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It always amazed me that a guy as undeniably smart as Mulder could be so damned gullible. According to his report, he'd stumbled onto the location of one of the final conspiracy hideouts after a tip from the 'ghost' of his old friend Frohike.
Not that there was much to find there. Since the unmasking of the President as a super-soldier and the pandemonium that resulted from that fun little revelation, the FBI had been working closely with a team of experts from the UN to track down the last members of the conspiracy, aided and abetted by the thankfully exonerated Agent Mulder, and the whole secret war was practically over bar the shouting. A lot of covert agents were coming back in from the cold, and their information was invaluable in helping to wipe up the mess.
A mess none of us would have gotten into in the first place if the various players in the game had worked together instead of using the situation for political grandstanding.
So, I understood the paranoia that led Mulder's friends to fake their deaths. What I never could figure out was why Mulder never questioned the fact they kept popping up, large as life, to talk to him.
Hadn't the guy ever heard of hologram technology?
Though, yes, I admit I had my own reasons for not taking him aside and giving him the heads-up on the situation.
The *best* reason was that he was back at work, finally being taking seriously, and was digging out the roots of the conspiracy with the enthusiasm and effectiveness of a pig hunting truffles. I didn't want anything to throw him off the scent, and finding out his friends had been playing him for a patsy wasn't going to help his self-confidence.
But the *primary* reason I didn't tell him was a personal one.
I didn't want him making the connection between 'ghosts', fake-deaths and a certain green-eyed KGB agent.
~#~#~#~
I've never been an impulsive man.
I have, admittedly, acted in ways that could be 'perceived' as impulsive on occasion. But the perception is an illusion. It's my nature to sit on the fence while I cogitate on the events happening around me. I sit and I wait and I think and then, when my course of action is finally decided, I act so swiftly and decisively that it appears I am reacting directly to an applied stimulus.
It isn't so.
I was not the ignorant man Mulder believed me to be. I was not snared blindly inside the smoker's web of deceit until I was finally dragged, kicking and screaming, into awareness of the alien conspiracy. I was always aware of what was going on. I simply bided my time until the battle-lines were drawn and, while Mulder's antics kept them distracted, I took the opportunity to learn the many faces of our enemy.
Mulder once described the conspiracy as being like a hydra. If you cut off one of its heads, two grew in its place. He was right and yet he was wrong. The resistance was the true hydra. It was the more dangerous of the two beasts.
What you have to try and understand is that the Consortium was playing both sides against the middle. The Consortium ran the conspiracy to co-operate with the alien invasion. The Consortium *also* ran the resistance movement against the conspiracy.
And if that sounds absurd to you, I can only assume you know very little about business or politics.
The saying, 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' works fine in theory. In practice, the enemy of your enemy is most likely capering with glee on the sidelines, waiting like a vulture to move in on whichever of you survives the conflict, and they don't care either way about who wins because war is a corporate game and corporations aren't countries. They don't have borders you can encircle or capitals you can invade.
The Consortium was everywhere. It was in every country on this planet. It had even spread, cancer-like, into two opposing alien factions. It had its eggs in so many baskets that it *couldn't* ever be defeated. All we could do was box it into a corner, reduce its options, and force it to accept a final solution that didn't involve the destruction of the human race.
So, in a way, the Consortium still won the war. Perhaps the war it won wasn't the one it *wanted* to win but, nevertheless, as you walk through the halls of power you know the only difference between the new politicians and the old is the manifesto they spout. Under the skin, nothing has truly changed. The Consortium still holds the power. It's only the faction of the Consortium that was charged with ensuring the alien occupation that has gone.
Nothing truly changes.
I think that's the reason Mulder's friends prefer to remain 'ghosts'.
~#~#~#~
Which brings me back to Aleksei Nikolai Krycek.
I still clearly remember the first moment I met him, all gawping green eyes and coltish legs. I can close my eyes and picture the scene as though it were a photograph, one that time can't fade. I remember the way my heart leapt in my chest and my dick stood up to attention behind the protective cover of my desk. I remember the way the blood suddenly surged through my veins as my eyes quickly stripped him of the cheap suit that tried to hide the flawless perfection of his body.
And I remember the terrible ache, the indescribable pain, of knowing even then that what I was staring at was just the latest, most insidious, face of my enemy.
Impossible not to, given the thick stench of Morley's that was curling from the smoker's sardonic mouth.
"He's going to be Mulder's new partner," the smoker told me, in a voice that brooked no opposition.
And I was still cogitating at that time. I was still carefully feeling my way around the battlefield. It was too soon to act, to take a stand.
So I agreed, without even a murmur of complaint, and the Smoker rewarded my easy acceptance of Agent Alex Krycek as the latest pawn in the his game with the kind of offer that proved him the very devil himself.
"I can see you want him," he said, when Alex had left the room. "Just say the word and he'll be waiting for you at the Lorimar Motel tonight. He's a very well behaved boy. You'd enjoy putting him through his paces."
And I remember, so clearly, the terror I felt as I heard his words. Not only fear that he should have looked at me, a faithfully married man, and seen through my façade of respectability to the base desires that lurked secretly in my heart, but fear of myself. Fear of how damned *tempted* I was to accept the bribe.
No matter that Alex was a Consortium plant, which meant he was inevitably a dangerous wolf lurking beneath the fake wool of that cheap suit, or that he was, clearly, amenable to being whored by his masters.
I still wanted him.
Wanted him so badly I could already taste the salt of his sweat in my mouth.
But, as I've said, I'm not an impulsive man.
"He's not my type," I replied shortly. "I would, however, like to know more about him. If you expect me to protect his position here in the Bureau, I need the truth…not the cover story."
The Smoker just smirked as I gave a businesslike slap to Agent Krycek's personnel file and, I think, he knew perfectly well that it wasn't *that* jacket that my hands itched to touch, but he was still humoring me in those days. Still imagining I might come down off the fence on *his* side, so he gave me what I wanted.
Well, what I *said* I wanted.
So I always knew.
Everything.
I knew exactly who Alex Krycek was
Admittedly, the fact he seemed to jump from allegiance to allegiance over the next few years threw me at first but, as I came to understand the nature of the Consortium beast, I realized that Alex was simply transferring from department to department, as it were, inside the organization that owned him.
There were times he worked for the Conspirators and times he worked for the Resistance but, ultimately, the pay packet he drew always came from the same source.
And, by God, he was a good little agent. Born in the Ukraine, trained by the KGB as an assassin before he was even out of short-pants, with a chameleon-like ability to blend into any surroundings. He could speak five languages fluently, several more adequately. He could transform himself into any identity or nationality; play the naïve green agent or the psychotic assassin with equal ease.
