Post "Existence"

"For I have sworn thee fair, and thought
thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as
night."
—Shakespeare

I watched him kill me and walk away.

I watched both of them walk away from the dead man lying on the cement floor of this dirty and dimly-lit parking garage, as if his spilled blood and ruined body were of no further consequence. No thought. No consideration. Just like there had been no mercy, not even that of a quick death.

Three fucking bullets to put me down. Three. Fucking. Bullets.

But then it was obvious that Skinner had deliberately dragged it out. Making it murder. Making it execution. All the time, Mulder just standing there like the village idiot, not saying a word, let alone trying to stop what was happening.

It chilled me and humbled me and hurt me all at once.

That my life should have come to this.

That both of them had cared so little.

Or hated so very much...

Finally, I moved out of the shadows, the sound of my boot heels ringing on the floor as I walked towards that fallen man. Not caring, in that moment, if anyone should hear me. Almost wishing that one or both of them would; it would give me an excuse at last to kill them and, unlike Mr. Big Shot Assistant Director of the whole freakin' FBI, I would do the job in one bullet.

Right between the eyes—where he had shot me at the last. Putting me out of my misery and my pain, of the physical kind anyway.

When I finally stood over him, looking down at my own face, at the blood on my face and that tiny tiny hole that had killed me at the last, I opened my mouth, but no words seemed right. In fact, they seemed pretty damn impossible right then and there.

But his eyes were already sliding open, betraying no expression at all, and his eyes were equally bland. As if what had just happened had been no biggie. And, I guess, if a bullet or two—or three—couldn't kill you, maybe it was. Maybe it didn't matter to you at all.

His eyes tracked over to me and finally took on some semblance of humanity.

"My performance pleased you?"

"You bled red," I replied.

He shrugged. "A new development. You approve?"

I nodded, then shrugged as well. "Coulda fooled me."

"But did it fool the ones you wanted fooled."

I bent down and ran my finger down that thin line of blood, almost but not quite touching it, familiar-strange green eyes staring back at me, allowing that nearness. Never blinking.

As I watched, the small hole closed up. Smoothed over. As if it had never been. No doubt, hidden under all that leather, the rest of the wounds Skinner had put into me were doing the same, making him perfect once again.

Perfect as I would never be.

I glanced over at the fake arm—watching that as well, as that plastic-seeming hand twisted and altered, turning back to the look of flesh. Fingers flexing and closing and then opening again. A tiny twinge of ancient despair and sharper envy shot through me at the sight. Handy talent to have, no pun intended. Sometimes I think I would give away the world just to have my left arm back, and other times I think it a more than fair sacrifice on my part.

Today wasn't one of those days.

Not when two of the men I was saving this damn planet for had just shot me down like a fucking dog and walked away without once looking back.

"Good party trick," was all I said, though.

He blinked up at me, noncomprehending, then those eyebrows came down a little and he levered himself up off the floor in one smooth move that betrayed an inordinate amount of strength and agility. Looking neat as a pin and so entirely not dead at all. Not even mussed up a little.

He looked at me again and then his face altered just as his hand had done. One blink of my eyes and those green ones once so like my own had gone silvery-blue, black hair fading to blonde, that face turning square-jawed and unsmiling. Giving off the impression that he was pretty much unamused by just about everything.

"Our deal is complete then?" he asked, though it wasn't really much of a question.

They already had what they wanted—a few piddling details of the rebel's plans and, more importantly for them at least, the location of Agent Scully and her unborn Sculliette. Or maybe, her Mulderette. Doggett had thought he was being clever, but I had been relying on being clever for far longer than him. Staking my life on it, actually. It paid to know just about everything about anyone who was someone—or ever came into contact with a certain Fox Mulder—just as it paid to know about those who opposed him. Alien or human. Or things in-between.

It hadn't been much to ask, I suppose, for a death. For a life. For an end to things.

For a beginning.

Even if I was still hurting inside, hurting as if I'd actually been the one to be shot. Tortured. Tormented. And then left behind as if what had just happened hadn't meant one damn thing.

And, suddenly, I wished that Skinner was there, needing him to suddenly reappear so that I could take him to task for what he had done. Maybe shoot his kneecaps out first and then move on to even more painful territory. One bullet for each year that I had wanted him. For every time that he had spurned me.

For that long night on his balcony, where he had turned what had once been an act of pleasure into an act of revenge.

Sure, I had gotten back at him for that one, but we were a long way from even. We would never be even as long as I...and he...

As long as he went on hurting me like this, knowingly or otherwise. As long as I went on letting him hurt me.

Fuck, I could have killed him today. Killed him before he'd killed me. My finger had been on the trigger of my little black box of tricks the whole time. I could have sent him down to death right along with my doppelganger. No fuss. No muss. I had done it before and I could have decided the hell with bringing him back this time. Or I could have just tortured him. I could have just let those little fuckers rip him apart from the inside out, but never let him actually die. As far as I could see, it was no less than what he deserved.

Because it had been more than I deserved. To die this way. Mocked and unmourned and bone-dry miserable at the last.

"What about my...they'll need a body," I said.

He nodded, those ice-blue eyes still fixed on mine. "Once you leave," he replied. "We'll take care of it. As agreed. Your best technology is still inferior to the least of ours. No one will ever know the difference."

But I could. I always could.

Between joy and hate, between love and indifference. Between him and me. He had gotten what he wanted and then turned his back on me and the world had been made a poorer place for it. Sad. Destitute. Damn near impossible to exist in actually, though I went on anyway. Just like I always did.

And in surviving there had been no real choices left to me and so I had made the only ones I could—the only ones that had half a chance of keeping me alive for a little while longer—irregardless of my own feelings on the matter and the fact that it had pretty much turned out bad in the end.

Death had never really been an option, but I had dreamed of it anyway. Like a man dreams of hands and lips and eyes and touch. Late at night when the sheets are cold and empty around you and your thoughts are way too fucking loud for any amount of liquor to quiet. When jerking off only makes it worse, because once you're done you have to admit that you're still alone. That you've fucked up every last little good thing in your life and you don't even have the guts now to knock yourself off when it comes right down to it.

Death is my only real lover these days. Has been for years. A more loyal companion than any other, even if I sometimes ran to the far end of the earth to try and escape him.

But still, the same as death, I could never completely deny my memories of Walter Skinner. They and my own body betrayed me in the end, every last fucking time. That electric erotic surge forcing his name up out of me, spilling out with my seed, as if it were more his than my own. All that pleasure I'd worked so long and hard for reaming me out just as bad as if it were pain, reminding me of when he had once held me down beneath him and tried to destroy me with both.

Tears hot as blood flooding down my cheeks.

One thin line of blood from a gaping hole, too small to have brought such an end. Except that it had. It had.

And that's all there was to that.

To me. To him. To this.

"Anything else?" the alien asked me. I could have sworn there was a slight smirk to his lips now. As if he were a mindreader as well as a shapeshifter.

I stared back into his eyes, suddenly finding myself wanting to shoot him myself. As if it would do any damn good.

"No," I said. "It's over."

He gave a small nod, economical and precise. "Good working with you then," he commented and it sounded like the politest of polite phrases and entirely unbelievable for all that. "I imagine we will meet again, don't you?"

Yeah, and the next time he saw me he most likely would try and kill me. Or take me off to be experimented with on one of their ships, more grist for the human/alien recycling mill. Not that it would be personal, mind you. Nothing they did was personal except, I suspected, for the little games they liked to play with Mulder.

For which I, for one, couldn't blame them. It's like the man went around wearing a big "go ahead and fuck with me" sign on his back. Even I hadn't been able to resist it.

"Yeah," I replied. "No doubt we will."

Still, I could feel his eyes on me the whole time as I walked away, going back into the shadows that had been my home for so very long, mother and father to me and my only remaining lover. My heart heavy in my chest as I walked away, dying a little more with each step, as if he had really succeeded in killing me today.

Knowing it was over at the last.

Oh God, it was over.

But, fuck...but how could it be? How could he have...Jesus... his eyes...

My own eyes burned at last, but there were no tears. Like I'd become an alien, too. Less human even than that. Only a corpse and a ghost in the dark.

It wasn't over.

Almost seven years later—long hard years with humanity teetering on the edge more times than I really care to remember—and still the unexpected sight of him sent me rocking, sent me reeling blindly into the nearest wall. Like a man who'd suddenly realized that he was drunk after all, despite all his protests to the contrary. Falling down on his ass, pissing on the carpet, barely making it to the porcelain god fucking inebriated.

Still, I hadn't completely lost my instincts, my edge, because I caught myself in the next instant and slid back along my friendly wall and into the store that I'd just left a bare second or two ago. Stepping behind a convenient store display—selling packets of seeds at half off the marked price for all those people who'd missed the first rush of the spring planting—before daring to glance back out through the open door.

My mouth dry and my legs shaking, my heart pounding like it was trying to deafen me, but unable not to look.

He was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a plain white t-shirt, a duffle bag hanging loosely in one hand, and though he had lost more of his hair—that smooth skin gleaming with accumulated sweat in the June heat—he seemed otherwise unchanged. No, that wasn't quite right; he was looking good, looking relaxed and tanned and casual and almost carefree. Careless.

Like he had nothing left to worry about anymore.

Like he fucking belonged here. Stepping out of one of the bigger and more expensive Northern Outfitter stores on Main Street in Mesaba, Minnesota, the small tourist town that had been my home for most of the last three years. Where a man was still a man and flannel ruled, and hunting and fishing and hiking and canoeing and camping were the only real concerns.

And where Skinner shouldn't have been. Where no one that I'd ever known in that past life of mine should ever have come, let alone be standing pretty as you please in the middle of town, looking as if he owned a piece of it. As if he had every right to be here. Goddamnit, that had been half the reason that I'd settled here in the first place, so far from anything and with winters bitter and long enough to remind me of the worst that Siberia could throw at you.

Except that here he was. Ripping the skin right off of the life I'd made for myself and exposing all those old wounds to the air again. The ones that I now knew had never healed up right, and probably never would. Just like my arm. Twisted and scarred and scorned. And useless.

I sucked in a couple of long slow breaths, reaching for my old remembered calm and disconnected purpose, as I stood there and watched the man in question walk down the street and climb behind the wheel of a silvery-grey SUV. The bright noon sun catching the driver's side mirror and skewering my eyes with it as he pulled out a moment later and drove away.

Still, I waited one long minute, two, before I walked back outside myself, the sidewalk shimmering hot around me. A kid in shorts and a grubby tank top running after his mother across the street, squealing that his ice cream cone had fallen and was dirty now and that he wanted a new one, mommy, please, please...

My hand gone clammy-wet and my few remaining fingers having painfully clenched themselves around the neck of the plastic bag of nails and glue I'd just bought. When the world had still been right. When nothing real had mattered to me. When it had all been just a dream...a nightmare... something best forgotten about.

Sweat trickled down my back, but I suddenly felt cold inside.

I drove home slowly, the passing woods and roads seeming strange to me now, as alien and dangerous as they had seemed so familiar and safe just that morning. It was only when I'd finally reached my own turn-off—with my beat-up red mailbox still leaning a bit too far to the left, the name "Kincaid" faded almost illegible—and started down the packed dirt road next to it, that I realized that I'd looked at every approaching vehicle all the way back with a sense of dread and anticipation. Expecting any of them to be that gleaming grey SUV. To see him coming around the next curve. Or pulled off to the side of the road. Hiding just beyond the treeline or behind a row of mailboxes. Watching for me. Waiting for me.

Maybe with a loaded gun in his hand.

And part of me knew it was stupid, completely unlikely, and even a bit paranoid, but I hadn't been able to stop picturing it. Thinking about it. And now I wasn't sure if I was more afraid or more relieved to have made it home without incident. To see the cabin before me. My home. Not much, but I liked it well enough.

I pulled up in front of it, then turned the truck around and set it facing back down the road I'd just come—ready for a quick getaway if I needed one. One old habit that I'd never lost. Just like I never went anywhere without the bare necessities; a Glock with two spare clips, a fake passport and driver's license, and almost five thousand dollars were hidden in a secret compartment beneath the vehicle.

The same was secreted inside the cabin as well, behind a panel in the wall in the larger of the two bedrooms. While my regular weapon—a .38, and the only one registered—currently lay in the single drawer of my nightstand. Where I kept it when it wasn't beneath my pillow, like a charm or a sachet, ode de gun oil and the best way to keep nightmares away that I'd ever discovered. Even if it only worked about half the time.

I picked up my package, slid down and out of the truck, slammed the door back shut, and then just stood there for a little whole. Breathing in pine and the faint odor of fish from off the lake. In the sudden quiet, I could hear the waves lapping on the shore and the more distant sound of a boat motor. A bird was singing somewhere in a strand of birch trees and the sun beat down heavily, making the cedar siding of the little cabin look even more grey and dilapidated. I would have to get to that this summer. Put down a fresh coat of sealant. Just like I needed to paint the trim around the windows, the steps and railings of the front porch, and fix that corner of the deck out back that was threatening to fall through to the ground below.

Yeah, it wasn't much, but it had been my home for longer than I'd ever really had a home before, and the sight of it relaxed me. Just a little, but it was a welcome feeling. Oddly, I'd always felt like no one could touch me here, my emergency escape plans notwithstanding.

I couldn't leave. I didn't want to leave.

And damn him for coming here and making me think of it. For making me doubt all over again. For revealing just how fragile my walls really were, even after all this time.

I let out a sharp breath and got myself moving again, going inside and routinely checking all the other doors and windows, putting away my purchases and getting out some meat to thaw for dinner. A dinner I wasn't sure if I was actually going to want.

Finally, I took a bottle of beer out of the fridge and wandered out onto the back deck. The afternoon sun was bright across the lake, with not a single cloud overhead to mar the perfect expanse of that June sky. It was hot and so humid that each breath felt like you were underwater. And, fuck, but I could have stayed inside, turned on the air conditioner, and sacked out on the couch with my latest paperback, even flipped on the TV if I had to, but right now none of it appealed to me.

Not even kicking back in my favorite lounge chair.

I had barely drunk half my beer before I couldn't be still any longer and found myself getting up again and heading down the steps, down the path towards the dock. I had only gone out on the lake a few times this year and the bottom of my boat had a good inch of water sloshing around in it. My styrofoam baitcooler floating on top of that. Another thing I could be doing rather than just moping around, drinking beers I didn't want and thinking about a man I didn't want.

Still, I found myself sitting on the edge of the dock and staring down into the shallows below. My eyes slowly going out of focus until it was all blurred together—brown water, white foam, tangled green strands of weed. The faint flickers of movement that I knew were the crayfish that lived near the shore, darting in out through pockets of shadow and sunlight. Vicious little things, they adored attacking bare toes in the water and had driven a good many smaller breeds of fish from the lake.

I understood their fanatacism. Their desire to be left alone.

It should have been easy to consider leaving. I had made no real friends here. Which also meant that I'd made no real enemies either and that was a definite improvement over the past. As had finally being able to relax enough to sleep for more than few hours at a time. To actually put on a few pounds. To find myself even getting bored every now and then. Bored and horny. Though not horny enough to go through with pursuing headier entertainment than a new book or a rented movie or two. It was too dangerous for one and if I gave it a day or so the urge always passed, whether I helped it along with my right hand or not. It wasn't like I'd ever been a life of the party kind of guy in the first place. And the quiet around here felt good, it really did.

