It almost made me feel like a real FBI agent.
This thing with Mulder was my bid for the top and the confidences that
go with it, out of anonymous killer land. If you never do anything
more challenging than ambushing targets, your bosses start to think that's
all you can do. Of course I couldn't give them my qualifications
for this job, my long and current experience in lies and subterfuge.
It would blow my cover completely.
The sporadic light from passing headlights showcased a Mulder very different
from the one I usually saw, as if the workings of his mind made an impression
on his looks. I don't believe in auras, but Mulder awake does seem
to broadcast something. Not a light but a kind of incessant energy.
For the past few days I watched him stay awake on mostly coffee, iced tea,
and sunflower seeds. It seems that he has a sleeping disorder on
top of his control issues. He always has to be the driver, as if sitting
in the passenger seat leaves him helpless. He sprawled in the driver's
seat right now, head back and a little to the side, leaving the long line
of neck exposed.
After a week of resentment so strong that it should have killed me with
its venom, Mulder was beginning to trust me and relax a little. For example,
he was no longer suspicious of my shooting of Augustus Cole. I had
a talent for winning people over eventually. Locked in a car together,
we discovered that we had some common interests, and what does that say
about you, Mulder?
A glimmering of trust slowly grew but couldn't compare with what Mulder
seemed to share with Agent Dana Scully. When they had spoken together
in front of me in a way that deliberately shut me out I felt angry but
also something else, something I didn't understand until later. I
felt jealous.
In my profession trust is a sucker's game, and I know that I will never
experience that kind of bond with another person. Didn't matter.
No matter how many times I tried to tell myself that such a bond would
make me weak, leave me open to manipulation, I couldn't help feeling envious.
I tried to imagine what it would like to be the one person a paranoiac
trusted implicitly. To deserve that trust.
Mulder muttered something then started to hyperventilate. I turned
and grabbed his shoulder, trying to shake him out of his nightmare but
he still made horrible choking noises as if whatever was happening to him
wouldn't even let him scream. I started to shout his name.
His whole body spasmed, then his eyes opened, but even in the dim light
I could tell that he was still asleep.
He reached for me blindly with shaking hands that gripped tightly when
they found my shirt. Without thinking about it I pulled him against me
until his head rested against my shoulder. While he shook against
me I stroked his back and whispered comforting nonsense into his hair,
ceasing to think under the overwhelming imperative of making Mulder hurt
less. When he eventually jerked and pulled away, I was shaking myself.
What had I been doing? I was supposed to earn his trust, but what
I had just done had nothing, consciously, to do with that. It had
felt good having him in my arms. I told myself that he had groped for me—no, no, wrong word, definitely the wrong word—reached for
me the way a distraught child would for his teddy bear, and I'm not so
low a guy that I would rebuff a child searching for comfort. But
I'm lying to myself, and I never lie to myself as well as I do to others.
"I told you not to let me sleep." His voice sounded ragged and
drained, taking the sting out of the words. He wasn't blaming me.
"Do you do that often?"
"Often enough. Too often." He put his hand over his eyes.
"Does anyone else know about it?"
"Not many people sleep over." Mulder tried to protect himself
with his usual sarcasm, but it didn't work right now. "My work consumes
my life, Krycek. Besides, my work never made good dinner conversation.
I don't know too many dates who would want to hear about the most efficient
way to eviscerate a child or the five signs that you've been abducted by
aliens." When he took his hand away from his face I could swear I
saw wetness. Tear tracks? "Please don't tell anyone about this.
Too many people would be too happy to have an excuse to send me to the
nuthatch."
Underneath the armor and prickly exterior hid something soft and vulnerable,
just as I expected, but I felt no sense of triumph. Mulder was confiding
in me, a state of affairs I spent the last week working my ass off towards,
but it felt like ashes. I don't know how else it could have been,
but it shouldn't be like this. It felt like cheating somehow.
Then I saw our relief shift drive up to replace us, thank God. "Mulder,
it's time to go home. Let me drive," I said. To my shock, he
got out of the car without a word and went to the passenger side while
I shifted over. He must not be fully awake.
We spent the trip in silence with Mulder staring into space. A
spy has to know how to think on his feet, to deal with quickly shifting
situations, but I was stumped, having never seen this from Mulder before.
