17 Mar 1998
SUMMARY: NC-17, slash, M/K. Krycek's reappearance forces Mulder to wonder who this Alex Krycek character really is.
DISCLAIMERS: All things originate with Chris Carter. Apparently, even more than we ever knew.... 1013 Productions and Fox are also involved somehow.
WARNING: This story is part of my new theory, which goes something like this: Somebody Should Be Doing Somebody Else on the X-Files, and I Don't Even Care Who Anymore. It's indisputably M/K, but with lots of MSR and M/Sk hints, and a tiny splash of Sk/K. Even the CSM gets in some slash time, so don't say I didn't warn you. This is not for the "There is but one true pairing" crowd, whichever pairing you favor.
TIMING: This takes place roughly three weeks before "Gethsemane" I think of it as a unique privilege to be posting my "Magna Krycek" in the aftermath of *the* watershed event in slash fandom. Take a moment to pause and reflect on the tides of history that brought us all here at this time and place, then read and enjoy.
ARCHIVE: MKRA, anywhere else
DEDICATIONS: Mainly to my beta-reader, who asked to remain anonymous. If anyone realized how much better this is than my first draft, she'd be deified, people would never stop bothering her to beta-read, and she wouldn't have time to turn out any more of her own quite remarkable work. But I'd like to send her my thanks anyway. Secondarily, to Mark Seliger, the good man who photographed a recent cover of US magazine that got me through many bouts of writers' block...
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story required a few flashbacks. I've set them apart with brackets at the beginning and ending of each section which would, in another medium, be italicized. There is often no line break between present and past, but if you keep your eye on the brackets, you should know what's what from the beginning.
FEED ME: hth29@hotmail.com

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Stroke of Luck
by Hth

(1)

On the day Alex Krycek returned to Mulder's life, the Agent's car stalled in the parking garage, and he had to ask Scully to drive him home. "You probably should get a cab," she told him. "We're already about to run late for that party, and if we make two separate stops--"

"I'm not going." Scully watched him levelly; Mulder counted to eight in the silence. She opened her door, turning her face away from him, and Mulder was sure she was about to drive off and leave him standing on the cold floor of Blue Lot 3. But she hit the power lock, and Mulder got in.

Neither of the partners said anything on the drive to Mulder's apartment. Halfway to Alexandria, Mulder realized that it wasn't necessarily Alex Krycek creaking loudly in the fatal silence between them. She'd had a nosebleed that morning, one that went on so long that she had become light-headed, and stumbled, and banged her knee on the desk. Mulder had offered to drive her home over lunch, which hadn't gone down well at all.

That would be ironic, Mulder thought. Mulder lost in the cthonic landscape of his feelings for Krycek, Scully contemplating her own death in monastic solitude. Eros and thanatos -- one gearshift and all the world away from each other. Mulder slumped low in his seat.

Instead of simply pulling up to his curb, Scully put the car into park and turned off the ignition. Mulder pulled his hand back from the door and waited to hear whatever Scully intended to say. "Are you going to be all right, Mulder?" The heel of her right hand was stroking the steering wheel's arc, her eyes carefully ahead. In the old days, Scully had no nervous habits.

"Who, me? Yeah." She turned to look at him, ready to disapprove. It was a lie, of course, and not even an ambitious one. "I don't appreciate being put under the microscope every time I have a bad day." It was a direct quote.

"Touche."

Mulder knew when his partner was through with a conversation, and she wasn't yet. He kept his eyes on the LED dash display, now dark. Scully's hand hushed rhythmically on the steering wheel, lulling him into mindlessness. It was almost dark out; they would be late for the party now, if they decided to go. "What do you want me to tell Senator Matheson?"

"Ebola virus?"

Her hand dropped to the key, threatening to turn it in the ignition. "If you can't be any more help than that, I'll tell him the truth."

"Ebola virus?"

Whether it was the comfort of nightfall or the familiarity of Mulder's flippancy, the tension seemed to be deserting Scully. Without its support, she looked like a scaffolding framework of herself --intelligent without being witty, beautiful without being elegant, noble without really caring, loyal without needing Mulder in her life anymore. It was an alternate Scully, one that he'd gotten to know in the past few weeks, much against his will. Mulder searched vainly for something to say, something to win her back from wherever Scully was going, and all he could find in himself was bitter, gunmetal desire, pulse and leather and the red, refugee welcome of Hong Kong's treacherous embrace. Dammit.

It was Scully who saved herself; it always seemed to be, and Mulder was as pathetically grateful for that strength as he was unable to find it in himself. She gave him a vague smile of pity, the look Mulder imagined she'd give a cat that had gotten its paw stuck in its collar while bathing -- a quintessentially Scully look. That smile comforted Mulder by banishing the Scully who was spare and unresponsive, but at the same time it made him feel messy, uncoordinated, and needy in her presence, as only Scully could. Made him feel like a stuck cat, trying and failing to say, *Scully, could you get me out of this?*

"I'll be fine. It was a shock, but I'm over it now." Over Alex Krycek and their coarse, bloody intimacy -- the tight harmonics of their hate and violence -- the arching, driving way they flew again and again into one another's murderous embrace, locking together, craving each other's assaults with the force of the junkie who kills for his drug. Over the way that each jagged breath Krycek drew seemed to strain in Mulder's lungs; the way that sheets damp with his own sweat in the summer would sometimes put a certain foreign taste in Mulder's mouth and a certain familiar name on his tongue. Over a phantom weight and shape of a body held against his, so real that Mulder could forget, did forget, that it was his own invention, a false memory. And almost over seeing him again today in AD Skinner's office; Mulder was working on that one.

"You know, Mulder, it's nothing to be ashamed of. You have a long personal history with Krycek, and it's perfectly natural that you would feel disoriented, seeing him again under these circumstances. Just remember that your life is still under your control. You don't have to give him the power to disrupt your schedule. I thought we were looking forward to this dinner."

Backstabber. She was an emotional marksman -- dead center, every time. Invoking *we,* insinuating herself into Mulder's self-pity, inviting him to refuse his private *long personal history* and operate instead as half of their partnership. It was the closest Scully was ever likely to come to a sentimental appeal. In a nutshell, it was, *Blow him off, Mulder, and take me out instead.*

Mulder turned the idea over and around in his head, scrutinizing it under the killing white light of self-knowledge. If he were to go -- if they were to go.... He wondered, guiltily, what she planned to wear to this black-tie event. How beautiful would she be? Beautiful enough to make him so bold and crazed that he would go hurtling blindly over the vast, bottomless chasm of their unconfessed estrangement, to put himself once more tight up against her smooth, ordered, luminous life? Beautiful enough to make him say the words to her that he once swore to her God he would say if he ever had her back again -- a heartfelt, at the time, promise on the sign that hung around his throat, curse and last bright hope simultaneously? She would probably wear black velvet, or cocoa or night-blue. No one but Mulder would know the depth of her longing to break free, to change everything about herself and escape headlong into a place where she wore white Marilyn dresses and laughed loudly and was not responsible for her sister's murder and would not be dead by thirty-five. Only Mulder would see the voiceless pain of a foundering, unfinished life, and he would love her fiercely, and she would never be beautiful enough to make him forget that Krycek was alive and probably thinking of him over delivery pizza and free hotel HBO, somewhere in Washington, D.C.

"I'm not up to it, Scully." A friend, unlike God or Lady Luck or AD Walter Skinner, would let you off the fucking hook if you just said, *I can't take any more.*

"Even though you already rented a tuxedo? And you once proposed marriage to Matheson's caterer?" She spoke with the measured, warning tone Mulder's mother used to employ, gamely trying to use the logic of cause and effect against an eight-year-old who was convinced that it was much too warm for a sweater on a Massachusetts March day.

Mulder shook his head. He was even sick of the sound of his own voice; he didn't know how Scully put up with his lunatic verbal foos-ball game, day in and day out.

"Fine. But I don't want to see you at the office tomorrow looking tragic and exhausted because you stayed up all night brooding about that rat bastard. It's just not healthy, and he frankly doesn't deserve the energy." *Rat bastard.* It was Mulder's phrase, not Scully's, and it sounded wrong in her mouth. The *we* had been refused and the offer revoked; she was handing him Alex Krycek on a silver platter, ceding whatever place she might've had in their little drama. Mulder's name, Mulder's rat, Mulder's problem.

He got out of the car without further pointless justifications. Lately, life with Scully felt like one long custody settlement: the cancer is yours, Krycek is mine, the desk is mine, the tattoo is yours, your aunt gave us the toaster oven, I picked out the sofa. The divorce metaphor was gruesome, but Mulder kept coming back to it. They were so separate now, each involved with separate problems, separate projects. Separate, separated. *Your mother and I have decided to try separating for now, Fox. Just a trial separation.*

For her sake, though, he took the stairs up to his apartment two at a time, knowing she would not drive away until he flashed the light four times. She was a different Scully now, but she was Scully, his faithful and paranoid friend, and she packed heat. It was still a relationship that worked, and it beat a home security system all to hell.

It seemed impossible that Mulder's apartment hadn't changed since that morning. He prowled it, opening doors, closing them again. Even his mug, a third full of cold coffee, was still balanced on the back of the toilet where he'd abandoned it to shave and rushed off without it. Chuckling at himself in the mirror, Mulder loosened his tie. What had he expected? Some ominous, Puzo-esque message from Krycek -- *I'm Back* written in toothpaste on the mirror, his fish floating in a tank of formaldehyde, his dishes put away? No, Krycek had been in Crystal City all week, with Skinner.

A sudden pain in Mulder's fingers made him look down at the death grip he had on the sink's edge, forcing his nails to bite back into his own skin. All week, since late Sunday -- four nights. Mulder had clear memories; he stood at Skinner's shoulder, watching the AD put on his glasses, watching him stand in the doorway, filling it menacingly, watching him watch a sleeping Krycek. Mulder remembered Krycek's sweeping eyelashes flutter, his head falling sideways as the weight of Skinner's forearm disturbed the pillow. He was there, passively observing as Krycek's hand rested on Skinner's bicep, able to see the complex flexing of the muscles there. He could see everything --Krycek's incredulous smile, his fingers nudging Skinner's cheekbone, jostling his glasses.

Mulder whirled away from the mirror. *No.* Shit, he didn't *remember* any of that, because he hadn't been there, and it never happened. Why was it always like this with Krycek, his fantasies becoming more clear than his own sure knowledge of the truth? Perhaps even more distressingly, Mulder wasn't exactly sure where the fantasy was coming from, or headed. Was he the one in the high-beam of that infinitely patient, possessive gaze? Or was Alex Krycek waking to his sudden presence, the flesh and the eyes raising, rising, reaching to him? *Mulder, you don't know *what* you want. As per usual.*

He carried the cup to the kitchen, dumped its contents down the sink. Mulder rinsed it out, then emptied his coffeemaker and put in a new liner and new grounds, debating whether to log on and check his e-mail first, or order some dinner. The tuxedo hung in his doorway, accusingly. Mulder reached for an orange from the fruit basket by his sink. AS he tried to pierce its skin with a recently-trimmed thumbnail, he wondered dimly, *Fruit basket?* Since when did he buy fresh fruit? Right, Scully. It was Scully's; it had come to her in the hospital, courtesy of brother Charles, and by the time Mulder had bogarted all the grapes and one of the pears, she'd rolled her eyes and said, "Just keep it."

That memory, a genuine, honest-to-shit memory, jarred everything into place. His stomach rebelled, and Mulder gripped the edge of the sink as his throat worked painfully to expel food that wasn't in Mulder's stomach. He hadn't eaten lunch, hadn't touched food since the pack of seeds at nine-thirty, and Mulder could only cough up a thin, tasteless trickle of vomit. Scully in the hospital. Scully's vital life, her unflagging force of soul and personality, being siphoned off to feed the thing that shared her skull, until it grew strong and bloody while she became pale and listless and brittle. She shared a D.C. oncology ward with God knew how many perfectly ordinary men and women, but he was *lying,* fucking *lying* to himself that her illness was ordinary. He knew better.

Someone had stolen her away, seized her and struck her and bound her as she screamed his name into the phone. They had imprisoned her in a train car, and a man named Ishimaru had sundered her dear, small body, and taken the valuable genetic material stored in the cradle of her pelvis. They had taken her DNA, her Scullyness, and used it to create something she could love but never would, something that was of her essence, but with its very humanity abrogated and adulterated. Some process he couldn't begin to understand had left her genes savaged and tangled, and she had awakened in a hospital, against all reason, healed herself with a slaughtered immune system. He had known then that payment would someday be due on her miracle. He knew now, if he could bear to face it, that she was dying now because nothing could erase the fact that her body had endured more tortures than it could bear. It was the truth that had muzzled him and kept him from speaking freely to her since the diagnosis. Mulder wasn't sure what had made him nauseous: that it was happening at all, or that he'd been too much of a coward for three years to say one word about it, leaving her to make sense of it alone.

Krycek Krycek Alex Krycek Alex Krycek made it possible. If it hadn't been for his interference, Mulder could have reached her in time to save her. His fault, his fault, *my fault--*

No! Krycek's. Krycek's fault. The same traitorous bastard who had embedded himself in every level of Mulder's fantasies, wound himself intricately, intimately inside Mulder's profound private longing for touch and breath and sweetly agonizing synthesis.

The irony, Mulder thought as he turned on the cold water, rinsing out the sink, the really staggering irony, was that on the long list of times Mulder had been faced by challenges, Scully's abduction practically stood out as his great victory. For once, he had been good enough. He hadn't taken no for an answer, hadn't rested, had been smart and brave and fast enough to reach her in time. He'd seen his goal, wanted it, and gone ahead, high and hard and on fire with the love of her. And he would have been there, waiting for her at the top of the mountain, there when she needed him, coming to her call. Only Krycek prevented it. No weakness in Mulder. Only Krycek's treachery.

But then again, if he'd really been good enough, would he have been duped by Krycek at all? Hell of a time for his paranoia to fail him. More irony. Mulder lowered his head under the faucet and let the cold water flood his mouth. He was quivering again; at least this time half the FBI -- the high-ranking half -- wasn't here to see it.

[[[[[ Skinner got him out of the conference; never had that remorseless, "Agent Mulder, I want to see you outside," been so welcome.

Kim wasn't back at her desk yet; Mulder wondered if she even knew about the late-afternoon meeting, or who had come to work with the AD today. Skinner pushed him into a chair with heavy hands on his shoulders, then braced himself on the arms of the chair and leaned in. "This is hard for you. I respect that. But I resent your attempts to sour this deal with your outbursts. I don't like Alex Krycek any more than you do, but right now he seems to be the only man on the planet who is both able and willing to supply us with this kind of information. I don't think you understand what he has for us. Hard evidence, evidence that dates over a period of many years, documented to hell and back. If even half of it pans out -- if this sting goes off -- we have him. We *have* him."

"So you're going to cut a deal with a killer and a traitor--"

"Stop making it sound like a production of *Faust,* Mulder. It's the Federal Witness Protection Program -- except slightly less official. Perfectly simple."

Mulder shook his head, feeling like a sulky child. "It's not right."

"Agent Mulder, it comes down to this: I *want* that smoking bastard. Fuck up my chance at him, and you'll have a beautiful career alphabetizing the checks in payroll. In the Wichita office."

"Well, *I* want Alex Krycek." It didn't sound right, even to Mulder. He wondered exactly how to rephrase.

But Skinner seemed to take it at face value. "I know. Believe me, my gut response was exactly the same. It may or may not be right, but it's happening. I'm going to strongly recommend that you avoid Krycek for the time being. He's being placed under 24-hour guard, and I've already spoken with him about the situation. Now I want you to promise me the same thing he did: that if you do have to interact on the job, you will not discuss any details of Krycek's past. There's still no permanent decision on how far beyond this sting his amnesty will extend, and OPC prefers to keep this quiet until his...fate is sealed, as it were. Mulder, there's still a chance he'll go to prison. Or be deported."

For a moment, Mulder's heartbeat was erratic. "Does he know that?"

"Of course. Krycek and I have been discussing a variety of scenarios for his future; we've been working together since Sunday night, when he came to me personally in Crystal City." Mulder smiled sourly. To go back to the man who'd laid him out flat the last time he put his nose in Crystal City -- it did take balls. "We've been discussing a lot of things. He's an extremely driven man. I don't think anything matters to him except nailing his former employer to the wall. I don't know what happened between them, but Krycek's not fucking around. He has dirt on this man that goes back to 1994."

The year Mulder and Krycek worked together. Mulder could only sigh. "I don't -- want to screw the pooch on this any more than you do."

"I didn't think you did. So for once in your life, Mulder--"

He raised his eyebrows. "Be a team player?"

"I'd appreciate the effort." Skinner patted his shoulder.]]]]]]

Awkwardly, of course. It was probably something from some management handbook, how to make that all-important personal connection with your troublesome subordinate. Mulder couldn't help being cynical; it wasn't the first time Skinner had tried to smooth over a tense situation between them with a judicious touch, and every time it sat uncomfortably, probably because Skinner himself never seemed quite sure it was all that great an idea.

Mulder stood up and ran a wet hand through his hair. But that was the joy of being Walter Skinner, wasn't it? Nothing was ever really a great idea if you examined it closely enough, and Skinner's job was to examine everything until he could determine what exactly was wrong with it. Though if the subject of your inquiry was Special Agent Fox Mulder, it didn't take long.

He wondered how long it had taken Krycek. How many days had they been paired before he'd known where Mulder's weaknesses were, what to say to get inside his life? As much as a week, maybe? He'd had a good strategy right from the start; generic, maybe, but the classics --earnest, green agent, easily tongue-tied, a little out of his depth --never really go out of style. What was the first memory Mulder had of *Krycek,* of another human being sharing his workspace?

Oddly enough, maybe the phone call from Scully. All too rare and often rushed, those calls had been the breadcrumb trail that led Mulder through the bleakness between crises, between Deep Throat's death and Scully's disappearance.

[[[[[ "It's me."

"What? Don't you sleep?" The clock on his microwave read 12:50.

"Why? Do you?"

Mulder chuckled, balancing the cordless against his neck as he opened a new box of Frosted Mini-Wheats. "And miss all this great cable that I'm paying out the ass for? Is that your microwave I hear?"

"Very observant, Agent Mulder. I'm reheating some beef stroganoff. I worked right through dinner grading these lab reports."

Hopping on his countertop, Mulder put a can of beer between his knees and popped the top with his right hand while steadily tossing Mini-Wheats near his mouth with the left. "That's what you do when you're not cutting up flukeworm victims, huh?"

"Please. Give me another week or two before we reminisce about that case over dinner."

"Then entertain me with something wholesome."

She paused. "Alex Krycek?"

"The judges say we're going to accept that, Dana," he said in his best game-show host voice. "Seriously -- Alex? What about him?"

"He called me last night."

"No shit? What for?"

Police sirens passed beneath his building, and Mulder tensed instinctively. Maybe his last little tenure as a hostage had gotten to him more than Mulder had realized. He readjusted the phone, leaning into it, amazed at how her disembodied voice could make him feel centered again. "--to help you get on your feet again, since I know you so much better than he does. He seems very concerned. Are you still as unhappy with your work situation as you were?"

"Oh...no, not so much. I'm okay. Skinner's been handing me some interesting cases under the table. So, you told Krycek small, unmarked bills, right?"

"I hardly knew whether to encourage the trend or not."

"You just want to be my only friend."

He could hear her dishwasher in the background. "I think he has a crush on you."

"*You* think? *You* don't share office space with it. Scully, he stands so close to me that you could get trace evidence off my clothes. And he keeps giving me these meaningful looks, and making up excuses to hang around the building until I leave. It's creepy."

"You could take it as a compliment. He looks up to you."

"When a junior agent looks up to *you,* it's a compliment. But me? Spooky Mulder? My career just washed up in the Potomac, bloated, with its eyes eaten out by fish. Excuse me if I find it a little weird to be a role model all of a sudden."

"I downloaded some nude photos of you to him. I'll call and ask him just to send them back without looking at them. If that's really how you feel."

"And they think I'm the bad influence."]]]]]]]

Stroke of fucking genius, that. To enlist Scully, flattering her by acknowledging that she was the key to winning Mulder. Krycek could have been a rival, if he hadn't been so careful to make her understand that Krycek viewed himself the same way she viewed him -- stranger, interloper, redundancy. How many hours had it taken him to draft that piece of award-winning strategy? Maybe he'd been issued a secret decoder ring along with his weapon and badge, one that clearly showed the red letters stamped across Mulder's forehead to read PROPERTY OF AGENT SCULLY.

Either Krycek knew him, knew him so deeply and in such detail that there was no retreat at all, or Alex Krycek was on the most staggeringly improbable lucky streak Mulder had ever seen. There was no third choice, no other way Krycek could've left Hong Kong alive.

How many seconds had they struggled in the airport? Twenty, thirty? Funny how each time his relationship with Krycek turned, Mulder could measure it in shutter-clicks. Three days. An hour. Thirty seconds. *I didn't kill your father,* he'd said. Mulder didn't believe him. But it was what he needed to hear, the hint, the implicit promise that just this once Krycek would tell him something, anything, explain one damn thing to him. It was the excuse he needed not to kill him, the reasonable doubt. Krycek had never offered explanations before. Already, this time was different. It would be different.

*Finish it,* he'd said. Meaning packed tight inside the fraction of a second. Calling Mulder's bluff. He was holding a gun, illegally, ready to commit murder. If he shot Krycek, it was finished, all of it, and there would be no second chance and no way out. Are you really ready for this? he challenged. If it all ends here, are you ready to live with that? There's nothing more you need from me? Then finish it.

Had Krycek known the gun was an empty bluff, or just rolled his dice and taken his chances? Either way, he'd been right. There was too much Mulder still wanted to know about him -- everything, actually. The profiler in him was starving for one good handhold on Krycek's brain. Mulder hated to admit it -- never had, actually, and certainly not to Krycek. Krycek knew anyway. Or he guessed. Either way, it seemed that Mulder never had any room to maneuver where Krycek was concerned.

(2)

He'd been standing in the kitchen for a good five minutes, and he still couldn't decide, dinner or the Internet. The only rational thing was to say fuck 'em all and watch some tv. Shedding his jacket and shoes, Mulder settled along the couch and flipped to the Prevue Channel. The titles scrolled past him unnoticed.

Was Hong Kong itself a false memory? He knew it couldn't have been, really. He wasn't a complete lunatic, after all. But some of it seemed so damn unlikely. He remembered -- didn't he? -- Alex crouched in a window, remembered the narrow cut of his jeans and the red light off the barrel of his gun. Such a shock, hitting him right under the chin, just when Mulder was sure he'd never see Alex Krycek alive again. It had stopped him cold and made him stupid; Mulder didn't even remember what he'd said. Whatever damn thing had come out when he opened his mouth. He'd needed noise, words to prevent him from voicing the words that pounded through him like an overdose. *Gun gun gun Alex Alex Alex please please please no yes no* Was it really likely that, stunned as he'd been at the time, Mulder could actually *remember* the angle of Alex's leg as he braced himself in the window? Did that seem believable?

