Does it surprise you, knowing what I've become, that that's not all there is
to me? Does it surprise you to know that I once wanted to be him?
Not any more, though. You can rest assured that my heart of gold is still
veined thick with lead.
The simple truth—an alchemist's tale: lead into gold—is that he very
nearly brought me back. I'm allowed to say—(you want the truth)—that I
love him. And okay, so I don't know how to be in love with him; and I
admit that I don't even have the basic vocabulary to communicate my feelings
or even understand them; and I know all the reasons why I can't ever allow
anyone to know how I feel about him—I've dreamt the reasons: [{smelled the
blood}], [{heard the screams}], [{seen the cigarette ash spiralling into
graves}]... Don't you think—if I knew how—I would be you and close to
him?
But I don't know how to be you. My language has become nicotine and hatred,
breathed in through gunshots, exhaled through terror. That other 'he' has
fashioned of me a mirror, and cloned himself—his vanity, he thinks—through shaping my world. But I have learned a thing or two about shaping
worlds—and I cannot stand cigarette smoke.
I'm rambling, I know. You want to hear it explained, defined—ink binding
thoughts to page: dissect my soul with words and make of them a history.
You're so literal at times. I think it's why he loves you.
But the truth you're searching for is not the one you're expecting. You
want to know of betrayals. You want to understand the mechanics of how and
why. And knowing that I have—and do—love him, I can taste your
confusion thick upon my tongue.
I'll make it simple: He seduced me.
They paint him the innocent and me the corrupter. I had never known how to
touch and be touched by another man—and yet I am the betrayer and he the
betrayed? I fell and fell hard: I was young, and he was the first person
that made me feel other than used, other than a tool. I was caught between
what I knew and what I thought I knew, trying to delay, procrastinate, until
I found a way out...
I believed in the smell of tobacco: I was given shape and purpose by
shadows, allowed to believe that what I did had some effect upon the world.
I believed in sunflower seeds and hazel eyes.
Faced with the choice—love versus purpose—we both know that we've never
chosen, don't we? Postponing the choice until there is no longer a choice to
make. At least I'm honest enough to admit it, honest enough to regret it
and acknowledge that I was wrong.
I... I... I believe that he did honestly feel something too. I have to
believe that he meant it when he smiled against the back of my neck, when he
traced whispered words across my skin with his fingers, when he captured my
mouth and drew my fragmented soul from between my lips; I need to believe
that his eyes told the truth when he dried my tears and taught me to gasp.
I can still cry. Didn't you know? 'Happy are those who have not seen and
yet believe'—isn't that a Catholic mantra?
I have my own mantra of belief: his name over and over again in my thoughts.
And he must never know. He's safe in his iron hatred, locked and barred and
rooted in his pains.
I'm trying to explain.
I don't have the words; I don't have the breath, or the heart.
Rightly or wrongly, I feel that you have it in you to take the leap of logic
and understand—to make the connection—between how I seem to act and what
the results of my actions are. Surely you must have made the correlation
between my appearance and your increased penetration of the conspiracy?
Why can't you recognise that I'm trying to do what's right without knowing
how?
He touched me.
An electric tingle that made the hairs rise on the nape of my neck.
I was drunk with fatigue, they'd fucked up on the reservations: one room,
one bed, one exhausted me, one wisecracking and relaxed him. Do the math.
I woke up, arm draped over the side of the bed, aware of his body pressed
close—his lips sighing his sleeping breath on my neck, his nipples erect
against my back, skin a furnace heat. I didn't dare move, paralysed by
indecision and apprehension; terrified because something in me, fluttering
and breathless, whispered an excited 'yes'.
I stayed still, conscious of his legs twined through mine, his arm around
me, his fingers splayed along my collarbone. Hyper aware of the searing
heat of his hardened cock nestling in the crack of my ass, a throbbing
pressure that flexed rhythmically through the cotton of my briefs.