Even if it sometimes left me too much space to think.

I took another pull of my beer, but it tasted cheap, nothing left but hops and bitterness, and I put the bottle down next to me and let my eyes drift shut.

We'd drunk good beer together, Skinner and I, back at that bar he'd taken me to and he'd looked at me across the booth we'd shared and I'd thought there had been honest enough desire in his eyes. Even a hint of something more.

Had that something more always just been my imagination or had it been destroyed by all the pain we'd shared with each other, so there had been nothing left but pain when he finally took his gun in hand and blew me clear to hell? I remembered too well how cool his eyes had been at that moment, so flat, not even betraying a single emotion at all, dark or otherwise. Hell, I could have dealt with honest rage, honest pain. Hate and rage and vengeance were part of the same dark that had cradled me for years

It was other things that didn't fit anymore, if they ever had—just like those damn

suits that I'd worn when I'd been Mulder's partner. Not that that wasn't yet another sore point; Mulder's hatred of me was truly a work of art, painstakingly nurtured and painted in strokes broad enough to inspire shades of true genius. Just like all the bruises he'd given me over the years. And though the memory of the physical pain he'd caused me had long since faded, I never seemed to be able to find the trick of forgetting how hurt those hazel eyes had looked at my betrayal.

Anymore than I could forget Skinner's eyes. Especially how they had looked in the soft light from the single lamp near my bed. So much more expressive without his glasses. More vulnerable. Not even a hint of that patented AD scowl remaining. His voice grown softer too, deeper, as he told me exactly what he was going to do to me with that same confidence and authority that I'd seen in him while in his office. Like it was hard-wired in him to be the man in charge.

And I'd loved every minute of it, of surrendering to that voice and those eyes and him. Even though part of me had screamed about what a big fucking mistake I was making and not to trust him, never to trust anyone.

We'd spent most of the night together, long enough for me to suck him off once and for him to return the favor. To share some of the whiskey I had in the cupboard and from there to have him roll me over beneath him, his weight pinning me down, his eyes lazy with renewed lust. And I had wanted so bad to taste his mouth at that point, as I had already tasted his cock, but he avoided my attempts and I got the clue soon enough.

Kissing was for lovers and though he was about to damn well fuck me through those cheap white sheets of mine—and I couldn't help but miss the heated steel of his massive cock riding across my thigh—we were never lovers. Though what that left us I wasn't sure.

Besides mortal enemies eventually.

I opened my eyes again, but nothing had changed. Except, I swear, it had gotten even hotter out. I lifted my head and glared up at that blue blue sky and then forced myself back to my feet. I poured out the last of my warm beer into the lake waters and walked back up to the cabin with the empty bottle, feeling all my years and scars and missing pieces like they were fresh wounds all.

Like a man in an ill-fitting suit. A stranger among strangers and the survivor of a war that had always been more about lies than the truth.

And, that night, I got an unopened bottle of good Irish whiskey out of the cupboard and sat on my expensive Turkish rug in that retro-rustic living room, my legs stretched out before me and my back pressed up against the couch, and drank to all those lies. To that faint breeze coming in off the lake, just enough to make you realize how sweaty you really were and not nearly enough to cool you down.

To the haunting cry of a single loon out on those dark waters, the lonesome sound of it making my eyes burn as much as the alcohol.

Because it felt like it was crying for me. Inside me. Where I couldn't anymore.

The building was deserted, the long corridors dimly lit and seeming to stretch on forever. My footsteps echoed almost as loud as my heartbeat and sweat trickled down my back even though my skin felt cold. I had tried a few doors but they all were locked, immovable.

Ahead of me the colors were pale, faded and stark with the too-bright florescent lights overhead, but behind me it was dark. Pitch black. And something moved in that blackness, keeping pace with me, its own footsteps a ringing afterthought of my own.

Speeding up when I moved faster, slowing down to a dead halt when I paused to try yet another door. To stare at the nameplate in the center of it: Duane Barry.

The first man I had ever outright murdered, slipping him poison in a plastic cup of water in the guise of mercy. Apologizing to him at the same time for the seriously inappropriate behavior of my partner, for having not pulled him off him sooner. Before he'd had the chance to half strangle him to death.

I walked away from both the door and the memory, but now the footsteps behind me weren't bothering with their disguise at all. They were quite deliberately stalking me and I shot a quick glance over my shoulder, but the darkness, if anything, was even more impenetrable. Swallowing up the door I had just left, nameplate and all.

I tried the next door I came to, but it was shut up just as tight. And when I glanced back again, the blackness was only a few feet away, close enough to touch.

I didn't want to touch it.

I began to run, those bright lights passing blindingly overhead, all those closed doors turning into a mere blur. Nameplates and all.

The corridor turned and then branched and I swerved to the left. At the far end, I could see the steel doors of an elevator. Red numbers glowed above it, changing even as I ran towards it. Heading downwards, hopefully not yet past this floor. Please God, not yet past this floor.

Behind me, the footsteps were coming faster and suddenly I realized I was freezing cold, that I could see my breath misting far out in front of me. That the floor beneath my feet was slick with ice, the doorknobs covered with it as well, frost on brass.

I slipped and fell hard. My left arm hit the floor first and it shattered within the confines of my jacket, as if it too had been quick frozen. Jagged pieces bit into the remains of my shoulder as I landed fully on the floor, as the side of my face hit that ice-cold surface next and was scraped raw.

I tasted blood, numb pain from my bitten tongue, and when I pushed back up again I saw the fingers of my left hand lying there on the floor. Broken and bloody and real. They had been real and not plastic after all and I had lost them again.

No...

I pushed frantically back to my feet again and felt something snatch at the back of my jacket, long sharp fingers whispering down the length of my leg, trying to catch hold. Staggering, almost pitching into the far wall, I ran from them, that dreadful hollowness at my side throwing me slightly off balance, just like it had in the beginning. When I had first been learning to walk again, to survive. Even crippled.

A disappointed hiss sounded behind me, but the elevator was there at last. The doors opening to greet me—shadows within, but not nearly as dark as that which followed me. As the thing that was coming for me.

I dove inside, rebounding off the far wall, more pain reverberating through me with the impact. Blood was dripping heavily down my side now, staining that slick pristine metal floor beneath me. I gripped my left shoulder and turned and the darkness was on top of me, the edges of the elevator doors starting to freeze up as well.

There was a figure in the darkness and, as I watched, it began to move towards me. Almost gliding towards me. Way too fucking tall and way too fucking thin. I pressed myself against the far wall, but there was nowhere left to go.

Then, to my relief, the elevator doors began to close, locking out the darkness. Locking out the thing that came with the dark.

But, at the last moment, impossibly long fingers slid in between the closing doors, curling themselves around the edges and holding it open for one extra second, two. And I saw the face of what had been pursuing me—Fox Mulder, his teeth white and bright and wide and his eyes completely black. Oil seeping out of them even as that grin widened, as he whispered my name.

Black droplets falling to that icy floor, worming their way towards me.

And then all the lights went out and the elevator was moving, falling, and I was falling with it. Hard and fast and furious. Past a man with a Bible in his hand, pleading for death to come and take him. Past a girl with red hair and the sweetest, most innocent smile I'd ever seen. Past a sad sick old man who turned at the last moment to watch me pass and transformed into yet another old man. This one with a lit cigarette in one hand and my own palm pilot in the other, one finger on the controls.

Agony shooting through me, tearing through my veins, as he smiled a nicotine-yellow smile and lifted it up as if in a salute. As if in honest tribute.

A ghost-thin voice cutting through my head...

"The hour is at hand then, I presume..."

Without any warning I hit the ground and was on my knees and there was a sharp pain in my right arm as well and the pavement was dirty beneath me, stained with oil and blood, and Fox Mulder—the real Fox Mulder—was standing silently to my left and another man was before me. A gun in his hand and his eyes blank and cold, no living warmth or compassion there at all.

And even as I raised my head and tried to struggle back to my feet Skinner pulled the trigger and fire and ice tore through me, sent me spiraling back down to the hard cement floor. Forcing a broken sound from deep inside me, half pain and half denial.

No...please...not like this...please, you can't...

But, obviously, he could. Because his eyes didn't change at all and that gun didn't waver. Not an inch, not a flicker. As if I meant nothing more to him than some bug to be crushed underfoot. The bullets burned inside me, a weight dragging me down, but still I fought. I tried to see inside him the man who had once been inside me, who had once held and stroked and pleasured me, but this was a stranger.

A stranger with the face of a lover.

And I wanted to plead with him, to beg him—not for mercy, but for forgiveness—but even as I fought to get my feet back under me he lifted that gun a third time and I saw my death in his eyes before I saw it down the long dark corridor of that gun barrel. I saw his disgust, seemingly both with himself and with me, the man dying in front of him, and relief...such relief, stark and bitter and cruel.

As if he would gladly cut off his own left arm to be free of me.

But then that third bullet took me and the darkness was there again, closing in on me like the damp walls of a missile silo, like the slithering tide of a sentient oil. Washing over my eyes. Seeping into every corner of my brain, just like it had done in that fucking bathroom in Hong Kong so long ago.

And I woke hard, shivering, sick to my stomach, straining for air, trying to get free of the covers strangling me around the neck and waist. The room was stifling hot and dark around me and the sense of something standing over me so very strong that I was reaching for my gun even before I was fully awake and aware. Cool metal sticking to my fingers as I pointed it upwards, as I almost...almost pulled the trigger.

But there was nothing there—not now, anyway—though it took me several more moments to fully realize that, to finally let that gun fall again. Back to the sodden sheets with me. Each breath choppy, ragged with panic, and that sickness growing rapidly inside me. Like a knot of black oil and blood, like shards of bone and ice and...oh shit...

Leaving the gun behind, I pushed out of bed and ran for the bathroom. I skidded down to my knees before the toilet, barely seeing that gleaming white surface in front of me before my vision faded out around the edges and that knot came undone. Came spewing up out of me in one searing surge after another, pulling half my insides out with it. And it was like I was throwing up the alien in the oil all over again.

Hot acid in my mouth and throat and my whole body twitching and shaking uncontrollably and then the floor rising up to meet me again. My one hand ending up just barely touching cool porcelain and my face pressed to the edge of cracked tile. My whole body somehow twisted into the narrow space between the toilet and the tub in this tiny little bathroom and the moon coming in through the one window to hit the mirror over the sink.

Reflecting the face of Walter Skinner.

Of Fox Mulder.

Of the alien bountyhunter with my own blood on his teeth.

And then that impossibly tall figure was back, was folding itself directly into my bathroom, long arms reaching for me, sharp fingers closing my shoulders and pulling me roughly up to meet it, to stare into blank black eyes. Where, worse than my death, I saw my life. I saw the life I might have had if I'd come clean. If I'd gone to Skinner like I had wanted to and told him everything the night before it had all gone bad.

Before I'd murdered Duane Barry and betrayed Mulder and lost my name and my career and any hope of self-respect. Of self-worth.

All the things that Skinner might have seen in me. All the things that I had killed, like I had once killed him...

Like he had killed me.

And this time, when I woke I couldn't breathe at all. I wasn't in my bed; I was on the floor next to the couch and the lights were all still on and the taste of whiskey was sticky-sour in my mouth, and when my lungs finally kicked in I almost threw up again. For real, this time. All over that beautiful Karastan rug.

Shit...fuck...

I hadn't had a dream like that in a long time. Not since I'd run out on our little secret-not so secret war against the aliens. Not since I'd found this place and settled here for good, or for as long as I could get. Even then those dreams had been more about the shit I'd had to do over the years before I'd "died," rather than the events that had led up to it. Rather than the actual moment I'd had to stand there and watch Walter Skinner kill me.

If seeing Skinner in town today had dragged all those memories kicking and screaming back up from the depths then that was another thing I had to blame him for; I did not want to remember those years. I didn't think I could stand it, if I had ever really been able to. I had managed to turn myself off pretty much during most of that time—to shut down emotionally as much as any man could—because I had known I wouldn't be able to deal otherwise. And that steel door had always remained tight shut since, except for an occasional crack here and there. Cracks that I sealed shut again as soon as I'd noticed them.

But this crack was the worst of all and it had Walter S. Skinner written all over it. Because Skinner had once meant something to me and look what I'd done to him. The nanobytes had been revenge ten times over for what he'd put me through that night at his place, on that fucking balcony seventeen stories above redemption, handcuffed and helpless to his anger.

But I didn't want to remember that either. I was a new man these days. Reborn seven years ago from the ashes of another man's regret.

Changed by years of sitting on the shore and watching the waves wash in and out.

Transformed by winter after winter of seeing the snow pile up and not caring if the spring ever came, even though my shoulder ached all the more in the cold. Hell, what did it matter? My whole body ached these days from the abuse I had heaped on it over the years and all that meant was that I was growing old and that it would all soon someday be over and good riddance to it all.

To both Alex Krycek and to Allan Kincaid, faded flannel jacket, shit-kicking boots, leave-me-the-hell-alone attitude, leaky boat, lonely cabin and all.

Still, I wasn't sure who it was who finally forced himself back to his feet and put that damn empty whiskey bottle in the trash. Who pulled the .38 out of the bedside table drawer and checked it all over before slipping it beneath my pillow. And went back to sleep with all the fucking lights in the house still on.

As if that had ever done any damn good.

I woke slowly some time after noon, a headache throbbing behind my eyes, and way too much fucking sunlight pouring in through the curtains. Aspirin took the edge off the worst of the pain, along with several cups of coffee, but still I spent the rest of the day avoiding doing all the things that needed doing. Sitting in front of the TV and staring at game shows and cartoons, too wasted to sit up straight, let alone snag the remote and actually change the channel.

Deliberately not thinking. Not feeling. Not eating. Not even thinking of eating.

It was almost six when I finally got up, but only to close the windows because the sky had darkened and it was starting to rain, light at first and then in almost a solid sheet of water. I ended up by the screen door overlooking the deck after that, watching the lake beyond turn metallic grey and white-washed with chop. Not moving. Just closing my eyes at the searingly bright flashes of lightning that occasionally flitted across the sky.

After the sullen heat of the last few days, the rapidly cooling air felt good, refreshing, electric, but I knew it wouldn't last.

Because nothing good ever did.

My stomach hurt and my arm and there was the copper-sweet taste of blood in my mouth, but that wasn't the worst of it. His eyes were so cold and I was so cold and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't catch my breath. I couldn't get up off that floor.

Not to save my own life.

But then I looked down and the blood running out of me—the blood on my one real hand—wasn't red, but black. And I turned even colder inside at the sight of it, my lungs, frost-bitten hunks of pain inside me, my heart chained to veins of ice.

And I was crumpling apart inside, cracking along all the fault lines that I had tried so hard to deny, and he was raising that gun again and I knew the next bullet would shatter me. Would destroy me beyond resurrection. Beyond putting any of those pieces back together again.

The sound of the gunshot deafened me and then the impact knocked me back, knocked me down, and I was falling. Falling straight into his arms, one imprisoning my chest, the other a heavy weight across my stomach. The rest of him even heavier across my back. Rough fingers toying with the head of my cock, teasing and twirling. His face pressed up next to mine and mine surrendered to the sheets. Breathing in the scent of fabric softener and him.

