—'The End is the Beginning is the End' by Smashing Pumpkins
Watching him has become a full-time job, these days.
It's arrogant of me to hold myself up as his guardian angel, I know, but
someone has to do it—might as well be me, his very own personal devil. Who
else could know all of his weaknesses so intimately, all of his fears, all of
his irrational obsessions, and still idolize him? Not Scully, that much is
certain. She will never see him in quite the same light as I. He protects her
from his flaws as he protects her from everything...and as I protect him,
driven by this relentless, almost fetishistic preoccupation that passes for
loyalty. It's a loyalty that has very little to do with virtue or trust,
however, and everything to do with truth.
It's a loyalty that'll get me killed one day—or more likely, one night. A
night very like this one, I suspect, the air dense with dread, the
smoke-heavy sky almost unnaturally dark. It's the kind of blackness you feel
your way through, orienting by scent and sound and the odd half-sensed
subliminal cue. Even the stars are shrouded in smoke, tonight, and the moon
is glacial and distant.
The smoke is everywhere, blue-gray and putrid, and I almost fail to see him
for the haze, but, strangely, it seems to dissipate as I draw nearer to him,
and the stench all but fades away. He is surrounded by it without actually
being touched, but I'm not fooled. He is not safe here. The shadows loom up
all around him, heedless of the light that follows at his side. It's her; the
red-gold gleam of her that is never absent, even when she is not with him—as
she isn't tonight. How very noble of him...to absorb the brunt of the danger
in her stead. But he doesn't have a monopoly on self-sacrifice, not by any
means. At least he has her assurance, a quiet steadiness that he wears about
him like a borrowed coat, like a knight bearing his lady's token.
I have nothing of him .
But I never really expected to get roses—or anything else, for that matter
(one kiss, yes, but that I stole). Just him, alive, for one more day. I can
make do with that. But first I have to see to it that he does live, and the
night is far from over.
He doesn't even know the danger he's in. Doesn't have a fucking clue, or
perhaps he knows but he doesn't care, can't waste a single atom of that
amazing mind on his own peril. I watch him staring up at this burning wreck
of a building through binoculars and I can almost taste his passion, fine and
raw and overwhelming. A thing so pure as this should have eaten him away by
now, burned him down to just the base elements, leaving nothing
non-essential, nothing human. But he lives with that fire and, incredibly,
isn't consumed, only scorched a bit around the edges. Those cinders he has
for eyes are the only evidence of his heat.
And I'm so absorbed with the sight of him that I forget to be quiet, and he
hears me even over the roar of the flames and the clamor of new explosions
going off every few minutes, set off by the blaze. I don't know what he
hears—my breathing, maybe, or the pounding of my heart—but he turns,
lowering the binoculars, and his eyes pick me out regardless of the broken
streetlamp and the cloying darkness.
His face goes instantly hard and in a moment his gun is out; he remembers me,
how touching. But he doesn't seem to remember what the Sig is for, because in
another moment he's come around from behind his car and his hands are on me,
inexorable, hauling me back to the silver Taurus and slamming me up against
it. His body crushes me into the doorframe, jarring my elbow so hard I'm
surprised it doesn't break the glass, and the gun is prodding me just beneath
the ribs. It's all so amazing I could scream.
But I don't, probably because the wind has been knocked out of me and any
attempt at vocalization would only worsen this terrible tightness around my
chest.
He gives me a few moments to catch my breath before clicking off the safety.
Suddenly I'm utterly, unbelievably hard.
He doesn't seem to notice.
"Krycek. Fancy meeting you here," Mulder says, as breathless as I, his voice
gone soft with fury.
I struggle half-heartedly in his grasp. "I know, I know—wh-what's a nice boy
like me doing in—in a place like this, right?" I manage between gasps. The
tightness in my chest hasn't receded, just descended so that it's hovering
low and bitter in my belly, right where his hip is grinding into me. I can
feel the bones of his pelvis, fragile and sharp as the skeleton of a
bird—he's too thin, I think, and then the thought twists my mouth into a
senseless grin. Maternal instinct? Now?
