Stroke of Luck
by Hth

	On the day Alex Krycek returned to Mulder's life, the Agent's car stalled in 
the parking garage, and he had to ask Scully to drive him home. "You probably 
should get a cab," she told him. "We're already about to run late for that 
party, and if we make two separate stops--"
	"I'm not going." Scully watched him levelly; Mulder counted to eight in the 
silence. She opened her door, turning her face away from him, and Mulder was 
sure she was about to drive off and leave him standing on the cold floor of 
Blue Lot 3. But she hit the power lock, and Mulder got in.
	Neither of the partners said anything on the drive to Mulder's apartment. 
Halfway to Alexandria, Mulder realized that it wasn't necessarily Alex Krycek 
creaking loudly in the fatal silence between them. She'd had a nosebleed that 
morning, one that went on so long that she had become light-headed, and 
stumbled, and banged her knee on the desk. Mulder had offered to drive her 
home over lunch, which hadn't gone down well at all.
	That would be ironic, Mulder thought. Mulder lost in the cthonic landscape of 
his feelings for Krycek, Scully contemplating her own death in monastic 
solitude. Eros and thanatos -- one gearshift and all the world away from each 
other. Mulder slumped low in his seat.
	Instead of simply pulling up to his curb, Scully put the car into park and 
turned off the ignition. Mulder pulled his hand back from the door and waited 
to hear whatever Scully intended to say. "Are you going to be all right, 
Mulder?" The heel of her right hand was stroking the steering wheel's arc, her 
eyes carefully ahead. In the old days, Scully had no nervous habits.
	"Who, me? Yeah." She turned to look at him, ready to disapprove. It was a lie, 
of course, and not even an ambitious one. "I don't appreciate being put under 
the microscope every time I have a bad day." It was a direct quote.
	"Touche."
	Mulder knew when his partner was through with a conversation, and she wasn't 
yet. He kept his eyes on the LED dash display, now dark. Scully's hand hushed 
rhythmically on the steering wheel, lulling him into mindlessness. It was 
almost dark out; they would be late for the party now, if they decided to go. 
"What do you want me to tell Senator Matheson?"
	"Ebola virus?"
	Her hand dropped to the key, threatening to turn it in the ignition. "If you 
can't be any more help than that, I'll tell him the truth."
	"Ebola virus?"
	Whether it was the comfort of nightfall or the familiarity of Mulder's 
flippancy, the tension seemed to be deserting Scully. Without its support, she 
looked like a scaffolding framework of herself --intelligent without being 
witty, beautiful without being elegant, noble without really caring, loyal 
without needing Mulder in her life anymore. It was an alternate Scully, one 
that he'd gotten to know in the past few weeks, much against his will. Mulder 
searched vainly for something to say, something to win her back from wherever 
Scully was going, and all he could find in himself was bitter, gunmetal 
desire, pulse and leather and the red, refugee welcome of Hong Kong's 
treacherous embrace. Dammit.
	It was Scully who saved herself; it always seemed to be, and Mulder was as 
pathetically grateful for that strength as he was unable to find it in 
himself. She gave him a vague smile of pity, the look Mulder imagined she'd 
give a cat that had gotten its paw stuck in its collar while bathing -- a 
quintessentially Scully look. That smile comforted Mulder by banishing the 
Scully who was spare and unresponsive, but at the same time it made him feel 
messy, uncoordinated, and needy in her presence, as only Scully could. Made 
him feel like a stuck cat, trying and failing to say, *Scully, could you get 
me out of this?* 
	"I'll be fine. It was a shock, but I'm over it now." Over Alex Krycek and 
their coarse, bloody intimacy -- the tight harmonics of their hate and 
violence -- the arching, driving way they flew again and again into one 
another's murderous embrace, locking together, craving each other's assaults 
with the force of the junkie who kills for his drug. Over the way that each 
jagged breath Krycek drew seemed to strain in Mulder's lungs; the way that 
sheets damp with his own sweat in the summer would sometimes put a certain 
foreign taste in Mulder's mouth and a certain familiar name on his tongue. 
Over a phantom weight and shape of a body held against his, so real that 
Mulder could forget, did forget, that it was his own invention, a false 
memory. And almost over seeing him again today in AD Skinner's office; Mulder 
was working on that one.
	"You know, Mulder, it's nothing to be ashamed of. You have a long personal 
history with Krycek, and it's perfectly natural that you would feel 
disoriented, seeing him again under these circumstances. Just remember that 
your life is still under your control. You don't have to give him the power to 
disrupt your schedule. I thought we were looking forward to this dinner."
	Backstabber. She was an emotional marksman -- dead center, every time. 
Invoking *we,* insinuating herself into Mulder's self-pity, inviting him to 
refuse his private *long personal history* and operate instead as half of 
their partnership. It was the closest Scully was ever likely to come to a 
sentimental appeal. In a nutshell, it was, *Blow him off, Mulder, and take me 
out instead.*
	Mulder turned the idea over and around in his head, scrutinizing it under the 
killing white light of self-knowledge. If he were to go -- if they were to 
go.... He wondered, guiltily, what she planned to wear to this black-tie 
event. How beautiful would she be? Beautiful enough to make him so bold and 
crazed that he would go hurtling blindly over the vast, bottomless chasm of 
their unconfessed estrangement, to put himself once more tight up against her 
smooth, ordered, luminous life? Beautiful enough to make him say the words to 
her that he once swore to her God he would say if he ever had her back again 
-- a heartfelt, at the time, promise on the sign that hung around his throat, 
curse and last bright hope simultaneously? She would probably wear black 
velvet, or cocoa or night-blue. No one but Mulder would know the depth of her 
longing to break free, to change everything about herself and escape headlong 
into a place where she wore white Marilyn dresses and laughed loudly and was 
not responsible for her sister's murder and would not be dead by thirty-five. 
Only Mulder would see the voiceless pain of a foundering, unfinished life, and 
he would love her fiercely, and she would never be beautiful enough to make 
him forget that Krycek was alive and probably thinking of him over delivery 
pizza and free hotel HBO, somewhere in Washington, D.C.
	"I'm not up to it, Scully." A friend, unlike God or Lady Luck or AD Walter 
Skinner, would let you off the fucking hook if you just said, *I can't take 
any more.*
	"Even though you already rented a tuxedo? And you once proposed marriage to 
Matheson's caterer?" She spoke with the measured, warning tone Mulder's mother 
used to employ, gamely trying to use the logic of cause and effect against an 
eight-year-old who was convinced that it was much too warm for a sweater on a 
Massachusetts March day.
	Mulder shook his head. He was even sick of the sound of his own voice; he 
didn't know how Scully put up with his lunatic verbal foos-ball game, day in 
and day out.
	"Fine. But I don't want to see you at the office tomorrow looking tragic and 
exhausted because you stayed up all night brooding about that rat bastard. 
It's just not healthy, and he frankly doesn't deserve the energy." *Rat 
bastard.* It was Mulder's phrase, not Scully's, and it sounded wrong in her 
mouth. The *we* had been refused and the offer revoked; she was handing him 
Alex Krycek on a silver platter, ceding whatever place she might've had in 
their little drama. Mulder's name, Mulder's rat, Mulder's problem.
	He got out of the car without further pointless justifications. Lately, life 
with Scully felt like one long custody settlement: the cancer is yours, Krycek 
is mine, the desk is mine, the tattoo is yours, your aunt gave us the toaster 
oven, I picked out the sofa. The divorce metaphor was gruesome, but Mulder 
kept coming back to it. They were so separate now, each involved with separate 
problems, separate projects. Separate, separated. *Your mother and I have 
decided to try separating for now, Fox. Just a trial separation.*
	For her sake, though, he took the stairs up to his apartment two at a time, 
knowing she would not drive away until he flashed the light four times. She 
was a different Scully now, but she was Scully, his faithful and paranoid 
friend, and she packed heat. It was still a relationship that worked, and it 
beat a home security system all to hell.
	It seemed impossible that Mulder's apartment hadn't changed since that 
morning. He prowled it, opening doors, closing them again. Even his mug, a 
third full of cold coffee, was still balanced on the back of the toilet where 
he'd abandoned it to shave and rushed off without it. Chuckling at himself in 
the mirror, Mulder loosened his tie. What had he expected? Some ominous, 
Puzo-esque message from Krycek -- *I'm Back* written in toothpaste on the 
mirror, his fish floating in a tank of formaldehyde, his dishes put away? No, 
Krycek had been in Crystal City all week, with Skinner.
	A sudden pain in Mulder's fingers made him look down at the death grip he had 
on the sink's edge, forcing his nails to bite back into his own skin. All 
week, since late Sunday -- four nights. Mulder had clear memories; he stood at 
Skinner's shoulder, watching the AD put on his glasses, watching him stand in 
the doorway, filling it menacingly, watching him watch a sleeping Krycek. 
Mulder remembered Krycek's sweeping eyelashes flutter, his head falling 
sideways as the weight of Skinner's forearm disturbed the pillow. He was 
there, passively observing as Krycek's hand rested on Skinner's bicep, able to 
see the complex flexing of the muscles there. He could see everything 
--Krycek's incredulous smile, his fingers nudging Skinner's cheekbone, 
jostling his glasses.
	Mulder whirled away from the mirror. *No.* Shit, he didn't *remember* any of 
that, because he hadn't been there, and it never happened. Why was it always 
like this with Krycek, his fantasies becoming more clear than his own sure 
knowledge of the truth? Perhaps even more distressingly, Mulder wasn't exactly 
sure where the fantasy was coming from, or headed. Was he the one in the 
high-beam of that infinitely patient, possessive gaze? Or was Alex Krycek 
waking to his sudden presence, the flesh and the eyes raising, rising, 
reaching to him? *Mulder, you don't know *what* you want. As per usual.*
He carried the cup to the kitchen, dumped its contents down the sink. Mulder 
rinsed it out, then emptied his coffeemaker and put in a new liner and new 
grounds, debating whether to log on and check his e-mail first, or order some 
dinner. The tuxedo hung in his doorway, accusingly. Mulder reached for an 
orange from the fruit basket by his sink. AS he tried to pierce its skin with 
a recently-trimmed thumbnail, he wondered dimly, *Fruit basket?* Since when 
did he buy fresh fruit? Right, Scully. It was Scully's; it had come to her in 
the hospital, courtesy of brother Charles, and by the time Mulder had bogarted 
all the grapes and one of the pears, she'd rolled her eyes and said, "Just 
keep it."
	That memory, a genuine, honest-to-shit memory, jarred everything into place. 
His stomach rebelled, and Mulder gripped the edge of the sink as his throat 
worked painfully to expel food that wasn't in Mulder's stomach. He hadn't 
eaten lunch, hadn't touched food since the pack of seeds at nine-thirty, and 
Mulder could only cough up a thin, tasteless trickle of vomit. Scully in the 
hospital. Scully's vital life, her unflagging force of soul and personality, 
being siphoned off to feed the thing that shared her skull, until it grew 
strong and bloody while she became pale and listless and brittle. She shared a 
D.C. oncology ward with God knew how many perfectly ordinary men and women, 
but he was *lying,* fucking *lying* to himself that her illness was ordinary. 
He knew better.
	Someone had stolen her away, seized her and struck her and bound her as she 
screamed his name into the phone. They had imprisoned her in a train car, and 
a man named Ishimaru had sundered her dear, small body, and taken the valuable 
genetic material stored in the cradle of her pelvis. They had taken her DNA, 
her Scullyness, and used it to create something she could love but never 
would, something that was of her essence, but with its very humanity abrogated 
and adulterated. Some process he couldn't begin to understand had left her 
genes savaged and tangled, and she had awakened in a hospital, against all 
reason, healed herself with a slaughtered immune system. He had known then 
that payment would someday be due on her miracle. He knew now, if he could 
bear to face it, that she was dying now because nothing could erase the fact 
that her body had endured more tortures than it could bear. It was the truth 
that had muzzled him and kept him from speaking freely to her since the 
diagnosis. Mulder wasn't sure what had made him nauseous: that it was 
happening at all, or that he'd been too much of a coward for three years to 
say one word about it, leaving her to make sense of it alone.
	Krycek Krycek Alex Krycek Alex Krycek made it possible. If it hadn't been for 
his interference, Mulder could have reached her in time to save her. His 
fault, his fault, *my fault--*
	No! Krycek's. Krycek's fault. The same traitorous bastard who had embedded 
himself in every level of Mulder's fantasies, wound himself intricately, 
intimately inside Mulder's profound private longing for touch and breath and 
sweetly agonizing synthesis.
