Closing In "A pretty good plan violently executed
today is better than a
1. TAKING LEAVE
Mulder finished throwing his few provisions
into the car and got into the driver's seat. Sometime in the last
hour he had achieved a calm indifference. It could be emotional overload.
He touched the small cross hanging around his neck. Brian's.
If he found Brian, he knew his clone would help it all make sense.
Mulder remembered the looks on the Lone
Gunmen's faces when he had showed up at their office/hideout looking worn-out,
stinking of sex, and shaking with fatigue. He knew they had wanted
to ask him what had happened, Frohike especially, but had restrained themselves.
They had probably hoped he would tell them on his own but respected his privacy
enough not to pry.
He didn't tell them. He couldn't.
After a long shower, which had given him
an opportunity not just to clean himself up <have to get Alex's scent
off me but it won't go; his touch won't either> and try to wash away the
last day but to also unobtrusively cry, Mulder had felt a bit better.
He'd picked up the extra money and put on the clothing—the comfortable
black outfit he used for the occasional "funky poaching" foray—he always
left with them in case of emergencies. He had worn the clothing he'd
arrived in for two straight days, and it was starting to show.
He couldn't go back to his apartment. Not
when Scully or any of the people who kept him under surveillance might
be there. Especially not if Scully was there.
After he'd thanked the Lone Gunmen he had
gone to a pay phone and called in to tell Skinner's secretary that he would
be taking an indefinite leave of absence. When she asked why, he just told
her that it was for personal reasons and hung up.
Now he just had to figure out where Brian
was heading and follow. Maybe he could be helpful to Bri and Serafine.
But on some level he recognized rationalization when he heard it, even
from his own mind. He went for his own reasons. He needed to
talk to his clone about Krycek and Krycek's plans, whatever the hell they
were. He needed to get his head on straight again, and he thought
Brian could do it for him.
Mulder jumped as his cell phone rang.
He debated answering, fearing it would be Scully, but curiosity won out.
He flipped it open and said, "Mulder."
"Mulder, I'm so sorry." Not Scully.
This voice sounded small and weighted with fatigue. It sounded like
Mulder's voice.
"Brian! Where are you? What
the hell happened?"
"False high. False, deceptive—
The hormone rush last night made my stupid body think I was on one of my
own highs and it behaved accordingly. I slept for maybe forty-five
minutes last night. I crashed off it about an hour ago, had to get
off the road before I fell asleep and killed someone. I'm sorry,
Mulder."
<This is all my fault. I dragged
Brian into the muck with me.>
"I thought I was doing the right thing,"
Brian said, as if he were listening to a different conversation.
"When I'm up, I can do no wrong; everything works. Stupid of me.
I should have left everything alone."
Mulder drew a ragged breath. "Your
location and his plans, Brian, please." Brian spewed out a stream
of gibberish in what must have been Russian, the language Brian had read
the plans in, with only one word, not Russian but also not English, recognizable
to Mulder: Kitsune. Chilled, he said, "In English, please."
Mulder could almost feel Brian trying to
force his sluggish brain to translate. "He told the UN where to find
Douglas. He didn't know it was Douglas, not that I think it would
have made much difference to him if he had, but he fished out the location
and revealed it. Where does he get his sources?" That thought seemed to sidetrack Brian for a moment,
but he soon continued. "He's also been selling the Kitsune secrets to the
UN and the Russian mafia, playing both sides against the middle, giving
them truth and total crap in various combinations. He planned to
sell them more today. He doesn't know what he's done, doesn't know
the UN shadow cabinet the way Sera and Douglas do."
"What do you mean?"
"They're going to want to have the Kitsunes
for themselves. It's so obvious. I used my computer to send
emergency messages to the others' guardian angels, but I didn't get responses
from many of them. It worries me, Mulder."
<It scares the hell out of me, too.>
"Where are you, Brian? And why do you sound so strange?"
"I'm sitting on the floor of a phone booth,
Mulder. It's so hard—"
"Bri—"
"I'm at a truck stop off Interstate 81
near Roanoke, Virginia. I have to go get some sleep. They have
some small rooms the truckers use— I'm sorry, Mulder."