I was hard. I was terrified. I was motionless with contradictions.
What should I do? What could I do that would leave us both unembarrassed by
the heat of our skin? He was too close and I... I was only Alex, for once
breathless, uncertain, a quivering construct of nerves, pulsing between heat
and cold, caught between the desire to extricate myself, or allow myself to
sink deeper into his arms.
I waited too long.
He moved.
A slow languid circling of his hips as he stretched against me. His lips
pressed into the back of my neck as he ground his cock against my ass,
bunching the cotton up between my cheeks. I could feel the heat of his cock
against my flesh and I realised that he was naked behind me. His fingers
traced a blazing trail down across my torso, lightly slipping across my
nipples, sliding slowly down until his palm rested flat on my stomach.
I stiffened, unable to suppress the involuntary tensing of my muscles as my
contradictions failed beneath a sweep of breathless, terrified anticipation.
I waited, afraid to admit that I was awake and aware, but his breathing was
still deep and regular, unchanged and unchanging, still pulsing—warm—on
the skin of my neck.
Fingers lightly circled my navel—once, twice, three times—slid down to
trace the waistband of my briefs, outlined the shape of my straining cock
through the cotton, cupped my balls in his palm.
My breath caught in my throat as his hand slipped beneath the waistband of
my briefs and his fingers—cool, elegant—closed around me.
I felt him tongue my ear, nibble my lobe, lay a progression of long, sucking
kisses along my jaw-line and neck.
I gasped and flinched.
His tongue dove deep into my ear. "Stop trying to pretend you're asleep,
Alex." He said, his words soft and heated. "I've seen the way you look at
me. I know you've wanted this."
My whole body spasmed with panic. Only his arms tightly enfolding me
prevented me from rolling away and out of the bed. I grasped at his hands,
trying to pull them from me, pushed back against him straining for leverage;
before I knew he had moved, I was rolled onto my back and he was above me,
pinning me down, my wrists held tight above my head, my world condensed to
the flaring of his nostrils, the colour of his eyes.
I struggled, yes. But every movement brought us closer together, pressed
us more intimately. He raised addiction with every whisper of flesh
against flesh, and I, addicted, found myself sliding beneath him, straining
to mould my body to his. I should have hit him for the smug smile that
shaped his lips as they descended to mine. Instead, I arched my neck as far
from the pillow as I could, thirsty for his kiss, desperate to inhale as
much of him as I could, wanting helplessly to lose myself in him.
And his kiss. The feathered touch of his lips brushing barely against mine
and withdrawing; dipping again to press harder, once, before evaporating.
And again, from another direction; and again ghost kisses, burning, almost
intangible, and I... left panting and hungry in their wake, straining to reach
them, tugging at my pinned wrists, wanting only to touch him, to be touched
by him...
I felt his tongue trace the outline of my lips, felt it sweep across them,
marking, claiming. Felt it slide between them, a flickering, teasing
challenge. My tongue swirled to meet his, succumbed to a suggestion of
cinnamon; I breathed his exhaled breath, drew it deep into my lungs and
sighed out a concentration of formless emotion.
I was constructed of ice and flame, sanity and madness, transfigured by his
touch, translated by his touching.
His kiss was suddenly not enough.
I'm trying to explain, but I'm tired of explanation.
It's true that I was assigned as his partner to help him fail: the same
reason that you were assigned to the role. They told me that they should
have explained to you their reasoning, shown you their evidence, and you,
eminently rational and logical as you are, would have believed them every
bit as much as I did. Their mistake with you was allowing him to consume
you with the fire of his vision, to persuade you with the integrity of his
passion and his pursuit of 'the truth'.
You were their prototype; I, their finished product. Learning from you,
they shaped me to be everything you weren't. But I, too, was brought near
to combustion by the heat of his presence, subtly corrupted by his nearness.
