Pearls Before Swine

"Give not that which is holy unto dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you."
-- Matthew 7:6

"Is she dead?" Krycek whispers. He doesn't mean to whisper, is angry with himself for being just the tiniest bit leery of the marble-like figure on the gurney, so he clears his throat and says in a louder voice, "She looks dead."

Spender puts two nicotine stained fingers to Scully's neck. "Not yet. Give her time. Dr. Wu said she has a few hours left, maybe."

"What do you want done with her?"

"I don't want her to be found," Spender says. "Make her disappear. You're good at that."

Krycek takes his eyes off of Scully's body. "Wouldn't it just be easier to hire a janitorial staff?"

The old man looks unamused. "Watch yourself, boy. I didn't drag you out of the gutter to hear your jokes."

Krycek is also unamused. "It wasn't meant to be a joke."

Spender jabs a yellow finger at him. "Remember where you came from. I can put you back there. Now do your job."

"Right," mutters Krycek, and starts to push Scully's gurney down the long hallway.

As he drives along the twisty roads between Butt Fuck, Nowhere and D.C., Krycek is trying to come up with a good way to lose a body in rural West Virginia (there are so many, it's hard to decide), but the Mulders in his head keep intruding. Bossy Mulder. Impossible-to-please Mulder. Derisive Mulder. Weak Mulder. Morose Mulder.

'Traitor,' the Mulders chant. 'Lying scum. I trusted you.'

"That was your first of a shitload of mistakes," Krycek tells the Mulders. He glances over to Scully, but she's still out cold, and maybe dead by now. Or maybe not.

Let's see here. He could send the car, with her in it, over the edge of the road and into one of the steep ravines. He could get some gasoline and have a big ol' Scully bonfire. He could weigh her down and drop her in a lake. As he passes a fragrant pig farm, Krycek considers feeding her to the swine, and lets out a laugh at both the perfection and the absurdity of that thought. "Talk about casting pearls before swine," he says.

Again he glances over to Scully. She shows no indication that the man next to her is plotting the disposal of her body. He reaches over to feel for a pulse at her neck. There is a weak, thready pressure underneath his fingertips. Not dead yet. He still has time to scheme and daydream more ways to make Mulder's little Scullykins go bye-bye forever. Good.

Krycek looks back toward the road and sees that he's drifted a little too close to the drop off and jerks the wheel of the car sharply to the left. "Fuck," he says. Scully slumps against her seatbelt.

'And you're a lousy driver,' the Mulders add.

Parked at a scenic overlook, munching on a Snickers bar, Krycek finds his thoughts drifting from finding a resting spot for Scully, who's still not dead, damn her, to Mulder, damn him.

Besides Derisive Mulder and Morose Mulder and all the rest, there is also Sexy Mulder. This is the bastard who keeps Krycek from putting a bullet through the rest of the Mulders' collective brain. Well, that and the hell he'd catch from the old man.

Sexy Mulder is a menace, and a lot harder to ignore than the others. He demands, 'Remember when I...' and 'Remember when we...' and 'Remember when you...'

Krycek lets the memories wash over him while Scully snoozes beside him. (Mulder's lips, soft and sweet in a way he would have never guessed, find his in a darkened room. Mulder's breath whispers against his ear, "Again." Fingers explore his body, followed by a warm tongue and teeth that nip at sensitive areas.) Krycek swallows the last bit of the chocolate, then his tongue (like Mulder's tongue) probes his molars for stray bits of caramel. (Mulder's cock enters him, pushing relentlessly as Krycek's hands grip the pillow until his knuckles go white.) Krycek's hand falls to his lap, and fondles the erection that has grown there. (The usual transitory discomfort is swamped by a pleasure so deep that it blots out everything else. "Oh god oh god oh god," he moans. And Mulder says --)

Hand still on his crotch, Krycek turns his head to check on Scully. She hasn't moved; her head is lolled to the side, only the slight stir of the hair fallen over her face indicating that she's still breathing.

'Scully is the one I love,' interrupts one of the Mulders, maybe irritated that Krycek's attention has wandered. 'You know that. Why do you keep fooling yourself? The only reason I take you in is because she isn't around. I fuck you because you're there. That's all there is.'

"Fuck that," murmurs Krycek. That isn't what Mulder said. He said --

(...Mulder says, "Mine," as he comes inside Krycek.)

Yeah. That's right. "So there," he says to Scully, and tosses the wrapper out the window.

'Dear Penthouse, I never believed the stuff in your letters was true, but that was until I took a trip with a comatose redhead. You'll never guess what happened to me...'