Oh, shit. And the most unbelievable of all, those endless minutes, passing against each other in the Hong Kong Mass Rapid Transport. Like that junior high party game, Seven Minutes in Heaven, only seven minutes in a sleek, glistening purgatory of surrender and denial. It was a pact. Pretend you don't know him, and you don't have to arrest him, and he doesn't have to put a bullet in your stomach at point-blank range. Let's just let the wild, reckless reputation of Hong Kong get under our skin, and if we both agree to it, then none of this exists outside. If I touch you, if my touch lingers, it's because the decadent thrill of your anonymity excites me. If your every breath is a hard-won victory, if you surge beneath my fingers, it's no more than you would allow any stranger on the subway whose dark carnal impulses brushed up against yours. It is your tight jeans, your cheekbones, your namelessness that turns me on, not my hatred of a man I knew as Alex Krycek. Whom you do resemble in this light. Who, if he were here, would have to gun me down when I had to intervene to prevent his escape. With whom I share nothing, not even this awkward, loveless contact, clumsy with nerves and desire. With you, the disconnectedness is voluntary; I never asked your name. My estrangement from him is so complete, so fundamental. No, I don't want to talk about it. Thanks anyway. Nice jacket.

Clicks of time. Three days. And hour. Seven minutes. Seven Minutes in Heaven. He had lost a kind of virginity on the MRT, and now he wore the texture of Alex, streaking his skin, clinging to him like vines. Even hurting him in the airport, not two hours later, had not been able to reverse the change.

Restlessly, Mulder squirmed on the sofa, looking for the most familiar position. His heel came down on the remote and the channel jumped. QVC. They were selling designer Barbie dolls. He would put Scully in that dress if he could, the black velvet Victorian with crystalline buttons and white satin underskirt. Wintry and lush at the same time. Not that Scully ever went anywhere nice enough to need a dress like that. He wondered if she would go to the dinner without him. Mulder hoped so; she sounded as though she'd been looking forward to it, and she certainly deserved at least that.

No. The very least she deserved was whatever the hell made her happy for one night. Dinner at a senator's mansion. The velvet dress of her dreams. Strength, a smile, her pride, her partner.

The phone rang, and her name leapt up in his chest. *Scully.* Five years running, and she hadn't given up on him yet. Mulder felt struck by lightning, all his energy restored in one bone-jarring jolt; there was one sure truth, and that was Scully. He grabbed his jacket from the coffee table and shook it, catching the cell phone as it fell, already talking as he flipped it open. "You're right. You're totally right, and we can still make it. We'll be fashionably late." He was trying to hang onto the phone with his chin as he unbuttoned his shirt. "It's going to be okay. Where are you? Are you still at home? I'll be done changing by the time you get here."

"Does that mean you're naked right now?"

The very worst thing about this, Mulder decided, was that he wasn't completely sure his senses were any more to be trusted than his memory. Bad enough not to be sure where Krycek had been, but never to know where he was and where he wasn't? Genuine, gold-plated insanity. And at the moment, Mulder wanted very much to be insane. Better an auditory hallucination than the real Krycek. Hallucinations didn't much care how you answered them.

"Mulder? Mulder. Mulder, are you still there?"

"Yeah," he said reflexively. "No! I'm hanging up."

"No no no, don't do that. Sorry, that was a cheap joke. I need to talk to you."

His voice was whatever the opposite of a hollow tone might be --dense? Full? Funny how few memories Mulder had of such a husky, beautiful voice. But then, Krycek had always watched, letting Mulder do most of the talking. Ages ago, Mulder used to tease him about being strong and silent, a young aspiring Skinner. He was pretty sure Krycek had never offered to have a conversation with him before.

"I'm not interested. Get off my phone; I'm not paying to talk to you."

"I'll buy you a Coke at the office to make it up to you." It was too absurd, and too flatly delivered, not to be a joke. Krycek's sense of humor had always been dry almost to the point of dessication. "I have something that belongs to you."

"FedEx it to me. And get off my phone." Mulder knew he should hang up. He told himself he was only staying on the line to rattle Krycek, to confound his expectations.

"It's information."

Of course it was. That was Krycek's field, after all. Taking it, selling it, luring you in with it. "Give it to Blevins; he's heading up your little adventure."

"It belongs to *you.*" Krycek was the last person Mulder would have expected to be arguing property rights on knowledge. Mulder had always figured him for the *information wants to be free* type, given how many people's secrets he'd blown apart, and more every day. "You should have had it a long time ago. Just meet me in person."

"No."

"Mulder. Let--"

He hung up, and sat down, shaking. Carefully, he laid the phone on the table and waited for it to ring again.

It didn't. After a few minutes, he called Scully's cell; it was off. He tried her house, and the machine picked it up. Mulder didn't leave a message.

[[[[[ "Mulder. Hi, Mulder. Did I wake you up?"

Mulder muted the televison and glanced at his watch. At almost three, a person could be getting less welcome calls than from his partner. "No. What's the matter?"

"Couldn't sleep." His voice was wrong somehow, as though he were fumbling. Normally, Krycek chose his words carefully, and never hesitated once he committed to speaking. "Scully still calls you Mulder. Does everyone call you Mulder?"

"Yeah. Are you drunk?"

"I've been drinking. Yeah, I've been drinking. Some beer, some vodka. My father was a real snob about his vodka. Have you ever had real Russian vodka? It's like tar. It doesn't pour, it drips. Nasty shit. Put you on your ass."

Mulder began flipping through silent channels. "Go to bed, Krycek."

"Your folks call you Fox, though, right?"

"I guess. They don't call me much."

He jumped at that. "No -- no, my dad and I, we're not close either. He doesn't like the government. He doesn't like America. Your father worked for the state department."

"I know. You should go to bed, sleep it off. Do you know what time it is?"

"Three. Ish. I can't sleep, thinking."

Mulder settled in. Drunk people were generally amusing, and a drunk Krycek should be especially so. "Whatcha thinking about?"

"You." A wistful tone, youthful. Mulder felt guilty; Alex Krycek was inexperienced, so intense, alone. Suffering, in his own way, just as much as Mulder was. On the spot, Mulder resolved to quit fucking with Krycek's head. "There's so much I never told you. Not that you probably don't know all of it. You know a whole hell of a lot, Mulder. Sometimes when you're really thinking, it's like your brain goes supernova, and I think you know everything. I really do think you know everything."

"I know enough," Mulder admitted. "You really don't have to go on. You'll just be embarrassed on Monday."

"But I want you to hear. Or I just want to say it. I'm fucking blitzed; there's no way I'll remember this on Monday."

"Krycek. It's okay. I know."

"You don't know shit, Mulder! You're just -- just some stupid fucking straight guy. I must seem pretty pathetic to you, huh, Mulder? Some lame, blue-collar, over achieving queer, like the poor man's *Philadelphia.* I'd never have the balls to come on to you sober, you or anyone else, 'cause I want a fucking career. I'm fucking upwardly-mobile, and a coward."

His voice was so raw; Mulder wanted to be there in person, to smooth away the ache somehow. His rational mind knew he was more likely to make it worse. "You don't seem pathetic. I'm actually very flattered."

"Right. Flattered."

"Okay, now listen to me, Alex. See if you can remember this. You're not the only person in the world who wants to sleep with me. And you're not the only -- person I consider a friend. But you're the only one who's both. You get it? The only one. Okay?" He gentled his voice. "Okay, Alex?"

"Okay. We're okay. You're -- okay. You're too damn good. I don't want to do this anymore, Mulder. I want out."

"I know."

Krycek's chuckle was rhythmic, like a stone skipped three times across a lake's vast surface. It sank into silence, swallowed by the darkness. "No. No, you don't. I think I wish you did. I think I wish you'd hurry up and hate me."

"Get some sleep."

"Have I really fucked up, Mulder?"

"No. We're cool."]]]]]]]]]]]]

Hearing Krycek's voice over the phone again undid years of rigorously not remembering that conversation. It was a fascinating exchange, though, wasn't it? Like their relationship in microcosm, truth laced with lies embellished with truth, meaning both what it said and what it concealed. Another fine strategy from a consummate professional? Or had Krycek just been weird and giddy with vodka and guilt and a sincere (*Krycek* and *sincere,* what a fucking day this had turned out to be), impossible attraction to an erstwhile partner? Either way, it had played out to Krycek's advantage. Beyond that point, Mulder had truly taken Krycek under his wing, motivated by sympathy for unrequited adoration and, yes, by ego, a bit. After that three a.m., Krycek had been utterly in Mulder's life.

God, that fucking phone call. He hadn't thought about it since the day he sat in Krycek's car with a palm full of Morley ashes. Hearing it over and over in his mind. *There's so much I never told you. I don't want to do this anymore, Mulder. Mulder. You. Hi, Mulder. Have I really fucked up, Mulder? I want out. I really do think you know everything. We're okay. We're okay. We're okay. I want out.*

They had never, not for one second, been okay. They were certainly not okay now, not if Krycek delivered the Cancerman hog-tied with an apple in his mouth to the White House lawn.

If he didn't get up and move around, Mulder was going to fall asleep. He lobbed the thought around, discovered that it didn't bother him. He tucked an arm under his head and lowered the volume on the television, setting it to the Sci-Fi Channel.

What did Krycek know that belonged to Mulder? Mulder felt entitled to plenty of things, but he really doubted they were Krycek's to give. It was probably a ruse, anyway. Krycek just wanted to know if Mulder really would come to heel for anyone who claimed to have a piece of the truth. Even if Krycek did know something, he probably wasn't giving it away, and Mulder had paid all he was really prepared to pay for the colossal error of ever being associated with Alex Krycek.

       ------------- -------------- --------------

"Four thirty-nine." The teenage girl behind the counter looked as though she wanted to be pissed at Mulder for coming in five minutes before close, but couldn't quite manage it. Mulder smiled apologetically, and she blushed.

"I'm going to write you a check, okay, Karen?"

She plucked at her charm bracelet. "Okay, Mr. Mulder." Mulder winked at her; he ate here three or four nights a week, and it was the last place he wanted to earn the enmity of the staff. Fortunately, Mulder had a feeling this kid would forgive him for pouring sugar in her gas tank. *Yeah, how cool, Mulder. Your emotional life is a nightmare, but you're a tremendous hit with the under-twenty set. Where the hell were all these girls when *I* was in high school?*

Karen's eyes widened as Mulder pushed back his jacket looking for his checkbook in an inside pocket and she caught sight of the Beretta in his shoulder holster. "Are you a cop, Mr. Mulder?"

"He's a federal agent."

The voice shot through Mulder; he leapt, and his hand gripped the gun instinctively. Seeing that, Karen yipped and jumped back from the counter, holding up her hands in a warning gesture. The clock hit eleven, and the timed lights outside Pagliai's Pizza shut off, leaving the lobby bathed in a soft fluorescent blue.

Calmly, Krycek slid four dollars and fifty cents toward the girl. "Come on, Fox," he said, his voice almost hypnotically pleasant. "You're scaring this nice lady. He picked up the white bag that held Mulder's dinner. "Get your soda and let's go."

Karen gave a breathy laugh of relief. "Oh, you two know each other." But seeing Mulder's expression, she still looked on the verge of panicky, staying well back from the money and the register.

"Where did you come from?"

"Bathroom. Come on, I'll give you a lift home."

Mulder jerked the paper bag out of Krycek's hand. "I prefer to walk."

The silence was endless; it was as though all three of them had sunk deeply into a sorcerous sleep where they stood. Mulder was terribly conscious of his sloppy appearance -- hair still mussed from his nap, Oxford t-shirt patched with sweat from his jog over here. And Krycek looked like a movie star, like a Quentin Tarantino, in a black silk shirt and dark suit that must have cost what Krycek's entire wardrobe had back in his FBI days. It made him look... different. The difference made Mulder nervous; more had changed than Mulder could yet know. His eyes fell to Krycek's empty left sleeve, then rose to Krycek's neck. He was dying to touch Krycek's neck; he couldn't even lust after someone in a normal manner.

"Fox..."

"*Mulder.*"

"Okay. Mulder. They're closed. We can talk at your place." He smiled slightly. "I came all the way back to D.C. just to buy you a calzone. You have to owe me at least five minutes."

"*Owe--?*" Mulder's jaw dropped; he shut his mouth, helpless. Speechless for the first time since God knew when.

*To buy you a calzone.* Krycek knew what was in the bag -- because he'd overheard Mulder ordering, or just because he remembered? Those Friday evenings when they'd take the elevator together up to their cars, and Mulder would string him along, pretending not to notice Krycek trying to fish out his weekend plans, until the last moment, when the elevator door would open and Mulder would give him a playful push and say, "So, you gonna buy me a pizza, or what?" And Krycek would smile at the floor and shrug, a studied *whatever* gesture. They would come here -- they sat in *that* booth -- and they'd have pepperoni and black olives, onions on Krycek's half, or Mulder would order a bacon double-cheeseburger calzone while Krycek had a reuben. They would talk about music, or science fiction, or football -- Krycek could wax passionate about any of the three subjects, his demeanor quite different from the understated, pragmatic way he approached any political or professional topic. In this pizzaria, in that narrow booth, Mulder had learned to admire Krycek's mind; he was both a fiend for details, able to isolate and describe each spoke in the madly spinning wheel of Mulder's own logic, and a natural-born inventor who saw the world in large-scale terms, understood the shape of events regardless of his own placement in the pattern. His intelligence was not divine fire like Mulder's, nor stone and iron like Scully's, but it had the art and precision, the vision and the equations of an architect's finest work. Mulder became adept at translating Krycek's rationed, skeletal words, learning to see them as blueprints that, to the initiate, indicated the whole depth and breadth of Krycek's thoughts.

Eleven cents clicked loudly in the silence as Karen laid Krycek's change on the counter in front of him.

*Click.* Three days. An hour. Seven minutes in heaven. A plea in the darkness at three a.m.: *I don't want to do this anymore.* A tendril of hidden strength in an empty restaurant at 11:04. *I'll give you a lift home.* Not an offer. A challenge.

The sound of a dishwasher. The hum of a soda fountain. Black and white geometric tiles and red vinyl booths and windows that only reflected their own images back at them when Mulder tried to catch a glimpse of the real world, the world outside. Mulder recognized himself, framed palely against the night. The man beside him was a stranger. He was calm and poised and dauntingly composed, certainly no part of the sullen, vulnerable young federal agent whose intellect, ambition, and passion had come crashing together to trap him impossibly between desire and fear of Mulder and his elusive, seductive truths. Neither, however, could Mulder see in his watchful eyes the feverish rage of the outlaw, the doomed madness of the fugitive in New England, the dark sinner in Hong Kong.

Just how many Alex Kryceks was he going to have to cope with, anyway? And if his life had fallen to rags and cobwebs after only two Scullys, how the hell many could he hope to get through?

Fucking hell, the man had come back to him looking like... Scully. That devastating serenity, the impeccable timing, even the gentle irony in his voice.

Mulder wanted an answer, any answer, any reality to latch onto. He wanted to strike Alex Krycek hard across the face and make him explode with the survivor's hate and anger. He wanted to caress Krycek's jaw, the pad of his fingers flirting up against Krycek's lips, and watch him grab at the excuse to sink gratefully against Mulder. Or maybe he had it backwards. Maybe an attack would send Krycek low to cower and ask his forgiveness, and a lover's touch would spark him to towering fury. How the hell should he know? In spite of it all, he had never learned the laws that governed Alex Krycek.

Feelings as though he creaked audibly, Tin Man style, Mulder took one step toward the door. The second step was more agonizing still; Mulder felt it as both a failure and a relief. With the third he thought of Scully -- Scully's touch, Scully's pain, Scully's trust, Scully's bitter, wretched revenge against him for being unable to share in this descent with her. It all seemed so clear now. What separated them was that Scully had yet to forgive him for failing to be with her always. Maybe someday.

Four steps: click. Think of three a.m., a drunken confidence, a confession he couldn't understand until it was too late. Which words had been real? Any? Which betrayals had Krycek regretted, and when had he regretted them? Ever? A fifth step. He could sense Krycek behind him, moving smoothly. He was invulnerable, and Mulder was the corpse, the trigger, and the battlefield all at once.

Six steps. Yes, he was afraid. Who wouldn't be? There was no way of knowing what came next. Krycek was a complete stranger to him, and Mulder was beginning to feel the same way about himself. Seven. His weapon pressed heavily against his side, icy through his t-shirt. Mulder was his own worst enemy and always had been. The gun was worse than useless -- it was tempting.

A chime sounded as Mulder opened the door. Krycek propelled him through it with his hand on Mulder's back.

The only car in front of Pagliai's was a Chevy Impala with that bleak government-issue look that always made Mulder feel like a Man in Black. Circles of light from the street lamps sat on the ground both in front of and behind the car, hemming it in. Chivalrously, Krycek opened the passenger door for him.

After a quick change around, a blurred second of shuffling, Mulder realized that Krycek was moving closer, not away. He took a step back, and found himself colliding softly with the roof of the car. The long-imagined contact of Krycek's body combined with the inescapable fact of his actual, not imagined, nearness, his scent all but on Mulder's tongue -- scent and taste were nearly the same, they said, the human brain practically unable to separate them in any meaningful way, and he had been close enough to Krycek to smell him so many times. It was impossible not to think of that with Krycek standing less than two fingers' width from him. Impossible not to be hungry for him.

Other cars were passing them by, one at a time, along with one black man in dreadlocks on his bike. It was life, innocent, ignorant life, coasting along late on a weekday night while Mulder and Krycek stood perfectly still in the V of the open car door, probably just as ignorant as the next person, but counting out each final second of their last lingering innocence with hard and relentless heartbeats. Click.

Mulder tilted his head to the side and let sightlessness take him like a drug. He waited. He shaped his command with his mouth, but gave it neither sound nor breath. "Finish it...."

Krycek's lips rested lightly on his, as if nesting there. Mulder heard a small groan, caged either in his throat or Krycek's. It was excruciating. Mulder twitched forward, ready to awaken this chaste, sleeping kiss. As if he hadn't even noticed, Krycek stepped away and walked around the car without a glance at him. Slowly, not trusting his balance (*Fox Mulder, unbalanced? What was your first clue?*), Mulder lowered himself into the car and sealed himself in.

It only took Krycek long enough to get behind the wheel and set Mulder's dinner on the dashboard for Mulder's sense of reality to begin sputtering to life. "*Shit,* he said, crossing his arms across himself protectively.

"What?" Krycek pulled his keys from his pocket, glancing toward Mulder for all the world as though he'd just arrived and wondered what could have Mulder so rattled. Hell, for all Mulder knew, maybe he'd swapped out with one of the other Kryceks on his way to the driver's side.

"I don't know which is worse, having this turn up on some official status report on someone's desk, or hearing about it in line for the coffee machine."

Krycek paused for a moment, then returned his attention to his keys. "You must file some pretty comprehensive status reports."

"Your *armed guard,* Krycek."

"Oh, them. Nice guys. They wouldn't have seen that."

"Why the hell not?"

He turned slightly and gave Mulder a third of a smile. "From the hotel?"

"What the hell did you do?"

"Drugged 'em," he said calmly.

"Jesus, Alex. We don't assign you those guards for you to ditch --like somebody's bad date."

For a quick instant, Mulder saw Krycek's face soften, and he gave Mulder a grave, almost gentle look that said *Yeah, Mulder, I get it.* Then he shook his head, as though Mulder were a slow but docile child and started the car. They were two blocks away before Krycek said, "Ninety-five percent of the FBI is for shit, okay? You tell Skinner there's just one person I trust at my back. Maybe he'll believe it coming from you."

"And who's that?"

"Don't fish for praise, Mulder. You don't wear it well."

"Speaking of, nice suit. Who paid for that?"

Krycek jerked in his seat; it was a minute movement, quickly killed, but so unexpected that it became larger than life. "What the fuck does that mean?"

*Obviously more than I meant it to,* Mulder was tempted to say. He'd only been wondering if Krycek were in the mood to reveal some names of those who'd bought up the MJ information, now that he was into revealing all. Instead of explaining his real meaning, Mulder shrugged it away casually. "I just assumed you'd have to be strapped for resources to come here, that's all."

"No. Business is good." It got under Mulder's skin, hearing Krycek call treason and profiteering and God only knew what else just *business.* He suspected that Krycek intended it to.

Mulder took a deep breath. "I guess you have some kind of business with me, too. Something outside your...project."

"Yeah."

Maddening bastard. "Well?"

"Inside." He caught Mulder's glare and had the grace to look away meekly. "Come on, Mulder. If this was all that easy for me to say, I'd have e-mailed you about it two years ago."

"Oh, this is *hard* for you." Mulder turned in his seat just as Krycek found a parking place in his lot. "This better damn well be important. You don't *know* hard yet."

He chuckled. "Is that a come-on, Mulder?"

Boldness eroded Mulder's embarrassment at his poorly-chosen figure of speech. "Isn't all of this a come-on?"

Krycek leaned back in his seat, looking Mulder over. There was nothing in his face that Mulder could read. "Is that what you think? I came here to fuck?"

That was one way to lay your cards on the table. Mulder shrugged, and the tension in his neck and shoulders roared. "I don't know. What should I think?"

"I came here...well, shit, I've covered this already. I have a...message for you. I came to Washington to settle up. With you, and with everyone."

"Redemption?" Mulder interpreted, scathingly.

But Krycek shook his head quickly, meeting Mulder's eyes. "Not at all. I don't regret who I am, and I wouldn't change anything if I had the option. I don't really believe in redemption, actually. Only...justice."

Justice. Could there be any justice for Scully's death, or his father's? What about for the way Krycek made Mulder doubt himself each time they met? What would be a just reparation for that? "There is truth," Mulder said quietly, "but no justice."

Krycek made a snorting noise. "Now you sound like *him.*"

"Who?"

He made a vague gesture in the air, almost indicating a canting bow, with a certain irony. "You call him Cancerman. So does Skinner, now. It's become standard usage with my investigative team. Cancerman. It seems to fit."

Mulder wondered by what name Krycek had known him before. "Seriously, Krycek -- what kind of justice? What's the really *fair* thing to do with you know?"

"Use me," he said simply. "Mulder, I'm the best in the business."

"Espionage?"