And I got sloppy deliberately so. They would have noticed my defection,
and he would have found out my deceptions sooner or later, by one agency or
another.
They should have made you theirs from the beginning that's what this is
all about. It's not so much about him: it's about reclaiming you.
His kiss was suddenly not enough.
He raised drought in my body.
Parched, I desperately sought his rain, grinding my hips against his, hating
the binding cotton of my briefs.
I was overwhelmed suddenly by how empty I was, how desperately I needed to
be filled. His passion served to ignite something within me, an
all-encompassing swirl of shadow and lust and grief.
Between kisses, all I could hear was someone saying: "Please...Help me...please
help me, Mulder, please..."
I was suddenly crying. My whole body shook with sobs as tears fell
helplessly across my cheeks and were caught between our lips.
"Mulder, please..." My stomach burned with the twisting helplessness of
breathing against the weight of his grinding body, the weight of my
emptiness.
He seemed suddenly to condense behind his eyes. "Alex?"
"Mulder, please...no "
He released my wrists and started to draw away, his face already beginning
to close down with the horror of his misjudgement. Before I had time to
think, I sat up and grabbed his hand, used it gently to brush away my tears
as I gathered my breath.
For the first time since I woke up, I could see him clearly in the moonlight
that fell through the gap in the curtains. He swayed in the silver, a
creature at bay in the tangled snowy sheets, wrought of velvet shadows and
ghost-gleam, barely breathing himself it seemed.
We were caught in the moment that stretched out between us: the only
connection in the hand pressed to my cheek, in the gaze that bound us
terrified of making it real to the taut silence. I felt light-headed from
holding my breath, and my lungs ached to wrench more air as they spasmed
with another almost almost-sob.
The moment quivered, strained to breaking, tore beneath a mutual gasping
breath.
"Well," he said, nervously. "I think I can account for the lost time in
abductions now."
I found myself half-laughing as the seconds began to fall around us like
snowflakes. Even to my own ears, my breath sounded ragged, terrified. He
looked suddenly so uncertain, so lost.
"Alex..." He said hesitantly, and then stopped. "Alex, I'm... I didn't..." He
drew another breath. "Alex, I'm so sorry."
"I think you've completely ruined the moment," I said.
"I thought I might have been having a moment on my own..." he said, wry,
self-mocking, afraid.
Not letting go of his hand, I crawled awkwardly to my knees, facing him
across the bed. "Mulder, I..."
He suddenly seemed to notice that I was still holding his hand.
Hesitantly, I inched towards him. "I...I..." I fumbled for words.
"Alex, you don't have to"
I silenced him by lunging forward and kissing him clumsily. Falling, I
managed to miss half his mouth, landing the kiss messily across the side of
his lower lip and chin. Unable to catch myself, it must have seemed that I
literally launched myself into his arms, knocking him backwards and landing
awkwardly across him.
After a stunned moment, he began to chuckle. "This isn't quite what I had
in mind..." he said.
"It isn't?" I tried for nonchalance: it came out coquette.
His hand came up and caressed my cheek, trailed the tear tracks with
blazingly gentle fingertips. His thumb rubbed softly across my bottom lip,
and caught, I began to fall helplessly into his eyes.
"You've not done this before, have you?" he asked quietly.
I looked away. "No." I could barely hear the sound of my own voice. How
could he have known that I wanted this when I hadn't even admitted it to
myself? How could he have seen enough to make him risk this when I...
He kissed me again. My thoughts dissolved into pure sensation as his arms
reached around me and pulled me tight against him. I became the sum of our
merging lips, a shiver of our sparring tongues.
His hands, warm and soft, swept across my back, teasing burning trails over
my skin. His fingers slid down until they encountered the waistband of my
briefs, hesitated, crept beneath it, sending shudders of arousal through me
as he cupped my buttocks, glided a fingertip down my crack. I raised my
hips, and he slid the material down over my straining erection, pushed them
down my thighs and snagged them with a foot, pulling them over my ankles and
off.