Trying to understand him was like trying to catch quicksilver. I wavered between pure hatred and reluctant admiration. Several times, I could have killed him with my bare hands and walked away without a second glance. Sometimes, I wished I had his ability to simply do what had to be done without conscience or self-doubt.
And, always, just the sight of him was enough to make my blood roar through my veins.
My second temptation came the night Mulder brought him to my apartment at Crystal City.
I'm still ashamed of dragging him out onto my balcony and handcuffing him to that railing. It was so cold I wouldn't have left a stray mutt out that night, let alone a man who was already pale with pain from an, admittedly satisfying, application of my fist in his guts.
But what do you do when the star of all your wet dreams shamelessly and emotionlessly offers you a free pass into his ass, with this infuriating knowing smirk on his face?
You chain the little whore out on your balcony to cool his sluttish nuts and prove to him he's not as fucking irresistible as he thinks.
And then you spend the whole night with your dick in your hands and your teeth buried in your pillow to stifle your cries and you curse yourself for being the worst fool in the world.
~#~#~#~
It isn't necessary to like someone to find them physically attractive. You dick doesn't give a shit whether or not someone's a nice guy. It has a mind of its own. It's perfectly capable of jumping up and waving in welcome even while your hands are reaching for your weapon. That's the difference between your conscious mind and your subconscious reactions.
Where choice comes into play is in whether your actions are driven by your brain or your dick.
Where Alex Krycek was concerned, my brain was always firmly in the driving seat.
Until…and this is where you could misunderstand me if you don't listen carefully…he brought me back to life.
Yes, I know it was Alex who killed me in the first place and, believe me, that wasn't something I was going to forgive and forget in a hurry, but the fact he brought me back to life again changed my perception of him considerably.
I still didn't like him.
Hell, I *hated* him.
He used those damned nanocytes to keep me dancing like a puppet on the end of his strings.
Well, actually, he didn't.
He *threatened* to do so. He made it clear that he *would* be back for payment.
But he never did. Even when he was manipulating me to get Mulder off the life-support that was killing him, he barely mentioned the nanocytes in my bloodstream. He just used them to get my attention.
And although I continued to sit on my imaginary fence, I could feel my center of balance beginning to tilt in his direction.
By that time I had enough understanding of the game to realize that Alex had truly done the unthinkable. He'd gotten tired of being a pawn and was now careering around the board like a loose canon in complete disregard of the rules of the game.
Which was one hell of a stupid thing to do when he, of all people, knew there was no perceptible difference between the two sides of the conflict. He was out on his own, trying to cut *both* sides of the Consortium out of the loop and dealing directly with the alien resistance.
As if the alien resistance *weren't* just a different hat the Consortium was wearing.
And the more I considered the way he was acting, the more I began to wonder whether Alex had severe combat fatigue.
What you have to understand is that Alex *wasn't* a criminal, or a traitor, or a betrayer. Alex was a soldier. Yes he was a spy, but if he'd been an *American* spy planted in the KGB we would have seen him as a hero. Because he was a KGB agent, we perceived him as our enemy.
Which is ludicrous, given what I've already explained about the fact that the Consortium is a multi-national organization.
The bottom line is that Alex was a good and loyal agent of his own Government. He was an obedient soldier. Until he wised-up and realized that in real terms his Government didn't even exist.
At which time he found himself truly out in the cold. His own people had betrayed not only him, but the entire human race, and his only potential allies, myself and Mulder, were too alienated by our knowledge of whom he *had* been working for.
Another man might have had a nervous breakdown. Hell, I could tell you a dozen tales of guys I knew in
'nam who fell apart after the war, unable to cope with facing civilian life after their experiences as soldiers. Alex had seen more horrors than all of them put together and the war he'd been fighting was still raging around him. Is it any wonder that he became a rogue agent; using the skills he'd learned in battle to survive?
He became, in effect, an assassin. A gun for hire to the highest bidder. A man with apparently no conscience or guilt. A man capable of selling his temporary loyalty to anyone who was willing to buy it.
It wasn't his fault. It wasn't what he wanted. He just continued to play the role he'd been taught to play.
What's the difference between a murderer and a medal-wearing sniper?
Just a uniform.
Alex was lost, drowning, and the only lifeline I could throw him was a bullet in his head.
I pretty much had a handle on what was going on by then. I knew the identities of the key players. I had enough knowledge to make a difference if only I was free to operate without the threat of the nanocytes over my head.
I didn't have the time to try and convince him to trust me. He was half-crazed by that time, running around and snapping wildly at everyone like a wounded wolf. There was no way he was going to listen to me even if I had managed to pin him down long enough to tell him my plans.
And I had an obligation to look after Mulder, Scully and their baby. They needed my full attention, not the moments I could spare between the numerous negotiations necessary to protect Alex from the consequences of his poor choices.
So I took the biggest gamble of my life. Not impulsively. Not without a long and considered examination of the available facts. But, still, I didn't *know* Alex was carrying the Supersoldier virus in his bloodstream when I killed him. I just played the odds.
Sometimes in life you have to just trust your instincts.
Alex was supposedly being pay rolled by the rebels at that time and yet he was working with a supersoldier. Which either meant Alex was trying to play both sides against the middle himself, or the lines between the two factions of the Consortium had become so blurred that *no-one* truly knew which side anyone was on.
I was pretty sure that Alex had a plan. He *always* had a plan. He was playing his own oh-so-clever game.
The problem was that despite his genius, and Alex's intelligence is something I've never doubted, there comes a point when you're in so deep that you lose sight of the whole picture. My instinct was that Alex was just treading water, fully aware that the whole game was collapsing around him like a house of cards but unable to swim away because he was surrounded by sharks from all directions.
And I was pretty damned sure that one of those sharks would have infected him to ensure his loyalty.
Hell, *I* didn't trust Alex as far as I could throw him so I couldn't see why the aliens would feel any differently.
So I threw Alex out of the game for three months.
That was the easy part.
The hard part was seeing the look on Mulder's face when I did it.
Don't get me wrong. I…well…I kind of love Mulder in a…well, an almost paternal kind of way and I *knew* he found Alex as irritatingly attractive as I did. I fully understood that a lot of his hatred for Alex was down to his own self-loathing that he could continue to feel sexual desire for a man he had good reason to hate. I suppose I should have been proud of him for being able to detach his dick from his brain as well as he did.
But the truth was that I was chilled by the emotionless way he reacted to Alex's apparent demise. I would have understood regret or grief. I would have accepted gleeful delight. I definitely expected him to at least self-righteously point out I'd killed a man in cold blood.
He just blinked once and turned away, like I'd just put down a rabid sewer rat.
It made me wonder, just for a moment, whether he'd become a Super Soldier after all.
Then the *really* hard part was figuring out what to do with Alex's corpse.
