Something.
But, then, I guess I'm not really dead, at least not completely, so maybe that lies ahead of me yet. Oblivion or heaven or hell. Not much to choose from, any which way.
If there's any choice at all, when it comes right down to it.
My father didn't believe in choice. He believed in destiny and the State. Sometimes in that order, sometimes not. If he had been a religious man, I have no doubt he'd have been involved with one of those that emphasizes predestination. God just liking some folks and spurning some others with no real rhyme nor reason between the two, no matter what they've gotten up to in life. Just the "saved" and the "damned" and nothing in-between. All black and white. No shades of grey to monkeywrench the deal.
I sometimes imagine I could use a God like that. At least, if I'm on the first list and not the second. Though, considering my luck, I'd have been on the second from day one—even back in those days when I actually still believed in right and wrong and honor and pride and all such good things—so it would have been a doomed proposition right from the start no matter if I pulled it off or not. Did what was right and just, instead of trying to stay alive, stay ahead, not asking questions and not letting any of my employers think that what they had me do bothered me in the least. Which I must admit it didn't, at least most of the time.
Which makes me think, when you come right down to it, that God must be Russian. Or, at least, from somewhere in the eastern Balkans.
My mother would have agreed with that, though for far different reasons. She was devout, though she kept it hidden from my father, and he played that game with her for the sake of their marriage and his career. It may be a bit different now, I imagine, in today's brave new Russia, but at that time one did not rise up through the ranks of the KGB while your wife prayed openly and reclined within the essentially forbidden embrace of the church.
Maybe, she actually did believe. Or, maybe, she just loved the pageant of it all, the sweet-faced virgin and her jeweled halo, the heady kiss of incense and the glow of the candles against all that blackness. Or, perhaps, she only liked the sense of having something all to herself, some small piece that she could hold tight to and kiss and pray over in the dark that wasn't the man she'd married. That wasn't the child she'd borne to his name and his ambition, despite how it wore her out long before her years. She'd lost three others before me, only one of which having drawn actual breath, and the doctors had warned her of the dangers of trying anymore after the last and dreadful attempt had almost bled her dry.
But she knew her duty as my father knew his. As he made sure I knew mine.
Which was why I'd agreed to go with them when they approached me in that first bland office of so many bland offices, when they offered me more money than I'd ever thought to see and a place and a future in their organization. The honor of serving a higher purpose than even that of country. And it wasn't such a big thing they asked me to do first, was it? Fitting myself into American society and eventually sliding me into the position of spying for them on this one man in the FBI, all the while secretly spying on them in turn for men like my father back in the Motherland. Not that each no doubt knew of the others' strings. Of my duplicity. They probably just didn't give a damn. Even if I tore myself apart between them in the process.
And, maybe, I could have handled it, after all, if a third party hadn't entered the equation. If he hadn't made his own demands on me, insisting that I be something other than I was. Something more than a Consortium spy. Something more than a KGB operative. Something more than a lying-through-his-teeth pseudo FBI agent who had taken all the right courses and done all the right work, made the cut and made the grades and licked the right boots and asses to work his way up in the system, all the while knowing it may be a short-lived career if it was any at all.
Shorter, as it turned out, than any of us had really expected. Shorter than was really useful, but that's just how things are sometimes. Not that I was really to blame for that. The man I'd been assigned to was just too damn smart, too fucking paranoid, for any to pull the wool over his eyes for long. Not even a man trained in deception almost from birth.
Raised to be cold and to be hard and to always place loyalty to the cause above all else, even one's own life. Even one's own father. One's mother.
Something else that also fell by the wayside when it all came crashing down. When my primary employers tried to blow me up, for no clear reason that I've ever been able to fathom. I doubted, at the time, that it was due to my continuing connection to my father's people, to the few messages and tidbits of information that I actually managed to pass along to them. As far as I knew, they might have even wanted me to do so, had even made sure the things I'd stumbled across were what they wanted their Russian "allies" to know. After all, they knew from the start where I came from. Where they had gotten me.
All of sixteen and already having killed several times for the good of my homeland. For the swiftly-suppressed gleam of pride and approval in my father's eyes. The shame in the white grip of my mother's hands as she bent her head and, quite obviously by now, prayed for me. For what my father had made me. For what she had given birth to.
She died my third year in America. I had just celebrated my 19th birthday with my new set of parents, a couple who provided me with the best of things and asked no questions about the weekends and the couple of months each summer that I spent elsewhere. I don't know if they were operatives themselves, playing a part for me, for this new American me, or simply had been programmed to actually believe they were my real parents. That I was their real son. They certainly seemed proud of me, supportive. Even kind, at times.
