Monastir

I was in the middle of taking a shower the first time she called after Pennsylvania. She wanted to meet in ten minutes.

My hair was still wet by the time I got there. She was sitting in a corner booth with her hands together on the table, waiting. I remember being angry, irritated. My prosthetic was chafing me horribly, the back of my neck was prickly with water and sweat. I hate being in a hurry. I don't like being summoned.

She didn't say anything as I took a seat across from her and asked how she was doing. Embarassed by my anger, I squirmed while she stared at the table.

'Is he dead?' she said finally. I don't remember how I answered, but I remember my voice cracked. All my fault. She looked at me coldly while I fumbled over my words, the disgust was plain on her face. She left me sitting in the dark booth of the dingy bar, cigarette smoke stinging my eyes.

The next time she told me to come to her place. I expected to get as far as her front door, but she ushered me inside and had me sit on the couch. She grilled me gently about a lot of things, some things were relevant to Mulder, others were not. At that point I decided that the only meetings I'd attend would be the ones that I arrange myself. But she stopped asking questions and looked at the floor, her jaw shifting back and forth while she considered something that I could only guess at.

I got up to leave because I didn't know what else to do.

'Don't go,' I heard behind me. Softly, almost pleading.

She was sitting on the couch, a fading bruise still on her cheek, lips pressed together as if to withold a sob. Her eyes were wide, but no tears came because she would never cry in front of me. It wasn't something I could walk away from without an eternity of self-punishment. Scully, so small and alone, asking me to stay when I was taking the steps to remove myself from her life which I had so thoroughly destroyed. I couldn't bear it. I settled beside her on the cushions and draped my good arm over her shoulders, whispering unacknowledged apologies into her hair.

My weeks are marked by visits to her place. I can't help myself. Maybe it's the novelty of having a place to go to, or maybe it's something else. Sometimes she eyes me as she opens the door, but I don't care that she estimates how pathetic I am each time I show up. I checked in my pride a long time ago when it came to her.

We sit and talk. At first our conversations centered around Mulder, but as news of him waned she mercifully decided that speculation wouldn't do any good. All the better for me.

So we talk of other things, little things that don't matter to me but make her stop and think. We talk about what I know, what I don't know. We talk about the dead - the smoking man, the Brit, the late Diana Fowley. We don't discuss her sister. We seldom talk about ourselves.

She asked me once about my arm. I grimaced in between words and she caught it. I rolled up my sleeve and let her look it over because she wanted to; I accepted the pills she gave me because the pain was particularly bad that night. My head was heavy and my ears were buzzing as I stammered out what little I could recall. Fragments, really - nothing that could form a whole, coherent story. I blamed it on the pills, but now I realize that it's because I've never had to explain it before. No one had ever wanted to know.

"What's this from?" she asks tonight. On the back of my neck I feel the tickling numbness that accompanies her question.

I'm sitting at her dining table while she stands next to me. 'Forj Sidi Toui,' I want to tell her, 'They did this to me every day before Marita came to get me.' I turn in my chair to face her, unsure if I should answer.

I feel her fingers run gently over the length of the concave blemish, as if to fill in the flesh that had been lost. I see her frown as she finds the intersecting lines, then the hardened mass of scar tissue that continues down my back.

"Krycek," she says, a little sternly, her hand still down the back of my shirt.

She looks at me strangely, brows furrowed. I shy away and shrug in response. There is nothing for me to say.

She slides her hand to my cheek, then smooths her fingers over my temple and hair, like she did that night when I came to see her. I press my forehead into her hip without thinking. Her hand comes around to cradle my skull.

Nothing. I think of nothing in her embrace. I empty my mind and ignore the pulsing of my phantom limb. There is no me, no Mulder, no Scully. My instincts are dulled, I can only feel my breathing. In this state there are no uncertainties nor are there concrete truths. I can never tell in these moments if things are suddenly clear to me or if my mind is muddled. It's a vacancy that I don't often visit.

An unknown amount of time has passed when I realize that this isn't how it's supposed to be.

"Hate me," I say after a long silence. Her fingers are still in my hair.

"What?"

"Hate me."

I know I can never finish this if she doesn't.

"The Rebels are winning," he says.

"Oh?"

"Plans are speeding up, supposedly."

"So what's the new timetable?"

He pauses. How dramatic. I'm asking him about the end of the world and he acts as if he's telling me a ghost story.

"Don't know yet," he shrugs. "But the guy you were asking about - Mulder? They're bringing him back."

"Back?"

