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isolation
            by mouser
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four a.m.

Who are we when we're alone?

I used to ask myself these kinds of questions. Hell, I used to ace tests because I grew up asking myself these kinds of questions. Because I understand alone. I understood it in a happy nuclear family with a distant mother and an abusive father and only my kid sister to keep me sane. I understood it so much better when my kid sister was taken away.

Nobody had to tell me that my quest for her was a quest for security, for identity, for my former self. And I wasn't stupid enough to volunteer the information, either. So I kept my mouth shut, and I asked myself all the questions I'd have asked a father, or a god.

If only I had believed in a god. Would that have made a difference?

It would certainly have helped me to identify Alex Krycek as some kind of satanic influence, instead of a too-smart, too-ambitious yuppie in bad suits. Or a nemesis, a bad penny, my own personal albatross.

I read the epics. I thought you had to do something to deserve such burdens. But the whimsies of the mythic gods seemed irrational to me, and maybe that's why I’m in the shitstorm I’m in today. Europa and a bull. Leta and Zeus. Me and Alex Krycek. I'd have accepted either of the former as literal truth before I'd have even considered the latter, but there you are.

When hate is what you know, and deceit is how you were raised, and you don't even know who your own father is or was and you begin to wonder if your mother's just a terribly bad actress… I guess I was beginning to feel like the star of my very own little Truman Show, and from that point of view Alex Krycek started to look pretty good.

Honesty? Hell, no. The great thing about him was that I never had to wonder if I should trust him; we both knew the score on that count. But at least I could always depend on his hatred. At least his deceit was never a surprise, not even at the beginning. It was strangely familiar, resonating with something inside me that no amount of psychology degrees would permit me to identify. And now, four whole years later, knowing I’m entrenched in eternal and platonic love with my perfect yet reasonable redhead, knowing that my only sexual relationships are those I paid for with VISA, Alex Krycek actually has the balls to lie here beside me, and sleep. I don’t know; maybe he’s going to bill me for this.

Is he insane?

Am I?

 

eight-oh-four p.m., the evening before

"You know what, Krycek? I don't care what information you have. I've had a hard day, and I could die happy if I knew I'd never have to see your sorry, duplicitous ass again. So if you're here to kill me do me the favor of asking me to turn my back. And if you aren't," I feel my voice rising, love the sensation of wind tearing up my trachea as the grating drone climaxes in a shout, "Get the hell out of my apartment!"

When Krycek rushes me, I honestly expect to die. In a perverse way I almost welcome it. Finally, it will be over, and our schoolyard threats and the promises broken and all of the knowledge my enemy holds but will not reveal, can no longer taunt me. So it’s a surprise when Krycek shoves me against the wall and kisses me.

Our teeth clash numbingly, and I would use my own tongue to check for chips but Krycek's is already in there, breaching my mouth, tasting of coffee and anger and goddamn if I’m not kissing him back. My breath rushes in my nostrils, whistling as I gasp, as I draw air from Krycek’s lungs. My sinuses burn with the effort to oxygenate my body as the serpent slithers inside my wide-open mouth, showing me my sin. It’s the cold plastic hooking under my tee shirt and drawing it up that smacks me back to some measure of sanity. Shoving away, almost falling back into the corner, I feel my control snap. I’m shaking, numb; my body is not my own.

My eyes roam wildly, colors and shapes barely registering, the world boiled down to mathematical shapes and planes: the rectangle of my sofa, the perspective lines of my dirty beige wall, the wood-colored square of my front door that I’m crouching beside… and Krycek, shocking now as he has never been, three-dimensional and thrumming with energy—the Sphere in Flatland.

I recognize my panic; I even know its cause. But as a psychologist I make a really good FBI agent, and can do nothing to help myself. So I growl instead and swipe at my wet mouth. "What do you think you're doing, you asshole?" The tight pain in my throat is welcome after so much monotony, so much swallowing down loss and emptiness and degradation at the hands of everyone from my boss, to the consortium, to the guy who screwed up my dry cleaning.