If I hadn't fully believed he was going to leap back to his feet like Lazarus three months down the line, I wouldn't have been able to shoot him in the first place. That didn't relieve me of the problem of what to do with him in the meantime.
Dead bodies smell.
Dead decomposing bodies *really* smell.
And my experiences with Mulder and Billy Miles had proven that Alex *would* decompose until the Supersoldier virus gestated in his system.
So I *had* to bury him and I couldn't have it done 'properly'. For one thing, I really didn't want to explain a corpse with three gunshot wounds to my superiors. For another, I didn't want Alex's masters getting their hands on his body. They'd have *known* he'd be coming back to life and they sure as hell wouldn't be standing there with a vial of antidote for him. And last, but not least, I didn't want to have to get a court order and a JCB to exhume him when the time came.
That's why Alex ended up lying in a shallow grave in a copse of woods just off route 270.
I spent the next three months consolidating my own position. I played Alex's game, but I dealt myself a hand from a stacked deck. I had several advantages that Alex didn't. I had my own contacts and connections forged from my association with the Smoker. I had Mulder's knowledge and genius at my beck and call.
And, since no one knew what had happened to Alex, I *supposedly* was living in fear of the nanocytes in my bloodstream.
So it was relatively easy to convince the Conspirators that I had decided to finally jump off my fence and come down on their side. They were still in disarray, their leadership decimated by the alien rebels in the hangar, and they were crying out for new blood to swell their ranks.
I took a lesson out of Alex's book. I infiltrated, I gained trust and then I betrayed.
Of course, it wasn't as easy as I've just made it sound. It's five years later and they still haven't routed out *all* the alien collaborators. But we're still five years away from the projected invasion date and the closer we come to it, the more certain we become that the date will pass us without incident.
We've won the war.
At least as much as any war can ever be won.
And, though it sickens me to face the fact that many of the victors are just the losers wearing new masks, the people I love are safe.
Even Alex.
Especially Alex.
~#~#~#~
Things never go exactly the way you plan.
It was my intention to retrieve Alex from his grave a couple of days before his revival and be standing there to cure and then claim him.
Part of the deal I'd brokered with the Consortium was Alex's life. I became the proud new owner of a slightly battered, one-armed Russian assassin. And if the idea of being 'sold' a human being like a commodity made me sick to my stomach, the knowledge that the target on Alex's back had been eradicated by my deal went a long way towards soothing my conscience.
You can never trust someone's self-analysis, so there's little point me speculating on how I would have behaved if I *had* been there when Alex came back to life. I like to imagine everything would have turned out the same, that I wouldn't have taken any advantage of the power the Consortium gave me over him. If I were the kind of man who regarded my own desires over the rights of another person, surely I'd have accepted the Smoker's offer on the day I first laid eyes on Alex.
He was mine *then* for the taking and I have no doubt whatsoever that he would have willingly wriggled his ass for me like the well-trained little spy he was. I equally have no doubt that he would have made it more than worth my while to handcuff him to my bed rather than my balcony that night before he went to Tunguska with Mulder. In view of the tragic consequences of that fateful trip, I often have regrets that I released him the next morning but I have never had second thoughts about my refusal to take advantage of his vulnerability.
Alex would laugh in your face if you even suggested he was capable of being vulnerable. He's all swagger and poise. Cocky. Self-confident. Infuriatingly arrogant.
Incredibly vulnerable.
Heart-breakingly so.
Sometimes he seems less the man I love than a little boy playing dress-up. He's like a kid with a toy gun who was dreaming of being James Bond, only to suddenly wake up with blood on his hands and scarred body and a look of complete bewilderment in his eyes.
Then he throws on his leather jacket and his cocky smirk and, suitably camouflaged, he prowls out into the night like a hunting wolf. But the moon-shadow he throws, as he passes down the dark streets, is that of a wag-tailed puppy.
So, no. I truly don't believe I would have found it in myself to abuse him, even though his fear of the Consortium would have kept him docile at my heels.
I never got the chance to find out.
Circumstances, namely Mulder, forced me to be half-way across the country on the day he woke up and by the time I managed to reach the place I'd buried him there was nothing in that grave but leaves.
I'd at least had the foresight to leave a vial of the antidote in his leather jacket, so I prayed he was truly alive. I couldn't bear the thought of an alien creature prowling around the world in his body, of a stranger staring out of those stunning green eyes.
But there was nothing I could do about it. I had a war to fight. I had agents I needed to protect. I had a world I needed to save before I even dared to dream I might one day live in that world with Alex at my side. I knew, at least, that if Alex resurfaced within the Consortium he'd be wrapped up and delivered to me like a piece of retrieved luggage and so, when he failed to turn up, I chose to believe he'd finally had the sense to get the hell out of Dodge.
It was several months later, when the collapsing conspirators threw a last ditch attempt to kill Mulder, when Alex's name came up in conversation again. At the time, I put Mulder's strange mutterings down to
PTSD. He'd been tortured and brainwashed. It was no wonder he was seeing ghosts. Hell, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd seen a troupe of pink elephants dancing in tutus through that mockery of a courtroom.
It wasn't until much later, when Mulder was finally back at the Bureau, that he confessed he was still seeing ghosts. Not the entire cast who had surfed through his mind on the back of whatever drugs they were pumping through his system during the hearing, but the ghosts of his strange friends, the lone gunmen. In the same conversation, he mentioned he'd seen the ghost of Alex *before* he'd been captured.
The pieces slammed into place in my mind. Helped, undoubtedly, by the fact I had infiltrated the Consortium deeply enough to see the work they were doing on trying to combine
holo-technology with extra-sensory perception. The experiment had been pretty much a failure, given the fact that few people even possess any scientifically provable talent of ESP, but Mulder's experience with the alien artifacts had proven, to my mind at least, that he was capable of a level of perception that escaped most people. So it made sense that someone trying to guide his investigations might make use of the machine.
If, firstly, they had access to Consortium projects and, secondly, they understood Mulder's mind enough to utilize his ability to accept the improbable.
It scared the hell out of me, at first. But I thought it through, fact by fact, and came to the conclusion that whoever was using the machine on him was doing so benignly. The 'ghost' of Alex had appeared in an effort to help Mulder escape. The 'ghosts' of his friends were only appearing to give him advice or warnings. No one meant Mulder any harm.
More importantly, the 'ghosts' weren't ghosts.
So Alex was alive.
And, it seemed, he had at least learned his lesson enough to stay well under the radar as far as the Consortium was concerned.
It wasn't easy to just carry on with my life. By that time, I had revealed my true hand to the Consortium, so Alex's mantle of protection had been removed. My every instinct was screaming to go out there and find him but I didn't dare take the risk. His continued survival depended on the Consortium believing he was dead.