And sometimes they were so kind and things felt so damn good that I actually found myself wishing that I could believe, could let it all go and just be their son, their real son. That I could actually live the life I had been assigned to mimic. And sometimes they were so kind and things felt so damn good that I wanted to destroy it all. Wanted to run away, back to something that made sense. Where I knew my place, my destiny, even if it lay between the harsh fist of my father and the clinging arms of my mother.
My father remarried less than a year later. I've never met her. Never even seen a picture. But I have to imagine that she's young, like my mother was once young. That, maybe, even now he's attempting to create a few half-brothers and sisters for me to also know nothing about. If he hasn't already. If she also hasn't died from trying to give them to him.
I sometimes wondered in those first few months on the run what they'd told him about my fall from grace. More lies, no doubt. From either the Consortium or the KGB or both. Not that the KGB was called the KGB anymore, as if that made any real difference. He was probably told that I was dead. Maybe even killed in the line of duty. At least, I imagine that's what his comrades would tell him, unless they had cause enough to want to shame him.
The man my last assignment called "Cancerman," and "Cigarette Smoking Man," among many other no-less descriptive, but rather more colorful epithets, would likely have told him that I'd fucked up and the fact that I'd ended up toasted had been my own damn fault.
Which, I have to give him, was not entirely untrue.
I had fucked up. I should have had myself pulled out the minute I'd realized. The minute I couldn't get that realization to go away. Couldn't get the feelings to stop. Couldn't crush them out of existence or chain up that box tight enough to keep them from creeping back out again once my back was turned, once my guard was down.
I liked the man, you see. The man I'd been assigned to. That I'd been sent to spy on and work against and even kill if it came to that.
More than liked him.
My father would have been appalled, though I've no idea which part of it would shock and degrade him more. That I began to have feelings for a man or that I let those feelings influence me when it came to my mission. That I disobeyed orders—double sets of orders, at that—to try and keep from hurting this man.
I was telling the truth when I told him that I didn't kill his father. Not that it's likely that he'll ever believe me. Oh, I was there, make no mistake about that. I'd been ordered to do it. But when it came right down to it, when I raised that gun and looked at that tired old man and knew what it would cost to pull the trigger, I just couldn't do it. I hesitated for the first time in my life and that hesitation was enough. Enough for Luis to realize that I wasn't going to follow through and for him to take the job upon himself. Enough for them to consider me a risk from then on, to set into motion the plan to turn me into a piece of overdone shishkebab.
Enough for me to see that there was some small part of myself that could still want something for me and me alone. Above and beyond the price of loyalty and country and cause and even the whole goddamned fucking rest of humankind, if what little I've learned in the course of my job is really at all true.
If he's right.
About that, if not about me.
He's here now. I can see him, standing over me, though I can't read his face at all. Can't even read his eyes.
It's hard for me to look at him. Almost as hard as it is and it was for me to look at myself. But I've long days in darkness and cold and hunger and thirst to remind me. After almost dying in that silo, I realized...I couldn't escape it anymore. Couldn't lie, at least to myself. So I began feeding him any and all information that I had and could acquire. I became the very informant that I had been sicced on him to discover and destroy in the first place. His new and improved "Mr. X," "Deepthroat," whatever. If he'd ever made up a name for me.
They killed me for it, of course. As I knew they would. Eventually. No matter how careful I was. No matter that I was better at the game than either of his first two. More desperate, anyway.
Again, it had been his fault, in a way. I'd lingered. Stayed to watch him pick up the information packet, unable to tear myself away from this too-brief a glimpse. This small interaction, anonymous though it was. At least, on his behalf.
Though, maybe, I'd been the one to underestimate him this time. Because it seems he knew. Maybe, even knew all along.
They'd used silencers, but he came anyway. Came back for me. As if, after so many years of investigating psychic phenomena, some of it had rubbed off on him along the way and
he'd been expecting what'd happened or felt it or something. I don't know. I still don't. All I do know is that it hurt and he was there all of a sudden, dropping the folder that I'd just left for him and lifting me into his arms. Pillowing my head on his leg. Calling for help in a
voice that amazingly sounded far too panicked for someone who was so very hungry to see me dead.
I think I remember trying to say his name. Trying to say something, anyway. But the effort only made me taste blood. Made the blackness gather itself up tighter around me. As if trying to squeeze me away from even these last few moments of life. Of being with him.
Still, I think I remember him saying my name. Or, maybe, I just wished that he would.
"Alex..." Soft as he'd never said it. Soft as he'd never meant it.
As I hadn't even dared allow myself to dream.