Slowly, I lowered myself again, feeling for the first time my hardened flesh
against his.
I was lost in him, adrift in his eyes, addicted to the warmth of his body.
Gently, he rolled me onto my back, rolling with me so that once more he was
above me. Instinctively, I parted my thighs so that he could lie more
comfortably atop me, raising my legs so that they were curled around the
back of his calves. He pressed against me, and I thrust up, our erections
sliding hard and heated between us. I found myself panting around his
swirling tongue, gasping into his smile.
His mouth migrated to my cheek, my jawbone, the side of my neck. His tongue
traced sigils into the skin beneath my ear, laid a licked path from my
Adams-apple to the tip of my chin before seizing my mouth again. My fingers
wound through his hair, crushing his lips to mine, breathing fiercely
through him and allowing him to breath through me.
His hands caressed my sides, slid across my stomach, traced the arch of my
ribs. His thumbs circled my nipples, recorded the pattern of my abs, slid
back down to cup my buttocks again.
He rolled over onto his back once more, pulling me astride him. I felt his
hard cock slide between my buttocks, a heated pressure as I bent down to
catch his mouth, to slide my tongue across his lips. I tensed, startled,
uncertain, but he smiled at me.
"Shh, Alex. We'll go as fast or as slow as you want."
I hesitated. I was suddenly caught by the desire to prove myself to him,
and so I let my hands begin to wander. He gasped as my fingers outlined his
collarbone, followed the silhouette of his pecs with my mouth. I tongued a
nipple, bit it gently, swirled my tongue down the centre of his stomach and
then back up, over the column of his throat. I let my hand wander between
us, reaching down and grasping his cock firmly in my fist, beginning to
stroke it rhythmically. His fingers closed slowly across mine, opening my
hand and reclosing it about us both, pressing our cocks together and gently
matching me stroke for stroke.
I shifted again, and worked my mouth down across his chest. I kissed his
navel, flicking my tongue inside, before laying a progression of kisses
further downwards. Again I hesitated briefly, looking up at him as his cock
gently nudged my chin.
"Alex," he said, "you don't have t-"
I slowly took his cock in my mouth and his gasp echoed in the stillness of
the room. Slowly; frightened; heady with desire and the taste of him; heart
racing so fast that I could barely breath around him, my lips closed over
the head of his cock. My tongue independent; rebel flickered across his
tender flesh, lapped delicately at the pearl of moisture gathered at the
top. He shuddered, straining not to thrust, as I went down as far as I
could go.
I choked suddenly, gagging, and felt his hands gently pull my head up.
"Alex," he said, eyes shining. "Don't feel you have to prove something."
"I...god, Mulder! I want you! Let me" I was shaking violently, my teeth
almost chattering. I was poised somewhere between fear and mindless lust,
terror and consuming passion. "I want Damn it, Mulder, let me"
He laughed and kissed me again. "Relax, Alex. There's plenty of time."
"No. Now."
There are no easy answers; there is no night and day.
All is second upon second building minutes, constructing hours. All our
lives, we're erecting days, manufacturing years as the cells divide and fail
within us, as we fission and split without. All is tick anticipating tock,
hanging breathless between heartbeats. All is wanting desperately to be
loved and to show ourselves capable of loving.
I'm speaking from the heart.
From the bit that's still golden.
"No. Now."
He opened his mouth again, and I seized it in a fiercely demanding kiss. My
body ached for him in ways that demanded satisfaction; desire ignited a
ferocious want that blurred my vision, clawed my hands as they gripped
his.
I sank my teeth into his lower lip and tugged, and somehow somehow I was
beneath him again, burning under the pressure of his body covering mine. I
heard myself moan as his mouth moved agonisingly slowly down my torso,
his tongue raising a rash of desire where it passed. His hands long
fingered; elegant his hands were... they were...