I knew, perfectly well, that if I told Mulder of my suspicion that his friends were alive he'd track them down. Mulder doesn't understand the concept of failure. He's like a dog with a bone, gnawing incessantly until he gets to what he wants. He'd have found his friends and, in doing so, he might have inadvertently signed their death warrants for real.
Okay.
He might have endangered Alex.
And if I wasn't allowed to go chasing after Alex, I sure as hell wasn't going to let Mulder do it.
~#~#~#~
For the next year or so, Alex made contact with Mulder five times. Then, as the Conspirators began to crumble and the 'resistance' began to take control of the game board, Alex dropped out of sight completely.
He wasn't needed anymore. He'd run out of ways to help and, frankly, had tired of the way Mulder greeted his every appearance with hostility and distrust. Even as a 'ghost' his presence was enough to stoke Mulder's hatred and I can understand how that would have hurt. Alex never had any defenses against Mulder. He still doesn't.
It used to make me jealous. I thought it was evidence that Mulder's opinion meant more to Alex than mine. Now I realize it's simply that Alex accepts he did things that aren't excusable, and he doesn't know how to defend himself against someone who demands justifications that just aren't there.
He doesn't have the same problem with me.
I was a soldier too.
I understand.
By that time, Alex had given up any pretence of being anything except what his training had made him. He had two choices. Surviving took money and he only had two job skills. Since a one-armed whore is at a disadvantage, he chose to make a living with his other talent.
It didn't take long for the FBI grapevine to spread the word there was a new player on the streets. Another nameless, faceless assassin whose only claim to particular notoriety was his reputation of only ever accepting marks who were undisputed scum. It didn't necessarily suggest a conscience behind the sniper's rifle. It could simply have been good sense. No one hunts *too* hard for a guy who's putting down the vermin of the streets. He took out drug dealers, pimps, rapists, pedophiles, members of crime syndicates, known criminals who were too smart and savvy to leave proof of their crimes but who were undoubtedly guilty in the eyes of the local cops.
Since his emergence into my consciousness co-incided with the impeachment of the President, I didn't have time to pursue my vague suspicions. I did, however, arrange for all the reports of this assassin's probable hits to be forwarded to my desk and often, late at night, I'd peruse them for the slightest clue.
The fact he left no prints anywhere could have been simple professionalism, rather than a suggestion he always wore gloves. But the few eyewitness reports had suggested a man with dark hair and dark clothes and the fact that none mentioned any anomaly with his left hand didn't necessarily mean it wasn't Alex. He'd had plenty of time to get himself fitted with a top-of-the-range prosthesis.
It was several months after the reports first started arriving when I knew for certain that the assassin was Alex.
An over-zealous cop had managed to backtrack the slaying of a multiple rapist to the father of one of his victims. It hadn't taken long for the guy to break because he wasn't ashamed of what he'd done. He'd hired someone to kill the bastard who'd brutalized his sixteen-year-old daughter and, despite his lawyer urging him to shut the hell up, he'd been too filled with self-righteousness to deny it.
He didn't know Alex's name. He didn't even have a good enough description for the police-artist to come up with a sketch. He said he'd been drunk in a bar, telling the barkeep and anyone else who'd listen that his daughter had been raped and the police *knew* who'd done it but that the DA had thrown the case out for lack of evidence. He admitted saying he wanted the bastard dead. Several times.
He said he hadn't been sober enough to remember the face of the guy who followed him out of the bar and offered to 'take care of it'. He hadn't even believed the guy was serious, until he read the paper two days later. But he *had* gone to the place agreed and left $2000 in untraceable notes in payment.
And all he had to say about the assassin was that he'd been surprised how reasonable the guy's rates were and that his voice had been the husky, beguiling tones of the devil himself.
And so I was sure I'd found my husky voiced devil.
No.
I didn't call the Philly PD and tell them the identity of their killer. I justified my silence by the fact that Alex had done the world, and in particular the sixteen-year-old population of Philadelphia, a favor.
I *did* promise myself that if he ever crossed the line, if he ever took the life of anyone who didn't belong in an electric chair anyway, I'd turn him in.
And I would have.
But he never did and so I managed to stretch my beleaguered conscience enough to stay out of his business, even though his choice of profession had convinced me, finally, that there couldn't and wouldn't ever be a future for us.
He was a killer. He stood against everything I believed in.
And, although I understood him and even empathized with the choice he'd made, there was no way I could reconcile my world with his.
I loved him enough to close my eyes to his nature from a distance but I couldn't bear to look him in the face and witness, first hand, the soulless monster he'd become. I'd left him the antidote to the Supersoldier virus. What I'd failed to do was come up with an antidote to the cancer that was eating him up from inside.
I'd witnessed enough guys go off the deep-end on their return from 'nam to understand his inability to accept his war was over. The only cure for *that* disease, for the sickness that was eroding him, was a bullet.
And I didn't have it in me to shoot him again.
Not even via the cowardly way of a telephone call to the Philadelphia authorities.
~#~#~#~
Another year passed, and then another, and still I kept loose tabs on Alex, as though he was an addiction I couldn't shake, but I was never tempted to go after him. He moved several times, of course, moving his activities from one city to another whenever the situation became a little too hot to handle, and I sometimes imagined how lonely and pointless his life must have seemed to him. I even fantasized that I could turn up on his doorstep and he'd be so relieved to see a friendly face that he'd instantly agree to turn his back on the life he was living and come home with me.
Then, obviously, I'd remember that the last time he'd seen my face I was firing a 9mm round into his forehead and so the chances of me surviving long enough to step through his doorway were slim to none.
And so it would have gone on.
Endlessly.
Pointlessly.
Until one day a report would have ended up on my desk that Alex had been captured or killed.
Instead, I received a telephone call from Marita Covarrubias telling me that Alex was in hospital in
New York..
Shot not by the police or the FBI but by a drug addict who'd attempted to rob the restaurant Alex was eating in. Even more surprisingly, Alex was being hailed as a hero. He'd apparently taken two gut shots while saving the life of a three-year-old.
"Why are you calling me about this?" I demanded. "What does Alex Krycek have to do with me?"
"I was there," she reminded me, her voice gentle. "When you demanded Alex as part of the price of your loyalty to the Consortium."
"And do you also remember the fact that my offer of loyalty was false?"
"Yes," she agreed. "But your desire for Alex wasn't."
I wanted to deny it, call her a fool, a liar or worse. But I couldn't. I couldn't speak at all and my silence was answer enough.
"Don't you think it's time for Alex to come in from the cold, Walter? Don't you think it's time you went and claimed what's yours?"
"He's not 'mine'," I snapped back, embarrassed and angry with the reminder that I had, indeed, purchased Alex. The fact I'd done it with false coin didn't negate the deal I had struck.
"His heart is."
