Follows: Midnight Matinee, Thorns . A rose by any name would smell as deadly , Sex, Lies & Nanocytes , Guns 'N Roses , Wreaths & Revelations & Revenge is a dish best served cold

Wrap up warm, lock the front door, get some tissues ready and hold your breath....There are some dark and scary parts in this one, gentle reader.

But, above all, even when all seems lost....even if you 'trust no one', trust the Mort. 

Alex swirled around, arms askew, twirling like a five-year-old with an ecstatic smile on his face as the pungent smell wafted through the warm evening air and infused his whole body with its heavy fragrance.

In the shadows cast by the house's high veranda, Ivan stood and stared, his craggy, heavily deformed face as puzzled as that of the rottweillers whose collars he held in either hand. The dogs were uneasy, straining silently against his strong fingers, their bodies quivering with tension. He had the strange impression that if he should let the dogs go they might as soon run away as attack the man who was dancing in the rosebeds. He understood their confusion.  He too was torn between the urge to flee and the irresistible desire to stand witness to Alex's child-like joy.

Like the dogs, he was instinctively aware that if Alex were to become aware of his presence the illusion would be shattered by gunfire. In his happiness, Alex was displaying vulnerability and, as always,  he would reward any witness of that vulnerability with potentially lethal retaliation. 

So Ivan faded back into the darkness, his tightening grip warning the dogs to silence as he dragged them away, and he left Alex swaying to his audience of roses.

He would have a good life here in this new country, living in peace in the shadow of Alex's mansion, half a world away from the horror and brutality and terrible loneliness of what had gone before. He had a car, and money, and his work here at the house, and although his occasional need to go to the local town brought him face-to-face with prejudice and suspicion it was a subtle torture. In America people shuddered and turned away from him rather than throwing stones or beating him with sticks and driving him away. There was still loneliness here, but now he had the dogs. Always the dogs. Sleek, black loyal beasts who saw beauty in his face where all others saw ugliness, who heard his voice as music where everyone else turned away in impatience from his incoherent grunts, who saw magnificence in his knurled, gigantean frame where the rest of the world saw freakishness.

Except Alex.

Alex who didn't seem to see his ugliness at all. Alex who actually *listened* on the rare occasions that Ivan spoke. Pretty Alex whom he had found in the forest, maimed and bleeding, and nursed back to life even though he'd known, from experience, that with the return of his health, Alex would recoil from his over-large hands and freakish face and flee in horror.

He'd been wrong. Alex hadn't been awed by his size or frightened by his ugliness. Alex had looked at him and seen a man, not a monster. Alex had offered  him the same wary distrust as he'd witnessed in the wounded wolves he'd sometimes attempted to heal and, like those wild creatures, Alex had judged him purely on his actions rather than his deformities. Pretty Alex, who had promised that one day he would come back to the forest and take him away to a new life.

In keeping that promise, Alex had bought Ivan's soul.

Although, as the weeks passed, he was beginning to wonder whether his new master was a devil or a madman, Ivan cast no judgments against him.  Whatever Alex was capable of, he had done the one thing no other person had ever done. He had looked at Ivan and seen a man rather than a freak.

Ivan was a gentle man. He'd cried whenever the creatures he'd tended to in the forest had died. He'd cried at the indignities he'd suffered through his life rather than learning to hate his abusers. He'd cried the night that Alex had grown tired of trying to persuade the owner of this house to sell and had, instead, driven the old man's car off the road to where it had exploded in orange fire.  It had been the night he'd finally been forced to accept that Alex's beauty concealed an interior as twisted and deformed as Ivan's own face.

Somewhere in that long night of grief, of loyalties twisting as he wrestled with both his conscience and his own fear of the beast he could now see lurking within Alex's pretty eyes, an understanding had come to him. He and Alex were the same. Both were cursed with an ugliness they had no ability to change. The only difference was that his was external while Alex's was more subtle.  

If Alex could blind himself to Ivan's ugliness, then Ivan too could blind himself to Alex's.

"It's me, Guys. Turn off the tape."

"You don't call, you don't write..."

"Ignore him, he's channeling a Jewish mother," Langly snorted, grabbing the phone out of Frohike's clutches and carrying it over to his own computer screen. "I've found something out that might interest you, Mulder."

"So have I," Frohike interrupted, snatching the phone back. "Only $12.99 and you wouldn't believe what these two chickadees are doing to each other."

Mulder closed his eyes and sighed. "Frohike, give the phone back to Langly. I don't have time for this."

He heard a brief struggle and then Langly's voice returned. "Hey man."

"What have you got?"

"That tape you gave me, the one from your mystery source? Well, I managed to unencrypt enough of it to get some more names and places. We put out some feelers, and its all checking out. Maybe a bit more than your 'friend' expected. The thing is that most of it's garbage, red herrings, but if you read between the lines it's almost poetic."