And I do remember how he held me, after that. His long frame folded around me like I was something he was praying over, one of my mother's prized and secret icons, and how safe it had made me feel. How I almost didn't mind dying anymore
He's turning away now and surprises me yet again by pulling up a chair next to my bed. By sitting down it in with all the air of a man settling in for the long haul. He hates hospitals. I can't believe that he's here, let alone that it seems he's staying. Maybe, he's hoping that I'll come out of my coma long enough to spill some more information for his own on-going cause. Or, maybe, he just wants to enjoy watching me go. Watching that thin line wind itself down into nothingness.
Surely, he couldn't have just been here just to look at me, to look after me. I looked like shit. Or, rather, like a man who'd taken four slugs to various vital parts of him and was just barely hanging on, though no one could really figure out why or how.
That didn't bother me. Much, anyway. I'd expected to die like this, though I hadn't exactly been looking forward to it. On most days. I just hadn't expected to have company of any kind, let alone of this kind. Let alone him. I hadn't expected to have him sitting by me as my body continued a long and rather fruitless struggle for a life I didn't really want anymore.
That I hadn't really wanted in a while. Even as I fought and clawed and lied and stole to keep it.
I hadn't foreseen this man of all men to turn up and use his own hands to try and slow my bleeding, to stay with me the whole time until the ambulance came and stripped me away from him at the last, taking from me the last lingering traces of consciousness as well.
And then there had been that nothingness—profound and black and unforgiving—until I found myself here at the last, standing in a sterile corner of a sterile room. Standing outside myself. Outside any feeling for the body lying there so white and still before me, oddly familiar and yet strange at the same time. As if I had never really seen it before. Seen myself. Three days unshaven and far too pale and thin, wasted with shadows and lines that hadn't been there just a year ago.
So meet your latest informant, Fox Mulder—the man who'd screwed you over so damn well that he screwed himself in the process. Whose rainy days have lasted so long that there was next to nothing left to keep body and soul together even before a few paltry bullets tore them apart. A man who's last splurge had been a bottle of half-way decent vodka that had been drunk cold as an ailing refrigerator could make it, one right after the next, each burn easier than the last, until the room didn't look quite so dingy and the old movie on the t.v. no longer made sense and the pain muted to a barely tolerable level. Dimmed enough to finally face looking at the root cause of it.
To remember...
A fleeting smile, precious for its very rarity. A passing brush of fingers, even more rare. A look. A word. Casual things that I had not been able to take as casual, even in the beginning. All the pieces that made up a picture of a man. Pieces that I had kept and held and treasured as nothing before. A picture that I let get inside, let touch something I had barely known existed. Until then. Until him.
And just that one night—after consuming almost half a bottle of that icy heat—I had let myself do it. Let myself imagine it. I had lain back on the sagging mattress and opened my jeans and tried to make my hands be his hands. Had imagined his weight on top of me, his lips at my throat, that voice whispering soft encouragement and crude suggestions and—breathless and teasing and sharp all at once—my first name. The name I had only heard him speak a couple of times, again as casual as sin and as tempting. As if to conjure ecstasy with it. To make me be for him what I couldn't be and yet couldn't help longing for.
Despite the fact it would destroy me.
That night, I made fantasy as much reality as I could manage, as much as I could stand, flimsy and thin and painful as it was. I had closed my eyes to the cheap room I was in and the smells that it held and saw only his face above me, made myself drunk on his scent and on the mingled taste of our arousals. Held myself and stroked myself with fingers far more slender than my own, more tender as well. But just as urgent. Just as needy.
Still, it had taken a long time, both because of what I'd drunk and because eventually I had to keep fighting back tears. Had to keep swallowing down the hurt that rose with the same chaotic intensity as the hunger. Pain and pleasure so twisted together that I couldn't hardly see where one ended and the other began. And it felt so good to want him and imagine him here with me and it felt so bad that it felt good, and worse still because it was a lie. Because he wasn't here and he never would be and all the shame and regret in the world couldn't make it otherwise.
My cock had been red and sore and raw by the time I was done, by the time the pleasure finally peaked and spilled over into a bittersweet, helpless and hopeless climax. One that had me crying out his name at the same time, then turning over immediately to hide my face in the bedclothes as if they could have protected me from anything.
From what I had just done.
From the hole inside myself that I had torn just a little wider. From the icy blackness that seeped out from the depths of it. Worse even than those last couple of days in that missile silo, when I would have cheerfully shot the back of my own head off if I'd been able to.
A blackness and a desperation that I couldn't feel anymore, that seemed a distant thing, now as I watched the very man I'd dreamed about sitting next to me. As I watched him watching me die.