"*Yes,* espionage. What, you're too high-minded for that? The Cancerman isn't, I promise you. Cardinale was a thug, but I was an expert, and I still am, Consortium or no Consortium. Not many people could have fucked you up like I did. But on the other hand, not many people can do for you now what I can. Isn't that justice, Mulder? I risked my life to hurt you. I'm here now, risking my life to help you."

"Is that supposed to make it all better?" Mulder wanted to sound angry, wanted to *be* angry. But it made such a nice story. Justice.... Even if not that, at least simple *aid,* an ally who was no longer under the sway of his enemies one way or another. Krycek -- he knew, all too well, Krycek's strength, his ruthlessness. The idea that it could be a shelter to Mulder instead of a gun at his temple, day in and day out....

This time, his body moved naturally, responding with his instincts instead of against them. His hand touched Krycek's shoulder, his left shoulder. Krycek looked down at it, but seemed to decided it was not the time to speak about Tunguska. "You're a stubborn bastard, Mulder. You need every enemy to be a monster, and every ally to be Jesus fucking Christ." It could have been an insult, but Krycek said it with...affection? Maybe so.

Mulder let his hand slide back to caress up Krycek's neck and cradle the base of his skull. "You never really answered.... About why you came here."

"Actually, I did. You're just convinced there's more to it."

"Am I wrong?"

Krycek sighed, and Mulder thought he felt Krycek relax slightly into his touch. "I did want to see you...in person."

"Here I am."

"Let it drop, Mulder. This isn't how I planned it."

"What did you plan? A calzone, a handshake, maybe trade business cards? Just chatting up your FBI connections, Krycek?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Mulder. You know better."

*No,* he wanted to say, *I really don't. If you aren't my friend and you aren't my rat bastard, I don't know what you want.* "Do I?"

"What do you expect to hear? I like you."

Without thinking about it, Mulder laughed. "You *like* me? Is this the fourth grade?"

"Oh, fuck off. You probably want sonnets. I like you, all right? I don't hate you. I don't want you dead. I'm not angry because you fucked up in Tunguska and cost me an arm."

"*I* fucked up? Tunguska was *your--*"

"I wasn't going to leave you there, Mulder, *Jesus!*"

"You could have fucking told me you knew those people."

"Yeah, that's a plan. *Trust me, Mulder; I'm KGB.*"

"It didn't seem important to you?"

"Shut up," Krycek said, and pulled him in hard to kiss him.

Maybe the porn habit had skewered Mulder's perceptions of reality; on the racks, anyway, sex was easy to come by -- any type, any time. But there were no skin flicks that capitalized on the intense sensuality of doing nothing but kissing, your arm wrapped tightly around someone's neck, your hand racing dementedly over his chest in all directions as he sucked hungrily on your tongue. It seemed more erotic and more forbidden than anything Mulder could see in the most explicit movie. Breathing hard, Krycek was sliding down in his seat until Mulder was practically on top of him, with allowances for the crooked sideways angles their legs hand to find to manage the space restraints. Something about the slow, hesitant way Krycek's fingers found their way through Mulder's hair sent chills over his arms and made him want to crush Krycek's lips even harder beneath his.

Some cautious part of him that Mulder didn't even know he had made him ease back. Krycek's eyes were wide and dark in this light, and he released Mulder's hair and raised his fingers dazedly to his own lips. Krycek let his head fall to the side, apparently staring at the Chevy's steering column. "Aw, shit," he said, his voice soft but distinct. "This is all going wrong." Mulder indulged the urge to nuzzle against Krycek's neck. "I wish you weren't such a perverse bastard, Mulder. Why couldn't you have wanted this back when we were partners?"

An interesting question. Had he wanted Krycek at all, before Hong Kong? He couldn't remember being anything but amused by Krycek's attentions before that, and after Duane Barry he'd been nothing but angry for a long time. Why? Probably because he was a perverse bastard, and he never seemed to want any relationship he could actually have. The danger of seducing Krycek was arousing, too. Almost as appealing to his steadily-rising cock as the tragedy of loving Krycek was appealing to Mulder's sense of the theatrical.

Loving Krycek? And where in the hell had *that* idea been hiding, preparing to ambush him in a weak moment? Well, it could damn well go back under its rock. Krycek was dead on target; this was going very wrong.

Krycek got his arm under him and pushed up on his elbow, partially dislodging Mulder. "Well, I hope you enjoyed that. After our business is finished, you won't be in the mood for much. Except maybe pitching me out another window."

"Let me be the judge of that."

"You usually are. Get off me; it's getting cold out here." Mulder grabbed his cooling takeout; he'd forgotten his soda. That was all right. If it wasn't a gin and tonic, it wasn't going to do him any good at this point anyway.

(3)

Inside the apartment, Krycek cased the living room quickly. "You think it's bugged?" Mulder asked, sitting down on the floor by the coffee table. Krycek only shrugged.

He positioned himself alongside the window, leaning against its frame with his left shoulder. "Let's just get this over with, okay?"

"Fine. It's your show. What's on your mind, Krycek?"

Without looking at him, Krycek launched into what seemed to be a prepared speech. "In April of '95, you got a phone call from your father, who insisted that you see him immediately. Even though you were sick and drugged, you drove to Massachusetts to hear what he had to say. He called you...knowing that his calls were probably being monitored, that none of his former colleagues would allow him to go unpunished if he told you all he knew. But he loved you, and he understood, by that time, how much it could mean for you to know the truth, so he risked his life. But he was murdered. I think you have a right to know what he died to tell you."

"Did you kill him?" All these years later, his father's death seemed almost dreamlike; it had taken on the stylized significance of a Greek tragedy, hardly as intensely human as the still-shocking reality of Krycek's presence. Morosely, Mulder wondered if he would one day look back and remember Scully this way.

Krycek hesitated. "My intention is not to discuss the circumstances of your father's death." That, at the very least, was obviously memorized. He was staring out the window, and Mulder couldn't tell if he was searching the street intently or lost in thought. "He wanted you to know about the project he headed up, organizing the efforts of scientists from several countries with the goal of hybridizing human and alien DNA. I wish I had all the details he meant to give you, but I don't. What I do know, I've handed over to the FBI. You've learned a lot of it on your own since then, anyway. You won't...find this easy, but he wanted you to understand the timeline. He left the project in 1992."

"No, that can't -- that can't be right."

"It is right. He left when he realized that you had inside sources, that your fascination with aliens would eventually have to lead you back to him. At that time, he believed he could...make it so you'd never need to know. He'd been uncomfortable with the project for years, but...of course you know what happened the last time he expressed his dissatisfaction."

Mulder nodded wearily. "They took Samantha."

"Right. Anyway, Mulder's-- your father's defection was the first time the Consortium as a whole really sat up and noticed the X-Files. Not the Cancerman, of course -- he knew you well. But the others. They decided to shut you down as quietly as possible, debunk you. They found the perfect partner for you -- young, inexperienced, eager to build her reputation, as passionate in her field as you were in yours. You had already shown signs of being slightly unstable -- antisocial tendencies, violent impulses, disregard for authority, even for your own safety. They felt sure that you were no match for Scully."

He had to smile at that. "I wasn't. You think I have antisocial tendencies?"

"Stay on target, Mulder."

"It's just...a lot to get a handle on. I always thought of his...complicity as all in the past."

"I'm not done yet."

"Really? After all that? You're not out of breath, are you, Krycek?"

"Can you shut *up*? I'm trying to tell you that your father knew where Samantha is."

Mulder almost asked *Samantha who?* It was too much, too impossible to believe that Krycek was talking about his Sam. His father. "He didn't know."

"Of course he did. Think it through, Mulder. She was taken to control him; how would that have been done if she were dead, or if he thought she was out of the Cancerman's reach in any way? For the abduction to mean anything, your father had to know that her life was constantly in jeopardy, that she could live or die according to how well he cooperated. You had to have known that, Mulder. It only makes sense."

"Why didn't he *tell* me?"

"I can think of a hundred reasons."

Mulder folded his arms on the table and put his head down. He could think of several, too. It was a reasonable story. Plausible. It could even be true. He didn't know what Krycek would gain by inventing it. For a profiler, it was amazing how little Mulder really knew about most of the people in his life. "Are you the one who shot him?"

"Does it really matter that much to you?"

It did. Because he needed all the help he could get in pinning down Alex Krycek. "Why should I believe you?"

"Believe whatever."

"Do you know where Sam is?"

"Yes."

"Then tell me."

"So you can go after her? And get yourself killed? No. I might if she were in danger, but she's not. She was raised by a foster family. Her memories were...shaded, to make it easier for her, to dull the trauma of her abduction. She's married now. She's a chiropractor. That's what he wanted you to know, finally: that there was nothing to worry about. She wasn't ever harmed, even when your father rebelled against the Consortium."

"Why not?"

Krycek sighed, drumming his fingers against his leg. "You'd have to know the Cancerman. He's nothing if not ruthless, but in his own way, he's very loyal. He came to think of Samantha as under his protection, which in a way she was. He...cares about her."

"And how do you know him so well?"

"Oh, Mulder. That's a hell of a long story. And it really isn't any of your business."

Skinner had told Mulder about Krycek's anger, his lust for revenge. But what Mulder heard was something quite different. Regret, or maybe sorrow. "You keep saying Cancerman. What did you call him before?"

"Mostly old man."

Mulder grinned. "To his face?"

"No. I don't want to talk about it."

"Why not?"

"Why do you?"

"Because I need to know where you learned all this."

Kicking one foot back against Mulder's wall, Krycek shoved himself forward and began to walk away. "I'm done here."

"The hell you are." Mulder caught and held Krycek's shin as he passed. "I appreciate you coming here to give me my father's message. Now what about us?"

"*Us?* Jesus, Mulder, are you listening to yourself? *Us.* For shit. You and me?" He was either appalled by the very idea, or terrified that Mulder would retract the offer as soon as it was accepted.

He got to his feet, placing himself far too close to Krycek's body, just as Krycek had done to him outside Pagliai's. "Isn't it possible?"

Of course it wasn't possible. Mulder knew it, and Krycek certainly knew it too. They weren't okay. Krycek was probably going to prison. Mulder was probably in love with someone else. They were better at hurting each other than they ever could be at coming close to each other. They were unredeemable, even if Alex was wrong and such a thing as redemption did exist. But at least this one time, it could be Mulder who was in focus, who wanted one single thing and tore reality in half to get at it. Tonight it could damn well be Krycek who was divided against himself, and if Mulder had to fake a complete lack of doubt to see Krycek looking uncertain, so be it. He slid a hand up Krycek's neck, his thumb stretching out to lie beneath Krycek's chin and subtly urge his head back. "There is an us, and you know it. You may hate it, but there's something between us. In Hong Kong--"

"Forget that. I'm serious, Mulder; do yourself a favor and forget that."

"You haven't."

Krycek took a step back, trying to stare off over his shoulder as though this were a casual, fidgeting move instead of a retreat. "I --don't have to. I know what it meant."

"Tell me, then. I'd love to know."

"*Nothing,* Mulder. It meant fucking *nothing.* It was a power trip. It was hormones. Who the fuck cares? You felt me up; there's no *significance* to that. It just happened."

"I'm the one who felt you up. Don't I get a vote?"

He made an angry, incoherent gesture with his arm. "*No,* you don't get a vote."

"Stay."

"*Stop* it. Who do you think you're *talking* to, Mulder? Do you even see me when I'm standing right in front of you?"

Lightly, Mulder kissed him, and in spite of his agitation, Krycek didn't try to avoid it at all. "What are you telling me, Krycek? That you never thought this could happen if you came here?"

"Not like this. It...occurred to me we could end up fucking. Not like this.... For one thing, I expected you to ask more questions. You usually do."

As little as Mulder liked the idea that Krycek understood him better than Mulder did himself, he discovered that he was even less happy to think that neither of them were calling the shots accurately. It meant that things had spun out of control, and they had no choice but to trust their luck. The thought did not fill Mulder with confidence; it made him downright edgy. "And what am I going to ask you? Why would I bother? We already know that I'm as capable of shooting pool stoned in the dark as I am of guessing when you're lying and when you're not --if you're ever not. What's the point of even asking anymore?"

"You want the *truth*? Let me show it to you." With a dexterity that it hardly seemed he should have anymore, Krycek unbuttoned his shirt and let it, along with his jacket, fall backwards off his shoulders, slipping off to hang from his wrist. He shook it away angrily and laid his hand over his ribs, tapping one finger just below his heart, on top of an inch-long white scar that stood out clearly from his olive skin. "You want to know who stabbed me here? You want to take a fucking guess? Your father. Right before I shot him." Mulder refused to give Krycek the pleasure of seeing a single emotion on his face. "Yeah, so what about it, Mulder? Am I still your *friend*? I was hired to go to his house and threaten him, to keep him from telling you what they knew he was going to tell you when the tap on his phone recorded him calling you. But he wasn't too damn easy to intimidate. He stabbed me with a pocketknife, and I blew him away. I probably didn't have to; he was old and sick and it was just a Swiss army knife. But he -- surprised me, and it hurt like a bitch. There was blood everywhere, and I wasn't thinking. I just fired. I tried like hell to feel guilty about it later, but I never really did. If I hadn't acted right away, you would have heard something and come upstairs, and if you hadn't killed me on the spot, I would've ended up in jail. People in my line of work don't get arrested; it's a very basic rule, and if you violate it, you end up like that prick Cardinale."

The events of that night...Mulder had to struggle even to begin to reconstruct them. "I didn't see a knife, or any blood that didn't look like his."

"Mulder, do you have any idea how high you were? I could have left my driver's license in his mouth and you wouldn't have noticed it. The Cancerman made sure all the evidence of my presence was done away with during the investigation -- even though he never really forgave me for it. But now do you understand what I'm telling you? You have this unbelievable gift for creating fantasy worlds, but I don't want us to settle down and build a summer house in this one. It's *not real.* I'm not the sweet junior G-man you want to believe I am, deep down."

Mulder snorted. "How do you know what I think you are? How would you possibly know?"

"Mainly you tell me. Scum-sucking vermin?"

"Invertebrate, I think."

"The moral dipstick...."

"Right," he chuckled. How had Krycek defused his anger so quickly, without even seeming to try? Had he been trying -- or had Mulder been looking for an excuse to let it go? "Moral dipstick. Good imagery, though, don't you think?"

"It does hang on."

They had adopted a posture that suggested dancing, with Mulder's hands at the small of Krycek's back and Krycek's hand behind Mulder's neck. "Blame that on the heat of the moment, then. We were talking about...before that."

"Oh, before that? I can only make an educated guess. Alex Krycek...a Dudley Do-Right, as painfully, cheerfully by-the-book as most agents fresh from the Academy, including yourself. You didn't figure I'd be in the field long; I was a management tadpole, about two years away from sprouting legs and my own office. A little bit low-rent, possibly from a blue-collar background, but ambitious -- maybe second-generation American, Russian or something. Not much sense of humor, but reasonably tolerant of yours. Type-A personality, paranoid about making the smallest mistake, an outstanding detail man. Maybe good-looking, but anxious, tense, and out of touch with my id. Not your type."

"Polish."

"Mm?"

"I thought Krycek sounded like a Polish name." Son of a bitch; he could not only profile Mulder, he could profile Mulder profiling Krycek. "But you're right about at least one thing: I didn't feel this way about *him.*"

Krycek threw his hand up in exasperation; it came down with surprising gentleness on the back of Mulder's head. "Are you telling me you only go for killers, Mulder? If you are, I really think you should...I don't know. Get help or something."

It wasn't visible to the eye, but Mulder could feel Krycek shaking beneath his hands. "So help me."

Roughly, frantically, Krycek kissed him, and for a moment Mulder was persuaded that this really was, here and now, their last and only moment. "Bastard, Mulder, you bastard." Mulder drove him backwards; it was all he could do not to laugh at the manic way Krycek tried to evade him and plunge his tongue into Mulder's mouth at the same time. "Don't forgive me. You have no right to." Krycek's back hit the cold wall; he jumped and hissed as though it were hot wax. The crook of his elbow settled behind Mulder's neck. "This isn't what I planned. This isn't how I imagined it." Mulder struck hard and fast, using his whole weight to slam him into the wall, back and up, so that he had to rise up on the balls of his feet. He bit softly into the sinews that tied Krycek's gorgeous neck to his shoulder, and heard Krycek cry out, "Fuck you, Mulder! Fuck you. You've ruined my life again." His legs were shaking, and the unsteadiness forced him to shift his weight constantly, arching away from the wall as much as he could. Mulder could feel Krycek's erection rock erratically against the elastic of his sweatpants. Krycek closed his eyes, turning his face away so that his lips were too far for Mulder to touch. "I had to see you again...." He coiled. He pounced, wrapping his legs securely around Mulder's hips, relying on Mulder's weight to keep him firmly braced against the wall, wincing as he did so. "I can't let you go. Every -- every --everything that I am--"

Amazed, Mulder memorized him, imprinting the image beneath the ordinary crowd of facts and pictures beneath the ordinary crowd of facts and pictures eddying uselessly around in his memory. Krycek's dark skin against the faded plaster. Krycek fighting for breath, surging, throbbing with life. Then, just as quickly, Krycek became still, hardly breathing. There was a light on in the kitchen, and lights outside the window, and they were crushed into a false, intermediate darkness that promised anonymity when they were so passionately aware of each other, promised secrecy when they were all too well-known by exactly the wrong people, seduced them both with a deep, impenetrable privacy that they had rarely known in their lives.

(4)

Gently, Mulder set Krycek on his feet. "Bedroom's more comfortable."

Eyes narrowed, Krycek reached around and pulled a pistol that Mulder hadn't even noticed from the waistband of his pants. "More comfortable than a Colt .44 grinding into my spine? Goddamn, what a generous guy you are, Mulder."

"Sorry about that."

The last doubts Mulder had about Krycek's identity soaked away, unnoticed. This man was all the things that had confused and intrigued Mulder through the years, all of them at once. Stripped to the waist, standing with an easy, flexible grace poised for motion in any direction without notice, armed and strong and glittering -- Alex Krycek. Mulder's rat, Mulder's problem. Mulder's obsession. Soft, floppy hair that begged to be twined around fingers, endlessly patient eyes, endlessly watchful, fixed forever on him, as though he were navigating by Mulder's unfortunate star. Alex Krycek. Mulder's rat, Mulder's partner. Mulder's victory.

Alex Krycek. All that tenderness and all that brutality, the lion's share of Krycek's lies and his need and his vengeance and his doubt, and Mulder stood at the center of it. Krycek's G-man, Krycek's problem. Krycek's only weakness.

"Go," he said simply, gesturing Krycek toward the bedroom door.

Alex Krycek. Crossing his living room floor silently, an expert at obfuscation, at having existence only inasmuch as he wanted you to believe he did. If he hadn't come to find Mulder, he would have remained what he had always been -- a phantom pain, a false memory, a name and a regret and nothing more. What did it mean that he had come, had allowed himself to be not a fact, an item on Walter Skinner's morning agenda, but a man?

Alex Krycek.

                          *

Not a memory at all; a premonition. Not Walter Skinner, but Fox Mulder who levered down to the bed above him, his arm on the pillow. But there was no surprise in Krycek's expression now; he bowed his head, letting his cheek brush the veins running up the inside of Mulder's forearm.

"There's nothing between you and Skinner, is there?"

Krycek's grin was unnervingly vicious. "I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. I prefer to see him stew slowly in his own juices over you."

"Me?"

His hand glided up Mulder's back, raising the t-shirt as it went. "Yeah, *you.* You think you're hot shit because you noticed a crush I was doing everything possible to make sure you noticed. You don't know anything."

Mulder raised up on his knees to help Krycek pull the shirt off over his head. "You think he's attracted to me?"

"I think this line of conversation's a little insulting." Mulder almost laughed, until he caught a glimpse of Krycek's familiar grimness in the flash of his eyes and the twitch of his jaw.

"Sorry," he said, and meant it. He sank down against Krycek, kissing him. He meant that, too.

                           *

When he kissed Krycek's forehead softly, Krycek jerked his head away. "Hey. Not without a ring, Mulder."

It was such an odd time to turn up a shy streak in Alex Krycek. Mulder chuckled. "Problem with intimacy?"

"Get a kick out of that, do you? You're a shrink; don't you have some kind of Hippocratic oath?"

"Nope," Mulder said cheerfully. "I can cause you all the harm I want."

Krycek's eyebrows rose. "And how much harm *do* you want to cause me?"

Mulder began working at Krycek's fly. "You'll be able to walk out of here on your own power, I promise."

"Mmmm, yeah," Krycek purred as Mulder's fingers found his cock. Mulder swore under his breath in frustration as he tried to pull the trousers off Krycek's hips with the other hand. Krycek raised his head. "You having trouble down there?"

"Dammit. This isn't easy to do with one ha--" *Mulder, you schmuck.*

Krycek made a soft, amused noise. "No shit? Lucky thing you got two, then."

But that would mean letting go of Krycek. This simple touch was turning Mulder's skeletal structure to warm, running water. Heated, pulsing, firm, sleek -- it was like holding a microcosm of Krycek in his palm. Mulder closed his hand more tightly and pumped twice, a strong, demanding touch. "Fuck! Yes!" He thrust up hard into Mulder's hand. "Fox -- I want your mouth...."

Mulder wasn't ready yet to let Krycek see how the dark fire wracked through him each time Krycek promised him more with that ragged, throaty voice of his. He resorted to teasing instead. "That's the second time you've called me Fox. You're going to have to knock that off."

Krycek flashed him a quick grin. "Can't help it. I'm a friendly fucking guy."

"You used to be a better liar."

"Ah, but as a lay, I just keep improving."

                          *

"Mulder. Can I try reasoning with you? This is extremely weird."

Shifting onto his side, Mulder rested his head on Krycek's thigh. "Weird. That's not the kind of thing a guy likes to hear about his technique."

"Not your technique. The whole damn thing." His fingers were rhythmically crushing handfuls of Mulder's hair and feathering soothingly back through it. "You're going to agree with me in the morning."

"Give it a rest, Alex." Krycek's mood swings were beginning to make him lightheaded. Mulder regretted ever wishing for a less decisive Krycek.

"Look, one of these days my bodyguards are going to wake up; what if they come here looking for me? What if Scully comes by? She's got a fucking key, Mulder."

"You know something? I *still* think you're anxious, tense, paranoid, and out of touch with your id."

"And you haven't so much as exchanged Christmas cards with your superego in years." In spite of Krycek's bravado, Mulder could hear the chord of fear underneath his raspy voice.