"The thing is," Byers interrupted, as he switched the call to speaker, "is that if you map all the places he's telling you to look at they form a rough circle. So we started looking *inside* the circle instead."

"What did you find?" Mulder demanded.

"A place owned by a company called Genetron Technologies."

"Who are they?"

"We don't know, but we know a man who does," Frohike crowed. "Your laptop on?"

Mulder double checked the computer they'd lent him. "Yes."

"Send him the photo, Langly."

"What photo?"

"A certain 'friend' of yours. Check the date stamp. Picture was taken just three hours ago."

Mulder jumped as his email notifier flashed onto the screen. "Hang on. Let me open it up."  He clicked a couple of buttons and waited as his lamentably slow connection downloaded the photo. As the picture slowly generated on his screen, a wide relieved smile spread across his face. There in front of him was Alex Krycek walking into the front door of the Genetron building in Geneva.

Krycek wasn't just out of town. He was on the other side of the world.

"You're the best," he announced, and hung up the phone as an argument started down the line over who'd just been complimented.  He grabbed his mobile and rang Scully.

"It's me. I don't have time to explain what's going on. We've got to get to the hospital and pull Skinner out of there."

"What's going on, Mulder?" she demanded.

"I'll explain later. Meet me there. This could be our only chance, Scully. If you're with me, he won't be able to argue."

He waited for her reluctant agreement, then grabbed his coat and headed for the door with a huge, triumphant grin on his face. 

Who's playing who, Krycek? he chuckled to himself as he skipped down the stairs from his motel room. The minute Krycek had sent him the tape, with the enticing reports of consortium laboratories doing alien experimentation in Switzerland, he'd been foaming at the mouth with the need to fly over and investigate.  Which was exactly why he hadn't gone. The whole thing had screamed set-up. Oh, he'd booked the flights and hotel. He'd even filled in a 302 with the woman standing in for Skinner. Then he'd lain low and waited for four days in a sleazy motel. 

He'd played a hunch and won because the photo proved that Krycek had flown over to find out why he hadn't yet fallen into whatever trap had awaited him in Switzerland.

Which meant Mulder had the window of opportunity he'd been waiting for. By the time Krycek returned to the States, Mulder intended to have Skinner out of the hospital and stashed away in a safe house.

He wasn't yet sure what he was going to do then. He was hoping that if he could just remove Skinner from the equation, he'd be able to regain his own equilibrium. In the week since Krycek had fucked him out of his brains in that dark movie theatre, he'd had plenty of time to consider his own motivations and the only explanation for his own behavior that he could live with was that he *had* only been trying to save Skinner's life.  He'd convinced himself that it had been that same fear for Skinner that had been the reason he'd been so disappointed four days earlier when Krycek had posted the tape to him instead of delivering it in person.

So the only decision he was going to have to make, once Skinner was safe, was how he was going to kill Krycek.

He vacillated between the idea of simply shooting Krycek dead on the spot the moment he saw him and the even more bizarre idea of chaining Krycek to his bed and fucking him to death.  He suspected the most likely outcome would actually be Scully forcing him to hand Krycek over to the authorities, but he'd enjoyed four days of jerking off to both fantasies anyway.

It had been considerably more entertaining than watching the motel's pay-per-view.

He was woken by the gentle slide of soft leather down his left cheekbone, and the familiar touch made his heart leap as frantically as though the nanocytes in his bloodstream had been activated. Wide-eyed and terrified, he snapped to full awareness, twisting in the hospital bed until he was facing the mocking smile and cold green gaze of his visitor.

"Alex," he whispered huskily, through a throat still raw from the tube that had kept his battered lungs working for more days than he cared to remember. 

"Walter," Alex replied pleasantly, leaning over to pour him a glass of water and handing it to him with a solicitous smile.

Walter took the glass gratefully and drank deeply. Although the water was unpleasantly warm, it still soothed the burn in his throat. "Thanks," he said, with an attempt at a smile of his own. He deliberately refused to acknowledge the silencer-fitted pistol in Alex's left hand, though he couldn't prevent his eyes sliding in its direction as he wondered...

"Yes," Alex said, as though he could read Walter's mind.. "The hand *is* fully functional."

"I see," Walter replied slowly, not even bothering to scan the room for avenues of escape. He couldn't move faster than Alex even without the barely-knitted ribs that were protesting his heart's panicked beating and although the silencer suggested help might lie within earshot, he knew calling for help wouldn't save him. It would just get innocents killed. "I suppose this is about what I said to Mulder."

He waited for the rage to flare in Alex's eyes, for the smile to melt off Alex's face to reveal the volcanic rage that undoubtedly swirled under the calm exterior. Instead, Alex threw his head back and laughed. Not a wild, uncontrolled laugh, but enough mirth to reveal his perfect teeth and stretch the skin of his throat taut, and when he dropped his face once more to meet Walter's anxious gaze, his mouth was still twitching with humor.