And Krycek? He can always be counted on to bring out the animal in me.

I feel my stomach pitch and roll as I vomit up emotion with words and stormy violence that I pray will leave me empty, because if it doesn’t the devastation left in its wake will choke me to death. "Have they run out of ideas for fucking with me? Have you run out of information to dangle? Don't you have anything more imaginative left?" The raw ache in my throat feels good, the pain something to hold on to as everything else spins out of control. I imagine I can force Krycek’s saliva out of my mouth with the power of these redundant words alone.

And Krycek, damn him, laughs. The color is high in his cheeks and a light shines brightly in his eyes. He steps forward, one gloved hand—the real one, I catalogue—in front of him like a man gentling a spooked horse. I feel myself squirming farther back, some piece of me watching my fear with my father’s disgusted eyes. My body is defined by the two walls that meet behind my shoulder and the floor upon which I crouch, and still Krycek comes. Slowly, a half-step at a time, teeth glaring white in the incandescent light. "That's it, Mulder," he whispers, that voice etched on my nerves, as much a part of me as Samantha's voice calling 'Fox! Fox!' on a dark night five hundred miles and twenty-six years away.

I watch in horror as the hand closes in, while panicked, pre-death images flood my brain. I think, irrationally, Just be an X-File; X-Files only want to kill me, as, out-of-focus now, his hand brushes my cheekbone. The warmed leather feels smooth and alive and I cannot help my reaction.

"Yeah, that's it, Mulder. Cry for me."

The switch flicked, the circuit connected, I’m fighting for everything I’m worth, growling "You twisted bastard!" as I shove, snap at anything near enough, and actually find myself astride the man at one point and pummeling him. The jolt up my nerves numbs my arm as my fist connects with bone, and all I can think is I wish I was ambidextrous so I could strike twice as often in the same span of time. But the time is too brief for satisfaction, indeed too brief for damage. Krycek, always a street fighter, has somehow adapted to his lost limb just fine. Just fucking fine. Because seconds later, it’s me on my back and Krycek astride me and that plastic wrist presses hard against my throat until the world goes gray. All I can see is the color on Krycek's cheeks, and the light in his eyes, and the white sparkle of teeth as the smile, artificial as the arm, poses itself on the man's face.

I feel my sobs jerking at my belly, know I’m shedding tears, know those tears are feeding that smile and making it grow. I struggle, hands grasping at air, digging into leather, fast losing their strength, and I can’t do anything to get air, to get him off me. Now I’m only fighting for breath. Soon enough, starved of oxygen, I feel my body give up the fight altogether.

"Oh yeah," that voice croons. "Cry for me. You make me want to fuck you when you cry."

The temblor starts in my diaphragm and rocks my whole body, rolling, an earthquake that shatters my bones; he’s telling the truth.

And I can’t stand it.

Weight shifts and slides against me until Krycek’s entire body presses against my own, until hot humid breath moistens the shell of my ear, until my senses are surrounded by him. "I think if you'd been more of a man," he says, "I'd never have wanted to do this." Another lick, a breathy, shuddering laugh on my damp skin. "Or maybe they should have just cut back on my surveillance assignments, huh?"

"Leave me alone." It’s all I can manage. With his erection hard on my hipbone, with the heavy, oxygen-starved hypnosis of my body, there’s nothing else to say. "Just leave me alone."

A tongue touches my ear, traces the shell, hot and sticky. A tiny laugh tickles my ear canal, whuffing jarringly against my eardrum. "If I could, Mulder, I swear to God I would." The pressure on my throat decreases further, and the rush of blood to my brain threatens aneurysm… or that's what I’ll claim one day, if I’m ever forced to offer testimony of this event.