"I want to get inside you," he whispered in my ear, and then I was turning—he was turning me like I was a doll, a child who hadn't yet learned to undress himself—and I was being laid out on my back now and his eyes were pinning me to the sheets as much as his body just had. Those brown eyes almost black in this light. His skin flushed rose with heat. His cock on fire with it, three tiny pearls on the very tip, a kind of liquid perdition. The one great vein throbbing with every pulse of his heart.

"I want to get inside you," he repeated, but now he was bending even nearer and I could see that his eyes were truly black. Swirling oil black, and I tried to sit up, to roll away, to escape, but my body was frozen in place and I couldn't move, I couldn't even scream. As he bent even closer and his lips touched mine at the last. The taste of cold flesh, of seawater, of decay, flooding into my mouth along with the brutal thrust of his tongue. Washing away everything until it was all I knew, until I was drowning in it.

Until I had drowned...

"God! Fuck!" I forced myself up in bed, the darkness of the room around me not half as dark as that within me. For a long minute or two all I could do was sit there and shiver, despite the lingering heat of the night. It was only when I'd finally gotten my breathing under control that I realized that my gun was in my hand. That my finger was on the trigger.

That my stomach, my arm, my chest, still hurt.

"Shit," I hissed and shoved the .38 away again, back under the pillow where it belonged. Still feeling shaky around the edges, I got up and walked through the dark rooms of my house and out onto the deck. It was only marginally cooler outside and the moon overhead was like a blade in the sky.

I stared up at it and then out at the lake. Which was reflecting nothing tonight of the moon or the stars. As if the waters just drowned them. Sucked them down into a great pool of liquid blackness. As alien and horrifying to me in the moment as what I had once seen in a woman's eyes. Before she slammed me up against the wall and gave that same blackness to me in a brutal parody of a kiss.

As alien and as uncaring.

And I didn't belong here. I could never belong here. Because I didn't belong anywhere.

Maybe I never had.

Finally, I sat down on the steps and wrapped my one arm around me, leaning back against the railing to watch the sky. But the stars were no more comfort than the lake had been and when, long hours later, the horizon began to lighten, that was no help either. Because the day was proving as incapable of keeping the nightmares away as the night that embraced them.

By the fourth night it was almost back to the good old days.

I was subsisting on less than three hours a sleep a night, four if I was really lucky. The only positive result of all this being that the cabin itself was almost fucking spotless now and I'd actually done my painting and even pounded a few nails into the deck where it needed it the most. Basically doing as much as I could around the house in lieu of going anywhere else. Like back into town, for instance.

And it wasn't like I hadn't been holed up here for days at a time—even weeks, especially in the winter—but this time it felt different. Because it felt like something that was being forced on me instead of my own choice. I hated the feeling of being trapped, so it was lucky that much of what needed doing was outside. Even if I ended up even more hot and sweaty and miserable because of it.

After that late afternoon storm had blown through, the weather had gone back to being hot and humid and both the mosquitoes and the gnats had grown ravenous, clouds of them following me everywhere despite all the bug shit I sprayed on. I had swum in the lake a few times in the afternoon to cool off and again in the early evenings, but no matter how hard I worked to exhaust myself sleep remained elusive. Deadly.

Drinking didn't seem to help either. It only provided me with a few hours of blessed numbness before returning to punish me with a queazy stomach, a fragile head, and still too much damn time to remember. But then I had never been much of a drinker and, deep down, I guess I knew it didn't really solve anything. But then neither did staying home and pretending the outside world didn't exist anymore, and I was doing a damn good job of trying that one out.

Finally, at the end of the fifth day, I ended up sticking most of my dinner back into the fridge, not able to face the thought of spending another long night all alone, drunk or sober, and snatched up my keys and my gun and took the car tearing down the road and over to Sorenson's Bar and Grill.

I told myself it was just to get out, change of scenery and all that, but that wasn't the real reason; it was Friday night and every Friday night two of the biggest gossips in all of St. Louis County would be at Sorenson's and if they didn't know something around here then it simply wasn't worth knowing. If Skinner had stuck around—was sticking around—rather than just moving on through after a couple of days like most of the tourists, then this was the place to find out. Not that there weren't other ways, of course, but that would have meant putting more thought and energy into it and exposing my indifference for the lie it really was.

Sorenson's sat at the corner of a crossroads, tucked back into the shadow of a strand of thickly intertwined old pine trees, and didn't look like much at all. Its cedar siding was just as faded as my own, one end of the front porch was sagging, and the outside walls and windows were hung with all sorts of shit, from battered and rusty road signs to carved wooden fish and ghostly white elk and deer antlers. Old neon beer signs flashed in the windows and a cigar store Indian, most of its paint long rubbed clean, was plunked down by the entrance. Which stood open, leaving only a screen door between the dark interior and the mosquitoes and moths circling around the bugzapper that hung from between two posts of the porch.

I parked my car between two old pick-up trucks—one of which had a dirty "Welcome to Minnesnowta" bumper sticker on the dented back bumper—stashed the gun under my jacket on the passenger seat, and walked past a rusty white Cadillac and a couple of motorcycles and up the front steps. The sound of music and voices poured out the open door. The cigar store Indian stared at me, impassive as always. Someone had carved their initials into his upraised arm, plus the year 1979, but he didn't seem to mind.

Just as no one inside seemed to mind as I walked in and let the screen door slam shut behind me. Like it always did since Elliot Sorenson was meaning to fix it and the fact that he never quite got around to it wasn't anything to hold against him. Unless you were his wife, Judy. But then she held everything against him, from the price of gas to the fuzzy way the Home Shopping Network came in on their satellite dish. Then again she collected bobblehead dolls and poodle figurines in her spare time so what did she know?

Not as much as the three men sitting at the end of the bar nearest the television that's for sure. John Lindgren, Elliot Sorenson, and Vern Gerholz—one a retired power company employee up from the Twin Cities, and the other two local entrapaneurs who owned a bar and a campground between them. All of them were in their mid to late-fifties, greying and balding in equal measure, two with promising beer bellies and the third, Sorenson, skinny as a wind-stripped pine tree.

Judy Sorenson, though, more than made up for his lack; they were like that nursery rhyme couple, Jack Sprat and his wife. But her home cooking had much to do with the success of the grill part of Sorenson's Bar and Grill and her cranberry and wild rice pancakes, served every Sunday morning at their all you can eat breakfast brunch, often had those in the know driving in from more than 50 miles away.

I even liked them and I've never been one for pancakes. Or for breakfast brunches, for that matter.

But her cherry custard pie was to die for too. A slice of which I ordered as soon as I sat down at the bar, along with a beer and a whiskey chaser. Just one bar stool between me and the men in question. Elliot himself brought me my drinks, nodding at me with a casual "Kincaid, how ya doin'?" before heading back down to join in the conversation again. Which appeared to be six parts about the Twins and their chances of getting in the World Series again, if ever, and six parts some new road project around the other end of the lake that was supposedly blocking off access to Vern's campground on one side.

A young blond woman in a t-shirt and blue and white floral shorts brought me my slice of pie and then took her other two full plates back into the dining area. About five or six tables were currently occupied, a couple with families and another with an older couple that I also recognized. The white Caddie outside was theirs and they lived two houses down from my own place. Also retirees, their names were Gladys and Sol Anderson and they'd helped me get my car out of a snowbank my first winter up here. Before I knew enough to keep a shovel in the trunk and a couple of extra blankets in the back seat.

They were of good Norwegian stock like a lot of people here—taciturn, stoic, but friendly for all that. Gladys glanced over and I waved at her. She smiled and waved back, then returned to her supper. She'd brought me a plate of cookies and a couple of jars of homemade elderberry jam after the car incident, said I'd needed fattening up.

I hadn't known what to say; I wasn't used to people, let alone strangers, being nice to me. Still wasn't, to be honest.

The television over the bar was on, but the sound was turned off and no one seemed to be watching it. Instead, the jukebox in the far corner by the bathrooms was playing, an old Pasty Cline song I thought. It suited the place, if anything could be said to suit the hodgepodge that the Sorenson's had accumulated over the years.

The knotty pine paneled walls were covered with old posters, a few actual framed pictures of people in full fishing and hunting gear, stuffed and mounted northerns, trout and bass, a few elk and deer heads, plus the ratty majesty of an ancient moose head hanging directly over the door to the kitchen. It was wearing a red and black cap with the name of the bar stitched on it, along with a picture of a lake and a jumping fish, and had a decidedly morose expression on its fuzzy face. A pool table sat along the wall opposite the bathrooms, a psuedo stained glass Hamms beer light hanging overhead. The linoleum floor was also made up of tiny multicolor designs, but the main traffic areas of it were long chipped and scuffed, as most of the bar stools sitting on it had been patched at one time or another.

Including the one I was currently perched on. Nursing both my slice of pie and my alcohol. Not looking at anyone in particular and trying to avoid looking at the Billy Bass singing novelty fish stuck up at the back of the bar. Though, strangely, it looked more alive in the dim light than half the real fish mounted on the other walls.

At least, its single eye did. The one staring back at me.

I could only assume that Judy's pie was up to its usual standard because I certainly wasn't tasting it. I couldn't taste anything but bitterness with my beer, a dull burn with the whiskey. Evaparating on tongue almost before I'd swallowed it and not because it was a particularly good brand.

My second round didn't go down any better. Though, by then, the three men I was sharing the bar with had finally moved on from the sad state of sports in Minnesota—the sad state of life in general—and were onto the weather. The single most popular conversational piece in all the Upper Midwest, at least so far as I'd come to discover. To both my amusement and my dismay.

Of course, the gossip back at the Bureau hadn't been much better come to think of it.

A few more customers had rolled in by the time I actually finished playing with my pie, leaving the picked over skeleton of a golden-brown crust and globs of brilliant red cherry filling decorating the plain white plate below. My head hurting and my heart leaping every time that damn screen door slammed—despite the familiarity of it. Not being able to stop myself imaging that it was him each time it did slam. Not that I expected Skinner to turn up here, I really didn't. But then I hadn't expected to see him in town either now had I?

The blond girl came by eventually and took the sad remains of my dessert away back into the kitchen. I could only hope that Judy wouldn't be offended. I couldn't deal with that right now either. Even the occasional laughter from the tables behind me grated on my nerves, made me have to resist hunching down over the remainder of my drinks like someone was going to come take them away from me.

I had never been a people person and the years had only made that tendency more intense.

Still, despite my resolve, I was only half-listening as the jukebox changed over to a Billy Joel song and finally something the three men were talking about took on something of real import. At least to me.

Vern Gerholz, the campground owner, had just said "FBI," shaking his head at the same time as if he didn't believe it. Or something anyway. I lifted my glass of whiskey and half-turned at the same time, glancing up at that silent TV screen. Pretending to actually care about what was on it.

The grey-haired man was frowning, his own glass of beer held tight in one hand. Elliot was leaning with both arms across the bar, a disappointed look on his thin face.

"So the Nordvik's aren't coming up this year then?" he was asking.

Gerholz shook his head. "Nope," he said. "They took Joanie on down to the Mayo. Doctors said they needed to run a few more tests. As if they hadn't already done a hundred of em. Ronnie didn't think they'd be able to get away all summer, not even for a weekend. And they needed the money. S' why they decided to go ahead, rent the place out. Kind of a last minute thing. I guess the kids were real disappointed, but what can you do?"

"So he gonna be here all summer then?" The third man—Lindgren—sat forward. His own beer was down to just the foam, but he was still nursing it.

Gerholz shrugged. "Paid for the first month up front anyway. Said he needed to get away from it all. Ronnie had me open up the place for him, turn on the pump and all. Seemed a nice enough guy. But you can never tell these days, can you?"

He was right there.

Both Sorenson and Lindgren were nodding too. Like they really had a clue how bad things could get.

"Ronnie's oldest always wanted to join the FBI," Gerholz went on. "Didn't make it, though. He's doing some sort of government work down in Chicago now. Pays good, even if he don't like it half as much. Married some girl from Texas or California or someplace. They got two kids now, both of em a real handful I guess."

"He retired then?" "The FBI guy?" Gerholz switched back with the ease of long practice to the previous topic. "Yeah, I think so. Said he was looking forward to doing some fishing anyway. Had some real fancy new gear with him, bought it at that place in town right next to Woodrow's. Probably got ripped off but good. Still, he might send some money my way as he was thinking of renting one of my boats. Seein' as we share the same dock and all."

Elliot shook his head. "Those places are just terrible. Went in one once and you wouldn't believe what they charge for a batch of rubber worms, let alone a decent fly."

"I prefer to tie my own," Lindgren mumbled. "Always did."

"Well, who wouldn't?" Gerholz replied, as if it were something obvious even to idiots who'd never been out to the country, let alone on the water.

"Damn straight," Elliot said, then excused himself to go pour out a couple of drinks as the blond girl came over with an order.

The other two men immediately switched back to the weather—hot and humid, with more hot and humid to come, as if an idiot wouldn't know that either—and I took my chance to leave my money on the counter and slink out of there.

Not that the screen door slamming behind me made it seem like much of a slink. But then, hell, I was seven years out of practice.

It started to come back to me as I sat in the dark in my car and watched the distant lights of someone else's cabin. Watched them flicker through the trees and then, slowly, go out from room to room. Living room. Bathroom. Bedroom. Though soft light continued there the longest, making me imagine him sitting up in bed, doing a little light reading perhaps, before catching some well-deserved, honest and peaceful sleep.

It hadn't been hard to find the place, even though I'd had to circle the campground twice to find the right access road. At least, one that wasn't completely destroyed, thanks to the jokers who tore up the asphalt every summer around here like it was their only joy in life.

In the end, I found the Nordvik's mailbox—sharing a post with a miniature cabin-shaped one marked "Vern & Louise Gerholz"—and continued on down around the curve in the gravel road until it came to a dead end overlooking the lake. Back the way I'd come, through the trees, I could see most of the two cabins and a double-sized dock lit up by the orange glow of the sodium light placed half-way between them. A good dozen boats were tied up the dock, everything from a battered old rowboat to a sleek high-prowed powerboat.

That silver-grey SUV was parked to one side of the farther cabin. Where I had both feared and expected it to be.

So I sat there in the dark, on that dead end road, watching and waiting. Though for what exactly I didn't really know. The .38 was a heavy weight in my lap and I wasn't quite sure when it had gotten there; I doubted that it had crawled out from under my jacket all on its own.

As a security blanket it left a great deal to be desired. As a reminder of my past life it was all flags and fireworks. Whispers in the dark and betrayal and smoke thick enough to send you to your knees. A phone call in the middle of the night that sends you off to some unknown address to kill an unknown man. With his only son right there in the next room with you.

And the night air was hot and heavy as that gun and my stomach was an uncomfortable knot right in my middle, filled with too much beer and whiskey and not nearly enough food. The moon less a blade tonight than a half-slice of some pie I was equally sure I didn't want.

Like I didn't want to be here.

Like I could have stayed away.

That last light going out finally around quarter to twelve, leaving me in true darkness. Wondering if I was brave enough tonight to creep out of my car and down to that cabin, to skulk past those empty black windows and pick the lock of the first door I found. To let myself inside. Just to see him lying in some stranger's bed—my tormentor and my victim—sleeping the sleep of the just.

The sleep I had been long denied.

And what would I feel then, as I looked down on him. So close again at last that I could touch him, could smell him. Would the clean scent of his skin be as I remembered it, would his muscles be as firm beneath my fingers. Would those eyes be as stormy dark and furious as that night on his balcony. Or would they be cold as that day that he'd killed me, as distant and cool as any killer that I'd ever seen.