"It's okay, Walter," Alex purred. "It was my own fault. I didn't hit you hard enough."

At Walter's frown of confusion, he chuckled again. "I meant to break your jaw. I forgot what a hard-headed bastard you are. Besides, it all worked out for the best. What's it they say? The truth will set you free?  Well, Fox and I have come to a... how shall I put it? An understanding. Yeah. That's the word. So, frankly, you don't matter any more. You're out of the game now."

"So you're here to kill me," Walter said casually, hating himself for feeling more wounded than afraid. "You don't need me any more."

Alex shrugged. "Don't take it personally, Walt. It just didn't work out. The nanocytes have been a bit of a disappointment to my employers. They were more interested in State secrets than your talents in bed. Don't get me wrong, you're a good fuck, but you never came through with the *real* goods, did you?"

"I'm sorry if my principles offend you, Alex," Walter growled. "I might have sold my ass to save my life, but I'd never sell my country."

"My point exactly," Alex replied easily. "Nice ass, though."

Walter's tenuous hold on his temper snapped completely as fear, rage and jealousy burned through him in a wave of outrage that drowned his sense of self-preservation.

"But not as nice as Mulder's? Is that all this comes down to? That he's a better fuck?"

For the first time, Alex's expression slipped and a spark of fury flared in his eyes. He struck faster than a cobra, back-handing Walter across the face so hard that Walter's lips split and blood sprayed the bed-sheet.  "Don't you *ever* talk about Fox like that. He's not like you. He's nothing like you. Don't you dare compare yourself to him."

"Or what?" Walter demanded, shaking his head furiously and telling himself it was the pain of Alex's blow that was making his eyes burn, not the way Alex had leapt to defend Mulder's honor. "You'll shoot me?"

"That's the general idea," Alex said, his smile returning.

Walter's guts twisted with self-loathing at the depth of pain he felt at this proof of Alex's complete indifference to him. He wanted to hate Alex. How could he fail to hate a man who was capable of killing him in cold blood and then just walking away without a second glance? How the hell could he be lying here, feeling like his heart would explode and almost welcoming the bullet if only it would take away the pain? And how, in God's name, could he be feeling sorrow for Alex rather than hatred? Sorrow that the maimed and dysfunctional creature that was about to murder him could be so damned stupid as to think this act might bring him some happiness.

Yet he did. His heart was breaking *for* Alex as much as it was breaking over him. He decided that maybe he was as crazy as Alex after all, because the next words he spoke weren't so much a plea for his own life as a warning. 

"If you kill me, Fox will know you did it. I don't know whether you're trying to prove your love for him or kill his love for me, but all this will do is make him hate you. By killing me, you'll lose him forever, Alex."

Alex's smile twisted into a self-satisfied smirk.

"Ah, but he won't know I did it, Walter. You see, Fox knows beyond any doubt that I'm in Switzerland today. In about twenty minutes he's going to come bursting through that door to rescue you. Unfortunately, he's going to be nineteen minutes too late. Of course he'll blame me at first. He always does. Then he'll check with his sources, and discover I'm *still* in Switzerland, and so then he'll start to blame himself for your death. So, I'll let him beat himself up for a few days and then I'll go and visit him." He gave Walter a lewd wink. "Between you and me, guilt always brings out Fox's inner slut."

The smug, triumphant expression on Alex's face was like a knife twisting in Walter's heart.

"If you're going to kill me, just fucking do it, you bastard. But don't expect me to sit here and listen to you explaining why..."

His furious words were cut off by a titanium hand grabbing his left wrist and metallic fingers tightening with bone-crushing pressure. His own fingers splayed wide in agony but, as his mouth opened in a hoarse, involuntary scream, Alex lunged forward and punched a thick wad of bandage into his mouth. 

The nauseating pain in his wrist sent a shock-wave through his still recuperating body, making his own movements dazed and clumsy as he struggled to pull the cloth out of his mouth with his one free hand.  He was still fighting the fabric when Alex picked up the pistol and fired.

With a sickening sense of deja vu, a mind-numbing haze of almost dream-like confusion, Mulder pushed his way past the flashing blue lights of the black and whites and through the crowd gathered behind the yellow-tape cordon at the hospital entrance.

Steps slow, like he was struggling through quicksand, like some invisible force was pushing back against his efforts to approach, and the invisible force had a name, and that name was terror. 

Because he knew. Somehow, he already knew the truth he would find beyond that tape. A truth too horrific to face.

"Mulder! Over here!"