"Don't be stupid," I replied, which was pretty rude but she'd shocked me out of my normal mantle of politeness with her comment. "Alex Krycek is a stone-hearted, cold-blooded killer."
"Of course he is. That's why he's lying in a hospital and two parents are sitting at home with their three-year-old son and calling Alex a saint."
She had a point. A *good* point. Though, if I knew Alex, he'd be as mystified as me as to why he'd done it.
Though it wasn't unprecedented. When Alex worked on pure instinct he could be surprisingly compassionate. I'd always wondered about the anomalies in his behavior. Best example being the way he saved Scully and William from Billy Miles, only to later turn around and threaten their lives himself.
Perhaps there was a simple explanation after all.
Perhaps the *real* Alex, the man underneath the cold exterior, was basically a nice guy. Perhaps his natural instincts were those of a *good* person and it was only the persona of Alex the trained assassin that was capable of cruelty and indifference.
I wasn't suggesting to myself that he was schizophrenic. Just that he had two faces, like we all do. The public Alex and the private Alex. And just because the public Alex was a
hardass, didn't necessarily mean the private one was the same.
Though I could imagine he'd reached the point where he wasn't sure himself where one Alex stopped and the other one started.
"You think he cares about me?" I asked Marita, in an embarrassingly hopeful voice.
"I know he'd *like* to," she replied carefully. "And he *will* accept you if you go and claim him, Walter. We were trained to *want* someone to take charge. It's…it's very hard to be alone."
It struck me then how hard it must have been for her to make the call. I'd forgotten how fragile she was at Mulder's hearing and on the few occasions I'd met her since. She was still beautiful but terribly frail, like a hothouse flower ripped out at the roots and cast adrift into a world of dangerous weeds. I'd forgotten that she, like Alex, had been one of the Consortium's super spies. Both gorgeous, deadly and obedient almost to the point of mindlessness until their loyalty had been abused past the point of endurance.
And thinking about her dissolution, about the way she had crumbled when the structure of her life was destroyed, I finally understood that I *could* accept Alex's flaws. I could accept that he was no more able to live in the real world than she was. The only difference between the two of them was that Alex was better at masking his vulnerability.
So, perhaps, the truth was that he was even more fragile than she was. At least Marita was strong enough to show her soft belly to the world. Alex was incapable of trusting anyone enough to appear to be anything other than a killer.
"I love him," I admitted, and although I'd expected the admission to be embarrassing it was, instead, oddly liberating.
"So you'll go and fetch him home?" she pleaded.
I liked the sound of that. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much that I was tempted to yell out of my office for my secretary to book me the next flight to New York.
But I didn't.
I'm not an impulsive man.
"You said his heart is mine. I want to believe you, but if I just turn up in that hospital I'll never know whether that's true. He's…well, he's offered himself to me before and it definitely wasn't his heart he was offering."
"Talk to him," she suggested. "Let him know how you feel. Give him a reason to trust you. We…well, we don't trust easily."
"You know him better than me, Marita. Help me. Tell me what would convince *you* that I'm serious."
She was silent for a long time, so long that I was grinding my teeth with frustration before she spoke again.
"Flowers."
"Flowers?" I repeated incredulously. It was as though I'd asked for the combination of Fort Knox and been told the answer was 1,2,3,4. It couldn't be that easy. Could it?
She laughed prettily. "Not just *any* flowers though, Walter. Do your research. Make sure you send him exactly the right message. I guarantee he'll understand."
I stared at the phone for a long time after she'd hung up. It sounded so damned ridiculous to send flowers to an assassin. A *male* assassin. I'd be lucky if he didn't save them up 'til he got discharged then come to DC and bury them in my ass. I winced at the thought of a dozen thorn-encrusted roses getting shoved where the sun didn't shine.
Then I thought about what I'd just thought and decided my subconscious was sending me a message.
Roses.
Red roses.
Surely they *had* to mean 'I love you?'
But I decided I had better check. After all these damned years, I wasn't going to blow my chance with Alex over something as stupid as choosing the wrong flowers to send. So I googled 'meaning of flowers' and was feeling pretty smug with myself until I discovered it wasn't an exact science. People didn't necessarily agree on the specific meanings. I was staring at a potential landmine.
I decided Marita had a surprising sense of humor.
I also decided that it was going to take far more than one bunch of flowers to hold my long overdue conversation with Alex.
In the end, I decided to choose one website and stick with it. Dancing around from one site to the next would be courting disaster. The one I settled on in the end was called "Flowers to Moscow".
The irony amused me.
I started with red roses, naturally. I was right about them meaning love. To my surprise, they meant more than just love.
/Love, desire, respect, courage and a job well done/
Which seemed like a damn good opening volley to me.
After checking with the hospital and learning that Alex was expected to remain there for about two weeks, I decided I had time to draw the conversation out. Although 'conversation' was going to be a misnomer if he didn't reply.
I'd give him a week, I decided, and then, if he hadn't responded to my messages, I'd fly over there anyway and hope that I'd at least softened him up enough to listen to what I had to say. So I filled in a form for a week's annual leave, starting the following weekend, and advised my secretary to keep my diary cleared for at least a further week in case I extended my vacation.
Optimism is never a bad thing.
The second day, my choice was far harder. I was really tempted to send Stock
/Bonds of affection, You will always be beautiful to me/
Simply because it was true.
But it sounded trite so I sent Jonquil instead.
/Violent Sympathy and Desire, Love me, Affection returned/
I had a few doubts about the 'violent' part, but it just seemed too apt to ignore and there was no point pussyfooting around. Hell, we'd both killed each other. It was a bit late to send him a bunch of white carnations.
Believe it or not, I was enjoying myself.
The third day, I chose Gladioli.
/I am really sincere/
I sincerely hoped that Marita wasn't pulling my leg about Alex understanding the language of flowers. I don't even want to mention how much they cost me. It turned out to be the wrong time of year and so I had to have them flown in specially. Having said that, there *was* a thrill to tracking the damned things down over the Internet and arranging for their delivery. I've always liked rising to a challenge.
The fourth day, I sent peonies.
I couldn't resist. I actually laughed out loud as I read the definition on my computer and my secretary consequently spent the whole day giving me strange looks.
/Healing, Life, Happy Marriage, Gay life/
I couldn't resist the 'gay life' and I didn't even hesitate about the 'marriage' part. The way I saw it, if Alex and I were going to have *any* chance together we were going to have to jump into the relationship with both feet. There wasn't going to be any turning back, ever, and that's as damned fine a definition of a happy marriage as any other.
The fifth day, Friday, I was trying to decide between Heliotrope (Devotion, Eternal Love), which I thought might be coming on a bit strong and Alyssum (Worth beyond beauty). I was definitely swaying towards the alyssum, feeling that it was a very appropriate comment to make to someone who'd undoubtedly become jaded with people only being attracted to him because of his looks.