"I…" I open my eyes then, force my head around until Krycek has to pull back. For the first time in minutes I’m locking eyes with my enemy, and the hunger I see there threatens to consume me. That’s why Krycek is here, I realize: to eat a part of me, to take it and digest it and make it his own, and I know it’s true. Because I know that light. It’s the same light that drives me to find my sister, to find the truth. It’s a hunger that nothing and no one will ever quench or defer.

So this is what I look like, I think. This is why I’m in the basement, why I’m Spooky Mulder, why members of my graduating class are now my bosses, why Alex Krycek is lying on my chest and humping against my pelvis. It’s why Scully, as much as I love her, will never be more than my friend; she’s too smart for me, and she sees all of this. Obsession. I’m dealing with an elemental force, one I can no more stop than I could stop waves from crashing into a beach. Obsession.

I’ll bet Krycek is really pissed off at me, when he stops to think of the trouble I’ve caused him. It’s no wonder he’s here grinding me into my living room floor.

He smiles, just a little. "So," he breathes, "You’re coming around."

"No," I say, hearing the whine in my own voice, helpless to stop what’s going to happen. "I can’t…" My throat seizes up on me, and fresh tears fill my eyes, overflowing to slide wetly over my temples and into my ears.

Krycek’s pupils dilate as I stare, the green eclipsed almost entirely by flat, reflective black. "Then let's emphasize the part where you don't have a choice."

I struggle again, consistent with my nature. I can’t remember a time I halted pursuit merely because the cause was lost, the odds too high, the game already called. I can’t help it; I don’t know how to surrender.

"Krycek—Alex—" the word makes his eyelids flutter, makes his mouth open in erotic shock, and his hips thrust once, hard, against mine before he regains his self-control. And I know he won’t be stopped, any more than I can be stopped, and my body deflates. I can feel the fight draining away, abandoning me, my rag doll limbs growing heavy against the wood floor.

Krycek seems to like it. He moans like a lover would, hand gripping strongly, and his mouth comes down again. I don’t resist. I can’t. His tongue traces my lips and the air is cold against their saliva-coated slickness. "Oh, Mulder," he breathes, "I should have done this years ago." I don’t know what he’s talking about. The smell of leather and flesh permeates my nostrils, and short hair scratches my cheek as his head moves past mine, as his teeth trace the line of my jugular. When I open my mouth to protest, two plastic fingers slide inside.

"Krycek—god damn it, Krycek—"

But I’m lost. My body isn’t mine, it’s his, its only energy exists where he touches it, and I bite hard on the plastic, feeling a slight give, hearing his breathless laughter as he tries to pull his prosthesis away.

He rolls, grasps, and my shirt leaves friction burns on my neck as he tears it off me. My jeans get tangled at my hips and again at my knees. Krycek’s shirt manages to disappear as he conjures sensations and emotions up from me with a theurgist’s skill.

At roughly the same moment I notice Krycek’s isn’t the only stiff dick in the room, I realize he’s moving slightly away. No longer covered by him, the ceiling light reflects on my skin, and I imagine it’s glowing as he just props himself there and looks down at my nakedness. His eyes devour me as his hand roams in their wake, just skimming my skin. I feel the path marked at my throat, mapped down my chest and over my right nipple… on down my ribs to my diaphragm, circumnavigating my navel, then tickling a trail through my pubic hair. My cock jumps as that finger nears, then veers away.

Fig leaves. Shame. All-knowing eyes. How has Alex Krycek become both my God and my devil in the last five minutes? I feel my hips jerk once and a sob is torn from my throat at my own helpless reaction. I’m so sick. I’m so spectacularly messed up.

Krycek sighs, and that serpent tongue flicks out, licking lips, tasting the lust in the air. It seems like he wants to say something, his breath drawing in and catching, but he always pauses, and then the breath is expelled in silence. This goes on for almost a minute as cool air makes me shiver, and the hairs on my neck and belly and thighs begin to itch and tighten.

"What?" I finally shout, surprised that all that sound comes from me.

He looks into my eyes, with a doctor’s clinical interest and a madman’s obsession, and says calmly, "We’re going to go into your bedroom and fuck, now. Get up."