He spun and almost fell, disorientated by the familiar voice that cut through the fogging, comforting numbness that was already smothering his ability to think. He felt nauseous, his stomach churning painfully as he tried to focus on her face. Her red hair, her too pale face, her sorrowful, tear-filled eyes and in those eyes he saw the answer to the question he couldn't ask.

"Oh god," he howled, dropping to his knees as he doubled over in retching agony.

"I'm so sorry, Mulder. So sorry. So sorry..."

Her voice faded into the white noise inside his skull, as he vomited on the ground uncaring of his audience. At some level he heard her persuading a paramedic to leave him alone and he heard her telling a policeman who he was and to let him be, but the words just washed over and through him, irrelevant in the face of a truth too terrible to bear.

He heaved until his throat burned, until he'd voided what felt like every meal he'd every consumed, until the empty ache inside his guts was as huge and encompassing as the hole inside his heart. He vomited until he felt like his body was no more than an empty shell and finally, within that cavernous emptiness, the flames of guilt and rage had room to flare and grow.

Mulder staggered to his feet, still white and shaken, but now the tremors of his body were no longer grief-racked spasms. His trembling now was fueled purely by outrage. 

"What happened?" he demanded, grabbing Scully's wrist hard enough to leave faint bruises. "How did he die?"

"Hurts like fuck, doesn't it?" Alex asked cheerfully, giving his passenger his best commiserating smile.  "Mind you, if you think that hurts, you should try getting your whole fucking arm cut off."

Walter looked down at the blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his left hand, and gagged as a fresh wave of pain assaulted him. It felt as though his hand was on fire.

"Besides, you won't miss a couple of fingers. Count yourself lucky I left you your thumb," Alex continued, as he indicated and pulled the car to the hard shoulder. "If you're going to throw up, get out of the car. I don't want to smell your puke all the way home."

"You fucking bas..." Walter began, raising his uninjured hand to strike. Then he swayed in his seat as throbs of white-hot pain shot from the raw site of his severed fingers through his swollen, possibly broken, wrist. 

Alex silently leaned over, unsnapped the seatbelt, opened the passenger door and shoved Walter in the ribs. He sprawled out of the car, landing on his knees, his right hand holding his weight as he cradled his injured hand to his chest and vomited onto the verge.

By the time he'd finished voiding his stomach, he was too weak and miserable to even consider trying to make a run for it.  The highway was deserted, flat crop fields stretched as far as the eye could see on either side of the road, and the awkward fall from the car had caused his ribs to start throbbing in counterpoint to his hand. Besides, he knew Alex had the palm pilot which had the ability to make his current pain seem like nothing more than a scratch in comparison. So he slowly crawled back inside the car and awkwardly pulled the door shut.

"Seatbelt," Alex reminded him, as he put the car back into 'drive' and pulled back onto the highway. "After all the trouble I've taken to keep you alive, I'll be really pissed if you take a head-drive out of the window now," he added, with a grin.

Walter stared at the smiling profile in disbelief but clumsily obeyed.

They drove in silence for a while, only Walter's ragged breaths disturbing the peace of the car's interior.  It was only when Walter felt he'd regained some control of himself and could talk without whimpering that he finally spoke.

"Why?"

Alex turned enough to give him a dazzling smile. "I killed you, Walter."  

At Walter's thunderous look, he chuckled.  "Shame you slept through it. It was a pretty spectacular firework show and no casualties whatsoever.  Well only you, of course."

"What are you talking about?"

"I blew your hospital room up," Alex replied with a proud grin. "As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you're a pile of spare-ribs. High density, low range explosion directly under your bed. Clever stuff. Didn't even take the walls down. So you can rest in peace, Walter. No animals were hurt in the making of this movie."

"Ever heard of forensics, Alex? Don't you think the absence of a body is going to be suspicious?" Walter asked dryly, although his mind was racing. Why? Why the hell had Alex *faked* his death?

If the noise hadn't come from the throat of a cold-blooded assassin, Walter would have sworn Alex giggled.

"I took a detour on my way to your room and had a very fruitful shopping trip through the used parts department of the hospital morgue. Do you have any idea how many bodies get incinerated down there? No? Well, I took a bit of this and a bit of that. Just enough to ensure sufficient gore. Couple of pints of your own blood, in case you were wondering why you felt so light headed, and then the final touch, a couple of your own severed fingers.  Very authentic touch if I say so myself."

Walter's stomach heaved and he gagged. Although his stomach was too empty to erupt, his esophagus spasmed painfully and he groaned as a rush of acidic bile seared his throat.

"You're not going to puke again, are you?" Alex asked, frowning over at his passenger suspiciously.

Walter glared at him. "Why, Alex? Why am I still alive? Why didn't you kill me?"

For the first time, Alex's confident smile slipped a little and his green eyes clouded with vague confusion.