As my own eyes in the mirror the night that I'd killed William Mulder.

And so began my final fall from grace.

Several times I almost got out, almost made my way through those trees to that waiting cabin, but in the end something always dragged me back. Kept me pinned to my seat. Kept that gun hard in my hand, cool as the night was warm.

Still, Vern Gerholz had long pulled in and gone to bed himself before I finally started my engine again and drove slowly back the way I'd come. Hearing the gravel popping and crunching beneath the wheels as I steered down that dark road with only the distant glow of that sodium light, of that uncaring moon, to guide me. Past silent tents clinging to the ground like poisonous mushrooms and rows of hulking ghostly-white RV's, the scattered remains of forgotten campfires.

Only turning on my headlights once I'd finally reached the main road and then driving so fast the world became a blur around me. Bugs splattering on my windshield and the air pouring in around me, drying the moisture on my face, the sweat and the salt that I hadn't actually tasted until then.

At least I imagined it was sweat.

Shit.

When you came right down to it things could only go one of two ways—badly or very badly. Still, especially after not getting a lick of sleep yet again, after driving around half the night and not finding anywhere I wanted to be besides that cabin across the lake from me, I couldn't seem to stop myself from going back that afternoon. As if by playing it safe last night had worn out the last of my tolerance for it. With being anything other than what I was. With hiding. I had already played at being normal and average for seven years and, somehow, right here and now, I couldn't see myself doing it for another day, let alone seven more years. Let alone a lifetime.

A lifetime of having no one knowing the real me. Of having no one care.

Of never being touched.

The dock shifted a little under my feet as I crept towards the figure seated at the end of it, rising and falling in the shallow waters, but not enough so that he would notice. At least, he didn't move—he remained slumped down in that green and red and white striped lawnchair, both feet propped up on a cooler, his fishing pole arched against a powder-blue sky. A battered camouflage cap pulled low on his forehead and his arms crossed in front of him.

For all I knew he was asleep. Having dozed off with the early afternoon sun warm on his skin and the wind sparking across the waves. Drifting on the far off drone of boats across the lake and the soft rustle of the leaves in the wind. The rhythmic slap of waves against stones and sand.

I had nearly dozed off often enough to the same thing myself, sitting out on my own dock month after month and staring out across the water until it was finally too cold to do so anymore. Until your ass felt like it might actually freeze to the chair despite that nice fleece blanket. Not that you needed a blanket today; the day had dawned clear and bright and was already hotter than shit. Hot enough that the slightest breeze felt good.

I carefully stopped to one side of him, staying just out of range of those long arms, and finally saw that his eyes were closed. That his glasses had slid down to the very end of his nose and his whole face was beaded with sweat as if he'd been out here for a while. Now that I was finally up close, he looked tired. With deep lines around his eyes and mouth that didn't look at all like they'd been caused by laughter. Not that the tan still didn't look good on him. Almost as if he had just recently been on vacation somewhere tropical, but hadn't taken full advantage of it. Hadn't truly been able to relax.

It made me wonder if he'd been trying to escape from his own memories, his own past, and had found it a tougher job than he had anticipated, than he would have preferred to admit. If, like me and mine, all that he had done during our little war had come to haunt both his sleep and his waking hours, reminding him of everything he had sacrificed. All those lives lost. All that blood spilled. The Earth was safe now, but what price had he and Mulder and Scully and all those like them paid? I knew the price of my own soul—of my own cowardice—and it had been high, but had it been worth it? After all this time, I still wasn't sure.

And if Skinner did dream these days of all the things he'd done in order to win, did he count my murder among his successes or his failures? Or had killing me so long ago now—or the thing he'd thought was me—been something he'd actually managed to move on from, to forget. Had I ever been worth anything to him, alive or dead?

Which made it a crap shoot about what his first reaction would be to see me standing right in front of him. Still alive and kicking, if with a few extra lines on my face as well and my hair touched here and there with actual silver.

His own remaining thin fringe of hair was more battleship grey than silver and it suited him.

Or, maybe, I was just biased. Still. Always. By a man I'd never even gotten to kiss, only to fuck. Which was ironic since at least I'd once managed to lay one on Mulder , if only on the cheek. But then I had never wanted him as much as I'd wanted this man, right from the first time I'd laid eyes on him—his big body folded behind the cover of that desk, his gruff voice taking me to task for not keeping better track of my new partner, for letting him walk all over me.

Me mumbling apologies and promises to do better and him finally looking up as he actually turned to praising my report, though only by comparing it to the lengthy mess that was Mulder's usual standard, and suddenly catching his eyes full on mine. One moment passing and then two, during which neither of us had looked away, my heart suddenly beating faster and my breath stopped completely.

But then he had finally gone back to looking at his paperwork and had dismissed me and his voice had betrayed nothing and that had been the last of it.

Until I'd run into him just outside the Hoover that Friday night, both of us heading home, and he'd paused after wishing me a polite good-night and asked if I wanted to go get a drink. It could have been a come-on or it could have been nothing; he was cautious, after all, understandably so. It wasn't a light thing to swing that way in the Bureau, even less so when you set your eyes on a man beneath you. In more ways than one.

Still, we'd ended up back at my place and, yeah, he'd fucked me but good. Not gently, but not without a show of consideration either. And it had been hard, demanding, real. It had driven all the ghosts and regrets and problems out of my head, at least for a little while. As he'd likely been driving away his own ghosts that night, most notably his wife and the problems in their relationship. I'd picked up that much between the silences of our beers.

The only thing that would have made that evening better would have been if he had allowed me to kiss him like I wanted. Or would that have only made it worse in the long run? I'm still not sure. We didn't kiss the second time we got together either, at a motel room this time and that should have given me a clue about how he saw me and what was happening between us, but I hadn't wanted to know. Maybe it was stupid, but I had wanted to pretend we actually had something. Not that I was just his mid-life crisis and some junior agent that he really didn't give a shit about.

But then along came Duane Barry, my eventual unmasking by Mulder, and that phone call telling me it was over. That Special Agent Alex Krycek was through. Too many suspicious circumstances surrounding him. And, by the way, you're wanted for questioning so just leave your badge behind now boy and move on like a good little Judas. Leaving no forwarding address.

Still, over the years, especially at the worst of times and there had been a lot of those, I had found myself fantasizing about those couple of nights with Skinner. About those big hands on me and his deep brown eyes. About how they had seemed to look inside me as he pulled me into his arms just after he'd spilled himself deep within my body. Of course, over time, I had probably made those two nights out to be more than they really were, had let myself imagine all the things that he might have wanted to tell me but never had. Oh, not in words but with his body—that he owned me now. That he would never let me go, never let anyone hurt me again.

Real fucking fantasies, but still I had indulged myself. Until it finally came grinding to a painful halt that night that Mulder brought me to his place in Crystal City. And I found out in exquisite detail just what Walter S. Skinner really thought of me and what he wanted from me. And it hadn't been a kiss or a cuddle at all, but a fist to the stomach and harsh words and his hands all but bruising my skull as they held my mouth still for that massive cock.

No compassion. No consideration, not even the pretense of one. Just fucking my face until he was done and then walking away without even bothering to zip up his pants for Christ's sake. Leaving me shivering on his balcony, hungry, thirsty, humiliated and still tasting the bitterness of his come. Hell, he hadn't even let me free to go to the bathroom the next morning before he'd left for work, even though I'd come near to begging by that point.

"Skinner," I said softly, but he heard me. His head shot up and he straightened in his chair, almost knocking his fishing pole down in the process. Those brown eyes stared at me from over the top of his glasses, his mouth open for one moment, before closing with an almost audible snap. Familiar fury, edged with a trace of fear, taking shape on his face.

"Krycek," he said, and it was the same old growl. I could almost hear the word "boy" hanging in the air between us. Could see his hands clenching into fists even as I watched. I even had a sudden flash image of his cock in my face again. Of choking pressure. My throat spasming on his length, on his semen.

"Yeah," I said, somehow managing to keep my own voice light no matter what it cost me. "Fancy meeting you here. They biting today?"

"Fuck," he replied. He was starting up out of his chair now, letting his pricey fishing pole rattle to the deck.

I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him, not caring to make a close and personal acquaintanceship with those fists of his again.

"Easy, Walt," I said. "Let's not scare the fish now, shall we?"

Reluctantly, he sank back down, but didn't bother raising his hands. So much for my best menacing aspect; I must be out of practice. Either that, or he was.

He looked me over, then glared all the harder. "It can't be you," he said. "You're dead. I killed you."

I nodded, then shook my head for good measure. "Right on both counts. And so wrong as always. At least I can be glad to hear you admit to it. My murder, I mean. What did you do with the body, Skinner? Shove it in the nearest dumpster? Or burn the evidence of your crime."

"I gave you a good burial," he replied, his voice suddenly even more gruff than before. As if I'd struck something painful inside him. "More than you deserved."

I let out a sharp breath that was almost a laugh. His eyes flashed as a result, his hands clenching and then releasing again.

"In a dank basement somewhere, no doubt. With all the other...vermin."

The chair creaked beneath him as he sat back. Pushed up his cap and let the sun fully into his face. It instantly warmed those brown eyes, but only from sub-zero to freezing.

"I didn't want to kill you," he said, deceptively soft.

"Well, you did a damn good job of hiding your real intentions then, sport. I definitely got the impression that you wanted to kill me. That last bullet to the head kinda clinched it, you know. Shooting down an unarmed man like that...Walt, what could have you been thinking? You must really have hated the shit outa me."

Those brown eyes had gone dark now. Black ice, slippery and dangerous as all hell.

"With good fucking cause," he grated out. "You used me. You killed me. You were going to fucking kill Mulder...

"I shook my head. "Never," I said. "If I had really wanted to kill him—or you, for that matter—than both of you would be long dead. A fact you've never thanked me for."

And I knew I was pushing, that I was taking the risk that I wouldn't get him so very angry that he would just rush the gun anyway, but I somehow couldn't stop myself. Anymore, than I had been able to stay away from him in the first place. One way or the other, it was going to be over.

It had to be over. I had been burnt down to ashes once before and made myself anew, but I doubted I had the strength to go through that again. Taking on a new name was the least of it, but I didn't even want to do that. I was tired of running. I had been tired of running seven years ago. Which is partly why I'd lit that fire in the first place.

"Then why...?" He started to ask, only to cut himself off. He swallowed hard and a

frown stitched its way between his eyes. "It was one of them, wasn't it? A shapeshifter. Or something..."

I smiled at the man. "Bingo. Give the man a cigar. And I thought Mulder was supposed to be the smart one. You must be catching up in your old age."

He threw off the jibe like he'd ignored the last one. So not only was he smarter these days, but he'd seemingly become more thick-skinned as well. In fact, he was no longer quite looking at me like he'd like to take me apart with his bare hands, making me wonder where my Walter of old had gone—the man who'd had no problem slugging a helpless man in the stomach and then hanging him out to dry without a second glance. Who'd once raped a handcuffed man's mouth and made him swallow every last drop as if his life had depended on it, which it probably had.

Who'd looked at me with such hopeless rage when I'd confronted him in his car after his most recent near-death experience, me holding that precious palm pilot, the very pulse of his life, in my one remaining hand. Which had also, surprise, surprise, been pressing right on my own brutally hard dick.

Hell, where was the man who'd stood there, military straight and poker-faced as all hell, and pulled that trigger in that dark parking lot. Once. Twice. Three times. Arm. Stomach. Head. Two for pain and one for permanence. As if that would make a penitent of me at the last. Make me suffer as much as he had suffered. Tit for tat, Skinner. And had you enjoyed that little scene that day or hadn't you even cared that much anymore?

I lifted my gun a little. "Why don't we take this inside?"His eyes never faltered, never even glanced at the weapon.

"Why should I make it easier for you?"

I shook my head at him. "If that was all I wanted I could have just shot you while you were sleeping. Or arranged for a little accident late some night."

"You've been watching me." It wasn't exactly a question.

"Let's take this inside," I repeated, letting him take that however he would.

I stepped back as he stood up, entirely too aware of the speed and force this man could muster when he had to. Or when he was jolly well pissed off.

Still not bothering to raise his hands, he rather sullenly preceded me down the dock and up the steps that led to the Nordvik's family cabin. It was larger than my own and in better repair, with flower beds and an actual lawn. A yellow and blue painted swing set sat to one side of it, a pink plastic kid's swimming pool lying overturned beside it.

We went through a side door and directly into the kitchen beyond. Even with all the windows open it was hot inside. It was also bright, cheery, and decorated with way too many sunflowers. Sunflower wallpaper, dishclothes, curtains, burner covers, cookie jar, stencils, and refrigerator magnets. Even a big old sunflower clock was ticking away on the wall over the kitchen table. Not my taste in the least, but it went with the old harvest gold refrigerator and stove against the inside wall.

It went rather less well with the two of us. Even in his grubby t-shirt and denim shorts, Skinner looked out of place here. Of course, I didn't think my .38 fit right in either.

"Sit down," I said, nodding at the kitchen table. Wonder of wonders, he went over, pulled out a chair, and sat. He tossed his cap down in front of him and then looked back at me with a hard expression on his face, an even harder cast to those too cool eyes. Deliberately laying his hands flat on the top of the table. Blunt fingered, capable hands. I knew only how capable.

"Well," I went on, leaning back against the doorjamb myself. "Shall we be civilized about it? Have a beer or two for old time's sake. It's the least you owe me, wouldn't you think?"

"I don't owe you anything." His voice was a low grumble.

"Oh, but you do," I replied. "You owe me, Skinner."

"So tell me," he said. "I'm a captive audience here, Krycek. What did I ever do to you that you didn't do to me first?"

I couldn't answer that question. I couldn't afford to. What he had done to me was obviously not something he had ever meant to do. He didn't have a clue about how I felt about him—about how I'd always felt about him—and though it was comforting to see that some things never changed, it was maddening as well.

Maddening and fucking pathetic.

I was pathetic. Still sniffing after this man after all these years, after what he had done to me, all because I was hoping for some scrap of...

Well, what was it that I really wanted? Affection? Sex? Punishment? Some combination thereof? Had I actually come here today to hurt him or had I come to let him hurt me? Again. Always. Fuck, it was painful even just to stand here and look at him, but had that been what I'd come for? Was pain the only thing that could make me feel alive these days, that could get this battered body of mine to react? Not simple masturbation, but the thought of mutilation. If not of the flesh, then of the spirit.

Mulder would have a field day with me.

With this great fucking empty space inside me where a living heart should be and wasn't. Though it was probably a good thing it was long gone because it had never done me any damn good anyway. No man with any real soul to him anymore—any degree of compassion or affection—could have done the things I'd done and seen the things I'd seen and survived.

But so had Skinner and Mulder and Scully so what did that say about them? About me? Had I given it all up for nothing? Or were they just better at lying to themselves?

"So," I said, mockingly, casually. "How is the old gang?"

He shot me a look as if to say you mean you don't know? Then his eyes fell.

"Scully's settled down," he said slowly, reluctantly. "Left the Bureau to start a small family practice in upstate New York. She's been married for almost a year now."

"And Mulder?" Even more casually, but I couldn't keep the edge out of my voice.

A long silence was my only answer. Then Skinner seemed to gather himself.