"No…" The tongue in my mouth silences my voice and my body betrays me. The thread of my thoughts unravels as something unidentifiable sweeps through me. I feel his lips reshaping mine, his tongue mapping the roof of my mouth; I feel grit from the unswept floor digging into my ass and shoulders, and I wonder when the last time I cleaned this place was.

"Yes." Teeth bite my cheekbone, my jaw. A tongue laves my throat. "Look at me, Mulder," Krycek whispers.

I do, frozen, a mongoose to a snake. I know without doubt that this moment will rise up and assault me for years to come: the green of Krycek’s eyes, the heat his body generates, the play of light over his sweating, alabaster skin. His head is haloed by the incandescent bulb in the ceiling, casting his face into harsh, familiar shadow. My pulse pounds in my veins, charting every capillary. My body has never felt more alive. All this and more will be with me in photographic detail.

From somewhere in my brain I hear my sister calling _Fox!_ and I feel as lost, as helpless now as I was then, and I wonder what this new memory will compel me to do. I wonder if I’ll be chasing it, twenty-six years from now.

He stands up, his bare foot nudging my hip, and reaches down to drag me up with him. "Come on." And, stumbling, shoulders bowed, I feel myself dragged along. I remember how my father used to promise the whipping, then remove his belt, and only then grab my arm and march me to my room. I feel the same dreadful anticipation mount with every step I take.

Once in my room, he pushes me toward the unmade bed and I sit meekly on its edge, naked, shivering, while he divests himself of his remaining clothes. Odd, really; when the prosthesis comes off I still sit here shaking. Some rational part of me reminds me I can escape this, that as a trained FBI agent I should be a match for a naked man with one arm. But I stay where I am, the blood pooled in my groin, drawing in hitching gasps of breath as my nemesis, my anti-obsession, smiles and steps up to me. I note relevant details, filing them away: he has pretty knees; his legs are bowed; his feet are long and slender. His erection is daunting; his belly is soft; his erection is huge; his pectoral muscles display an unreasonable dedication to Nautilus. His erection is bobbing, pointing at me, staring back at me. A hand—the only hand—touches my left shoulder, rolling the joint forward, guiding my arm.

"Put your hand on my cock, Mulder," he whispers. "Get to know it. It’ll be in you, soon."

Panic thunders through me, its noisy reverberation deafening my senses, so that when my fist closes gently around that club of flesh my skin is numb; I can’t feel it. "No," I say again, and Krycek laughs, a sound that seems giddy and joyful to my ears.

The hand tilts my chin up, and he looks into my eyes. "That’s it. Just remember to tell yourself you had no choice."

He bends and kisses me as I tremble, as his body weight drives me down to my back. I can’t reach his cock anymore, and as my fingers slip away I receive the barest impression of velvet, of heat, of grave danger. Then the room skews, and I clutch at the bedcovers to keep from falling.

"Spread your legs."

I have no idea why I obey. I’m trapped in this spell, in this moment, in this hunger I witness and recognize and share. I’m guided by that voice, by that hand, and by the ravenous craving inside me.

He pushes my right leg up, guides my own hand beneath the knee. He instructs with touch alone until I’m holding that knee up, pulling my body open, quaking with fear and anticipation. I can feel the weight of my balls as they hang loose and unrestricted between my open thighs. His movements are small and happy, an artist studying his canvas, reaching to add a brushstroke here, a hint of color there.

My cock flushes deep red the first time his finger touches it. I gasp, feel my scrotum tighten. He nods, content with the response. He moves away for a moment and I lie there, still holding my own knee, staring mindlessly at the ceiling. When he returns something slippery is pushed inside my ass and his finger spreads it around. I gasp, and feel the tears start to roll across my temples, and he watches with an erotic widening of lips, and an aborted, jerking thrust of his hips against air.

"I think I could come just by watching the pain in your eyes," he tells me with feeling. I cringe and turn my head away.