And I couldn't even be angry, even though I knew he'd killed me, even if he hadn't been the one at the last to pull the trigger. He'd always made on like he wanted to. Acted as if shooting me down was high on his personal wish list—find his sister, find the truth, kill Alex Krycek, buy some new porn tapes and so on. But he'd never quite done it, no matter how many opportunities he'd had. No. Instead, he'd pulled me back to him and destroyed me that way. Made someone else do the actual dirty work.
Just the once he'd come close. And, even then, he'd been drugged, out of control. Helpless to stop himself.
And I'd been equally helpless. Stricken by his rage and his accusations and I'd let him hit me, let him take my gun. Let him threaten me with it.
Would have let him pull that trigger...
The door opened and now she was here, too—the woman who'd stopped him from that very act. His partner, who he loved and would give up the world for. One of the most painful reasons why he hated me so thoroughly and unredemptively. He must have called her on the way to the hospital. It made me wonder what she thought of him now; that he had been there and that he had gone back and tried to save me, and now didn't seem inclined to leave. Though she must be somewhat inured to the inexplicable by now, especially in regards to her partner.
She had come up quietly behind him and was now glancing back and forth between him and the body on the bed, as if trying to come to some kind of decision. As if debating what to say. Wondering what his reaction might be. She probably had some ideas about what it should be, but that surety was likely in doubt right now all things considered. Considering that my blood was still on his hands, on his fine Armani suit, even though it had probably been at least a couple of hours since I'd gone in under the knife.
As if he hadn't even thought to wash it off.
I figured I knew what she had to say to him. What the doctors had told her, in grand and clinical detail. I imagined it gave her a thrill, despite herself and her oath to the contrary; I wouldn't have let the woman splint a broken finger without fearing she'd tried to make it a life-threatening injury. Not that such a situation had ever come up, or was ever likely to now.
Still, maybe she'd volunteer to do my autopsy. Get her kicks that way.
She was leaning down next to him now and talking to him, softly as first, but then more urgently. But he didn't seem to respond to either tone. Hardly even seemed to be listening—until he suddenly surged upwards and out of his chair and was all the way across the room a moment later. She seemed a trifle shocked by the reaction, but covered it well. She approached him again, slowly, as if he were some wild animal she had to tame, and put a gentle hand on his arm. And, after a long moment, he turned towards her this time rather than away.
And, now, I could finally see something in his face, in his eyes. His mouth pinched and tired, his eyes weary as well, but somehow managing to look brilliant and angry and sad at the same time.
They touched me as nothing else had since I'd found myself here. They hurt me, worse even than the bullets had. Worse even than that drunken night and the morning after, when I'd woken to stinking sticky sheets and a pounding head and a despair as steely and unbreakable as a pair of iron manacles. As the walls of an underground tomb.
But this pain had nothing more to hold it, no vessel to contain it, and it poured through me like a swollen river, a flood. God's vengeance. Drowning the damned and the saved alike.
Something must have caught his attention then, because he was turning away from her. Was turning back to me, or to the me that lay there anyway. And one of his hands was moving to touch me, to grasp my hand, to twine longer fingers with shorter. Warm with cold.
And I saw what he had seen, knew what he had heard. Saw the tears seeping out from behind closed eyes. Tracking across pale skin and hollow bone. Heard myself the slightest hitch in breathing that he must have heard, a shattered and strained breath breaking loose despite the oxygen tube feeding into one side of a slack mouth.
Saw him bend down even closer and brush those tears away with his free hand. Then bring that same hand up to his own mouth and taste them, as if they could bring him his own drunken revelation.
Saw how he ignored the woman standing close behind him now. How her hand rose and then fell again without ever having touched him.
As he whispered my name. Hazel eyes burning...burning...
I don't know exactly when I figured it out. I guess it was sometime between the third and fourth info drop. I could, if I wanted, go back and expend the time and energy to pull the pieces back apart again and see how I'd fit them together to make the whole that my mind had just jumped straight to. By why bother? I was right, after all.
This gift? ability? curse? of mine drives Scully a little crazy.
It has driven me crazy.
Going from point A to point C without stopping at the all important point B in the middle, I mean. Not even pausing to consider it. Do not pass "Go," but collect your $300.00 anyway, if you please. If you think you can. If you can stand it.
All I knew is that I was walking up the steps to my apartment one night and there it was, the realization of who was sending me those messages, who was arranging for me to pick up packages of papers and pictures and other odds and ends vital to my investigations. My search. My quest.
Like a seductively brilliant vision, ever and always leading me onwards. A castle in the clouds. The grail. The slowly fading voice and laugh and smile of my sister.
