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Sleepless
Part Two


FBI Library, Federal Building
2:10 p.m.

"Here we go. Willig was assigned to a special force in recon squad J7. Thirteen original members—he's one of two survivors."

Krycek leaned in to study the computer screen. "Until yesterday," he said quietly, with a trace of dark irony. He gave a small, wry grimace.

Mulder leaned back, gave the keyboard a tap.

"Which leaves us with one person who can tell us what happened at Parris Island... one Augustus Cole. Let's hope he has a record."

"Vietnam vet? More likely than not," said Krycek laconically.

Mulder looked over at him. "The cynic outs himself," he said, deliberately allowing an ambiguous weight to rest with his words.

They were sitting in intimate proximity at the library terminal, both of them in rolled-up shirtsleeves. The building was air-conditioned, but dusty sunlight sheeted heavily through tall, nearby windows, and both men had begun to roast slowly in the poorly-ventilated room.

Alex met and held Mulder's gaze. Eyes like green smoke, cat-calm and depthless, regarded him equably. Already close, he leaned in even further into Mulder's personal space, resting his arm on the back of his chair and bringing their faces near enough to share an ice-cream. "Are you going to keep fucking with me?" he said softly, lips inches from the other man's. Mulder had gone still; only his eyes showed life, watchful and bright.

"Oh, I don't know," Mulder said carelessly, his voice equally soft.

"You shouldn't play these games, Mulder," Alex said quietly. In his peripheral vision he could see other agents working intently at the library tables, or pulling books from the stacks. He tilted his head, looking at Mulder speculatively from under his thick lashes. Alex knew the very moment when the other man's nerves kicked in; could feel the uneasy tension rising and radiating from his body. He smiled, and without warning slid his hand up along Mulder's nape, splaying fingers across the short hairs and up into the softer, thicker hair above, molding his palm to the finely sculpted skull. Expecting a snap, a cool withdrawal, Alex's pulse jerked in shock when Mulder arched his neck back and let his eyes drop shut. Lips parted, issued a whispered, ecstatic: "Fuck—yes—" Surprised, almost laughing.

Alex pulled his hand away immediately as if burned.

And Mulder returned his own heavy-lidded regard, his lips twisting gently. "I thought I was being obvious... guess not."

A quick glance around the room assured Alex that no one had observed the brief exchange. "You are crazy," he hissed disbelievingly, angrily.

"Hey, I'm the one being fondled, here."

Color tinged Alex's cheeks. "I was just... trying to yank your chain." His tone was defensive, his words more than half a lie.

"Felt pretty good. Want to yank it some more?"

Alex shook his head, stared out across the library, then finally turned and met Mulder's eyes again. "I can't—do this." They didn't tell me this, he thought desperately. "I—I don't think personal involvement is—when two people are working together—it's not a good idea." He was almost stammering, and felt like a fool. He wasn't worried so much now about Mulder reporting him to bureau officials; more alarming was the risk of the chairman finding out about this. What the hell would the man do to him if he discovered—well, anything? Alex didn't know what he feared more: that he might be pulled off the investigation and faced with some sort of punitive action, or that he might actually be encouraged to seduce Mulder... or be seduced by him, as the case may be.

Or—an even more terrible thought struck Alex—what if the chairman decided that a sexual scandal would be a convenient way to bring Mulder down, and sacrificed him—Alex—to that end? Alex didn't know enough about the Committee's methods to rule that possibility out. He knew fuck-all, except what they told him, which was, when you came down to it, fuck-all.

He could feel the other man's gaze was on him.

"You want me to drop it?" asked Mulder quietly. He was open-faced, without artifice, and so ridiculously, humanly beautiful that—like an unexpected slap in the face—it nearly took Alex's breath away, made vision almost a caress. His face might have been modeled to capture the very essence of humanity's strange loveliness: the monkey raised to an angel's state, a clown gilded and god-touched. His eyes were like those of some trapped animal, sad and mute, but the face in which they rested was hard. Pure. It was like looking at a man who had swallowed himself—the wolf after devouring grandma. In Mulder, you could tell, a gentler nature had been subsumed into a stronger, more ruthless incarnation. Even as Alex looked on the lapidary face seemed to harden briefly and then soften again—a trick of perception, a subliminal shift of muscle, he couldn't say. Yet it seemed clear now that somewhere under that crisp, aloof exterior, was warm, eager need, a hunger for contact.

Alex didn't know why that should unnerve him so.

"I—I don't—you don't even know me," he said at last, echoing earlier words. His voice was faintly accusing. "Two days ago you didn't even trust me—"

"I still don't. I... can't." Ruthless honesty was borne on the low, roughened voice.

Alex made a little sound of derision. "Right—so, what—? You just want to jump my bones?" He was half angry, half amused... and more flattered than he would have expected.

"They're pretty nice bones," Mulder said. But his own amusement had faded out somewhat by the end of the remark. He leaned forward over the keyboard, resting his forehead lightly in his hands, shielding his face from Alex. Long fingers pressed to his temples. When he spoke again, his voice sounded more tired. "You're right, this is—we really shouldn't—" He paused, then straightened in his chair. "Do whatever we were thinking about not doing," he finished ironically. "So..."

Another pause fell, in which Mulder stared blankly at the monitor screen, collecting himself, and Alex, at a loss for words, swallowed and looked out across the library, focusing on nothing.

"So," Mulder said, standing and gathering his jacket. "We run a search, see what we can turn up on Cole, and... grab some lunch."

Taking Mulder's cue, Alex adopted a casual, businesslike tone. "Great. Sounds like a plan. Chinese?"

"Sounds like a plan," Mulder repeated blandly, his face expressionless once more.

xx

Late Saturday

A Saturday afternoon in New York, in the heat of a lingering summer.

The air was muggy, but cooling; high above the skyline the clouds rolled in. Bruised and smeared in a muddy palette, clouds grey and gold and orange and pink arrived in the sky, streaking across its surface until what little blue could be seen from street-level was spray-painted over in the bright, messy colors of garbage and gardens.

From a lower level of the sky, off unseen behind the buildings, the setting sun poured forth a golden voluminous light that slid between the towering walls like a thousand knives to fall in thin brilliant stripes across the streets. Here and there light nicked a surface and a mirroring flash was born and died in a moment, in the turn of a head, in the distance of a single footstep.

Crowds filled the streets, millions of particles borne on their own wave, moving in groups and in single elements, erratic or purposeful, aimless or charged, following laws of kinesic flow that each was unaware of. Shifting and bumping, sending ripples of motion through the great body, the people mingled and unmingled, knotted and unknotted, eddying and whirling away from one another. Most were strangers to each other; and though faces seen long ago were seen again they did not for the most part register as familiar.

Fantastic diversity colored the streets. A loose clutch of Rastafarians ambled en masse down Fifth Avenue, starting a long foot journey toward Bleecker Street. Passing them in the opposite direction, an equally numbered handful of Haitians meandered toward Central Park, ostensibly to catch Soul Coughing at the Summer Stage—but, if they didn't make it in time—no sweat. Beer would still be there, and much sweet coucoune. A Japanese couple glanced at the Haitians, then returned with expressionless but intense focus to their window-shopping, as if they were not being trailed by several giggling children, neat as ducklings in formation and almost as small. Across the street from this thread of traffic, a white South African couple and a black South African couple crossed paths in front of Tiffany's; by an odd coincidence, the darker woman's mother had once been the lighter woman's cook, but neither recognized the other in the moment of passing.

Fifth channeled a hot, slow-moving sea of people. Shop-browsing Quebeckers squeezed by gawking camera-toting Hoosiers, who in turn shoved awkwardly by a trio of exquisitely blase Parisian schoolgirls, who wrinkled their noses and with exaggerated tolerance and savoir-faire pushed past a group of gangsta-rappin' youths with half-mast sweats and ingeniously shaved scalps, who were descending with parasitical ferocity upon a scowling hotdog vendor, who held up a thick red hand and said: "Hey, one atta time, watch th' cart, d'ya mind, Jeezus, youth today, like fuckin' dogs, want ya some kraut widdat, no, one dolla', no twenties, see the sign, you can read cantcha, fuckin' kids today—"

The crowds passed Raymond Weil, Barnes & Noble, and then—for a long time—Saks; they passed Rockefeller Center, St Patrick's Cathedral, Versace and Cartier and Banana Republic; they went from Boticelli to Bennetton, from Gucci to Elizabeth Arden, from Godiva to Dior to the Disney Store; they stopped in front of Trump Tower and took photos, pulling haughty faces, paused at Tiffany's and vogued for the camcorder. At FAO Schwartz large chunks of the crowd, particularly those toting small children, broke off, leaving the street and entering the fantastical world within. It was cool in there, and many dazed fathers fell prey to their own reluctance to return outside, and found themselves maneuvered into parting with the contents of their wallets. Revenues from The Lion King passed the billion mark that afternoon, and it would have surprised none of the store's tired clerks if the billionth dollar had passed anonymously across their counter.

Outside the cool stores, Fifth gleamed with light, sharp light that pierced from the west, diffuse pinkish-gold light that slid in under the clouds from the north and bathed faces in a humid, August-afternoon glow. Gawking like a first-time tourist and not caring, Alex tilted back his head, running his sights up along the lines of buildings that rose around them like canyon walls. The evening's slow descent was joyous, crushing, and prolonged: death by drowning in humanity. Pulling his shirt from his jeans and fanning himself with a draft of warmish summer air, running a hand across his heated, silk-damp scalp, he felt a brief touch of peace, blanketing and not quite real.

Beside him, Mulder seemed equally serene, but was perhaps merely preoccupied. Before leaving the field office, they had put in the request for a nationwide database search on Cole; various networks would be checked and any hit would be forwarded immediately to them. So far they had not received a call. Dining in Chinatown had turned into a hugely indulgent event, despite being a working lunch. They'd sketched out some possible directions to take regardless of whether the lead on Cole panned out, agreeing on the value of talking to Grissom's maid, and entertaining the idea of hypnotizing Mrs Dipace in an effort to glean more from her memory.

After lunch, stunned on Kung Pao chicken and dim sum, they'd driven slowly—slowly—up Broadway, made their way to the hotel, parked the car and changed, then ventured out into the city. They'd worked over to Fifth and then set out in a straight but lazy course down its shop-chocked blocks, in the direction of Central Park.

Both had disclaimed to the other any serious interest in shopping, despite the wealth of opportunity surrounding them. In casual partnership they people-watched and window-gazed, pausing for now and then for ice creams, lemonades, juices, ices. Neither man was inclined to bring up any subject more serious than Knicks prospects or changing trends in music, but somehow—as things will happen—their intermittent conversation took an unobtrusive left turn, and then another, until they suddenly found themselves in a discussion of philosophical perspectives on euthanasia. After which, it seemed unnatural and affected to return to bluff chit-chat on sports and suit styles.

"You don't have any religious qualms about it, then?" Mulder said, as they leaned indolently together on a bench outside Rockefeller Center. In front of them passed an elephantine woman displaying an eye-shocking expanse of naked skin and trailing a mane of long, gorgeous red hair. She laughed and waved to someone further along, drawing many eyes.

"I'm not religious."

"Mmm. So you said."

Alex, one arm hooked comfortably along the bench back, looked sidelong at Mulder, who sprawled easily akimbo, like an unstrung marionette, all legs. "Are you—religious? I mean, you're not a Quaker, are you?"

Mulder looked at him in blank amazement, then amusement. "Quaker?"

"You told Mrs Dipace your mother named you after George Fox."

"I did, didn't I." Mulder turned back to watch the people passing. "I'm not religious. Even when I was a child, I used to drive my mother crazy. I didn't even qualify as a Doubting Thomas—she used to call me a pagan reborn... inaccurately, as it turns out. In truth I have no spiritual life."

Alex quirked a brow. "I find that hard to believe."

"Why?" Mulder asked, his tone flat, seemingly incurious despite the question. "Because I believe in little green men—alternative life forms—that we are not alone?" His voice grew self-mockingly spooky on the last few words.

"Well... " Alex shrugged. "I guess—yes."

"It's not religion, and the belief doesn't indicate any particular spiritual depth. It's not as if I go home and assume the lotus position—sit around stroking my crystals and channeling my spirit guide. I have a tough enough time visualizing my way through an expense account without visualizing my higher self."