	The irony, Mulder thought as he turned on the cold water, rinsing out the 
sink, the really staggering irony, was that on the long list of times Mulder 
had been faced by challenges, Scully's abduction practically stood out as his 
great victory. For once, he had been good enough. He hadn't taken no for an 
answer, hadn't rested, had been smart and brave and fast enough to reach her 
in time. He'd seen his goal, wanted it, and gone ahead, high and hard and on 
fire with the love of her. And he would have been there, waiting for her at 
the top of the mountain, there when she needed him, coming to her call. Only 
Krycek prevented it. No weakness in Mulder. Only Krycek's treachery.
	But then again, if he'd really been good enough, would he have been duped by 
Krycek at all? Hell of a time for his paranoia to fail him. More irony. Mulder 
lowered his head under the faucet and let the cold water flood his mouth. He 
was quivering again; at least this time half the FBI -- the high-ranking half 
-- wasn't here to see it.
	[[[[[ Skinner got him out of the conference; never had that remorseless, 
"Agent Mulder, I want to see you outside," been so welcome.
	Kim wasn't back at her desk yet; Mulder wondered if she even knew about the 
late-afternoon meeting, or who had come to work with the AD today. Skinner 
pushed him into a chair with heavy hands on his shoulders, then braced himself 
on the arms of the chair and leaned in. "This is hard for you. I respect that. 
But I resent your attempts to sour this deal with your outbursts. I don't like 
Alex Krycek any more than you do, but right now he seems to be the only man on 
the planet who is both able and willing to supply us with this kind of 
information. I don't think you understand what he has for us. Hard evidence, 
evidence that dates over a period of many years, documented to hell and back. 
If even half of it pans out -- if this sting goes off -- we have him. We 
*have* him."
	"So you're going to cut a deal with a killer and a traitor--"
	"Stop making it sound like a production of *Faust,* Mulder. It's the Federal 
Witness Protection Program -- except slightly less official. Perfectly 
simple."
	Mulder shook his head, feeling like a sulky child. "It's not right."
	"Agent Mulder, it comes down to this: I *want* that smoking bastard. Fuck up 
my chance at him, and you'll have a beautiful career alphabetizing the checks 
in payroll. In the Wichita office."
	"Well, *I* want Alex Krycek." It didn't sound right, even to Mulder. He 
wondered exactly how to rephrase.
	But Skinner seemed to take it at face value. "I know. Believe me, my gut 
response was exactly the same. It may or may not be right, but it's happening. 
I'm going to strongly recommend that you avoid Krycek for the time being. He's 
being placed under 24-hour guard, and I've already spoken with him about the 
situation. Now I want you to promise me the same thing he did: that if you do 
have to interact on the job, you will not discuss any details of Krycek's 
past. There's still no permanent decision on how far beyond this sting his 
amnesty will extend, and OPC prefers to keep this quiet until his...fate is 
sealed, as it were. Mulder, there's still a chance he'll go to prison. Or be 
deported."
	For a moment, Mulder's heartbeat was erratic. "Does he know that?"
	"Of course. Krycek and I have been discussing a variety of scenarios for his 
future; we've been working together since Sunday night, when he came to me 
personally in Crystal City." Mulder smiled sourly. To go back to the man who'd 
laid him out flat the last time he put his nose in Crystal City -- it did take 
balls. "We've been discussing a lot of things. He's an extremely driven man. I 
don't think anything matters to him except nailing his former employer to the 
wall. I don't know what happened between them, but Krycek's not fucking 
around. He has dirt on this man that goes back to 1994." 
	The year Mulder and Krycek worked together. Mulder could only sigh. "I don't 
-- want to screw the pooch on this any more than you do."
	"I didn't think you did. So for once in your life, Mulder--"
	He raised his eyebrows. "Be a team player?"
	"I'd appreciate the effort." Skinner patted his shoulder.]]]]]]
	Awkwardly, of course. It was probably something from some management handbook, 
how to make that all-important personal connection with your troublesome 
subordinate. Mulder couldn't help being cynical; it wasn't the first time 
Skinner had tried to smooth over a tense situation between them with a 
judicious touch, and every time it sat uncomfortably, probably because Skinner 
himself never seemed quite sure it was all that great an idea.
	Mulder stood up and ran a wet hand through his hair. But that was the joy of 
being Walter Skinner, wasn't it? Nothing was ever really a great idea if you 
examined it closely enough, and Skinner's job was to examine everything until 
he could determine what exactly was wrong with it. Though if the subject of 
your inquiry was Special Agent Fox Mulder, it didn't take long.
	He wondered how long it had taken Krycek. How many days had they been paired 
before he'd known where Mulder's weaknesses were, what to say to get inside 
his life? As much as a week, maybe? He'd had a good strategy right from the 
start; generic, maybe, but the classics --earnest, green agent, easily 
tongue-tied, a little out of his depth --never really go out of style. What 
was the first memory Mulder had of *Krycek,* of another human being sharing 
his workspace?
	Oddly enough, maybe the phone call from Scully. All too rare and often rushed, 
those calls had been the breadcrumb trail that led Mulder through the 
bleakness between crises, between Deep Throat's death and Scully's 
disappearance.
	[[[[[ "It's me."
	"What? Don't you sleep?" The clock on his microwave read 12:50.
	"Why? Do you?"
	Mulder chuckled, balancing the cordless against his neck as he opened a new 
box of Frosted Mini-Wheats. "And miss all this great cable that I'm paying out 
the ass for? Is that your microwave I hear?"
	"Very observant, Agent Mulder. I'm reheating some beef stroganoff. I worked 
right through dinner grading these lab reports."
	Hopping on his countertop, Mulder put a can of beer between his knees and 
popped the top with his right hand while steadily tossing Mini-Wheats near his 
mouth with the left. "That's what you do when you're not cutting up flukeworm 
victims, huh?"
	"Please. Give me another week or two before we reminisce about that case over 
dinner."
	"Then entertain me with something wholesome."
	She paused. "Alex Krycek?"
	"The judges say we're going to accept that, Dana," he said in his best 
game-show host voice. "Seriously -- Alex? What about him?"
	"He called me last night."
	"No shit? What for?"
	Police sirens passed beneath his building, and Mulder tensed instinctively. 
Maybe his last little tenure as a hostage had gotten to him more than Mulder 
had realized. He readjusted the phone, leaning into it, amazed at how her 
disembodied voice could make him feel centered again. "--to help you get on 
your feet again, since I know you so much better than he does. He seems very 
concerned. Are you still as unhappy with your work situation as you were?"
	"Oh...no, not so much. I'm okay. Skinner's been handing me some interesting 
cases under the table. So, you told Krycek small, unmarked bills, right?"
	"I hardly knew whether to encourage the trend or not."
	"You just want to be my only friend."
	He could hear her dishwasher in the background. "I think he has a crush on 
you."
	"*You* think? *You* don't share office space with it. Scully, he stands so 
close to me that you could get trace evidence off my clothes. And he keeps 
giving me these meaningful looks, and making up excuses to hang around the 
building until I leave. It's creepy."
	"You could take it as a compliment. He looks up to you."
	"When a junior agent looks up to *you,* it's a compliment. But me? Spooky 
Mulder? My career just washed up in the Potomac, bloated, with its eyes eaten 
out by fish. Excuse me if I find it a little weird to be a role model all of a 
sudden."
	"I downloaded some nude photos of you to him. I'll call and ask him just to 
send them back without looking at them. If that's really how you feel."
	"And they think I'm the bad influence."]]]]]]]
	Stroke of fucking genius, that. To enlist Scully, flattering her by 
acknowledging that she was the key to winning Mulder. Krycek could have been a 
rival, if he hadn't been so careful to make her understand that Krycek viewed 
himself the same way she viewed him -- stranger, interloper, redundancy. How 
many hours had it taken him to draft that piece of award-winning strategy? 
Maybe he'd been issued a secret decoder ring along with his weapon and badge, 
one that clearly showed the red letters stamped across Mulder's forehead to 
read PROPERTY OF AGENT SCULLY.
	Either Krycek knew him, knew him so deeply and in such detail that there was 
no retreat at all, or Alex Krycek was on the most staggeringly improbable 
lucky streak Mulder had ever seen. There was no third choice, no other way 
Krycek could've left Hong Kong alive.
	How many seconds had they struggled in the airport? Twenty, thirty? Funny how 
each time his relationship with Krycek turned, Mulder could measure it in 
shutter-clicks. Three days. An hour. Thirty seconds. *I didn't kill your 
father,* he'd said. Mulder didn't believe him. But it was what he needed to 
hear, the hint, the implicit promise that just this once Krycek would tell him 
something, anything, explain one damn thing to him. It was the excuse he 
needed not to kill him, the reasonable doubt. Krycek had never offered 
explanations before. Already, this time was different. It would be different.
	*Finish it,* he'd said. Meaning packed tight inside the fraction of a second. 
Calling Mulder's bluff. He was holding a gun, illegally, ready to commit 
murder. If he shot Krycek, it was finished, all of it, and there would be no 
second chance and no way out. Are you really ready for this? he challenged. If 
it all ends here, are you ready to live with that? There's nothing more you 
need from me? Then finish it.
	Had Krycek known the gun was an empty bluff, or just rolled his dice and taken 
his chances? Either way, he'd been right. There was too much Mulder still 
wanted to know about him -- everything, actually. The profiler in him was 
starving for one good handhold on Krycek's brain. Mulder hated to admit it -- 
never had, actually, and certainly not to Krycek. Krycek knew anyway. Or he 
guessed. Either way, it seemed that Mulder never had any room to maneuver 
where Krycek was concerned.
	He'd been standing in the kitchen for a good five minutes, and he still 
couldn't decide, dinner or the Internet. The only rational thing was to say 
fuck 'em all and watch some tv. Shedding his jacket and shoes, Mulder settled 
along the couch and flipped to the Prevue Channel. The titles scrolled past 
him unnoticed. 
	Was Hong Kong itself a false memory? He knew it couldn't have been, really. He 
wasn't a complete lunatic, after all. But some of it seemed so damn unlikely. 
He remembered -- didn't he? -- Alex crouched in a window, remembered the 
narrow cut of his jeans and the red light off the barrel of his gun. Such a 
shock, hitting him right under the chin, just when Mulder was sure he'd never 
see Alex Krycek alive again. It had stopped him cold and made him stupid; 
Mulder didn't even remember what he'd said. Whatever damn thing had come out 
when he opened his mouth. He'd needed noise, words to prevent him from voicing 
the words that pounded through him like an overdose. *Gun gun gun Alex Alex 
Alex please please please no yes no* Was it really likely that, stunned as 
he'd been at the time, Mulder could actually *remember* the angle of Alex's 
leg as he braced himself in the window? Did that seem believable?
	Oh, shit. And the most unbelievable of all, those endless minutes, passing 
against each other in the Hong Kong Mass Rapid Transport. Like that junior 
high party game, Seven Minutes in Heaven, only seven minutes in a sleek, 
glistening purgatory of surrender and denial. It was a pact. Pretend you don't 
know him, and you don't have to arrest him, and he doesn't have to put a 
bullet in your stomach at point-blank range. Let's just let the wild, reckless 
reputation of Hong Kong get under our skin, and if we both agree to it, then 
none of this exists outside. If I touch you, if my touch lingers, it's because 
the decadent thrill of your anonymity excites me. If your every breath is a 
hard-won victory, if you surge beneath my fingers, it's no more than you would 
allow any stranger on the subway whose dark carnal impulses brushed up against 
yours. It is your tight jeans, your cheekbones, your namelessness that turns 
me on, not my hatred of a man I knew as Alex Krycek. Whom you do resemble in 
this light. Who, if he were here, would have to gun me down when I had to 
intervene to prevent his escape. With whom I share nothing, not even this 
awkward, loveless contact, clumsy with nerves and desire. With you, the 
disconnectedness is voluntary; I never asked your name. My estrangement from 
him is so complete, so fundamental. No, I don't want to talk about it. Thanks 
anyway. Nice jacket.
	Clicks of time. Three days. And hour. Seven minutes. Seven Minutes in Heaven. 
He had lost a kind of virginity on the MRT, and now he wore the texture of 
Alex, streaking his skin, clinging to him like vines. Even hurting him in the 
airport, not two hours later, had not been able to reverse the change.
