials. So that, not only would I be looking the wrong way when the real shit hit the fan, I'd actually be pivotal in advancing their agenda.
I considered quitting. Let's face it, I considered dying. I may have used the death of the agent surveilling me to fake my own death so that I could work underground, but a part of me wondered what I was still searching for. What I was living for.
You go underground, you gotta learn to live with the rats.
No shit, Krycek.
It's what I thought as I stood on the corner, waiting. After the Cancer Man had shown me my sister in that diner. After he promised that putting the implant back could cure Scully. So many promises. And here I was. Remembering the man who pulled the trigger on my father. Feeling myself succumbing to the vertigo as I stood on the line Krycek himself must have made the choice to cross once upon a time.
I smelled his cigarette smoke before I turned and saw him. We started walking.
"My apologies for the rather hasty departure last night," he said, slowly. As though he left the dinner party before dessert was served.
"What do you want from me?" I asked, needing so desperately to get to the point. I felt the weight of Scully's survival, having my sister back, the FBI's investigation into the death of my surveiller...all of it with each measured step. The Cigarette Man's disposition matched the sunny day. I clenched my jaw.
"Want from you?" he intoned with fake innocence.
"You give me these things, the only things I ever wanted and I can't think of any reason for you to do so." It was so naive, really. After four years of this shit, more if I counted the time I was on the X-Files before Scully, but I hardly could since all it was then was Sasquatch and telekinesis. So much time spent running. Running after their shadows, grasping nothing. And now to be offered...what? The grail? Or their packaged bullshit.
"Well that's true, no act is completely selfless," he replied philosophically. "But I've come today not to...not to ask, but to offer. To offer you the truth that you've so desperately sought. About the project, about the men who've conspired to protect it."
"I know the truth," I said bitterly.
"Do you?"
"I spoke to one of your men."
"And you know that he's not a liar."
I felt the dull, ulcerous doubt at his words. "I've seen enough to know he's not a liar, yeah."
"He's seen but scant pieces of the whole," the Cancer Man said, then, reminding me of all the times I'd glimpsed that painful truth. Pieces. Always, only pieces, in and of themselves worse than nothing. But like the bird pecking at the feeder that doled out a morsel every thousandth time, I'd been so very, humiliatingly, morbidly persistant. Was Kritschgau a pawn like me? Were we predestined to meet and fight it out for the truth?
The truth, the truth...there's no truth! These men, they make it up as they go along.
I looked at the man next to me, inhaling, and remembered the words, the breathless voice, the smell of dirt on him, the stains across his cheek.
I can get them for you, too....
I shook the memory off. "What more can you show me?" I asked, ready to tell him to go fuck himself and take my chances. Chance Scully's life...
"This man you spoke to, Michael Kritschgau, he has deceived you with beautiful lies. He's told you that everything you've ever believed about the existence of extraterrestrial life is untrue."
"What are you saying?" I asked impatiently, the thought of Scully's pale body lying in that bed waiting for me potent, a spiritual toxin.
"As I said, I'm offering you a chance to know the truth," he said so easily.
"In exchange for what?"
"Quit the FBI, come work for me. I can make your problems go away."
Yeah, so can a good shot of heroin, I thought. So can choosing never to be held accountable, denying everything.
"No deal," I told him.
"After all I've given you?" His reply held a predictable amount of hurt. It did nothing to hide his continued confidence. So confident. Like he already had me; I merely had yet to realize it.
I swallowed the bitter hatred I suddenly felt for him. I'd always held it in check around him...always felt it would only betray a weakness. I started to let it seep out. "What have...what have you given me? A claim of a cure for Scully. Is she cured?! You show me my sister only to take her right back! You've given me nothing!"
"I intend to keep my promises; I just need something from you."
The thought of him, of anyone, and to my disgust this included Scully, ANYONE needing ANYTHING more from me, of taking yet again, of draining all I had after I'd given my life's blood to find her, to save her, to expose the truth... It all came out at him, the words, the actual accusations, shocking me. "You murdered my father. You killed Scully's sister. And if Scully dies, I will kill you. I don't care whose father you are, I will put you down."
All this time... I'd been hating, blaming, fighting...the wrong one. The devil was in front of me and offering what looked like salvation in his withered hands. Was this how Krycek had felt? What offer had he accepted finally? What bittersweet elixir was placed at his parched lips? Because, God help me, I was aching to fall under the guise of this monster's protection, to ally with him to save her life, even as I knew, unerringly, that he might as well have pulled that trigger and blown my father's skull apart himself.
The smoking demon spoke words, then, that cut into the heart of what I truly feared, what I'd yet to understand until that moment. "Well, you're certainly capable, so I've been told. I understand you have a hearing tomorrow where you'll have to testify to these murderous impulses of yours." Murder? Me? I felt the gun fill my hand, empty the moment before. It was self-defense. He'd pulled a shotgun on me. And yet I'd overtaken him. The shot I took was at his temple. It was a killshot. There was no mistake. The shotgun blast that took off his face was just an insult at that point.