"The cynic outs himself?" said Alex, almost gently.

"Yeah, well... I've never matured into the New Age, I guess. Communal soul groping doesn't ring any chimes for me."

"I had a—a friend once, who believed in reincarnation," said Alex, staring out across the crowds as Mulder did, absently drumming his fingers on the bench back. "I've never really understood how someone can believe they'll live over and over again—and still cling to their own miserable fucking life so strongly."

"Lots of reasons. Most believe they need to learn some lesson in their present incarnation—that the spirit is evolving, progressing through the 'school of life' by means of repeated embodiments."

"Uh-huh." Alex cast a dry look his way. "For a skeptic, you know a good bit."

Mulder smiled over at him. "Oh, you know—I had a friend."

Their eyes met, broke apart again. Both men stared face forward across the plaza, toward the buskers and hawkers, the invigorated street preachers and the sun-melting wanderers.

"You don't believe it then—that we'll live again?" Alex heard his own words, spoken offhand, just for something to say, and wondered what the chances were that such a wildly speculative theory was true. His mind, flashing once with the cruel indecency of a camera, reprinted the tableau of his parent's deaths, their blood-spattered, unmoving bodies freezing into the winter snow and memory.

"I don't disbelieve it. I just don't know... and the doubt has been... useful."

In the smallish pause that followed, Alex waited silently, not looking at Mulder. After a minute Mulder spoke again, quietly, abstractedly. He spoke in such a normal, conversational tone of voice that it took Alex a moment to realize he must be quoting.

"It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where then is the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel? —Do you imagine that I repine at Providence or curse my creation, because I go out of life, and put a period to a being, which, were it to continue, would render me miserable?"

He gazed gravely out across the teeming plaza, then turned his head to regard Alex with odd, disquieting calm. "Is it because human life is of such great importance, that 'tis a presumption for human prudence to dispose of it? But the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster... "

After another momentary silence, Alex said: "Shakespeare?"

"David Hume."

"Must have missed that class."

"An irreligious old skeptic—atheist, actually—after my own heart. My sixteen-year-old heart, that is. The affair only lasted a summer."

Alex blinked, shook his head. "I'm not going to ask—because I know I'm going to look like an idiot."

"Eighteenth century," Mulder said smiling. "And before you do ask, no temporal transmigration was involved."

"Mmm... you were—suicidal?"

There was no reply from the other half of the bench, and Alex didn't dare pursue the question. He'd been given only the abridged version of Mulder's history, but he knew enough not to push now.

Mulder's cellular rang, and both men instinctively straightened.

"Mulder." Pause. "You aren't actually at the lab, are you? You should be gone fishin', or out doing whatever it is that good little Scullys do on their days off." Longer pause. "You'll get something in your stocking for this—you know, I think Godiva's somewhere just down the street... women always think they're fat—it's all done with mirrors, Scully... " Much longer pause, then: "Great—I guess. At least it's something to think about. Now go home... mmm, somewhere deep 'in the very heart of it', surrounded by rare and wondrous freaks of nature—don't say it... actually, surprisingly well. I haven't had to use the cuffs yet—don't say it... okay."

He snapped the phone shut. "Scully's been running on her little wheel all day down in the lab. She managed to snare some of the more hapless members of her support staff into working on our evidence—drug and food samples, the mouse and cross we found." Mulder stood and stretched, with carelessly sensual motions. "Do you want the long or the short version?"

Alex rose and tucked his hands in his front pockets. "I don't know—do I want the long or the short version?"

They began walking slowly back up Fifth Avenue.

"Well, it turns out that one of the bottles in Grissom's medicine cabinet, though labelled for Codeine, actually had a mix of pills inside—either he liked to play a kind of pharmacological roulette, or it just served as a useful cocktail shaker. They were all drugs used for treating either pain or migraines. Two of the tablets were Ergomar—ergotamine, in other words."

"That's what you were looking for," said Alex quickly. He wondered whether this implied a break in the case, but—given Mulder's own phlegmatic response—decided it must not.

"I'm not so sure. Oddly enough, to complicate matters, there were also very trace amounts of lysergic acid hydroxybutylamide in the bottle. Methylergonovine. It's a derivative of lysergic acid—kind of a kissing cousin to LSD. But it's usually used to stop excessive bleeding in childbirth."

"O-kay," said Alex, grimacing in exasperation. "So, unless he was giving birth to his inner child and suffered complications—"

"Ha-ha."

"—this means what?"

"I have no idea. But I'm not ready to take this as evidence of an ergotismic hallucination. We don't know if Grissom had taken any Ergomar recently."

"Will we?"

Mulder made a tiny face, and said in rote, sing-song fashion, obviously quoting Scully: "Oral or sublingual administration of ergotamine by itself usually results in undetectable systemic drug concentrations, because of extensive first-pass metabolism. Bioavailability is usually less than one percent." In a more normal voice, he added, "Ergotamine is metabolized in the liver by 'largely undefined pathways'. About ninety percent of the metabolites are excreted in the bile—I'm told—and only traces of unmetabolized drug can be found in urine and feces. Something called vasoconstriction should endure for twenty-four hours plus, despite a plasma half-life of approximately two hours."

"What does all that mean?" asked Alex, determined not to be embarrassed for having to ask.

"Short version? She's found no trace in bloodwork or biopsy to indicate the presence of any ergot derivative."

They walked in shared, thoughtful silence for a minute, before Alex said, "What about the mouse—the cross?"

"Pulling anything off the cross, if that's possible, will be a tedious process. They don't have anything yet, and I didn't expect them to. The mouse died from the direct effects of ingesting the anticoagulant warfarin—his blood stopped clotting and his wee heart stopped beating. You were right—ze mousie, he vhas poisoned. Unfortunately, his death has no bearing on our case. As to how he got into the box—that remains a minor X-File for now."

Alex brought them to a halt by pausing in front of Modavo. Coolly he scanned the watches in the window display—minimalist black discs strapped to white upraised hands that seemed, in their disembodied and elegant way, to be imploring heaven for another martini, please, darling.

"You didn't want to try and interview the maid tonight, did you?" he said to Mulder. Asking the question, the irony struck him: this was supposedly hiscase, and he'd spent the last two days deferring to Mulder at every turn, note-taking like a good boy and generally playing apprentice to Mulder's mentor. He wondered if a little more spunk might be in order, but wasn't sure. Mulder was the senior agent. Anyway, the case itself was less than half the picture, and the role he played probably served his needs better than leading-man status would. Time spent wrestling Mulder for the upper hand would distract him from his observations.

"God, no. Even I'm not that much of a swot."

Alex frowned. "Sorry—what?"

They drifted off again down the street. "Swot—it's British slang," Mulder said. He was turning a searching gaze around the street as he spoke, perhaps seeking another ice cream vendor. "Kind of like their version of a nerd, someone who grinds away at the books or chronically overworks."

"Oxford."

Mulder looked at him askance. "Oh, please—not that anglophilic, envious tone again. It's just a really old school full of hormonally active kids trying to get by without going crazy. Same as anywhere."

"It's not the same."

"Well, look where it's got me, Alex," Mulder said with gentle but bone-dry irony. They traded a glance, and Alex had to smile. "Some of the truest lunatics I've ever known wander the hallowed halls of Oxford—and those are just the dons. I follow in a grand tradition, all right, but it's not all laurel and ivy."

"Yeah, but still... " Alex stared off moodily down the street, then at Mulder, who'd taken his turn at window shopping now, and had stopped in front of Alex to peer through the storefront of Crabtree & Evelyn. Sunlight poured itself over him as if it burned for him alone. A honeyed halo enveloped his face and light picked up glinting red threads in his hair, fine, unexpected, and fiery. Fox—yes. A fox's fur, a fox's elusive presence. A loose olive-green tee-shirt followed the lines of his torso and tucked into his faded jeans, their combined effect heightening every curve and shallow masculine hollow of his body into even sharper definition.

"I really should get Scully something... "

Why did you have to look like this?

"I think she goes for these smelly, flowery types of things—"

Traitor. Alien-loving seditionist.

"Oils and creams and soaps. Myself, I've always found something morbid and funerary about that whole aesthetic—"

It's weakness to want you. I don't want you. A little jingle in the balls doesn't mean anything... just horniness. You're just another guy sliding slowly out of your prime... fifteen, twenty years from now you won't be so pretty any more and then all your ufology bullshit won't be so cute... but you are... awfully cute. Bastard.

"—shoving a sharp instrument up the nose, breaking the bone between the nasal and brain cavities, then picking the brain out piece by piece with a hook—or they'd stir it up until it liquefied, then turn the body face-down so that it poured out the nostrils."

Alex blinked at Mulder, who was lecturing with placid professorial interest to his own reflection in the shop window. "What?"

"The Egyptians didn't realize the importance of the brain—they thought it was just this big, snot-producing sponge."

"Sponge. Right." Don't ask.

They went in the shop and Mulder sniffed around—literally—searching for something that, in his own words, "won't require opening windows when she's in the same room with me". No bull in a china shop was Mulder, but rather a greyhound in a parlor, ranging here and there, poking his elegant, longish nose into scent bottles and sachets, and looking on the whole slightly uncomfortable in the boutique's elaborately feminine setting. His smooth face was cast so as not to betray his feelings—be they mild unease or manly panic, but he shifted around the shop in a blank, unsettled fashion that didn't quite square with his usual blase demeanor.

Alex found it amusing to watch; nonchalant himself, he leaned against a support post and let himself be chatted up by a sales assistant who'd approached him, while keeping Mulder always in his field of vision. The salesgirl, blonde and svelte, presented a heavily glossed facade appropriate to the store's ambiance but subverted by hints of a former, punkish incarnation: multiple but empty piercing holes in ears and nose, fading razor scars on tanned arms, a flowered swastika just visible under the sheer white linen of her blouse. In a euphonious vowel-rich drawl whose origin Alex couldn't pinpoint, Camilla (according to her name-tag) flirted professionally and attempted in oh-so-subtle fashion to prod him toward a purchase.

Eventually she noticed she didn't have his full attention and followed his gaze across the store to Mulder, who had been cornered in bath oils by a short, matronly woman who was holding a bottle under his nose. His brow had wrinkled a bit by now, and his eyes had taken on a hint of well-mannered worry, as if he were being tested and was unsure of passing.

"Boyfriend?" asked Camilla, with an admirably apathetic tone.

"Partner," Alex replied, enjoying the use of the deliberately ambiguous word.

"Oh yeah, that's nice." Affected, commercial interest had waned from Camilla, disclosing a more personal ennui, but some sticky force—inertia, perhaps—kept her at Alex's side.

"Tell me something," Alex said, leaning conspiratorially toward her. "Do you think he's cute?"

Dispassionately, Camilla studied Mulder across the distance of the store. "Not bad. Bit of an ectomorph. The hair—well, I guess if he's going for that retro, early-eighties, Flock of Seagulls meets John Boy look... but I hope he didn't tip his stylist too well. Yeah, but he's cute—got that sweet Jewish je ne sais quoi going for him. God, I used to fall for that," she said in a bored voice. "Jeff Goldblum, you know. Seinfeld. Kafka." She rolled her cool blue eyes, while maintaining a face devoid of any animation whatsoever.

Alex, folding his arms and leaning back against the post, grinned. "Jewish—I hadn't noticed. I don't think he is."

"Yeah, well, whatever. Let me know if you need any help." She wandered off.

Mulder finally found something, paid for it, and returned to Alex, holding the flowered paper bag slightly away from his body as if it held a bomb or a Christmas bauble. "Let's go," he muttered, and looked relieved once they were back on the street.

The light left now in the sky was lower. Clouds had piled up further in the high ceiling, gray wool that breathed and slowly drifted pieces of itself across one another; yet at the skyline and just above lay long strips of yellow, visible among the spires like slivers of gilded lemon peel. The brightness of the day was being pressed flat, but still held out. It had become almost intolerably humid, however, for the humans crawling across the city's lowest level. In the air one could feel, presciently, the coming deluge.

"It's going to rain," Alex remarked. Anticipation of the weather was infecting him with a building restlessness; humidity dragged at him like a wet, heavy blanket. He stopped walking. "You know," he said, "we're still near the Rainbow Room—we could drop in at the Promenade without reservations—watch the storm from the top of the city."