	Restlessly, Mulder squirmed on the sofa, looking for the most familiar 
position. His heel came down on the remote and the channel jumped. QVC. They 
were selling designer Barbie dolls. He would put Scully in that dress if he 
could, the black velvet Victorian with crystalline buttons and white satin 
underskirt. Wintry and lush at the same time. Not that Scully ever went 
anywhere nice enough to need a dress like that. He wondered if she would go to 
the dinner without him. Mulder hoped so; she sounded as though she'd been 
looking forward to it, and she certainly deserved at least that.
	No. The very least she deserved was whatever the hell made her happy for one 
night. Dinner at a senator's mansion. The velvet dress of her dreams. 
Strength, a smile, her pride, her partner.
	The phone rang, and her name leapt up in his chest. *Scully.* Five years 
running, and she hadn't given up on him yet. Mulder felt struck by lightning, 
all his energy restored in one bone-jarring jolt; there was one sure truth, 
and that was Scully. He grabbed his jacket from the coffee table and shook it, 
catching the cell phone as it fell, already talking as he flipped it open. 
"You're right. You're totally right, and we can still make it. We'll be 
fashionably late." He was trying to hang onto the phone with his chin as he 
unbuttoned his shirt. "It's going to be okay. Where are you? Are you still at 
home? I'll be done changing by the time you get here."
	"Does that mean you're naked right now?"
	The very worst thing about this, Mulder decided, was that he wasn't completely 
sure his senses were any more to be trusted than his memory. Bad enough not to 
be sure where Krycek had been, but never to know where he was and where he 
wasn't? Genuine, gold-plated insanity. And at the moment, Mulder wanted very 
much to be insane. Better an auditory hallucination than the real Krycek. 
Hallucinations didn't much care how you answered them.
	"Mulder? Mulder. Mulder, are you still there?"
	"Yeah," he said reflexively. "No! I'm hanging up."
	"No no no, don't do that. Sorry, that was a cheap joke. I need to talk to 
you."
	His voice was whatever the opposite of a hollow tone might be --dense? Full? 
Funny how few memories Mulder had of such a husky, beautiful voice. But then, 
Krycek had always watched, letting Mulder do most of the talking. Ages ago, 
Mulder used to tease him about being strong and silent, a young aspiring 
Skinner. He was pretty sure Krycek had never offered to have a conversation 
with him before.
	"I'm not interested. Get off my phone; I'm not paying to talk to you."
	"I'll buy you a Coke at the office to make it up to you." It was too absurd, 
and too flatly delivered, not to be a joke. Krycek's sense of humor had always 
been dry almost to the point of dessication. "I have something that belongs to 
you."
	"FedEx it to me. And get off my phone." Mulder knew he should hang up. He told 
himself he was only staying on the line to rattle Krycek, to confound his 
expectations.
	"It's information."
	Of course it was. That was Krycek's field, after all. Taking it, selling it, 
luring you in with it. "Give it to Blevins; he's heading up your little 
adventure."
	"It belongs to *you.*" Krycek was the last person Mulder would have expected 
to be arguing property rights on knowledge. Mulder had always figured him for 
the *information wants to be free* type, given how many people's secrets he'd 
blown apart, and more every day. "You should have had it a long time ago. Just 
meet me in person."
	"No."
	"Mulder. Let--"
	He hung up, and sat down, shaking. Carefully, he laid the phone on the table 
and waited for it to ring again. 
	It didn't. After a few minutes, he called Scully's cell; it was off. He tried 
her house, and the machine picked it up. Mulder didn't leave a message.
	[[[[[ "Mulder. Hi, Mulder. Did I wake you up?"
	Mulder muted the televison and glanced at his watch. At almost three, a person 
could be getting less welcome calls than from his partner. "No. What's the 
matter?"
	"Couldn't sleep." His voice was wrong somehow, as though he were fumbling. 
Normally, Krycek chose his words carefully, and never hesitated once he 
committed to speaking. "Scully still calls you Mulder. Does everyone call you 
Mulder?"
	"Yeah. Are you drunk?"
	"I've been drinking. Yeah, I've been drinking. Some beer, some vodka. My 
father was a real snob about his vodka. Have you ever had real Russian vodka? 
It's like tar. It doesn't pour, it drips. Nasty shit. Put you on your ass."
	Mulder began flipping through silent channels. "Go to bed, Krycek."
	"Your folks call you Fox, though, right?"
	"I guess. They don't call me much."
	He jumped at that. "No -- no, my dad and I, we're not close either. He doesn't 
like the government. He doesn't like America. Your father worked for the state 
department."
	"I know. You should go to bed, sleep it off. Do you know what time it is?"
	"Three. Ish. I can't sleep, thinking."
	Mulder settled in. Drunk people were generally amusing, and a drunk Krycek 
should be especially so. "Whatcha thinking about?"
	"You." A wistful tone, youthful. Mulder felt guilty; Alex Krycek was 
inexperienced, so intense, alone. Suffering, in his own way, just as much as 
Mulder was. On the spot, Mulder resolved to quit fucking with Krycek's head. 
"There's so much I never told you. Not that you probably don't know all of it. 
You know a whole hell of a lot, Mulder. Sometimes when you're really thinking, 
it's like your brain goes supernova, and I think you know everything. I really 
do think you know everything."
	"I know enough," Mulder admitted. "You really don't have to go on. You'll just 
be embarrassed on Monday."
	"But I want you to hear. Or I just want to say it. I'm fucking blitzed; 
there's no way I'll remember this on Monday."
	"Krycek. It's okay. I know."
	"You don't know shit, Mulder! You're just -- just some stupid fucking straight 
guy. I must seem pretty pathetic to you, huh, Mulder? Some lame, blue-collar, 
over achieving queer, like the poor man's *Philadelphia.* I'd never have the 
balls to come on to you sober, you or anyone else, 'cause I want a fucking 
career. I'm fucking upwardly-mobile, and a coward."
	His voice was so raw; Mulder wanted to be there in person, to smooth away the 
ache somehow. His rational mind knew he was more likely to make it worse. "You 
don't seem pathetic. I'm actually very flattered."
	"Right. Flattered."
	"Okay, now listen to me, Alex. See if you can remember this. You're not the 
only person in the world who wants to sleep with me. And you're not the only 
-- person I consider a friend. But you're the only one who's both. You get it? 
The only one. Okay?" He gentled his voice. "Okay, Alex?"
	"Okay. We're okay. You're -- okay. You're too damn good. I don't want to do 
this anymore, Mulder. I want out."
	"I know."
	Krycek's chuckle was rhythmic, like a stone skipped three times across a 
lake's vast surface. It sank into silence, swallowed by the darkness. "No. No, 
you don't. I think I wish you did. I think I wish you'd hurry up and hate me."
	"Get some sleep."
	"Have I really fucked up, Mulder?"
	"No. We're cool."]]]]]]]]]]]]
	Hearing Krycek's voice over the phone again undid years of rigorously not 
remembering that conversation. It was a fascinating exchange, though, wasn't 
it? Like their relationship in microcosm, truth laced with lies embellished 
with truth, meaning both what it said and what it concealed. Another fine 
strategy from a consummate professional? Or had Krycek just been weird and 
giddy with vodka and guilt and a sincere (*Krycek* and *sincere,* what a 
fucking day this had turned out to be), impossible attraction to an erstwhile 
partner? Either way, it had played out to Krycek's advantage. Beyond that 
point, Mulder had truly taken Krycek under his wing, motivated by sympathy for 
unrequited adoration and, yes, by ego, a bit. After that three a.m., Krycek 
had been utterly in Mulder's life.
	God, that fucking phone call. He hadn't thought about it since the day he sat 
in Krycek's car with a palm full of Morley ashes. Hearing it over and over in 
his mind. *There's so much I never told you. I don't want to do this anymore, 
Mulder. Mulder. You. Hi, Mulder. Have I really fucked up, Mulder? I want out. 
I really do think you know everything. We're okay. We're okay. We're okay. I 
want out.*
	They had never, not for one second, been okay. They were certainly not okay 
now, not if Krycek delivered the Cancerman hog-tied with an apple in his mouth 
to the White House lawn.
	If he didn't get up and move around, Mulder was going to fall asleep. He 
lobbed the thought around, discovered that it didn't bother him. He tucked an 
arm under his head and lowered the volume on the television, setting it to the 
Sci-Fi Channel.
	What did Krycek know that belonged to Mulder? Mulder felt entitled to plenty 
of things, but he really doubted they were Krycek's to give. It was probably a 
ruse, anyway. Krycek just wanted to know if Mulder really would come to heel 
for anyone who claimed to have a piece of the truth. Even if Krycek did know 
something, he probably wasn't giving it away, and Mulder had paid all he was 
really prepared to pay for the colossal error of ever being associated with 
Alex Krycek.
 ------------- -------------- --------------
	"Four thirty-nine." The teenage girl behind the counter looked as though she 
wanted to be pissed at Mulder for coming in five minutes before close, but 
couldn't quite manage it. Mulder smiled apologetically, and she blushed.
"I'm going to write you a check, okay, Karen?"
	She plucked at her charm bracelet. "Okay, Mr. Mulder." Mulder winked at her; 
he ate here three or four nights a week, and it was the last place he wanted 
to earn the enmity of the staff. Fortunately, Mulder had a feeling this kid 
would forgive him for pouring sugar in her gas tank. *Yeah, how cool, Mulder. 
Your emotional life is a nightmare, but you're a tremendous hit with the 
under-twenty set. Where the hell were all these girls when *I* was in high 
school?*
	Karen's eyes widened as Mulder pushed back his jacket looking for his 
checkbook in an inside pocket and she caught sight of the Beretta in his 
shoulder holster. "Are you a cop, Mr. Mulder?"
	"He's a federal agent."
	The voice shot through Mulder; he leapt, and his hand gripped the gun 
instinctively. Seeing that, Karen yipped and jumped back from the counter, 
holding up her hands in a warning gesture. The clock hit eleven, and the timed 
lights outside Pagliai's Pizza shut off, leaving the lobby bathed in a soft 
fluorescent blue.
	Calmly, Krycek slid four dollars and fifty cents toward the girl. "Come on, 
Fox," he said, his voice almost hypnotically pleasant. "You're scaring this 
nice lady. He picked up the white bag that held Mulder's dinner. "Get your 
soda and let's go."
	Karen gave a breathy laugh of relief. "Oh, you two know each other." But 
seeing Mulder's expression, she still looked on the verge of panicky, staying 
well back from the money and the register.
	"Where did you come from?"
	"Bathroom. Come on, I'll give you a lift home."
	Mulder jerked the paper bag out of Krycek's hand. "I prefer to walk."
	The silence was endless; it was as though all three of them had sunk deeply 
into a sorcerous sleep where they stood. Mulder was terribly conscious of his 
sloppy appearance -- hair still mussed from his nap, Oxford t-shirt patched 
with sweat from his jog over here. And Krycek looked like a movie star, like a 
Quentin Tarantino, in a black silk shirt and dark suit that must have cost 
what Krycek's entire wardrobe had back in his FBI days. It made him look... 
different. The difference made Mulder nervous; more had changed than Mulder 
could yet know. His eyes fell to Krycek's empty left sleeve, then rose to 
Krycek's neck. He was dying to touch Krycek's neck; he couldn't even lust 
after someone in a normal manner.
	"Fox..."
	"*Mulder.*"
	"Okay. Mulder. They're closed. We can talk at your place." He smiled slightly. 
"I came all the way back to D.C. just to buy you a calzone. You have to owe me 
at least five minutes."
	"*Owe--?*" Mulder's jaw dropped; he shut his mouth, helpless. Speechless for 
the first time since God knew when.
	*To buy you a calzone.* Krycek knew what was in the bag -- because he'd 
overheard Mulder ordering, or just because he remembered? Those Friday 
evenings when they'd take the elevator together up to their cars, and Mulder 
would string him along, pretending not to notice Krycek trying to fish out his 
weekend plans, until the last moment, when the elevator door would open and 
Mulder would give him a playful push and say, "So, you gonna buy me a pizza, 
or what?" And Krycek would smile at the floor and shrug, a studied *whatever* 
gesture. They would come here -- they sat in *that* booth -- and they'd have 
pepperoni and black olives, onions on Krycek's half, or Mulder would order a 
bacon double-cheeseburger calzone while Krycek had a reuben. They would talk 
about music, or science fiction, or football -- Krycek could wax passionate 
about any of the three subjects, his demeanor quite different from the 
understated, pragmatic way he approached any political or professional topic. 
In this pizzaria, in that narrow booth, Mulder had learned to admire Krycek's 
mind; he was both a fiend for details, able to isolate and describe each spoke 
in the madly spinning wheel of Mulder's own logic, and a natural-born inventor 
who saw the world in large-scale terms, understood the shape of events 
regardless of his own placement in the pattern. His intelligence was not 
divine fire like Mulder's, nor stone and iron like Scully's, but it had the 
art and precision, the vision and the equations of an architect's finest work. 