"Mulder," he said finally, his voice dropping even lower, to just one register above a whisper. "Mulder didn't...he couldn't seem to..."

"Yes?"

Abruptly, brown eyes shot up to claim mine and to my amazement I swear I could see tears in them.

"Mulder's dead," he said bluntly, flatly, as if were simply one more fact in a whole file full of them. "He killed himself almost six months ago."

Of all the things I had been expecting, I hadn't been expecting this. The floor seemed to drop sharply out from under me and a cold chill ran right straight through me. As if the universe had just walked over my grave. No, that was wrong; Mulder couldn't be dead. Mulder was a survivor as much as I was, despite all the trouble he seemed to land himself in the middle of. Mulder was brilliant and Mulder was strong and on the fucking side of truth, justice and the American way. If he couldn't keep it all together—if he had taken death, my own enemy, my old lover, as his only way out—then what chance did I have?

"Dead?" I repeated, as if saying it would make it different. "But what about him and Scully. I thought, what with the baby and all..."

Skinner shrugged. "Oh, they tried it, probably against their own better instincts. It only lasted a year, year and a half, before they called it quits in order to still remain friends. But Mulder never seemed the same afterwards. As if he thought it had been his last chance for a normal life. He left DC shortly after we drove the last of the aliens out and we all pretty much lost touch with him for a while. Even Scully. Then, about a year or so ago I guess, he went to live up at his family's cabin. Dana visited him with the kid once or twice, but...when I got the phone call, went up there...I tried to think that someone else had done it for a while, but I guess I knew long before the coroner's report came through. He didn't even leave a note. As if he had nothing more to say. Can you imagine that? Fox Mulder with nothing more to say."

I couldn't and I have a frighteningly good imagination.

"I'm sorry," I said, the words just slipping out before I could reconsider them.

I glanced up to see him staring at me intently.

"Oh, yeah. As if you really care," he said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

"More than either of you will ever know," I replied. Somehow, I managed to keep the resentment out of my own voice. "We were always on the same side. We just played by different rules, that's all."

"Bullshit," he snapped. "The only side you were on was your own."

"Oh, that's right," I said softly. "That's why I gave up everything in order to drive those alien fucks back where they belong. That's why I lied to both the rebels and the shapeshifters and the Consortium and Mulder and played them off against each other no matter what it cost me to be caught in the middle. That's why I've been captured and tortured and used and maimed and made to walk through fire more times than I can count. Living on the edge, on the run, in one stinking shithole after another. Always with no one to turn to and no one to trust. Just to fucking save myself."

Skinner blinked, but those brown eyes didn't soften in the least. "And you think the end justifies the means?"

"Yeah, I do," I said, then shook my head and let out a long breath, sagging a little against the doorjamb. "I have to."

To my surprise, the he let out a small, but rather honest laugh. "Lies on top of lies, that's all you've ever given me, Krycek. I don't fucking believe that you're sorry...for anything or anyone. Except, maybe, for yourself."

I pried myself away from the door and walked towards him, finally coming to a halt a few feet away. Close enough that even my .38 would put a pretty big hole in him if I wanted it to. But he didn't look at the gun. As if he'd forgotten it was even there.

"I destroyed that palm pilot almost seven years ago," I said quietly. "If that's what you're wondering."

For a moment, his face betrayed surprise, then that expression was wiped clean.

When he said or did nothing more, I leaned in even closer, lowered my voice. "Did you think that I'd misplaced it? Or that you just got lucky? That you simply got the drop on me. C'mon, tell me. Did you enjoy killing me, Skinner? If I gave you this gun, would you do it all over again? Shoot me down without a word, without a chance. That second bullet was pure shit-fire meanness. You just wanted to hurt me, didn't you?"

"It wasn't you." The words were soft as a whisper, but sure for all that.

I recoiled, then caught myself. He knew? All along, he had known?

"What?" I asked, unable to stop my confusion from escaping. "How?"

Brown eyes slowly looked me over, a lingering glance that made my heart speed up, that made heat rise beneath my skin, before finally settling on my face again after what seemed like forever. I knew that possessive look, that leisurely inspection. I had seen it once in my own bed in that scuzzy little DC apartment so long ago, in an even scuzzier motel room, and in myriads of dreams since. In all those long ago fantasies.

My cock stirred and I ruthlessly slammed that door shut again, forcing myself back to coolness that I really didn't feel.

"Then why?" I asked.

He shrugged, then finally glanced away. "It was what you wanted, wasn't it?"

I backed away from him before I realized what I was doing, how much I was giving away with my sudden retreat. Still, I couldn't slow down, I couldn't stop, not until the very edge of the refrigerator was grinding into my back. I slumped against its solid weight then closed my eyes for one long moment, breathing hard. Suddenly not wanting to breathe at all. But when I opened them again he still hadn't moved, was just sitting there in his chair by that damn kitchen table, and nothing had changed. Nothing at all.

I lowered my gun then until it was pointing at the floor instead of at him. Not like it had done me any damn good here. Like he was taking it seriously as a threat.

So maybe it had been stupid to destroy that palm pilot. Though that had never much scared him either, only made him mad.

And resentful...don't forget resentful.

But the man looking back at me right now didn't look resentful or angry. He looked more resigned if anything, even a trifle sad. The expression made him look older as well, old and worn out and battle weary.

I knew the feeling.

"While you're over there," he said finally, almost tonelessly. "Why don't you get me a beer. Go ahead and get yourself one too, while you're at it."

For a second, I contemplated leaving. Then I thought about shooting him. But, in the end, I only turned and did as he asked. I stuck the gun into the front of my jeans and opened the fridge and pulled out a can of St. Paulie Girl beer, buxom blond and all. I tossed it at him, not looking to see if he caught it, then cadged one for myself.

We popped the tops almost at the same time and I took a long drink and it was good, pretty goddamn good. Almost as good as those beers we'd drunk together at that bar in Alexandria...God, what had it been? Ten years ago? Twelve?

Thirteen years, seven months, and some odd days, but I've never just sat around and thought about it. It's not like I had nothing better to do now that I was officially or semi-officially "retired."

"So," Skinner said. "If we're going to be civilized then I suppose I should ask you how you've been. Pretend to give a fuck."

"Knock yourself out," I commented.

"I never thought I'd see you again," he said, taking another drink of beer. He leaned back in his chair and stretched those long legs out beneath the table. Easy as you please and as if he were in control of the situation. "Alive or dead."

"Which would you have preferred?" I drank from my own beer.

"My preferences never seemed to matter," he replied. "Not from the first time the smoking man walked into my office. Or you. I've often wondered though...did you fuck me for him or was that all your own idea?"

"What do you think?"

He didn't look at me, just finished off his beer and crushed the can in one hand. "I think I'd like to fuck you again. Just for old time's sake, you understand."

It was all said casually, with a lack of emotion that seemed as calculated as it was ruthless. Still a shiver ran through me again, followed by a definite twitch of my traitor cock.

"Fuck me or fuck with me?"

"There's a difference?"

"If he knew," I said, choosing to answer a different question altogether. "I never told him. He held my leash as much as yours, but having you in my bed was never part of the deal. It was stupid, but never part of the deal."

I took the time then to finish off my own beer, but didn't crumple the can. Instead, I walked over to the sink and set the empty down inside it. Let my gaze fix on the window right in front of me, the birches, spruce and pine trees outside framed by those impossibly bright sunflowers.

Forcing myself not to tense as I heard his chair scrape back, his footsteps on the floor behind me. I could have hurt him, killed him—I had had my chance today just like I'd had my chance all those years ago, and yet I hadn't taken it. Had let him command me once again, seduce me with his very presence.

He stopped right behind me, so close I could feel the heat of his body.

"I've hated you," he said. "And I've wanted to kill you. I used to imagine it. Every morning when I got up and realized that I was still alive, but only because you hadn't bothered to kill me. That every breath I took was yours. And when Mulder..."

I couldn't help myself; I winced at the rough tone of his voice as he said that name, at all those broken edges. Flashing suddenly on the thought of Mulder lying there all alone in his long-abandoned family's summer home, those long fingers still graceful even after they'd gone cold and stiff, his hazel eyes turned flat and grey like tarnished silver. Like a star fallen from heaven, transformed from pure light to a hunk of poisoned rock.

"I was so ashamed," Skinner went on. "When he read in my mind just how badly I was compromised. He never said anything, but I think he knew about the rest too. That we'd been..."

Part of me wondered what word he'd choose in the end, but the rest of me had already stalled out on the thought of Mulder knowing about us. Not that there had ever really been an "us."

"Krycek," he said, not finishing the thought at all—as if even he didn't have a name for what we had been, what we were—and now part of me was desperately wishing that he'd just damn well shut up already. "Alex...why did you destroy that palm pilot?"

Alex...aw, fuck...

"I didn't want to be tempted," I somehow managed to say, but so very softly that I hoped that he couldn't hear me. That he would have to lean closer to hear me. "To ever use it again."

"Why did you come here then if it wasn't to kill me?"

Another question that I could have gone a lifetime without hearing.

"It'd just be another lie," I replied. "Like all the others."

"Tell me anyway," came the quiet response, almost an order.

A sharp breath burst from me and I suddenly felt far too fucking exposed. Opened wide and bleeding a little inside. Just like how I'd felt that first time he'd fucked me. Leaving me raw and ruined and reborn afterwards, all at the same time. Needing and yet afraid to need and wishing he'd leave and wanting him to stay. Not that he had.

And I couldn't help but remember in sharp detail the coarseness of that cheap motel bedspread beneath me too, the heat of his skin and the coldness pooling inside me as he pulled himself out of me for the second time and told me he had to go. Not even allowing me the illusion that a quick cuddle might give. Just the walls going up and the end coming too fast to blink and me caught in the middle like usual.

Caught between the dark and the dawn and this man's dick.

"Why don't you tell me," I said at last. "Tell me to get on my knees so you can show me again how much you hate me."

"And if I don't?"

I shrugged. "Then hurt me anyway, Skinner. You know you want to. Make me be your excuse one more time."

"Or make it be yours?"

He might as well have hit me. Shit, either I didn't have a fucking shield left anymore or he had grown as spooky as Mulder.

"Alex?"

"I couldn't stand it anymore," I said. "Being dead was the only way that I thought I could get out from under. I needed to get out from under. I didn't care about the war anymore, the invasion—I couldn't. It was...just too much."

"So you arranged for me to kill you. Set it all up. Set me up. Not thinking twice about what it might do to me."

"You?" The word was a whisper, almost a laugh. It was a joke.

I turned around and there he was, close, too fucking close, and intimidating as always. His face was impassive, but not his eyes. They were hot, almost impossible to meet, let alone hold, though I did hold them.

"I killed you once," I said. "I could have left you for dead, but I didn't. Just like I could have been the one standing in front of you that day, waiting for you to kill me, except that I made up my mind in the end that I didn't want to die. Not for real anyway. Even though I sometimes felt like I was all but dead inside already, you know. But it was a close thing. You have no fucking idea how close."

Brown eyes burned me. "You think I would have pulled that trigger if it'd been you?"

I knew the answer to that. "Yeah, I do."

Skinner let out a soft breath. He shook his head slowly.

"What I've seen," he said. "What I've done. What I've had to do... none of it was easy. Some of it almost destroyed me. It did destroy Mulder."

"Boo-fucking-hoo," I said through my teeth, though I didn't mean it, not really.

Skinner didn't believe it either. "We've all been caught in the middle. We've all lost...something in order to win."

"And what did you lose, Skinner?"

"My job for one. But that's the least of it. This is the second war I've fought where people didn't want to know. The second time I've... died and been made to come back. I'm tired, Krycek, so if you're going to kill me today then I wish you'd just get on with it. Just get it over with."

I stared at him and his own gaze was steady, unwavering. Weary to the bone. I knew that look; it was the same one that I'd seen in the mirror seven years ago. The one that made tired an understatement. That made death seem like a gift instead of an enemy.

"I'm not going to kill you," I said. My voice sounded harsh even to my own ears and I couldn't help the feeling that he might hear an unspoken "today" after that promise, whether I meant it or not.

His own voice was equally gritty, matter-of-fact. As if we were simply discussing the damn weather. "So do you want another beer then, or do you just want to go? Leave me to get back to my fishing."

I couldn't tell from his tone or his face which option he preferred. If either. Not that I didn't know what I should do—go home, pack up, move the hell on—but somehow I couldn't move. I couldn't even peel myself away from the edge of that kitchen counter, let alone skirt around the man directly in front of me. Not that he had left me much room to maneuver.

"Another beer would be good," I admitted at the last.

Skinner nodded. His expression still didn't change, though. Either did the liquid heat of those dark eyes.

"Go sit down," he said. Again, it had the ring of a command to it. "I'll get this round."

A second time, his eyes raked over me, then he turned away. I felt air rush back into my lungs and was suddenly dizzy. Quickly, I suppressed the reaction and wandered away from all those sunflowers. Pretending that I didn't care that his eyes were on me. That my cock wasn't half-hard in my jeans.

The living room was thankfully far more masculine in character, with wood paneling on three sides and brick on the other, where a full-size woodstove sat on a raised section of floor. Pictures of deer and fish hung on one wall, along with a polished wooden clock in the shape of Minnesota. Shelves filled another wall, containing a few hardback books, assorted nick-nacks, and a whole crew of framed photographs—smiling kids goofing around in the water, obvious high school graduation pictures, and one old wedding portrait that had long faded to sepia, the couple in question stiff, posed, and staring quite unsmilingly into the camera.

A dark hallway led off to the left and two other doors lay to the right, one half open to reveal the edge of a bunkbed and a worn-looking blue toybox. The rest of the room was sparsely furnished, with a matching tan upholstered couch and loveseat. The couch faced a cabinet that held a good-sized TV set and VCR, plus an assortment of tapes, some of them with bright Disney colors. A grey leather recliner sat right next to one side of the couch, an end table between them holding a stack of hunting and fishing magazines and a couple of remotes.

More magazines lay scattered across the heavy oak coffee table directly in front of the couch, along with a chipped orange coffee cup that I suspected Skinner had probably been using earlier. At least, there was still a bit of coffee left in the bottom. A paperback book was turned face-down over one arm of the couch and I absently picked it up and set it on the coffee table next to the cup before sitting down. My gun immediately poked me hard in the gut and I took it out and looked at it, flicked on the safety, before leaning forward and slipping it into the small of my back instead.

Skinner came in a moment later and handed a second can of beer over to me, his eyes almost carefully averted this time. He sank down into the recliner, the leather creaking under his weight.

"It's quiet around here," he commented, popping the tab.

"That it is," I said.

I looked down at the matching can in my hand; it was slick with condensation already and I wasn't sure why I was staying to have it, except that it was the only excuse that made sense. I ran the side of the slick metal across my forehead and down the side of my face—feeling coolness fade some of the heat both on my skin and in my head—and then finally popped it open and took a sip.

When I glanced up at the last, Skinner was watching me again. He seemed strangely almost amused.

"I never would have pegged you for a back to nature kind of guy."

"You never knew me," I replied, taking a larger sip of my beer. Skinner's beer. Feigning my own nonchalance, I settled back into the couch. The gun at my back was as comforting as it was uncomfortable. "None of you did."

Skinner snorted. "Wasn't that part of your job?"