I doubted that bone-deep knowledge at first, despite it never having been wrong before. Despite having had it honed by years of studying killers and the strange and unexplained. I just didn't want to believe. Not in that. Not in him. Least of all, in him helping me. It made me immediately think to doubt what he was giving me, what he had given me, but since none of the information had yet led me astray—at least no more than the information that my other informants had—that reaction died stillborn.
It was a dangerous job to help me. To even skirt the increasingly jagged edges of the X-Files. Scully had almost been lost for that reason and, to my great shame, she had ended up losing her sister to it. Sacrificed on my altar of truth. Of misinformation. And both of my previous informants had chanced to die on that same altar. Just to send me the a few rare snippets and slender particles of the truth. To involve me in their games. To keep me a player, albeit no more than a blind pawn sometimes.
But though they had used me as much as I had used them, maybe even more sometimes, they had never done me as a great a wrong as he had. Had never personally hurt me. Betrayed me.
Gotten so damn close.
He had been good at it, you have to give him that. He had been perfect even in his imperfections. Just unfinished and eager enough to be annoying. Focused and smart enough to be useful. Determined and motivated and a more than a touch aggressive so that you could believe that he'd come pretty much straight out of Quantico and was already well on his way up from there, that he was ready, willing, and able to do what it took to keep that star rising. High as he could go.
Feigning an open mind to my theories. Sympathy for my position, for the many unkindnesses of the Academy and the Bureau. Laying it on with such a heavy hand that all my normal and well-honed doubts had no chance—no real spy could be so clumsy, act so obvious. Make the kind of mistakes that he was making. Not and live anyway.
As oddly enough, my instincts, my gut-feelings, ended up failing me this one time.
And I was blind-sided by betrayal because of it. By the sight of a half-dozen abandoned cigarette butts, the faint aroma of their clinging smoke underpinning a shattering loss. The loss of my real, my true, partner.
The one he had helped steal away.
Then stole away, himself, to avoid facing the music. Scurrying back to the damp and darkness where such men seem to be born. If they're even born at all. If their mothers wouldn't have been moved to strangle them at birth. Or leave them in the hills for some poor unsuspecting shepherd to find. To be raised to perpetuate the legendary and sickly-sweet largess of wolves in sheep's clothing.
Though this one had worn a bad suit and rather too much hair gel.
Perfect in his imperfections. As if even his faults had been tailor-made for me.
That shy smile and that husky voice and that conciliatory/competitive attitude, contradicting me just enough to earn him a touch of necessary respect and yet sucking up to me just enough to make me both feel superior and mockingly soothed at the same time. No one had ever much listened to me before—not since I'd gotten the X-Files anyway and gone to live in the basement—not even Scully. Though she had come to, reluctantly and after a fact and after many arguments on the subject, at least consider my views and my insights no matter what her scientific upbringing had taught her to believe. To consider and reject, more often than not, despite my track record, but it had been something.
And he had certainly been something. Something more. Something maybe even better. Or might have been if it hadn't all been a lie right from the start. That shy smile an act and that husky voice a game and all those faults most definitely tailor-made. By a man with fingers as much stained by blood as nicotine and cold eyes and a colder heart. If he had one at all, even one as small and black and withered as the Grinch's.
I'd been betrayed before—my parents had raised me for it, you might say—but this had hurt like nothing before had hurt. Shocking me with its intensity. At first, I'd thought the feelings had all been for Scully. Anger at her loss and fear for what might be happening to her. Grief that I would never get her back. Guilt that it had been all my fault.
But when I'd finally gotten her back, battered and used and barely alive, the anger had only grown and it had been tinged with a hatred I'd never before known. Let alone thought myself capable of. With Scully still barely hanging on in the hospital, I'd arranged for the men who'd taken her to come to my apartment. Where I was to lay in await, to surprise and kill them. Murder them. Stain my floors with their guilty blood. And part of me had wondered—had hoped, had pleaded with a merciless and relentless trio of fates—that he would be one of them. That my face would be the last thing he'd ever see.
That he would know how much I hated him for what he'd done. What it had brought me to.
But Melissa had talked me back from that abyss, from that dank and dark place of wolves. And Scully had eventually and miraculously pulled through, only to have her sister die in her name on another black and fateful evening. As if tragedy could not be held long in abeyance. Only side-tracked. Fooled, for a so brief moment or two.
A life for a life—wasn't that how it went?
A life for a life...