Mulder became adept at translating Krycek's rationed, skeletal words, learning 
to see them as blueprints that, to the initiate, indicated the whole depth and 
breadth of Krycek's thoughts.
	Eleven cents clicked loudly in the silence as Karen laid Krycek's change on 
the counter in front of him.
	*Click.* Three days. An hour. Seven minutes in heaven. A plea in the darkness 
at three a.m.: *I don't want to do this anymore.* A tendril of hidden strength 
in an empty restaurant at 11:04. *I'll give you a lift home.* Not an offer. A 
challenge.
	The sound of a dishwasher. The hum of a soda fountain. Black and white 
geometric tiles and red vinyl booths and windows that only reflected their own 
images back at them when Mulder tried to catch a glimpse of the real world, 
the world outside. Mulder recognized himself, framed palely against the night. 
The man beside him was a stranger. He was calm and poised and dauntingly 
composed, certainly no part of the sullen, vulnerable young federal agent 
whose intellect, ambition, and passion had come crashing together to trap him 
impossibly between desire and fear of Mulder and his elusive, seductive 
truths. Neither, however, could Mulder see in his watchful eyes the feverish 
rage of the outlaw, the doomed madness of the fugitive in New England, the 
dark sinner in Hong Kong.
	Just how many Alex Kryceks was he going to have to cope with, anyway? And if 
his life had fallen to rags and cobwebs after only two Scullys, how the hell 
many could he hope to get through?
	Fucking hell, the man had come back to him looking like... Scully. That 
devastating serenity, the impeccable timing, even the gentle irony in his 
voice.
	Mulder wanted an answer, any answer, any reality to latch onto. He wanted to 
strike Alex Krycek hard across the face and make him explode with the 
survivor's hate and anger. He wanted to caress Krycek's jaw, the pad of his 
fingers flirting up against Krycek's lips, and watch him grab at the excuse to 
sink gratefully against Mulder. Or maybe he had it backwards. Maybe an attack 
would send Krycek low to cower and ask his forgiveness, and a lover's touch 
would spark him to towering fury. How the hell should he know? In spite of it 
all, he had never learned the laws that governed Alex Krycek.
	Feelings as though he creaked audibly, Tin Man style, Mulder took one step 
toward the door. The second step was more agonizing still; Mulder felt it as 
both a failure and a relief. With the third he thought of Scully -- Scully's 
touch, Scully's pain, Scully's trust, Scully's bitter, wretched revenge 
against him for being unable to share in this descent with her. It all seemed 
so clear now. What separated them was that Scully had yet to forgive him for 
failing to be with her always. Maybe someday.
	Four steps: click. Think of three a.m., a drunken confidence, a confession he 
couldn't understand until it was too late. Which words had been real? Any? 
Which betrayals had Krycek regretted, and when had he regretted them? Ever? A 
fifth step. He could sense Krycek behind him, moving smoothly. He was 
invulnerable, and Mulder was the corpse, the trigger, and the battlefield all 
at once.
	Six steps. Yes, he was afraid. Who wouldn't be? There was no way of knowing 
what came next. Krycek was a complete stranger to him, and Mulder was 
beginning to feel the same way about himself. Seven. His weapon pressed 
heavily against his side, icy through his t-shirt. Mulder was his own worst 
enemy and always had been. The gun was worse than useless -- it was tempting.
A chime sounded as Mulder opened the door. Krycek propelled him through it 
with his hand on Mulder's back.
	The only car in front of Pagliai's was a Chevy Impala with that bleak 
government-issue look that always made Mulder feel like a Man in Black. 
Circles of light from the street lamps sat on the ground both in front of and 
behind the car, hemming it in. Chivalrously, Krycek opened the passenger door 
for him.
	After a quick change around, a blurred second of shuffling, Mulder realized 
that Krycek was moving closer, not away. He took a step back, and found 
himself colliding softly with the roof of the car. The long-imagined contact 
of Krycek's body combined with the inescapable fact of his actual, not 
imagined, nearness, his scent all but on Mulder's tongue -- scent and taste 
were nearly the same, they said, the human brain practically unable to 
separate them in any meaningful way, and he had been close enough to Krycek to 
smell him so many times. It was impossible not to think of that with Krycek 
standing less than two fingers' width from him. Impossible not to be hungry 
for him.
	Other cars were passing them by, one at a time, along with one black man in 
dreadlocks on his bike. It was life, innocent, ignorant life, coasting along 
late on a weekday night while Mulder and Krycek stood perfectly still in the V 
of the open car door, probably just as ignorant as the next person, but 
counting out each final second of their last lingering innocence with hard and 
relentless heartbeats. Click.
	Mulder tilted his head to the side and let sightlessness take him like a drug. 
He waited. He shaped his command with his mouth, but gave it neither sound nor 
breath. "Finish it...."
	Krycek's lips rested lightly on his, as if nesting there. Mulder heard a small 
groan, caged either in his throat or Krycek's. It was excruciating. Mulder 
twitched forward, ready to awaken this chaste, sleeping kiss. As if he hadn't 
even noticed, Krycek stepped away and walked around the car without a glance 
at him. Slowly, not trusting his balance (*Fox Mulder, unbalanced? What was 
your first clue?*), Mulder lowered himself into the car and sealed himself in.
It only took Krycek long enough to get behind the wheel and set Mulder's 
dinner on the dashboard for Mulder's sense of reality to begin sputtering to 
life. "*Shit,* he said, crossing his arms across himself protectively.
	"What?" Krycek pulled his keys from his pocket, glancing toward Mulder for all 
the world as though he'd just arrived and wondered what could have Mulder so 
rattled. Hell, for all Mulder knew, maybe he'd swapped out with one of the 
other Kryceks on his way to the driver's side.
	"I don't know which is worse, having this turn up on some official status 
report on someone's desk, or hearing about it in line for the coffee machine."
Krycek paused for a moment, then returned his attention to his keys. "You must 
file some pretty comprehensive status reports."
	"Your *armed guard,* Krycek."
	"Oh, them. Nice guys. They wouldn't have seen that."
	"Why the hell not?"
	He turned slightly and gave Mulder a third of a smile. "From the hotel?"
	"What the hell did you do?"
	"Drugged 'em," he said calmly.
	"Jesus, Alex. We don't assign you those guards for you to ditch --like 
somebody's bad date."
	For a quick instant, Mulder saw Krycek's face soften, and he gave Mulder a 
grave, almost gentle look that said *Yeah, Mulder, I get it.* Then he shook 
his head, as though Mulder were a slow but docile child and started the car. 
They were two blocks away before Krycek said, "Ninety-five percent of the FBI 
is for shit, okay? You tell Skinner there's just one person I trust at my 
back. Maybe he'll believe it coming from you."
	"And who's that?"
	"Don't fish for praise, Mulder. You don't wear it well."
	"Speaking of, nice suit. Who paid for that?"
	Krycek jerked in his seat; it was a minute movement, quickly killed, but so 
unexpected that it became larger than life. "What the fuck does that mean?"
	*Obviously more than I meant it to,* Mulder was tempted to say. He'd only been 
wondering if Krycek were in the mood to reveal some names of those who'd 
bought up the MJ information, now that he was into revealing all. Instead of 
explaining his real meaning, Mulder shrugged it away casually. "I just assumed 
you'd have to be strapped for resources to come here, that's all."
	"No. Business is good." It got under Mulder's skin, hearing Krycek call 
treason and profiteering and God only knew what else just *business.* He 
suspected that Krycek intended it to.
	Mulder took a deep breath. "I guess you have some kind of business with me, 
too. Something outside your...project."
	"Yeah."
	Maddening bastard. "Well?"
	"Inside." He caught Mulder's glare and had the grace to look away meekly. 
"Come on, Mulder. If this was all that easy for me to say, I'd have e-mailed 
you about it two years ago."
	"Oh, this is *hard* for you." Mulder turned in his seat just as Krycek found a 
parking place in his lot. "This better damn well be important. You don't 
*know* hard yet."
	He chuckled. "Is that a come-on, Mulder?"
	Boldness eroded Mulder's embarrassment at his poorly-chosen figure of speech. 
"Isn't all of this a come-on?"
	Krycek leaned back in his seat, looking Mulder over. There was nothing in his 
face that Mulder could read. "Is that what you think? I came here to fuck?"
	That was one way to lay your cards on the table. Mulder shrugged, and the 
tension in his neck and shoulders roared. "I don't know. What should I think?"
	"I came here...well, shit, I've covered this already. I have a...message for 
you. I came to Washington to settle up. With you, and with everyone."
	"Redemption?" Mulder interpreted, scathingly.
	But Krycek shook his head quickly, meeting Mulder's eyes. "Not at all. I don't 
regret who I am, and I wouldn't change anything if I had the option. I don't 
really believe in redemption, actually. Only...justice."
	Justice. Could there be any justice for Scully's death, or his father's? What 
about for the way Krycek made Mulder doubt himself each time they met? What 
would be a just reparation for that? "There is truth," Mulder said quietly, 
"but no justice."
	Krycek made a snorting noise. "Now you sound like *him.*"
	"Who?"
	He made a vague gesture in the air, almost indicating a canting bow, with a 
certain irony. "You call him Cancerman. So does Skinner, now. It's become 
standard usage with my investigative team. Cancerman. It seems to fit."
	Mulder wondered by what name Krycek had known him before. "Seriously, Krycek 
-- what kind of justice? What's the really *fair* thing to do with you know?"
	"Use me," he said simply. "Mulder, I'm the best in the business."
	"Espionage?"
	"*Yes,* espionage. What, you're too high-minded for that? The Cancerman isn't, 
I promise you. Cardinale was a thug, but I was an expert, and I still am, 
Consortium or no Consortium. Not many people could have fucked you up like I 
did. But on the other hand, not many people can do for you now what I can. 
Isn't that justice, Mulder? I risked my life to hurt you. I'm here now, 
risking my life to help you."
	"Is that supposed to make it all better?" Mulder wanted to sound angry, wanted 
to *be* angry. But it made such a nice story. Justice.... Even if not that, at 
least simple *aid,* an ally who was no longer under the sway of his enemies 
one way or another. Krycek -- he knew, all too well, Krycek's strength, his 
ruthlessness. The idea that it could be a shelter to Mulder instead of a gun 
at his temple, day in and day out....
	This time, his body moved naturally, responding with his instincts instead of 
against them. His hand touched Krycek's shoulder, his left shoulder. Krycek 
looked down at it, but seemed to decided it was not the time to speak about 
Tunguska. "You're a stubborn bastard, Mulder. You need every enemy to be a 
monster, and every ally to be Jesus fucking Christ." It could have been an 
insult, but Krycek said it with...affection? Maybe so.
	Mulder let his hand slide back to caress up Krycek's neck and cradle the base 
of his skull. "You never really answered.... About why you came here."
	"Actually, I did. You're just convinced there's more to it."
	"Am I wrong?"
	Krycek sighed, and Mulder thought he felt Krycek relax slightly into his 
touch. "I did want to see you...in person."
	"Here I am."
	"Let it drop, Mulder. This isn't how I planned it."
	"What did you plan? A calzone, a handshake, maybe trade business cards? Just 
chatting up your FBI connections, Krycek?"
	"Oh, for Christ's sake, Mulder. You know better."
	*No,* he wanted to say, *I really don't. If you aren't my friend and you 
aren't my rat bastard, I don't know what you want.* "Do I?"
	"What do you expect to hear? I like you."
	Without thinking about it, Mulder laughed. "You *like* me? Is this the fourth 
grade?"
	"Oh, fuck off. You probably want sonnets. I like you, all right? I don't hate 
you. I don't want you dead. I'm not angry because you fucked up in Tunguska 
and cost me an arm."
	"*I* fucked up? Tunguska was *your--*"
	"I wasn't going to leave you there, Mulder, *Jesus!*"
	"You could have fucking told me you knew those people."
	"Yeah, that's a plan. *Trust me, Mulder; I'm KGB.*"
	"It didn't seem important to you?"
	"Shut up," Krycek said, and pulled him in hard to kiss him.