"Stay there, Bri. I'm coming."
When Mulder pulled the car out of its spot,
another car followed.
"I am a wolf but
"I'll tell you about my daddy," Early said.
"No, I don't want to be here, not again"
but Brian's eidetic memory never let him forget, no matter how much he
wanted to. Waking or sleeping, he remembered. He could usually bury
this memory, but fatigue brought it bobbing to the surface in his dreams.
He and Early walked through the Davidson
Mine in Nevada, with Early taking pictures on Adele's cheap little camera
in a conscious or unconscious parody of Carrie. Brian thanked God
that this was the site Early accompanied him on rather than the last one,
the abattoir. Brian remembered all the sharp meathooks still hanging
there. Something cold inside him said that maybe Brian would have
been better off, had more advantages, at the abattoir. Maybe a push
at the right time onto one of those hooks...
The thought sickened him but he had to
think about it. Early was a killer, and more lives than just
Brian's hung in the balance. "And I want to..."
Early backed Brian against the wall.
"My daddy believed in strength. If you were weak, you deserved
what you got."
"Sounds like our fathers would have
gotten along just fine."
"One day when my momma got too fresh with
him, he hit her a little too hard. I didn' care; bitch was always
whinin'. But a man has needs, Bri, and he couldn't always find a
woman when he had to."
Brian kept his face blank but understood
where Early led him. And desperately hoped that he was wrong.
"He fucked me, Bri, and said that it would
stop if I ever found the strength to make it stop. Until then, I
deserved what I got. One day I killed him. Guess I showed him.
"You want to know so bad, Bri, I guess
I could show you." Early pinned Brian against the wall and ravaged his
mouth, then grabbed his ass hard.
As Brian struggled, his mind raced.
He knew that Carrie thought he had some sort of sick infatuation with Early,
but he knew better. This wouldn't arouse him even under different circumstances.
He didn't want Early. One step forward
for his mental health.
No, what attracted Brian was Early's casual
amorality, indifference to what anyone thought of him, and willingness
to grab whatever he wanted no matter what. Brian didn't want Early.
He wanted to be Early.
Two giant steps back.
Brian felt the cold darkness rush in and
started to kiss back with bruising strength, with nothing of healthy lust,
just a pure show of power and struggle for dominance. Like Early.
Early rocked back in surprise, and Brian took advantage,
pushing Early against the wall hard, pinning him there. They grappled
together violently, neither one giving way, until the brutality and struggle
for power began to turn into actual lust.
Early pulled away and looked at Brian with
surprise and craving in his eyes, and the most frightening, malicious smile
on his face. Brian felt a similar smile stretch his own lips. Early
moved in again for another bruising kiss.
Brian woke badly in the small, darkened
room with an erection and no memory—at first—of how he'd gotten there.
He buried his head in the pillow.
He didn't know how far he and Early would
have gone if Early hadn't heard the cops outside and come out shooting.
Early must have thought Brian was one hell of a tease when Brian refused
to kill that cop even with Early's gun to his head. Kill or be killed,
and somehow Brian had found the strength to refuse the choice.
Not that it made a difference to the cop
in the end. Early murdered him anyway.
Grayce probably thought he was being helpful,
like a mother bird shoving her baby from the nest to teach it to fly.
Early's words echoed through Brian's head in the darkness. "You ain't
never killed no one, have you, Bri? Nope! Ain't seen nobody
killed, either, have you? Nope! Tell me somethin', Big Time,
how the hell you goin' to write a book about somethin' you don't know nothin'
about?"
"If you wanna know about it, you gotta
do it, son."
And the one that still constantly reverberated
through Brian's dreams: "Shoot him. C'mon, mean boy, shoot the dog!
Shoot the dog! Go! Go, mean boy!"
"Yeah, well, I learned well, didn't
I, Early? Continued the Grayce family tradition by killing my mentor.
And you liked it."
Brian would deal with it, just as he always
did. He usually didn't have orgies triggering his memories.