"We're not dressed for it."

"We'll get in," Alex said, a sly smile sliding across his lips.

"I'm not pulling my badge to get into a restaurant, Krycek, and I left my gun at the hotel, which is what it would take for us to get into the Promenade dressed like this."

"I'll bet you dinner I can get us in without gun or badge—deal?"

Mulder narrowed his eyes. "Is it going to be publicly embarrassing and legally actionable?"

"Relax." Alex turned and began to walk, then—when he realized Mulder was merely staring after him with a single, skeptical brow raised: "Mulder, none of the above, okay? Now come on, before it starts to rain."

xx

Later...

"You have to tell me how."

"That wasn't part of the deal."

Mulder stared across the table at him, obviously annoyed. A stubborn, offended set had subtly realigned his jaw. "It's implied. How do I know you didn't use your badge—or threaten him with your gun?"

"I don't have my gun with me."

"You did use your badge, didn't you."

"I didn't."

"Money—you bribed him."

"I think I'm going to have the grilled swordfish sandwich." Alex cheerfully scanned the menu. "Shrimp cocktail, of course... smoked salmon... "

"You have to tell me."

"Whining won't get you out of this, Mulder."

"I'm not—" Mulder grated irritably to a stop, gathered a breath, calmed himself. He eyed Krycek for a moment, then allowed a small smile to bend the set of his lips. "You went off with the maitre d' to the cloakroom for five minutes and you both came back satisfied... you want me to draw the conclusion?"

Alex looked up from studying his menu, eyes gleaming under lush lashes. "If you like, Mulder."

Mulder dipped his head gently and gave his own studious attention to entrees. "Slut," he said mildly into his menu.

"The shrimp cocktails are only twelve dollars," Alex noticed aloud to himself. "Maybe I'll get two... "

xx

For a time the cloud banks had glittered with electricity at the edges, their billows lit and stroked with the storm's rising charge. Then the storm had broken, combing the lightshow with torrential rain. The first rush lasted less than fifteen minutes, but the sky promised more.

It was still light outside when they left the restaurant, but just barely. Fading fast at the edges of the city, the lingering day gave way to dusk and then evening in quick order, and in its wake the urban, artificial dazzle of the city switched itself on. Swathed in neon and pricked above by countless window lights, the jungle awoke. By the time Mulder and Krycek had half made their way back to the hotel, darkness had settled in. Muggy air had been partially ionized by the storm and steam still rose in places from the cooling pavements. Persons passing them on the street had a harder, more purposeful look than those seen out earlier; in general, there was an impression that two waves of people were meeting uneasily on the street, those quickly finding their ways home, and those who'd just awoken and were starting their day off with a prowl. Within a few hours, the sidewalks would be far emptier, insidiously desolate.

Most shops had closed but the bright store-front windows gave window on a tranquil, boxed-in world of fashionably dressed mannequins, who coolly watched the foot traffic outside their cells. Many seemed always on the verge of violent motion, but never (as far as one could tell) moved.

Even two men with badges, men accustomed to carrying guns, were not inclined to linger on the night streets of New York, and Mulder and Krycek didn't dawdle as they returned to the hotel.

"Think we should have taken a cab?" Mulder asked, glancing over his shoulder as they turned down 47th. Behind them Fifth was still relatively bustling; the cross street ahead was nearly empty.

"Maybe... but for a few blocks... " Alex shrugged, but his eyes were in constant casual motion, flicking from building to building, between cars and around piled-up garbage deposits.

The attack came not from an alley or out of a shadowed stairwell, but from a surprisingly well-dressed young man who had been approaching them steadily for half a minute before reaching them and pulling a gun from his suit pocket.

"Wallets and watches," he said in a bored voice, a conductor requesting tickets please for the hundred thousandth time.

"Shit," Mulder said, more annoyed than scared. Glowering at their mugger, he pulled out his wallet and began to remove the money.

"Toss it over," said the man, gesturing with his free hand.

After a second's hesitation, Mulder did. Incredibly, the mugger plucked it out of the air one-handed. His gun hand didn't even waver. Seeing that, Mulder almost thought he deserved the money. The man didn't look into the wallet, merely tucked it in his hip pocket.

"I need that back," Mulder said, frowning. It has my badge in it, he almost said, before reconsidering. "Can't you just take the money out?"

"Watch," the man said, then squinted at Mulder's wrist in the street's dim light. "Nah, wait—never mind. Keep it." He turned the gun slightly toward Alex. "Wallet, watch—hurry up, man." Though the words might have suggested impatience, his voice was calm.

Mulder glanced sidelong at Krycek, who'd slid his hands into his pockets and was beginning to get a very dangerous gleam in his... oh shit.

"Krycek," Mulder said evenly. "Give him your wallet."

And Krycek—incredibly—turned to look at him, lips parted slightly in derision. "Oh, please," he said dryly.

The words macho fucking hot-shot lunaticflashed by in Mulder's brain in the space of an instant. Shaking his head once in simple disbelief, he quietly ground out: "Krycek—"

"It's just a .22, Mulder." To the mugger, Krycek said, "You'll have to shoot me if you want anything, asshole. And when you do I'm going to tear your fucking throat out."

"Crazy bastard," the mugger said, shaking his own head now, then cocking it to one side, apparently measuring Krycek and weighing matters. "Ah, screw it," he said after a moment, turning in the space of an instant and darting off down an alley.

Krycek, before Mulder could even react, followed. He caught up with the mugger halfway down the alley, slammed him into a brick wall, and did something in the shadowy crush of their bodies that caused the man to scream once in surprised pain, something that was immediately followed by an ugly cracking sound. It was bone, not gun; when Mulder, quick on Krycek's heels, reached them, the erstwhile mugger was slumped against the bricks cradling his right arm against him and groaning pitiably.

As Mulder, mildly stunned, stared back and forth between the man and Krycek, Krycek leaned down and pulled Mulder's wallet free. The gun now rested casually in his left hand, pointing toward the ground. It looked comfortable there; disturbingly so. He straightened up, handed Mulder his wallet, then looked consideringly down at the man before them.

"Should I shoot him?" he asked Mulder conversationally. The mugger moaned, then began to curse and cry softly, the mingled sounds threading with the light patter of rain, which was resuming as they stood there.

"Are you fucking nuts?" Mulder said. In fluid, almost unthinking motions, he grabbed the gun from Krycek's hand, flipped open the chamber, and emptied out the bullets.

"I was just kidding, Mulder." Krycek kicked the mugger's leg. "Stop whining."

It was hard to be sure which of them the command was intended for, but Mulder decided to assume it was the mugger. Rain was pouring harder now into the dim, trash-heaped alley. Mulder ran a hand through his hair, tucked the gun carefully in his pocket. "We'll have to take him to the police station," he said reluctantly after a few moments of thought.

"You can if you want," said Krycek. "I'm going back to the hotel." In the poor light it was hard to read his face, but Mulder sensed his defiance, offhand yet somehow hard as steel.

"We're federal agents, Krycek—" At the mugger's distressed groan ("Oh, fuck"), Mulder scowled and prodded the man with his foot. "Shut up." To Krycek, he added angrily, "We have to take him in—we can't just leave him here."

"Yeah? Why not? We've got better things to do. At least I do. You know how many fucking muggers there are in this city? They're like cockroaches—rats. The system is clogged with them. Besides, look at him—he's probably an investment banker on the side. On his way to a party, needed to feed his meter and didn't have any spare change on him." He kicked the mugger again, none too gently. "Right, asshole? On your way to the corner store for a snowcone?"

"Yeah, man, that's all—I've never done this bef—"

"Shut the fuck up," said Krycek irritably. The man fell silent again. "Come on, Mulder, there's gotta be something good on HBO. You want to spend your Saturday night down at Manhattan South filling out paperwork?"

There was a brief silence. "You broke his arm."

"Yeah, well—" It was the equivalent of a verbal shrug. "He doesn't have to walk on it."

Another brief silence passed before Mulder said quietly, "Fine." He turned to the man on the ground. "Give me your wallet."

Dazed, bewildered, the mugger looked up at Mulder. "Wh—what?"

Krycek kicked him.

"Man, cut it out—no, hey--okay, I'm sorry—fuck—" Cringing from Krycek and favoring his broken arm, the mugger struggled to pull his wallet from an interior jacket pocket. After a few moments, Mulder leaned down and did it for him. He opened it, found the man's ID, studied it a moment, and then pocketed it. The wallet he tossed in the man's lap.

"You know," Mulder said, moving in and speaking very quietly to Krycek, "if we turn this gun over—as we should—and evidence links it to a previous crime... we're going to have to live with the knowledge that we let this guy walk."

Dark eyes caught an inkling of reflection from a dim security light as the other man's head tilted. "You're such a boy scout, Mulder." Krycek's voice was low, husky, and amused. Their faces were close in the dimness and rain and Mulder, reacting to those velvety, sensual tones, felt a spill of heat descend his body despite himself, despite the circumstances.

When Krycek's mouth suddenly claimed his he gasped roughly into the kiss; a hot, viciously skillful tongue filled him and stroked the arched, aching vault of his mouth. The rawness, the heat, the unexpected invasion of skull and breath made Mulder want to cry out with pleasure, but the sound of his desire came out as a harsh, dry sob. He felt that exact moment when the rubbery anonymity of his own face was stripped from him like a mask, as the flesh of his lips and cheeks and throat ignited and flew back like brushfire across his suddenly tingling scalp. Oh god—and then the rush of flame outstripped thought and drove through every nerve in his body, down and further down, until he was in danger of falling, weak and smoking, where he stood.

The silken mouth of his demon, his partner, withdrew as abruptly as it had attacked. "You want we should bring him in now?" he asked, softly, wickedly teasing.

"Oh—god—fuck—" Mulder could barely speak. His cock, tightening to a hard, pressing ache against the stiff material of his jeans, throbbed as if an echo of his voice. Desire was an almost blinding pain that could have driven him easily to his knees. It needed only a nudge to send him falling, greedy and supplicating, in front of Krycek.

Let me suck you, you fucking bastard, he wanted to say. His mouth ached, hurt, and hungered to be filled again.

"Jesus, fucking queers—" Sneering up at the two agents, the mugger seemed to have forgotten his own predicament momentarily, but a split second later the lightning-flash impact of Krycek's foot on his broken ulna recalled him to it.

"Ah—ah—fuck—" The man rolled over onto his side, gagging helplessly.

The impact of foot on bone, the man's harsh angry cry, sent a further surge of wild, sickening lust through Mulder's body that no moral conscience could scrub clean. His cock was stiff as a spike and he had a sudden, world-tilting desire to lay down on the filthy ground and offer himself with legs spread—he wanted to feel Krycek's foot rub dangerously over his aching flesh and then press... hard... until...

I'm clearly out of my fucking mind. Mulder looked at the other man in the shadows, only the tiniest glimmer of light in the alley lending itself to the stygian chiaroscuro of his form. He's a lunatic, a savage, probably a sadist...

Bemused, saturated with arousal, it took a moment for Mulder to recall just what argument he was trying to make to himself.

Mmm. Oh yeah—

He was dangerous, this one. And not to be trusted.

"Mulder, let's go." Krycek's whisper slid into his ear and uncoiled there like a kiss, tempting and serpentine.

They went.

xx

The remainder of the journey back to the hotel was for the most part strained, difficult, forgettable. Arousal ebbed just enough to make walking possible, but lingered like the effects of wine in Mulder's veins, causing his limbs to tangle awkwardly and his breath to come in irregular, distracting rhythms. Impossible not to be aware of Krycek next to him, a dark figure pacing him, a devil riding at his side in the wicked night. What would happen once they were ensconced in their close, insulated hotel room Mulder didn't know, but even before they reached their destination, at a streetlight under which a dowdy, conjugal couple was passing from the other direction, Krycek grabbed him and slammed him up against the metal. The couple looked their way but didn't pause—hastened their pace, rather, muttering to themselves, as Krycek kissed him roughly. Still clutching Scully's present in one hand, Mulder tried not to let go of this single, mundane talisman that was tethering him to anything approaching reality.