	Maybe the porn habit had skewered Mulder's perceptions of reality; on the 
racks, anyway, sex was easy to come by -- any type, any time. But there were 
no skin flicks that capitalized on the intense sensuality of doing nothing but 
kissing, your arm wrapped tightly around someone's neck, your hand racing 
dementedly over his chest in all directions as he sucked hungrily on your 
tongue. It seemed more erotic and more forbidden than anything Mulder could 
see in the most explicit movie. Breathing hard, Krycek was sliding down in his 
seat until Mulder was practically on top of him, with allowances for the 
crooked sideways angles their legs hand to find to manage the space 
restraints. Something about the slow, hesitant way Krycek's fingers found 
their way through Mulder's hair sent chills over his arms and made him want to 
crush Krycek's lips even harder beneath his.
	Some cautious part of him that Mulder didn't even know he had made him ease 
back. Krycek's eyes were wide and dark in this light, and he released Mulder's 
hair and raised his fingers dazedly to his own lips. Krycek let his head fall 
to the side, apparently staring at the Chevy's steering column. "Aw, shit," he 
said, his voice soft but distinct. "This is all going wrong." Mulder indulged 
the urge to nuzzle against Krycek's neck. "I wish you weren't such a perverse 
bastard, Mulder. Why couldn't you have wanted this back when we were 
partners?"
	An interesting question. Had he wanted Krycek at all, before Hong Kong? He 
couldn't remember being anything but amused by Krycek's attentions before 
that, and after Duane Barry he'd been nothing but angry for a long time. Why? 
Probably because he was a perverse bastard, and he never seemed to want any 
relationship he could actually have. The danger of seducing Krycek was 
arousing, too. Almost as appealing to his steadily-rising cock as the tragedy 
of loving Krycek was appealing to Mulder's sense of the theatrical.
Loving Krycek? And where in the hell had *that* idea been hiding, preparing to 
ambush him in a weak moment? Well, it could damn well go back under its rock. 
Krycek was dead on target; this was going very wrong.
	Krycek got his arm under him and pushed up on his elbow, partially dislodging 
Mulder. "Well, I hope you enjoyed that. After our business is finished, you 
won't be in the mood for much. Except maybe pitching me out another window."
	"Let me be the judge of that."
	"You usually are. Get off me; it's getting cold out here." Mulder grabbed his 
cooling takeout; he'd forgotten his soda. That was all right. If it wasn't a 
gin and tonic, it wasn't going to do him any good at this point anyway.
	Inside the apartment, Krycek cased the living room quickly. "You think it's 
bugged?" Mulder asked, sitting down on the floor by the coffee table. Krycek 
only shrugged.
	He positioned himself alongside the window, leaning against its frame with his 
left shoulder. "Let's just get this over with, okay?"
	"Fine. It's your show. What's on your mind, Krycek?"
	Without looking at him, Krycek launched into what seemed to be a prepared 
speech. "In April of '95, you got a phone call from your father, who insisted 
that you see him immediately. Even though you were sick and drugged, you drove 
to Massachusetts to hear what he had to say. He called you...knowing that his 
calls were probably being monitored, that none of his former colleagues would 
allow him to go unpunished if he told you all he knew. But he loved you, and 
he understood, by that time, how much it could mean for you to know the truth, 
so he risked his life. But he was murdered. I think you have a right to know 
what he died to tell you."
	"Did you kill him?" All these years later, his father's death seemed almost 
dreamlike; it had taken on the stylized significance of a Greek tragedy, 
hardly as intensely human as the still-shocking reality of Krycek's presence. 
Morosely, Mulder wondered if he would one day look back and remember Scully 
this way.
	Krycek hesitated. "My intention is not to discuss the circumstances of your 
father's death." That, at the very least, was obviously memorized. He was 
staring out the window, and Mulder couldn't tell if he was searching the 
street intently or lost in thought. "He wanted you to know about the project 
he headed up, organizing the efforts of scientists from several countries with 
the goal of hybridizing human and alien DNA. I wish I had all the details he 
meant to give you, but I don't. What I do know, I've handed over to the FBI. 
You've learned a lot of it on your own since then, anyway. You won't...find 
this easy, but he wanted you to understand the timeline. He left the project 
in 1992."
	"No, that can't -- that can't be right."
	"It is right. He left when he realized that you had inside sources, that your 
fascination with aliens would eventually have to lead you back to him. At that 
time, he believed he could...make it so you'd never need to know. He'd been 
uncomfortable with the project for years, but...of course you know what 
happened the last time he expressed his dissatisfaction."
	Mulder nodded wearily. "They took Samantha."
	"Right. Anyway, Mulder's-- your father's defection was the first time the 
Consortium as a whole really sat up and noticed the X-Files. Not the 
Cancerman, of course -- he knew you well. But the others. They decided to shut 
you down as quietly as possible, debunk you. They found the perfect partner 
for you -- young, inexperienced, eager to build her reputation, as passionate 
in her field as you were in yours. You had already shown signs of being 
slightly unstable -- antisocial tendencies, violent impulses, disregard for 
authority, even for your own safety. They felt sure that you were no match for 
Scully."
	He had to smile at that. "I wasn't. You think I have antisocial tendencies?"
	"Stay on target, Mulder."
	"It's just...a lot to get a handle on. I always thought of his...complicity as 
all in the past."
	"I'm not done yet."
	"Really? After all that? You're not out of breath, are you, Krycek?"
	"Can you shut *up*? I'm trying to tell you that your father knew where 
Samantha is."
	Mulder almost asked *Samantha who?* It was too much, too impossible to believe 
that Krycek was talking about his Sam. His father. "He didn't know."
	"Of course he did. Think it through, Mulder. She was taken to control him; how 
would that have been done if she were dead, or if he thought she was out of 
the Cancerman's reach in any way? For the abduction to mean anything, your 
father had to know that her life was constantly in jeopardy, that she could 
live or die according to how well he cooperated. You had to have known that, 
Mulder. It only makes sense."
	"Why didn't he *tell* me?"
	"I can think of a hundred reasons."
	Mulder folded his arms on the table and put his head down. He could think of 
several, too. It was a reasonable story. Plausible. It could even be true. He 
didn't know what Krycek would gain by inventing it. For a profiler, it was 
amazing how little Mulder really knew about most of the people in his life. 
"Are you the one who shot him?"
	"Does it really matter that much to you?"
	It did. Because he needed all the help he could get in pinning down Alex 
Krycek. "Why should I believe you?"
	"Believe whatever."
	"Do you know where Sam is?"
	"Yes."
	"Then tell me."
	"So you can go after her? And get yourself killed? No. I might if she were in 
danger, but she's not. She was raised by a foster family. Her memories 
were...shaded, to make it easier for her, to dull the trauma of her abduction. 
She's married now. She's a chiropractor. That's what he wanted you to know, 
finally: that there was nothing to worry about. She wasn't ever harmed, even 
when your father rebelled against the Consortium."
	"Why not?"
	Krycek sighed, drumming his fingers against his leg. "You'd have to know the 
Cancerman. He's nothing if not ruthless, but in his own way, he's very loyal. 
He came to think of Samantha as under his protection, which in a way she was. 
He...cares about her."
	"And how do you know him so well?"
	"Oh, Mulder. That's a hell of a long story. And it really isn't any of your 
business."
	Skinner had told Mulder about Krycek's anger, his lust for revenge. But what 
Mulder heard was something quite different. Regret, or maybe sorrow. "You keep 
saying Cancerman. What did you call him before?"
	"Mostly old man."
	Mulder grinned. "To his face?"
	"No. I don't want to talk about it."
	"Why not?"
	"Why do you?"
	"Because I need to know where you learned all this."
	Kicking one foot back against Mulder's wall, Krycek shoved himself forward and 
began to walk away. "I'm done here."
	"The hell you are." Mulder caught and held Krycek's shin as he passed. "I 
appreciate you coming here to give me my father's message. Now what about us?"
	"*Us?* Jesus, Mulder, are you listening to yourself? *Us.* For shit. You and 
me?" He was either appalled by the very idea, or terrified that Mulder would 
retract the offer as soon as it was accepted.
	He got to his feet, placing himself far too close to Krycek's body, just as 
Krycek had done to him outside Pagliai's. "Isn't it possible?"
	Of course it wasn't possible. Mulder knew it, and Krycek certainly knew it 
too. They weren't okay. Krycek was probably going to prison. Mulder was 
probably in love with someone else. They were better at hurting each other 
than they ever could be at coming close to each other. They were unredeemable, 
even if Alex was wrong and such a thing as redemption did exist. But at least 
this one time, it could be Mulder who was in focus, who wanted one single 
thing and tore reality in half to get at it. Tonight it could damn well be 
Krycek who was divided against himself, and if Mulder had to fake a complete 
lack of doubt to see Krycek looking uncertain, so be it. He slid a hand up 
Krycek's neck, his thumb stretching out to lie beneath Krycek's chin and 
subtly urge his head back. "There is an us, and you know it. You may hate it, 
but there's something between us. In Hong Kong--"
	"Forget that. I'm serious, Mulder; do yourself a favor and forget that."
	"You haven't."
	Krycek took a step back, trying to stare off over his shoulder as though this 
were a casual, fidgeting move instead of a retreat. "I --don't have to. I know 
what it meant."
	"Tell me, then. I'd love to know."
	"*Nothing,* Mulder. It meant fucking *nothing.* It was a power trip. It was 
hormones. Who the fuck cares? You felt me up; there's no *significance* to 
that. It just happened."
	"I'm the one who felt you up. Don't I get a vote?"
	He made an angry, incoherent gesture with his arm. "*No,* you don't get a 
vote."
	"Stay."
	"*Stop* it. Who do you think you're *talking* to, Mulder? Do you even see me 
when I'm standing right in front of you?"
	Lightly, Mulder kissed him, and in spite of his agitation, Krycek didn't try 
to avoid it at all. "What are you telling me, Krycek? That you never thought 
this could happen if you came here?"
	"Not like this. It...occurred to me we could end up fucking. Not like this.... 
For one thing, I expected you to ask more questions. You usually do."
	As little as Mulder liked the idea that Krycek understood him better than 
Mulder did himself, he discovered that he was even less happy to think that 
neither of them were calling the shots accurately. It meant that things had 
spun out of control, and they had no choice but to trust their luck. The 
thought did not fill Mulder with confidence; it made him downright edgy. "And 
what am I going to ask you? Why would I bother? We already know that I'm as 
capable of shooting pool stoned in the dark as I am of guessing when you're 
lying and when you're not --if you're ever not. What's the point of even 
asking anymore?"
	"You want the *truth*? Let me show it to you." With a dexterity that it hardly 
seemed he should have anymore, Krycek unbuttoned his shirt and let it, along 
with his jacket, fall backwards off his shoulders, slipping off to hang from 
his wrist. He shook it away angrily and laid his hand over his ribs, tapping 
one finger just below his heart, on top of an inch-long white scar that stood 
out clearly from his olive skin. "You want to know who stabbed me here? You 
want to take a fucking guess? Your father. Right before I shot him." Mulder 
refused to give Krycek the pleasure of seeing a single emotion on his face. 
"Yeah, so what about it, Mulder? Am I still your *friend*? I was hired to go 
to his house and threaten him, to keep him from telling you what they knew he 
was going to tell you when the tap on his phone recorded him calling you. But 
he wasn't too damn easy to intimidate. He stabbed me with a pocketknife, and I 
blew him away. I probably didn't have to; he was old and sick and it was just 
a Swiss army knife. But he -- surprised me, and it hurt like a bitch. There 
was blood everywhere, and I wasn't thinking. I just fired. I tried like hell 
to feel guilty about it later, but I never really did. If I hadn't acted right 
away, you would have heard something and come upstairs, and if you hadn't 
killed me on the spot, I would've ended up in jail. People in my line of work 
don't get arrested; it's a very basic rule, and if you violate it, you end up 
like that prick Cardinale."
	The events of that night...Mulder had to struggle even to begin to reconstruct 
them. "I didn't see a knife, or any blood that didn't look like his."
	"Mulder, do you have any idea how high you were? I could have left my driver's 
license in his mouth and you wouldn't have noticed it. The Cancerman made sure 
all the evidence of my presence was done away with during the investigation -- 
even though he never really forgave me for it. But now do you understand what 
I'm telling you? You have this unbelievable gift for creating fantasy worlds, 
but I don't want us to settle down and build a summer house in this one. It's 
*not real.* I'm not the sweet junior G-man you want to believe I am, deep 
down."
	Mulder snorted. "How do you know what I think you are? How would you possibly 
know?"
	"Mainly you tell me. Scum-sucking vermin?"
	"Invertebrate, I think."
	"The moral dipstick...."
