Odysseus At The Death And Degradation Of Ajax

//I never wanted to love him// he thought as tears coursed down his face, spasms and jolts of agony pouring over him in a deluge of horror and sorrow. This pain he knew would never end. This pain he knew would follow him into the next life, and the next, and the one after that. This pain is all he would ever know.

He bent over the still body below him, on his knees, burying his face into the folds of black cloth, unmindful of the congealing blood pooling around his calves and knees as it soaked his jeans. His fingers grasped, loosened, and grasped again on that cloth, twisting it in his fists in twitches that echoed the empty despair that suffused him.

//I never told him//

//I will never get to tell him//

//It's over//

He raised his head, his heart ripping apart in his chest, and gazed on the face of his lover through the blurry veil of his tears. The beautiful face, now slack in death, still held something of the shock and betrayal that he must have felt when that final bullet smashed a hole in his forehead, and burrowed a dark tunnel into his brain. A hole in that beautiful head, destroying so much more than his last arm, which had also been violated by the insane rape of a FBI-issued pistol.

Mulder's breath hitched uncontrollably with his sobs, as his lover's face finally faded into the background of his tears.

//He thought I was part of it//

//He thought I planned it//

//He died in the face of what he saw as my betrayal//

Mulder screamed. Beat his fists on the silent, motionless chest below him. Then his hands came up, and he clawed at his own face and hair, ripping bloody furrows into his skin, tearing chunks of hair from his scalp. He screamed and screamed, and screamed some more, his voice echoing hellishly in the empty car park.

His fingers scrabbled through the blood that steadily welled to the surface, overflowing and dripping in large, ruddy droplets onto his knees, and when his eyes fall upon that angelic face again, he knew he must gouge them out for ever having witnessed this horror. But as he moved to do so, strong hands descended on his shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. And he shrieked his anguish, his pain, his terror, vaulting away from the restraining hands.

Skittering back so he leaned against the filthy, exhaust-coated wall behind him, his chest heaved as he met the eyes of his former superior.

"Mulder, get a handle on yourself. It was only Krycek for God's sake. You know that bastard deserved to die!"

His rational mind having left him some time around the time that his lover was blasted to the next world without him, Mulder launched himself with an anguished roar at Skinner, bloody hands reaching, grasping, pounding at the man's face.

"You tortured him!" he cried as he dug at his ex-bosses' face, trying to mark the man just as he had marked himself, with bloody gashes down the sides of his face and neck. "You degraded him! He was no threat to you without any arms left! You debased him, you took all he had left, and then you murdered him! YOU FUCKING MURDERED HIM!"

He was no match for Skinner, though, even in his crazed state. The man sent him soaring over the pavement, to land in a heap at his lover's side. That face with its dying accusation filled his vision again, and he threw himself over the body, kissing the cooling cheeks. He heard Skinner breathe in sharply behind him.

//Yes I loved him//

//Yes I still love him//

//No I can't live without him//

In that moment he made is decision, although he knew it had been his decision all along. He rooted through his jacket to find his gun, the gun he wasn't supposed to have anymore, and, raising his eyes to meet Skinner's, his tears mixing with his own blood, as they both poured down his ruined face, then he sobbed:

"Ai! Ai! Woe! Woe! How strange are the ways of the gods..."

And with that, he lowered himself to plant a kiss on Krycek's blue lips, and raised the pistol to his temple and fired.

He never heard the shot.

I'm sorry; I don't know what came over me. I just...had to write it. Call it therapy.