He just as docilely allowed me to lead him into his apartment building.
Once we reached his floor I trailed behind him a little, never having been
here before. He seemed to be moving on autopilot.
He stopped in front of a door with a 4 on it. "I thought your
apartment number was 42," I said.
Without warning he bent at the waist and almost hit the floor headfirst,
with only my grip holding him up. Mulder held up a 2 in his right
hand. "The damn thing has been falling off ever since I took it and
the 4 down while I was taking my apartment apart," he mumbled.
I didn't have to ask why. I knew him well enough to realize that
he had been sweeping for bugs. He had good cause, but I knew that
the apartment was clean right now.
He opened the door to reveal a small, somewhat dreary apartment. The
Consortium once showed me the tiny basement room, originally a copy room,
Mulder had used as an office while working on the X-Files, and it looked
more like a home than this. This place looked more like a pit stop.
Sparse furnishings, no bedroom, stripped-down and barely used kitchen. Only the living
room, if you could call it that, showed any character. The reports
said that he slept on the black leather couch.
I pushed him onto the couch. He sat with his head dipping down,
apparently willing to sleep like that. I pushed his head back up
with my hands under his jaw. "Lie down, Mulder," I said. We
stared at one another, then I kissed him with an increasing passion. Our
arms locked around one another, and I pushed him down into the couch as
my tongue explored his mouth even as a part of me screamed, <What the
hell are you doing?>
When we broke apart for air, Mulder sighed, "Daddy," which made the
screaming part of me go stone cold even as another part of me went rock
hard. I pulled away, gasping, as Mulder looked at me with dazed,
sleeping eyes.
Could I possibly be developing morals at this late date?
Mulder didn't know where or when he was. God knew who he thought
he was with—<You know who he thinks he's with, Alex, even if you don't
want to know>—or what he wanted. Right now Mulder was warm and pliant,
a zombie love doll that would docilely accept anything I did.
But, God help me, this wasn't the Mulder I wanted.
That made it worse. I could excuse lust—Mulder was gorgeous after
all—but simple lust would let me take advantage of this unprecedented
opportunity. No one I knew would censure me for that, and that cigarette
smoking bastard would probably see it as an excellent ploy to get under
Mulder's skin and gain his trust. But, much as I admired the body,
that wasn't all I seemed to want from Mulder. I needed him—his odd,
quirky mind—to be here too. I didn't want to think about what that
meant, even if I already knew deep down.
Morals, affection, emotion all kept you from doing whatever you had
to to survive. They were liabilities.
I took off his coat and shoes, put a blanket over him, and gave him
a chaste sleep-well kiss on the forehead before I left, knowing that something
would inevitably happen if I stayed. I wondered if he would remember any of this tomorrow. Somehow I doubted it. Maybe
he would remember this as a dream. If he did, I hoped he would remember
it as a pleasant one.
The Cancer Man stubbed out another cigarette in the car ashtray. "So,
Alex, did you find out anything we could use?"
Oh, yes. I found out that Mulder is an infamous insomniac because
he has screaming nightmares almost every time he does sleep. I found
out that if he's tired enough and fresh from a nightmare while you're coming
on to him, he'll think you're his father feeling him up.
These are the kind of things the Consortium sent me in to discover,
but Mulder's weaknesses are inextricably entwined with my weakness.
For his sake, I would keep tonight's events secret. I'm good at secrets.
But it didn't matter what I felt. I had to betray him. I
had no choice. There would be no happy ending for us.
I thought of Dana Scully and felt a sudden hatred like a hot poker in
my gut as I thought of her getting to stay with him when I wouldn't be
able to. I found myself saying, "Not from Mulder, sir. He's too paranoid
to reveal anything. But Scully is more of a problem than we thought…"
The End
Weaknesses I
by Viridian5
Day 4 of what Mulder had confirmed to be the most pointless long stakeout
known to man, and Mulder finally fell asleep. He told me I shouldn't
let him, but he looked like he needed it so badly, and he kept sitting
watch over me when I dozed off. Even with the other shift taking
over occasionally we were still spending too much time sitting in this
car looking at the same damned building waiting for something incriminating
to happen.