Mulder and Krycek together. He felt his face flush, and the thought
didn't help his erection at all. It had been so good, so intense.
Later his paranoid nature had surfaced and ordered him to rifle through
Krycek's things. What he found had tempted him to go back into the
bedroom and wring Krycek's neck.
"But I didn't. God, I hope I haven't
caught that Krycek disease that seems to be going around, the one that
makes you incapable of killing the rat bastard once he's touched you."
Brian heard footsteps in the hall stop
in front of his door. He quietly pulled his gun out from under the
pillow and readied himself. The door cracked open and a familiar
voice asked, "Bri?"
He put down the gun. "Sera!"
She entered the room, closed the door behind
her, and turned on the light. He gaped at her. She was dressed
like a trucker, her new costume having only faded black jeans in common
with her usual.
He wanted to jump her right there but asked,
"Who are you, and what have you done with my girlfriend?"
She grinned at him, then jumped onto the
bed and smothered him with kisses. "You like, marshmallow bunny?"
"Oh yeah, my spongy circus peanut."
Brian felt his mood start to lift, and he grinned back at her. He
sometimes wondered if her effect on him had something to do with her being
an Imoto to his Kitsune, but right now he didn't care. He could go
insane pondering what effects the genetic engineering might have had on
him. "How long have I been out?"
"If you fell asleep right after you posted,
almost eleven hours."
"And I still feel like shit. Where's
Douglas?"
"At the door. He's done up trucker-style
too."
"Will wonders never cease."
"I wish I had the time to properly greet
you, but—" She dragged him out of the bed and led him into the hall.
Douglas, dressed like a trucker and sporting a scraggly mustache, silently
fell in with them. He looked a little less skinny now, but he still
could use more flesh to cover all the bones. As they made their way
to the parking lot, Brian felt a sense of foreboding and a certainty that
he'd done something very stupid.
Mulder drove through the parking lot looking
for Brian or at least his vehicle. He couldn't believe it when he
saw Brian's leather collar sitting in plain sight on the passenger seat
of a mini-van.
Mulder parked his car next to the van and
got out to wait. Brian had to come back sooner or later.
Mulder heard something behind him only
an instant before a heavy weight hit him across the back of the head.
"Not the head again..." He expected to hit the ground hard but
felt someone catch him on the way down instead. As the darkness closed
in, he had the confusing sense that someone was stroking his hair before
he tumbled into unconsciousness.
Brian remembered what he had done and wanted
to kick himself for being so stupid. "Sera, I have to—" Before he
could finish, he heard something blow up behind him.
Sera pulled them behind the cover of an
eighteen-wheeler. "This doesn't seem like the UN shadow force's style,"
she shouted over the gunfire that had suddenly erupted.
"I told you that Krycek called in the Russian
mafia, right?" Brian replied.
"Shit. Those guys are all brute force.
But how did they guess where we went?"
"I did something asinine."
She sighed. "Yes?"
"When I was Down, I called Mulder and told
him where I was. They may have followed—"
"Of course they have. Mulder's probably
here now, with Ratboy in pursuit and the Russians playing Follow the Leader
with him. You have to beware of those compassionate impulses, Bri." But
she kissed him to soften the sting.
"I've learned my lesson! Wait, if
he's here, he's in the middle of all this."
"We're talking about Mulder. Of course
he is. He has the devil's own luck, though, or maybe a choir of guardian
angels. He'll get through."
When a fuel tank exploded somewhere behind
them, bathing the parking lot in heat and setting several trucks ablaze,
Douglas said, "My life has been in danger so many times I don't even get
to see it flash before my eyes anymore. I'm getting too jaded." But
his eyes still showed his fear. Brian squeezed his shoulder.
Sera flipped open a cell phone and dialed.
She immediately shouted, "Remy, take the van and go! We have a ride!"
"But—"
"Your family needs you more!"
"D'accord. Good hunting, Angel.
Remy out."
"Sera, our wheels are this way!"
Brian grabbed Douglas's arm and trusted Sera to follow as he slowly led
them in the right direction, ducking behind cars and fuel tanks for cover
the whole way. Brian noticed that some of the men with guns now fought
other men with guns. It looked like the UN shadow force had arrived.