	"Right," he chuckled. How had Krycek defused his anger so quickly, without 
even seeming to try? Had he been trying -- or had Mulder been looking for an 
excuse to let it go? "Moral dipstick. Good imagery, though, don't you think?"
	"It does hang on."
	They had adopted a posture that suggested dancing, with Mulder's hands at the 
small of Krycek's back and Krycek's hand behind Mulder's neck. "Blame that on 
the heat of the moment, then. We were talking about...before that."
	"Oh, before that? I can only make an educated guess. Alex Krycek...a Dudley 
Do-Right, as painfully, cheerfully by-the-book as most agents fresh from the 
Academy, including yourself. You didn't figure I'd be in the field long; I was 
a management tadpole, about two years away from sprouting legs and my own 
office. A little bit low-rent, possibly from a blue-collar background, but 
ambitious -- maybe second-generation American, Russian or something. Not much 
sense of humor, but reasonably tolerant of yours. Type-A personality, paranoid 
about making the smallest mistake, an outstanding detail man. Maybe 
good-looking, but anxious, tense, and out of touch with my id. Not your type."
	"Polish."
	"Mm?"
	"I thought Krycek sounded like a Polish name." Son of a bitch; he could not 
only profile Mulder, he could profile Mulder profiling Krycek. "But you're 
right about at least one thing: I didn't feel this way about *him.*"
	Krycek threw his hand up in exasperation; it came down with surprising 
gentleness on the back of Mulder's head. "Are you telling me you only go for 
killers, Mulder? If you are, I really think you should...I don't know. Get 
help or something."
	It wasn't visible to the eye, but Mulder could feel Krycek shaking beneath his 
hands. "So help me."
	Roughly, frantically, Krycek kissed him, and for a moment Mulder was persuaded 
that this really was, here and now, their last and only moment. "Bastard, 
Mulder, you bastard." Mulder drove him backwards; it was all he could do not 
to laugh at the manic way Krycek tried to evade him and plunge his tongue into 
Mulder's mouth at the same time. "Don't forgive me. You have no right to." 
Krycek's back hit the cold wall; he jumped and hissed as though it were hot 
wax. The crook of his elbow settled behind Mulder's neck. "This isn't what I 
planned. This isn't how I imagined it." Mulder struck hard and fast, using his 
whole weight to slam him into the wall, back and up, so that he had to rise up 
on the balls of his feet. He bit softly into the sinews that tied Krycek's 
gorgeous neck to his shoulder, and heard Krycek cry out, "Fuck you, Mulder! 
Fuck you. You've ruined my life again." His legs were shaking, and the 
unsteadiness forced him to shift his weight constantly, arching away from the 
wall as much as he could. Mulder could feel Krycek's erection rock erratically 
against the elastic of his sweatpants. Krycek closed his eyes, turning his 
face away so that his lips were too far for Mulder to touch. "I had to see you 
again...." He coiled. He pounced, wrapping his legs securely around Mulder's 
hips, relying on Mulder's weight to keep him firmly braced against the wall, 
wincing as he did so. "I can't let you go. Every -- every --everything that I 
am--"
	Amazed, Mulder memorized him, imprinting the image beneath the ordinary crowd 
of facts and pictures beneath the ordinary crowd of facts and pictures eddying 
uselessly around in his memory. Krycek's dark skin against the faded plaster. 
Krycek fighting for breath, surging, throbbing with life. Then, just as 
quickly, Krycek became still, hardly breathing. There was a light on in the 
kitchen, and lights outside the window, and they were crushed into a false, 
intermediate darkness that promised anonymity when they were so passionately 
aware of each other, promised secrecy when they were all too well-known by 
exactly the wrong people, seduced them both with a deep, impenetrable privacy 
that they had rarely known in their lives.
	Gently, Mulder set Krycek on his feet. "Bedroom's more comfortable."
	Eyes narrowed, Krycek reached around and pulled a pistol that Mulder hadn't 
even noticed from the waistband of his pants. "More comfortable than a Colt 
.44 grinding into my spine? Goddamn, what a generous guy you are, Mulder."
	"Sorry about that."
	The last doubts Mulder had about Krycek's identity soaked away, unnoticed. 
This man was all the things that had confused and intrigued Mulder through the 
years, all of them at once. Stripped to the waist, standing with an easy, 
flexible grace poised for motion in any direction without notice, armed and 
strong and glittering -- Alex Krycek. Mulder's rat, Mulder's problem. Mulder's 
obsession. Soft, floppy hair that begged to be twined around fingers, 
endlessly patient eyes, endlessly watchful, fixed forever on him, as though he 
were navigating by Mulder's unfortunate star. Alex Krycek. Mulder's rat, 
Mulder's partner. Mulder's victory.
	Alex Krycek. All that tenderness and all that brutality, the lion's share of 
Krycek's lies and his need and his vengeance and his doubt, and Mulder stood 
at the center of it. Krycek's G-man, Krycek's problem. Krycek's only weakness.
"Go," he said simply, gesturing Krycek toward the bedroom door.
	Alex Krycek. Crossing his living room floor silently, an expert at 
obfuscation, at having existence only inasmuch as he wanted you to believe he 
did. If he hadn't come to find Mulder, he would have remained what he had 
always been -- a phantom pain, a false memory, a name and a regret and nothing 
more. What did it mean that he had come, had allowed himself to be not a fact, 
an item on Walter Skinner's morning agenda, but a man?
	Alex Krycek.

	Not a memory at all; a premonition. Not Walter Skinner, but Fox Mulder who 
levered down to the bed above him, his arm on the pillow. But there was no 
surprise in Krycek's expression now; he bowed his head, letting his cheek 
brush the veins running up the inside of Mulder's forearm.
	"There's nothing between you and Skinner, is there?"
	Krycek's grin was unnervingly vicious. "I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. 
I prefer to see him stew slowly in his own juices over you."
	"Me?"
	His hand glided up Mulder's back, raising the t-shirt as it went. "Yeah, 
*you.* You think you're hot shit because you noticed a crush I was doing 
everything possible to make sure you noticed. You don't know anything."
	Mulder raised up on his knees to help Krycek pull the shirt off over his head. 
"You think he's attracted to me?"
	"I think this line of conversation's a little insulting." Mulder almost 
laughed, until he caught a glimpse of Krycek's familiar grimness in the flash 
of his eyes and the twitch of his jaw.
	"Sorry," he said, and meant it. He sank down against Krycek, kissing him. He 
meant that, too.

 ***

	When he kissed Krycek's forehead softly, Krycek jerked his head away. "Hey. 
Not without a ring, Mulder."
	It was such an odd time to turn up a shy streak in Alex Krycek. Mulder 
chuckled. "Problem with intimacy?"
	"Get a kick out of that, do you? You're a shrink; don't you have some kind of 
Hippocratic oath?"
	"Nope," Mulder said cheerfully. "I can cause you all the harm I want."
	Krycek's eyebrows rose. "And how much harm *do* you want to cause me?"
	Mulder began working at Krycek's fly. "You'll be able to walk out of here on 
your own power, I promise."
	"Mmmm, yeah," Krycek purred as Mulder's fingers found his cock. Mulder swore 
under his breath in frustration as he tried to pull the trousers off Krycek's 
hips with the other hand. Krycek raised his head. "You having trouble down 
there?"
	"Dammit. This isn't easy to do with one ha--" *Mulder, you schmuck.*
	Krycek made a soft, amused noise. "No shit? Lucky thing you got two, then."
But that would mean letting go of Krycek. This simple touch was turning 
	Mulder's skeletal structure to warm, running water. Heated, pulsing, firm, 
sleek -- it was like holding a microcosm of Krycek in his palm. Mulder closed 
his hand more tightly and pumped twice, a strong, demanding touch. "Fuck! 
Yes!" He thrust up hard into Mulder's hand. "Fox -- I want your mouth...."
	Mulder wasn't ready yet to let Krycek see how the dark fire wracked through 
him each time Krycek promised him more with that ragged, throaty voice of his. 
He resorted to teasing instead. "That's the second time you've called me Fox. 
You're going to have to knock that off."
	Krycek flashed him a quick grin. "Can't help it. I'm a friendly fucking guy."
"You used to be a better liar."
	"Ah, but as a lay, I just keep improving."


	"Mulder. Can I try reasoning with you? This is extremely weird."
	Shifting onto his side, Mulder rested his head on Krycek's thigh. "Weird. 
That's not the kind of thing a guy likes to hear about his technique."
	"Not your technique. The whole damn thing." His fingers were rhythmically 
crushing handfuls of Mulder's hair and feathering soothingly back through it. 
"You're going to agree with me in the morning."
	"Give it a rest, Alex." Krycek's mood swings were beginning to make him 
lightheaded. Mulder regretted ever wishing for a less decisive Krycek.
	"Look, one of these days my bodyguards are going to wake up; what if they come 
here looking for me? What if Scully comes by? She's got a fucking key, 
Mulder."
	"You know something? I *still* think you're anxious, tense, paranoid, and out 
of touch with your id."
	"And you haven't so much as exchanged Christmas cards with your superego in 
years." In spite of Krycek's bravado, Mulder could hear the chord of fear 
underneath his raspy voice.
	Mulder tumbled onto his back, laying his head on Krycek's muscled torso, 
looking up and back at him with a boyish smile. He raised his arms, taking 
Krycek's hand in both of his. Krycek stared dreamily down at the long sprawl 
of Mulder's naked body. Mulder sobered. "Krycek, I can't -- just *talk* to 
you. It's not enough. You have me so tied up in knots I can't even think, and 
I need to burn it off. I can sleep with you or beat you up; nothing else is 
going to get me through this. Take your pick." Krycek brushed light fingers 
over Mulder's collarbone, across his shoulder. "Krycek. Hey, Alex. That wasn't 
supposed to be a trick question."
	"But it does bear thinking about. I mean, we got this far on the combat."
Raising his head, Mulder craned his neck around to get a clearer look at 
Krycek. "You want me to hit you?"
	"I need to burn it off, too, don't I?"
	"Will I *ever* understand you?"
	They were having a fight, Mulder thought, but it didn't feel like a fight. It 
felt quiet and comfortable, lying on the bed he rarey used, with Krycek's legs 
wrapped loosely around his body. Mulder let his arms fall open wide, spanning 
the double bed. He hardly remembered the last time he'd been totally bared to 
another human being's eyes. All they lacked to be the absolute last word in 
vast, vulnerable, shameless sensuality were peeled grapes for Krycek to feed 
him. This was peace.
	Humming in pleasure, Mulder arched his neck, letting it rub against Krycek's 
hard, wet cock. "Alex. You know neither of us is going to back out of this 
now. Why are you trying to delay it?"
	"I'm just...thinking."
	"Quit it."
	"Fuck you, Mulder. My life would be a lot easier if you responded to logic."
	"Oh, fuck you, Mulder, whatever. Bitch about it all you want. Jesus, you turn 
into a fussy old woman when you're not trying to kill me." He put a hand high 
on Krycek's leg, and Krycek gave a long, quiet groan, and attempted no more 
logic that night.


	Krycek's body was marked now in more ways than one. The imprint of Mulder's 
teeth around his hardened right nipple. A gunshot wound that had gone through 
his side. A mark on his shoulderblade; unidentifiable, but it looked as though 
it had once hurt, however long ago something had gashed into his body there. A 
purple whorl on his throat, Krycek's blood ripping free of his veins where 
Mulder had put his lips. A tattoo on the back of his left leg, a small, spare 
representation of Da Vinci's Eternal Man. The stump of his left arm. The scar 
below his heart. Each distinguishing mark on his otherwise perfect body 
fascinated Mulder. It was Krycek's history: some of it known to him, much 
unknown, some of it unfolding here and now.
	"Looking at you," Mulder joked, "a person would think you had a past."
He didn't laugh. "You fucking well know I do."
	"That's not-- Just forget it. I was only kidding."
	"No. Stop trying to make me *forget.* I need my past."
	Mulder allowed himself to be rolled onto his back, and his fingers 
instinctively sought Krycek's tattoo as he straddled Mulder's legs. Already, 
he could orient by the secrets encoded onto Krycek's very flesh. "Don't you 
get sick of it sometimes, though? Don't you want to...be anyone else?"
	"*No!* Fuck me, fight me, whatever you have to do, Mulder, but *never pretend 
we're not who we are.* You don't know how hard I fought to get here. Death and 
the Devil had to learn to take me on like who I fucking am, and so will you. 
So will you, because no one invents me --not anymore. Never again. Never. I'm 
done with that, Fox. *Never* again. Not even for you."