That morning I'd cried when I returned from Scully's bedside. When I came home and found my apartment ransacked. I sank down and cried as if all my soul were cracking, as
broken as if it too had been made of glass and ripped cushions and torn books, ravaged by the bitter knowledge that I'd lost my chance. That the men who'd raped my apartment, the men who'd taken my partner from me and nearly killed her with it, were long gone and I'd lost my chance at revenge. At justice, bleak and unrepentant as it was.
That I'd lost my chance to perhaps see him one last time and discover if he really had the slightest idea—could ever have imagined or known, let alone cared in the least, in the most minute of ways—about what he'd done to me. How much he'd hurt me.
How very much I wanted to hurt him back.
And when my chance for that had come, much later and with illicit drugs burning my thoughts to white-hot ash, with the blood of my father hardly dried on my hands, I'd taken it. Given way to that rage. A rage and a violence I now I think I would have fallen prey to even if they hadn't played around with the water in my building, poisoning me to the brink of madness. As if that's ever very far away, even in the best of times.
Because that same violence found me again in a busy airport in Hong Kong and there was no other excuse for it. Only the fact that he was there and I was there and how very much I hated him. I'd been slightly less out of control, but no less vicious this second time. As if once it'd sunk it's teeth into me I couldn't shake it, could never again find myself free.
I was a prisoner of the satisfaction I felt at smashing that face in, at his sounds of pain, his weak struggles. Ineffectual as he always seemed to be in my grasp, as if he somehow knew on some unspoken level that he deserved it all, that he had to be made to pay. Had to atone. And not just once or twice, but as much and as many times as the demon inside me needed feeding. The demon that he'd awakened.
The one that tore at my insides every time I saw his face and heard that soft voice.
But that night on my steps, with the latest packet of information an increasingly familiar weight inside my jacket, I'd only felt a brief flash, an incandescent twinge, of that long and lonely fury. And even my old and familiar hatred had seemed a distant thing, nearly as ill-fitting as an off-the-rack suit. As if it had only been gathering dust lately. Like all the flat surfaces of my apartment.
Like my bed.
But I didn't want to go there—figuratively, as well as literally—not now and not then, and never in the case of a man with eyes too pretty for his own damn good. Too fucking deceitful. With a voice that could, when just asking if I wanted a cup of coffee, put a porn star to shame. The breathless husky dark-edged tone of a liar.
Sliding right into the faults in my own composure like a thin blade, wedging in and twisting until the pressure built up, until the cracks began to split even wider. So wide that I couldn't seal them up again, no matter how many times I hit him, how badly I threatened him. Making him bleed as I had bled, inside where no one could see it. Where no one even suspected, except maybe Scully.
And even she hadn't known. Could never know. It would kill her, as it was killing me.
As it was killing...
Oh, I had known, but it still had been a shock to see him there. And not just because he'd been shot, though that had been a part of it. It had been a long time since I'd last seen him and even with a memory like mine things still tend to fade, the colors lose their brilliance, the edges their crispness. They just don't have the impact of the real thing; like the difference between masturbation and making love, not that I'd been able to compare the two much lately. In years, if I was to be absolutely honest.
His eyes had hardly been tracking, but I was sure they'd seen me standing over him. And I'd seen the pain in them all too clearly, the unspoken question, as I'd sunk down next to him. Sunk down with the same urge to cry as I'd succumbed to that morning in my apartment, everything jammed up so hard in my throat that I felt like I was choking on it. Drowning in all the tears I'd already shed and those I never could.
I'd fumbled my cell phone out and spoke somehow—forcing the words out, trying for a semblance of calm—even as he shuddered beneath my hands. Even as I felt his blood, the heat of it and the flood, pulsing out between my fingers. Stealing his warmth away. All but the spark in his eyes as they struggled so hard to fix on me, to hold me the only way he could. Green the only remaining color in a far-too pale face, in all that blackness he'd taken to wearing.
As if leather had ever protected him before.
A life for a life, but when it came down to it, when it was right there in front of me, I didn't want him dead. Couldn't bear for him to be dead. Especially knowing that I was the cause of it.
Because even as I held him I wanted to kiss him. Kiss him despite or maybe even because of the trace of blood on those parted lips. Wanted to give him—and myself—at least that, if nothing else was possible. One simple thing that couldn't be denied or excused, that could change everything and nothing.
And he was trying to reach out to me, too. Trying to talk when he had no real breath left to spare, just little sounds escaping at the last, as if he were choking on desperation as much as death. I couldn't understand them, but I couldn't miss the look in those eyes. Confusion. Apology. Despair.
Longing.
Acceptance.