The feel of hard muscle twisting and straining against his own desperate body made him erect again in seconds, and for one eager, lust-mad moment Mulder was certain that Krycek was going to turn him and take him right there in the open, under the harsh illumination of the streetlight—and was certain that he would let him.

I thought we weren't going to do this, he might have said, but didn't. It was too good, he didn't want the other man to come to his senses—such as they were—and stop. His clothes, rain-damp and heated, hung upon his body as if constituting a snakeskin he was on the verge of outgrowing; he could feel the shifting millimeters of separation between cloth and skin, a layer of chafing, contained heat that he needed to peel free if he were to continue breathing. A hand yanked his tee shirt loose from his jeans, slid up along his bare skin, and then slid around behind him, cupping his ass, drawing him close. He arched once, voluptuously, as civilized inhibitions loosened further.

With damnable placement, his cellular was in the direct path of Krycek's hand, a back-pocket barrier between palm and ass, and becoming aware of it Mulder had a sudden, panicky fear it was going to start ringing as they stood there.

"Public indecency," he muttered into Krycek's mouth, around the swirling bow of his tongue.

"Mmm, yeah... " A warm, laugh-laden breath burst gently into Mulder's own open mouth, followed immediately by a soft groan that sent tickling reverberations down his throat, and lower. Their bodies twined impossibly closer, welding them head to toe in sensation, a range that contained the friction of lightly risen whiskers, denim, wet cotton, and working muscle. The rain, indecisive, had retreated again, but a fine mist remained and bathed them in a dense, humid element that seemed the very aura of their lust.

Breaking the kiss, Mulder rubbed his cheek against Krycek's jaw and neck, and then against the hard curve of his shoulder. Arms tightened around him, hands seized and searched the tense muscles of his back as if to give comfort. But it was not that which was being offered. The intoxicating scent of Krycek's body (burning beach sand a holocaust of crushed diamonds steaming off spilled oil sun heated) brought to the surface of Mulder's desire the memories of previous lovers, rising and mingling like smoke from his present burning. He knew what he was getting into, and it was likely to be very messy, very complicated... it would not fit neatly into his life as he'd been living it.

Except that he hadn't been living. Until now.

"You're just a kid," he said into Krycek's shoulder. He lifted his head, and wan lamp light washed over both their faces. "This is highway cradle-robbery."

"A kid—" Krycek laughed softly. "A kid, Mulder?"

"Mmm... a big kid, but still... " Mulder's voice slid away into a murmur.

Kryeck's own voice lowered, darkened to the brooding growl of thunder just before the lightning's flare. "Do you know what I'm going to do to you?"

"Oh, god—" Gasping, Mulder took the other man's mouth with plundering urgency, sliding his tongue into that silken pocket, tasting fire.

The rest of the journey back to the hotel was, relative to the great scheme of things, almost instantaneous.

"I think the bell-hop was onto us," Mulder said, pressing his forehead briefly into the warm shallow declivity between Krycek's shoulder blades. Krycek drew one of Mulder's hands around his waist, and tilted his head back, watching the elevator lights flash their ascension.

"Yeah, Mulder, you can forget your good name—your reputation at the Roger Smith is ruined."

In answer, Mulder pressed a kiss against the nape of his neck, on the tip of his spine, and then laid several more kisses there, whispering nonsensical nothings as he did. "Your occipital bone articulates with your atlas... articulates with your axis—you've got a great axis, Alex... nice parietals... the winged sphenoid... mmm, there's just something about a man's inion... "

Alex closed his eyes briefly, reminded himself to breathe. He tried to tell himself that the man standing behind him was too old and too ordinary to meet his exacting standards, but neither was true. He was lovely and very weird, and Alex wanted him more and more with every passing moment. He tried then to tell himself that he would pay for this diversion in ways countless and unforeseeable, that his career was placed in jeopardy and his plans at risk by such a personal, dangerous indulgence... but he wasn't listening to himself. He didn't care.

The elevator brought them to their floor, and in brief, well-behaved guise they passed various other guests on their ways to or from dinner, then tumbled into their room like puppies, cooperatively kicking the door shut behind them, kissing hungrily before they were more than a half foot in.

"Alex—Alex, wait—listen—" With lustful disregard Mulder chucked the soggy flowered bag containing Scully's present onto the floor and slid both hands, free now, around him. "Listen—"

"I'm listening," Alex said, with a touch of foreboding.

"Like beautiful bodies which never grew old / tearfully sealed in a bright mausoleum, / at their heads roses and at their feet jasmine— / so look desires that grow cold unfulfilled, / forever denied even one night of pleasure, / or one of its light-filled mornings... hmm... don't you think?" He laughed at Alex's expression.

"You—that's what—"

"Library shelves are always so telling. I like a literate man."

"Not literate, just lucky," Alex said cryptically. His entire poetry collection represented the numerous hopeful gifts of a discarded lover trying to resume his bed. It would be a fine irony if their suggestive lure had drawn Mulder there. He wanted to be able to quote something back, but no words came to him; he'd never in his life memorized a poem with anything like Mulder's casual ease. He slid his hands up under Mulder's jaw, cupped his face. "Mulder... " His lips twitched, eyes gleamed. "Can I stop calling you Mulder, now?"

Mulder groaned, butted him forehead to forehead, gently. "Don't ask me that," he said. "Just... don't ask, all right?"

Don't ask, just do? Alex wondered. He stroked a thumb up along the other man's jaw, traced the orbital ridge under one eye, where the shadows gathered like a ghostly feathering under the skin. Green eyes considered him, half obscured by heavy, sensual eyelids and the gilded, fox-fur lashes.

"What do you like, Mulder?" he asked softly, teasing him with the light, padded caress of his thumb, bringing it back down along the arch of his cheek, then running it along his lips. "What do you want me to do to you?"

"To me?" Mulder asked with interest, eyelids lowering another notch.

"To you, with you... for you."

"I think you've already done it," Mulder said, laughing. His face, wide open, spilled out simple happiness to Alex's view.

Almost wincing at the sight, Alex pressed his thumb across Mulder's lips, as if in a silencing gesture. He didn't want to hear Mulder's laughter, not real laughter. Just his cries. His groans. Letting hunger guide his hand, he moved it lower, running the thumb roughly down Mulder's throat into the hollow at the base, then stroking it across his windpipe. Trachea... hyoid bone... carotid arteries... jugular... Mulder was a finger's width away from death, all it needed was a pressure, a touch... Alex stroked the other man's throat and watched as it arched, watched the pulse contained within accelerate, beating with increasing rapidity under the skin.

When he pressed briefly against the left carotid, Mulder's breath caught. His eyes, bright and unreadable, bored into Alex's, and Alex let his touch ease. For a moment they stared at one another, then Mulder shook off his paralysis and flowed into him like a river. It was several long minutes before the warm, fluid weave of their tongues became insufficient in itself, and then almost as one mind both men began stripping themselves and each other.

Breaking apart to remove shoes put a momentary distance between them, and Alex, toeing off his sneakers, hesitated, then looked up to speak. "Uh, Mulder, I—I'm clean... I just thought I'd tell you. My last test was two weeks ago."

Mulder, tossing his socks impatiently aside, glanced up. "My sex life of late—virtual, solo, pseudo—hasn't exactly introduced me to any risk factors." He straightened and stood with his hands hooked in the waist of his jeans. "I haven't been tested for several months, but I don't have any reason to think I'm not clean."

Alex eyed him with glittering humor, letting his gaze slide down his bare chest and across tight denim. "Yeah, well you certainly look clean, Spud."

Suddenly Mulder stared off to one side; struck by a thought, he seemed to be trying to remember something. "Oh, no—" He looked back at Alex, lips parted, face dismayed. "I don't have anything—do you?"

"Some boy scout you are. Lucky for you, though... " Trailing off with a smirk and a wink, Alex sifted the contents of his open suitcase until he found a handful of condoms and a small tube.

"Hmm." Mulder eyed the items as Alex placed them on the bedside table. "Four condoms? Is he well-prepared or over-sexed, I ask myself."

Alex drew close again. "Why not... optimistic?"

"Mmm... why not."

They stood between the beds, bathed in the rather pinkish glow cast by the room's lamps. For a minute or more they stroked each other's bared chests and arms, both absorbed by the novelty of the occasion, in no hurry—just then—to hasten it. Now and then they kissed, lazily.

After one such kiss, Mulder drew back, looking distracted again, and said, "Oh, wait, what did you do with the handcuffs—", then laughed as Alex pulled him aggressively close. Their bodies shifted together almost as if dancing.

"I knew it, Mulder, you sick, twisted fuck." Alex grinned wickedly against his lips. "And don't try and tell me you were just joking. It won't work."

"Wrong kind of headboard," Mulder said with mock (or half mock) regret.

"Another time," Alex said, promise smoldering in his face and eyes.

Mulder leaned in. Deepening shivers were expanding in his flesh in slow, hot waves, a rippling backdrop of sensation to his tumbling, skipping thoughts. Another time. He searched Alex's face and dark eyes, smiling just a little, mixed emotions painting the smile with the faintest of shadow. "Alex... there's something I should tell you—"

Alex groaned and gave him a surly, irritated look. "No, Mulder. There's not. I don't want to hear about your STD or your fiancée or your inoperable brain tumor. I just want to fuck, okay?" Then, at the adamantine patience on Mulder's face, he sighed. "What?"

"I... " Mulder hesitated, then at Alex's equally impatient expression, said slowly, searchingly: "I talk a lot, during sex... "

"Is that all? I'll gag you."

Mulder's grave, almost Mona Lisa smile didn't noticeably alter in response. Alex himself wasn't entirely sure whether he'd been joking or not.

"I sleep poorly, I steal the sheets, I kick my bed partners and sometimes wake screaming. I believe in aliens, I drink the last beer... when I don't talk too much I don't talk enough. I get on people's nerves, I annoy waiters and embarrass my friends and the people who know me best usually end up suggesting I seek counseling. Words used by various acquaintances to describe my sparkling personality have included tactless, rude, juvenile, socially autistic, obsessive, neurotic, paranoid, psychologically disturbed, subclinically depressed, fashion-impaired—"

"Mulder, shut up," Alex said gently.

"Oh, but there's more." Mulder smiled, but his smooth face remained essentially unreadable.

"I don't care. You're assuming a lot. Who says we'll get to know each other that well?"

Another man might have been offended at this point—a woman certainly—but Mulder looked almost relieved. His smile relaxed a notch. "Yeah. Okay. Let's boff, baby."

"Oh, so romantic," Alex laughed. Abruptly he pushed Mulder sprawling onto the bed behind him and dropped to his knees between the collapsed vee of his legs. Mulder shifted, at first planting his feet more firmly on the ground and then drawing them up to rest on Alex's shoulders, where he kneaded his toes and heels into the smooth congruence of muscled arms.

Alex bent his head, kissed one fine and elegant foot. From above and beyond there rose soft little sounds, hums and murmurs that gradually flowered into speech. He did talk a lot. Alex wondered if it was a method to slow down and distract himself from arousal. For a few minutes he half listened, trying to follow the trail of words—scraps of poetry, odd anatomical observations, things he'd seen on Wild Kingdom as a child—then tuned him more or less out, figuring that when Mulder said something truly pertinent the urgency would communicate itself.

Jeans allowed only a limited access to the legs sprawled bountifully in front of him, so Alex didn't waste much time before he reached up and began wrenching at the fly. Though rough and purposeful, his motions were rewarded with a pleased sound that interrupted the flow of speech. Two warm hands closed over his and entwined long fingers into his own.

"You're making this difficult," Alex said. He tried to tug his hands free, but Mulder's fingers had formed a surprisingly strong weave. Goaded by frustration and zany impulse, Alex leaned forward and began tugging the zipper with his teeth. Between tugs he said, "I know—this was—your plan—" Stiffening flesh, still barricaded behind thick denim, swelled under his lips, and the strong fingers loosened, unlocking Alex's hands and sliding off into his hair, carding its strands. Alex shook himself free. Trying to evade Mulder's busy hands was rather like trying to escape the importuning clutches of some quickly mutating kudzu.