I flashed him a brief, slightly vicious smile and then went back to my beer. It was too much of an effort to do anything else right then and there. Even to shoot the man.

"So why did you do it then?" he asked. "Why did you sleep with me if it wasn't part of your job. If it was so stupid."

Because I wanted to sounded as lame as because I wanted you. I could have made up a million ulterior motives, but this new and improved Spooky Skinner was more than likely to undercut any of them just because he could.

"Because you asked me to," I said.

"As simple as that?" He didn't even sound surprised, the bastard.

"No," I replied. "Nothing's ever that simple. Nothing's ever that easy. But you know that."

Skinner took a long drink of beer, then laid his head back. All for the world as if he was settling in for a long afternoon of football, belching, and other such manly pursuits. Free of kids and cares and friendly neighborhood assassins.

"It was stupid of me too," he said. "To approach you. To go with you back to your apartment that night. To meet you in that motel room later, even more stupid. I was still married. I still had hopes then of making Deputy Director someday."

"So you'd never...?"

"Done anything like that before?" He shook his head. "No. I always played it by the book even when I was an agent. Once I got behind the desk I had even bigger plans. To do some real good, to make a difference. So when Cancerman—Spender—approached me...well, it was a very tempting carrot."

"They always are."

I'm sure he wanted desperately to ask, but he didn't. Instead, he took another drink. I matched him and slowly a personable but scary silence settled over the room. Broken only by the faint sound of boats on the lake outside and the ticking of that damn clock.

I wasn't sure what I wanted. Only what I shouldn't want.

I wasn't sure what he wanted. Only what I knew I couldn't give him.

So I drank and sweat trickled down my back and that beer can sweated in my hand as if in mute sympathy. My gaze carefully wandering the room and Skinner's eyes seemingly fixed on the blank screen of that television set or on the far wall. Either way, he was probably seeing something else entirely. Or nothing at all.

"The quiet life must suit you, though," he said at last. "You're looking good."

"You're being obvious," I replied.

"Direct," he corrected me. "You didn't stay for the beer now did you?"

I hesitated, then finally settled for the honest answer of all things. "No. But it's still a stupid idea."

"Yeah, it is." Skinner finished off the rest of his beer in one gulp, then crumpled that can too. He flipped the crushed metal empty across the room and it rebounded off the corner of that black iron stove with a clatter and rattled back across the floor. Right towards me.

Skinner stood up and moved back into the kitchen, returning with another couple of cans of beer. I hurriedly finished off my own can and took the extra he was offering me, as if we were just two buds having a laid back afternoon together. He generously crushed my empty and pitched it after his own. Then stood there, again seemingly staring at nothing in particular.

"But maybe," he said. "I don't give a fuck anymore. Mulder gave a fuck and look what happened to him."

Hollow and haunted, and suddenly Skinner took his glasses off and tossed them aside as well, down on the end table with all those magazines. He rubbed his free hand across his face then sighed and shifted his shoulders around as if they were hurting him. Maybe they were. Weren't any of us getting any younger.

"You blame yourself?" It was both a question and an accusation and I hadn't meant to say it but there it was, softer than I had imagined and more concerned than I had expected.

"Why? You think I should blame you?"Skinner turned his head and looked right at me and, without his glasses, his eyes were naked, bruised around the edges, and bottomless.

I shrugged, but couldn't look away from them. From him. "Wouldn't be the first time. For you or for him."

"Oh, and you're an innocent, I suppose."

"No," I returned darkly. "One thing I am not is innocent."

He smiled almost as darkly. "Good."

My cock stirred again, like it wanted to leap through rings for this man. Perform a magic trick or two, not least of all taking responsibility for having a hand in bringing me here in the first place. Not that it was surprising that it might actually get the better of me; it had been a long time since I'd been with anyone. Longer still since that anyone had meant anything. Or that I had been able to fool myself into imagining that it had.

Like those couple of nights with this man. Fool's gold, but gold all the same. Glittering and beautiful, but cheap and worthless in the end.

"You asked me to," I said. "And I wanted to. For myself. Not for any of those old bastards that I worked for. Not for Spender...God, never for Spender. He would have had my balls in a vise for interfering. For getting in the way of his grand schemes."

"Not so grand now," Skinner commented.

I smiled at my can of beer. "No," I agreed softly, flashing for an instant on that mad tumble the man had taken down those stairs. On the pleasant sprawl he had made on the floor. Fish-belly white skin and staring eyes and all.

One death that I didn't mind taking the blame for.

Not that this man was likely to mourn him either. For a second, I actually thought about telling him about it, but those old habits were still too deeply engrained. I'd never admitted to a murder in all my life and I wasn't about to start now, even if Skinner wasn't officially a man of the law anymore.

"I liked Mulder," I said, admitting it at the last, not caring in that moment if the other man decided to contradict the sentiment. "He could get on your nerves faster than any other man I've ever met, but still..."

"He was good agent," Skinner commented. "Even if he never could follow the rules."

"You mean especially since he never followed the rules."

"Yeah." He took a drink of his fresh can of beer, then walked over to look out the window. Out at the lake beyond. His shoulders suddenly slumped, making him look a far smaller man than he really was.

I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.

"I should go," I said, setting my barely tasted third can of beer on that cluttered coffee table before levering myself back to my feet. What I really should have said was I shouldn't have come, but I wasn't going to reveal that much, even to him. I had already revealed too much. Said too much. Let too many walls down.

Or had them ripped away.

He didn't answer and I walked out of the room and back into that bright kitchen, picking up speed as I went. Not running—no, I wouldn't admit to that, not even to myself—but just getting the hell out of there as fast as humanly possible.

Before I said or did something really really stupid. Like telling him that I did want him to fuck me. That he was right and it was him and not the beers that I had stayed for and that I hadn't just wanted him then, all those years ago, but that I wanted him now, too. That I had never really stopped wanting him. Even when I'd been hurting him. Especially when I'd been hurting him.

I was almost to the door when he caught up to me. Moving so silently for such a big man that I'd never heard him. Had no time to react—let alone reach for my gun—before one of his arms had closed tight around me and stopped me just like that. Frozen in place and hardly even able to breathe, shocked and shaking inside, just one small step away from freedom. From the way things used to be. Alone on the outskirts of a world that I didn't understand and could never truly fit into.

No matter what name I took or what rock I hid under.

In here, I was still Alex Krycek. Out there...well, if I wasn't Allan Kincaid after seven long years of flannel shirts and fishing, shoveling snow and cooking meat and potato meals for one, then I didn't know who I was. Except that Alex Krycek was long dead and, according to Skinner at least, long buried and Allan...Allan had never really been alive, had he? The poor useless shit.

"Alex..." Skinner's voice was husky, almost desperate. But he had never been desperate, not even when I'd lorded it over him with my black box of pain and poisons. "Stay. Just for tonight...please..."

That last word just about undid me. Even though it had to be a lie, a trick, a fucking miscalculation. This man never asked. This man never pleaded. He only took. He glared defiance at me even in those worst moments, when I'd brought him down. Angry and determined and resistant to the last dregs of his being.

I pulled a little against his grip—experimentally, instinctively—but he didn't let me go. He refused to let me go. My fingers slowly slid down the doorframe, almost but not quite touching the closed latch on the screen door.

Outside, long shadows lay over the lawn now. The light from the setting sun giving everything a warm glow of gold and dusty pink. The sky overhead blended with those same colors where it wasn't still blue. It seemed slightly cooler as well now, just a hint of a breeze coming in through the screen. Rustling the leaves of the trees across the clearing.

That swing set casting the longest shadow of all, a puzzle piece of line and angled darkness that I couldn't begin to decypher. That Mulder probably could have untangled in mere moments.

Finally, my hand fell to my side. Before I was entirely aware of what I was doing, I had leaned back against him. That solid bulk supporting me like it had always been there, would always be there, a comfort and a caution at once.

My .38 was a sharp presence between us. One that I was completely aware of. That he had to be aware of, too. Grinding into his stomach as it was pressing into my back. Still, he didn't complain or try to touch it, only pulled me back harder against him. His arm tucking itself tighter around my chest.

My head fell to one side at that and a moment later his mouth was on my throat, wet, exploring, consuming. Inflaming my cock in an instant, a red heat and sensation of molten surrender spreading through every nerve, electrifying flesh and blood and bone. I gasped outloud at the feel of it, at being taken apart from the inside out, at being made suddenly alive again. But the feeling burned me, too, it had been so long, it fucking hurt, and I yanked myself away from both it and him at the last. Taking that last step away.

Again, my hand went to that latch, then slid off. Instead of leaving I rested my forehead against the doorframe, closed my eyes and in that self-imposed darkness felt big fingers brush across the nape of my neck. Lightly. Inquiringly.

Thankfully, though, he didn't ask if I was okay. I would have had to lie yet again and I was sick to death of lies. Not that I hadn't grown good at it, fucking brilliant even, but I had never liked it. Not even in the beginning and not now at what felt like the end. Not of me, exactly, but of the years I'd stolen since my death at his hands. Those same hands that were touching me now, so gently that I could hardly believe that it was him.

Violence I could have handled. Rough trade. Even a shade of cruelty. I had gotten it from him before, after all. But this...

"Alex?" Stroking down my arm now, his other arm gliding back in and around my stomach, so warm, so strong. His breath tickling across my ear, an insatiably patient whisper. "You can still shoot me in the morning or beat the crap out of me or whatever you like. But I want the night. This night. You owe it to me. For making me kill you if nothing else."

"Fuck you, Skinner."

But I was already turning, twisting around within the compass of his arms, to face him. I looked right into his eyes and he looked back, his own expression amazingly mild in that moment. Not full of forgiveness or anything like it, but not filled with pain or rage or even the ever-present weariness that I had seen in him up until now.

"One night," he repeated. "And then you can walk away again. Free and clear. I won't say a word. I swear."

"And why should I believe you?"

He gazed back at me for a long moment, then looked away. Back at that nothing which had so enthralled him before.

"No reason, I guess," he said, so softly that I could hardly hear him. "No reason, but this..." And then he was looking right back at me again, those eyes filled with some emotion that I couldn't name, and leaned forward those last few inches and kissed me. Full on the mouth and easy as pie. As Judy's finest cherry custard pie with all the trimmings.

And it was everything I'd ever wanted and more intense than I'd ever imagined.

Soft lips and a demanding tongue, wetness and heat and a dizzying sweetness made all the more sweet by the lingering traces of the beer he had drunk. He took possession of my mouth the way he had always taken possession of my body, leaving me nothing solid to hold onto but more of him. The arm around my waist and the one moving to curl itself around the back of my neck. His chest crushed against my own, his whole body crushed against me, driving me backwards into the nearest hard surface. Which could never be as hard as him.

His cock pulsing against my thigh as he slipped a leg between my own and rode my own cock with it. Roughly rubbing up and down until I thought I might explode right then and there from the sheer unbridled pleasure of it, from the pressure and the pain.

God, it had been so long...it had been fucking forever...

The doorframe grinding into my back and him grinding into me and his smell and taste and the implacable touch of his hands making my head spin, making me wish I could just crawl right down inside him and never come out again. But he was already slowing the kiss, lightening up on my cock—as if he knew how close I already was. Or maybe he was too close, too, because as he pulled back his face was flushed and he was breathing hard, somewhat erratically.

"You still..." he said between breaths, "wanta leave?"

I stared back at him, not looking away as I reached out and let my hand glide down his chest—still hard, still sculpted—across a stomach that was only slightly softer than I remembered it, down and down until my fingers touched the hard rod of a cock crammed into those suddenly too-small shorts. A cock which proved to be even more impressive at first touch than memory served, its length twitching and jerking in that cramped space as I stroked it, as I cupped my hand between his legs and pressed gently upwards, compressing both cock and balls at once.

My own cock jumping in mute reaction as I squeezed his then, as I heard his soft intake of breath, his even softer moan.

"You still...hate me?" I asked.

Another gasp, then a quiet laugh, his hips kicking a little towards me, demanding more, more. "God, yes...I hate you so bad...I want to fuck you right though the damn bed, okay?"

"Okay," I echoed, barely a breath but it caught his attention anyway.

Brown eyes fixed on my own, filled with desire, yes, but with something even deeper than that. Something not quite fury, but furious all the same. Hot and sharp as a blade being drawn through the bone, leaving you open and vulnerable and hurting.

Wanting what you can never have again.

"I will hurt you," he whispered, his breath on my face just as hot. "If you want me to. If you ask me to. But you have to ask me, Alex. This time, you have to ask."

Something twisted inside me, all mirrors and broken glass, but Skinner's eyes were steady. Waiting. Wanting.

"Okay," I said again and felt the ground flex and roll alarmingly beneath my feet even as I said it, as I admitted to this man what I wanted. Just how I wanted it. Suddenly terrified that it had gone this far and that here I was asking for it to go even further, out beyond the realm of fantasies and the staid if safe little flannel world of Allan Kincaid. Back to the darkness that waited to claim Alex Krycek. A darkness long waiting for its due it seemed.

But Skinner's arms were still close enough to catch me, strong enough to draw me back to him even as I trembled inside, as I couldn't stop the flinch at his touch, and he bent his head again to my neck and planted the most gentle of kisses there, as if it were a precious jewel. Or as if I were.

As if he was trying to be fucking reassuring of all things.

"Come with me," he said. "It'll be all right. You'll see. Everything will be all right."

I wasn't quite sure who he was attempting more to convince, himself or me, but I went anyway. He let go of me, seemingly reluctantly, and I followed him back through the kitchen and into the living room and down that dimly-lit hall, but each step seemed to come harder and harder as a sickly fear I didn't want to acknowledge and a bone-deep regret that I did abruptly began to weigh me down. Finally, I stopped just before the last doorway on the end, the same doorway that he had just disappeared into. Wanting desperately to leave and yet not wanting to have him know me for the coward I was. Yet again.

One moment passed, then two, before Skinner reappeared.

"Alex?"

I didn't answer. There was no way right then and there that I could walk through that door. There was no way I could just turn around and go.

He moved back towards me. "Alex...you don't have to do this, you know," he said quietly. "If it...if you..."

And I knew what he was going to say and why he didn't say it. We had done too much to each other for there not to be fear in any of this, willing or not. But I ached inside and I still wanted him and my cock was an iron bar in my jeans and I couldn't just walk away, not with him watching me like this. With him wanting me in return.

With him willing to accept me back into his bed, if only for this one promised night.

With all that soft warm darkness just outside and the sound of the waves gently lapping on the shore below and Skinner breathing softly with me, his hand rough and warm on my face as he stroked down the side of my jaw and cupped my mouth back to his.

Hot breath and the rasp of whiskers and me melting back into that familiar embrace, back into needing him more than fearing him. Remembering what had felt good once upon a time and feeling the worst of the fear wash away beneath the taste of him, the strength of those arms as they enfolded me. Holding me close and taking me away with him those last few steps and into the bedroom beyond.

Kissing me like a man who had a million reasons for inviting me here and not one single doubt.

Pulling the gun out of the back of my jeans and letting it fall to the floor at our feet. Me not even capable of mourning the loss.

And the next thing I knew we were both falling, landing on a surface that yielded beneath us, springs squeaking out their protest at our weight and enthusiasm. Skinner immediately rolling until I was beneath him, his long legs wrapped tight around my own and his hands not letting me go for an instant. His mouth moving down now, to the tender juncture between neck and shoulder, his tongue rasping across my flesh like some great cat's.