The finger leaves me, and his hand grasps my chin, turning me back to him. The lubricant is slick and he has to grip hard to hold me. The smell of me reaches my nose—not strong, hardly unfamiliar—but I wonder if every time I take a shit from now on I’ll remember him. If, once a day every day, like baking bread recalls one’s childhood, I’ll think of this hunger and this helplessness, and of him.

I relax against the tug of his fingers, and he nods as I obey.

The hand releases me and returns to its task. Two fingers now, stretching me open, the thumb pushing against the cheek of my ass and digging in. The heel of his palm rubs my perineum and I wonder if I’m going to come, if he’s going to notice. His hooded eyes keep sweeping down my body and back, always returning to my eyes. Always watching. His fingers pull out and the hand slides, slick and viscous, down my thigh, around my other knee. Pushing it up, he slides his hand further until his elbow hooks under my leg, and the hand finds my wrist on the bed.

"Hold it, Mulder," he orders gently, and I do. I hold my own legs apart, I pull my own buttocks into the air while he scoots forward, while the hair of his thighs tickles my ass, while he aligns the head of his cock against my anus… and pauses.

I could scream. I could die, I could do anything at all if it would only break this spell, if the electricity between us would lessen and the ozone smell would leave the air and I could have my own control back. I want to kill him and I know it, and I suspect he knows it too. I feel exposed—I _am_ exposed—and even though it’s my own hands that hold me open, it’s my own brain that orders me not to turn my head away, I believe with every micron of my faith that he’s making me do all of this. That I have no choice.

Because I don’t.

He has watched my face all along, and something he sees makes him tilt his head, wonderingly, and shove hard with his cock, breaching the barrier of my body. I hear my own voice keening in pain, hear his grunting breaths as he pushes again, promising me no time to adjust, to assess, to identify what he’s doing to me. He must be half way in before he pauses, and the hand slides up over my shocked erection, coming to rest on my belly.

"Does it hurt?" he asks.

"Yes. Damn it Krycek, yes!" I shake my head back and forth, trying to diffuse the pain centered so directly in my asshole.

"Good."

I whimper when he thrusts again, more gently this time. He’s merely rocking, easing himself slowly further, but the pressure in my rectum is intensely painful and I feel like he’s ripping right through my intestines. I fight the urge to look down, because I’m afraid I’ll see the outline of his cock pushing against my skin, like some X-rated "Alien".

"Krycek…" his hand presses down on my belly, defining the space he’s filling, and he thrusts once, hard. Sadist, I think, and I wonder why the thought comforts me.

"Yes?"

I look at him, catalogue the flush of arousal spreading across his chest, the sweat that makes his skin look oiled and healthy, the empty space where his left arm used to be… the tension in his muscles and the unslaked hunger in his eyes. So many words offer themselves to my tongue: pleas, demands, accusations; threats of retribution, weapons of emotion and hatred and pain.

"Hurry," I say, and I’m crying yet again. He gasps, and the hand reaches to my face, touching my wet skin. He curls over me, wedging his knees further beneath my hips, and thrusts home. Light explodes in tracer streaks behind my clenched-tight eyes. I don’t recall ever feeling such agony. I don’t recall ever being so hard. I don’t recall ever wanting and hating something so much at the same time… except, perhaps, the truth.

His hips move slightly and I feel a dull, distant thud in my pelvic girdle, a bomb dropped miles away whose aftershock vibrates through me from under the ground. It’s an insistent feeling, annihilating something in my guts with every tiny move he makes. I know he’s close, I can tell from the tiny, squeaky sounds he makes, and the increasing strength and focus of his thrusts. I feel split open, wish-boned out and torn apart by his lust.

My fingers bite harder into the backs of my knees. I want to beg him to hurry, to finish this, but for once I keep my mouth shut.