"Why, Alex?" Walter repeated, his voice deliberately softer. "It's obvious you want the consortium to think I'm dead. I'm not happy about it, but I understand. What I don't understand is why you went to all this trouble to fake my death. Why *didn't* you just kill me?"

Alex didn't reply.

"Alex?" Walter whispered, ignoring the blazing ache of his left hand and reaching over with his right to stroke the dark shadow of Alex's cheek. For a brief moment he imagined that Alex relaxed into the touch, welcoming it, inviting the contact, then Alex snarled and swung his head towards him, green eyes blazing and mouth twisted into a feral sneer.

"Maybe I just haven't finished playing with you, Walter," he snarled. "Maybe the consortium don't give a fuck what I do to you and this is just my way of making sure no one *else* comes looking for you. Or," and his lips twitched into an evil smirk, "maybe you're just bait for a fox-snare."

"It was a pipe bomb. Simple design. Several thousand shotgun pellets encased in a steel pipe that was attached directly under the hospital bed. It detonated with such concentrated impact that it's a miracle there's any identifiable remains. We'd have been stuck with DNA identification alone if it weren't for the two fingers that were recovered from the scene."

Mulder swallowed noisily and pressed his right hand against his eyes. Scully frowned at him in concern but resisted the urge to touch him. Mulder didn't want sympathy. The only way he could deal with his emotions was by throwing up a barrier between himself and the rest of the world. She understood that. Just as she understood why he needed to be part of the investigation, even though her better judgment told her it was a mistake. Melissa's death had taught her that it was impossible to be objective when investigating the death of someone you loved. It had also taught her the impossibility of walking away.

So she turned her attention back to Gallagher.

"What about the detonator? Was it remote?"

"Yes and no," he replied, reaching for a sealed evidence bag and dangling in front of her with a smile of self-satisfaction. 

She resisted the urge to hit him. As far as he was concerned, this was just a puzzle to solve. She understood professional detachment. It didn't make it any easier to be on the receiving end of that kind of impersonal indifference though.

"Essentially, it was a car bomb and it worked in exactly the same way. It required a small electrical pulse. In this case, instead of wiring it into the ignition of a car, we think the bomber wired it into the victim's heart monitor. In view of the bullet fragments we found, I'd say the killer stood in the doorway, shot Skinner dead, and as the monitor flat-lined it triggered the explosion."

"Slight overkill, wouldn't you say?"

Scully and Gallagher both jumped in reaction to Mulder's softly spoken comment.

"I mean, why shoot him *and* blow his body into mince? That suggests a very *personal* level of hatred, doesn't it?"

Gallagher shrugged awkwardly, dropping his eyes from Mulder's frighteningly dead glare. "Well, it's just speculation, of course. There's simply not enough evidence to be certain. What I can say with confidence is that the killer must have been inside the hospital at the time the bomb exploded. The detonator isn't sophisticated enough for it to have been triggered from a distance. I'm running its specs through the computer for matches. Chances are this isn't the first time he's killed. Despite the simple design, the precision of the explosion suggests this guy's an expert. He's probably killed before."

"He's killed before alright," Mulder snarled, grabbing his coat and striding out of the door.

Scully ran to catch him up but he ignored her cries for him to wait. She had to jump in his path and physically halt him before he'd listen to her.

"You heard him, Mulder. It couldn't have been Krycek. You told me yourself that Krycek is out of the country."

"It was personal, Scully. Whoever killed Walter didn't just want him dead. He wanted him erased as though he'd never existed. The only person who wanted that is Krycek."

"Why?" Scully demanded furiously. "What aren't you telling me, Mulder? What was the connection between Skinner and Krycek?"

He shook his head mutely, refusing to tell her.

"Listen to me, Mulder. Krycek's an assassin. That means he works for someone. So, even if you're right about Krycek's involvement, despite your own admission that he's out of the country so he couldn't have done this himself, doesn't it make more sense that it was Krycek's employer who wanted Skinner dead?" she asked reasonably.

Mulder froze, only his haunted eyes moving as he absorbed her words, then he groaned and staggered back against the wall of the corridor, sliding down onto the floor as his legs gave way beneath him. She dropped down at his side, automatically checking his pulse with one hand and his temperature with the other, as he just stared into some inner nightmare with huge, despairing eyes.

"It's my fault, Scully," he eventually whispered, so quietly that she had to strain to hear him. 

Then she shook her head in disbelief. "What?"

"I told him to choose between us. I told him he had to let Skinner go."

"What are you saying?"

Mulder gave a deep, choking laugh.

"Alex had a hold over Skinner. Some kind of blackmail. And I stopped it. I forced Alex to leave him alone. Don't you understand, Scully? Alex must have done it. He cut Walter loose. He let him go."

"By killing him?" she demanded, narrowing her eyes suspiciously at his unexpected use of Krycek's first name.