He sees the grin; he thinks I'm laughing at him. This time when he slams me
backwards the force of it lifts me onto the balls of my feet, and I'm forced
to cling to him with my good arm just to keep my balance. The false one
strikes the car's metal chassis with a dull-sounding thud.
Ignoring it, he jerks my head back by the hair. It's long enough, now, that
he can do that, and I'm not sure whether I regret it or not. "Start talking,
Krycek," he demands. "What are you doing here?" His face is only inches from
mine, I can smell him, his body, his breath...he smells clean, like shampoo
and spearmint and the faint second-hand aroma of White Shoulders, which I
don't fault him for because I've seen the way he looks at Scully, and there
is no lust in it. She is too virtuous for that. Saint Scully the Stainless.
"Looking out for your sorry ass, actually," I grit, unable to come up with a
suitable lie. It doesn't really matter. He won't believe me anyway.
"I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself," he says coolly, shoving me again.
If I didn't know better, I'd think he was trying to optimize on the physical
contact.
"Look, playing double-agent is tough enough as it is without you going and
getting yourself killed. What would I do then—break into Scully's
apartment?"
He nearly grins at that in spite of himself, and returns wryly, "You could
try Skinner's. He gets this look in his eye whenever your name comes up...I
think he misses you."
An involuntary shudder passes through me at the thought. "No thanks. That
last visit did wonders for my love of balconies."
Just then another explosion takes out the left wing of the building, and he
sobers, glancing over my shoulder at the heightening flames. "If you want to
help me, Krycek, you can start by telling me what this building was used for,
and by whom."
In his anxiousness he's loosened his grip on the gun; I can feel it flagging
against my left side. If I twisted away I could easily grab it out of his
hand and be out of here, leaving him to his fate.
But instead I arch into him fractionally, tilting my head back, neck exposed
and vulnerable. That's something he should be able to understand: surrender,
total, unspoken, physical. It's my only weapon against him, and I use it
well. Mulder has a weakness for weakness—losing my arm is probably the best
move I've ever made toward gaining his trust.
"Don't you ever get tired of asking questions, Mulder?" I ask quietly.
"You'll think I'm lying no matter what I say. Besides, that's not what you
really want to ask me, is it? After all our... history together?"
He stiffens, the specter of his father thrown down between us once again,
divisive as ever. Couldn't leave it alone, could you, Alex? But that little
bit of trivia would have reared its ugly head sooner or later—I'm only
trying to save us some time.
But, for once, he doesn't take the bait. "Answer me, Krycek." And abruptly,
I'm out of weapons.
"You shouldn't be here, Mulder," I begin. It sounds like a plea, but I'm not
too proud to beg. "Believe me, it's not worth it." Yet even as I say the
words he is already dismissing them. There is no unimportant information, for
him; he truly believes the truth will set him free. He doesn't understand
that in some situations ignorance is more than bliss—it is life.
"What's in there, Krycek?" he presses, stirred now, his curiosity aroused.
His voice is strained and needy, desperate for answers. "Why did they blow up
this building? What's in there? "
I shake my head. "The men who destroyed this building are long gone, and any
evidence of the work they were doing here is gone by now."
I can see by his eyes that he doesn't want to believe me, but he's not about
to go rushing into the flaming building. I know that fear of his well, that
vulnerability. It's one of his most endearing qualities.
"You're too late." It almost hurts me to say it. I know how badly he wanted
this to be the one, the lead that broke the conspiracy open, that gave him
his ultimate, longed-for, conclusive proof. As much for himself as for her,
because as much as he wants to believe, even he needs something tangible to
put his hands on once in awhile.
"The fire's almost burnt out," I continue, "there's nothing left. Nothing
that could help you." I say it gently, as though the sound of my voice itself
could shatter him, and god, god , the way he's looking at me, maybe it has.