Licking at the accumulated salt and sweat.

And I couldn't help it; I shuddered and let out a breath that came near to being a laugh, an actual fucking giggle. Up close like this he smelled of sweat too, of musk and madness and beer and soap and earthier things. Just like I remembered his groin smelling with my face buried in it, his come tasting like when it hit the back of my mouth and filled it past capacity.

"Shit..." I mumbled.

Skinner raised his head slightly, nudging his nose against the underside of my jaw. "What? Something wrong, Alex? You okay?"

"Yeah," I admitted. "Just...it's been a while, okay?"

"Oh, yeah?"

His hand immediately slinked down between us and he pressed large strong fingers hard into my swollen cock.

"Bastard," I hissed, but there was no rancor there, only need. Needing him to do that again, no matter that it had hurt almost as much as it felt good, and needing him to go even further than that. Much much further. My cock suddenly wanting out of those damn jeans in a big way. Begging for me to just let go, let it happen. To give in and let him have his way with me.

To let him have me.

Once again.

To let him get inside me.

Where no one else had been since.

All those dead places standing up and insistently begging for a light and a life they had been denied for seven long years, for far longer than that. For as long as I could remember anymore. And I suddenly realized that it should have been me lying dead in that summer house on the Atlantic—that I just hadn't had the guts to do what Mulder had done. To admit that there was nothing left and to move the hell on. Mulder had gone into the unknown just like he always did, unflinching, making up his own fate as he went along, even if it wasn't what most folks would choose, let alone approve of. While I had stayed behind once again, pretending this half-life was what I truly wanted. Hiding behind all my masks and wrapped myself tight in a shroud of indifference. Dying one slow drop at a time.

And I should have stayed. I should have fought alongside them all, even if it meant my death at either their hands or at the hands of our mutual enemies.

I should have tried to be the man I once could have been. The one who might have turned out to be Mulder's friend and ally. And Scully's and Skinner's and...Oh God, Skinner, what could I have been to him if I hadn't run away? If I hadn't faked my death and had destroyed that palm pilot right there, that day in his office with all of them looking on, trusting and not-trusting me and always looking to me for the answers anyway, even if they didn't believe half of them and...

I could have given them real reason to trust me.

I could have just kissed him that day, once we were finally alone, and told him that I was sorry. That I still needed him. That I still wanted him. Would it have all turned out different if I had had the courage to do that? Would Mulder still be alive today?

Would I?

But Skinner was staring down at me now, a puzzled look in his eyes, and I belatedly realized that I had quit responding, quit reacting to the hand still resting on my cock, and that I felt cold all over. Hair standing up at the back of your neck some ragged ghost sliding right on through you freezing fucking cold.

I let out a long breath and sucked in some of the heat of the room. Of Walter Skinner. His big body sprawled all on top of me and his cock a hotter knot against my thigh, throbbing a little as if it too were begging to be released.

I was so cold and he was so hot and this thaw had been a long time coming. And even though it was still a trickle, I feared that I might shatter. Because of him and how much I still felt beneath all that ice.

"Where were you?" Skinner asked.

"Thinking that I've been a fool," I replied. "That I knew then what I should have done and was too fucking afraid to do it, that's all. That I should have told the truth, back when it would have counted the most."

"We all make mistakes," he said, but it sounded like the platitude it was. It also sounded like he didn't much believe it either.

"Even you?" I asked.

His eyes narrowed, but he bent down and kissed me briefly on the mouth. "Yeah," he said. "I made the mistake of letting you go. Of blaming you for belonging to him when I fucking belonged to him, too. When we were all just trying to stay alive, to stay sane. To save the human race. You're right, we were on the same side. But that didn't stop me from hating you and wanting you and hating myself all the more for wanting you. Growing more and more angry with each betrayal. Every death. My own, included. Especially my own. I hated you for that, Alex. I fucking hated you."

"And now?" My voice was harsh, hardly even a whisper.

"I still don't like it. To look at you...even after all these years, part of me is still angry. I never forgot the look on your face that day in the hospital. When I died. What it felt like to be owned by you. To be made to betray the people who trusted me most because of you. How you played me and how you betrayed me. Me and Agent Mulder. And then being forced finally to pull that trigger—thinking the whole time that it couldn't be you, it can't be, but never being entirely sure afterwards that it hadn't. Especially when I never heard from you, never saw you again. And that made me angry too, though it shouldn't have. It made me hate you all over again."

I couldn't help it; I tensed up and tried to push him away, to get out from under him, but it was only a half-hearted effort and he was so damn heavy, so fucking solid and he still refused to let me go. He shook his head at me.

"No," he said. "Don't. I'm not telling you these things to hurt you. I didn't ask you to stay to hurt you. Not that way, anyway."

"Then why?" The question came out harsher than before.

"Because I don't want to remember those things. I don't want to be angry or hate anymore. I want to remember something good. I want to have something good to remember. To hold on to when nothing else works. Fuck Alex, I don't want to end up downing a bottle of vodka and a whole fucking pharmacy of pills someday. To lay there for almost an entire week before somebody finds me."

I didn't have to ask him who he was talking about. The thought that Mulder had been so alone at the last made me ache inside as well, though probably not as badly as Skinner was. Obviously, Mulder's death had more than thrown him for a loop; it had pulled his whole world out from under him. No wonder he looked so damn tired. No wonder he hadn't acted like he really cared all that much that I might have come to kill him at the last.

No wonder he didn't seem to want to let me go.

Maybe he couldn't.

Just as I hadn't been able to just walk away, either.

"Skinner," I said. "Fuck me."

For a long moment it seemed as if sorrow was going to win out over lust, then those dark eyes refocussed on me. Studied me. Looked so deep inside me that I wasn't sure I had any secrets left by the time he was done.

Least of all the one covering up that jagged hole inside me.

Seven years wide and thirty-some years deep.

"Right," he said.

Then his mouth came down on mine again and it was all right. It was what I had been waiting for all those years and what I had always feared and the most precious thing in the world, our lips and tongues meshing into one as if they'd been doing this all our lives. Breathing in his discarded oxygen and the liquid of his mouth and growing high off of it, like it was a fucking drug. His weight on top of me the only thing keeping me from floating right up and off that bed.

The next thing I knew his hands were on my shirt, were trying to tear it right off of me, popping buttons right and left and getting both my real and fake arms all tangled up in the sleeves in the process. Skinner grunted with seeming displeasure at that—as if it were my fault—and finally began ripping in earnest. Half-lifting me off the bed in his arms as he roughly tore the shirt clean off me, then began fumbling with the supports of my prosthetic. His big fingers turning abruptly clumsy, giving up in the end with the device all twisted around and still more than half-attached. Moving on instead to the zipper on my jeans.

And I knew I was going to have bruises in the morning and my left shoulder was already protesting its rather rough handling, but I didn't care. Certainly not as much as I cared that this would be the first time he would be seeing me naked again in over ten years—naked and mutilated and as scarred in body now as I'd always been in spirit. With bits of me grown soft from the last few easy years and with other bits ruined by all the hard roads that had preceded them.

When he had last seen me like this I had been perfect, a young man just coming into his prime. What would he make of me now? What could he?

But his hands were already pulling my jeans down, turning them inside out in the process, until they hit my boots and caught. Instead of quitting at that point though, he yanked even harder, as if brute force would solve the problem, and since I cared far more about my boots than the old shirt I had been wearing, I told him to wait up and then sat up and got them off myself.

Leaving me in only my underwear—plain white, something Allan would wear and quite frequently did—and Skinner still entirely dressed, if only in that awful sweat-stained t-shirt and those entirely too small for him at this moment, not that I was complaining about that, denim shorts. Still, the sense of unbalance between us was abruptly even keener. As keen and as seductive and disquieting as it ever was.

Once more he pushed me flat on the bed. He straddled my legs, pinning them down beneath him again, and then put one hand down right square on my groin. Smiling a tight-lipped little smile right at me as he cupped me there, as if returning the favor I'd granted to his own cock and balls, and making me intimately aware of just how wet that pair of guilty underwear already was. Wet enough that I swear it squelched as his fingers flexed on me, as they moved to circle the head right through the thin material and began rubbing at it. Rubbing and rolling and squeezing hard on my whole length, as if he wanted to squeeze the life and come clear out of me.

His eyes never leaving mine. As if he didn't give a damn about what the rest of me looked like, even the wreckage of my arm. As I stared back up at him, biting down hard on the sounds piling up at the back of my throat. Keeping my silence no matter how good it felt. And it felt damn good.

I wasn't quite sure of why this contest had started, but I was unwilling to just let go. To let him win. Even if I already knew he would win in the end. That if I could have denied him I would have been out that kitchen door already, tearing down the road to some new oblivion. And Skinner seemed to know the rules as well, as if he had been born to them. As if he had been born to be the one man to make me surrender.

Because he smiled again, one more tight little smile, and then my underwear—Allan's underwear—was going, going, gone, and I was completely naked before him. Under him. His fingers coming back to hold me again, skin against skin this time, his hand feeling even hotter than my cock if that was at all possible. Rough skin, a rough touch, and it made me gasp at last. Made me shiver all over.

Which seemed to be exactly what the Skinner had been waiting for. Because he bent then and took me deep into his mouth, his hand moving to squeeze down hard on my balls at the same exact moment. Catching me acutely between agony and ecstasy, which was just the place where he somehow always managed to send me and where it seemed I had always wanted to be.

Deny it all I like, either to him or to myself.

But there was no denying this. Lips, teeth, and tongue, he had me, his mouth moving up and down my cock now, swallowing me down and spitting me out again, scouring pleasure out of sensitive flesh. Keeping the edge on by his hold on my balls. A steady, steely rhythm that had my hips arching up to greet him without any conscious thought on my part, without hope of me being able to stop them. My legs finally falling apart as well, leaving me exposed, hoping, hopeless.

As his other hand slunk down and a blunt finger forced itself inside me without care, without compunction. Without a stitch of fucking lube. Burning tender skin as it twisted and turned, then was joined by a second finger. Stretching me out as I hadn't been stretched in years.

And it hurt and there was going to be more hurt to come and Christ, but I wanted it and he wanted it and there was no going back anymore, no escape, and that was exactly why I'd come, wasn't it? I'd only ever been alive with my back up against the wall. When I'd been walking that razor blade between life and death and damnation. Knowing there was no difference between any of them.

Between pleasure or pain either. As long as you felt...something.

And Skinner had always made me feel.

That's for damn sure.

"Please..." The word just slipped out of me, as did another sharp gasp. A third finger having hooked up with the first two. Reaming me out without gentleness, without remorse. "Please...shit..."

Skinner's mouth slid off my cock, leaving it wet, gleaming and flushed as red as his lips. The ones he licked as I watched him. As he narrowed his eyes at me. "What?" he asked, a smug tone to his voice. "You want me to quit...now?"

"No," I said, the word shuddering out of me. His fingers were still moving deep inside me, a burn and twist and tug that I couldn't possibly ignore. "Just..."

"This?" he asked, no question about it, and then one of those fingers turned just so and scored right across the magic spot, sending a bolt of pure lightning and moonshine writhing through my veins. Blinding liquid heat. I bucked up into it, but still he held me down and scrubbed the tip of that finger over it again, like it hadn't fucking caught fire the first damn time.

I think I shouted something, but since I couldn't clearly remember English right then I had no clue what the hell it was.

Maybe Skinner knew, though, because his mouth was sinking back over me, taking my entire length down and down, that knowing finger compelling brutal pleasure out of me a third time even as I felt his lips clamp themselves around the base of my cock. Which was a neat trick and one that I'd never quite been able to manage with him, no matter my enthusiasm—large dicks do have their disadvantages, difficult as that may be to believe—but I wasn't complaining. Not in the least.

Especially since I very well know just what that big dick could do to me once he actually got it up inside me.

Though this came close; being caught so tightly between those piercing fingers and the demands of that sweet hot mouth. Helpless to both and writhing in his grasp, suddenly sure that I couldn't stand much more and yet desperate to make the attempt. And somehow I knew that if he hit my prostate like that just one more time that it would all be over but the screaming.

Skinner must have known it too because he was already pulling his fingers free, letting my cock slip from the recesses of his mouth. He was kneeling up on the bed and pulling his t-shirt off at last, stripping it away in one impatient gesture and throwing it aside. Revealing a chest rather liberally sprinkled with grey hairs, the tan skin beneath gleaming with sweat, the muscle definition still clear in places and grown slightly obscured in others. But hard yet, so very hard. Just like the flex of those thighs as he undid the buttons on his denim shorts and pulled them down his legs and off as well, removing the briefs under them at the same time.

Releasing the cock beneath, as big and as heavy as I remembered it—sticking straight out from below a slightly rounded stomach, rich and glistening with its own brand of sweat and tears. The knotted head almost purple and all the veins throbbing along that thick length, like it really was rooted in the earth or in some great flood. The stone of his heart, maybe, or the river of his desire.

With me rubbed smooth and brittle between them; feeling far too transparent to those gleaming brown eyes right now.

Feeling more vulnerable and breakable than I had ever felt before.

As if all those years as Allan had undermined my ability to be Alex, the man who had walked away from his own death as if it hadn't already been too late. Way the hell fucking too late.

Just as it was too late again and he was grabbing me by the legs and splitting them even wider, pulling me down into the embrace of the bed, towards the pressure of those thighs and that urgent cock. His weight crushing the living breath out of me as he climbed on top of me, his hand slinking down between us again—this time to gather up the slickness from his own cock and mine, mixing them together, rubbing the clear liquid down the cleft of my ass and into the dark pucker below.

Which twitched at his touch, sending pleasure and fear and anticipation reverberating back through me. My nerves and all my muscles suddenly pulling taut, even the ones that shouldn't be. The ones that needed to be open. That he had actually taken some care to open.

"Relax," Skinner hissed, working his and my pre-come and a couple of fingers back inside me again, finding it rough going.

"Sure," I said, then swallowed hard and closed my eyes. Unable to bear the intense look on the his face, the concentration of his weight and smell and touch on all my skin. The familiar melting black of those naked eyes. As a sudden unexpected fear shook and battered me—that I would look up at him and they would have abruptly turned both cold and dark. Flat black, cool metal eyes. The eyes of an executioner and not of a lover.

If you could even say this...thing between us had anything at all to do with love.

Even of the sick and twisted kind.

Which didn't stop me from wanting it. From wanting him as much as I feared him. All that hot flesh, that heavy bone, the sizzling spill of his sweat on my face and those rough hands catching and stroking over the soft skin of my parted thighs. As another wet, even harder flesh moved at the last to press up against me and he bent his head and took one of my nipples between his teeth. The sharp jangle of it contrasting to the long slow stretch of pain as he began to push inside me.

Ignoring any resistance and my own ragged gasp for air. Air that tasted of him, that was filled by him as he was determined to fill me. To fill every last dark space. Even the ones that I wasn't sure I wanted to know about.

The pain and discomfort steadily growing as he forced himself into me, sliding in inch by inch, achingly slowly—his cock feeling big as my fist, fucking solid as steel, though still molten hot at the core. His length cracking me open beneath him until I felt like I couldn't take anymore. Though his hands had closed now on my shoulders, were holding me, making me do just that. And I could take it, I could...

Until his mouth mapped its way over to my other nipple and bit down there as well, even more viciously than before.