"Castrated by his own zipper—there's an epitaph—ouch—oops, the cellular—just, can you—Alex, watch it—can you put the gun in the night-table drawer—god, what would Scully say, I can't believe I let you talk me into... um... yes, that's... you're very talented, m'boy... mmm, did you know that the rate of tongue flicking in snakes and lizards indicates the stimulation of the vomeronasal organ... it's thought that we humans have our own version... right now as you're licking up my molecules you're probably receiving a whole bundle of pheromones and chemical signals that I'm not even aware of sending... mounting signals, probably... hamsters have a vomeronasal organ... vomeronasal... and they're so dependent on olfactory signals that a male won't mate if he can't sniff... do hamsters catch colds... mmm, part of the hamster mating ritual involves the male slinking up to the female's side and sniffing and licking her flank gland... you can tell a lot about a girl that way... "

"Mulder, has anyone ever told you, you know waytoo much about the sex lives of hamsters?" Alex, having licked his way up Mulder's legs, began rubbing his cheeks teasingly against the hard wishbone of his hips, on either side of the tightening briefs.

The flow of words began to pick up speed, punctuated by breathless gasps. "It's not... an intimate knowledge—oh... um—Alex, have you ever thought about whether you're to eron or ton eromenon? The lover or the beloved... no, I don't suppose it's relevant... I should ask if you're paiderastes or philerastes... no reason you can't be both, of course... I've never really found a great affinity in Platonic erotics myself, but you see it everywhere in the clubs... in a debased form... as the saying goes... and without the phil—oh—the philosophical context of the aphrodisia, but—"

Alex slid his tongue across the other man's enclothed erection, in a broad, hard swathe that traced its straining silhouette with precise cruelty.

"—oh, god—Alex—oh—yes—that's—oh, god—wait—wait—fuck, I didn't mean stop, you bastard—"

Standing, Alex quickly began shucking off his own jeans, leaving Mulder sprawled and groaning on the bed before him. He was, Alex thought, almost absurdly cute, more like a precocious ten-year-old than a man who'd never see thirty again. He propped his head awkwardly on one arm and pouted up at Alex, six lush feet of renegade G-man and wanton national security threat—quite possibly the sexiest risk to its purple mountain majesties the U.S. of A. had yet been blessed with.

I'm doing this for my country, Alex thought. The dramatic whimsy gave him a moment's amusement—not to mention a rather zingy erotic thrill—but he didn't delude himself that it was actually the truth. To hell with work, and case work, and career cultivation. To hell with national security. This was the weekend. He was horny, Mulder was horny, they had the convenience and the correct ephemeral tone of a hotel room at their disposal, and the next mugger they met might not be a half-sprung punk but a super-jaded crackhead packing a magnum—as incentives went, these pretty much covered the basics. Alex knew opportunity when it knocked him in the balls, and fate didn't need to give them any further twist before he took advantage.

"Wait," said Mulder sultrily, eyeing him. He sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed. "Let me help." He slid his arms around Alex's waist and kissed him at an interesting latitude. "Nice abs," he murmured. His tongue flicked into Alex's navel. "Omphalos... the heart of the world." Behind his back, Alex could feel warm, good-sized hands sneaking up into his briefs, cupping his ass and drawing him into further kisses. "Hello... hello," Mulder said, nuzzling lower. Laughter bubbled against the peaked cotton of Alex's briefs. He closed his eyes, and took Mulder's head gently in his hands, sliding palms back and forth through the soft, short hair and feeling it tickle the lengths of his fingers like freshly mown grass.

"I've raised an orchid," Mulder said, smiling dreamily.

"Are you going to help or not?" Alex said, managing speech only with difficulty.

"Yes, let's... " Briefs finally began their descent over hips, then dropped. Alex impatiently kicked them off. He began to push Mulder back again, but the other man resisted. "No—hold on, I want to take some measurements—hey—" Driven by the force of Alex's shove, they tangled together on the bed in a shared laughter that did not quite leave their throats.

"Oh—oh god, Alex—" Mulder said quietly, arching neck and back slightly. He gripped Alex's sleek, wiry body, forbidding him to withdraw his blanketing weight. "Oh god, right there—just—don't—" Gasps followed as Alex began a rocking motion with his hips, driving naked, spear-stricken flesh across Mulder's own trapped cock. When Alex found a groove that drove his cock like a rough, chafing file between Mulder's balls and up along his straining shaft, Mulder's back jack-knifed and his hips twisted wildly, creating a torquing counter-motion that brought them both near the brink in moments.

Only severe self-command allowed Alex to stop moving at that point. The curses that followed entertained him and goaded him, and provided a well-timed excuse to take Mulder in a silencing kiss. And then several more. He stabbed his tongue against Mulder's again and again, and felt in their mouths the intersection of two flames, as if two lighters were being flicked over and over in close proximity, and the harsh grate of the flinted wheels was their own mingled breaths. In the skipping, dancing play of their tongues fire merged with fire fluidly, and their mouths were scalded by the heat they contained.

When mutual asphyxiation seemed a near reality, Alex finally broke away and moved on to other areas. Mulder, gasping, said something about primordial high-temperature high-density plasma ("very big bang, I think, Alex—"), which Alex, for his sake, ignored. Fiercely he bit at Mulder's neck, collarbones, shoulders, nearly drawing blood at each point; no signal from Mulder halted or hindered him, no matter how hard his teeth raked flesh. Only sharpening cries of pleasure rose in the other man's throat (alternating with an agonized rendition of what sounded like a Shakespearian sonnet). Alex, arriving at stiffly readied nipples, gave them in turn sharp bites and the dull, skidding caress of his tongue, until the pressure of Mulder's ever-mobile hands grew violent enough to make their proximity to Alex's throat a danger. He drew back, his body a half-draped curl across Mulder's torso, and ran a finger down the line that bisected his gleaming chest.

"Fox," he said, his voice a husky, uneven tenor, "what would you—"

"Don't call me that," Mulder interrupted in a whisper; the words sounded like a reflexive, well-worn rebuff. His eyes were closed and his head moved from side to side restively.

Alex's face tightened. "I'm going to bite you again, Mulder, if you don't fucking watch it, and you won't like where... you know, if you don't want to be on a first-name basis, we could just play some checkers, watch a little Nick at Nite—"

Mulder groaned. "No... " Heavy-lidded eyes opened, smoldered at Alex. Mulder half propped himself up. "Let me make it up to you," he said softly, a wild, wicked heat showing in his eyes and the hot, glowing planes of his face. Lamp-light, pinkly gold, sank into his skin and hair and became a sunset, shifting to hues in which every variety of rose breathed. In his hair maple trees caught fire and burned and died, leaving behind ashes, cinnamon, dried blood.

Alex reached out and touched his finely carved jawbone, chin, throat. "Gee, Mulder," he said softly back. "I don't know if you can."

"I can be very good, Alex," Mulder said, opening his eyes wider and blinking several times, all innocence.

An intriguing contrast: the lamblike docility of the words themselves and the way in which they rolled out across the rough gravel of that incredibly flat, incredibly sensual voice. Distracted, it took Alex a moment to catch up; before lips, parted in astonishment, began to curve in a not-so-nice smile. "Really? I'll bet you can... but I'll ask you to prove it."

He could be very good, as it turned out.

... infuriating, distracting, inebriating...

Very good, Alex decided, shuddering up into Mulder's skillfully exploring mouth, feeling what could be no more than a half dozen silken hairs rise on a wave of static electricity and brush the base of his cock. Christ. He was talking less now, and that was fine too, and he was a practiced tease, with a inquisitor's refined habit of beginning a pleasure only to stop just when things were starting to get interesting.

"God, Mulder—" Alex bit back a curse as Mulder's tongue left the inside of his upper thigh and wandered carelessly down to his right kneecap. "Tell me something," he ground out, "when you're jacking off, do you stop halfway through to run a load of laundry, answer the mail, read a fucking good book... "

"It's a kind of cubist technique I'm working on developing here," Mulder said to Alex's knee, between kisses. His flat, grave voice mused aloud. "Finishing involves a stupidity of perception. Graceful, spontaneous lines go dull or get lost altogether. Pretty good, hmm? Almost a neat dozen words, if you don't count the little ones. Guy Davenport." Abandoning the one knee, he moved his attention to the other, apparently without any plan other than making a visual study of it.

Cubism indeed. Alex gritted his teeth and regulated his laboring breath, teetering on a razor's edge between exquisite boredom and exquisite ecstasy. "Yeah? You wanna tell me where this Guy is, I've got a bullet with his name on it."

Can't you just talk dirty, Mulder?

Alex felt as flushed and full and ready as he'd ever been in his life; and not just in his cock, either—the entire length of his body, the backs of his eyelids, his earlobes, the backs of his knees, the strip of aching flesh between balls and anus—every pleasure-laden part of him was suffused with sensation, strobic and pulsing, linked by a million sizzling nerves to the lazy, erratic movement of Mulder's mouth. He wanted to cry outand beg for that mouth to descend on his cock—it felt as if it had been dipped in liquid paraffin and he could feel that pearling of need that signaled an almost unbearable tumescence. A single touch of that flame-wet tongue and he would ignite and stream with fire.

"Mulder... "

"Alex?"

Mulder moved to straddle Alex's thighs and settled there, bending to rest his hands on either side of Alex's head and looking down at him with serene, Nilotic attention. A cat contemplating a dinner half chewed, the bird half dead.

Alex groaned, panted. "There's a double standard here, Mulder. Why am I calling you Mulder when you're calling me Alex?"

"You didn't ask me not to," Mulder said reasonably, then smiled. "Want me to call you Krycek?"

"Yeah, right—not." As he spoke, Alex unobtrusively tried to snake himself closer to Mulder's warm, proximate heat, back into that cock-cozy basket he never should have abandoned. "I don't go for those butch, boot-camp games, Mulder. If I wasn't getting used to calling you Mulder you'd be in big trouble... I can think of a lot of other things to call you."

"I'll bet," Mulder said, more seriously than the occasion might have seemed to warrant. He contemplated the other man, shifting back just as the distance between their cocks narrowed to a hair's breadth.

"Fuck," Alex grated out, seething with frustration.

"I need you to know something, Alex." Mulder watched the younger man's eyes snap fully open, flare dangerously and darkly. Before he could speak, Mulder went on. "I don't do this often... I'm not a slut."

Half full—or half empty, Alex thought, not quite able to read the other man's tone. Half joking—or—?

"It's just that... it's been a long time."

Do I look like I give a shit? Alex wondered. "Glad I could help you out, Mulder. Now will you shit or get off the pot—figuratively speaking, please."

Mulder shifted again, welding their bodies together at the most crucially sweet junction and watching Alex's face blossom. Cheeks flushed, lips parted and seemed to grow fuller, eyelids unfurled and descended, and the bloom nodded on the stem with restless, imperative motions.

He really was... attractive, Mulder realized. It fell short, but he could think of no word appropriate to Alex's strange, fey charm. Neither beautiful nor handsome, he might have belonged to some other species (an alien species?) to whom such set, simple terms did not apply. His features, his demeanor, were in constant flux; he altered too quickly to be pinned down. One moment he seemed only the measure of his twenty-odd years and no more—an unpolished kid, a bit naive, almost shy—and then a leprechaun face would peep out behind the mask, mischievous, willful, elementally tricky... and then, in the next shape-shifting moment, he was all panther, feral and vital, dark and sharply fanged. Fey... dangerous... volatile...

He's a fairy, Mulder thought wickedly. Aroused but distracted by his own whimsy, he grinned down at Alex, unaware of the rather dry, smug expression that had stolen across his face.

Alex opened his eyes—realized that he and Mulder had fallen out of synch again—and felt something inside him snap. Swearing, he flipped the other man off of him—and off the bed. Mulder fell onto his ass on the floor between the beds, looking startled and then angry, but only for as long as it took Alex to reach him and haul him up again. He twisted Mulder around, tossed him face down on the other bed, and held him there with one arm forced up behind his back. Mulder had, during his previous accommodations, stripped free of his own briefs. Convenient.

"Mulder, I'm going to fuck you now," Alex said flatly. What remained of civility required that the other man should be informed of this, but that was as far as Alex's manners and patience went. He stretched and snagged a condom and lube from the bedside table, keeping an inexorably strong grip on his prey as he did. One part of his mind noted quickly that it really wasn't necessary—Mulder's struggles were no more than a tentative, pro forma exercise contradicted by the instinctive widening of his legs. But the dominant mode had switched over to domination. Alex was focused.