For now the two sides were expending too much effort killing one another
to keep track of three rapidly moving people.
They finally huddled behind a truck a few
feet away from the mini-van Brian had stolen. "What the hell is—
Angel, Mulder's sitting knocked out in the passenger seat," Brian whispered.
"Someone's standing on the other side.
I'll take him down." Gun in hand, Serafine slithered under the van, grabbed
the man's ankles, and pulled him down, disarming him in the process.
"You son of a bitch!" she yelled. She came up with Krycek held in
her iron grip.
"What the hell did you do to Mulder?" Brian
shouted.
"He was standing in plain sight while the
UN soldiers were wandering around. I had to put him somewhere safe!"
Krycek snarled.
"I don't trust you."
"You don't trust me? You went
through my papers, Kessler!"
"You sold the Kitsune line out to the two
highest bidders!"
Krycek took a deep breath. "I admit
that was stupid of me. I thought I was pulling one over on them.
I got too hungry, too desperate, and too damned greedy. Happy now?"
"Not even remotely."
"We have to get out of here. The
shock troops will soon have the gangsters mopped up."
"What do you mean 'we'?"
"We can do this later!" Serafine said.
"For now, we can use Alexei. Everyone into the van!"
As they got in, Brian asked, "How did you
know this was mine?"
Krycek took Brian's leather collar out
of his jacket pocket and let it swing on his finger. The metal chain
link glinted in the firelight. Krycek just raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
"Shit, I'm so damned stupid."
Sera reached back to touch him. "No,
your extremes just knock out your concentration. That's why the Consortium
altered your brain chemistry to intensify your bipolar disorder after the
Grayce affair. Now everybody stay down!"
Douglas belted Mulder in just before Angel
put the van into reverse and peeled out of the parking lot at high speed.
One back window shattered from a bullet, but for the most part she avoided
bullets, debris, and other cars and got them back on the highway.
"Did I ever tell you about the assignment
I had that involved driving getaway for a gang of diamond thieves?" Angel
asked. Then she heard the helicopters. "It's daylight, and we're
surrounded by regular American citizens! What the hell did you promise
them to make them this eager, Alexei?"
"Nothing!"
"We have the other Kitsunes. Surrender
now," a speaker blared down at them.
"Shit!" Serafine hissed as she swerved
around another car.
"They're lying, right? They can't
have taken all of us!" Brian said.
"Can we be sure?"
Then the gas grenades started to fall.
Angel sped up and avoided the first two but couldn't do anything about
the third, fourth, and fifth. The van's passengers began to cough
until they finally passed out.
Hoping To Fall Into Grace II
by Viridian5
"I live like I feel:
Too much
I'll take whatever you're giving:
Not enough
...
I'm hoping to fall into grace"
—My misheard lyrics from "6 Underground"
by the Sneaker Pimps
perfect plan tomorrow."
—George S. Patton
"I've reached a natural conclusion:
Out with the illusion
I hate being in these situations
Back off of diplomatic relations
If I only knew the answer or
I thought we had a chance or
I could stop this
I would stop this thing from spreading
like a cancer"
—"Leave in Silence" by Depeche Mode
"Where are you? And what are Krycek's
plans?"
2. REUNION
"I'm open to falling from grace"
—actual "6 Underground" by the Sneaker
Pimps
I like to wear sheep's clothing"
—"Temptation Waits" by Garbage
He saw old sneakers, a worn-out black
denim jacket, a blue plaid shirt over a black T-shirt, and a baseball cap
with the ponytail of her tied-up dark hair pulled through the hole in the
back.
"Either way you turn I'll be there
Open up your skull I'll be there"
—"Climbing Up the Walls" by Radiohead
Anyone who knew Bri would recognize it.
"Considering how he sounded on the phone, I should be happy he didn't
go wandering in among all those truckers while wearing it." It made
him worry even more.
"Have I failed somehow or some way
Will the weight of today
Finally pull me down to drown"
—"Darkest Days" by Stabbing Westward