Not the slightest trace of resentment or accusation or anger, even though I had half-way expected it. Had even been geared up to face it, to face the worst that those eyes could give me. But there was nothing there of hate. Not even as a shiver of pain ran through him, so strong I almost felt it in myself, echoing through my own flesh and blood and bone. Making my throat constrict even tighter—a traitor's noose, an assassin's garrote. Harsh and brutal and heartless.
Heartless as the men who took him away from me at the last—ostentatiously, to try and save him—but still it stung. Didn't they know that only I could save him? Or damn him, if it came to that.
I didn't remember anything of my drive to the hospital. Only that about half-way there, I finally found the presence of mind to call Scully. To let her know what had happened. Where I was going.
To cut her off the minute she started asking questions, unable to piece together my own feelings, let alone my motivations, let alone to try to appease her curiosity and her flash of anger. Of shock and fear. As if I didn't already know I'd been playing with fire. I'd been burned often enough to know a lit match when I saw one.
The next clear memory I have was of walking down long hospital corridors, of trying to ignore the smell that always seemed to cling to them. Avoiding the questions and the raised eyebrows of several interns and nurses and the busy fluster of the one behind the desk I ebbed up against at last. I wanted to see him, but they'd already taken him to the operating room. No time to try and get him more stable first. No time to do anything but make some last-ditch effort. Hopeless as it was looking.
The EMT's had already almost lost him once on the way there. They had no time for
anything else, least of all some poor lost FBI agent who couldn't even figure out why he should care anyway. One of those same nurses showed me to some waiting room and tried to be nice to me, asking me if she could get me some coffee, if she could call anyone. But I couldn't drink. I couldn't hardly breathe. I just found my thoughts spiraling around and around, an obscure and obscene orbit. Grooving their way a little deeper on each pass. Making it hurt a little more.
Then, finally, Scully arrived. Some part of me recognized her shoes anyway. Those slender legs. The purposeful way she entered the room and came right over to me. But I still had no answers for her. No clarity to give her. No strength to face her.
As if everything had been stripped away. Leaving just a husk behind.
One that answered to my name and looked up at her and talked. Made sounds, anyway, though I have no clue if they made any kind of sense. Though, they must have, because she was responding to them and her tone wasn't sharp anymore. Or not as sharp as it had been on the phone, at least. And she got me that cup of coffee I'd refused earlier. Put my normal dosage of sugar in it, too.
She was sitting beside me, her own cup nearly empty and mine still nearly full, when a couple of doctors came in at the last. I caught nothing of what they'd said, except that he was still alive. I cut in then before they could take anything away from that, before they could play false with my hope, and demanded that I see him. They hadn't wanted to let me, even after I'd showed them my badge—started to make up some damn good reason why they should bend the rules—but Scully cut in and dragged them off with her. And she must have convinced them of something because they told me I could see him, for a few minutes anyway, in about half an hour. Once he was out of recovery. Or as out of recovery as he'd ever be.
I sat back down and drank my coffee then, like a good boy, and avoided Scully's eyes and her questions as much as I could sitting right next to her. She was angry with me, and worried too, but I couldn't find it in myself to do more than that. I don't know how long I let them keep me waiting, but I finally got up and couldn't stand it anymore. And Scully must have known I was at the end of my rope, that I was just squeaking by on a fingernail, because she took me to him.
And left us alone, as she went to call Skinner. As if that could help.
And all the reasons why I hate hospitals came back to me in full force as I stood there and looked down at him. At the man I'd hated for so long and thought so invincible, at least to anything that I could throw him. Hair shorn short to the skull, as if anything else had been too much to bother with. That once-perfect skin nearly as white as the bandages that crisscrossed his chest, even more pale and fragile under the bruised-looking eyes. Beneath the bandages and the thin blanket I could make out the count of each and every bone, as if he'd not been eating well lately, if at all.
He was a wreck and I had helped make him so. As he had helped make me. And it was so obvious now, so clear. What we had both been running from. What had frightened us so badly we'd thought there'd been no other choice. No way out. Except in denial or in death.
My denial. His death.
I wanted to leave then, wanted to turn away, but I found I couldn't. My heartbeat was so very fast, so loud in my ears that it nearly drowned out the sound of the heart monitor, the sound of the regulator pushing oxygen into his lungs. Keeping him alive. Keeping him here. I felt dizzy with it all, dizzy and sick to my stomach and so very tired.
It was almost more effort than I could stand to pull a chair over and fall down in it. To try and keep myself breathing steadily. To not keep from screaming. Or crying. I felt as if the walls were closing in on me—on us—everything reduced to this one small room and its indifferent green-bland walls, the subtle and sour odor of death that all the disinfectant in the world couldn't completely cover up.