He shakes his head, a childlike gesture of denial, lips defiantly mouthing
No, no. But there is little need for persuasion. With two or three final
explosions the building crumbles behind me like a giant falling to its knees,
the whole violent spectacle reflected for me in his eyes, and for an instant
we are forced to cling to each other while the earth shudders under our feet.
My head is pulled to his chest as though he were trying to protect me, but I
don't mind the role reversal. We huddle into our own private darkness,
sheltered from flying rubble by his car, and after a time the only sound I
can hear is the rush of blood in my own ears, incredulous...
And then the moment is gone, and he pulls back from the embrace, uncertainty
showing in his eyes for the first time.
I let my arm slip reluctantly from around his waist, but we are still pressed
together against the side of his car, and he shows no signs of moving. He is
so still I have to peer at him for a good ten seconds to be sure he is even
breathing. Then, reassured, I glance up at his face—and instantly regret it.
I was wrong. His eyes aren't cinders—they're open wounds.
Finally, mercifully, he turns his face away. Stands there staring up at the
sky for an interminable period of time, a boundless, drawn-out interval in
which my throat becomes cracked and dry and a sourceless fear rises over me,
coursing up my spine, coiling itself at the base of my skull.
He's not safe.
I've been lax. I've been standing here rubbing up against him, heedless of
the danger, and now it may be too late; we've got to get out of here. I
have to get him out of here.
Gently, I begin to extricate myself from this not-altogether-unpleasant
little niche between Mulder's too-lean stomach and the driver's-side window.
I don't dare push, not now. I've never seen him like this. He's still staring
at the sky, hazel eyes brimming over with nothingness. Empty.
"Mulder, what are you looking at?" I ask carefully.
He shakes his head, mute.
"There's nothing up there, Mulder. Just stars, and you can't even see them,
they're clouded over."
Silence. A wind rises up out of nowhere and ruffles his hair.
"Smoke," he says at last.
"What?"
"Smoke, not clouds."
A pause. "Ah."
The moon is nothing but a faint brightness above the horizon, wreathed in
haze. The air is stifling and hot.
"We should leave," I suggest, easing away from him. He gives no sign of
hearing me and so I take him by the arm and lead him around to the passenger
side, his trench coat fluttering behind us.
And that's when the first shot rings out.
Some instinct moves me to throw my body across his a fraction of a second
before the bullet comes ripping through the steaming air, and it grazes my
shoulder instead, hurtling on past to shatter the window of his Taurus.
Shards of glass burst out toward me, planting themselves in my chest,
splintering the air, scoring the left side of my face. I scarcely feel it.
A second bullet buries itself just above the stump, where the strap holds the
prosthetic to my body. This one is worse, a blue-white explosion of icy heat.
I grin savagely, as much from the pain as from the bitter humor of the
situation. It can't do much more harm, there, but all the same my left side
is now slick with blood under the leather jacket.
The third bullet takes out the rear tire. Shit. How are we going to get out
of here without the car?
Mulder comes alive against me, at last some vestige of survival instinct
kicking in, his gun cocked and ready in his hand. But even with my one arm
I'm faster than he is, and I've already fired off a well-placed shot. A rifle
clatters to the ground some fifty feet off.
There will no doubt be more of them, and the gunshots will have alerted them
to our presence now. There's only one possibility left to us. I grab his arm,
pulling him toward the building and its flames, and he follows easily,
shielding his eyes against the smoke and the terrible brightness.
Then for a moment he stiffens, holding back. "You're bleeding," he states
flatly, touching my ribs where the blood has soaked through the gray shirt
I'm wearing. Touching my face. He glances up at my shoulder and sees the
bullet hole in the leather. "You've been hit," he realizes.
Idiot. Irritation rises up in me like arousal, but I yank him onward without
pausing to savor the brush of his fingers on my cheek.
Behind the building we duck into a hulking metal structure that's been left
largely untouched by the flames, a featureless gray cube that looks like some
kind of shed—a storage house, one might think, to look at it. But I know
better. Inside, the back wall slides away under our combined effort and we
slip down into the darkness behind it breathing hard, trembling with
exertion.