Before I'd made my mind up, my secretary rang through to tell me I'd had a delivery of flowers.
"What kind of flowers?" I asked.
After a long silence, she admitted she wasn't sure and my world turned upside down.
I remember feeling nauseous as I instructed her to bring them in. I was half-certain he'd sent me a bouquet of withered blooms.
/rejected love/
And at that moment I silently cursed Marita's name.
When I saw the flowers, which thankfully were in full bloom, I understood my secretary's confusion. Strictly speaking, it was a *plant* and it wasn't one that I recognized. It was vaguely like an African violet, but I had absolutely no idea what it was.
"I need to know what it is," I insisted, so fiercely that my poor secretary blanched.
She offered to go over to the local library during her lunch break. I remembered enough manners to thank her for her offer, and then I grabbed the plant and took it straight to the local florists.
"What is it?" I demanded.
After a little conferring, they decided it was a Gloxinia.
"What does it mean?"
They gave me blank looks so I grabbed the plant once more and raced back to the Hoover. I ran past my secretary's desk, completely disregarding her attempt to give me my messages, and logged into "Flowers from Moscow."
I'm told my whoop of happiness was heard on the next floor.
/Love at first sight/
I was grinning so wide it hurt my jaw. Then, as I looked around my office, I remembered that day, twelve years earlier, when my heart had hammered and my cock had leapt and my collar had suddenly felt two sizes two small as I first laid eyes on Alex Krycek.
And I wanted to cry for all the wasted years. For the hurts we'd inflicted on each other. For the hatred and the pain and the violent misunderstandings. For the twelve years we'd both spent yearning for something we'd both believed out of our grasp. Something that had been right there in our hands if we'd only known to reach out and admit how we felt about each other.
I was still sniffling slightly when I grabbed my jacket and strode out of my office. By this time my secretary was pointedly checking her watch and clearly hoping I'd leave early on my vacation.
I obliged.
~#~#~#~
I took a cab from the airport to the hospital, stopping en route to buy a huge bunch of Peach roses.
They weren't the most romantic flowers, if you were considering meaning rather than beauty - and they were, definitely, the most gorgeous shade of delicate peach - but they said exactly what I wanted them to.
/Closing the deal/
Okay, it was blunt and to the point but, flowers aside, Alex and I were *guys*. We were more spit and sawdust than romantic walks by moonlight. I wasn't offering to buy him a house in the suburbs where we were going to play happy families. I wanted to shake hands on the notion that I was planning to take him home with me and spend the rest of my life fucking him senseless.
Not that I objected to the idea of buying a house in the suburbs and fucking him senseless *there* but I'm sure you get my point. We were both grown men who had devoted far too many years to our own right hands and, now understanding had been reached, I wasn't planning to seal the deal between us with a mere *kiss*.
I hoped they were feeding him well at the hospital because, after I'd spent a week in his hospital room describing exactly what I was planning to do to him when he was discharged, I couldn't envisage either of us remembering to call room service for the foreseeable future.
He was speechless when I walked into his room. His eyes *did* flare momentarily with alarm as I stepped inside and instinct made him reach automatically for a gun he wasn't wearing, but his hand arrested half-way to his ribs as he finally took in the bouquet of flowers I was carrying. Then, his eyes widened and darkened with an emotion far stronger than fear.
There was a brief moment when I actually thought he was going to cry. His eyes were darting between the flowers and my face and the look on his face was pure incredulity. My heart clenched as I saw the emotions chasing over his features. Hope and disbelief and fear and a terrible, desperate longing to believe.
I wanted to throw the flowers down on the floor, race over to his bed, throw my arms around him and enfold his body inside my embrace. I wanted my touch to make him the promises that my mouth wouldn't. I wanted my fingers to express the regret and sorrow and love that had driven me, finally, to his side. I wanted to hug him tight inside my arms and let him feel the promise of my protection for the rest of his life.
But I'm not an impulsive man.
So I waited.
And, sure enough, he quickly shrugged off his momentary lapse of control and offered me his familiar, trademark smirk.
"Bout time you got your ass here, Walt. At this rate I thought I was going to come down with hay fever."
He gestured lightly at the numerous flowers that were crowding every available surface in the hospital room. I stared with undeniable jealousy at the flowers that *I* hadn't sent. I made a point of checking every single card, while he watched me with amused eyes, until I was satisfied that none of them were from a rival. He had a huge bunch of now slightly wilted roses from Marita, bouquets from, seemingly, every member of the family of the little boy he'd saved and even a display from the office of New York's mayor.
"Seems you're a hero," I muttered, a little snidely I admit.
"Good job they don't really know me, huh, Walt?" he replied, with a wry smile.
"Maybe they know you more than you think," I said, and his eyes flashed with surprise. He even blushed slightly but then he recovered with aplomb and smirked again.
"Nothing from Mulder," he purred, and made a point of stretching in bed like a lazy cat.
"That's because he thinks you're dead," I snapped back.
He looked genuinely surprised. "Still?" he asked. "Haven't the gunmen come back to life yet?"
"They seem to feel safer as ghosts, and who can blame them?"
"But didn't you tell him about the ESPer machine?"
"What for? The gunmen are giving him as much help as ever, from the great beyond, and Mulder doesn't have a problem with believing he's talking to ghosts so where's the harm? Besides. If he figured out the 'ghosts' aren't really ghosts, he might have come looking for you."
"How would he know where to look?" Alex challenged.
"I did," I pointed out, and he paled a little.
"Hmm. I wondered about that," he admitted finally
"Oh, I've been following your new career closely," I told him, and was gratified to see a look of horrified embarrassment in his eyes before his face slipped into a stone mask of indifference.
We slipped into an uneasy silence.
"So," he said casually, when it was clear I was prepared to wait all day for him to move the conversation onwards. "You here to arrest me?"
He said it like a joke, or maybe a challenge, but I was pretty damned sure the stiff, defensive set of his shoulders had little to do with fear of arrest. Fear of betrayal, possibly. Fear I'd set him up for a fall.
"That's not the deal I came here to close," I replied, slapping my flowers down on his bed for emphasis.
His mask slipped and he looked strangely defenseless for a moment. Then again, it's hard to maintain a tough-guy image when you're lying all bandaged up in a hospital bed.
"So what happens next, Walt? We ride off into the sunset together and live happy ever after?"
Despite his sarcastic tone, it was a valid question. One I'd spent a week considering carefully.
"The war's over bar the shouting and I've got my twenty-five years in. I'll tender my resignation and we'll go somewhere no one knows us. We'll start again. A new life. Together."
He shook his head violently, rearing up in his bed like a striking cobra. "Damn you. It's not that easy," he shouted.