"God..." The word broke out of me as my eyes snapped back open, an involuntary flinch making me tighten up around him even as he gave one last great shove and was there. Balls deep and with his cock butting right up against the base of my throat, my struggling lungs, that black place in my mind where the past still lived. Pinning me right to it, right to him. Right to every reason that I'd ever come crawling to him. And that I'd killed him for.

"Alex?"

I heard my name like a distant echo, meaningless and jumbled.

I mumbled something back, but even I had no clue what.

Not until his lips descended on mine, until they coaxed open tight lips and bared teeth—the feral grin of death that had gripped me in that moment, remembering, remembering...

What I had always wanted to tell him and never had had the guts or the time or the words for.

And I was abruptly begging him. "Hold me...oh, fuck..." All that brittle pride shattered at the last and my deepest walls tearing right down the seam like a piece of rotting fabric. "Skinner...hold me, please..."

If he hesitated, I never knew it; his arms were suddenly sliding around me and pulling me towards him. Fixing me tight to that broad chest and the open press of his mouth as his tongue delved even further, as if he wanted to suck the last of that hurt, that blackness right out of me. As if he actually liked the taste of it. His cock twitching deep inside me, an oddly pleasurable sensation amid all the pain.

And I had never felt so small, or so well kept. He owned me in that moment. Just the way I'd always wanted to be owned. He knew my true name and the depths of the hole inside me where a heart should have been and wasn't. Maybe he didn't really care, but still he held me and I held onto him. Slowly feeling a calmness of purpose and a desperate need knotting themselves tighter and tighter inside me. Until I was pushing back against that massive cock, was letting my tongue wind itself up with his, as if I could keep his mouth matched to mine forever. Breathing be damned.

But Skinner finally pulled back and his eyes were smoky black and beautiful, reflecting my own eyes right back at me. His hands framed my face and he kissed me once more, just a press of lips this time, tender and terrible at the same time. Like a benediction or a warning.

"Christ," he said, his voice trembling. "You know how fucking long I've wanted this? How I've..." His face twisted and he stopped there, his hands falling back to my shoulders. Holding them both the same even though he had to have seen what an ugly mess the one was.

What an ugly mess I was. Inside and out.

"Fuck me," I said again, not a plea this time, but a command. "Hurt me."

He stared down at me, then nodded. Though it almost seemed like a denial because his shoulders shrugged and rolled immediately after. A movement I felt all through my own body.

Most especially where we were locked together.

"Hurt..." he repeated, a strange hollow note to the word. And then he was flexing on top of me, his cock sliding back out until just the head remained inside me. Then, without hesitation, he was shoving it deep again—moving hard, moving fast, his hips slamming into the backs of my upraised thighs. His balls impacting on my ass.

And it did hurt, but it was marvelous too. Deadly and too dreadful to ignore.

As he did it again and again, long steady strong strokes that punched me down into the bed beneath him. That had me raising my own hips up to meet his. Every impact forcing the breath right up and out of me. And the pain finally began to grow and change into something else, something still quite close to it, but infinitely more precious.

Undeniable pleasure. The other side of the blade. Wicked, wicked pleasure.

The only kind that mattered.

My hand crept down to curl around one driving hip and he let it stay. He let it urge him into quicker, harder thrusts, like little rabbit punches inside me. One, one, one, and I was being laid bare by my pleasure now, by the pressure of that great cock as it rode me, as he rode me. Unable to imagine going without it anymore, without being fixed and savaged like this.

Skinner's increasingly loud little grunts of effort blending with my own spastic gasps for air, sweet air, rarefied and elusive. The bed creaking and groaning beneath us and the headboard trying its best to hammer its way through the wall. And we had to be waking up poor old Vern and his lovely wife Louise from their afternoon siesta and half the fucking fishermen on the lake couldn't have missed what was going on, but I didn't give a fuck.

The aliens could have landed again, right on the damn beach outside, and I wouldn't have cared.

Not when I only had ever really cared...about this.

As Skinner fucked me harder and harder, keeping up the pace, keeping up the pressure. Knowing I could take it. Counting on me to take it.

His cock an explosion waiting to happen now, a fucking meteor in my gut, a comet in my veins. Reaming me out and possessing me over and over, as if he knew how badly I needed possessing. And I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore, I couldn't look at him—not when he was like this. Not when he suddenly shifted and clasped me even tighter, thrusting slower now again but right across that hot spot. The one that had threatened to turn me inside out before.

That was turning me inside out again.

And it wasn't a burn anymore, it was searing acid and liquid delight, blood-hot and fevered. His cock riding up inside me and my own cock ploughing across that soft-hard stomach. His face coming down to bury itself in the crook of my neck and his hands imprinting themselves on my back. Bruising me to him.

Bringing me back to him again and again.

One slamming stroke after another until I felt it at last—the pleasure swelling inside me, expanding rapidly beyond my skin and the ragged expanse of my soul. Skinner's cock swelling inside me as well in that moment, as his hips suddenly lost their rhythm and began to turn wild. Jabbing and jamming his full length into me as he sobbed for breath against the skin of my left shoulder, that steely head stabbing hard, hard, hard.

As if looking for its own lost heart and freedom.

A curse, a name, breaking out of him as he thrust one last time and let it all go. More acid spilling deep inside me, a sear and snap and throb that I couldn't deny. That made the last of the pain and that even more ruthless pleasure finally come crashing down on me, breaking me in two and flooding right through me until I thought it would wash everything away.

As my seed shot out and across the tanned skin of the other man, white-washing his stomach and groin in more patterns that I couldn't interpret. The pleasure shaking me like a wet dog, exposing me to the root. And I didn't know what I was feeling right then, what I should be feeling, except that I had no right to feel it. To feel anything.

A second curse and Skinner was collapsing, tumbling down and taking me with him. His weight half-suffocating me. His cock still buried in the deepest part of me. My own cock slick and still half-hard beneath him, trembling in the hollow of our meshed hips. The two of us sliding together in spilled semen and sweat and the bed having swallowed us both down at last. Revenge for the punishment we had put it through.

Revenge...

And now it was over and I was still nowhere. Was nobody. Not Allen and certainly not Alex and never his lover and not his friend, but nothing if I wasn't either. Nothing...

Salt burned my face as I turned it into the pillow, as I opened my eyes at the last. My lip stung as well and I dimly realized that I had bitten it somewhere along the way.

That Skinner was sighing and was already well on his way towards falling asleep on me. In me. Without me.

As I had once gone on without him. Or, at least, gone away.

"Alex," I heard him say, just one more sigh, and then his breathing was deepening further and he slowly rolled the both of us over to one side. His face moving to share the pillow with me and one hand sealed to my back and the other sliding down now to cup my ass, holding me to him as if that cock still buried so far inside me couldn't. "So tired."

I looked back at those brown eyes trying so hard to keep themselves open and shook my head. Could hardly believe the soft soothing sound that escaped me.

"Shhhh," I breathed. "Sleep then. It'll all...be okay."

"Promise?"

I smiled—a real fucking smile that warmed even me, brief as it was—but his eyes were already sinking shut.

"Yeah," I said. "I promise."

I stayed awake for long hours after that, long enough for his cock to finally fade and slip out of me. For the shadows to lengthen and creep into the room, wrapping us up in heat and darkness. Just lying there, listening to him breathing, to the matching ebb and flow of his heart beating, and wondering why I couldn't stand to hear either sound end. Making more of those quiet reassurances whenever he stirred, when nightmares threatened to break him of his sleep. Not knowing where the knowledge and the strength came from to do that for him when I couldn't even do it for myself.

Skinner's mouth was slack in sleep, half-buried in the pillow across from me. The waning light made those lines of pain and loss, of sorrow and hardship on his face look fainter than before. Almost smoothed over entirely in places. Either the light or having just fucked the worst of it out of him.

And into me.

Not that I could blame him; it had been my choice as well.

Only once true night had come did I shift and pull myself away from him. From that great lax tangle of limbs and superheated skin. He mumbled, but didn't wake as I rolled away and out of the bed and stood there, one more shadow among so very many. Shaking and shivering a little despite the heat, but still strangely full of some great calm. Like being in the eye of a storm, one that had rolled right on through and left me battered and bloodied and sore at the core, knowing there was worse to come but unable to care.

I didn't bother with my clothes, but walked back down that hall and out that kitchen door I had been unable to open earlier. It was slightly cooler outside, enough to finally begin drying the sweat off me. My sweat. Skinner's sweat. An even greater stickiness was cemented on my stomach and I swiped my hand through it and brought some of it to my mouth. Somehow it seemed to taste more of him than of myself.

Bitter, either way.

I took the steps down to the lake slowly, the trees black and silent around me. Not even a hint of a breeze catching in their leaves. The moon was almost gone now—just a slim edge against the stars—but I could see well enough from the orange glow of that sodium light. I could see the dock and the boats and most of all the lake, the waters still and black as ink. As oil.

Though not as black as the place slowly coming unraveled inside me.

And something was dripping out of me now, shockingly warm on my legs, but it was washed away as I waded out into the lake. Rocks and sand slipping away beneath my bare feet, slimy with moss and weeds. Those tiny crayfish skittering before me. The water itself was warm at first, but grew steadily cooler as I went further and further out. To my knees, to my waist, to my chest. Until the bottom fell away at the last, forcing me to swim.

The black waters opening up like a mirror before me, with only my few faint ripples to disturb it. It was quiet as well and despite the stars overhead, despite the lights from other cabins scattered along the shores of the lake, I felt alone. Which was what I was used to. Which was how it had to be.

I swam and swam until the waters had lost the last of their residual warmth. Until I could sense how deep they were below me, how secret and dark and dreamless. With the shore seemingly miles away behind me and a loon—maybe even the same one as before—crying out in the miles ahead. A ghost in the darkness, lost and lonely. I paused there, listening to it and to the silence, just barely doing enough to keep myself afloat. Feeling the cold slowly seeping into my veins, into my bones. Welcome and familiar.

Only then did Mulder's face suddenly flash through my mind—how I had left him sitting alone in his apartment once upon a time after I'd kissed him and offered him his own gun back. How lost he had seemed that night. How lonely. Sprawled out on the floor and emptied of hope. Just like he'd probably been with all those bright pills in his hand, that bottle next to him on the floor. All his demons conquered at the last, human and alien alike, and the battle for the earth and for truth finally won, but the world having passed him by in the meantime. As ungrateful and mocking as ever, to its martyrs and victims alike.

No one caring enough anymore to bother tracking him down, let alone to keep tabs on him.

Not his enemies or his friends.

I'd never been a martyr and I'd never really had any friends to speak of and more enemies than I cared to count, but I could well imagine how much that had to have hurt. How the vodka must have numbed the worst of it, before those pills finally kicked in and chased it away entirely.

I could imagine...

Skinner's face as he was brought in to ID the man. How helpless he might have felt at that moment, how full of regrets.

I could remember...

The sounds he'd made when I'd smashed him down in that stairwell and took the tape from those capable hands. His face that night he'd slugged me without any warning and picked me up by the scruff of the neck, sticking me out on his balcony like he was doing me a favor.

I could remember the day he'd died on that hospital table. And when he'd looked back at me later, reflected in the mirror of his car. How resigned he'd seemed to find my finger on the button. At this greatest betrayal. But not the last.

The loon cried out again and something colder than the water sliced clear through me at the sound of it. So close. So far. So impossible. It had always been impossible.

I closed my eyes and let out one last breath, let myself sink below the surface without one single remaining ripple. I dove down into the blackness below me, passing through layer after layer of progressively colder water until I hit the frigid spring-fed depths that lay beneath them all. Pushing myself as far into it as I could before opening my mouth to take my first breath of this new world. To take my last.

Only to feel arms abruptly snag me, wrap themselves around me with rib-crushing intensity and pull hard. Not towards the depths where I wanted to go, but towards the surface, where I couldn't stand to be any longer. I fought them, fought hard, as if for my very life, but the last of my air was already long gone and suddenly the heavier weight of water was rushing in to fill the void it had left and it hurt like hell, more than I thought it would, and I couldn't see anything, I couldn't feel, I couldn't fight anymore.

I couldn't even run...

Air and sound and breath broke over me without warning and I dimly heard a voice pleading and calling my name. I felt hands holding me up out of the water and lips burning their way across my face, scalding my lips as they sealed themselves tight to my own and poured yet more air into me. Terrible warm air and life and a moment later I was choking on it, twisting sideways in the waves and spewing coldness and water back out in equal measure.

Coughing up numbness and despair and darkness and such pain that I'd never known anyone could have lived with it, let alone for so very long.

Strong arms holding me the whole time, keeping me from death. From drowning.

"Alex...Alex..." A familiar voice was shattering itself around my name. "Goddamn it. You stupid shit. What the fuck...?"

I choked out his name—a denial—and tried to push myself free once more, but he only pulled me even closer and kissed me again. Not giving me just his breath this time, but something else. Something even more vital.

And then my pulse was thudding and thundering in my ears, fire and desire and urgency pouring all through me, as my heart began pounding so hard and so fast that it actually fucking hurt. Pounding as if it had never left me. As if I had never sold it for lesser things.

Leaving me to pull my mouth away from his and bury my face in his shoulder instead. To put my one arm around him and hold on just as tightly. Feeling his own heart reverberating through my chest. Those strong legs working to keep us both afloat. To save us. Not able to look at his face right then, but not needing to; it was all there in his arms, in the feel of his flesh pressed to my own.

In his voice, that rough gruff always commanding voice.

"Alex...why?"

And there was no real answer to that. At least none he would have wanted to hear. So instead I kissed his shoulder, cool skin and bone and all. Kissed the side of his neck, feeling his pulse with my lips, and then up along that clenched jaw and finally to his mouth, feeling it trying to deny me at first, before slowly opening to my tongue. To shared need. To what felt like a mutual apology.

I kissed him as long as I could before finally and reluctantly pulling back. Nose to nose with the man now and with dark brown eyes looking right square into mine. Questioning. Scared and still looking a bit shell-shocked. Though not angry for once, not angry at all.

"Skinner," I said, my voice stripped nearly raw. Trembling like the rest of me. "I'm sorry...please...please don't let me go."

"Never," he replied. As if it were easy for him.

As easy as swimming us both back to shore and shuffling me up the hill and into that bright kitchen. Down the hall and into an even cheerier bathroom filled with rosebuds and bluebirds and to the fuzzy comfort of a couple of big gold towels. Me blinking owlishly and stupidly up at him as he rubbed heat and life back into chilled limbs, never quite letting go of me the whole time. Handling me like a sleepy child as he steered us to that dark bedroom beyond and sank back down with me into a hot tangle of sheets, into the musky scent of lingering sex that had nothing at all to do with childhood.

But everything to do with this. With Walter Skinner's mouth setting kisses on my forehead, on my lips, on my heart. A strangely chaste but sure touch. One full of forgiveness and something else, something even more rare and precious. As rare and precious and fragile as the heart now beating in my chest. As the odd bright feeling inside me as my hand crept to claim one naked thigh and those strong arms closed around me once more and he laid us down together.

His body fixed skin to skin to mine, all his muscles taut, tight, hard as sin, as if he really would never let me go again. As if he couldn't even dream of it. Sighing then as his cock slipped back into place between my own thighs, riding gently in the lake damp that fuzzy towel had missed, already hard. Already wet. Hot and here and home at last.

Home at last.

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