"Oh, no. I killed him, Scully. I made Walter expendable. The minute Alex walked away, his employer probably sent a cleaner to wipe up the mess he'd left behind."

"Even if you're right, then it's still not your fault, Mulder. Krycek must have known what would happen to him."

Mulder shook his head wearily, his eyes dark with self-hatred.

"He's a sociopath, Scully. I doubt he even gave Walter's safety a second thought. But what's my excuse, Scully? What's my excuse for being so fucking arrogant that I thought I knew what I was doing?  Walter begged me not to interfere. He...he, oh fuck, he *loved*, Alex."

At her choked gasp of disbelief, Mulder began to cry. "Walter wasn't afraid of dying, Scully. He was afraid I was going to take Alex away from him. And I did. Now tell me his death wasn't my fault."

Titanium hand clenching his neck, Glock pressed against his spine, Alex pushed him through the heavy oak door and through into a huge library. A harder shove and Walter unbalanced, his legs giving way beneath him so that he crashed to his knees on the floor.

"Welcome to your new home," Alex announced, kicking the door shut behind them and strolling past him to a built-in bar. "Want a drink?"  Without waiting for an answer, he reached for a bottle and poured a generous measure of whiskey into a lead-crystal glass. "Don't even think of using this as a weapon," he warned, as he handed the drink over. "It's part of a matching set."

Walter gulped the alcohol gratefully, gasping as it burned down his throat, praying it would take the edge off the throbbing of his hand.

"So what do you think?" Alex asked, as he refilled Walter's glass and then gestured around the room. "Nice, huh? Not quite the sewer you expected?"

"I never took you for a reader."

"Oh, the books came with the house. The last owner died unexpectedly, so I bought it contents intact," Alex confided, with a wolfish smile.

"It's a fine house," Walter replied carefully. "Must have cost you a lot."

"Enough," Alex agreed disinterestedly. "But the money wasn't relevant. I knew the moment I saw it that this was the right place."

"For what?"

"The right place for Fox, of course."

"For Fox," Walter repeated cautiously, his heart beginning to hammer with fear once more.

"Well, eventually," Alex conceded. "I've only had the place for a few weeks. It's going to take a lot more work before it's perfect. Most of this crap will have to go," he said, kicking a faded leather chair with obvious disgust, "but I think I'll keep the books. He likes books, doesn't he?"

"I think you'll find that the only thing Fox really likes is freedom, Alex." 

Alex ignored the comment, turning his back and walking over to the far wall where a pair of French windows reflected blackly into the room. He threw them open and took a deep appreciative breath before turning to face Walter once more. "Smell that?" he asked, with a boyish grin. "Roses. A whole yard of roses."

The faint smell wafted into the room on a low breeze, and Walter sniffed then nodded.

"It's the main reason I bought the house. That and the fact it's in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town's almost an hour's drive away and there's no phone line. There's power, of course, but no TV signal and I haven't gotten around to satellite yet so I guess the books will come in handy."  He shrugged.

"Must be hell for groceries," Walter replied dryly.

Alex shrugged again, sly smile on his face. "Not a problem. Ivan takes care of that."

"Ivan?"

"Cook, gardener, handyman, whatever. He lives over the kennels. I'd introduce you to him, but it's getting late and it's not a good idea to walk outside the house at night. The dogs tend to bite first and ask questions later. Come to think of it, so does Ivan. Probably best you keep away from him."

"How long are you intending to keep me prisoner here, Alex?"

Alex affected a look of outraged hurt. 

"You're a guest in my home, Walter. Considering the fact you're an official corpse, I would have thought you'd be grateful for my hospitality. But," he shrugged, "you know where the door is. Don't let it hit your ass as you leave."

As Walter hesitated uncertainly, Alex's mouth twisted into an amused grin and he pointedly checked his watch.  "You've got less than ten minutes. Once Ivan lets the dogs go, you're going to be stuck here until morning. So are you going or shall I show you to your bedroom?"

Although every bone in his body told him that Alex was playing with him, that the smile on Alex's face was just anticipation of whatever cruel fun he'd afford by running, Walter *had* to leave. If only to prove to himself that escape was impossible.

So he hugged his left hand protectively against his chest and ran.

He wasn't fool enough to try to break into Alex' car. Even if he could hot-wire the ignition, he wouldn't be able to turn off the factory-installed immobilizer and so he'd just become a sitting target. So he ran past the parked car and down the long drive, ignoring the pain of the sharp stones against his bare feet and praying he wouldn't twist an ankle in one of the numerous small pot-holes.

Then the gate was there in front of him, a darker shadow amongst the fat trees that lined the fence that surrounded Alex's estate, and his heart clenched in fear as he imagined finding it locked against him. He doubted he could climb the fence one-handed before the dogs were released against him.