Mulder tumbled onto his back, laying his head on Krycek's muscled torso, looking up and back at him with a boyish smile. He raised his arms, taking Krycek's hand in both of his. Krycek stared dreamily down at the long sprawl of Mulder's naked body. Mulder sobered. "Krycek, I can't -- just *talk* to you. It's not enough. You have me so tied up in knots I can't even think, and I need to burn it off. I can sleep with you or beat you up; nothing else is going to get me through this. Take your pick." Krycek brushed light fingers over Mulder's collarbone, across his shoulder. "Krycek. Hey, Alex. That wasn't supposed to be a trick question."

"But it does bear thinking about. I mean, we got this far on the combat."

Raising his head, Mulder craned his neck around to get a clearer look at Krycek. "You want me to hit you?"

"I need to burn it off, too, don't I?"

"Will I *ever* understand you?"

They were having a fight, Mulder thought, but it didn't feel like a fight. It felt quiet and comfortable, lying on the bed he rarey used, with Krycek's legs wrapped loosely around his body. Mulder let his arms fall open wide, spanning the double bed. He hardly remembered the last time he'd been totally bared to another human being's eyes. All they lacked to be the absolute last word in vast, vulnerable, shameless sensuality were peeled grapes for Krycek to feed him. This was peace.

Humming in pleasure, Mulder arched his neck, letting it rub against Krycek's hard, wet cock. "Alex. You know neither of us is going to back out of this now. Why are you trying to delay it?"

"I'm just...thinking."

"Quit it."

"Fuck you, Mulder. My life would be a lot easier if you responded to logic."

"Oh, fuck you, Mulder, whatever. Bitch about it all you want. Jesus, you turn into a fussy old woman when you're not trying to kill me." He put a hand high on Krycek's leg, and Krycek gave a long, quiet groan, and attempted no more logic that night.

                          *

Krycek's body was marked now in more ways than one. The imprint of Mulder's teeth around his hardened right nipple. A gunshot wound that had gone through his side. A mark on his shoulderblade; unidentifiable, but it looked as though it had once hurt, however long ago something had gashed into his body there. A purple whorl on his throat, Krycek's blood ripping free of his veins where Mulder had put his lips. A tattoo on the back of his left leg, a small, spare representation of Da Vinci's Eternal Man. The stump of his left arm. The scar below his heart. Each distinguishing mark on his otherwise perfect body fascinated Mulder. It was Krycek's history: some of it known to him, much unknown, some of it unfolding here and now.

"Looking at you," Mulder joked, "a person would think you had a past."

He didn't laugh. "You fucking well know I do."

"That's not-- Just forget it. I was only kidding."

"No. Stop trying to make me *forget.* I need my past."

Mulder allowed himself to be rolled onto his back, and his fingers instinctively sought Krycek's tattoo as he straddled Mulder's legs. Already, he could orient by the secrets encoded onto Krycek's very flesh. "Don't you get sick of it sometimes, though? Don't you want to...be anyone else?"

"*No!* Fuck me, fight me, whatever you have to do, Mulder, but *never pretend we're not who we are.* You don't know how hard I fought to get here. Death and the Devil had to learn to take me on like who I fucking am, and so will you. So will you, because no one invents me --not anymore. Never again. Never. I'm done with that, Fox. *Never* again. Not even for you."

Mulder's fingers filled the crack of Krycek's ass. "I couldn't invent you, Krycek. You're too twisted to come out of my head. Too sexy. Too much goddamn trouble."

This time, Krycek did laugh. "That's better."

                           *

Krycek's fingernails scrabbled loudly on the wall. "Fuck it, Mulder. Just *come on.* It won't hurt."

"Did it ever occur to you that I'm just torturing you?" Mulder tried another short thrust, found himself buried a little deeper in Krycek. They were both lying, of course; they hadn't used enough lube, at Krycek's insistence ("I hate that shit. It clings to everything for days.") There probably wasn't enough lube in Alexandria to keep Krycek from getting hurt, as rigid as he was holding every damn muscle in his body. If they had any sense, they'd just try something else, but Krycek was having none of that. He wanted Mulder to fuck him.

"Damn it, Mulder! Do you want this or not?"

"Yes! Would you shut up a fucking second?"

Krycek arched hard into Mulder's next thrust, and Mulder, startled, drew back reflexively. Krycek's fist struck the wall with a force that sounded to Mulder as if it must have splintered bones. Startled and frustrated, Mulder moved with the mindless instinct that had always before driven him to punch Krycek. This time, impulse and anger twisted his hips, moved the muscles all through his thighs and back, driving him deep into Krycek.

Alex roared once, pain and triumph, and then the room was eerily still. Krycek's heaving breaths were the only sound; Mulder watched a bead of sweat roll from his temple down the side of his face. Krycek opened his eyes slowly. "There," he rasped. "Was that so hard?"

"Well, I hope it's all you dreamed it would be," Mulder said sardonically.

"Believe me, Mulder, not one thing about tonight has gone the way it does in my dreams."

"Would you really have walked out after delivering your message?"

"I was counting on you stopping me."

"You always were a lucky son of a bitch, Krycek."

                         *

It was impossible to think of Krycek as Russian. Mulder remembered that country as white and bladed, empty and keening and splintering like a tree under the weight of an ice storm. He remembered the mesh, and the fear, and the distances.

Krycek, though. He reminded Mulder of nothing but heat. In terms of a homeland -- he reminded Mulder of the Carolina summers that had killed so many settlers in this country because of what collected in the low-lying areas -- fever and dank, sluggish water, blood-fed mosquitos and still, sick, humid air.

He was warm to Mulder's touch, Mulder's every touch. Flushed, infected by some killing madness that Mulder was as likely to catch as he was to cure, Krycek twisted and raved in wild delirium, his body rocked by each of Mulder's thrusts.

Mulder sank his elbows hard into the mattress, anchoring himself, needing better leverage. "Please...please don't stop...." Mulder was surprised to recognize his own voice. Krycek was pinned, at Mulder's mercy -- what the hell would he stop doing?

On a pang of loss, Mulder realized that he was speaking to himself. It would be so easy to run out on this, to deny that it had happened. His force of will could unmake tonight, just as his force of will had called so much previous elegant, agonizing, illusionary sex with Krycek into being. Already, Mulder could sense himself plucking at the threads, ready to isolate this and spin it away into a vacuum.

That wasn't what he wanted.

*Your problem, Mulder, has always been that you don't know what you want.*

"Krycek!" he cried out. He needed the check and balance of Krycek's memory, the comforting pressure of proof. He needed to know that Krycek was experiencing what he was. That they were digging fiercely into the same reality.

Krycek's voice returned to him as though from across a canyon, a wind-blown reverb of itself. "Easy, Mulder. We're okay...."

A sob drilled through Mulder's body. "Krycek, how the fuck did we get here?"

"Just lucky."

                             *

He could feel the instant when Krycek came apart -- not orgasm, but the snapping of all the cords that held him in check. Mulder could see it rise through him, drawing Mulder's dick further up inside him. The force opened his chest, his lungs, his throat, and Krycek was keening, a true, steady noise that was almost a death omen, a warning cry.

Nothing held him any longer. Nothing remained of his wary defense, his body no longer stretched and racked. Krycek was all motion now, and all of Krycek's motion at once -- prowl and sprint and vault and brawl were all in him, and all in Mulder's arms.

"Mulder!" he cried out, his voice no longer dense and opaque, but translucent, all the brightness of Krycek's wild and lawless life filtered through it, appearing as something more earnest and generous than Krycek had ever revealed himself to be. "Mulder -- please -- don't trust me. I don't want to hurt you again. Don't let me, Mulder. Don't believe -- don't believe anything I say to you."

"I do trust you." It wasn't the truth, but nor was it exactly a lie. He trusted not Krycek's words, but his own gorgeous, gilded, Mardi Gras memories. He trusted not one thing Krycek said, and everything Krycek was. "You told me once -- Alex -- you called me once. At three.... I have to know -- that was the truth. I believe -- I believe -- I need you to tell me. Was that -- real? Or a part of your plan?"

He gasped out a sound, all vowels and memory and longing. "That was never part of my plan. I can tell you that much. I did not plan that."

"I believe you."

Krycek laughed, and strained up to grind against Mulder's chest. "Dumb bastard. Don't. Don't believe me. This is all the help I can give you, Fox. *Don't trust me.*"

                          *

[[[[[ One sound, the half-heard voice of a hinge or a floorboard, transformed him. At fourteen minutes to three, he was a young FBI agent up late on a weekend, settled into bed with a bag of pretzels and a dog-eared copy of *Rendezvous With Rama.* At 2:47, he was sitting bolt upright with a Glock leveled at the doorway, death in his eyes.

The man who appeared in the door was outside the effects of Krycek's reading lamp; during the moment it took him to identify his visitor, Krycek kept the gun aimed squarely at his chest. "Oh," he finally said, lowering his weapon. "It's you."

A lighter sparked and hissed. For a moment there was flame, red and naked, and then darkness gulped it down again, leaving only a fiery thumb print, the end of his cigarette. "It certainly is."

The smell of smoke made a quick hunger in Krycek rattle its chains for attention. Everyone had agreed, Agent Krycek ought to be a nonsmoker -- he was cautious, tidy, his virtues and his vices both small and restrained -- forgettable in every way. But Alex Krycek, the actor who played him, had smoked since the age of fifteen. Cutting down to three or four late-night cigarettes a week, behind locked doors, had been difficult, but not impossible. Krycek had even been pleased with his success, to the extent of telling himself that this would be a good time just to quit. His voice, so sweet and clean in his garage-band days, had already developed that train wreck and Kentucky Tavern quality to it, and the streak of Agent Krycek's fastidiousness that was genuine in Alex, too, rebelled at the thought of what his lungs must look like, a decade after his first smoke. And still...still, that smell. The addiction moved like a cobra inside him.

He came toward Krycek with a stealth that didn't fit well at all with a man of his age, a man with health problems through the back and respiratory system. Krycek laid the gun back on his nightstand, beside the pretzels. "It's late. I figured you weren't coming."

"I was involved in something on CNN. You really should let me buy you a television."

Krycek shrugged. "I don't want one."

"I do hope I haven't spoiled your Saturday evening."

He gave the old man a slow, lazy smile, and set the book aside. "It has been quiet."

"Perhaps you should have called Mr. Mulder."

*No, no,* he wanted to protest, *that would be completely out of character. Agent Krycek doesn't initiate well. He's too frightened of relationships; he hates not having clear rules. Mostly, he's afraid of the way he responds to Mulder -- and embarrassed because everyone knows. He'll try to play it down, not call him.* But Krycek realized that his employers didn't spend as much time hammering out these kinks and quirks and motives as he did, and frankly didn't care to. He had to keep reminding them that Mulder *would* care, would notice any inconsistency in the persona. They were sending him out after a profiler, and he needed a mind that could be profiled, an alter ego that worked on every level.

Creating Agent Krycek was a challenge, almost an artistic endeavour. And no one else could play him like Krycek could, not well enough to get past Fox Mulder. Some days, he thought it would be possible to go years, a lifetime, without stepping out of character. "I...didn't want to push it," he said. "We don't need him getting sick of me."

A box of cigarettes landed with a soft thump on the bed by Krycek's leg. Not Morleys; Benson & Hedges. Krycek's brand. He reached for it, then pulled back. "I'm quitting."

"Quitting? Really?" He exhaled another thick cloud of smoke. "Just so long as you don't become as unpleasant as Assistant Director Skinner did when he gave it up." Krycek picked up the package and set it aside, by the Glock, trying to ignore it. Amused, his guest took it up, looking the pack over. "Well, I wouldn't have bought these if I had known. But now that you have them, you might as well."

Krycek parted his lips, letting the old man place the cigarette between them, then set it on fire with his gold-plated lighter. Embarrassed by his easy surrender, Krycek took a long drag and breathed out the smoke slowly. "Thanks."

"Not at all. Every former smoker should have one final pack to savor. The more fleeting a pleasure, the more powerful it is, don't you agree?"

Another long drag helped quell Krycek's flicker of paranoia and kept him from tensing. Whatever word game the old man was playing, he could ride it out. "I don't know."

"As an example, Mr. Mulder. Your time with him is limited, and so everything appears...disproportionately large. You romanticize him."

"I don't know what you mean."

That polite, predatory smile. Krycek did not fear this man, exactly. On the contrary, he was Krycek's patron, surprisingly open-handed with his money and his information alike. They were good for each other, and they knew it. But when he smiled, it always seemed to say *ultimate power.* Krycek believed the old saw about corruption. Power was a pressure that made it impossible to remain unchanging, however many years you'd been wielding it. It made the old man unpredictable, and Krycek remembered that best when he was smiling. "I do understand. He intrigues you. He compels you. I watch you, drawn to him over and over --"

"I'm *paid* to be 'drawn' to him. It's what *you* wanted, not me." *He's haunted you for years, since long before I'd ever heard of Fox Mulder.*

"At first, granted. You do your work well -- too well, perhaps. Who, now, is Agent Mulder's devotee -- you or your fictional Agent Krycek?"

*He knows. He knows.* Krycek inhaled shakily, held the poison inside him until he could no longer keep it. "You chose me because I'm the best. If I have even you believing my bullshit now -- well, maybe I'm due for a raise."

His fingers curled around the back of Krycek's neck, holding him carefully. "You are not two men. You are only one."

"Not anymore."

After a tense moment, the old man chuckled, and released him. "A natural double agent. Even you do not know your role from yourself. Oh, yes, you are the best. There is no center to you, no solidity at all. Endlessly malleable, printed so deeply with everyone else's desires...perhaps you really don't know who it is who loves him."

"It's just a role." Timidly, Krycek tried another smile. "The last thing I wanted was to make you...jealous."

His eyes flashed. Danger, Will Robinson. "It's far too early for you to be so secure in your position here. Proceed with care, Alex Krycek." The old man reached for the cordless receiver by the bed. He held it out to Krycek with something in his small, sharp eyes that might have been humor or menace. "Call him."

"Call -- Mulder? At this hour?"

"He'll be awake."

"And say what to him?"

"Confess." He smiled at Krycek's surprise. "They do say it's good for the soul. Tell him you've fallen in love with him."

Krycek's mind whirled like a small animal on an exercise wheel. "I can't -- I can't do that." What the *hell* was his game? The old man gave him a look with raised eyebrows -- *You can't?* "What if it scares him off?"

"I think it will flatter him. Mr. Mulder has a number of weaknesses. Among them, he has a native vanity that is rarely fed. Call him." Krycek took the phone and stared at it as though it were a piece of alien technology.

As a matter of fact, Krycek was sick of exploiting Mulder's weaknesses; he had thought it would be a challenge, at first, but it wasn't. Mulder had so damn many, in spite of his brilliance. And he was brilliant; the boys in Behavioral Sci still shook their heads when his name came up and called him the fallen angel, ascribing a kind of Miltonian greatness to his rebellion and exile to the basement -- better to reign in the X-Files than to serve in heaven. Arrogance, yes, that was one of his prime weaknesses -- vanity, if you liked.

And Krycek's prime weakness was that he felt so damn sorry for Fox Mulder. Krycek's star was on the rise in the Consortium; wrapping the Mulder job could take him to a whole new level -- no longer just the old man's protege, but a player in his own right. It was what he had always craved: power, the enormous, wide-reaching power of knowledge. Agent Krycek was warily intrigued by aliens, against his best judgement; Alex wanted so badly to *know* that it sometimes drove him to rage, or despair. He figured it was probably the same for Mulder. But Mulder insisted on pissing off the very people who could tell him what he wanted to know -- a mistake Krycek did not intend to make. If Mulder would just play the game..if he would cultivate allies instead of blustering around the nation like a dervish of intellect, subversion, and rhetoric...then maybe their stars could both rise. Maybe the only way up from obscurity for Alex Krycek would not be his leading role in the sabotage of Fox Mulder's whole life.

But that was Mulder, and there were only two ways to deal with him: throw away career, security, sanity itself, like Agent Scully had done, like AD Skinner showed all early signs of doing, and follow him to the ends of the earth, or shake him off and be on the winning side. Given that Krycek had never been the type to get hard for lost causes, he knew what side of the scale he'd end up on.

Tonight, that meant getting out of this fucking phone call without starting something he'd regret with the old man. Krycek leaned over to put out his cigarette, and left the phone on the nightstand, pretending it was something that had simply gotten in his way -- who could remember what he'd been doing with it, anyway? He rolled onto his stomach, lazily propping his head on folded arms to half-watch back over his shoulder. "It's three in the damn morning," he said pleasantly. "Come to bed or go home and let me get some sleep."

One chilly fingertip, low on his spine. Like Krycek, the old man cared nothing for lost causes; he was not interested in flirting or feigned subservience. It was Krycek's supple strength that fascinated him -- Krycek's lean, runner's body, Krycek's small stubbornnesses, his resilience, his ambition. The finger stroked up to his shoulderblade, tracing the scar there. *Belt buckle?* the old man had said calmly the first time he'd seen it -- said, not asked -- and Krycek knew immediately that this was not a man who could be lied to. He saw so much, so deeply. He was never wrong.

Both hands now, at the small of his back, around Krycek's waist, stirring the low-slung sheet just enough to make it waft and settle again around Krycek's legs. Krycek stretched, letting the pleasure roil up his spine, slow and subtle and thick. He was not the worst lover Krycek had ever had; Krycek had never yet regretted accepting that first tentative, archaically polite overture. They were indeed good for each other.

He paused to extinguish his own cigarette, and Krycek let his mind shift down to a lower gear, below decisions and destinations. It was so tiring, keeping one eye constantly on Agent Krycek's needs and fears and signals, the other on his own goals. He was happy to give it up for the evening.

"You know everything about Agent Krycek, don't you?"

"Sure." His own thinking felt thinner, sleeker when he was one humming mind instead of the constant interplay of two. Answers came more easily, and every word did not leave six unsaid.

"Does he have a lover?"

Krycek smiled into his pillow. "Agent Krycek? Hell, no. He's too afraid to pick anyone up. He tells himself it's his career he's worried about...which is true, but it's also intimacy. He doesn't know how to be close to anyone."

"Aha." The old man laid down beside him, one arm stretched over Krycek's back. He kissed Krycek's shoulder, then the back of his neck -- dry, shivering kisses. "Then his sex life is...solitary." Krycek nodded. Easy, easy, no need to think. He knew these answers; they welled up naturally from some deep place. He knew Agent Krycek so well. Very well. "What does Agent Krycek think about when he masturbates?"

"Mulder." *Easy, too easy. Alex, what are you saying?* But it was the game -- Agent Krycek dreamed of Mulder, as he'd been told to. No, Alex had been told, and Agent Krycek dreamed and came and lost hope. He tried to tense, to find magnetic north in this conversation.

"I watch the two of you on surveillance tapes. The way you open to one another. The way you flush and shuffle your feet and look up at him, as though he were twenty feet tall. The way he smiles."

He was breathing in an uneven rhythm, trapped by the warm fence of the old man's arm, his body, the bed they so often shared. "That's my job. What the hell do you want from me? You're angry because I'm convincing -- you'd be angrier if I weren't."

"Is it his smile you see when you close your eyes?"

"No!" God, that smile -- that sinful, *Alex, wanna know a secret?* smile. How the hell did the old man know it was the smile?

"Is that what Agent Krycek sees?"

Easy. Easy question. So fucking unfair. "I...guess so. Probably."

"Probably? Oh, no. No, no. You know everything about him. You're the expert. You're the best. Tell me, then. What haunts Agent Krycek?"

"Mulder -- Mulder's smile. Mulder's voice. Mulder's rotten handwriting. The incessant crunching of those sunflower seeds. Mulder's hands. The water tracking through his hair when he first turns on the water in the gym showers -- tracking down his back. All right? I know my job, all right?"

Though nothing like strong enough to subdue Krycek, the old man was easily able to roll him onto his back while Krycek was frozen and unresisting. He pressed the telephone into Krycek's hand, and Krycek gripped it like grim death, needing something smooth and plastic and ordinary to cling to. "Then call him."

"No...."

"Pretend to be Agent Krycek. Pretend to be the one who loves him. Lie to him -- you must be able to do that, or all of this is useless. Can you still finish your work here?"

"Of course. Of course." Not a test -- a punishment. Because the old man knew what Krycek had been hiding from himself since that first day, the insomnia case: he was not two men. Krycek, he was Alex Krycek, Agent Alex Krycek, and when he had allowed himself to want Mulder, it was one man who wanted him, completely.

His hand shook as he dialed. *555...* "Can't I do this privately?" He tried to sound gruff, not pleading, but he couldn't gauge his effectiveness from the old man's expressionless face. At least he got off Krycek's bed. *01... 9...*

The center that the old man had mentioned -- he could feel it now, crystallizing inside him. *Krycek.* It was his axis, and everything else orbited, held in by its powerful gravitational pull. It was huge, and alive. *Krycek.* Krycek pressed his eyes shut and his hand over them. Damn it all to hell. If only...if only he were being asked to lie. Lying was the easiest thing in the world. *9*

He listened to the ring of the phone; a light went on somewhere in his apartment, the living room or the kitchen. Agent Krycek was a false protector, not an innocent at all, but the monster on to whom he projected all his darkest, deadliest impulses. Fear. Solitude. Obedience. Desire.

"Mulder. Hi, Mulder. Did I wake you up?"

Alex Krycek was a natural double agent. Even his center became a lie. Even his confession became the agenda. Never in his life had he regretted any lie the way he regretted telling Mulder the truth that night.

He held the disconnected phone to his forehead when it was over. Agent Krycek had not come to save him, to be him. Krycek doubted he ever would again. One man. Alex Krycek. A natural double agent. A carefully-groomed traitor. Addiction slung and spat inside him, and Krycek reached for the pack of cigarettes, knowing it was not what he hungered for.

The dark shape filled his doorway again, backlit from the light down the hall. "Never lie to yourself, Alyoshka. Never. It will kill you."

"Fine," he said dully. "Come here and give me a light."

The lighter sparked and hissed, and fire ate away at the cigarette. His fingertips rested on Krycek's chest like five blunt talons. "Do you regret your involvement with us, Alyoshka?"

"No," he said quietly. He had no idea whether he was telling the truth or not. There were still two sides to him...*no solidity at all...endlessly malleable.* He simply did not know what he wanted anymore.

"Good. Because there might be a great deal more to regret. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Alyoshka. Do you understand?"

He knew what he was waiting for. Krycek inhaled deeply. Chain smoking was a slow and inefficient method of suicide, and a popular one, among a populace that by Krycek's standards was basically slow and inefficient. "Yes, Father."

His hand flattened, stroking Krycek's chest lightly. "I'm glad that's over with. How did I get distracted? I'm quite sure I did not come here to discuss business...."]]]]]

                           *

Once, the danger Alex presented had been gunmetal and gashing hatred and red ruthlessness.