"He was never here," he snaps. "He was off- you know. With the others." His hand waves in the air as frowns at me impatiently.

"Where can I find him?"

"No idea. Kaiser's men know, though."

"Strughold's guy?"

"Yeah," he says, smirking. "He wasn't even in the U.S. when that shit went down at El Rico."

"So why are they bringing Mulder back?"

"He's special, isn't he? Some mind-reading bullshit, right? I don't know. They're scrambling after the Rebels' latest attack, so it's all a mess. Kaiser somehow got the info. He wants to sell it."

I know I'm not going to pay for it. "How do I contact him?"

He gets up to leave and drums his fingers on the table. Even this little gesture annoys me. I barely know my contacts, but he's the one I detest the most.

"Just call up Reynolds. Kaiser's guys are coming here."

There's a key in my pocket. It opens the mailbox of an apartment not far from my little hideaway. The place is empty; it belongs to man who doesn't exist. Inside the mailbox there's a disc, a disc that I stole less than forty-eight hours ago from a bunch of amateurs fresh off a plane from Monastir by way of Gatwick. I consider it revenge for time served in Tunisia. But it's not really about me - the disc is for her. It contains what she wants, what she's waited for for all these months.

This should put an end to all of this. I should be glad, but I'm not. I don't know what to feel.

I drop the key behind the gas meter of a building two blocks from where I live. It's two am and I've been up too long. Scully gets her disc tomorrow.

I wake up with the taste of metal in my mouth. Not an unfamiliar situation. I lift my head and find that the side of my face has adhered to the drying blood on the floor.

There is a man lying next to me. His body is still. It occurs to me that I killed him in our struggle and a second man got away. They were here to get something. I remember the hard muzzle of the gun cutting into my jaw, a calm voice with a foreign accent asking me in broken English about the location of a disc.

I roll onto my back, fluid rushes to my head. It's still dark. Early morning, maybe. I stumble out the door. The cold wind makes me gasp, makes my ears numb. It is only by the time I get to the gas meter and grasp the key in my fingers that I realize the blood on the floor was mine. I look down at my shirt and see that I'm bleeding myself out through a wound in my side.

I'm shaking so hard that I can barely talk when she opens the door. Her reaction does not register because I am concentrating on the words spilling out my mouth.

"This disc. This will tell you where he is," I say, forcing the object into her hands.

I try to say more but she is talking over me, pulling me inside.

"Krycek, please," she says in earnest, "come inside, you're bleeding to death."

This is not the end, I know it. She needs more than this disc, she needs access. She needs to know that he's coming back, but there is no telling what state he'll be in when she finds him. I want her to understand the consequences of what she seeks.

My mouth hangs open and I choke on my words.

"I'm taking you to the hospital," she says.

The burning in my lungs clamps down on my chuckle. I push her away and turn to leave, but she grips my forearm and won't let go. It's not smart but I stop and glance at her because I want at least one clear memory of this chaotic departure before I'm gone.

"Wait," she says, "just wait."

She runs off into the darkness of her apartment but I dare not enter. I lean on the doorframe and struggle to breathe between the chattering of my teeth and the convulsing agony that racks my body. It's a mystery why I'm still here. Through the spasms I stare at the blood-streaked disc that is discarded on the floor.

When she returns there is something in her hands. I feel her arm around my waist as she draws me inside. It feels good, warm.

"No." It comes out as a strangled groan. I think this time she knows I mean it.

I start down the hallway and hear her voice behind me.

"Take this."

Take what - the disc? Why would she...

She comes up to me and throws something over my shoulders.

"You're cold," she says. Her voice is dull and low.

It's a jacket. Something to cover me up because I've been stumbling around town in a cotton t-shirt on a night in February. She's grasping the lapels, still willing me to come inside.

This is too much. Her decency towards me claws at my insides, it hurts in a way that makes me want to beg without reason. She's looking up at me, and I look at her too. Her eyes are wild and serious, but I just stare and wheeze. When I feel the heat and sting in my eyes, I know I have to go.

I push her away, cruelly this time, and drag my shoulder across the wall as I stagger down the hallway.

I see stairs, then sunlight and concrete. I pick a car and my brain watches my fake and human fingers struggle with the wires to start the engine.

In the early morning I drive away. I drive away to get myself stitched up, to pick up some cash and new IDs. I drive away from her. I don't know where I'm going. There are a million places to hide, but that doesn't concern me. In my mind, I see her face.

She is free, I tell myself. She is free, she is free, she is free...