He howled aloud, in misery and fury, as he heard the distinct whine of a motor firing up in front of him, and ignoring the pain in his ribs and the throb of his hand and the wet warmth that was now spreading across his stomach as the wounds of his severed fingers reopened once more, he thrust his thighs in a new burst of speed.

Only to then pause in confusion as he finally reached the gate.

It wasn't closing. It was opening to release him. It *had* been locked shut, but either his approach or a signal from the house had started the motor that was even now making the gate swing open to allow his escape.

Alex was letting him go.

Why the fuck was Alex letting him go?

Had Alex shot him, and kidnapped him, and dragged him to this place in the middle of nowhere as some form of test? Were all of Alex's cruel taunts about loving Fox, and buying this house for Fox, just a bizarre joke? Deep inside Alex's admittedly psychotic head, was this his way of trying to prove that he *did* love him after all? And, if so, was he proving by running away that his own love for Alex meant nothing?

No.

That was his heart talking not his head. That was what he *wanted* to believe. 

But even he wasn't that much of a fool.

There was a difference between being in love with a sociopath and being suicidal. 

Alex was in love with Mulder.

There was nothing for him in Alex's house except humiliation, and heart-break and eventual death when Alex no longer needed him. Alex would just play with him while he prepared his Fox-snare, and while he couldn't deny that there was a part of him that wanted to return to Alex's side, his overwhelming instinct was to escape. So with one last regretful look over his shoulder, Walter began to jog through the gate.

And then pain exploded in his chest.

He tripped, staggered and  collapsed to the floor, felled not by the agonizing pulse inside his heart but his left hand's instinctive attempt to clutch at the site of pain, and his sobs of distress were less of pain but of humiliation and perhaps even a little disbelief that he hadn't even considered that Alex might use the Palm Pilot to bring him back to heel.

He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn't. He was too faint and light-headed to rise. One too many shocks on a body already weakened from pain and blood-loss left him struggling even to gasp one breath after another into the rapidly chilling night air. Even the eerie sound of a howling dog failed to kick his body back into adrenaline-powered strength. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, aware at some level that if he didn't pull himself together and crawl back to the warmth of the house he would die, yet unable to find the energy to even care. 

The shadows lengthened and twisted around him, forming grotesque forms that seemed to leer and mock him from the darkness, and nearby a dog howled. So near that his spine shivered with instinctive dread, even as he sank deeper into the numbing cold that was coiling around him like a vast serpent, crushing the life from his body as he chilled inside its embrace. 

One of the shadows shifted, becoming a creature out of his worst childhood nightmares, a deformed giant with a face so misshapen that it seemed as though its features were melting off its face.

"Alex," Walter pleaded, the weak, helpless cry of a child, as the monster continued its slow, shuffling approach, but the night was silent except for the howling dog, and Alex didn't come to save him, because Alex didn't love him, because Alex loved Fox and so, with a sob of despair, Walter gave up his struggle for consciousness and surrendered himself to the nightmare.

When he woke, the birds were singing outside his bedroom window and he could feel the warm rays of a bright, mid-day sun across his face.  He opened his eyes cautiously, squinting into the brightness until he could look comfortably around the room despite the dull throbbing of both his head and his left hand.

He was alone, in a large plain room full of antique furniture. The bed he was lying in was the only object in the room that didn't seem to be layered with dust. Even the heavy, faded drapes that hung on either side of the windows were gray with disuse and he could see the dust motes swirling in the sunbeams that danced through the window pane to caress the almost sterile whiteness of his sheets.

Other than the obvious newness of his bedding, it was as though no one had entered the room for years. It was a ghostly lonely room, anonymous and abandoned, its function as a guest room unmistakable. Even scrubbed and dusted, the room's very blandness would scream that here was a place for a temporary guest. And although Alex had admitted to owning the house only a short time and to buying it furnished, Walter couldn't escape the feeling that he had been placed in this particular room for one reason only. To drive home, without any doubt, that his presence in this house was that of a temporary visitor only.

Not only was it obvious that this was not Alex's room, but Walter remembered what Alex had said to him before he'd made his aborted attempt at escape. "Shall I show you to your bedroom." Not to *a* bedroom or to *my* bedroom but to *your* bedroom.

So what did it mean? That Alex had no intention of touching him, or just that Alex wanted him to understand his place in the household?

He wasn't sure, and when he threw back the bedcovers and discovered that he was wearing nothing he wasn't sure what that meant either. Except for the fresh bandage wrapped around his left hand and the glasses that had been thoughtfully placed on the bed-side table, he was naked.

He looked around the room, but there was no trace of his clothes and although he rifled through the wardrobe and chest of drawers he found nothing except mothballs.  A door in the corner of the room led to a small en-suite, with an old fashioned bath suite but thankfully warm water. It also boasted freshly laundered towels, a new bar of soap and a shaving kit. So he washed and shaved and used the toilet, then he wrapped the largest of the towels around his hips and stepped out of his bedroom into the eerily silent house.