He was like that tacky old expression -- a tiger in bed. Each ripple of his muscles as he broke and twisted against Mulder's skin carried killing strength, the hunter's desperate competency. His touch was lazy luxury. His throat vibrated with purrs and growls, and a single word, repeated relentlessly -- Mulder couldn't decide if it sounded more like *fuck* or *Fox.*

Dangerous now, but differently. Disarmed, split open, reduced to pleasure, his danger was now plague and presence -- the ability to shunt off Mulder's past and his future -- to breathe fever into him.

It might as well have been an epidemic. Two of them sick with the same maddening longing, the same fantastic hallucinations -- the plague swept everything else ahead of it, weightless and useless. There was no healing.

Mulder's fever broke first, and then Krycek's. They would survive -- Krycek because he was a born survivor, and Mulder mainly because he didn't travel well alone.

                          *

Mulder must have dozed, because he remembered first only Krycek's lips nibbling at his jaw in the darkness, then Krycek standing on the floor, fighting his pants back on. "You want me to help--"

"Fuck you," Krycek said, in a voice more bored than angry. "I'm fine."

"Shit. You and Scully both," Mulder grumbled, rolling and curling in bed, following the scent of Krycek's sweat to its strongest point, a dampness on his sheets that meant exhaustion, not orgasm. He glanced back up. "Next time, we--"

Krycek began to shake his head, but only completed one arrow of movement, a line drawn in the air. "No next time."

He'd half-expected this. Maybe more than half. "You said you had to see me in person. How do you know that won't happen again?"

"I also said you shouldn't trust what I say."

"You see the inherent contradiction in that, right?" Krycek shrugged. His usual eloquence. "What if it's destiny?" Mulder didn't know if he was joking or begging.

Turning, Krycek fixed him with a keen look. He was as darkly unreadable as ever. More so. "If it's destiny, you'll be around when I finish the work that needs to be done."

"And if it's dumb luck?"

A tiny spark and hiss in his voice betrayed him. "Then let's not push our dumb luck." He reached for Mulder. Their palms struck quietly together, their fingers locking. Mulder shivered. "You were right. We needed to burn."

"I'm good with need. It doesn't mean -- that I know what I want."

"So I gather. I keep tabs on you, Mulder, you know that? I heard you had some witch doctor drilling holes in your head." Krycek's hand stroked the piece of Mulder's body in question. "You fucking straighten up and fly right, you hear me? The world needs your head."

"I saw...things that...."

Krycek nodded. "If it helps...I don't think he's your father. I think he'd like to be. He has...that need."

In the silence, Mulder kissed the fine skin under Krycek's wrist. "If you change your mind...we still have a lot to talk about."

He turned away. "I can't tell you anything about the investigation. You know that."

"Still.... Something."

Pausing in his exit, Krycek reached out to touch the doorframe. His voice pulled, wounded, out of his chest. "You were the luckiest goddamned thing that ever happened to me. And you ruined my life."

"If you ever change your mind...."

"*Das vidanya, tovarish.*"

It was as much Russian as Mulder knew, but he did know that much. He let Krycek go, and rolled over into the thick of his scent. A small blow, that Krycek was so ready to walk out again. But if he needed time to think -- privacy to regain his focus -- so be it.

He would change his mind. Mulder's rat bastard....

Other people stayed, or they left. With Krycek, it was an endless loop, division and demand. Krycek returned, again and again, bound to him in bloody, fevered fascination.

Trusting Krycek was out of the question. But all of Mulder's trust, all his belief, was invested in the certainty of Krycek's return. And maybe that was the justice, if not the redemption, that Alex had come to find.

Hth
hth29@hotmail.com

 

---

 

Title: Dogs of War
Series: Fire In the Sky, Part 2 of the Kill or Cure trilogy (http://members.tripod.com/HthW/xf.html)
Author: Hth, at hth1@chickmail.com
Descriptors: X-Files, NC-17 for explicit m/m slash - M/K. Sequel to "Stroke of Luck." Further content warnings for violence, bloodshed, and emotional cruelty.
Necessary Information: Takes place on a Sunday night, three days after "Luck." For best effect, I implore you to read that story. Actually, any of the Fire In the Sky series might be helpful, but definitely "Stroke of Luck."
Disclaimers: Chris Carter, 1013, and Fox own these characters. Nothing herein belongs to me, except possibly the sadomasochistic overtones. No, I'm pretty sure not even those.
Permission Granted: to archive and otherwise circulate with all notes and credits intact. If you want to link to it, try my Fire In the Sky site, http://members.tripod.com/HthW/xf.html
Feed Me: Encourage my antisocial tendencies. hth1@chickmail.com

Dogs of War
by Hth

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.
Blood and destruction....
-Julius Caesar, 3:1

Jogging had always been Mulder's preferred method of defying reality.

Ignore Scully's voice in his head saying, *Is that so? How do you explain your career, then?*

Ignore a lot of things about Scully, particularly her sense of humor, which just seemed to get fucking wittier every time Mulder felt good about himself.

Bad Mulder. He pushed himself a little faster, bones impacting a little harder on the pavement, pain settling pleasantly right between his chest and stomach. Head directly home, say five Our Conspiracies and twenty Hail Scullys.

One foot, then the other, faster than Mulder felt like bothering to count, drill ankle through heel, break concrete, sink underground, die die die, burn in hell. The purity of aching muscles, the science of shock and pain and physical fucking rational sensory reality. Slam part of your body with all your weight behind it on the cement sidewalk and hell, yes, it's going to hurt, what, didn't you take physics in high school?

And it felt so damn good. Like flying. Like life after death. So fuck you, Freshman Physical Sciences. It ain't heavy, it's my fucking fucking fucking *life.*

For whatever reason, Mulder had never been suicidal. Not yet. Life was good, jogging was good, hell, he didn't even feel the pain anymore, not like he used to. One foot, then the other, and the light was fading; even with the gun holstered under his baggy windbreaker, Mulder didn't feel like being out here much after dark, and he took the corner hard and headed home. One foot, then the other. It was all good, and they would never hurt him worse than he could hurt himself; hell, most of the time he hurt worse from jogging than he did at the job they were trying to make difficult for him. Put that in your Marley and smoke it.

Above it all, sweating hard and breathing harder and, Jesus, he was inside it now, in his body, in the zone, the way he felt with his girl - shit, how many deaths would he die, what surgical tools would she use to peel the skin from his body, above what Washington edifice would she mount his severed head on a stake if he called her that out loud? - his girl's head on his shoulder. The way he felt with Alex-

Don't continue it. Don't bother. The way he felt with Alex. Enough already.

Too much already.

One foot, then the other. Let them both slough off, too slow to keep up, too sweet in the back of his throat to be in the crunch and grind of his bones, the stress and quiver of his muscles.

Too much, too slow, too real, too

One foot, then the other, and the evening breeze was cool enough now to lift the sweat off his neck and face with a pleasant chill. He stopped under his own building, resting his hands on his thighs, ignoring proper cooling-down procedure. This was part of the fun, his ribcage barely able to contain his breathing, his perplexed leg muscles twinging as they prepared to stiffen up, his heart going loud like a chainsaw. Next would come the shower, hot enough to make gumbo out of him, and then some television, which God knew was its own brand of torture.

He was thinking about macaroni and cheese - a major cooking project, what with involving both milk *and* butter out of his very own refrigerator - when Mulder glanced up and saw Alex looking down at him from his own window. Slowly, Mulder straightened, squinting back up at him.

Alex, and the color of Mulder's kisses was still staining his lips. Alex, and he laid his palm on the windowpane as if inviting Mulder to touch his own to it, nothing but sharp, lethal glass separating them. Alex, and he looked like he'd missed Mulder badly; wishful thinking, possibly, but there he was, close to the window, waiting and watching for him, and the sound of his eyes carried all the way down here, saying, *get up here, Mulder, what the hell are you waiting for?*

Far from domestic, nothing like Leave It to Beaver. No *hi, honey, I'm home,* just *if you'd promise to wait forever, I'd promise not to make you.* Holy Christ. Not healthy, not when the thoughts came attached to Alex-fucking-Krycek, and when did that become an endearment, when did he learn to forget the ghost-and-guns Alex and remember the one wrapped like a noose around him, whispering brokenly into his ear?

Alex-fucking-Krycek, and Mulder took the elevator up to him, the fox to the coop, ready to tangle with the meanest bird in town, to tear the place apart in a riot of flesh and feathers and shreds of real life. Things were going to happen that shouldn't, that should have no explanation at all, but that was fine, that was Mulder's life, and Alex's touch and Alex's kiss made perfect sense in context.

Mulder had always liked it hard.

Alex opened the door for him, and even though Mulder was expecting it, counting on it, there was a small sensation of shock when their mouths met, seared together, softer and warmer than they should be, gentler and needier than it was okay to be. Heedless of the sweat he was smearing all over Alex, Mulder pulled him in closer, wrapped an arm around his neck and touched his cheek with the other hand as they kissed. There was no reason for this, every reason to stay the hell away from the man who shot his father, the man who, the man who. Yadda yadda.

The man who had gone so far and then come back. Mulder felt Alex's hands resting lightly on his waist, one light and flesh-padded, the other made of weightier, motionless plastic. His own hands drove hard down Alex's back, forcing him even closer, until Alex pulled away with a strained little laugh. "Take it easy, stud."

"Please tell me you didn't come here to give me more disturbing information about my past."

"Not today. I came to get some decent fucking food, for one thing. This city has more goddamn Chinese food than China." He knocked Mulder's shoulder back as Mulder tried advancing on him again. "Take a shower."

"What's the matter? Tough guy in the leather jacket can't take a little sweat?"

He gave Mulder a puzzled look, as if he really wasn't sure how Mulder could be so oblivious. "How long have you known me?"

"Don't go there."

"Have you ever known me to get off on dirt?"

The sheer insanity of Krycek believing that Mulder knew him, knew his habits and his preferences - did he still expect Mulder to trust the months they'd spent as partners? Until a few days ago, Krycek had been nothing more in his mind than a beautiful blank, something unknown and almost nonexistent, except in the form of a certain sensation, a certain ache lodged in Mulder that wouldn't go away. Until a few days ago, he'd been a piece of Mulder, and suddenly he was a person in and of himself, coming here for his own reasons, and shit, but that was scary.

So. Shower.

Tonight, for obvious reasons, Mulder couldn't really settle into the shower. Usually it was his own special brand of meditation, scalding out the filth of each day's lies, letting the water sluice off him, and with it the sticky film of shame that always seemed to cling to Mulder, the omnipresent memory of every single time he'd ever had to get down on his belly and crawl for the powers that be. It made the smoke and dirt and the smell of disease melt right off of him, and when Mulder stepped out, he felt taller, lighter, practically clean and practically sane.

Tonight, he came out of the shower feeling oddly defenseless. What was there that held him back from Alex, if not the silt and scum he'd been accumulating over the years? If not for all that shit, all the history that swamped him under and made him unclean, there would be nothing on the other side of that door except a guy named Alex who was crazy about him, who could kiss him down to bare bones and talk him to death about Radiohead and the Laws of Robotics afterward. Mulder was ridiculously unprepared to open the door and cross the line back into Alex Krycek's world - which, not so damn long ago, was *Mulder's* apartment - and he knew it.

Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't Krycek in his kitchen, busily cooking and stirring. "What the hell is this?"

"Tortellini. I told you, I came here to eat."

"You're making tortellini?"

"Mulder, they have these things now called *supermarkets.* Might be of interest to you. Somebody cooks a bunch of food, freezes it, and then you buy it and throw it in a pot of boiling water. Even you can do it, tovarish."

They were going to play it that way, then. As though they were lovers - as though they were friends. He wondered if the idea hit Krycek the same way it hit him, a sickly-sweet blend of nerves, guilt, grudging desire, and irresistible curiosity. What would it have been like to be Alex Krycek's lover? Before, during, after the betrayal - would it ever have mattered to either of them?

Questions to keep you awake all night long. Thoughts to occupy your mind while you stood against the wall in your own kitchen, waiting for a man you theoretically hated to be done boiling pasta.

*If you promised to wait forever*

Maybe it should have been a domestic scene - except that even if he could cook like Emeril, instead of defrosting like a bachelor, no power on earth could make Krycek seem like a homebody. There was something even a little Gahan Wilson-y about Alex Krycek, with his hard, high cheekbones and his sharp, resentful eyes, with one prosthetic arm and the outline of a gun showing through the dark blue fisherman's sweater, doing anything with a stovetop other than shoving someone's face down on it. A prejudice, maybe. After all, for all Krycek's faults - and their name was Legion; Mulder wasn't too smitten yet to remember that - he'd never appeared to have any real cruelty to him, or any madness.

He was much worse than that - he was a hired gun, a rat who had turned against everyone who'd ever been fool enough to take him into their confidences. Mulder understood madmen and murderers; no urge to violence was so deeply felt or so brutally fulfilled that the profiler in him couldn't recognize and interpret it, discover its shape and pattern and predict how and where it would flare up next. There were times, in the dead of night, when Mulder couldn't run from looking into his own heart any longer, and he knew there was a madman crouched there, and a murderer, too. He felt a guilty tenderness for the psychos he pursued in the course of his work, something he'd never admitted to anyone, inspired by a sense of *there but for the grace of God....* Madness he got; hate, rage, the will to power, the need to shove someone down and make them suffer, all of that Mulder could understand.

Alex Krycek he could not understand. Try as he might, Mulder couldn't imagine being so divorced from the rest of humanity that even killing couldn't fill up the hollow of your heart with...something. And yet, as hard as Mulder scrutinized him, there was very little in Krycek's manner that gave Mulder an angle to work. He could be angry or tender or frightened or content, just like any other human being, but those were just moods; none of them seemed to run deeper than a response to some immediate stimulus. Alex was what he felt, and underneath all of that he was - what? Nothing? Stubborn yet adaptable, proud yet needy, deceitful yet blunt, passionate yet remote. Nothing defined him, nothing enabled Mulder to fix him to any one thought or idea. He was a profiling nightmare.

As bad as Scully for secrecy and ambiguity. Oh, a pattern was being detected, all right, but it had everything to do with Mulder himself and nothing to do with Krycek. Either he loved a challenge, or he was setting himself up to fail. Take your pick.

But if total, crash-and-burn, black-box, identified-by-dental-casts failure was in Mulder's future, then he might as well go down - going down. Yuk yuk.

He settled his hands slowly on Krycek's hips - the last thing you wanted to do to a trained killer who was colluding with the federal government to bring down his ruthless employer was startle him. Mulder didn't remember ever reading that anywhere, much less testing out the theory himself, but it seemed so reasonable that he thought he might just treat it as a known fact.

Things always started that way between them - one touch, one honest word, a brief crossing of paths or a crossing of swords -- then somehow never ended with *one* of anything. So quickly that Mulder couldn't break it down into steps, Krycek was in his arms, kissing him roughly with his real hand in Mulder's hair and his other arm hooked around Mulder's waist.

One way or another, one of them - possibly Alex - got them over to the couch, and one of them - possibly Mulder - remembered to bring a plate of tortellini, and if the walls of Number 42 could talk, they'd be confused and frightened, because all at once, with Mulder on top of Alex, burrowing under his sweater and arching as Alex ran his hand slowly up Mulder's bare back, there was suddenly more rich, golden, erotic energy crammed into this room than in the whole fourteen years of Mulder's tenancy here.

Those deep green eyes stayed steady on him as Mulder settled himself and the plate on top of Krycek. There was something unaccountably trusting in the way Krycek ate off the fork Mulder offered without looking at it, silently accepting the rhythm Mulder set - cut, stab, lift, pull back, cut, stab, lift, pull back. He spilled very little alfredo sauce, and nipped hardly at all at Krycek's warm, stubbled chin as he kissed it off.

So this is what it would have been like, being Alex Krycek's lover. His good arm was flung casually up over his head, and Mulder worked his left hand slowly up it, feeling the lean muscle under the heavy cable-knit as he fed Alex with his other hand, the plate balanced precariously on Alex's slow-moving chest. When his palm crossed Krycek's, Krycek pressed his eyes closed, the only notable change in expression Mulder had wrung from his erstwhile partner yet.

It was impossible to blame him. There was something, something about the way the thin skin of their hands brushed together, slickened by a fine sheen of sweat - intimate, painfully soft, scored with the rough touch of knuckles and callused fingertips, shocks of hard sensation in counterpoint to the gentle way their hands were tangling, seeking each other. "Jesus...."

"Mulder...." Alex responded, in exactly the same tone.

This was not Krycek's usual kiss, the kind that melted them both into a dazed dreamscape of submission and long-denied release. This was...something else. Something more deliberate, something that aimed squarely toward a goal that Mulder suspected he hadn't even started to understand.

Alex was full of goals, always had been. He The plate made a hell of a noise as Alex pitched it over the back of the sofa, and he sat up into Mulder's kiss like a striking snake, and - snakebit - Mulder froze. was going somewhere, chasing something, asking and offering, wheeling and dealing. Mulder didn't have a clue what the ultimate purpose of it all was. *Do you like a challenge, or do you just set yourself up to fail?*

*Are you up to this? Do you want to know where he's taking you this time? Do you really?*

He was still paying for losing that dare in Hong Kong. *Finish it....* Damn Krycek for knowing that he couldn't finish it. Not until he knew the truth.

*I want to know I want to know I want to know who the fuck you are I want to know what you want from me I want to know I want to believe I want to know what this is I want to know what you know why you're here who you are I want to know I want you*

They hit the ground together, and before Mulder had time to feel stupid and clumsy he was off his back and up on his knees, and the kiss had dissolved into something full-bodied. Their knees touched, their hands and wrists and forearms played each other in arcane patterns. The heat of their groins and chests radiated doubled in the narrow breath of space between them, and Mulder could smell his mouth, taste it in the air, as their chins nudged against each other and their eyes bored into each other, making out, marveling in the way the kiss had fanned out to crackle up and down the surface of their skin where their skins touched, where they half-touched, where they ached to touch.

It was unbearable, unsustainable, and Mulder croaked out something that should have been a word and grabbed Krycek's hair where it had grown long on top and pulled the kiss back up to their lips where it belonged, where it was - if such a thing was anything less than absurd under the circumstances - a little safer. Krycek's hand got hold of Mulder's t-shirt at the tail and pulled it up in a careless, rough sort of caress that made Mulder shiver, made him not at all hate to draw away from Krycek's mouth long enough to let Krycek strip it off of him. Krycek didn't make him give up the kiss for long; he swooped right back into it, and the shock of his mouth on Mulder's was every bit as cruel and wanted as the casual twist Krycek's strong fingers gave to Mulder's nipple. He groaned into Alex's mouth, felt himself losing ground under the force of Krycek's barely leashed desire. He was weakening, leaning back as Krycek came in deeper and deeper for more and more.

And soon he was laid out like an altar waiting for the sacrifice, his body a clean arch from knees to thighs to ribs back down to chest and shoulders and throat. *Who's that trip-trapping across my bridge?* Mulder had become architecture, something designed and arranged by the strangely fierce and focused man whose teeth were worrying the skin at the side of Mulder's neck, who was straddling him and creeping up, crossing. Perched like a carrion bird, and there was no mistaking the way his dick was trying on its own to press down through the undefended skin of Mulder's stomach. If anyone could fuck him straight through....

"Let's talk."

Mulder played it once again through his mind. Twice. Three times. Nahh. Couldn't.... The *hell*? Talk? Krycek *never* wanted to talk, let alone.... "Now?" he croaked in disbelief.

His fingernails were scraping up and down Mulder's body, the strip of skin that wasn't quite his side and not quite his back. Mulder's inner psychologist latched onto the repetitive gesture: nervous? Maybe. But if so, it wasn't showing at all in Krycek's steady, sea-dark eyes. "Now works for me."

"How long *do* these Mickey Finns you keep slipping your guards last, anyway?"

"Shut up, Mulder," he said good-naturedly, and kissed him once more. It was a borderland kiss, not entirely in Krycek's old, desperately tender style, but not quite devoid of it either. "Now. This is what's called negotiation."

"That's a big word." Mulder faked the overly serious tones of the worst nightmare of a kindergarten teacher he could dredge up. "Can you say 'negotiation'?"

"I knew you could," Alex murmured silkily, copying his inflections, brushing a fingertip playfully down Mulder's cheek. "I am going to fuck you, tovarish. I'm going to make you come, my cock up your ass -- so hard you change your religion. On one condition."

Mulder swallowed, waiting for his voice to steady out. "And that condition is?"

"You have to ask me for it."

"Fuck me."

Too fast; it made Mulder flush uncomfortably, his own eagerness, even though, face it, nobody here was unaware that Mulder was eager for this. Just because Mulder spent his entire adult life chasing down other people's secrets didn't mean he was much good at keeping them himself.

But Krycek's smile wasn't triumphant; it was almost wistful, a little impatient, still hungry. A complicated smile - which meant a *genuine* smile, probably. For whatever that was worth. "Not yet."

"You gonna give me some kind of sign when you're ready, Krycek?" he asked tartly.

"Oh. You won't need one."

There was something about Krycek's voice - some unsettling commonality between the rough, quiet sounds buzzing near Mulder's ear right now and the voice Mulder remembered from the days of their partnership. Not the same voice, exactly - Krycek's voice now sounded like he'd been through a fire and all the scars had settled inside his throat, while the old Alex Krycek had possessed an entire repertoire of evasive noises, mutters and fake postures of formality and reluctant unease. But with his eyes closed, Mulder could hear the past - *I want out. There's so much I never told you. Mulder.... You.* -

He shook it off, tried to focus on what Krycek was saying to him.

"-knew what to make of it when you quit Behavioral Sciences to head your own...unit? Are you a *unit,* technically? Well, to be your own alien task force of one. A lot of people figured it had to do with your marriage falling apart. Actually, for a long time, no one in the Bureau knew what they found sadder - your bizarre obsession with alien abductions, wasted potential, etcetera etcetera, or the fact that you clung to your marriage so desperately that your wife was nine months pregnant with someone else's baby before you finally agreed to the divorce."

"Yeah, everyone was very concerned about me," he said tightly. "What does this have to do with anything?"

"Well, it has to do with everything. It has to do with *you,* and I'm sure you'd be the first person to agree that everything is about *you.* I mean, come on, Mulder. I've spent the last three years of my life trying to map out what makes you tick. It's a bullshit job, you know that, Mulder? I'm not a fucking profiler; I should never have gotten stuck with this."

"Maybe someone thought it was a promotion from assassin."