	Mulder's fingers filled the crack of Krycek's ass. "I couldn't invent you, 
Krycek. You're too twisted to come out of my head. Too sexy. Too much goddamn 
trouble."
	This time, Krycek did laugh. "That's better."


	Krycek's fingernails scrabbled loudly on the wall. "Fuck it, Mulder. Just 
*come on.* It won't hurt."
	"Did it ever occur to you that I'm just torturing you?" Mulder tried another 
short thrust, found himself buried a little deeper in Krycek. They were both 
lying, of course; they hadn't used enough lube, at Krycek's insistence ("I 
hate that shit. It clings to everything for days.") There probably wasn't 
enough lube in Alexandria to keep Krycek from getting hurt, as rigid as he was 
holding every damn muscle in his body. If they had any sense, they'd just try 
something else, but Krycek was having none of that. He wanted Mulder to fuck 
him.
	"Damn it, Mulder! Do you want this or not?"
	"Yes! Would you shut up a fucking second?"
	Krycek arched hard into Mulder's next thrust, and Mulder, startled, drew back 
reflexively. Krycek's fist struck the wall with a force that sounded to Mulder 
as if it must have splintered bones. Startled and frustrated, Mulder moved 
with the mindless instinct that had always before driven him to punch Krycek. 
This time, impulse and anger twisted his hips, moved the muscles all through 
his thighs and back, driving him deep into Krycek.
	Alex roared once, pain and triumph, and then the room was eerily still. 
Krycek's heaving breaths were the only sound; Mulder watched a bead of sweat 
roll from his temple down the side of his face. Krycek opened his eyes slowly. 
"There," he rasped. "Was that so hard?"
	"Well, I hope it's all you dreamed it would be," Mulder said sardonically.
	"Believe me, Mulder, not one thing about tonight has gone the way it does in 
my dreams."
	"Would you really have walked out after delivering your message?"
	"I was counting on you stopping me."
	"You always were a lucky son of a bitch, Krycek."


	It was impossible to think of Krycek as Russian. Mulder remembered that 
country as white and bladed, empty and keening and splintering like a tree 
under the weight of an ice storm. He remembered the mesh, and the fear, and 
the distances.
	Krycek, though. He reminded Mulder of nothing but heat. In terms of a homeland 
-- he reminded Mulder of the Carolina summers that had killed so many settlers 
in this country because of what collected in the low-lying areas -- fever and 
dank, sluggish water, blood-fed mosquitos and still, sick, humid air. 
	He was warm to Mulder's touch, Mulder's every touch. Flushed, infected by some 
killing madness that Mulder was as likely to catch as he was to cure, Krycek 
twisted and raved in wild delirium, his body rocked by each of Mulder's 
thrusts.
	Mulder sank his elbows hard into the mattress, anchoring himself, needing 
better leverage. "Please...please don't stop...." Mulder was surprised to 
recognize his own voice. Krycek was pinned, at Mulder's mercy -- what the hell 
would he stop doing?
	On a pang of loss, Mulder realized that he was speaking to himself. It would 
be so easy to run out on this, to deny that it had happened. His force of will 
could unmake tonight, just as his force of will had called so much previous 
elegant, agonizing, illusionary sex with Krycek into being. Already, Mulder 
could sense himself plucking at the threads, ready to isolate this and spin it 
away into a vacuum.
	That wasn't what he wanted.
	*Your problem, Mulder, has always been that you don't know what you want.*
	"Krycek!" he cried out. He needed the check and balance of Krycek's memory, 
the comforting pressure of proof. He needed to know that Krycek was 
experiencing what he was. That they were digging fiercely into the same 
reality.
	Krycek's voice returned to him as though from across a canyon, a wind-blown 
reverb of itself. "Easy, Mulder. We're okay...."
	A sob drilled through Mulder's body. "Krycek, how the fuck did we get here?"
	"Just lucky."


	He could feel the instant when Krycek came apart -- not orgasm, but the 
snapping of all the cords that held him in check. Mulder could see it rise 
through him, drawing Mulder's dick further up inside him. The force opened his 
chest, his lungs, his throat, and Krycek was keening, a true, steady noise 
that was almost a death omen, a warning cry.
	Nothing held him any longer. Nothing remained of his wary defense, his body no 
longer stretched and racked. Krycek was all motion now, and all of Krycek's 
motion at once -- prowl and sprint and vault and brawl were all in him, and 
all in Mulder's arms.
	"Mulder!" he cried out, his voice no longer dense and opaque, but translucent, 
all the brightness of Krycek's wild and lawless life filtered through it, 
appearing as something more earnest and generous than Krycek had ever revealed 
himself to be. "Mulder -- please -- don't trust me. I don't want to hurt you 
again. Don't let me, Mulder. Don't believe -- don't believe anything I say to 
you."
	"I do trust you." It wasn't the truth, but nor was it exactly a lie. He 
trusted not Krycek's words, but his own gorgeous, gilded, Mardi Gras memories. 
He trusted not one thing Krycek said, and everything Krycek was. "You told me 
once -- Alex -- you called me once. At three.... I have to know -- that was 
the truth. I believe -- I believe -- I need you to tell me. Was that -- real? 
Or a part of your plan?"
	He gasped out a sound, all vowels and memory and longing. "That was never part 
of my plan. I can tell you that much. I did not plan that."
	"I believe you."
	Krycek laughed, and strained up to grind against Mulder's chest. "Dumb 
bastard. Don't. Don't believe me. This is all the help I can give you, Fox. 
*Don't trust me.*"


	[[[[[ One sound, the half-heard voice of a hinge or a floorboard, transformed 
him. At fourteen minutes to three, he was a young FBI agent up late on a 
weekend, settled into bed with a bag of pretzels and a dog-eared copy of 
*Rendezvous With Rama.* At 2:47, he was sitting bolt upright with a Glock 
leveled at the doorway, death in his eyes.
	The man who appeared in the door was outside the effects of Krycek's reading 
lamp; during the moment it took him to identify his visitor, Krycek kept the 
gun aimed squarely at his chest. "Oh," he finally said, lowering his weapon. 
"It's you."
	A lighter sparked and hissed. For a moment there was flame, red and naked, and 
then darkness gulped it down again, leaving only a fiery thumb print, the end 
of his cigarette. "It certainly is."
	The smell of smoke made a quick hunger in Krycek rattle its chains for 
attention. Everyone had agreed, Agent Krycek ought to be a nonsmoker -- he was 
cautious, tidy, his virtues and his vices both small and restrained -- 
forgettable in every way. But Alex Krycek, the actor who played him, had 
smoked since the age of fifteen. Cutting down to three or four late-night 
cigarettes a week, behind locked doors, had been difficult, but not 
impossible. Krycek had even been pleased with his success, to the extent of 
telling himself that this would be a good time just to quit. His voice, so 
sweet and clean in his garage-band days, had already developed that train 
wreck and Kentucky Tavern quality to it, and the streak of Agent Krycek's 
fastidiousness that was genuine in Alex, too, rebelled at the thought of what 
his lungs must look like, a decade after his first smoke. And still...still, 
that smell. The addiction moved like a cobra inside him.
	He came toward Krycek with a stealth that didn't fit well at all with a man of 
his age, a man with health problems through the back and respiratory system. 
Krycek laid the gun back on his nightstand, beside the pretzels. "It's late. I 
figured you weren't coming."
	"I was involved in something on CNN. You really should let me buy you a 
television."
	Krycek shrugged. "I don't want one."
	"I do hope I haven't spoiled your Saturday evening."
	He gave the old man a slow, lazy smile, and set the book aside. "It has been 
quiet."
	"Perhaps you should have called Mr. Mulder."
	*No, no,* he wanted to protest, *that would be completely out of character. 
Agent Krycek doesn't initiate well. He's too frightened of relationships; he 
hates not having clear rules. Mostly, he's afraid of the way he responds to 
Mulder -- and embarrassed because everyone knows. He'll try to play it down, 
not call him.* But Krycek realized that his employers didn't spend as much 
time hammering out these kinks and quirks and motives as he did, and frankly 
didn't care to. He had to keep reminding them that Mulder *would* care, would 
notice any inconsistency in the persona. They were sending him out after a 
profiler, and he needed a mind that could be profiled, an alter ego that 
worked on every level.
	Creating Agent Krycek was a challenge, almost an artistic endeavour. And no 
one else could play him like Krycek could, not well enough to get past Fox 
Mulder. Some days, he thought it would be possible to go years, a lifetime, 
without stepping out of character. "I...didn't want to push it," he said. "We 
don't need him getting sick of me."
	A box of cigarettes landed with a soft thump on the bed by Krycek's leg. Not 
Morleys; Benson & Hedges. Krycek's brand. He reached for it, then pulled back. 
"I'm quitting."
	"Quitting? Really?" He exhaled another thick cloud of smoke. "Just so long as 
you don't become as unpleasant as Assistant Director Skinner did when he gave 
it up." Krycek picked up the package and set it aside, by the Glock, trying to 
ignore it. Amused, his guest took it up, looking the pack over. "Well, I 
wouldn't have bought these if I had known. But now that you have them, you 
might as well."
	Krycek parted his lips, letting the old man place the cigarette between them, 
then set it on fire with his gold-plated lighter. Embarrassed by his easy 
surrender, Krycek took a long drag and breathed out the smoke slowly. 
"Thanks."
	"Not at all. Every former smoker should have one final pack to savor. The more 
fleeting a pleasure, the more powerful it is, don't you agree?"
	Another long drag helped quell Krycek's flicker of paranoia and kept him from 
tensing. Whatever word game the old man was playing, he could ride it out. "I 
don't know."
	"As an example, Mr. Mulder. Your time with him is limited, and so everything 
appears...disproportionately large. You romanticize him."
	"I don't know what you mean."
	That polite, predatory smile. Krycek did not fear this man, exactly. On the 
contrary, he was Krycek's patron, surprisingly open-handed with his money and 
his information alike. They were good for each other, and they knew it. But 
when he smiled, it always seemed to say *ultimate power.* Krycek believed the 
old saw about corruption. Power was a pressure that made it impossible to 
remain unchanging, however many years you'd been wielding it. It made the old 
man unpredictable, and Krycek remembered that best when he was smiling. "I do 
understand. He intrigues you. He compels you. I watch you, drawn to him over 
and over --"
	"I'm *paid* to be 'drawn' to him. It's what *you* wanted, not me." *He's 
haunted you for years, since long before I'd ever heard of Fox Mulder.*
	"At first, granted. You do your work well -- too well, perhaps. Who, now, is 
Agent Mulder's devotee -- you or your fictional Agent Krycek?"
	*He knows. He knows.* Krycek inhaled shakily, held the poison inside him until 
he could no longer keep it. "You chose me because I'm the best. If I have even 
you believing my bullshit now -- well, maybe I'm due for a raise."
	His fingers curled around the back of Krycek's neck, holding him carefully. 
"You are not two men. You are only one."
	"Not anymore."
	After a tense moment, the old man chuckled, and released him. "A natural 
double agent. Even you do not know your role from yourself. Oh, yes, you are 
the best. There is no center to you, no solidity at all. Endlessly malleable, 
printed so deeply with everyone else's desires...perhaps you really don't know 
who it is who loves him."
	"It's just a role." Timidly, Krycek tried another smile. "The last thing I 
wanted was to make you...jealous."
	His eyes flashed. Danger, Will Robinson. "It's far too early for you to be so 
secure in your position here. Proceed with care, Alex Krycek." The old man 
reached for the cordless receiver by the bed. He held it out to Krycek with 
something in his small, sharp eyes that might have been humor or menace. "Call 
him."
	"Call -- Mulder? At this hour?"
	"He'll be awake."
	"And say what to him?"
	"Confess." He smiled at Krycek's surprise. "They do say it's good for the 
soul. Tell him you've fallen in love with him."
	Krycek's mind whirled like a small animal on an exercise wheel. "I can't -- I 
can't do that." What the *hell* was his game? The old man gave him a look with 
raised eyebrows -- *You can't?* "What if it scares him off?"
	"I think it will flatter him. Mr. Mulder has a number of weaknesses. Among 
them, he has a native vanity that is rarely fed. Call him." Krycek took the 
phone and stared at it as though it were a piece of alien technology.
	As a matter of fact, Krycek was sick of exploiting Mulder's weaknesses; he had 
thought it would be a challenge, at first, but it wasn't. Mulder had so damn 
many, in spite of his brilliance. And he was brilliant; the boys in Behavioral 
Sci still shook their heads when his name came up and called him the fallen 
angel, ascribing a kind of Miltonian greatness to his rebellion and exile to 
the basement -- better to reign in the X-Files than to serve in heaven. 