"Of course it is," I told him, my tone firm and implacable. "I love you. You love me. What else matters?"
He deflated like a pricked balloon, all the air whooshing out of his lungs in shock at my words.
Which just went to prove that 'saying it with flowers' could get your foot in the door but nothing compared with the impact of the real thing.
I have to give it to him that he rallied quickly, pulling his self-defensive shields up so fast that if I'd been touching him I'd have lost my fingers.
"Look, I always figured you wanted my ass," he said, his voice dripping with defiance, "So if you want to fuck me, just cut the bullshit and say so, okay?"
Bit late for that, love. Never should have sent me the Gloxinia if you wanted to play *that* game.
I figured it was private Alex who'd ordered the flowers and public Alex who couldn't cope with the consequences of his impulsive action. It probably should have irritated me, but I'd known Alex for twelve years. He'd always been this prickly, and I'd fallen in love with him regardless, so it was a bit late to decide I couldn't deal with this aspect of his personality.
"Of course I want to fuck you, you stupid shit," I told him, and struggled not to grin at his wide-eyed surprise. "If I'd wanted to spend the rest of our lives just whispering sweet nothings to you, I'd have stayed in DC, called you on the phone and saved myself the air fare."
For a minute he just stared at me in complete disbelief. Then his mouth began to twitch into a smile and a rumble of surprised laughter rose in his throat and escaped into the room.
It was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard in my life. Alex Krycek laughing. Because of me. And we just stared at each other then, as though we'd never seen each other before in our lives, as though we'd just met and he wasn't a spy and I wasn't an AD and the smoker wasn't sitting there watching our meeting with that sardonic sneer on his face.
In that hospital room, after twelve years of denial, we finally truly met each other for the first time.
"I want to kiss you," I told him, and he nodded, his eyes wide and mesmerized as I moved to sit on his bed and leaned down to wrap my left hand behind his neck, pulling his face up to mine and pressing my lips against his.
Soft, yielding, generous, welcoming, all the things I'd dreamed his mouth might be, all the things I knew Alex wasn't. Yet he was. He met my mouth with a gentle sigh of anticipation and his lips yielded at the first, hot press of my hungry, questing tongue. I wanted to be gentle, to be slow and steady. I wanted to give him time to adjust to the feel of my flesh upon his own. But I couldn't. The moment I touched him, I was lost in a ravenous hunger that couldn't be sated. Alex was the drink that increased thirst instead of quenching. His mouth was a cavern of treasure that needed to be pounded wide with a hot thrusting tongue, until he was gasping for breath and trembling in my arms. Then his tongue had to be fully explored with licks and sucks and every millimeter of his lips bruised dark with my kisses.
When I'd finally satisfied myself that there wasn't a place in or on his mouth that hadn't been marked by my possession, when I was sure my scent was so embedded in his taste buds that he'd never wash my taste out of his mouth, I moved down to his chin, gnawing and grazing on the dark morning stubble, nibbling the pale flesh beneath until it was as red and swollen as his lips.
Along his jaw line to his ears. Cute, pixie ears that suited his cute, pixie nose. Not that I was suicidal enough to say that out loud. And he just gasped and writhed beneath my assault, the fingers of his right hand clenching my waist, digging into my flesh like the claws of an ecstatic cat, and he was so wonderfully, beautifully, submissively compliant that I completely forgot we were in a hospital and why until a polite cough from the doorway brought me spinning back down to earth with a bump.
Two minutes later and the nurse would probably have seen enough to report me for gross indecency.
I was so hard I wasn't sure I could stand up without it snapping off in my pants. From the look of disappointment on Alex's heat-flushed cheeks I was pretty sure I wasn't the only one. It took me a few minutes to catch my breath, while the nurse took Alex's temperature and blood pressure and tutted at us both with remarkable sternness considering the fact she was struggling to keep a smirk off her face.
"So," I said, when she finally left the room with the warning she'd be back with Alex's breakfast *immediately*. "Do we have a deal?"
I waited for the smart remark, the off-hand flip comment, the sarcastic drawl. All I got was a breathless, "Oh god, yeah."
~#~#~#
It took me three more days and several cold showers before I broke Alex loose from
Colditz. By that time, I realized the word had spread around the hospital and the nurses all took turns to 'accidentally' walk in on us when we were busy exploring each other's tonsils. I came to the conclusion they didn't have cable on the ward and so Alex and I were the only entertainment in town.
By the time I got him discharged, we were both so frustrated and horny that it was only Alex's still tender stomach that prevented me pushing him into the nearest alleyway and taking him up against the wall. So we jumped into a taxi instead, and I told the driver to break the land-speed record back to my hotel.
We hadn't mentioned the future again. I took it as read that 'closing the deal' meant Alex had agreed with my plan to start a new life together and Alex had been more interested in playing tongue-tango than talking whenever I arrived in his hospital room.
So I was a bit startled when we walked into my hotel room together, after maintaining a discreet distance from each other in the hallway in view of the fact I was booked in under my real name, and he transformed instantly from limpet-like, cuddly kitten to spitting, bristling tiger.
"Okay," he demanded. "Bottom line, Walt. What's your game?"
"Huh?" I asked him, intelligently.
"Cut the crap," he roared, his expression twisting between fury and pain. "I believed you, you asshole. I actually fucking believed you." He slammed his fist so hard against the wall that I winced in sympathy.
"What have I done?" I asked him, with calmness I didn't feel, and I moved to block the doorway.
"I'm not your toy, Skinner. I'm not your fucking whore," he yelled, his hand clenching in and out of a fist and his eyes so murderous that I had no doubt that if he'd been armed, I would be lying in a pool of my own blood.
"I love you, Alex," I told him. "I don't know what I've done to make you doubt that, and I'm sorry, but I *do* love you."
His mouth twisted into a sneer of derision and he spat deliberately on the floor at my feet. I forced myself to stand still, not to react. Hell, if he wanted to spit in my *face* I'd let him as long as he'd stay long enough for me to put right whatever had gone wrong between us. I told myself to look past the moment, see past the fury in his face and see the wounded hurt that I knew had to be lurking in his eyes.
And it was.
Alex's eyes bore the same shell-shocked incomprehension as the survivor of a bomb attack. He had the same vacant, horrified, inward stare as someone drowning in memories too terrible to remember.
Realization struck me so unexpectedly that I gasped with pain. No one else would have seen anything wrong in my behavior. No one else would have seen it as cruel. No one else would have reacted the same way.
But this wasn't no one. This was Alex. And he had his own emotional buttons, his own memory trip-wires that had to be navigated with the care of a man stepping through a minefield.
I had just climbed out of the taxi we'd been kissing each other in and had pointedly removed my embrace and towed him through the hotel in my wake like an embarrassed trick sneaking a rent boy into his room.