"Well, maybe *someone* wasn't thinking. Christ, I'm a courier, Mulder. I transport information and evidence through some of the tightest security in the world. I've worked for the FBI *and* the NSA, Communist *and* post-Communist Russia, the Syndicate *and* - forget that; we'll come back to that some other day. The point is that I am a highly skilled professional, I'm very good at what I do, and being your partner was just one stupid assignment that was supposed to last six months, max, and it's been *three years,* and my head is still crammed with your fucking life story." Krycek caught his breath noisily, and when Mulder opened his eyes, the look on Krycek's face was half frustration and half confusion, as though he wasn't sure why this was all bursting out of him now. "You and your fucking father and your fucking sister -" Krycek's fist pounded against Mulder's chest to emphasize each curse -- "and your fucking ex-wife and your fucking partner and your fucking ill-conceived *job.* You're somehow behind every fucked-up thing that ever happened to me. I lost my job because of you, I lost my *arm* because of you, Jesus, there aren't even *words* for some of the things I lost because of you. And I still. Don't. Understand. You."

The momentary silence was welcome; Krycek was usually silent, watchful. This had the comfort of familiarity. Mulder's legs were beginning to ache, and he touched a hand gently to Krycek's hip. "Look, Alex. Why don't you get up for a second?"

His eyes flashed, a sharp and dangerous look that was also - less comfortably - familiar. "You backing out, Mulder?"

"I'm just - you don't exactly seem in the mood right now. I'm talking retreat and regroup."

Slowly enough that Mulder had plenty of time to decide he should be stopping this, Krycek slid his hand up Mulder's chest and settled it across his throat, his grip heavy but without much pressure. "I'm *completely* in the mood. You're still not getting what I'm saying to you - what I came here to tell you."

Guilt swam up so fast and so dizzying that Mulder forgot to be afraid at all. He knew - he *did* know. How could he not? He'd been studying Mulder for years, he must have - somehow - Sam would never have told anyone, but Phoebe, Diana.... Mulder shut his eyes, hard. It could be just a threat, Krycek's usual ruthless style.... God, he'd sunk to the *bottom,* now that he was hoping Krycek was threatening him with death rather than trying to arouse him. Mulder didn't have the breath or the will to prompt Krycek; he could only wait.

"I came to tell you that *you owe me my life back, you son of a bitch.* But since it's painfully obvious that you're not up to giving *anyone* a life, or you'd have one yourself, I'm going to have to take what I can get." His hand tightened once, and Mulder gagged on his yell of pain, and then relaxed again. "You really ought to be thanking me, you know? I don't see anyone else banging down your door to get much of anything from you. I mean, look at you. You're a violent, self-punishing, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive frustrated control freak. You completely distrust happiness, don't you, Mulder? Is that why you're attracted to me now? Because you know how really fucking miserable I'm going to make you? Like I said, I'm not a shrink, but it seems to me that a guy whose idea of a solid career move is to get a *hole* drilled in his head is really cruising for some major cathartic pain." His voice shifted so far and so fast that it might have been someone else completely; a silky, milky tone without any of Krycek's usual strain. "You want to get hurt, Mulder? I can take care of that for you."

"Get off me."

"Make me."

In his position, Mulder actually had quite a lot of leverage, and just by pushing himself up he could dislodge Alex. He launched himself right back at Mulder, of course, and they both went down to the floor in a clumsy grapple. He'd expected Alex to be strong, and he was, but he was also startlingly light, and maybe jogging had given Mulder a fresh surge of energy for the evening, or maybe his anger was something particularly berserk and dangerous tonight, because as their struggle lapsed into stillness, Mulder realized that he had a knee planted firmly in Alex's chest and Alex's good arm twisted around, his hand trapped under his slightly arched back. The fake arm lay docilely out beside him on Mulder's carpet, its angle not quite natural. Somehow, Mulder didn't feel any triumph at all; he just stood up and backed away, feeling like this evening was shaking down wrong. Like something didn't fit, even though he knew full well that it made a hell of a lot more rational sense than the last time had.

Without looking at it, Krycek made a quick adjustment to his prosthetic as he got to his knees, and it started to look a little more like an arm should look. "Come on, Mulder, don't tell me that's all you've got. I had bruises that looked like Skinner's knuckles for three weeks after the first time I was alone with *him.*"

"Is there any chance you're projecting when you accuse me of being self-punishing, Krycek? Because that's not the first time you've implied that you kinda like it when I beat you up."

"Maybe. Maybe it just makes it that much easier for me to fuck you over. Tovarish."

"I thought you'd defected."

"Not for the first time. Or the last, probably."

And even though he *knew* Krycek was just taunting him, just trying to get some kind of reaction, the perverse rat bastard, and that the thing really to do was just to ignore him, which would suck the wind right out of his sails, the truth was that Mulder had been waiting for so long, looking for something, anything he could react to. Something real and present and somehow connected to his frustration and hopelessness, some way to use the pain he'd been stockpiling for, oh, *ever* now, it felt like. So when he brought his knee up hard to clip Krycek under the jaw, he knew it wasn't really because of anything Krycek had said. Just because he was there, and refusing to let Mulder lie dormant under his routines and his few hard-won certainties.

He made a satisfying grunt of surprise as his head snapped back - very satisfying. *That's for breaking into my apartment, asshole.*

It wasn't exactly his intention to kick Krycek in the stomach, too...but that sound was really *great.* He didn't make it exactly the same, though, more like a growl, and he was looking up at Mulder with a gleam of pure pleasure in his eyes, even though his face was set hard against the pain. *That's for touching my throat without permission, you sick fucker. And this is for making me dinner before you tried to screw with my mind....*

Even before his knee connected with Krycek's nose, Mulder sort of felt bad. It seemed like too much. He wasn't - he didn't really want to be the kind of person who would just beat the shit out of someone to feel better, regardless of how much that person probably deserved it. But it was too late to pull out, and Krycek was perfectly silent this time, so the crunch of impact resounded like a gunshot in the room, making Mulder jump skittishly away. Krycek's head was down, and there was a small dark blot on the knee of Mulder's jeans.

"Alex...." His voice died away. Krycek wasn't much for making apologies, and Mulder got the distinct impression that he wouldn't be much for listening to them, either.

When Krycek raised his head, the pleasure was gone; he looked a little tired, but mostly just steady, businesslike, the same old Alex Krycek who'd sat across the desk from him at the Bureau, making endless phone calls and filling out endless requisition forms. "Help me up," he said simply, and for a moment there was no pretense and no subtext between them. Krycek could've been down on his knees with black blood dripping down his lip for any one of a million reasons, and all he wanted was a hand getting to his feet. Mulder reached out, and they gripped each other by the wrist so Krycek could pull himself up more easily.

Standing again, face to face, Krycek gave him a brief, wry smile, something that it was easy to imagine could stand in for an apology. "More like it," he said approvingly, wiping at the blood on his mouth with his prosthetic arm so that the sleeve of his sweater came away smeared with the same nondescript dark color that was on Mulder's jeans. "You really shouldn't keep your feelings bottled up so much. You're going to give yourself an ulcer - or kill someone."

"Keep your head tilted back. I'll get you some paper towels."

"Nah. I'm just gonna let it bleed a while." Krycek lowered his thick lashes and gave Mulder a razor-sharp, appraising look out from behind them. "What do you think, partner? Does it make me look more like Scully?"

Before he had any time to think about such niceties as what kind of person he wanted to be, Mulder moved, backhanding Krycek across the mouth so hard that it almost sent him back down to the floor. He could see Krycek stumbling, trying to regain his stability, but it was just visual input; it didn't work the slightest wedge of pity, triumph, or any other emotion into the featureless walls of anger that had slammed down all around him. He threw a punch, and a second, and he was vaguely aware that they'd both connected with something, but for the most part Mulder was locked so deeply inside those horribly twinned images - Alex's blood on his clothes, Scully's blood smeared across the paperwork on his desk - that he might as well have been back out on the street, shoving his abuse randomly on his own body, the ground, science, and nature.

It was blood that broke through, the red color popping unexpectedly vivid from its white background, making Mulder's attention lock onto it, slowly resolving itself into a small oval tear in the pale skin of Alex's sharp cheek. Mulder stepped back, shaking his head, and when he raised his hand to keep Alex's subtle following motion in check, there was blood on his knuckles.

Roughly, Alex pulled up on the collar of his sweater and hastily wiped the sticky mess his face was quickly becoming on its inside. "Say something," Mulder demanded.

"I dunno," Alex grumbled with a hint of his old prissiness. "That was my big finale. If you're not done yet, you'll have to think up your own reasons to hit me."

"Don't make me do this."

Alex laughed sharply, unconsciously straightening out his sweater. "Yeah, Mulder, I make you do this. I make you do everything. I'm a mean son of a bitch. You're catching on. You finished or not?"

"Finished hitting you?"

"Yeah."

"*What in the fuck is wrong with you?*"

The question actually seemed to make Krycek pause for a minute, and then he shrugged. "Hell if I know, Mulder, but I promise, if I ever figure it out, you'll be the first to know."

"You *promise.* Well, if you *promise*...."

"Yeah, Mulder. I promise."

It sounded so serious. From anyone else, in anyone else's life, in any other world, it would have been Alex Krycek making a promise to him. For just a few seconds, Mulder closed his eyes and played the words over again in his head, thinking *this is what it would've been like, being Alex Krycek's lover.*

Unable to see the decision being made in Krycek's eyes, Mulder had no time to react before Krycek's arm was resting along his chest, fingers closed lightly on his neck. When he kissed Mulder, his lips were still sticky and iron-tangy with blood. The kiss lasted as long as it took for Mulder's hands to find Alex's waist, but when he carelessly nudged a cut he hadn't realized was on Alex's lower lip with his tongue, Krycek hissed and pulled his head away. Mulder leaned forward for more of the gory kiss, but Krycek pushed him away by the shoulder. "Why are you doing this?" Mulder murmured.

"Just need to know what kind of man I'm getting mixed up with."

"Am I failing your test?"

"You're no coward."

"Why do I feel like one?"

"Don't let the liberal guilt get to you, Mulder. If I really wanted to, I could kick your ass even with two fake arms."

"I can't trust you. I don't even know why I'd want to."

"Because you're lonely, Mulder. Believe me, I know how that is." Mulder raised a skeptical eyebrow and Krycek shrugged. "What? I'm *human.* You know, the kind of life I live...there's just not a lot of consistency, let alone people you can count on. It sucks."

Gently, Mulder dabbed blood off Krycek's cheek with his thumb, fighting back a lopsided grin. "Sucks, huh, Shakespeare?"

At first Krycek looked startled, and then the glitter in his eyes turned to that sly amusement that Mulder so rarely saw. "'I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.' Suck on *that,* Mr. Oxford."

"Okay, I'm impressed."

"I did go to college, you know. I have an English degree from Columbia University."

"No kidding? Your classified file says Criminal Justice from NYU."

"My file says a lot of things."

"Was that Macbeth?"

"Hamlet."

"Right, right, right. Get thee to a nunnery. You know, that was Elizabethan slang for a whorehouse."

"I *know,* Mulder. Christ." He sounded exasperated, but there was a smile at the corner of his lips as he leaned in and brushed them very lightly down Mulder's neck. The sudden teasing contact sent a brief, violent shudder through Mulder's body. "You just stick to the psychology, okay?"

Damn, it was too hard to sit stoically under the burden of all this intensity; the urge to shake it off with dumb humor was overwhelming. Mulder waggled his eyebrows suggestively. "I was hoping to play pre-med."

He was getting the hang of kissing Alex without hurting his lip, and his fingers found a position against Krycek's face that didn't press against anything sore. "Alex - hey, Alex?"

"What?" he mumbled obediently, but he didn't seem very keen to let Mulder get out of kissing him.

"Do you like Hamlet?"

"Do I- ? *Fuck,* Mulder. Are we going to have sex or what?"

"Yeah, yeah, don't worry, I'm mentally rehearsing my begging and pleading for you to fuck me even as we speak. I'm just - I'd like to - this is something I want to know about you, all right? Do you get that? Out of all the things I don't know, I would just like you to be fucking honest with me for two seconds and tell me, do you like Hamlet?"

"Technically speaking, the man's finest play. I'm a big fan. Does that make you happy, sweet prince?"

"Overjoyed. Your favorite?"

"Nah. I like Julius Caesar."

"Figures."

Alex snorted, but he obviously wasn't feeling cynical enough to resist as Mulder pushed him back toward the sofa and down on his back. Stripping off the worse-for-wear sweater, Mulder put his mouth against Alex's stomach, ignoring the faint yellow bruise there. Alex groaned softly, but not, Mulder was pretty sure, in pain. "God. God, you're so sexy. Whoever the fuck you are - FBI agent, courier, assassin, fucking Shakespeare scholar - whoever the fuck you are."

"Yeah, Mulder. Oh, yeah. Let me fuck you, please. Please."

*You, Mulder. Are we okay?*

*Mulder -- please -- don't trust me. I don't want to hurt you again. Don't let me.*

*We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.*

*Don't believe me. This is all the help I can give you, Fox.*

Mulder froze. Like all insights, this one had come down on him like a semi, and now it seemed so fucking ridiculous that he'd struggled this long with it. Jesus, he could be stupid sometimes. "I'm your - I'm your goddamn Ophelia."

"What?"

"That speech - Hamlet is trying to convince Ophelia - fuck, I'm such an *idiot,* it's so obvious - trying to convince Ophelia to stay away from him, because he knows he's into this revenge thing over his head and he's afraid she's going to end up going down with him. *That's* why he tells her he's dishonest and ambitious and all the rest of it." He pointed a finger between Krycek's eyes, and Krycek batted it away impatiently. "That's why you came here. You thought that after - after last time - I might be thinking about getting involved with your little kamikaze mission."

"You're a piece of work, Mulder. Does it *never* occur to you that I might just *be* dishonest and ambitious?"

"Every damn day, Krycek. But you didn't come here to twist the knife in me, and you didn't come here to make it easier on yourself in case you should need to fuck me over again. You love me-"

"Fuck you! Get off of me."

"Yes, you do! You're in love with me, you bastard, and it scares the hell out of you that the one person in your life that you give a shit about might get hurt because you let him care about you. You came here to make me hate you again, knowing I'd let you fuck me anyway, figuring that in the harsh light of the morning after, I'd feel too guilty and generally nauseous about what I let you do to me that I'd never want to be anywhere near you again. This is part of your half-assed making amends program."

"*Half-assed*? My *half-assed* making amends program is going to break the Syndicate's back for you."

"For me?"

Krycek's eyes widened in surprise as his own words sunk in on him, then narrowed. "*Instead* of you. Since you obviously can't or won't. Some arch-nemesis you are. And I am *not* making amends. Does this look like Black Ops Anonymous to you?"

"Call me Fox."

"*What?*"

"The other night - you kept calling me Fox. What made you stop?"

"You're complaining?"

"I'm making a point!"

"Which is...?"

"That this -" Mulder waved his hand vaguely, indicating Krycek's body lying tense beneath him - "this isn't you. This is just another performance."

"Or the last time was."

"No."

Mulder was a stubborn man, and he packed all the stubbornness at his command into that one word, pinning Krycek down with it. His eyes didn't flicker as they held Krycek's, watching him cycle through anger, frustration, fear, anger again, confusion, respect, another flavor of fear. He'd never seen emotion lit up so plainly behind Krycek's witchy green eyes; it made him exquisitely human, brought him right here and right now no matter how hard he tried to be somewhere else. Softly, Mulder kissed his jaw. "I'm getting better at this game, Alex. I'm going to get into your head yet."

"Did anyone ever tell you that you have this way of making up theories that strike you as attractive, then interpreting all the evidence to support your theory without duly considering a sufficient range of alternative explanations?"

"Yeah. Call me crazy, but that speech turns me on every time, too."

"You're *crazy.*"

"You promised to fuck me if I asked. Alex, I'm asking. I want it."

Krycek's jaw twitched slightly. "A lot's changed since I promised that."

"I won't let you hurt me."

"You can't stop me. You never could."

"How long?"

It didn't look as though he really wanted to, but Krycek smiled anyway. "How soon they forget...."

Mulder made a post-punchline rimshot noise. "How long have you been in love with me?"

"This is *your* psycho theory, Mulder. It's not healthy for me to play into your delusions."

"Don't you dare honesty-containment-conciliation me, Alex Krycek. How long have you been in love with me?"

"Ask me again."

"How long?"

"No. Ask me to fuck you."

"I want you. Christ, Alex. I'm begging you." He dropped his head, resting his forehead lightly on Krycek's shoulder as Krycek's fingers hesitated, just brushing the skin of his back. "I'm so fucking lonely."

Between their three fully functional hands, they managed to get rid of the last of their clothes without letting go of each other's mouths long enough to say anything *else* that couldn't ever be taken back again.

Already, the scars and marks on Krycek's body had a strangely nostalgic familiarity to them - the knife wound in his chest, the brace that strapped his silicone arm to the remains of his real one, the tattoo on his leg. Souvenirs of a rough life, with few protectors and no unbreakable rules. Mulder touched each of them in quick recognition - found the tattoo and the scar behind his shoulder with his fingers, kissed the scar that had been the proximate, if not the ultimate, cause of his father's death, let his chin rest briefly on Krycek's left shoulder, his prosthetic arm pressed between their bodies. Alex fucking Krycek, with all his failures seared permanently into his body, exactly the way it sometimes seemed that all Mulder's failures were seared permanently into his mind. They could both run forever, and the truth would never be purged out of them by pain or sweat, not by any amount of effort, defiance, ambition, stubbornness. Krycek's body, Mulder's life - monuments and martyrs to things, truths, they never should have messed around with at all.

Too soon old, too late wise, as the saying went. Too late to back out now.

Far from being handicapped by the massive migration of blood to his dick, Mulder's thoughts seemed crisper and more orderly than it had since he got home from his run - wait until he could tell Scully that his best thinking really *did* happen in his pants. Out of them. Whatever. Now it seemed even more ridiculously obvious than ever before: somewhere on his way up the bad side of the ladder, Alex fucking Krycek had fallen in love with him. Him. Fox Mulder, the FBI's redheaded stepchild, inept arch-nemesis of big government gone horribly awry, America's alien task force of one.

*When you fuck up, you fuck up for keeps, don't you, Alex-whoever-you-are?*

Only this time, Alex seemed determined to sear his biggest mistake into Mulder's body. Every time his rough-chewed fingernails dug into Mulder's back or his teeth snapped sharp and quick at the top of Mulder's ear, Mulder got his intent just as clearly as if Krycek's low growls had been words: *feel this pay attention to this how deep can I touch you? let me in where you're bloodiest*

"Feel this?" Mulder murmured, half-convinced he was repeating real words that had escaped from Alex's lips as the heel of his hand massaged heavily down Alex's chest, pressing into his nipple and making his back arch suddenly.

"Fuck," he gasped softly, and caught Mulder's mouth in a short, clumsy, perfect kiss. "Fuck. I like that. No - no, quit it. I can't-"

"Sure you can." Mulder sealed his lips around the warm, darkening nipple. The agonized, erotic sound that escaped Krycek was, on reflection, much more appealing than his earlier stifled pain noises. That was nice to know for sure. Mulder fought to keep from breaking the suction by twisting his lips into a wide grin.

"I can't - Mulder, for fuck's sake, *quit.* You're gonna make me-"

"I wanna make you."

His voice was low, and humid like the most unbearable Virginia summer nights. "Not like this. In you."

*In me. In me. In me.*

As gently as he could while his body wanted to push roughly, over and over again, against Krycek's hard hipbone and muscled thigh, Mulder brushed two fingers over Krycek's face, observing the way the clean, handsome features were settling into bruises and scabs. "Did you ever wonder - what it would've been-"

"No. And you shouldn't either."

"Liar."

"*Now* you don't trust me," Alex snorted.

"I never trusted you."

"Liar."

"I still don't."

"Fucking *liar.*"

"In fact, I hate you. I'm plotting my elaborate revenge against you, but no revenge will ever be sufficient, and when I die, I'm having 'I Still Hate Your Guts, Alex K.' carved on my tombstone. I'm putting up with you because you're under federal protection, but once your sting is over, all bets are off. I'll probably try to push you out of a window before you ever get out of the Hoover Building. My final thoughts before I shuffle off this mortal coil will be about what a worthless, vile, morally bankrupt and spiritually diseased, bottom-feeding rodent you are - or were, since I will have killed you long since by that time - and how glad I am that I never, ever, *ever* fell victim to one of your insane, labyrinthine, Shakespearean schemes."

In spite of a few snorts of unwilling laughter, by the time Mulder had run out of breath for his ramble, Alex was looking at him with unexpectedly grave eyes. "Got it all figured out, do you?"

"You bet."

"No revenge will ever be sufficient, huh?"

Unwillingly, Mulder thought of the ashes in his hand, a friend erased as though he'd never existed - because he hadn't. The dark shadow of sadness that had warped his Scully, made her someone he didn't know, someone he was constantly losing even while he was constantly waiting to lose her. He thought of the way he always had to obey the most frightening, least humanized chunks of himself when Krycek turned those eyes, eerily level and thoroughly haunted at the same time, on him. "No. I guess not."

They would never be even.

*In me. In me. In me.*

"Well, I guess someone's going to do me sooner or later. I'd just as soon it was you."

"Alex, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"Probably."

With a grace that was controlled and precise, not showy, Krycek rolled them both to their sides, and Mulder instinctively draped his arm over the back of the couch, holding himself tensely against the fabric so he couldn't see anything else. When Alex's fingers cupped his balls, the knuckle of his thumb stroking Mulder's perineum, it seemed like his whole hand was warm and slippery - obviously the dislike of lubricant that Alex had been so vocal about last time didn't extend to fucks where he was on top. *I can't believe you called *me* self-punishing. You're a fucking lousy psychologist, Krycek.*

One finger, two fingers - hell, Mulder had only done this once before, but he couldn't shake the feeling that this was absurdly...normal. That this was how almost anyone would take it up the ass on his living room couch from a one-armed man who had a thing for him, whether or not they were supposed to be mortal enemies, whether or not the living room in question was under constant illegal surveillance, whether or not they'd both exceeded their life expectancies by a couple of years apiece already. It was just a couple of fingers, living and mobile. The right amount of body heat for two naked men in fairly good shape, suffering no especially debilitating wounds or ailments at the moment. The ring of muscle opening to a little gentle pressure, tightening down as the relevant tissues swelled and sensitized with blood. Breathing, laborious and carefully controlled. A kiss, a brush of cheek on Mulder's back, too artless to be anything less than desire.

So normal. This is how it would've felt. Being Alex Krycek's lover. Taking a shower, eating some pasta, talking, fucking on the sofa. Sleeping deep in the center of Alex's scent. Alex in him, Alex tasting him, Alex teaching him new definitions of the word *longing.*

Fuck it. Fuck it. This is how it did feel. Because he was sure as hell Alex Krycek's lover. It couldn't have been seared deeper into either of their lives. It was a goddamn *brand.* Yippie ki yi yo.