And then we turn and shove the wall back into place. It's like moving pure
lead. Only the adrenaline singing through my veins, and his, gives us the
strength to manage a job more suited to three or four able-bodied men our
size.
The bullet-wounds are beginning to hurt now, a slow acid burning that eats at
me from inside.
"Come on," I whisper, because the blackness is too constricting for anything
louder; it would ricochet off these walls like gunfire, reverberating in the
hollow space between us until it drowned out the sound of his breathing, and
that sound is my only anchor here.
He lets me take his hand and I lead him blindly through the twisting
passages, tracking by feel alone, a rat in its alley. I don't dare use a
light, not until we reach the far end. Out here the walls are too reflective,
too direct, and even the minute red glow of a cigarette can be detected yards
away.
His hand is slack in mine, relaxed, but I can feel the taut weight of him
behind it, and the lean lanky body. "Alex, where are we going?" he murmurs.
He's calling me Alex now; it's rather alarming. At least the empty stare is
gone.
"Shh. You'll see," I reply in undertone. Pausing at a junction of corridors.
Right, isn't it? I'm sure it's a right turn here. Or was that the last one?
Oh God. I can't have lost track. My heart starts beating faster.
He comes up behind me silently, still holding my hand, a whisper of air at my
back. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," I say, with a remarkable imitation of composure. "I'm thinking."
The panic is starting to edge into my voice, but I hold it back staunchly.
He shakes his head in the dark; I can feel it. I can feel every movement he
makes, every twitch of his muscles, I can feel his heart beating behind me,
and the pulse in his wrist under my fingers.
And then—and then...
And then it happens, as far as I can tell: that's when it starts. Or perhaps
it started years ago, when we met as fellow agents and he refused to shake my
hand and I fell in love.
His breath on the back of my neck. His mouth...
I gasp, staggered. "Mulder...!"
He drops my hand and buries his face in my hair, one arm coming around to
circle my waist.
My voice comes out a hoarse whisper. "God...What are you doing, Mulder? What
are you doing ?" I've never heard myself sound so weak, so needy. I must be
crazy, or he is, or both; all I know is that if he lets go of me my knees
will surely collapse under my weight.
And then he draws away and I am still standing, my heart machine-gunning in
my chest like it's about to rip out through my rib cage. I don't know who he
is anymore. I don't know who I am—
I swallow and take his hand again, leading him firmly through the darkness to
the right, and he follows.
At times there are sounds of confusion very far above us, engines and gunfire
and later, sirens. But here the walls cocoon us, dampening the sound, and
nothing is quite so real compared to his hand in mine, the sweat of his palm,
the fine tendons under the skin.
When at last we come to the end there is no need to carry a flashlight; the
yellow-gold glow of the emergency lights has crept up on us like sunrise,
glinting off his hair, his skin, striking sparks into his eyes. There's a cot
in the corner of the little alcove, a first-aid kit and dried food packets in
the cupboards lining the walls. A bathroom, even, and all utilities pre-paid
for the next five years. I made sure of that myself, with a few computer
tricks I've picked up over the years.
I sit on the edge of the cot and strip off the ruined leather jacket,
suffering a pang of regret. I loved that jacket; it fit me like a second
skin. Now I'm going to have to break in a new one.
After a few moments Mulder sits cross-legged on the floor, agile as a
teenager, and watches me clean and dress my wounds. He's looking at me
strangely, like I'm some kind of extra-terrestrial. It unsettles me, that
look. His eyes almost shine in the darkness, effulgent and flecked with gold.
"What?" I ask distractedly.
He shakes his head, lower lip curving slightly into the shadow of a smile.
"For a minute there you looked like him ."
"Who?" Jeez, I sound so inane. 'What? Who?'
" 'Agent Alex Krycek'," he says, grimacing slightly. Sardonic little
half-smile. "You know, that young guy I worked with a while back."
I shoot a glance at him, but there's no real venom in his expression. "I'm
not so young," I tell him, wiping a bloody hand on the leg of my jeans.