And when Scully joined me again, I couldn't face her at all. Couldn't even look at her, let alone hear what she had to say in that so-cool, practiced and impartial doctor's voice. It was a lie, anyway. The tone, if not the words. I knew only too well her true feelings. I knew only too well what I would see if I dared look up and into those frost-blue eyes. And who could blame her? After all, she was only expressing her more than justified personal distrust and dislike for this man. An aversion that was kissing cousins to my own. Or to what my own had once been.
She was a little ticked off at me. And getting more ticked off by the minute as I didn't respond. Her anger matching the depth of her worry; what had her fool partner gotten himself involved in now? What abyss was she going to have to pull me back from? One thing that she and her sister had shared—the need and the ability to save my ass when it most needed saving. Even from myself.
I could tell that's what she wanted to do now. To save me. But I didn't want her to save me. Not this time. I wanted her to save him. To tell me that it was not too late. That he could still make it. Could pull through like the survivor that he'd always been, saving himself at the price of others. Always doing what it took, no matter how cruel.
But the hollows under his eyes and the starvation-thin form mocked that knowledge. As did the fact that he'd been shot at all. It told me that somewhere along the line, under influences that I could only imagine, he'd crossed over and become someone else. A man who wanted to help me. A man who looked up at me as if I were the only thing left that mattered in all the world.
A man who'd died for me.
All something she'd never understand, let alone believe or appreciate. That I hardly understood myself. No matter that I believed it. Oh God, I believed in it...in him.
Scully only backed off once I actually got up and ran from her, from those soft-sharp words. From the way the room seemed to be growing ever smaller around me the longer she talked, painfully small, the very air thickening with that sullen smell, and I almost told her then. Almost let it all come pouring out—my terror and my desire, and the fear of what my desire was driving me to do, to want, to be. Madness, all of it. But a madness I no longer wanted to deny, even if I ended up destroying my life because of it.
The pale ghost it had become.
"Mulder..." she was saying, the gentle affection in her voice getting to me as nothing else before had. A hand on my arm, even gentler. A soothing pressure. "Mulder, please...tell me what's wrong?"
"Scully..."
I almost turned to her then, returning to familiarity and sanity, but something made me stop at the last moment. Something made me hesitate. And I looked away, instead. Walking back over to that bed and the man lying so quietly on it.
A man crying so quietly that there was no way I could have heard him, except that I had. And I knew what the tears were for, even before I tasted them. Even before I bent down over him and took his hand and made a small and protected space between us. A place he
could come back to if he would. That I wanted him to know was there.
Where we could be a whisper of skin across skin in a shadowed bed. Where we could have long nights of being held safe within a cage of muscle and bone and mute and shared desire. Our hands both gentle and hard at the same time, working to create a need as slow as cream, but sharply desperate for all that. That same seductive blend of desire and desperation I wanted to see shining out of a pair of sly green eyes as they looked at me, looked into me. The same eyes that had come to know me in my darkness. That knew a darkness of their own. And that could no longer lie to me, not to save their own soul, let alone such a pitiful remaining shard of life.
I couldn't help it. I crossed those last couple of inches and kissed him. Meshing our mutual insanities, mouth to mouth and beyond any misunderstanding, any last and lingering regrets. Even the one coming to stand behind me, her shock and disbelief and dismay wicked as a blade in my back. As a piece of broken glass. A spill of pills across a bathroom rug.
Not forgotten, but forgiven. Necessary.
Fated.
And entirely vindicated when lips slowly parted beneath mine, as far as they could, as much as they could, and grew warm and full of life once more. When heavy lashes lifted and green eyes looked up at me, more than a little dazed and full of wonder and still oh so wary of miracles. Even the one we'd just been given.
To begin again. To see. To believe.
To have, the most unbelievable thing of all. And the most precious.
And sure, I could tear it all apart and examine each separate piece, see how it all came together at the last, but what would it matter? What could it serve? I've gotten to point C anyway without it and there's my $300.00 waiting for me and though some days I may not know if I'm the thimble or the shoe, or just some half-assed idiot with the universe pissed as hell at him most days and far too lenient on others, I do know this.
This is my chance and my choice and I'm not going to walk through that door alone. Never again.
And neither is he.
Threshold
by Garnet
I guess maybe I expected something different. Something more. Or maybe less, as the case may be. Even though the sheer and unrelenting blackness of final oblivion was never something I'd ever really believed in. Still, I guess I always imagined—when I found myself with the time or the inclination to think about it at all, that is—that things just kind of went on. Oh, not with some "final judgment" sort of deal, harps and angels and demons and brimstone and all that shit, but something anyway...