"Mulder," he breathed, his chin resting in the hollow low between Mulder's shoulder blades. "You're...I missed you. I fucking *missed* you."

"I know."

Mulder hadn't known he had a streak in him, part Kama Sutra and part supermarket romance novel, that would allow him to feel so *different* in the split second after he'd had Alex Krycek's dick inside him than he had the split second before. Even when Mulder had lost his virginity, he'd been vaguely surprised at how he was pretty much the same gangly egghead teenager he'd always been. But with Alex lying flush against his back, real arm wrapped around Mulder's ribs and plastic arm resting on the arm of his couch, his chin tucked into the curve of Mulder's neck becoming his shoulder - like it or not, he was...pretty much...totally different.

Pretty much totally Alex's.

*In me. In me.*

*Jesus, Mulder. Still a romantic, after all these years? After all the fucked-up-beyond-all-repair romances? This must be what they call *hopeless.* You're fucking hopeless.*

*You're fucking doomed.*

The way he moved when Alex rocked against him, the way he cried out when Alex's strong fingers found his cock and closed around it, just under the crown, the way each stab of pleasure came as its own little unexpected world of new sensation - it was all just *past* normal. It was fucking *archetypal.* It was how every single person on the face of the earth probably felt, from toes to lungs to cock to eyeballs, with the one man who could turn him into mental origami with one accidental flutter of his eyelashes buried in him and fucking him like neither of them had a doubt in the world. Mulder hated to be a cliche. How bizarre to finally realize that the tackiest Top 40 cliche ever invented was actually about two steps to the left of - of those stupid auto fatality statistics Krycek used to rattle off. Hard facts, true things, carved in stone, humankind's simple but amazingly accurate attempt to turn the complexity of real life into ten digits and sixty seconds per minute.

And each of those seconds was beating through Mulder, time a long, slow vibration from each deep thrust toward the moment when statistics started to lie and truth became incalculable. Alex kept time with his fingers tugging on Mulder's cock, fucked him to the relentless count of their harmonizing pleasure. "I'm begging," Mulder informed him hoarsely, his hands curled into a claw that was probably permanent around the top of the sofa. "I've got to come. Can't you-?"

"I've got you." He sounded strangely calm, his breath ruffling Mulder's hair as he spoke. "Go ahead - go ahead."

Whether it was the minor shift in the angle of Krycek's thrusts, the permission, or the complicated twist his hand did, palm and inner fingers and round knuckles dancing artistically across the tender skin of Mulder's cock, Mulder came. By the time his attention had returned, he could feel the final twitches of Krycek's dick inside him, leaking the last of his semen. Mulder reached back and cupped the back of Krycek's skull, holding his hand in Krycek's thick hair through the final throes of his pleasure.

"You never answered my question," Mulder finally commented, speaking to the back of his couch.

"Which?" Krycek mumbled, or something like that; it wasn't entirely intelligible.

"How long?"

He didn't say anything for a moment, and when he did speak, it wasn't an answer, just a lazily annoyed, "This again?"

"Hey, last time you were bitching because I didn't ask *enough* questions."

"That's not *exactly* why I was bitching," he grumbled. "Christ, you made up this whole stupid Ophelia theory. Why don't *you* answer your question? I mean, you jury-rig facts to your own liking for a living, Mulder. You're a fucking *professional.* I'm not going to compete."

"Have you always been this much of a caustic bastard, deep down underneath all that strong, silent crap?"

Mulder could feel the shape of Krycek's grin along the nape of his neck. "Wouldn't need the strong, silent crap if I weren't."

"Camouflage. So the people you're infiltrating don't wring your neck before they even get to the part where you're a professional double agent."

"No flies on you."

"Your preferred method of defying reality," Mulder murmured, almost to himself. "Deflection. Verbal defense. Jesus, an *English* major."

"What the hell are you babbling about?"

"You."

"Quit."

*Too little, too late, Alex. I'm starting to get this. I'm starting to see.*

"Tell me something, Krycek."

"What?"

"Something. Anything. Something I don't know."

Krycek snorted. "Figures. The only two people in the world whose idea of afterplay is trading secrets." Mulder chuckled, and under the influence of the laugh rumbling through his body, Krycek's bitter sound trailed off into amusement, too. "Okay, okay. Something you don't know."

"I know, this is a tough one."

"Right."

"Try, though."

"If you shut up, I will. You don't know...that there's a war on. That my real job isn't carrying information - it's concealing it. Where the weapons are. *What* the weapons are."

He hadn't expected - business. Real information, pieces of the puzzle. Mulder's heart began to bang loudly and slowly. "You're protecting a weapon."

"The only weapon. The only method of meaningful resistance we have."

"We?"

"We."

It was supposed to be *We?* as in *You and who else knows about this?* But Alex seemed to have read *We?* as *You and me?*

*You and me.*

*You in me.*

*Yes.*

"We," Mulder repeated. "I need to-"

"Not right now, you don't. I'll tell you when you need to move on this. I'll tell you what you need to know."

The question hung unspoken in the air: *And will you trust me when I tell you?*

*Yes. No. Maybe. Probably. Foolishly. Yes. Statistically speaking, I trust you 48.6% more often than I should.* "There are three kinds of lies," Mulder heard himself say under his breath. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

"Believe me, Mulder, I may be a damned liar, but I'm not playing this by the numbers," Krycek said, and he sounded distant somehow. "This is a war that I'm very likely to lose."

"You don't seem the...losing type."

"I didn't use to be."

One more digit falling into place, one more piece of the puzzle. Somehow, somewhere, something had changed for Alex Krycek. Something that made him fight to lose; he had the ravaged life and the pretty face smeared with traces of drying blood to prove it.

*I want to know I want to know who you are I want to know what you want from me I want to know I want to believe I want to know what this is I want to know why you're here who you are*

*I'm starting to get this, Krycek. Just give me a little more time.*

And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge....
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war.
-Julius Caesar

End.

 

---

 

Title: Game of Kings
Author: Hth
Series: Part Three of the "Kill or Cure" trilogy, which belongs to the Fire in the Sky universe. This really won't make a whole hell of a lot of sense if you haven't read the first two parts of the trilogy, "Stroke of Luck" and "Dogs of War"; read them, and the rest of the series if you so desire, at http://members.tripod.com/HthW/xf.html
Summary: Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. The games we play....
Warnings: Rated R for men in sexual situations with other men. Yes, I realize that I've created an X-Files world where *everyone* is queer, but this is my fantasy, and I'm rolling with it. This is set a week or more after the trilogy began, and a week or more between the episode "Gethsemane" -- except for the flashback parts, naturally. Time jumps are funkier than usual in this story. Good luck.
Disclaimers: Chris Carter owns them. He's jealous because I hurt them even worse than he does....
Feedback: hth1@chickmail.com It took me three years to write this. I deserve pity feedback, if nothing else.

---

Game of Kings
by Hth

I: MULDER & KRYCEK

The truth was a game they played in the dark, an Atlantic City shell game. Keep your eye on the Lady, turn the cards over one at a time.... One for lust, one for the terrible, killing gentleness that Alex and Mulder seemed to have invented just for themselves, a third for the truth. Now which was which? Keep your eye on the Red Lady.

"Tell me where you grew up."

"Warrensburg, Missouri."

"*That's* bullshit."

Alex made a buzzing sound, punctuated by two fingers kneading deeply into Mulder's nipple. "That one's true."

"I thought New York was true...."

"I sound like a New Yorker to you?"

"No, it's just that you're such a bitter, skanky whore. How was I supposed to picture you in Smallville?"

He laughed his scratchy, satisfied little laugh, and bit Mulder's nipple gently. "I grew up a stone's throw from Whiteman Air Force Base. If the Cold War had ever gotten toasty, you'd have seen the first mushroom cloud over Warrensburg. Very strategic military location."

"Which is why you picked it to grow up in, of course."

"Well, of course."

"I can see you as a junior double agent. The secret decoder ring you found in *your* Cracker Jacks really worked...."

"I wasn't a double agent. I was a Cub Scout."

"That, I can't see."

"My father was."

"A...double agent."

"Yes."

"That one's...true."

"Right. That one's true."

"What's your name?"

"You know my name."

"Tell me -- oh, *Jesus,* oh, Alex -- *tell me.* Tell me your name...."

Quick breaths, raspy and uncontrolled; Alex was noisy when he got fucked, but he rarely gave himself away with sound while he was fucking Mulder. "Alex."

"True -- no, not true -- dammit, give me more, Alex, more, give me, give me...more...."

"Aleksander."

"Yes!"

"Aleksander Izydorovich -- my father called me -- he liked the patronymic, the other was too American. Alexander Krycek -- on my birth certificate, Mulder, that's *true.* Part of my father's cover. Had to pretend to be escaping from Russia, had to pretend he loved being here, give his kid an American name. Part of the fucking paper trail. Alex. Alex Krycek."

"Alex. Alex. Alex fucking Krycek." Wild laughter, so close to the edge that he was hysterical with it. "Alex!"

Alex closed his eyes so hard that it made his head hurt, feeling the bed quiver underneath him, Mulder grinding down on him from above. "Alex," he murmured, letting his voice fall into a conjuring synchronicity with Mulder's. "Alex -- Alex -- Alex."

"Are you gay?"

"Naw, Mulder," he said lazily. "'S just you. Your ass is *that* wonderful." He twirled his finger inside the ass in question, just to watch Mulder's eyes roll back.

"Fuck you. I meant -- women. Do you like women, too?"

"Depends on what you mean by 'like.' I've fucked women; I get off on it and all that, sure. Past that...not really."

"So...you're a bisexual misogynist?"

"You got it."

"But you like men. I mean, really like."

"Well...no. I don't *really* like anyone."

"Love...."

"Never been."

"That's not true."

"This again?"

"Liar."

"Hell, yes. Just not about this."

"You're here, aren't you?"

"Mulder, you're letting me fist you. Damn right I'm here."

"I'm letting you be in love with me. You'll be here until it kills you."

Alex kissed him once, bruisingly, and then concentrated on getting the fourth finger in.

"*Why?*

It was the one question that came back again and again. Alex couldn't shake him loose from it, not with the most demanding porn movie positions he knew and not with the richest, most symbiotic intimacy. Alex turned his face deeper into Mulder's neck and tried to think.

"My father was too valuable an agent for the USSR to lose, so when the Air Force pegged him as their security leak, the KGB scrambled together an alternate version of events. They set me up to look like the spy. I had some...connections to people on the bad side of legal; it was easy to believe, even without the evidence the KGB manufactured. I was twenty, I was on the edge of being arrested for fucking *treason,* I had no one to go to. He showed up out of nowhere and said he knew the truth. That he would make sure I was cleared of all charges, if I came to work for him. I owed him everything."

Mulder stretched, the muscles in his back rippling sensually against Alex's chest. "I like that one. That's *very* sympathetic."

"Yeah." Alex yawned. "I thought it was pretty good, too. For the spur of the moment."

"It's not true, though."

"No. It's not."

"How do you keep getting here? Aren't you supposed to be guarded?"

"My guards and I, we have an understanding."

"You know, you can only feed a man so many horse tranquilizers before he starts to notice something is up."

"That trick only works once, Mulder. Twice, maybe. It's not a long-term solution."

"What's a long-term solution?"

"Blackmail. Extortion. Bribery."

"For example."

"Yeah. For example."

"You're going to leave the mother of all OPC reviews in your wake, aren't you?"

"I've noticed that coming into contact with me tends to reveal a lot about who a person really is."

"So what does it reveal about me?"

"Not all truths fit neatly into words, Mulder. Wouldn't hurt you to remember that."

"Why?"

"Same reason you do it. I wanted to believe in intelligent life from other solar systems. I asked a lot of questions, I was smart and fairly personable and too ambitious to be completely ethical, and I attracted attention. He promised me the truth, after I'd proved my loyalty. Go easy on the pepper, there -- *Jesus,* you're disgusting. Here, let me. They asked me to do a lot of little things; it didn't seem too nefarious. I was in over my head before I realized the danger of it. And then, well.... You don't just resign."

"None of that's true. There's more to it than you're telling me."

Alex smiled without much humor, and tasted the potato soup. "*All* of that's true. And there's more to it than I'm telling you."

"You tried to seduce me when we first met."

"You think?"

"Was that your idea or theirs?"

Mulder's thighs quivered slightly as Alex straddled his lap, but his face remained admirably blank. The man really had missed a calling in espionage. "Mine, tovarish. All mine. I wanted you so fucking bad...."

"That's a lie," he said roughly, but the roughness was sorrow and not anger. It did something unpleasant to Alex's chest.

"Okay. It is. The truth is...they figured you were as good as done in terms of the threat you posed. Mulder, my assignment wasn't even about you. They sent me to find out who, if anyone, was listening to you -- who might try to step up after you were gone and carry on your work. I wasn't sent in to seduce you, beautiful. I was sent to seduce Skinner." He made a wry face. "I never took orders well."

He was frozen, no quiver, hardly a breath to distinguish Mulder from the chair he sat in. "That's...true," he said, sick with grief.

"Aw, babe," Alex laughed, kissing his cheek, "you are the single most vain person I've ever met. It *kills* you to think this might not have been all about you, doesn't it?"

"I'm supposed to *like* knowing that my life got ruined so that I could be brushed aside and you could move on to a more *important* job? A more important...man?"

"Fox. That one's not true. I made it up."

A few beats of confusion -- which lie to believe? Mulder relaxed fractionally. "You are an *asshole.*"

"But I'm one hell of a good liar, aren't I?"

"You're a sick fuck, and one hell of a good liar." Mulder pulled his head down with one hand and worked the other inside Alex's boxers, and Alex wasn't sure if there was more dizzying cruelty in the fist tight around his cock, or the tongue that blocked his own from slipping into Mulder's mouth. "You have to answer, though," Mulder reminded him as Alex gasped his way free of the kiss.

"The answer...I don't know. I don't fucking know, Fox, okay? I can't remember. That was so goddamn long ago...."

The steady, stripping hand on his cock didn't break rhythm as Mulder searched his face for confirmation. "Okay," he finally said, and he gave Alex a hesitant half-smile. "Okay, I believe that. That's true."

"Yeah. That's true."

"Why?"

"Because he's my father."

"Bullshit! I don't believe that!"

Alex ran a comforting hand down Mulder's cheek, flushed with exertion. "Okay. Okay, it's not true."

"That's not even funny, Krycek!"

"Okay. I'm sorry. It's not true...."

II: WALTER

The truth was a poker game; Walter had felt extremely out of his league when he was first promoted out of the field and into administration, until he'd realized that if you could play poker, you could play politics. Because the nature of the game was that you knew what cards you were holding, beyond a shadow of a doubt, but you could never know until it was all over whether it was a winning hand or not. You could only act as if you knew, which in real life was called having the courage of your convictions, and in poker bore the more nakedly honest name *bluffing.*

Walter Skinner was a very good poker player, and a pretty damn good AD, too. All things considered.

"I have decided, Mr. Skinner, to allow you to live."

This was a mixed blessing, and Walter was sure they both understood that. He nodded once, shortly, and chose the better part of valor in keeping his jaw tight and his mouth closed.

Spender glanced around for the ashtray that had always been in Walter's office, and when he found it missing completely, he smiled. More than anything, Walter hated it when his minor acts of defiance *amused* the bastard. Spender knocked off his ash in the dish of mints on the table. "The truth is, I'm not entirely surprised. Our last encounter ended...with some hard feelings. You're not wholly comfortable with the idea that I own you now; I wouldn't have expected you to be. You're a good man, Mr. Skinner. I appreciate your frustration."

"I'm touched." And owned more deeply now than ever before. The last thing Walter had wanted was *favors* from this man -- and now his very life was a favor. From this man. *Frustration* didn't begin to cover it.

"And," Spender continued lightly, almost happily, "I'm capable of taking into account the fact that you haven't been acting entirely on your own behalf. Then again...you never do, entirely, do you? That's what makes you unique, Mr. Skinner. You are a coward on your own behalf, and surprisingly brave when the opportunity to...support others presents itself. I daresay I don't know another man quite so uniquely suited to law enforcement as you are. Excellent career choice."

"Not that I do a lot of law enforcement anymore," Walter reminded him, not bothering to disguise his bitterness.

"Yes. That must be difficult for you." Spender didn't try any harder to disguise his lack of sympathy. "If it makes you feel better, however, I do admire you."

Walter's throat tightened suddenly, and his stomach made some slight move to rebel. Because it...did make him feel...not better, but.... *Christ,* was he such a weak, worthless -- nothing, so empty that he could find it in himself to feel grateful for *anybody's* compliments? When did wanting to be a good man, wanting the world to respect him, turn him into a dog, belly to the ground and taking scraps from any indifferent hand? No wonder he was a pawn. He didn't even really have Spender to blame.

"Harder hearts than yours have melted under the light of Fox Mulder's halo." There was a little contempt in the old man's dry voice, but a little bit of something else, too. Amusement? Sympathy? "It would be pointless to deny that I have my own soft spot for the man -- and his family."

Mulder. Jesus, how was he going to break this to Mulder? All their hopes, their revenge that had finally seemed so reachable. Walter had pushed him into this, against Mulder's hard-earned cynicism. Walter had made him believe that they had a weapon, and now they had nothing. Now that Spender knew what was going on, Krycek was probably already dead, and without his testimony, most of the evidence they had could be made to look like something other than what it was.

He had, in short, jerked Mulder around and given him nothing. It wasn't the way Walter would ever have treated him intentionally...and it wasn't very likely to get him any closer to discovering what Mulder's compliments would sound like, filling up and echoing off of the emptiness inside him.

"But," Spender said briskly, standing up, "as you know, I've been out of town, and I have a great deal of business to put in order. I'll be back when I have more free time, and you can catch me up on all the FBI's doings. In the meantime, you can save me a little trouble and deliver this."

The envelope he threw down on Walter's desk on the way out the door was small and cream-colored, and had Alex Krycek's name on it. Inside there was a folded notecard, and Walter recognized the thick, jagged handwriting all too well. It said only, *Welcome home, Alyoshka.*

Krycek was sitting in a chair reading when Walter entered his room within the safehouse and locked the door behind him. Generally speaking, Walter Skinner wouldn't have hit a man who wasn't even standing up to face him, but the pain and the *frustration* were almost a conscious presence inside him, needing to be allowed out, and it was pitifully easy to exempt Alex Krycek from the human race, or at least from that large part of the human race that was covered by the rules of honor. When you stopped and thought about it, it was really Krycek who'd exempted himself from all honor and all rules, many years ago.

So Walter walked right up to him and cuffed him hard on the side of the head, hard enough to jar Krycek's glasses lopsided and send the chair almost over on its side with the forceful shift in weight. Krycek managed to jump free without being tangled in the chair, but instead of standing up like a man, he stayed down low, crouched to the floor and staring up at Walter in shock.

"I'm putting you under arrest, you sneaky son of a bitch."

"What in the *fuck* has gotten into you, Skinner?"

"You sold us out." He didn't really know if it was true or not. He didn't really care. "Spender's back in Washington, and he knows everything. Now how did that happen, *Alyoshka*?" He threw the envelope at Krycek, but the boy had gone suddenly stiff and pale, and he didn't even seem to notice it bouncing off his chest.

"Don't call me that," he managed, and it sounded uncomfortably like begging. In fact, the whole scene was making Walter profoundly uncomfortable; when he thought of Alex Krycek, he thought of blood and fists and the wild edge of danger, but this man at his feet was -- different. Both older and younger than Walter remembered, fine-featured and barefooted, glasses and book discarded beside him and one arm missing. He looked like someone's grad student son. He looked like someone who knew a lot more about homelessness and hunger than anyone should have to. He didn't make Walter feel all right about taking out his aggressions this way...damn him to hell. "Just -- where did you *hear* that name?"

It took Walter a moment to focus back in on the meaning of Krycek's words, and even then he found it simpler to ignore them. "You're working for him, aren't you? Aren't you?!"

"No! Jesus fucking *Christ,* Skinner! I'm not, I swear! I don't know how he found out -- he's got a lot of contacts. Nobody could possibly know who or where they all are at all times, not even me." Abruptly, Krycek lowered his face into his good hand, and Walter felt like he should turn away from the sudden scene of brute misery -- Alex Krycek, every part of him crippled, put in one last corner by the men who made their careers by moving younger, more daring men like himself wherever they could best be used. Men like Spender. Men like Skinner. He'd tried to fight back, and gotten his bluff called. Walter knew how that felt.

"Let's go, son," he said gruffly. "I want to get you into a holding cell. It's going to take a hell of a lot more to keep you protected now."

"Don't even *fuck* with me like this," Krycek barked out from behind his hand, his voice rough with panic, or grief. "You can't protect me. What the fuck are *you* good for? You can't -- help me --"

It was so true that Walter couldn't even take offense. He reached down, and although Krycek jerked his arm away once, Walter got hold of it the second time and pulled Krycek to his feet. "I wish.... Shit, it doesn't matter what I wish, and you and I both know it. I'm going to do what I can for you, and we'll both just have to pay the piper, one way or another. There's no way out for either of us, not anymore."

Krycek's eyes sparkled dangerously, and he stepped menacingly closer to Walter, who held his ground. "I am *not* going to die this way. Not now. I fucking well have *things to do,* Walter. You have to let me go."

"You're joking."

"I'm deadly serious. If I can get out of the country -- today, *now* -- I can shake this off."

"You sound pretty sure."

"Are you kidding me? This is my job; I know how to move without being seen. Put me in one place, I don't care if it's Fort fucking Knox, and he'll find me, and he'll kill me. Let me *move,* and I can take care of myself. It's that simple."

Maybe it was that simple. For a moment, Walter was jealous. What would that be like, to have a life with room to move? "I can't just...let you go, Krycek. You're in too deep for that."

Without warning -- as if any kind of warning would have been sufficient to protect him from the shock -- Krycek put his good hand on the back of Walter's neck and leaned in to kiss him with rough, demanding sensuality. It was unreal, impossible, unacceptable -- and it felt better than anything had felt in months, maybe years.... Totally outside his conscious control, Walter's hands settled in the younger man's thick, soft hair and ground his mouth implacably closer. With his eyes closed -- the soft pelt of hair, the narrow and graceful length of his back -- it could have been....

But it wasn't. It wasn't. And the very thought of how Mulder would look at him, if Mulder could see him now, all but allowing the man he hated most to whore himself to Walter in order to weasel out of paying for his crimes.... Walter pushed him away physically and used his best distant-thunder voice to push him away more fully. "Boy, don't you believe for a second that you can buy me off that cheaply."

The words seemed to sting a little, from the way Krycek's eyes narrowed. "You fuck. I trusted you, and you're setting me up to die. Now *tell* me who's selling out whom? We had a deal!"