If Krycek's life was a porn flick, then after carrying Scully into the hotel room and putting her on the bed, she'd wake up and give him some pretty goddamned wild head. If his life was a Penthouse letter, he'd probably do something creepy like fuck Scully's unconscious body until she woke up screaming, not with outrage but with fiery passion. If his life was a romance novel, he and Scully would fall asleep next to each other and they would wake together in the middle of the night only to make sweet love to each other (never mind that they are virtually strangers).

However, Krycek's life is none of these. He carries Scully's body into the hotel room, sure enough, but after laying her on the bed he takes a shower. In the shower various fantasies (none of them particularly Penthousesque) of what could happen if Scully wakes up flit through mind, making him lather and rinse as quickly as possible.

When he dries off and opens the door of the bathroom, a towel modestly swathed around his hips, Scully is still out of it. 'Fuck it,' he thinks, and lets the towel drop onto the floor. Ceasing to worry about the possibility of Scully waking up and somehow finding the strength to kick his ass before he can get his underwear on, Krycek gets dressed and turns on the TV. HBO is showing "The Terminator" and he settles on that, stretching out on the bed beside the recumbent Scully. He falls asleep during John Connor's conception.

Krycek wakes to a "Larry Sanders" re-run and a warm body curled against his. He leans up on his elbow and looks down at Scully, still alive, still breathing, still out of it. Her face has started to look a little sunken. Perhaps she's finally about to die.

The sodium-tinted light filtering through the drawn curtains is a dark syrupy gold that changes Scully's hair to mahogany and makes her skin glow with an eerie ethereal, almost pearly sort of light. She looks exotic and strange, like the goddess of a primitive people washed up on the shores of the twentieth century.

'She's everything you'll never be,' Mulder says in his head.

"Shut up," Krycek says aloud. He lies back down and shuts his eyes. He can feel the tiny movement of the rise and fall of her chest against his arm.

'I could just kill her,' a thought suggests. It'd be so easy, like shooting fish (or Scullys) in a barrel. On the other hand, she looks like one stiff breath would crumble her into a thousand pieces. Why waste the bullet?

"I'll tell you what, you bitch," he says with a yawn. "If you're still alive tomorrow, I won't feed you to the pigs. How's that for a deal?"

Krycek falls back asleep with Scully's warm weight resting against him, a fluttering presence that is most definitely not dead.

He dreams of Mulder: long limbs and hot skin all around him. Mulder's hand is on his cock, stroking and squeezing, and he wants to come, but Mulder won't let him.

'Please please please.' He hates how Mulder makes him beg.

'No.' Mulder is as implacable as a stone idol.

'Please.'

'You owe me. Give me what you owe me.'

Krycek wakes with a raging hard-on. 'Give me what you owe me.' He knows what that means, oh yeah. Fuck Mulder. He doesn't owe that prick anything.

(But you do)

'The only thing I owe Mulder is a punch in the face,' he thinks with a glance at Scully. He lifts her limp wrist and feels the weak flutter that means she hasn't checked out yet. For a second, he pictures taking her hand and placing it on the hard bulge in his shorts to see if that indignity would wake up her highness.

He can imagine her hand curling around him, her small fingers squeezing as tightly. She moves stiff arms and legs, stretching like a sleepy cat. She lifts her head only to rest it on his bare chest. He can feel her tongue dart out to lap at his skin. Then slowly, ever so slowly, she flows over him and takes him inside her, bringing relief to the hard ache he feels. She moves and he moves and they move and is this what Mulder thinks about when he and Krycek are fucking?

Krycek drops Scully's wrist and her arm flops back down onto the bed, unresponsive. Disgusted with his train of thought, Krycek gets up to go jerk off in the bathroom where he can't see Scully lying there right next to him. He starts to stroke his slightly flagging erection, and as usual, Mulder's face is the one he sees behind his eyelids. Scully also sneaks in, here and there, when he's not concentrating, her eyes sharp and knowing.

He sits on the toilet, come smearing his hand, and imagines he hears Scully speaking to him from the other room, using the name his grandmother had called him:

'Sasha, I know what you want.'

He doesn't want to hear it, but can't tune out his own thoughts.

'What you want is us, isn't it?'

"Oh, just shut up," he says aloud, then takes a shower.

That day, Krycek watches Jaws III, New Jack City, and Alien Nation while Scully lingers on in the gray area between life and death that she occupies. In the afternoon, he orders a pizza and eats it while he watches her breathe. If he concentrates, staring very hard in between bites, he can see her chest move.

Goddamn but she's stubborn.

Her persistent will to exist amazes him. Krycek has never seen someone cling so tenaciously to life. Most of the people he's seen die did so quickly; some with fear, some with resignation, some with gratitude. Scully's simple refusal to die is as impressive as it is novel.