His sweat begins to run, a tiny glistening rivulet down his neck. When his thrusts become erratic, his lips peel back in a grimace of pleasured intensity, and I know he’s going to leave me behind. I shouldn’t have expected anything else. With my hands holding my legs for him I can do nothing but lie here surrounded by him, trapped helplessly on my own edge of pain and thorny pleasure as the hand clutches convulsively at my waist and he freezes in climax. He shudders, and a deep guttural groan of "Mulder!" rips from his throat. The tendons stand out in his neck and the flush deepens to red, spreading across his chest like fire, consuming his nipples, his sternum. When I look back up his eyes are waiting for me, half-open and infinite.

I’m sure it’s only imagination that tells me I feel his semen in me. If truth be told I think my rectum has gone numb from the pain. Certainly, my sphincter will never know true constriction again.

Seconds pass in pregnant silence, then he leans over me, licking at my drying tears, at my mouth. Finally, he kisses me again and the hunger is still there, still deep and resonant in the way he checks my tonsils, fights my own urgent tongue into submission, leaves me laid waste and trembling.

He draws back slightly, wiggles his hips once, and smiles when I gasp and arch against him. "Want me to suck you off?" he offers.

Oh, God, yes. He pulls out slowly, and I’m introduced to entirely new pains: the bloated empty feeling of my rectum, the pressure deeper up my large intestine about which I refuse to speculate, the stinging burn of my stretched anus. Then his head drops down and his mouth engulfs me and he swallows until he’s gagging on my dick and nothing else matters.

It’s seconds, a whirlwind, Dorothy’s tornado sweeping her up and tossing her into an entirely new world, and as I feel myself edging over the summit, as the gravity of my pleasure begins to drag me back down to a body that is transcendent with orgasmic tension, he shoves three fingers back up my ass and I cry out in agony as the world goes white.

Time passes. I hear the bedside clock tumble over another minute. I don’t know how many it has already registered as we lay here in silence, his head pillowed on my belly, his hand idly stroking the inside of my thigh. I realize I’m still holding my left leg up, even now, and that my hamstring will probably cramp when I finally release it. I’m not worried. I don’t even care, actually. I can tell by the attention of his fingers and the ozone-smell in the air that the electricity is building again, that while my body can’t even imagine another saturation of such pleasure yet, this isn’t over.

And it isn’t. Not until he has sucked me again, not until he has fucked me again—and I think I’m going to scream, the pain is so intense on my stretched and burning skin—not until, at the last second, he jerks out—a pain all its own—and comes across my belly like a dog marking its territory. After time passes, after his brain comes back online, he whispers, "Rub it in." And I do. And finally, he seems satisfied, and he drops onto the bed. He reaches for me, tugs and silently demands until I lie beside him, staring at the ceiling in the small hours of the morning.

My asshole hurts. My stomach muscles ache from the sobbing and the humping. My various bruises from hand and teeth and sucking lips all throb, keeping tempo with my heartbeat. I glance Krycek’s way, remembering why I panicked earlier. In that first raw connection of mouth to mouth, I realized that he might actually know me. That knowledge, wielded by a man like Alex Krycek, could do me far deeper and more permanent damage than my freaky, fascinating case subjects. After all—generally speaking—my X-files can only kill me once, and that’s pretty much the end of it.

I reach out and brush the pad of one finger over his high, square cheekbone, mesmerized by the way the miniscule contact makes his shoulder twitch, his eyelids quiver. Perhaps my greater fear is that somehow, I think Krycek and I deserve each other.

I’m probably in shock right now, I think as I watch his eyelashes flutter against his cheeks. That’s common for victims of rape.

I wonder what he’s dreaming.

I lie still, watching him, and I listen to the whuffling sounds of his sleep, and I wait for sanity to return.

 

five-fifteen a.m.

The pillow isn't working. He is so much stronger than I am, and I don't know when that happened. I'm sure there was a time I could have taken him… or is that a lie, too? Has he always been the stronger?

I should have slipped out of bed and grabbed my gun. An imaginary hypodermic. A fucking necktie, for chrissakes.