"The deal's off! You don't have anything I can use anymore." It was cruel and Walter knew it, but he sure as hell wasn't the one who'd made Alex Krycek's bed. You crossed the wrong men, you died, and that was the nature of the game. There was no reason now for Walter to shield him from the inevitable. No reason at all. The boy should've gotten out of the kitchen years ago.

Amazing, resilient little rat -- he tried again, arm around Walter's shoulders, lips brushing Walter's ear as he spoke. The blood was leaving Walter's brain so quickly it was dizzying. "Let me sweeten the deal, Walter. You don't know what you've got here; you don't know who I am."

"I know who *I* am."

Krycek chuckled, and licked slowly along the shell of Walter's ear, then blew gently into it. "I used to fuck him, Walter. I was Spender's...prize...possession. Does that shock you?"

"You're lying."

"Come on. You didn't really think I was just another ops nobody, did you? You've *seen* some of the tips I gave the Bureau; you think those came out of a Cheerios box? He was grooming me as his successor. He wanted to give me *everything.* He adored me. And I learned how to ask the right questions...and when. I learned how to make him crave the chance to answer my questions...."

Walter forced himself to swallow. "And this has *what* to do with me?"

"Well...the way I see it, we have a lot in common."

He snorted, and it served the dual purpose of expressing his disdain and covering temporarily for the fact that his breaths were coming harsher and harder. "Oh, you see that, do you?"

"You and I, Walter, we hate him more than anybody. More than Mulder could on his worst day. I did everything he asked me to do, and somehow I still ended up with fuck-all -- and you, well, he's made your whole life into a joke, hasn't he? Assistant Director of the FBI, with your six-figure salary and your posh office and all that beautiful, useless power. You should *be* somebody, Walter. You should be a force to reckon with. But you're not. He has more power than you and I can imagine; he rules the whole fucking world, and he knows it, and he feeds you off the crumbs."

"Is this going anywhere?"

"Don't play dumb with me, Skinner. You wanted me from the second you laid eyes on me, and you want me now. Think about it...just ask yourself, just for one second, what it would feel like. To fuck me...knowing that for *once,* you were the one stealing what should be his, right out from under him?"

"Should you be his?" Walter growled, and he couldn't keep his head from dipping lower, his tongue venturing out to flick against the thin skin of Krycek's pale throat.

Krycek laughed, and then he sighed. "Have you ever known him to let go of anything? Ever? I was his, once. He might kill me, but he'll never stop wanting me back. And you could be the one who has me...."

"Who buys you, you mean. I assume this is a quid pro quo?"

"I just wanna get the fuck out of this worthless city, Walter. That's not so hard to understand, is it?" Krycek laughed again, dangerously. "And, shit, if it's the whore thing that has you bothered, you've got no one but yourself to blame. I'd have done it for free, Walter, any time. You shoulda fucking asked."

In spite, in spite, in spite of...everything...it was impossible not to kiss him again, not to try to kiss him bloody, son of a bitch, rat with blood on his claws, dangerous thing, a man who'd been bold enough to try to play bigger men than Walter Skinner...and God only knew how close he'd come to pulling it off. Walter found himself down on the bed, and when Krycek's mouth pulled away and he got a good look at his new situation, it made Walter's cock throb and his hand come up of its own volition to knot tightly in the front of Krycek's shirt. Krycek was on top of him, half crouched and half coiled, a subtle and controlled movement rubbing his groin against Walter's over and over, while his green eyes shone with bitter, feverish confidence. He looked like some corrupt Renaissance devil, here to feast on Walter's tarnished soul, here to crush the breath slowly out of him, here to make him come until he died screaming and on fire....

Harder, more desperately, Walter found himself grasping at the tense arch of Krycek's whipcord-muscled body, his hips jerking up to be stopped by the agonizing pleasure of meeting hard hipbone, hard-on.... "Jesus," he heard himself gasp out, and he was being kissed again, his mouth raided by a tongue that was by quick turns both carelessly selfish and soothingly kind. Walter was fighting for air now, finding it all sucked away by that wicked mouth -- slickened, sensual lips and the high arch of cheekbone under his thumb, hair just long enough to wind his fingers into, fine-boned, beautiful grad student, feline, mysterious, resilient, full to brimming with every kind of sly surprise.... "Fox," he mumbled, lapping at the faint texture of stubble on his jaw, bucking up hard. "Fox...." Walter tightened his arms around his lover's shoulders, and felt the tension there like a steel spring.

He was so agonizingly close, and when he thrust and made contact with nothing, Walter's eyes flew open, stunned by thwarted desire and the sudden, confused flurry of motion and grasping. An evil *click* cleared away Walter's confusion, and for a moment his concentration was focused with perfect purity on the barrel of the gun. Slowly, awareness expanded outward, and he watched Krycek crawl backwards off of him, Walter's own gun leveled precisely between his eyes.

Shit. Shoulder holster. *Shit.*

Krycek smiled at him, but the expression was shaky, a hasty facade. "Get up. *Get up.*" Walter obeyed, and Krycek kept suspicious eyes on him as he backed toward the overturned chair and crouched down to pick up Spender's envelope. There was something chillingly professional in the way he juggled the gun and the envelope and the notecard within; not for one second did Walter catch a hint of an opening. Krycek read the card, then balled it up in his fist and threw it back on the floor. "I really hate that old man," he said conversationally.

"Boy, if you shoot me--"

"Relax, Skinner. Nobody's shooting anybody -- I hope. But I am getting the fuck out of here. And I'm taking the gun, and if I have any reason to believe that you've done something that pisses me off, you don't even want to know where this gun is going to turn up next. I'd start bulletproofing a nice little portfolio of alibis, if I were you."

"You leave this room, and I can have the whole FBI out after you with a phone call."

For a moment, Krycek looked tired, and old, no kind of boy at all; Walter wondered how he could ever have made that mistake. "Yeah, but you're not going to. Because deep down, you don't want me dead, and you don't want me captured. You know that would make Spender happy, and you'll take any chance you can to keep him from being happy. So you're gonna let me go out that window, and you're going to stay here for about...twenty minutes, and then you're going to leave, like nothing's wrong. I'll be over the Atlantic by the time Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern out there think to check in on me again. This--" Krycek drew a rough circle in the air with the gun, "--is just the excuse you need to do what you wanted to do all along. You're going to look back on this later, and take comfort in the fact that *somebody* got away."

And since that was probably exactly what was going to happen, Skinner wasn't left with much to say. He said nothing.

Krycek pulled the drawer loose from the nightstand by his bed and dumped its contents into a nylon bag. Getting his coat on with one arm while trying to keep his gun at the ready seemed to present a logistical problem even for a professional, but he managed.

He paused at the window, and quirked a strange little smile at Walter, full of an irony that Walter didn't understand at all. "You have a thing for the truth, Skinner? I've got one for you. Next time you see him...tell him I don't fuck anyone just for favors anymore."

"That's not a conversation I can really see myself having with my employer."

And the smile deepened, sharpened; it was almost alight with ferocious playfulness. "Oh, right. Tell Spender, too."

Walter stayed for twenty minutes. Then he left, like nothing was wrong.

III: ALEX

The truth was a chess game. Not because it was a rich man's game, or because it was easy to learn and took a lifetime to master -- although that was all true, too. No, it was a chess game because even though every time you sat down to play you never knew how the game would go, you were still always moving the same pieces in the same patterns. You couldn't even begin without the Bishop, the Rook, the King. And so Alex Krycek was never surprised anymore when the same things and the same people kept coming back into his life. And back again, and back again. Bishop, Rook, King.

[[["Alyoshka...honey?" Her voice was timid and husky, and Alex wished he'd locked the door, but he couldn't stand to send her away. She was touching his forehead with her cool, manicured fingernails, and she was the only person in the world who had ever touched Alex without fighting him. "Alyoshka, talk to me."

"No. Not while *he's* in this house. You said you wouldn't let him come back again!"

"Oh, honey," his mother sighed. "You won't even tell me what happened to your arm?"

He'd forgotten all about the sling on his arm. "It's nothing. Happened playing football; the coach says it'll be fine in a few days."

"Maybe you should...maybe you should take it off."

Alex opened his eyes in surprise. "Mom! It won't heal right if I do that. Plus, it'll hurt like a bitch if it's not supported."

"I know, but if your father sees.... You know he thinks the game is too dangerous anyway. He won't let you play if he thinks you'll hurt yourself permanently, and I know how you love it. I just don't want you to lose this, Alyoshka. It makes you so happy.... Take it off at dinner. Just for dinner, so he won't see it."

So many things they couldn't let Izydor Krycek see. The possibility that any foolish and wasteful game could ruin his only son's chances of being accepted into the KGB when he was old enough. The man in the kitchen, who had replaced him while he was too busy being a patriot to notice.

"It's not right. I don't want...." How could you argue something so basic? Alex didn't even have the language to argue with her, not with his mother. They had always been friends, a secret underground, living under Izydor's rules but secretly considering themselves better than he was. He was a grim, fanatical man, vicious and pragmatic, and his wife and son were utterly different from him. All his life, Dasha and Alex had only had each other; they went to movies and Rolling Stones concerts together, she taught him card tricks and bummed cigarettes off of him and teased him about girls. She sang him to sleep in Russian, she cracked him up with her accented Lucille Ball impressions. She was his best friend, the only one who could ever understand who and what he was, where he came from. Where he was supposed to be headed. They never *argued.* They cooked and they laughed until their whole bodies hurt and they kept each other's secrets. They were everything for each other.

At least, until Mr. Spender arrived.

"Come out and say hello, Alyoshka. He wants to know how you've been."

"Screw him. He shouldn't even be here! You *said*--"

"Please. Please, Alex. He's still my friend, even if you've decided to hate him."

Hate.... He didn't think he *hated* Mr. Spender. The man had traveled so much and knew so many things, and he told Dasha and Alex stories without ever giving the impression that he was talking with women and children. He was polite, with a dry sense of humor, and a sort of elegance to him that reminded Alex of the movies, not real life at all. He used to take Alex to baseball games in Kansas City and read the short stories that he wrote for English class, and his advice on Alex's fastball and on his prose was critical, but gently so; what really mattered was that he was taking it all seriously, taking Alex seriously. And although it took a few years, Alex got old enough to understand the serious looks that passed between his mother and her *friend* when he leaned close to light her cigarettes for her, and then...and then he didn't know what to think.

He had no loyalty to his father, who was a drunken asshole and had spent his life making both his wife and son unhappy. Mr. Spender, on the other hand, did his best to take care of both of them, to fill in as Alex's father, to...be there for Dasha, to care about her when her husband so plainly didn't in the slightest. That should have been good. Alex should have been happy.

But it wasn't...right. He couldn't explain it any better than that; he was fifteen, and he was a straight-A student. He spoke three languages fluently, he'd read every book in the high school library, he liked science and poetry...but emotions were often obscure to him, his own and other people's. Alex didn't know when he'd started to resent and mistrust the man he'd once thought of as a better father than his own, but it had entered his heart, and now when he saw Mr. Spender sitting at his kitchen table, back again, the only word that flashed like fire through him was *enemy.*

She kissed his cheek, and the strong scent of her heavy lipstick and her cigarettes was infinitely comforting. "Please, Alex. I can't be alone. You know my headaches are getting worse, and you're getting too old to be around the house all the time -- you have football, and friends, and it won't be long before you're gone. You know, you *know* I love you more than life, more than anything in the world, and I'd die before I'd hurt you, Alyoshka, you know that. But it's so hard for people like us. All the secrets. I just need someone I trust."

Alex answered her in Russian; his father always complained that Alex's accent was an embarrassment, but Dasha was always pleased to hear her own language in her son's voice. "I don't think we can trust him. I don't know why -- but I think he's going to -- ruin everything for us."

She kissed him again, harder. "No, no, Alex, don't think that. He cares about us. He wouldn't let anything hurt you, any more than I would."

*This family,* Alex thought, *is fucked up beyond belief.* But for his mother's sake, he just nodded.]]]

The cab passed through Alexandria on the way to the airport, and Alex slumped down in the backseat, leaning into the corner and inspecting the torn vinyl on the passenger seat in front of him, keeping his eyes away from the windows. He didn't know where exactly they were, and he didn't want to. He'd pretended to speak only Russian, but for some reason that hadn't slowed his cabbie down very much; the guy was still talking to him. Hell, he was probably thrilled once he realized that occasional pauses for Alex's response weren't necessary.

There were excellent reasons to visit Mulder, beyond the selfish and stupid ones. Mulder was high as a kite on him right now, stoned out of his mind on the unexpected combination of finally getting laid for the first time this decade, the ego boost of deciding that someone was in love with him, and...well, and whatever it was that, underneath it all, he really could and did feel for Alex. Mulder would probably help him escape; Alex could get money, at the very least, and maybe a cover story of some kind that could help buy him some time, divert his enemies off in the wrong direction.

*Bullshit,* Alex told himself, and he smiled a little in the evening darkness. *That one's not true.*

There was only one good reason to waste valuable time with a stop-over at Mulder's apartment. One last kiss, one sweet good-bye scene, Mulder, you were right, I've loved you for years....

Fuck that. Fuck that. All of this had started with Fox Mulder, but it was bigger now. Alex had responsibilities that he couldn't just blow off because of his personal life. So he kissed Mulder goodbye behind closed eyelids, and he wondered if he'd be forgiven again, next time the two of them met.

The voice inside Alex that always sounded like his father, vicious and pragmatic, said, *Wrong time, wrong place. First, you get yourself out of this alive, and then you worry about Mulder. Just get on that goddamn plane, and then you can brood about him, have wet dreams about him, write a fucking operetta about him. Doesn't matter. But you save yourself *first.**

Alex wished he had a counterbalancing voice in him, a voice that would say, *Alyoshka, my baby, it hurts so bad, I know. I know, honey.*

But for whatever reason, whatever flaw in his nature, he'd never carried Dasha's voice in his head. She had left behind a son when she died, which should have ensured her immortality, but it didn't. She was simply gone, and had been since Alex was eighteen years old, and there was no voice left in the blackness of Alex's heart to counsel him in anything but fanaticism, violence, and sacrifice.

Aleksander Izydorovich fingered the plane ticket in his coat pocket, lying alongside the gun, and he kept his eyes closed until they were out of Alexandria.

[[[There was a picture of a woman on the mantle, and for one awful instant, Alex thought it was his mother. It wasn't, though. "Who's this?" he asked, picking it up.

Spender didn't answer immediately. "An old friend. Elizabeth Mulder."

That name again. Alex set the picture back down with a slight shake of his head. At this rate, he was going to be fucking sick of Fox Mulder before he ever met the guy.

"Are you nervous?"

Alex shrugged. "I've played Iago in summer stock. Don't see how playing him in the Hoover Building can be any harder."

His host chuckled raspily. "Of course. I do forget how talented you are."

"Look. Thank you for dinner. Thank you for the job. But this is going to start getting old before long; if you want to fuck, let's just do it." Alex tried to sound as bored as possible; he always preferred, if possible, to make his partners think that sex was a matter of extreme unconcern for him. Much more alluring than just coming out and saying, *Hey, some people drink, some people snort coke, I get laid. It makes me stop thinking for a little while, which I really love, in fact I really sort of need it really fucking bad, because I have it all together on the outside, and inside my head it's just one long goddamn nightmare, so take me home...please.*

He hadn't expected Spender to look at him with those hurt, innocent calf eyes. Treacherous fucker -- what was up his sleeve? "Alex. I'm afraid you're...terribly misunderstanding me."

"Give me a break. I'm not some stupid virgin, okay? You're into me. I can tell. I'm fine with it. That simple." If it was that simple, why was he standing at this angle, seeing Spender out of the corner of his eye, but unable to turn and face the man?

Spender reached out and put his cold fingers, with their loose, old-man skin, around Alex's wrist very gently. "It isn't simple at all, I'm afraid. Alex, look at me." He did, slowly. "I am...*into* you -- is that what the young people are saying now? Yes. But not like this. I know it doesn't mean much to your generation, but it still matters to me -- behaving like a gentleman."

"*Gentleman*?" Alex repeated, amused and appalled. Who even *used* that word anymore?

"I told you I would look out for your interests, and I will. I owe you that. I owe it to your mother."

Alex jerked his hand away. "*Don't.*"

"I will. I have to. I cared about her, and I cared about you. You may not believe that, but I won't agree with your cynicism just because you don't enjoy facing the idea that there are still people in the world who don't want to use you. Not all men are your father, Alex."

"Sure they are. *You* sure as hell are. You show up in my life again after seven fucking years, and you want me to do a job for you. You might as well be my father! You want me because I was bred and born to covert ops, because I've been lying with every other breath since the first word I ever spoke. You're right; I'm good at it. I'm fucking *great* at it. I'm going to lie for you, and you want me to think I should feel *grateful* because you're giving me the chance to do it. If you don't think that makes you exactly like my father, then you didn't know him very well."

It was a relief when Spender kissed him, and then Alex groaned in frustration, because it wasn't a *real* kiss. Just Spender's soft, dry lips lingering against his, making it harder and harder to stay angry. There was nobody left in the world who touched Alex without fighting or fucking him.

"I used to wish," Spender said quietly, his mouth still hovering close to Alex's face, "that you really were my son -- that the two of you both were my family. If I'd known you would grow into such a fascinating man, I would have been very much comforted. I think...I've become quite glad you're no relation to me."

Alex leaned in to kiss him again, but a hand on his chest stopped him. "I don't...what the fuck do you want?"

He brushed Alex's cheek with the back of his fingers. "Everything, Alyoshka. Everything, in its proper time."]]]

And in proper time, he took almost everything.

IV: MULDER

The truth was a game of Russian roulette. Click...click...click. You hung on. You hid your fears. You waited for the killing shot. Click...click...click....

"Alex Krycek, I'm placing you under arrest."

"Oh, *Jesus.* You *asshole.*" In sheer frustration, Alex threw the copy of *Premiere* that he'd been browsing over in the back of the airport gift shop at Mulder. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"You'd have gotten away with it," he said dryly, "if it hadn't been for those meddling kids and their dog." An employee appeared to check out the source of the noise, and Mulder flashed his badge without even looking at her. She retreated fast.

"Skinner called you?"

"I found the message...at your safehouse. Skinner knows where you are?" he blurted out, at exactly the same time that Alex said, "You were at my house?"

They stared at each other for a moment, until Mulder snapped one handcuff ring around Krycek's good wrist. "You and I are going to talk."

*click*

Mulder could see Krycek's eyes on every clock they passed as he was escorted out of the airport and into the parking garage. His plane was leaving in nineteen minutes; the ticket was in his pocket. Capetown, South Africa. Krycek was also carrying a passport, an FBI badge, eleven hundred dollars in cash, and a gun that appeared to be federal issue.

*click*

"Take this off of me, Mulder." He rattled the chain that connected him to the handle of the car's back door.

"Like hell. I'm sick of you running off."

"Mulder...listen to me. Listen." He'd seen those green eyes in every shade of desperation; Mulder knew the look. "I only have one hand, okay? I need it. *Shoot* me if you have to, but don't fucking tie me up -- I can't take it. Okay, Mulder? Jesus Christ -- *take this off of me*!" His voice was scaling upward in thin, barely controlled panic.

"All right! All right." He unlocked the cuff, and Mulder saw genuine relief, quickly muffled. He shook his hand out a couple of times to restore circulation.

*click*

He'd told himself a hundred times that he had to find Alex Krycek for professional reasons, and that their...relationship wasn't a factor. Not today. He'd told himself that if he could find him, he'd get some fucking answers out of Krycek, nothing more.

Of course, he hadn't even asked any questions yet, because he was still busy with the kissing. Alex was right -- coming into contact with him *did* reveal a lot about a person.

Krycek's fingers were scrabbling to get a grip on the shoulder of Mulder's leather jacket, but they were shaking, too, and he didn't seem able to make them function correctly. Mulder pulled him in closer, until Alex just gave up and locked his whole arm around Mulder's neck, and he seemed to need this kiss with every inch of his body.

*click*

"Alex," he whispered, as Krycek pushed him onto his back with his prosthetic hand, the real one fumbling with Mulder's button-fly. "Alex, you can't just run out on me. Not now. Look, I know this place, in Pennsylvania. You can stay there. I swear, it's as safe as anywhere in the world. You've *got* to quit running, Alex. Sooner or later, we'll have to come up with a better way. Let me help you."

"Why? Why the fuck should I?"

"Because I'm in love with you."

Alex nuzzled the sensitive skin of Mulder's stomach as he pushed the t-shirt up out of his way. "You're not. No, you're not...."

"I *am.* Why the fuck do you think I would have let things go *this* far if I wasn't?"

"Because you trust me. Because you're a god. damn. idiot."

The cold metal of the gun against his bare skin made Mulder jerk convulsively. He blinked twice, forcing his vision to solidify, and then the cold metal of Alex's eyes as he knelt over Mulder in the backseat of Mulder's own car made him shatter.

*click*

"You won't shoot me."

"You don't think?"

"You care about me more than that. I know you."

"No, you *don't,* Mulder. I keep trying to tell you that. You really don't know me, and neither does your Cancerman, and neither does Walter Skinner, and neither does anyone else alive. So don't think you can tell me what I will and won't do, because you don't know what's at stake here, and you don't know who I am."

*click*

The gun dug painfully into his stomach as Mulder wound his fingers in Alex's hair and pulled him down, pulled him closer. It quivered for a moment, and then slipped, until it was lying flat between their bodies as Mulder kissed the sum of his fears and his trust into Alex, tonguing them into his mouth, speaking in heat and in the time that they didn't have. Alex sobbed once, and Mulder caught the sound and devoured it, and kept on kissing him.

*click*

Alex kicked the door open and scrabbled backward through it; he was still the one with his gun at the ready, but you couldn't tell by his eyes. "Sorry, gotta cut this short," he said, and his voice was manic, mechanical, flashing and fragile. "Plane to catch."

Mulder said nothing.

"One piece of advice, though. You should never, *ever* fucking trust me...but Walter Skinner's in love with you. Stick with him. He won't let anything hurt you." Alex's voice broke slightly at the end of that sentence, and suddenly he was back on top of Mulder, pressing one starved kiss to his lips, one to the side of his throat, one to his stomach as he snaked his way back out the door again, grabbing for his bag in the floorboard as he went. He was gasping the whole time, saying, "Be careful, tovarish, take care of yourself. I'll come back for you, I swear."

He slammed the door this time, and Mulder could see him through the window, but only for a moment. He jammed the gun in his pocket, he checked around him reflexively, and he broke into a run. Mulder put his arm up across his own eyes.

*click*

End.

 

---

 

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