Work Text:
Dance 4 Bransle
by JiM
Mulder was floating, bobbing on the tide of Krycek's breath, drowsing on Krycek's chest, an arm wrapped around his ribs. Krycek's hand was on his head, thumb stroking small circles on his temple.
He was grateful for the deep green silence, reluctant to surface, to breach reality. So he kept his eyes closed and thought of nothing beyond the whisper of Alex Krycek's breath across his forehead and beneath his chest and beside his hand and the long slow ripples he could feel in the water bed beneath them. Suddenly, he could feel Alex stiffen.
"Hmmm?" he murmured into the moon-bright skin beneath his lips.
"Mulder, have you given any thought to what you're going to tell Scully and Skinner about us?" Krycek's voice was even and uninflected and made Mulder's skin crawl with icy reality.
"Why?"
"Because they're standing in the doorway."
Krycek's voice had an End of the World finality to it that Mulder had only heard in Japanese monster movies. He lifted his head to glare into Krycek's eyes, red-rimmed and wounded no longer. "Jesus, Krycek. If you're yanking my chain...."
"He's not, Mulder."
Skinner's voice was calm, controlled, even more uninflected than Krycek's and it rippled up Mulder's spine with a glacial rill. The silence that followed it reminded Mulder of that moment of perfect stillness after an atomic blast, that one tranquil moment just before the tearing wall of destruction arrives, when you can still see the doomed perfection of the landscape that will never be again.
He closed his eyes and said his last prayer.
Krycek was a stony silence beneath him. He felt Krycek take one deep breath and waited for the explosion of motion and violence that he knew was an inevitable part of the oncoming wave of destruction. Alex Krycek moved beneath him.
The warm brush, the light click of his lips against Mulder's forehead shattered the stillness. Someone's breath rasped in shock and Krycek smiled, a very small, very real smile. "Somehow, I don't think they're gonna offer me last cigarette."
"Get up," Skinner ordered. "We have to talk."
When Mulder gathered enough courage to look over his shoulder toward the doorway, Skinner and Scully were both gone. He could hear them talking softly and clinking noises as one of them, Scully probably, made coffee. Mulder dropped his forehead to Krycek's chest and was faintly comforted when Krycek's hand gathered him a little closer.
"Oh shit," Mulder murmured into Krycek's throat. "Lemme go talk to them. They're gonna be so intent on chewing my ass for the first ten minutes they won't even notice you're gone."
"And where am I going, Mulder?"
"This is a full service slum, Krycek. There's a perfectly good fire escape out that window."
The resounding silence made Mulder look up; he was shocked to see the frown of hurt on Krycek's face before his expression went flat and unbreachably null. Krycek shook his head and said, "No. They need to hear what we saw last night and we need to start making plans. Together."
Mulder blinked at him for a moment. "I take it back. You're not a coward. You're insane."
"Mulder!" Scully's voice was the hiss of the lit fuse.
Mulder grimaced. "Let's go, then. The auto da fe awaits."
Mulder dressed quickly, yanking on jeans and a t-shirt left draped over a chair. He silently tossed clean clothes in Krycek's general direction. The younger man was deftly fastening on his prosthetic and Mulder couldn't meet his eyes. "It'll take me a minute," Krycek said flatly. Mulder nodded and went to meet his fate.
Fate was standing in his living room, staring at his bookshelf and looking like a glacier about to calve. Mulder said nothing, just waited for the debacle. It came, with a slow, deep grinding growl, from deep in Skinner's chest before he spoke.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Agent Mulder?"
There was no answer to be made. So Mulder said nothing. His silence seemed to only enrage Skinner, who swung around and took two steps toward Mulder before stopping himself, fists clenched by his thighs.
"Well?" he demanded.
Suddenly, Mulder had had enough. Last night, he had been tired of all the bullshit and ready to shove it all, and that had been before Krycek had appeared with his 'invitation.' This morning, well, this morning he was centuries older. The sunlight in the room was golden and sparkling with dust motes and too pure to be seen by the same man who had washed human ash from his hair the night before. Skinner's outrage was pointless and Mulder had no energy to give to it. Scully's icy glare from the door of the kitchen gave him pause, but then he felt his reflexive guilt begin to wither as the ghost images of melting faces charred away all unnecessary emotion.
"Why are you here?"
"Because six people were found burned to death last night in a train yard in Paeonian Springs. Because the M.O. is the same as the Skyland Mountain 'suicide.' Because your melted cell phone was found at the scene at 4 a.m. this morning by sheriff's deputies. Because you didn't answer your phone and we thought...." Skinner's voice trailed off and he rubbed his hands over his face before standing up straighter and facing Mulder again.
"I don't know what I thought. Then I come here and you're snug in bed with Alex Krycek." Mulder could hear the hatred bubbling beneath Skinner's words, seething and looking for some crack in his self-control.
"What do you want, Skinner? Some sort of apology? Forget it." Mulder could smell coffee, a dark and whispering scent. He headed toward the kitchen, brushing past Scully and her outrage. He yanked four mugs out of the cabinet and thumped them onto the counter. He poured coffee into each mug, not caring how much he slopped around. Then he picked up two of the mugs and went back into the living room.
"Yours is on the counter," he told Skinner. An analytical part of his brain wondered why he was baiting the man; the answer slid into place even as he watched Skinner's jaw grinding. Because he was tired of always being rescued and thwarted, betrayed and manipulated and right every time. He was tired of being right and alone.
"Mulder...." Scully's voice was gentle, striving for the detachment she prized. "What were you doing in that train yard?"