I'm not an impulsive man.
But I can learn.
Keeping myself between Alex and the door, I reached for the internal phone and called room service.
"I want a bottle of your best champagne and a dozen long-stemmed red roses," I asked, while Alex listened to me suspiciously. "Then I want dinner for two served in my suite. No. I don't want to see a menu. I just want something really special. Yes. It's a celebration. Or at least I hope it will be. It depends whether he accepts my proposal or not."
I didn't wait for the housekeeper's squawk of surprise, I was too busy dropping the phone and rushing to Alex who actually looked like he was going to faint.
Thankfully, he pulled himself together and just swayed unsteadily on his feet. I don't think his ego could have coped with such a display of vulnerability.
"I am not ashamed of you, Alex, and neither was I trying to belittle you. I think I just proved that. My only concern was that I'm booked here under my own name and it's possible that someone might see me here and mention your presence at the Bureau. You're supposed to be dead, remember?"
"Yeah," he agreed, a little shakily.
"So I just think it would be wiser to keep our relationship low key for the couple of weeks it takes me to wrap up my affairs. When we start our new life, we won't have to worry about appearances any more."
"Sure," he agreed, shrugging casually, and his eyes begged me to drop the subject.
So I did. I knew why he'd reacted so badly. He knew I knew. But if he needed me to pretend I didn't, it was fine by me.
"I'll…um…just grab a shower, okay?" he asked me, his face a study of cool poise.
"Of course," I agreed, and my heart stopped hammering. He was staying. Crisis averted.
He was still in the bathroom when the champagne, flowers and meal arrived. The bellhop took several curious glances at the closed bathroom door while I fetched him a tip and I sighed internally. Word traveled fast in hotels. Please god Mulder wouldn't turn up on one of his typical 'track down the AD and confess all before he gets a report on your behavior' missions. I could just imagine the receptionist gleefully telling him I was too busy proposing to a male green-eyed sex god to receive visitors.
Alex was in the bathroom so long that I could only assume he'd either had cold feet and climbed out of the window - not an advisable course of action for a one-armed guy in a twelfth-floor hotel suite - or he was cleaning more than his hair. The thought caused my dick to jump to instant, throbbing attention and I gulped down a glass of $200 a bottle champagne without even tasting it.
He was still dripping water when he stepped back into the room, his muscular body glistening, his poor truncated arm defiantly displayed, his jaw set firmly as he revealed his naked magnificence to me for the first time. His eyes dared me to find fault, challenged me to react to the scars
criss-crossing almost every inch of exposed skin. Some so old they were pale blurs on his flesh, some like the two barely healed bullet wounds in his belly, still vivid and red.
"It's a *kind* of immortality," he said, his voice husky and tight, "but the price is kinda high."
Again, I wanted to throw my arms around him and hug the pain away.
Again, I understood that the only thing that could ever truly hurt Alex was the loss of his pride.
"Forget dinner," I growled. "You're so fucking sexy, the only thing I want to eat in this room is you."
And, oh, if I could capture in words the look in his eyes at that moment, if I could find a way to express the way his dull, wounded eyes blazed into liquid green fires, if I could share with you the way it felt to know that I had the power to eradicate his self-loathing with nothing more than my sincere and genuine desire.
I didn't sweep him into my arms with the suave grace of Rhett Butler and carry him to the bed like a precious jewel. I drove into him like a quarterback and we landed on the mattress like a couple of bull-elephants, grunting and groaning, our tongues battling for supremacy as I ground the hardness of my cotton-sheathed cock against Alex's silken, dark length.
I was too occupied pinning his head between my hands as I plundered his mouth to assist more than bucking my hips upward as he struggled to undo my pants one-handed. He gave up trying to unfasten my belt and just unzipped me instead, his greedy hand diving inside to haul my cock and balls out of my boxers and onto his groin. He shifted beneath me, his wet naked skin slippery as an eel as he squirmed until I was cushioned between his open thighs, and then he drew his knees up and began to insistently guide my cock towards his ass.
I broke free of the kiss long enough to gasp "What about your stitches?" only, for some reason, what came out of my mouth was "Condoms and lube".
"I'm lubed and I'm clean. Fuck me already."
I shook my head frantically. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. I was still dressed, dammit. It was supposed to be a slow, careful and loving seduction. Not a crazed dive between his legs and my cock driving into his hole before I'd even kissed him properly.
He grabbed my cock and forced its head into the hot, velvet tightness of his ass.
"Fuck me, Walt. Isn't twelve years of fucking foreplay enough?"
The man had a point, I decided, and slid home in one, smooth, grunting push.
Oh god, he was perfect, from the tight silky-soft furnace embracing my cock to the way his eyes closed in bliss as I began to move inside him. His head tipped back, exposing his neck to the eager bite of my hungry teeth as I marked him as mine, inside and out, my hips driving into his as I forced myself harder and deeper into his willing depths, my rhythm guided by his rapid gasps of pleasure.
"Mine," I growled, which was the kind of thing I'd only ever heard in movies and could never imagine myself saying. But it was the only word that wanted to escape my throat as I slid in and out of his delicious ass. "Mine, mine, mine…" over and over, as I finally claimed him
in a way that didn't feel dirty like the smoker's offer or wrong like my deal with the consortium. I claimed him as a lover. As an equal. As the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
And preferably *in*.
~#~#~#~
And that's it, really.
Another year has passed, and Mulder still doesn't know Alex is alive. He's still talking to his 'ghosts' and moving like a rising star through the Bureau as he continues to find the last remnants of the Conspiracy.
I can't remember whether I mentioned Scully. Not a lot to say there anyway. She left the Bureau, married a Forensic Scientist, retrieved William from whatever Briar Patch she hid him in and is living as an MD in Seattle. Mulder spent Christmas there, so I guess they're both happy enough.
Aloysha and I moved to Toronto. He still plays the hard-ass criminal in public. Our neighbors have a regrettable tendency to cross the road whenever they see him sauntering down the street wearing his black leather and his sneer. There's no point confronting him about it, because he's perfected an innocent 'who me?' kind of grin that turns me into putty in his hands.
At least he hasn't killed anyone since we moved here and, for Alex Krycek, that's one hell of a step forward in his socialization progress.
I quickly got bored with retirement and started up a small security consultancy business. Aloysha loves it. He gets to chauffer me around and look mysterious and dangerous to my clients. Since the most exciting work we get is recommending burglar alarm systems that's *all* he gets to do, but at least he manages to keep his image of big, bad guy in a leather jacket and that seems enough to keep him perfectly content.
That and the fact we're still humping like rabbits on speed.
And every week, without fail, I call in the florists and buy him a bouquet of pink and white roses.
/I love you still…and I always will/
The End.
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