Maybe it's just that Scully doesn't want to lose a game she's not done playing yet. Or maybe she's just a born pain in the ass. One theory is as good as another. Regardless, he finds himself frequently looking away from whatever movie is on to watch her. She fascinates him.

Considering this, Krycek starts picking the pepperoni off of the remaining slices of pizza. He can almost hear Scully scolding him for it, making it clear that he's being a pig. From Mulder he's heard that she's prone to do that very thing.

'Idiot,' he thinks. 'If Scully was awake, she'd be trying to blow your fucking brains out with your own gun, not worrying about your eating habits. Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?'

Good question. He isn't Scully's Mulder and he'll never be Mulder's Scully. He is

(liar traitor killer thief)

not meant to be either one. He knows this deep down, but

('Mine,' Mulder whispers, hands gripping Krycek's hips so hard that the bruises he left could still be seen, if there were anyone to see them)

knowledge can't always erase our most secret, deepest wishes.

(Sasha, I know what you want.)

"Go to hell," he snarls to the room in general, then slams out of the hotel room, leaving Scully still motionless on the bed next to a pizza box half-full of pizza picked entirely clean of pepperoni.

After walking to town and back, the only conclusion that Krycek comes to is that he is tired of the hotel room and Scully's silent yet accusatory company, and that the only way to remedy the situation is to kill the bitch and get it all over with. That decision made, Krycek enters the hotel room and levels his pistol at her body. This'll make a god-awful mess, but it isn't his bed, so he doesn't give a shit.

His finger curls around the trigger but doesn't tighten the last few millimeters. This feels all wrong. He wants her to see the bullet coming. Krycek reaches down, grabs Scully's shoulder, then starts shaking her violently. "Wake the fuck up!" he snarls.

For ages there is nothing, then her eyelids snap open. He looks directly into Scully's eyes for the first time and sees nothing there. No recognition, no fear of the gun pointing at her from just inches away, not even outrage at being woken so rudely. Her eyes shift beyond his face, as if looking for something. Not finding it, Scully closes her eyes again and no amount of jostling can rouse her.

Fuck. Krycek swears fluently in his head in both English and vestigial Russian. He points the gun at Scully's once again unresponsive body, then lowers the weapon again.

No. This is not the way it's going to be. When Krycek kills Scully, he decides, she's going to damn well know who's behind the trigger. He is not going to be the unexplained mystery of Scully's death. This is something he wants full and total credit for.

Scully will know it right before she rises transparent, wearing a nightie and playing a harp, to the heaven that Mulder is convinced she belongs in. Mulder will know when Krycek decides to throw the knowledge into his smug face.

Krycek knows he's being childish, but right now he doesn't care. For the first time since Spender introduced him to the Mulder/Scully juggernaut, Krycek is making a decision that takes only his own petty desires into account. He puts the gun away and starts packing up his things, which have become scattered around the hotel room.

It's time for Scully and him to hit the road. Yeah, it's possible that she'll still kick the bucket in between here and D.C., but somehow Krycek doubts that'll be the case. It would be too convenient, too pat, and totally without a sense of dramatic justice.

In other words, the story ain't done yet. Krycek can feel it in his bones.

Krycek, who is not without a sense of irony, leaves Scully's unconscious form curled on a bench in a park near Walter Reed. Of all the hospitals in the D.C. area, there are more doctors on the old man's payroll in Walter Reed than any other. Krycek knows his disobedience to a direct order will be found out in no time by Spender, but he's in a mood to flaunt his insubordination to the old man. After spending nearly three days with Scully and his own thoughts, he's not feeling like anybody's good little boy.

Krycek gives Scully one last look before melting into the shadows of the trees. Her skin is drawn tight over her cheekbones, making it easy to see the skull beneath. She looks like a small, lost child, and Krycek finds himself strangely reluctant to just abandon her now, after all his care taking.

'If you can qualify not shooting a person as care taking,' he can imagine Mulder saying.

'That's okay, be a smart ass,' Krycek thinks. 'You'll be singing a different tune later.'

Krycek has plans to drop in on Mulder tonight, but it can wait until after the current show gets on the road. Mulder still has no clue what's going down, and even though he knows that it's going to be a busy day for Mr. Grumpypants tomorrow, Krycek has no compunction about waking him up at -- he checks his watch -- two a.m. for some fun and games. It's been a long three days. Krycek figures he deserves it.

Eventually a nurse on her cigarette break walks by and sees Scully. Krycek watches the orchestrated commotion initiated by the startled nurse until two men finally lift Scully's body onto a gurney and start to wheel her toward the hospital.

"Do novyh vstrech," he says. Not 'good-bye,' but 'until we meet again.' It isn't time yet to announce "the end," then close the book with a bang. This is just the end of the chapter, it's everyone's bedtime, and Krycek has an appointment that he doesn't intend to miss.