"Alex?" he called out uncertainly.

The word echoed unanswered through the empty hallway, and he shivered uncomfortably as his mind inserted unwelcome images from a myriad of horror movies. As he worked his way towards the staircase and each floorboard groaned and creaked under his bare feet he was half-expecting some crazed knife-wielding man man to burst out of one of the closed bedroom doors he was passing. Since it was Alex's house, the expectation of meeting a crazed madman was all too probable.

Yet, although he was still slightly jumpy by the time he'd descended the stairs he'd become certain that he was alone in the house. It wasn't the silence that convinced him. He knew Alex could move like a cat. It was more the stillness of the place, an oppressive atmosphere that seemed to crush his spirit, almost as eerie as the feeling of walking through a morgue.  

He tried several doors before he found the kitchen, and it wasn't hunger that drew him inside that room as much as the fact that it was the first room he'd found that showed evidence of recent habitation. Bright, shining new units covered the walls and the floorboards under his feet were unscarred and highly polished, obviously newly laid. A low purr behind one of the inbuilt cupboards led him to a fully stocked refrigerator unit.

On the second shelf, between a plate of cheeses and a jar of peanut butter, there was an envelope with his name on. 

Walter hated the way his fingers trembled as he reached for the envelope, and the way his heart thumped as he ripped it open. For a moment, he was distracted by the hand-writing. It was too neat, too smooth. If he'd ever given any thought to the way Alex wrote, he would have imagined that Alex's writing would be chaotic and sprawling, convoluted and unintelligible. Instead, Alex's writing hand was as deceptively beautiful as his face.

The letter fluttered down out of Walter's nerveless fingers.

If he'd ever been in any doubt of Alex's insanity, the sheer arrogance of the letter would have put paid to those doubts. Especially the final taunts, the way that Alex was not only acknowledging the fact that Walter might spend his absence plotting against him but was virtually asking him to show that defiance.

Alex had imprisoned him and there was no escape. Not unless he could rip the whole house and its grounds apart to discover where Alex had hidden the control to the nanocytes.  Even if he were to somehow lay a successful trap and gain the upper hand enough to torture the location out of Alex, the chances were that the control was somehow buried outside the outer limits of Walter's invisible leash. If he'd learnt one thing, it was that Alex always covered his own back.

Yet despite the fear, and the anger, and the damned helplessness that was flooding through him, there was something else that overwhelmed those feelings, something so hot and bitter and furious that it left his other emotions too pale and weak.

Fox's room.

He had the freedom of the house except for "Fox's room".

Suddenly none of the rest mattered. Not his imprisonment, nor Alex's absence nor even the pain of his severed fingers.  All that mattered was that he found "Fox's room".

With a bellow of almost primal rage, he stormed out of the kitchen and powered up the steps to the second floor. One by one he crashed open the closed bedroom doors, sending swirls of dust rising. Two doors to the left of *his* room, he discovered Alex's lair. As bare and impersonal as his own room, only the absence of dust and a scattering of clothes pronounced its occupier, as though Alex viewed his own comfort within the vast house to be of little importance.

The two rooms to Alex's left were empty.  That left only the three doors on the other side of the hallway.  Walter hesitated, unsure of which to open first and then a very faint odor snapped his attention to the room on the farthest end of the hallway. The room that was situated over the far end of the library. The room that presumably overlooked the rose garden.

He felt the anger drain out of him, leaving him shaken and numb. He no longer wanted to open that door. He didn't want to look inside that room. He didn't want to put a name to the emotion that was now coursing through him, making his footsteps leaden and making his eyes sting. He didn't want to face, finally, the depths of Alex's obsession with Fox Mulder.

His rival.

His hand shook as he turned the door handle but he pushed the door wide and looked inside.

And something broke inside him.

His eyes scanned the room, devouring its beauty, cataloguing each and every mark of Alex's love for Fox. From the rich, deep-pile of the new carpet, to the heavy-velvet drapes that hung in shades of russet and hazel to frame the balcony that opened over the rose-garden and from each corner of the ornate, four-posted bed, with its richly engraved frame of dark oak.

Covered in silken sheets of gold and green, tumbled with bolsters and pillows in every hue of emotion that hazel eyes could reflect, the bed dominated the room, its posts carved into an intricate design of climbing roses.

To the left of the bed, there was an inbuilt fish-tank. Its frame carved to match the intricate floral design of the bed. On the wall, to the right, was a framed copy of the poster that Walter had seen so often in Mulder's basement.

I want to believe.

"Oh, Alex," Walter whispered, tears beginning to pour down his face. "How can you be so fucking stupid. He's going to break your evil little heart."

Go to "Smoke and Mirrors"