"Trying to keep thirty abductees from being taken again or burned to death by the Resistance."
"And Krycek?"
"I took him there," Krycek said from the doorway. He was still barefoot and tousled, and he was wearing Mulder's jeans and a black t-shirt and Mulder wanted very badly to take him back to bed and pretend that they knew nothing about each other but their names. Instead, he crossed the room and handed Krycek a mug of coffee. He turned his back on Krycek's surprise and faced Skinner's towering anger again.
"So what happened?" Skinner was trying very hard to keep his temper. Mulder discovered that he still didn't give a damn.
"The abductees had gathered and were waiting at the railyard for a ship. When it got there, a second ship appeared. There were men, aliens -- with their eyes and mouths sewn shut. They started through the crowd, touching people with some sort of rod. Anyone they touched, burst into flame. I started shooting at them, which is when Krycek showed up. Have ice pick, will travel, I guess." He was surprised to see the ripples in his coffee, then he realized that his hand was shaking. "I did try to call for back up," he said to Scully. She sighed and shook her head in resignation. "I guess that's how you found my phone. It got knocked out of my hand when one of the women caught...." he stopped, the night's sounds and smells swirling around him again.
Krycek spoke, his tone so neutral that Mulder knew the horror was still too close. "We killed three out of four of the Resistance fighters and managed to drive the rest of abductees away from the pick-up site. I don't know what happened to the fourth alien, or the ship that came to pick up the abductees. The last I saw of Mulder, he was shoving people toward their cars and I was trying not to become a flambeé."
"I thought you were dead." Mulder's voice split the sunlight, making the dust motes dance wildly.
Krycek's head jerked up at that and his eyes fixed on Mulder's. "I'm hard to kill."
"I thought you were working with the Resistance, Krycek." Scully's suspicion cut through them like iron.
"Not when they start killing harmless people. They're nothing more than lab rats, it's not their fault."
Skinner snarled, "Don't expect us to buy that, Krycek. You've killed plenty of innocents."
"This was pointless slaughter, Skinner."
"A humanitarian gesture, Krycek? I don't buy it."
He merely shrugged. "I don't care what you do or don't believe about me, Skinner. But we have the same goals here."
"And those would be?"
"Stopping an alien invasion."
"What if one of my goals is roasting your heart on a stick?"
Krycek closed his eyes for a moment and he suddenly looked exactly like a substitute math teacher, halfway through a bad Monday morning. "Let's save the world, then you can have your shot. OK, Skinner?" he said flatly.
Mulder raised his mug to his lips, then noticed that it was empty. He turned and went back to the kitchen, leaving Krycek and Skinner locked in a silent dance of hatred that was too private for witnesses. He was concentrating very hard on pouring the coffee when he felt his partner come up behind him.
"Mulder...."
"I know," he said. "I don't get it, either, Scully. But he was there and...." Mulder stopped, the steam from his coffee curling up to touch his face so gently.
"So you're saying it was simply convenience?" Scully sounded almost hopeful.
"No. I mean, he was there, he saw what I saw, what I did...." His eyes closed again and he gulped at his coffee, trying to smell, taste, hear anything that wasn't last night.
"What did you do, Mulder?" Scully asked in a low voice. "What did Krycek see?"
He shook his head, knowing even as he did that she would have to know. Forensics would discover the bullets before long.
There was a growl of pure rage from the living room and the sound of something crashing into the wall. Mulder and Scully boiled out into the living room to see Skinner and Krycek locked in the same stances as before. But the tableau had changed; Skinner's chest was heaving and there was a shattered piece of electronic equipment on the floor behind Krycek.
"Happy now, Skinner?"
"Oh no, boy. That doesn't even begin to even the score." Skinner's voice was the whisper of the glacier making deadly promises to the rock below it.
"But it does level the playing field," Krycek said evenly. "We're all starting from the same place now. We have to trust one another."
"Trust YOU?" Scully's voice had lost its gentle detachment and slid straight into shrill. "You've betrayed everyone in this room, Krycek, why should any of us trust you?"
He simply looked at her and blinked.
The silence became hotter and seemed about to give birth to some kind of violent new life when Mulder said, "Why should anyone in this room trust anyone else, Scully?"
Her shocked gaze froze and shattered against him. "I'm your partner, Mulder. Skinner is your boss. We've stood beside you for years. Krycek is...."
"I know what Krycek is," Mulder cut her off. "You're my partner, Scully." His face softened for a moment. "But you've betrayed me, lied to me, almost gotten me killed...," he stopped, took a step toward her as one tear slid down her face.
"And Skinner." Mulder turned to face his boss. "You've lied to me, betrayed me, nearly gotten me killed... you even had me committed. TWICE." His voice had grown rusty with decayed and hopeless fury. He swallowed, then continued. "Krycek -- you've lied to me, betrayed me and nearly gotten me killed, too." He looked back at Scully. "I guess I'm not really seeing much difference here, Scully."
"Mulder...."
He wasn't sure which of the three had spoken in protest and he held up his hand. "I'm no better," he reassured them dully. "I've lied to all of you, put you in terrible danger, betrayed your trust... I got you infected with cancer, Scully, dragged Krycek somewhere they cut off his arm, and painted Skinner into a corner where they had to inject him with nanocytes to control him enough to rein me in. So who's got the moral high ground here, exactly?" Mulder's voice bled away.
They stood, staring at one another across a room stark with sunlight and not a shred of hope, four people frozen in the figures of a dance to which no one knew the steps.
end