He ripped the condom wrapper open with his teeth, rolled the rubber on with practiced ease and a sweet frisson of anticipatory pleasure, then fumbled impatiently with the lube until he managed to get at least a nominal amount smeared on his fingers and then on his throbbing cock.

"Jesus, Mulder," he muttered, "I hope you can take this, 'cause I'm waiting only as long as it takes to get my head in the door before I fuck you stupid."

A groan—encouraging, fervent—answered him, and Mulder's heat-slicked body twisted up to meet him, attempting to find purchase on the bed. And then the dam of words burst again, stripped of erudition and fancy, sweetly inarticulate.

"Oh, god, Alex—fuck, yes—oh god—"

Need had arrived, impacting full force in both their bodies. Mulder sounded close to sobbing and Alex was gratified. Teeth bared with unconscious ferocity, he slid his free hand between the cleft of Mulder's thighs and yanked him upright, onto his knees. "Not a virgin, are you? Never mind, don't answer that, I don't give a fuck. Hold still."

"Oh god—fucking do it—now—" Mulder's voice was the rasp of a file across prison bars, harsh and keen.

Like key fitting to lock, the first kissing touch of his swollen cockhead against burning, tightened eyelet nearly made Alex scream. "Relax, Mulder," he said, fiercely, almost warningly. Desperate to thrust but unwilling to batter his way in, Alex closed his eyes and rocked against the gate. "God, you are so fucking tight—just—yes, that's—that's it—oh, god, Mulder—" Alex tilted his head back further, eyes sliding shut, face transfixed midway between ecstasy and wild laughter. He laughed once, unevenly, almost drunkenly, feeling the first stars come out and roll blazing through his veins. He felt the other man's body ease itself to take him, and the dark fires of triumph and lust that swept over him nearly blacked consciousness out altogether.

If there was anything more perfect than driving fully into a man's willing ass, Alex had never discovered it.

There was nothing he could do to make it last—before he could help himself he'd released Mulder's arm and drawn him up against his own body back to chest, and the suddenly altered angle and the risky, shifting awkwardness of their positions on the bed became a skewering, corkscrewing twist—Alex's pulsing flesh embedded in Mulder, Mulder's ass seizing spasmodically around him—and then Alex was coming sharply, disarticulating in a jagged bolt of lightning that strobed out from the clenched source of his balls, rolling up his cock to burst with scalding force into the heart-heated darkness.

"Oh... wow... " Mulder said, slumping forward after a moment, while Alex stood dizzily behind him, still buried to the hilt, trying to figure out if he could move without falling. "... I was... so close... "

It took several seconds for the words to work their way through to Alex's brain. "Close," he managed eventually, through the ragged wind of his breath. "Close?"

Forehead pressed to the sheets, Mulder groaned.

Alex staggered back a bit and felt himself slip free of his prize. Wincing, he slid the condom off and chucked it messily into the small (pink) wastebasket between the beds with a cool disregard for form. He glanced at Mulder's ass, decided no niceties were required, and shoved at the other man's hip, flipping him over onto his back.

"Jesus, Mulder." Alex didn't know whether to be impressed, flattered, or annoyed. Mulder looked painfully hard, slick, ready—and incredibly frustrated. "Can I give you a hand with that?" he asked dryly.

"You'd fucking better," Mulder rasped. "Christ, I thought—" He closed his eyes, took a deep breath.

Alex nudged Mulder further onto the bed, slid down next to him. "Yeah, well, sorry, I couldn't wait. Talk about a fucking cocktease."

Mulder's head shook from side to side and he groaned again. "No... oh, fuck... Alex, I need... " Raggedly he took a breath, opened his eyes. "I need..."

Alex looked down at the flushed face, raw with need, burning with feeling. Passion? Shame? "What do you need?" he asked in a warm, silky voice. Sated, it was hard for Alex to resist the temptation to minor sadism.

Mulder bit his lip, searched up into Alex's eyes, then pressed a hand against his own reddened face. "Shit... oh shit... fuck."

"Take it easy, Mulder. Even you can't be thatweird. What do you want me to do for you?"

Wordlessly, a bit clumsily, Mulder took Alex's hand and drew it to his throat, held it there, splayed close and warm on his neck. Alex could feel the pulse beating madly under his palm, felt the rhythm of quickening breath and the escalating movements of Mulder's throat as he swallowed several times in agitation.

"Shit," Alex whispered, feeling an unsettling flutter in his nerves that approached panic, and a disturbing hint of returning arousal.

"Please, Alex." Mulder's own voice was a whisper. "Oh, god—please—" Rising desperation cracked his voice. His eyes had compressed tightly, and his face was stricken in need.

"Mulder, I have no clue... what—"

Impatiently Mulder manhandled Alex up into a kneeling position over his own reclining form, keeping hold of the hand on his throat, guiding the other to the arched, pulsing bow of his cock.

Alex felt a further spur of panic kick in at the determined, deliberate positioning. "Mulder, what if you—have you ever—has anyone ever—"

"I'm not going to die, Alex. Trust me." He smiled fleetingly, almost warmly. "I trust you... it's easy... you'll know what to do."

Alex licked his lips once, gathering up his slightly frazzled nerve, then began carefully stroking with his left hand, gripping with his right. It took a minute or so to coordinate the two rhythms, the slightly variant motions, and then he found it, what Mulder needed, could tell by the arch of his back, the stunned focus of his face as the other man closed in on himself, folding inward, disappearing behind his shut eyelids, into wherever it was he went at such a point. Alex flexed his hand over and over against Mulder's neck, gradually letting the pressure increase. A breath—interrupted—a breath—interrupted. Gentle squeezes became tighter, faster—and longer, and in response Mulder began to twist, kicking out and flexing like a swimmer in deep water. Like a man drowning. The deepening shades of his face were almost alarming, and Alex sincerely hoped that Mulder didn't have a heart problem; he'd have some difficult explaining the body.

He could tell when Mulder was near; his movements grew more frantic, became the thrashing, instinctive gestures of survival. His hands seized and covered Alex's own, tightly, and then began pulling and striking at him with such wildness that Alex almost let go. Only the suspicion that Mulder would kill him if he did allowed him to keep his grip. When Mulder's lean, tense body began arching convulsively off the bed, Alex realized that he himself had grown erect again. It was very sick, but very sexy, feeling Mulder writhe within his hands, watching his face tilt back, his full lips part as he gasped for air and found it denied, feeling the swollen length of his cock stiffen and pulse faster as his heartbeat accelerated, skipped, and—and then he was coming, bucking madly in Alex's grip, shooting across his own belly with unbound, impossible force, all breath closed off in his throat, the life-sustaining element withheld even as the procreating element spilled free.

When Mulder seemed on the verge of unconsciousness—or had he passed over?—Alex quickly released his throat. Damp-lashed eyelids fluttered, and Mulder choked once—twice—then began sucking down air in long, shuddering breaths.

Alex slumped next to him, his own breath irregular and harsh in his throat. He was trembling, nerves jangling. He'd been pushed up almost to his own peak just by bringing Mulder off. "Was that... good for you... darling," he muttered, rubbing his damp face against Mulder's, unconsciously miming the gestures of a mother cat nudging and licking her kittens into the realm of the living.

Slowly, wordlessly, Mulder shook his head to one side and then the other, but Alex suspected this meant yes.

After a while, Mulder journeyed back to awareness. He looked over at Alex, blinking as if to clear the haze from his eyes. Silvery stripes of tears brimmed there, raised by the intensity of his body's reflexive struggle. "Hello," he said in a small, scratchy voice, smiling lazily.

"Yeah, hello, Mulder." Alex shifted to rest against the other man's body and studied his face a moment, before licking a kiss across his passion-bruised lips.

"Like Orpheus returned," Mulder said quietly.

His eyes were shut as he said this, and Alex couldn't tell if he was talking to himself, about himself, or... fuck it, he thought, trying to ignore the prickling hairs on the back of his nape. Whatever, Mulder. But Alex felt his own body, cooling and damp, shiver once in response.

"Hey, you're feeling a bit stiff again, Butch." Mulder flexed his hips up, raising a groan of appreciation from Alex's throat as wounded, aching flesh was touched. "I thought we'd worked those kinks out."

"Mulder, if you ever work those kinks out, that'll be the day."

"Mmm—what day?"

"Hell will freeze over... pigs will fly... "

"Martians will land," Mulder said, warmly and sleepily, as his hand slid down further in his investigations.

"That may be... too soon," Alex said.

xx

Roger Smith Hotel
Sunday, 5:18 a.m.

"Yes, yes—hold on—"

Mulder fumbled for the lamp switch, cursed, sat up in the dark, found it, and picked up the phone—

"What?"

—which continued to ring.

"Shit," Mulder muttered, looking blankly around the area between the two beds. "Alex, what did you do with my cellular?"

A muffled mumble leaked out from under a pillow but didn't elucidate on the question.

"Thanks so much... okay, okay... " Mulder coughed slightly, speech tickling his dry throat. He fell to his knees on the floor and fished around in the tangle of clothes until he uncovered his phone. "Mulder. What."

"Agent Mulder, this is Rebecca Sheer at the New York field office. We have a hit on your trace request."

Mulder listened for a few minutes, his silence interspersed by an occasional light grunt. Finally, he said, "Yeah, okay—and hey, thanks."

"No problem at all, Agent Mulder," said the quick, smooth voice on the other end. "And I'm sorry if I woke you."

"No, that's fine." Mulder struggled sleepily to his knees. "Perfect start to another day in the glorious, glamorous life of a bureau badge." He hung up after a few more brief pleasantries, with a groggy, bemused feeling that he ought to send the ebullient Ms Sheer a bouquet of flowers.

Yes, but perky is its own reward.

Mulder yawned, screwing his gritty eyes shut against the lamp light. He slumped forward against the edge of the bed and very nearly fell back asleep there.

"Who was that?" Alex said muzzily, rolling out from under his pillow some little while later. Squinting at the travel alarm, then down at the boneless drape of Mulder's body, he drew himself reluctantly from sleep. "Hey." He reached over and prodded Mulder's resting head, then ruffled his hair. "You asleep?"

"Very much so."

"Who was that—Scully?"

"Mmm... no... " Mulder drew himself up, ran a hand through his hair, pushing it into a mare's nest of divergent clumps and spikes, then slapped himself once in the face. "Ow." The brief exclamation was toneless, unsurprised.

Alex, startled by the sound of the impact, stared at Mulder, then laughed. The other man's face was still rather expressionless and sleep-heavy.

"That was the New York office. They've got a hit on Cole. They pulled up a record for him from the V.A.'s vault at Neosho. Happy news. He's right next door in New Jersey, at one of their medical centers."

"Fuckin' great... I think." Coming almost fully awake, Alex sat up in bed. "What's his story?"

"He was involuntarily committed there years ago. Which seems to rule him out as a suspect. But we'll call them, set up a meeting. It might be useful."

"You callin' them now?"

"You're kidding, right?" Mulder crawled up into bed and rolled himself close to Alex's chest.

Alex reached over him, switched off the light, then let his arm wrap around the other man's slim, warm body.

They kissed for a little time in the darkness, then twined further together, down into the sheets. Flesh followed ancient, instinctive drives; thoughts drifted loose. Speech came easier in the dark. Words somehow were more easily spoken, more easily forgotten.

"Thanks for that... earlier, what you did," Mulder whispered at one point, as their bodies were slowly, lazily finding their rhythm. "I needed that... really... a lot of people freak, but you were... I... "

"'S'okay, Mulder," Alex said softly back, his lips brushing the crook of Mulder's arm, the deepening well of his chest. "You're not as far out there as you think—you're still here with us in the human race." Dark, darker, darkness.

"Humans... we're the weirdest monkeys ever... " In the unlit room open eyes saw only shadows, some lighter, some darker. On his back, Mulder floated, feeling his body lifted and carried by pleasure as if on the swell of a dark, fathomless sea. "Alex—tomorrow—today—"

"You don't have to tell me. This is just... recess."