He heaves beneath me, his knee connecting with my groin—much more gently than he could have made it, actually. I fold, choking. I'm pinned again, staring up at him through tear-blurred vision. When he bends to kiss me I don't move. I don't respond to the soft pressure that deforms our mouths. Then he pulls away and smiles, more genuinely I think.

"Mulder," he whispers. "I think I'd have been disappointed if you hadn't tried."

"We’re even, then, because I think I’m disappointed that I failed."

He stares down at me, eyes gleaming in the dim light of the lamp, his face half in shadow. I know it best, half in shadow. "You’re not pissed at me, you know." Quiet-voiced, this is Krycek’s pillow talk. "You’re pissed at yourself. For letting it happen. For wanting me. For going with the devil you know…" His fingers fan out along my ribs, branding me, and the sensation tickles even as it fans dying coals of lust.

"You’re insane," I hear myself say dully, even though I know he is right.

He merely shrugs. "Whatever."

His hand disappears under his pillow, retrieves his gun. Jesus Christ, when did he put that there? I don’t think I ever noticed he had a gun.

"I have to go now, Mulder. We'll see each other again, I’m reasonably sure. Don’t beat yourself up about this; you’re only human, no matter what you like to think."

What’s that supposed to mean, I wonder. But I know what it means. Asshole. He thinks I’m arrogant. Prick. Traitor. Alex…

Casually, like any man climbing from the bed of an old lover and heading off for work, he dresses one-handed as I watch, noting the marks I left on him—so few in honest anger, so many more in the passion fueled by how much we have hated each other and how much we have resented each other and oh, most definitely, by how much we define each other. I think, this is what family is, to me? Probably. I am a ruined shell of a man who has only now, after all these years, paused to consider that reality. I'm the chicken that flops and runs and flaps its wings, blood pouring from its neck while its head lies motionless on the ground at the feet of a smoker who holds the axe. I see my father—well, Bill Mulder—and the smoking man and all those blank silhouettes that represent my enemies in my mind, and I think, all this? For me?

Krycek’s right; I am arrogant. But I’m also not dead, and my lifeblood is being drained from me far more slowly than from that chicken. Alex Krycek their axe? Or just a leech, feeding where he can, on what he can? Or is he something else I cannot and will not entertain?

It’s fascinating, watching him put his arm back on. Scar tissue disappears inside a smooth urethane cup, and the whole contraption gets lifted into the air as he extends his stump upward. The straps hang down and he grabs one, flips it back around his ribs and catches it in the front, all with his right hand, like Bruce Lee swinging numchucks. I hear the crackle of velcro, and I lose the details as I focus on his utter lack of self-consciousness. Half in profile to me, he looks over, watches me watching him, and shakes his head. He is indulgent, and I want to hate him for that.

"Krycek?"

He's at the door when I finally speak, in jeans and prosthetic arm, heading for the living room where his boots and shirt fell in the headlong rush to mindlessness. He turns, looks wide-eyed and expectant with no hint of fear. There isn't even a hint of hatred, and I wonder what has happened to him, and what has happened to me. "Yeah?"

"If I asked you nicely, could you please never do this again?"

The warmth sparks in his eyes, a fire blazing through a forest, chasing all that life inside him around in circles and threatening to consume it. He’ll be his own death one day. No one will need to help him exit this plane.

His teeth come out gleaming, and I think of the wolf devouring grandmother. "If you asked me nicely, Mulder, would you mean it?"

We stare for a moment, each of us as distant from the rest of the world as two islands can possibly be. He blinks. I roll onto my side, turning away, leaving the question, unfortunately, answered. My ears strain to hear his quiet movements, the whisper of a belt threaded through denim loops, his near-silent boot tread as he heads for the door. The door snicks shut and locks behind him and I think,

Who are we when we’re alone?

And I, lying naked on my bed, covered in the sweat and semen of my enemy, bite down on the pillow I tried to suffocate him with, just to keep from screaming.

 

the end

 

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