Arrogance, yes, that was one of his prime weaknesses -- vanity, if you liked.
And Krycek's prime weakness was that he felt so damn sorry for Fox Mulder. 
Krycek's star was on the rise in the Consortium; wrapping the Mulder job could 
take him to a whole new level -- no longer just the old man's protege, but a 
player in his own right. It was what he had always craved: power, the 
enormous, wide-reaching power of knowledge. Agent Krycek was warily intrigued 
by aliens, against his best judgement; Alex wanted so badly to *know* that it 
sometimes drove him to rage, or despair. He figured it was probably the same 
for Mulder. But Mulder insisted on pissing off the very people who could tell 
him what he wanted to know -- a mistake Krycek did not intend to make. If 
Mulder would just play the game..if he would cultivate allies instead of 
blustering around the nation like a dervish of intellect, subversion, and 
rhetoric...then maybe their stars could both rise. Maybe the only way up from 
obscurity for Alex Krycek would not be his leading role in the sabotage of Fox 
Mulder's whole life.
	But that was Mulder, and there were only two ways to deal with him: throw away 
career, security, sanity itself, like Agent Scully had done, like AD Skinner 
showed all early signs of doing, and follow him to the ends of the earth, or 
shake him off and be on the winning side. Given that Krycek had never been the 
type to get hard for lost causes, he knew what side of the scale he'd end up 
on.
	Tonight, that meant getting out of this fucking phone call without starting 
something he'd regret with the old man. Krycek leaned over to put out his 
cigarette, and left the phone on the nightstand, pretending it was something 
that had simply gotten in his way -- who could remember what he'd been doing 
with it, anyway? He rolled onto his stomach, lazily propping his head on 
folded arms to half-watch back over his shoulder. "It's three in the damn 
morning," he said pleasantly. "Come to bed or go home and let me get some 
sleep."
	One chilly fingertip, low on his spine. Like Krycek, the old man cared nothing 
for lost causes; he was not interested in flirting or feigned subservience. It 
was Krycek's supple strength that fascinated him -- Krycek's lean, runner's 
body, Krycek's small stubbornnesses, his resilience, his ambition. The finger 
stroked up to his shoulderblade, tracing the scar there. *Belt buckle?* the 
old man had said calmly the first time he'd seen it -- said, not asked -- and 
Krycek knew immediately that this was not a man who could be lied to. He saw 
so much, so deeply. He was never wrong.
	Both hands now, at the small of his back, around Krycek's waist, stirring the 
low-slung sheet just enough to make it waft and settle again around Krycek's 
legs. Krycek stretched, letting the pleasure roil up his spine, slow and 
subtle and thick. He was not the worst lover Krycek had ever had; Krycek had 
never yet regretted accepting that first tentative, archaically polite 
overture. They were indeed good for each other.
	He paused to extinguish his own cigarette, and Krycek let his mind shift down 
to a lower gear, below decisions and destinations. It was so tiring, keeping 
one eye constantly on Agent Krycek's needs and fears and signals, the other on 
his own goals. He was happy to give it up for the evening.
	"You know everything about Agent Krycek, don't you?"
	"Sure." His own thinking felt thinner, sleeker when he was one humming mind 
instead of the constant interplay of two. Answers came more easily, and every 
word did not leave six unsaid.
	"Does he have a lover?"
	Krycek smiled into his pillow. "Agent Krycek? Hell, no. He's too afraid to 
pick anyone up. He tells himself it's his career he's worried about...which is 
true, but it's also intimacy. He doesn't know how to be close to anyone."
	"Aha." The old man laid down beside him, one arm stretched over Krycek's back. 
He kissed Krycek's shoulder, then the back of his neck -- dry, shivering 
kisses. "Then his sex life is...solitary." Krycek nodded. Easy, easy, no need 
to think. He knew these answers; they welled up naturally from some deep 
place. He knew Agent Krycek so well. Very well. "What does Agent Krycek think 
about when he masturbates?"
	"Mulder." *Easy, too easy. Alex, what are you saying?* But it was the game -- 
Agent Krycek dreamed of Mulder, as he'd been told to. No, Alex had been told, 
and Agent Krycek dreamed and came and lost hope. He tried to tense, to find 
magnetic north in this conversation.
	"I watch the two of you on surveillance tapes. The way you open to one 
another. The way you flush and shuffle your feet and look up at him, as though 
he were twenty feet tall. The way he smiles."
	He was breathing in an uneven rhythm, trapped by the warm fence of the old 
man's arm, his body, the bed they so often shared. "That's my job. What the 
hell do you want from me? You're angry because I'm convincing -- you'd be 
angrier if I weren't."
	"Is it his smile you see when you close your eyes?"
	"No!" God, that smile -- that sinful, *Alex, wanna know a secret?* smile. How 
the hell did the old man know it was the smile?
	"Is that what Agent Krycek sees?"
	Easy. Easy question. So fucking unfair. "I...guess so. Probably."
	"Probably? Oh, no. No, no. You know everything about him. You're the expert. 
	You're the best. Tell me, then. What haunts Agent Krycek?"
	"Mulder -- Mulder's smile. Mulder's voice. Mulder's rotten handwriting. The 
incessant crunching of those sunflower seeds. Mulder's hands. The water 
tracking through his hair when he first turns on the water in the gym showers 
-- tracking down his back. All right? I know my job, all right?"
	Though nothing like strong enough to subdue Krycek, the old man was easily 
able to roll him onto his back while Krycek was frozen and unresisting. He 
pressed the telephone into Krycek's hand, and Krycek gripped it like grim 
death, needing something smooth and plastic and ordinary to cling to. "Then 
call him."
	"No...."
	"Pretend to be Agent Krycek. Pretend to be the one who loves him. Lie to him 
-- you must be able to do that, or all of this is useless. Can you still 
finish your work here?"
	"Of course. Of course." Not a test -- a punishment. Because the old man knew 
what Krycek had been hiding from himself since that first day, the insomnia 
case: he was not two men. Krycek, he was Alex Krycek, Agent Alex Krycek, and 
when he had allowed himself to want Mulder, it was one man who wanted him, 
completely.
	His hand shook as he dialed. *555...* "Can't I do this privately?" He tried to 
sound gruff, not pleading, but he couldn't gauge his effectiveness from the 
old man's expressionless face. At least he got off Krycek's bed. *01... 9...*
The center that the old man had mentioned -- he could feel it now, 
crystallizing inside him. *Krycek.* It was his axis, and everything else 
orbited, held in by its powerful gravitational pull. It was huge, and alive. 
*Krycek.* Krycek pressed his eyes shut and his hand over them. Damn it all to 
hell. If only...if only he were being asked to lie. Lying was the easiest 
thing in the world. *9*
	He listened to the ring of the phone; a light went on somewhere in his 
apartment, the living room or the kitchen. Agent Krycek was a false protector, 
not an innocent at all, but the monster on to whom he projected all his 
darkest, deadliest impulses. Fear. Solitude. Obedience. Desire.
	"Mulder. Hi, Mulder. Did I wake you up?"
	Alex Krycek was a natural double agent. Even his center became a lie. Even his 
confession became the agenda. Never in his life had he regretted any lie the 
way he regretted telling Mulder the truth that night.
	He held the disconnected phone to his forehead when it was over. Agent Krycek 
had not come to save him, to be him. Krycek doubted he ever would again. One 
man. Alex Krycek. A natural double agent. A carefully-groomed traitor. 
	Addiction slung and spat inside him, and Krycek reached for the pack of 
cigarettes, knowing it was not what he hungered for.
	The dark shape filled his doorway again, backlit from the light down the hall. 
"Never lie to yourself, Alyoshka. Never. It will kill you."
	"Fine," he said dully. "Come here and give me a light."
	The lighter sparked and hissed, and fire ate away at the cigarette. His 
fingertips rested on Krycek's chest like five blunt talons. "Do you regret 
your involvement with us, Alyoshka?"
	"No," he said quietly. He had no idea whether he was telling the truth or not. 
There were still two sides to him...*no solidity at all...endlessly 
malleable.* He simply did not know what he wanted anymore.
	"Good. Because there might be a great deal more to regret. Do you understand?"
	"Yes."
	"Do you understand?"
	"Yes."
	"Alyoshka. Do you understand?"
	He knew what he was waiting for. Krycek inhaled deeply. Chain smoking was a 
slow and inefficient method of suicide, and a popular one, among a populace 
that by Krycek's standards was basically slow and inefficient. "Yes, Father."
His hand flattened, stroking Krycek's chest lightly. "I'm glad that's over 
with. How did I get distracted? I'm quite sure I did not come here to discuss 
business...."]]]]]
 

	Once, the danger Alex presented had been gunmetal and gashing hatred and red 
ruthlessness.
	He was like that tacky old expression -- a tiger in bed. Each ripple of his 
muscles as he broke and twisted against Mulder's skin carried killing 
strength, the hunter's desperate competency. His touch was lazy luxury. His 
throat vibrated with purrs and growls, and a single word, repeated 
relentlessly -- Mulder couldn't decide if it sounded more like *fuck* or 
*Fox.*
	Dangerous now, but differently. Disarmed, split open, reduced to pleasure, his 
danger was now plague and presence -- the ability to shunt off Mulder's past 
and his future -- to breathe fever into him.
	It might as well have been an epidemic. Two of them sick with the same 
maddening longing, the same fantastic hallucinations -- the plague swept 
everything else ahead of it, weightless and useless. There was no healing.
Mulder's fever broke first, and then Krycek's. They would survive -- Krycek 
because he was a born survivor, and Mulder mainly because he didn't travel 
well alone.


Mulder must have dozed, because he remembered first only Krycek's lips 
nibbling at his jaw in the darkness, then Krycek standing on the floor, 
fighting his pants back on. "You want me to help--"
	"Fuck you," Krycek said, in a voice more bored than angry. "I'm fine."
"Shit. You and Scully both," Mulder grumbled, rolling and curling in bed, 
following the scent of Krycek's sweat to its strongest point, a dampness on 
his sheets that meant exhaustion, not orgasm. He glanced back up. "Next time, 
we--"
	Krycek began to shake his head, but only completed one arrow of movement, a 
line drawn in the air. "No next time."
	He'd half-expected this. Maybe more than half. "You said you had to see me in 
person. How do you know that won't happen again?"
	"I also said you shouldn't trust what I say."
	"You see the inherent contradiction in that, right?" Krycek shrugged. His 
usual eloquence. "What if it's destiny?" Mulder didn't know if he was joking 
or begging.
	Turning, Krycek fixed him with a keen look. He was as darkly unreadable as 
ever. More so. "If it's destiny, you'll be around when I finish the work that 
needs to be done."
	"And if it's dumb luck?"
	A tiny spark and hiss in his voice betrayed him. "Then let's not push our dumb 
luck." He reached for Mulder. Their palms struck quietly together, their 
fingers locking. Mulder shivered. "You were right. We needed to burn."
	"I'm good with need. It doesn't mean -- that I know what I want."
	"So I gather. I keep tabs on you, Mulder, you know that? I heard you had some 
witch doctor drilling holes in your head." Krycek's hand stroked the piece of 
Mulder's body in question. "You fucking straighten up and fly right, you hear 
me? The world needs your head."
	"I saw...things that...."
	Krycek nodded. "If it helps...I don't think he's your father. I think he'd 
like to be. He has...that need."
	In the silence, Mulder kissed the fine skin under Krycek's wrist. "If you 
change your mind...we still have a lot to talk about."
	He turned away. "I can't tell you anything about the investigation. You know 
that."
	"Still.... Something."
	Pausing in his exit, Krycek reached out to touch the doorframe. His voice 
pulled, wounded, out of his chest. "You were the luckiest goddamned thing that 
ever happened to me. And you ruined my life."
	"If you ever change your mind...."
	"*Das vidanya, tovarish.*"
	It was as much Russian as Mulder knew, but he did know that much. He let 
Krycek go, and rolled over into the thick of his scent. A small blow, that 
Krycek was so ready to walk out again. But if he needed time to think -- 
privacy to regain his focus -- so be it.
	He would change his mind. Mulder's rat bastard....
	Other people stayed, or they left. With Krycek, it was an endless loop, 
division and demand. Krycek returned, again and again, bound to him in bloody, 
fevered fascination.
	Trusting Krycek was out of the question. But all of Mulder's trust, all his 
belief, was invested in the certainty of Krycek's return. And maybe that was 
the justice, if not the redemption, that Alex had come to find.