"How many fucking hands do you have Mulder?" I heard myself pant, and he
grinned up the length of my body at me.
"Fucking hands?" He asked, his voice low and smoky. "Why, just the t-"
His sentence went unfinished as his tongue snaked out to lick the crease at
the top of my thigh.
I shivered, digging my heels into the tangled sheets, fighting the urge to
wrap my legs around his shoulders as his lips pressed sucking kisses along
the length of my cock. I fought to breathe as his tongue flared
startlements of electricity through my groin, licked shivers of raw and
arching passion across my flesh. I found my hands clawing handfuls of
sheets in an effort to avoid grabbing his head and forcing him to stop
teasing... My thoughts cycled around and around; the entirety of my existence
balanced precariously upon the same words: His mouth; his hands; oh god
his mouth, his hands his mouth, his handshismouthhishands...
I think I cried out when he took me deep into his throat; I think I must
have passed out briefly from want and need, fear and desire. I was
incoherent with emotion and ecstasy as his tongue his tongue rasped
over and around me, pulling shudders from deep within me, making me arch
from the bed, twist my fingers through his hair.
I threw my head back against the pillow. Any hope I might have had for
retaining even a tenuous element of control in this situation vanished
utterly: I was his. Utterly his. Stars flashed in front of my eyes; I felt
my whole body ignite in a superheated blush as his tongue scribed circles
around my hardened flesh. I was transfixed by sensation, appalled and
excited and... thoughts failed as his tongue flickered, teased.
It felt as though I'd tried to enter orbit. I found myself arching into the
air, pushing into his mouth as if I was trying to pull him into me.
Screaming, I came violently, my body spasming as Mulder wrenched my orgasm
from me. The world went dark, the silence punctuated by my furious
wrenching gasps for breath and his slow velvet chuckle.
"Mulder, I..."
He collapsed in a heap next to me, snaked his arm across my chest. "Am I
gonna let you finish a sentence? Ever?" He kissed me.
"I..."
"The answer is no: no sentence no talking, Alex. Shhh." He silenced me
again with his lips.
I settled into his arms, allowed him to spoon up behind me. I could feel
his hardness against me and pressed back into it.
"Tomorrow," he whispered, sleepily. "There's time for me tomorrow. Now
that I know it can happen."
We lay in silence. I could feel his heartbeat against my back, felt his
skin, slick, against mine, his breath on the back of my neck. The heat
between us was comfortable under the sheet, the intimacy new but only
slightly hesitant. I felt myself relax into him, drift off towards sleep.
I was jerked back to wakefulness by the shrill ring of my mobile phone.
Mulder shifted irritably. "That's yours," he said smugly.
I disentangled myself from him and picked my phone up from the table by the
door.
"Krycek here."
"Agent Krycek." There was a pause, an inhalation. "I trust you were having...
pleasant dreams." I went cold, my skin rising in gooseflesh. He couldn't
know... couldn't possibly... "You may be interested to know that the agenda has
been set. All is now in motion." Another inhalation, a perfunctory
exhalation. "You have your orders."
I looked across at the bed. Mulder lay sprawled across it, tangled among
the sheets. His chest rose and fell evenly, a slight snore escaping from
his open mouth.
It took me some moments to realise that all I could hear was a dial tone.
The truth you're searching for is not the one you're expecting.
The End
Veined thick with lead
by Mockery
I've seen the way that you look at me: disgusted, condescending, hating and
despising. I can't deny that I've deserved those looks in my time—it
might be taken as a token of my success: each glare a trophy; each stare an
award—but I don't even have to think back that far to find a time when
those things didn't define other people's perceptions of me, didn't define
my perceptions of myself.
He must never know: I don't have the breath or the heart.
I'm trying to do what's right without knowing how.
All is wanting desperately to be loved and to show ourselves capable of
loving.
I'm speaking from the bit that's golden.
I'm living in the bit that's lead.