He nods seriously, not looking away. "Yeah. I suppose not."
I have to drop my eyes then, unnerved by the unexpected warmth of his gaze,
and I busy myself with the bandages, fumbling them one-handedly. It irks me
to appear so awkward in front of him. This isn't me, I want to explain. I'm
not really a cripple. Someone made a mistake; I was never supposed to lose my
arm. That wasn't part of the plan.
And when he moves to sit beside me on the bed I start to draw away almost
instinctively, defending myself from the pity that will inevitably come with
his kindness—but his eyes are unbearably soft, and there is no condescension
in them.
He reaches across and takes the bandage from me. Turns my body very gently
toward him and unstraps the prosthetic before I even know what he's doing.
Binds up my wounds like some kind of goddamn Florence Nightingale.
"Thanks," I say roughly when he's done. "You didn't have to do that."
"I know," he says, shrugging easily, the shadow of a smile curving his lips.
And comes to kneel before me, slowly, demurely almost, his eyes never leaving
mine.
I pull back, alarmed. "Mulder—"
It's too late. He's leaning in, fingers working at my zipper, quick hands,
beautiful hands. My breath is caught somewhere in the hollow of my chest,
frozen, but his fingers stroke the heat back into me, skimming the line of my
boxers, sliding down and down. When he takes hold of my cock, that first
time, it's almost more than I can bear. A sob wrenches out of me, a ragged
terrified gasp. My lips try to form his name, but can produce only moans.
And then his mouth—god! his mouth is on me, I'm dying, I am dying, I have
never been so alive.
"Fox!" I cry out, amazed, floored. He lets me say it. He gathers me in and
laps me to hardness with his tongue, ignites the twisting fire in my groin,
mouthing me toward blue-hot ecstasy.
I'm babbling now, incoherent fragments of Russian and English and German. All
the most profane words I ever learned, I use them now, because that mouth
deserves profanity, and the way he's sucking my cock has got to be some
erotic form of blasphemy itself.
"Mulder," I say desperately as the pleasure begins to skyrocket, soaring
almost to pain. " Mulder ." But he doesn't relent. His mouth is merciless
around my cock, head bobbing between my legs and I reach down and twine my
fingers in the soft dark hair, my own head falling back in perfect
excruciating rapture, tears coursing down my cheeks. His name is the only
thing I know, the only thing I can say, and I scream it until there is no
more voice left in me, and orgasm is a cresting silver wave that drowns out
everything but his mouth.
I collapse backwards on the cot as soon as he releases me, jeans pushed down
around my knees, penis softening against my thigh. After a few moments he
crawls up beside me and curls his long body around mine, pulling me close.
I can feel him hard against my hip, and I begin to turn in his arms, my hand
snaking around to cup him gently. But he shakes his head silently and moves
my hand, so I kiss him instead.
A real kiss this time, leisurely and soft, ridiculously tentative at first.
My lips barely brush his, our eyes shying away from each other in the low
golden light. But he leans in, deepening the kiss, and I slide my tongue
between his lips, oh! at last, and suck on his lower lip, biting lightly. My
teeth draw blood, and I lick that up, tasting this part of him, too. Tasting
myself on his tongue.
He smiles against my mouth.
"What?" I virtually grunt, but I have an excuse for inanity this time. You
try being coherent after getting blown by Fox Mulder.
He shakes his head, laughing silently. "You taste like...like I always
imagined he'd taste," he tells me, the grin evident in his voice.
And again, I'm floored. "You—you imagined—?"
His mouth cuts off the question in a brief, scalding kiss. "Shh," he says.
"Get some rest."
And so I do.
And when I fall asleep, I dream of stars, burning naked and blue in a
smokeless sky.
Smoke and Shadows
by Sssenza
"...And in your darkest hour
My whole secrets flamed
We can watch the world devoured in his game
Time has topped before us
The sky can not ignore us
No one can separate us
For we are all that is left
The echo bounces off me
The shadow lies beside me..."