"Yes... " Mulder's low voice spiralled out dreamily into the room. "I tend to plow through with my head down, forget I have any life beyond work... well, actually, I don't, which is what makes this so very... very... um... have I mentioned... you make a pretty good partner, Alex... ?" Mulder felt the answering laughter against his stretched, shivering abdomen, then lower. "Oh," he whispered with pleased approval. "Oh my, oh my, oh my... "

A while later...

"Did they teach you that at the Academy?" Mulder murmured.

A kiss found its way through the darkness to plant itself on Mulder's lips, and then drifted across his face in soft, light landings, gentle as a moth's touch. "This is my hobby, not my career, Mulder."

"Mmm, yes... and this is way better than bowling."

xx

10:42 a.m.

Mulder and Krycek breakfasted in the hotel dining room, unhurriedly and rather sloppily, amidst scattered sections of the Sunday Times and the accumulating debris of their colossal, over-priced meals. After the diversions of the night and morning (including a shared and ridiculously prolonged shower), both men had pulled back a bit into their shells, just enough to take a breather from one another. Even the territorial division of the table and its mess seemed to spell out clearly: personal space being reestablished here.

Mulder claimed the crossword; Krycek grabbed the sports page. Mulder read the Book Review; Krycek scanned the stock reports. Mulder unearthed the sports page and turned to basketball previews; Krycek hunted out the comics and read them quickly, almost perfunctorily, without once cracking a smile. Eventually, with earnest, dutiful attention they both shared pieces of the news sections. Mulder gleaned every scrap of weirdness from the paper's pages of with unerring accuracy and read them to Krycek. Krycek, with bland reciprocity, shared with him the highlights of congressional business.

Eventually, glutted on feast and famine, they slumped back in their seats and wound up the breakfast, settling with the waitress and preparing to head out on the day's work.

"Pilsson said he'd be there up until three or so," said Mulder, looking at his watch. "But we probably should go... now... soon."

"Mmm." Alex, leaning back in his chair, contemplated Mulder from under the lush shade of his lashes.

After a moment, Mulder glanced up absently from the folded wad of Dear Abby he'd laid across his plate. "What?"

Alex shook his head with idle amusement. "Those glasses do a lot for you Mulder. Give you that professorial, learn'ed look. Respectability, credibility even... well, almost."

"Yikes. Credibility. I didn't think I was in any danger of that."

"Just the appearance of."

"That's okay, then."

Mulder went back to reading, and Alex went back to watching him. He looked so... normal this morning. The contrast between Mulder unzipped—perverted, desperately demanding, happily abandoned—and Mulder of the morning after—sated, blase, mildly boring—amused and fascinated Alex. Mulder's face, even at its most inexpressive, was like a proverbial window on his soul, and Alex felt he could look right through that lucid mask and see all of the other man's inner processes at work: gears turning, cogs clicking into place. Here was Mulder in metamorphosis, altering from private to public persona. Mulder, the good little G-man, working himself gradually back into full bureau mode, all bland demeanor and spit-polished badge.

Mulder, apparently feeling Alex's gaze on him, looked up again, peering out from the enigmatic cosmos contained within his skull, over the top edge of his glasses. "I'm that cute, am I?" he asked mildly.

"You're adorable, Mulder," Alex said seriously, and watched with secret satisfaction as the other man tried hard not to react.

Mulder fiddled with his paper, his coffee, his glasses, until his embarrassment had passed, then began rolling down his shirt sleeves, tightening his tie. Mulder. FBI.

The bill had been paid. The day was getting on.

"Okay," Mulder sighed, when he was finally able to meet Alex's eyes again. He looked up, all business—or as close to it as he could bring himself. "Time to go."

xx

V.A. Medical Center, North Orange, N.J.
Sunday, 1:15 p.m.

A hell of a place to spend a weekend, thought Alex, much less the uncertain remainder of one's life.

As they descended into the depths of the institution (Mulder quizzing Pilsson about his work history, current position, duties), Alex's gaze wandered, taking in their surroundings. His face, unrealized to himself, wore a twisted, disgusted expression, the look of a man who values his freedom like his very blood and breath.

Once out of the public lobby area and past the doctors' tolerably comfortable offices, the medical center revealed its hidden heart, a labyrinth of endless corridors in which the center's patients counted out their days. The greater part of the building, to Alex's impression, seemed composed of nothing but corridors—long and claustrophobic, their cinderblock walls painted in drab institutional tones, with here and there large patches of damp eating away the surface of the paint, creating an effect like that of eczemous skin. The very bricks were crumbling from the damp-rot, and leaving small dusty piles of eroded cement on the floors. The floors were maroon, blood-red, and reflected little of the jaundiced light given out by the fluorescent strips above. Pipes ran parallel to the lights, dropped down the walls in places, disappeared into the floors, presumably to even lower levels.

What a hole, thought Alex, with bone-deep distaste. Walking slightly behind and to the side of Mulder and Pilsson, he studied the doctor while half listening to Mulder natter on (something about horticultural therapy for patient rehabilitation, utterly irrelevant to their investigation as far as Alex could tell: a flake, but a brilliant flake). Pilsson was a short, thinnish, balding man with glasses and wispy hair, wearing a white lab, baggy brown trousers, suspenders, and a big tie. He walked with his right hand habitually planted in his pocket, fondling his ward keys—or the family jewels, perhaps—and an arid "know-it-all, seen-it-all" smirk had been hanging lopsidedly on his face ever since the two agents had introduced themselves. Though, in all fairness, Alex had to admit that it might have hung there long before.

"This is the floor," Pilsson said, passing through a door and holding it open for the two agents to pass through. "Sorry the elevators aren't available. Inspector closed them down. We need new ones, but our budget is tapped out—we've used up all our funds for this fiscal year. Another month. God grant we make it."

"Yeah," Mulder said in companionable sympathy, "we're all out of bullets at the bureau." A straighter face it would have been impossible to imagine outside of Flatland. He made a tiny tsk-ing sound indicative of regret and resignation. "We're all hoping September will be a slow crime month."

"God grant," Alex said earnestly before he could stop himself.

Pilsson turned his head and gave the two of them an odd, sidelong look. "You are joking, I presume?"

"Just keep your eye on the statistical charts and your fingers crossed," Mulder said.

Pilsson looked at him, then at Alex, as if trying to determine which category of the DSM to fit them into, then nodded and smirked to himself, obviously deciding that humoring the loonies was par for the course—even (or especially) those with badges.

They turned down one long featureless corridor, and then another. Bread crumbs seemed in order; Alex hoped Mulder's memory was sharp enough to lead them back out the maze if it became necessary.

"How long have you been treating Cole?" Mulder asked, drawing back to the topic.

"I've been supervising Mr Cole's treatment since I admitted him twelve years ago... I'm afraid you won't find him very cooperative though."

"We just want to ask him a few questions about his military service."

"He doesn't respond well to... authority figures," Pilsson said dryly.

Mulder, subtly oppressed by the clinic and its empty, echoing corridor, directed a blandly sardonic question to Pilsson's moving back. "Is that why you put him in isolation?"

"We've had to house Mr Cole in this section of the ward because he was interfering with our treatment of the other patients."

"How was he interfering?"

From behind, the two agents could see the doctor looking up and off to the side, as if in a cue to memory. "He was disrupting their sleep patterns," he said after a moment. He looked over his shoulder—almost pointedly—as he delivered the comment.

Mulder and Krycek exchanged a glance.

Pilsson, coming up on a door bearing Cole's name, was continuing: "With psychiatric patients especially it's critical that their circadian cycles are strictly maintained—"

Mulder interrupted him, pressingly. "Excuse me—but exactly how would Cole disrupt their sleep?"

The doctor looked over at Mulder with an unreadable smile, not answering his question. "Here we are." He yanked up a big arm latch on the windowless metal door, then pulled it heavily open. "There's some gentlemen here who—" He fell silent and went still, standing frozen in the doorway. Astonishment radiated from him; after a moment's bewildered paralysis he shook himself to life and moved sharply into the room, looking from side to side.

Mulder pushed in after him, duplicating the doctor's scan. The room was small and quite obviously empty. Despite Pilsson's intense scrutiny of the interior, a single glance was enough to make clear there was no one within, and nowhere to hide. It was not really a hospital room so much as a small, neat cell, more befitting a monk than a patient receiving therapeutic care. A cot flanked one wall, one corner of its plain blanket folded down. Next to the bed was a sink, high above which a small meshed window provided a limited view of brick, what appeared to be the opposing wall of another wing. Next to the sink, across from the bed, a table had been squeezed into the room's other corner; on it sat an old transistor radio and a few books.

Alex followed the other two men into the cell. Three men made for a tight fit. A hole, Alex thought again with a subliminal shudder. A hole in the wall, a hole in the ground...

Mulder had picked up a book from the end of the bed. He glanced at the cover, opened it to the flyleaf, then held it up to Alex's view. It was an inexpensive but well-worn Bible. Alex looked it over, shrugged.

"So, what's up, doc?" Mulder said mildly, looking over at Pilsson.

"I—I don't know." Pilsson touched a hand to his forehead, a stunned, out-of-focus look on his face, as if he were trying to recall something he'd forgotten. Perhaps mentally checking through charts or floor plans.

"Field trip? Sunday—movie night?" Mulder turned in the cramped space, eyeing its spartan elements. "Bowling night, maybe?"

"No, no, no," Pilsson said impatiently, gesturing off the distraction.

"Maybe he had a therapy session scheduled," Alex suggested.

"I'mhis doctor," Pilsson said. He stared at the bed, then up at the window. "The door was locked... wasn't it?" He seemed to be talking to himself, and managed to sound certain and then doubtful within the space of a breath. He pressed a finger to his lips, stared at the door.

"It was locked," Mulder said. "Or at least very well barred. We watched you open it."

"Yes, yes," the doctor murmured. He seemed to gather himself together. "Yes. It was locked."

Alex caught Mulder's eye, held it a moment, then both men turned a contemplative gaze on the doctor.

"You seem to have misplaced your patient, Doctor," Mulder said with cool, expressionless regard. "I think we'd better see about finding him, don't you?"

They made their way to the nearest nursing station, located on the next floor up and a good mile to the west, as it felt like.

The nurse, a middle-aged blonde woman with a tired face, was immersed in paperwork and gave no more than a cursory glance to their progress down the long hall until they arrived directly before her at the counter.

Pilsson, who had quickly succumbed to nerves and man's basic instinct to shift blame, pounced on the nurse and demanded to know Cole's whereabouts, managing—within the space of a few sentences—to suggest that the nursing staff had either lost him or smuggled him away, and in either case had covered up the deed with subversive, conspiratorial malice.

The nurse, despite a natural touch of defensiveness in her voice, met Pilsson's accusations by informing him with straightforward immediacy, "You discharged him two days ago."

For a split second Pilsson gaped at her, before catching hold of himself. "I most certainly did not," he said. "Don't you think I'd remember if I did?" His voice was harsh and anxious, and Mulder and Krycek exchanged another glance.

At his words the nurse's face drew on an expression that suggested she was used to humoring absent-minded doctors. "Well, I was on shift, Doctor"—she reached for a file—"and you signed the order yourself." She handed the file to Pilsson, who took it quickly and looked it over intensely, his eyes blank and bemused.

"That is your signature, isn't it?" the nurse asked, tapping the file pointedly.

Pilsson stood staring at the file, lips parted slightly in speechless confusion. He was clearly at a loss, and Alex gently took the file from his hand. He held it so that Mulder could study it as well. Cole's face stared out at them from the flat capture of his photograph with the eyes of a man who'd seen far too much to sleep easily. Alex's glance flicked over the pages of the chart, noting the illegible scribble at the physician's release line, next to a tiny, thready blot that might have been a date.

Mulder, at his shoulder, reached out and held the edge of the chart to steady it, and for a moment Alex felt his gaze distracted, drawn to the curved form of his thumb, an articulation of long, fine bones fitted into the warm glove of muscle and skin, capped by a perfectly formed, neatly manicured nail. A light, ghostly lunula edged the bottom of the nail plate. Looking at just this single digit of Mulder, the smallest part of his sum, Alex could remember with terrible lucidity the entirety of him, the feel of Mulder's hands, his thumbs—that particular, well-carved thumb—stroking his body, his hip bones, its smooth, whorled ball running like the velvety eye of a daisy over his nipples and raising them into aching peaks (hot carmel striking snow and stiffening) and brushing that same, lush stroke down the base of his cock, along the throbbing vein, into the heated nest of his balls, pressing there until Alex would have given anything to keep himself imprisoned in the round, hard cell of that touch, would have screamed any word, any confession, to his inquisitor.