I walked away from the man standing on the street corner, calmly taking a deep, satisfying drag. His words followed me. "When you reconsider, the offer still stands!"
.......
It was dark. I'd been walking for hours. My mind was made up. Hadn't it been all along? I'd never fall in with that bastard.
Your politics are yours. You've never thrown in.
I closed my eyes on my father's words, nearly his last, and swallowed hard. I opened the door to her room.
The frail light fell in across her face. She slept heavily, without moving, breathing softly. I walked slowly, quietly, until I stood over her, shoulders round with exhaustion and grief.
God... She looked like she was already dead! Oh my God... Scully...
I knelt by her hospital bed and lay my cheek on the rough sheets. It took a moment to realize what was happening to me: that the sadness had reached this degree somewhere behind my back, somewhere in the closed room of my subconscious. It welled in my chest and began to overflow.
No. Not sadness. I wished it was sadness.
It was guilt. It was guilt, goddamn it. So much black, fucking guilt. The pain of it ripped a hole in my ribs, built in my throat... And still I couldn't let it loose. I stopped it as it rose and bloomed on my palate, a sour wine. My mouth reflexively opened, only to become an aching, empty hole, the scream caught and held, strangled, as I made a fist and fought myself. The tears, though silent, were shut out as well. Tightly held back from falling. I was dying to break open, but I suspended this great despair so that even though it had already overwhelmed me, I didn't breathe a fraction of it. I just wrestled it back down into my body, where it could cancer me, too.
Smelling her sweet shampoo just under the harsh disinfectant and feeling like I'd rather burn in hell than have to see her like this one more day, I reversed my decision. It was easy. The guilt demanded it, demanded this sacrifice, this blood of mine. I'd call first thing in the morning. It was only an ideal after all. It paled in comparison to the flesh and blood woman asleep so close to my agony. It could be sacrificed. She could not.
It was done. Simple, really. So much easier than the pain.
I wept silently, rigored with everything I couldn't spill, everything she couldn't know I was about to do. For her.
........
But first thing in the morning, I was awakened from a half-stupor, something not at all like sleep except for the reclined position of my body, by an urgent call from Blevins' secretary. I was to be in his office in twenty minutes. That was all, then the phone clicked dead. I wiped my eyes. I sighed and thought about the day before. About the Cancer Man's offer and Scully's cancer-ridden body. I remembered the woman who might have been my sister. Might have been...
I didn't shower. I didn't eat. I took a piss and brushed my teeth. I changed my shirt and my tie. I'd be in Blevins' office, but unless he had revelations on how to cure cancer, I'd still be contacting the smoking man with my agreement to the deal before I'd be attending any hearings about any murders I'd committed.
It was dark in the office, secretive. "Agent Mulder, will you please take a seat," Blevins said as I walked in. "Something urgently important has come to the fore."
I sat down across from his desk, feeling the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
"As you're set to testify on your own behalf later today, I've received alarming forensic evidence from the man's body found in your apartment. I have here in my hand ballistic data matching your service weapon, Agent Mulder."
I felt my stomach drop, my brain firing frantically to get to the answers I felt sure Blevins wasn't going to give me. "Where did you get that?"
"I'm not at liberty to say," he said. The company line. I frowned, and he went on, "But unless you can offer up someone else who might have fired the kill shot, everything points to you as this man's murderer. Are you prepared to give testimony about the man who fired the shot?"
The man who fired the shot. But they knew it was me. That's what they were saying. But they wanted... They wanted me to implicate otherwise. "Why am I here?" I asked, feeling myself to be in danger somehow.
"The man worked for the Department of Defense, Agent Mulder."
Tell me something I don't know. "The man was spying on me," I reiterated.
"Do you know for whom?" He paused. Nothing had changed in his voice, but something about the question, asked here and now, not at the hearing... Something was not right at all. Blevins continued, "Agent Scully was prepared to name the man at the FBI who was involved in this plot against you and her. We believe she was about to name Assistant Director Skinner, whom we have learned has been working inside the FBI with a secret agenda."
Skinner? They wanted me to implicate Skinner? "I refuse to believe that," I answered, mind racing.
"We've accumulated some substantial evidence against him," Blevins retorted.
"Can you show it to me?" I replied. Jesus, it was making more and more sense by the moment!
"Agent Mulder, if you name this man today in your testimony, we can file charges against him. Charges which may very well exonerate you."
"Name Skinner and save myself?" I sneered.
"That's what I called you here to recommend," he replied. And then he said the one thing that cemented everything I'd come to suspect: "As a friend."
As I sat there for another moment, studying him, profiling, finally feeling awake to the awful truth, I made my decision. "I'll see you at the hearing," I told Section Chief Blevins. He nodded at me, confident in my buyability. I nodded back. And I knew I'd never deal with any of them ever again.
To Be Continued...
Series Name: History
Title: History, Chapter Nine: Terrible Lie
Author: Sage Fyre [email/website]
Details: Series | NC-17 | 13k | 06/02/07
Pairings: Mulder/Krycek
Category: Drama, Angst
Summary: See previous.
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