Alex felt a sheen of heat break the surface of his temples and throat, even as his mouth went dry. I am looking at this man's thumb and I am about to snap a pup tent. This is not good. Not good, Alex, not good...

Mulder's phone rang and Alex nearly choked his relief. Mulder, grabbing the phone from his pocket, said, "Let's get Cole's face out on the wire." Then, with the phone at his ear: "Mulder."

Alex breathed himself carefully and shallowly into a semblance of calm, keeping his gaze pinned to the pages of the file with what he hoped passed for studious interest. He saw nothing, he was looking at nothing. He wondered if Pilsson, or the nurse, had been attentive—if they'd taken a good close look through the windows of his face—would they have been able to see the storm of animal feeling raging inside.

He sure as fuck hoped not.

After a moment he glanced up, noticing that Mulder had slunk away to the far side of the nurse's station, where he was hunched over his cellular with a rather suspect degree of intensity. Probably just Scully, though...

"Mr Mulder, I have obtained information that might shed some light on your current work. You must exercise discretion when we meet. If anyone follows you, I won't be there."

The intense, level, and measured tones of the anonymous voice began as soon as Mulder answered the phone, and it took him a second or two before he could absorb the words themselves. It was his new source. Whoever he was, he certainly possessed an admirably pointblank manner—no introduction, no preamble. Mulder only hoped this bluntness reflected honesty rather than, say, simple rudeness.

"Where do you want to meet," Mulder said almost inaudibly into the phone. Just speaking to this person made his shoulders tense instinctively with paranoia and worry.

The man named a place, an hour. Mulder looked at his watch, calculating times and schemes, half expecting to hear at any second a click in his ear singling the man's abrupt dismissal. But there was only a hissing, heavily laden silence.

"I—I appreciate your help, I do," he said, glancing over his shoulder behind him. Krycek and Pilsson had gone into a huddle over Cole's chart, while the nurse had gone back to her paperwork with an air of conscientious duty and righteousness. "But I'm not alone here and I don't want to call attention to our meeting by trying to justify an awkward disappearing act, if I can help it. I could probably get away easier for a while if... " He continued speaking softly into the phone, and after another minute punched off and slid the phone in his pocket. Thoughts shifting and reorganizing themselves in his head, he stared at a glass-boxed fire extinguisher hanging on the wall, then brought his gaze back into focus and turned.

"Sorry," he said, rejoining the others. The two men glanced up from Cole's chart, Krycek alert and inquisitive, Pilsson distracted. "I've told my bookie not to call me at this number, but—" Mulder shrugged, made a what-can-you-do? face. Before Pilsson could react, he went on. "Let me ask you something, Doctor." He took the chart from Pilsson's hands, flipped back a few pages to the discharge sheet and pointed. "What does this look like to you?"

Pilsson followed the arrow of his finger. "I don't understand."

"Is that your handwriting?"

There was a silence before Pilsson said carefully, reluctantly, "I'd have to say that it looks like my handwriting, but frankly, Agent Mulder, it isn't. It can't be. There is noway I would forget discharging a patient, particularly one I've been treating for over a decade." He shot another acrimonious glare at the nurse. "I have no explanation for this, but you can be sure I'll get to the bottom of it."

Mulder nodded, studied him. "Do you cross your sevens, Doctor?"

Pilsson's lips parted and moved as if seeking speech, then he said slowly, "Wh—yes, I—actually I do. I spent a few years in Germany, I was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Inst—"

"Is this a nine or a seven?"

Pilsson looked back to the chart where Mulder's finger pointed, then took it from his hands and gave it meticulous inspection.

"Um... I don't... " The doctor's head shook slowly.

"Could it be a seven?"

"I sup-pose—but—" He looked up. "What are you suggesting, Agent Mulder, that not only have I discharged a patient without remembering it, I've discharged him on a day other than the one I don't remember?" The psychiatrist's dry smirk threatened briefly to creep back.

"You said it, I didn't." As Pilsson began to flare with renewed offense, Mulder cut him short. "We have a suspicious death occurring in the metro area sometime late Wednesday night, the seventeenth—Alex, have you called the police and the bureau yet? Fax that photo, too. There's a machine behind the counter." Startled, snapped into action, Alex pulled out his cellular to comply.

"That's two days before Cole was supposedly discharged on the nineteenth," Mulder continued to Pilsson. He turned to the nurse, who had obviously been listening and looked flustered to find herself the sudden focus of his attention. Glancing at her name tag, Mulder said, "Nurse Burrows, are you sure you remember Cole being discharged on the nineteenth—Friday?"

"Well, yes—" she began.

"Why?"

"Why?" She hesitated, appearing to review her memories. "Well, let's see, well, it was Friday—that was the night that we lost Captain Fredericks—"

Mulder couldn't resist. "You lost another one?"

Nurse Burrows gave him an arch, cold eye. "He coded right after 4 o'clock meds—cardiac arrest—was gone before we even arrived. He was in group therapy at the time. Captain Fredericks was a TBI—he suffered from traumatic brain injury as a result of having been shot in the head while serving in Korea. He was on a wide variety of medications. Antidepressants, anticonvulsants—he had a history of seizures—"

"I'm not investigating Captain Fredericks' death," Mulder interrupted. Which is not to say I shouldn't be, he thought. Talk about prescription overkill—he would have bet a month's paycheck that every patient in the clinic was a walking cocktail shaker of volatile chemicals and medications, just waiting for someone to give them a jarring push and send them spilling over the edge.

"Wait a minute now, wait a minute," said Pilsson, staring at the nurse. "Group therapy for P ward is on Wednesday nights." A look of startled triumph and relief flitted across his face, or so it appeared to Mulder, who was still observing him closely to determine the veracity of his reactions.

Nurse Burrows, flushing, opened her own lips to reply, then paused as a look of uncertainty and bemusement touched her own features. "Now, of course—now, that's true—why... " She trailed off, biting her lip and staring blankly at the papers on her desk. Suddenly she began searching through them, muttering to herself. High color had risen in her cheeks, making them appear clumsily and heavily rouged. It was hard to tell whether she was more angry or more embarrassed by the discrepancy between her memory and events. "I know... I know... "

Mulder tried to catch the eye of Krycek, who was feeding Cole's information through the fax, but the other man didn't see his look. Mulder sighed to himself, and tried to decide what to do next. He'd committed to meet with his source, and toward that end he'd already planned out a certain course of action, but if he were to follow that course, it would mean leaving the clinic almost immediately. He hated to leave before putting both Pilsson and Burrows—and maybe some of the patients—through a detailed questioning.

But on the other hand Mulder was beginning to have his suspicions that all the questioning in the world wouldn't clear up this mystery—except maybe under hypnosis. And maybe not even then. It was part of a larger picture, tied in somehow, he was sure, with Mrs Dipace's unique recollection of events, with the psychosomatic nature of the victims' deaths. Cole was the key—the nature of his disappearance only reinforced Mulder's certainty of this. They needed to find him. Grilling government lackeys could wait in this particular case. Except for one or two questions...

Krycek came around the counter. "I've got a BOLO out to state and metro police, and I dictated a squib to the New York office and faxed them his info. Judy said she'll run it through the network for us, make sure all the offices get a copy."

"Judy, huh?" One side of Mulder's lips quirked up.

"Gotta keep in good with the Betty bureau, Mulder, if you want your stamps licked." Sensual eyelids lowered their lush lashes over gleaming eyes.

Don't go there, Mulder told himself, accidentally catching Pilsson's gaze. The doctor was still rotating on the nervous axis of his own worried world, and his eyes were rather blank, but Mulder nonetheless ironed his face back into good G-man form. "Doctor, before we go, I'd like you to give us some background on your erstwhile patient—an overview, and anything regarding behaviors and beliefs that you might not have recorded in his file."

"I record everything in the patients' files," Pilsson said, drawing himself back up into a semblance of offended professionalism, all hauteur and dudgeon, as if relieved to get back on familiar ground. "Everything relevant, of course."

Mulder picked up the file, hefted it. "Twelve years, Dr Pilsson. That's a good book of days, but it still doesn't maketh the man. I mean—did you even know his favorite color?" Pilsson's moue of exasperation only goaded Mulder further. "Did he like Dickens, Doctor, gamble away his matches, harbor a secret ambition to bungee jump off Royal Gorge?"

"Agent Mulder, I'm certainly willing to help you as best I can, but—"

"Did you ever notice him to twist scraps of paper into an 'X'—the sign of the cross?"

Pilsson started lightly as if poked. "Why, yes—he did that compulsively, at least when he was in a therapy session, or someplace where his gross motor activities were limited. How did you know?"

Only the thinnest leash kept Mulder's excitement reigned in; the surge of adrenaline spiking through his system nearly knocked him off his feet. Eyes glowing, he flashed a triumphant look at Alex, who stared back at him, looking somewhat stunned.

"Did you record that here in your file, Doctor?" Mulder asked with quiet intensity.

"I—I'm not sure," Pilsson stammered, before defensively regrouping. "Do you have any idea what my caseload is here, Agent Mulder?" he asked angrily. "Do you know what our annual budget is? A joke. Compared to the Department of Defense—"

"I don't have time for this," Mulder said shortly. "We'll go to your office. You can talk on the way. Tell Agent Krycek everything you can remember about Cole's habits." He opened the file and quickly absorbed himself scanning its pages. When after a moment the other two men started walking down the hall, he fell absently into step with them. He read all the way to Pilsson's office, and through most of the brief meeting held therein, then snapped the file shut and requested an orderly to bring Cole's Bible up to them. He quizzed Pilsson while they waited for its arrival. When he had the book in hand, he stood, bringing conversation to a close.

"We'll probably send a crime scene team here to the clinic. Don't have Cole's room cleaned. Lock it up—I don't want anyone going in there."

"A crime scene? Exactly what crime do you think has been committed here, Agent Mulder?"

"We'll find out, won't we?" Mulder asked rather coldly.

Alex sent a small frown after Mulder's abruptly departing form, then made a few polite noises of good-bye to Pilsson before following. He had to jog after Mulder to catch up; by the time he did, Mulder had already reached the lobby doors.

"I'm not in the mood to walk back to Manhattan," Alex said, grabbing the edge of the entrace door as Mulder began pulling it open. Mulder looked startled by the appearance of Alex's hand on the frame, and Alex realized that Mulder hadn't even been aware of his presence. Welcome to the Mulderzone.

After facing off in a brief, macho war of the gazes, Alex removed his hand and let Mulder open the door. "You didn't even say good-bye to Pilsson."

"I'm sure he's as torn up about it as I am," Mulder said with casually brutal disregard.

"Hey, Mulder," Alex said as they paused on either side of the car. The other agent looked up. "Remind me not to get on your bad side."

And Mulder, quite suddenly and to Alex's surprise, smiled, with that beautiful, unaffected innocence that sometimes surfaced in him. "How about my backside?" he asked. The offhand humor was carelessly and happily juvenile, and the grin on his face might have belonged to a boy on a playground, the run scored, the water balloon hitting its mark. He was Tom Sawyer incarnate, forced into a six-foot body and a stiff suit.

Alex swallowed. What kind of bastard am I? For just a second he felt ill—fed up with his assignment and scared for his soul. He had to look quickly to one side, to break away from that awful, open gaze. It's just a kind of hypnosis, he told himself. Don't look into his eyes and it will pass. You'll be fine. Keep yourself on track, Alex. Don't let him derail you... maybe that's what he's tryingto do.

As they got into the car, Alex looked sidelong at Mulder, trying to discern any ulterior motive in his forthright face. Trying to convince himself he saw it.

This is the job, Mulder. It's just the job.

And Alex tried to convince himself he meant it.

xx

A Little Take Out
eliade@drizzle.com

Category: Slash [Mulder/Krycek]. NC-17
Disclaimer: I hope Chris Carter doesn't mind sharing his toys. I promise not to break them... well, maybe their hearts.
See part 1 for author's notes.
Please send feedback to: eliade@drizzle.com
No flames, please!

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