One for sorrow, two for joy—isn't that how it goes?
I know how crows feel, with their black eyes and their black wings reflecting on the snow like shadows dropped down from heaven.
They had fallen from heaven, too. Long years ago, when mankind was still young and savage and respected the fires that burned in the skies. When they believed that they were gods and spirits looking down on them.
They were right.
One for sorrow, and they've stolen my one away. And I am left behind to wonder if he fought them at all, or went into their hands gracefully and eagerly. A moth to the flame, if you will. One never knows with the man; I can't say I ever really knew him, no matter how long I'd watched him and studied him and how many times I crept into his bed.
Late at night, when forgiveness is easier.
Or the loneliness harder to hide.
No one ever knew. No one could ever know. It would have destroyed us both. Me, probably quite literally. No one messes with "Daddy's little boy," at least without his permission. Not that he was ever a real father to the man, or to the boy either for that matter.
No, he left that up to his best friend—if the man can be said to have any real friends—and his mother. Cold-hearted parents, at best. Or, at least they were after the deal was made. After the daughter was surrendered to the forces of heaven, leaving the son behind to bear the guilt.
He knows the truth of that now, too. I saw the report. What it doesn't say is more revealing than what it does, but then I'm an expert at reading between the lines.
I saw a picture of her once. It was in his file. It was of the two of them together and they were both smiling the same smile. She had his eyes, but even more so. His eyes before loss and betrayal and the world had worn him down. I shared my part in that, I must admit.
Sometimes I drink to it and sometimes I get drunk because of it.
I was getting drunk tonight.
It was either that or eat my gun, and that's something I was pretty likely to regret in the morning a bit more than a fucking hangover.
Skinner blames himself. I've seen that report, too. What it says and what it doesn't. He tried to be so careful, but the guilt is still there. As well as the belief. He can't deny it anymore. What he saw that night blew him away and the pieces are falling down around his ears still.
If he's lucky he'll keep his job, make it to that gold watch and pension and actually have a little time to enjoy it before the world ends. If he isn't lucky...well, I can't spare much sympathy for the man. He made his bed and he'll have to lie in it.
Same as me.
It's strong stuff, the shit I'm drinking tonight, but not as strong as the bottle that Mulder once kept in his kitchen. Right under the sink, cuddled up next to the cleansers, from which it wasn't far removed in taste. He didn't even know it was there, I think, which speaks of his housekeeping habits as much as anything.
I was drinking the contents from a chipped blue glass, which had no match in all his cupboard, when he walked in that night.
The same night I'd kissed him for the first time. On the cheek. It was the least I'd dared.
He'd looked tired. No, he'd looked beat up on, defeated, a bit vague around the edges. Not even really surprised to see me there, one more shadow amidst the greater darkness.
Instead, he shook off his coat and let it fall to his feet. His keys following, their crash on the floor way too loud for the night. He took out his gun next and I almost expected him to use it to tell me to get the hell out, if not to simply blow me away. But he didn't. He let that fall, too. Loose from those long fingers.
Only then did he approach me. Move to sit down next to me on his leather couch and reach for my glass. He drained the last of it and I watched his throat move as he swallowed hard, great gulps of the stuff, as if he didn't care if it burned him.
Maybe he wanted to be burned.
Maybe he needed to feel.
I don't know. All I know is that was when it began, when he reached for me the first time. Those same long fingers snagging my face and holding it as he put his mouth to mine. And I was burned in turn. All my darkness seared away in one bright, unbelievable moment caught between space and time.
Like the gods had really come down to earth.
As if they'd never left.
"Alex," he'd said at last, when he'd finally released me. Just one word, but there was entire worlds within it. Everything he wanted to say and couldn't—every last bit of pain and anger, of frustration, hopelessness, loss and fear. All the things that no one else would understand because they hadn't lived his life and seen what he'd seen and lost what he'd lost.
No one but me. Maybe it was the booze, but I'd understood him that night. I'd understood that moment. When you realize that you're standing on a blade and try as you like you can't deny anymore that your feet are bleeding. That you're slowly dying inside and that you're slipping on your own blood and when you fall it's forever.
Fucking forever.
I fell a long time ago and I'm still falling. I don't think there's a bottom. But if there is, I don't want to know about it. I don't want to know just how bad it can get. I have a murderous enough imagination as it is.
But then, maybe, we're all falling already and I'm just one of the few who knows it. Who knows that the clock is ticking and time is running out, running down, and all of us—heroes, villains, innocent and guilty alike—will all end up the same if we don't stop it somehow.
I don't really know if it can be stopped, but what other choice is there? To be dead might be preferable to ending up on a white table in a white room. Or, worse still, one of the millions who will unwillingly bear the children of the future. Those who have come to replace us here in our once-lovely little garden.
I had said nothing to him in return that night—what more was there to say? Only put my own hand to his face and looked into those eyes, not knowing what he might see in my own and, in that moment, not even caring.
Except that I felt bared and broken before him, before the need in his eyes,
in his mouth. Like he had stripped my masks away with just one kiss. Even the strongest one of all. My indifference. To him. To the world. To my own eventual and entirely too inevitable fate.
And it had been so long since anyone had been able to look at me like that, to see the real Alex under all those other fucking Alex's, that it scared me. Terrified me right down to the bone like countless bullets and beatings and torture had never been able to do.
Nothing but being trapped in that silo. Where I had contemplated not only my own mortality, but the mortality and doom of the whole human race. It's kind of hard not to when you're sharing an enclosed space with a spaceship of all things. When you've just puked out an alien and watched it slither down a spiral into nothingness.
When I wasn't screaming, I'd had a lot of time to think. When I wasn't crying, I'd a lot of time to regret. And when someone finally came for me, I'd finally figured out that there was only one thing left living for and that the irony of it all was that he didn't know and would never know and that it was for the best that he never found out.
Love is a strange thing, most especially love that you can't afford.
It led me to Tunguska. It led me to mutilation.
It led me back to Mulder, even after all that.
As it led me to his dark little apartment and to his couch and that booze under the sink and one lonely chipped glass that we had shared between us, as we finally had shared a real kiss at last and so much more.
And to the same couch on yet another dark and lonely night years later. Knowing he wasn't coming home, this time. That he wouldn't steal the last of this glass from me and set it aside as if it was of no consequence as he finally pulled himself to his feet and drew me off to that unmade bed in the other room. To rumpled sheets that smelled of him and of other desperately empty nights.
Of furtive efforts in the dark, dreaming of God knows who.
Certainly not of me. Though, maybe, I'd been wrong about that, too. Because Mulder had seemed pretty intent on proving me wrong. On proving something to me, anyway.
With his mouth, his hands, the press of his body against mine, on top of mine, driving me down into those frustrated sheets. Stripping me of my last protections, clothes and arm and all. Putting his lips to my injury as if he could kiss it all better, then holding me tight to him as I whimpered and shivered at the touch.
It had been so long. It had been forever.
Because not only my arm had been stolen from me that day. I hadn't been, well...able to since that day. Since Tunguska. Oh, I had tried. Hell, I had even tried with Marita, the one woman in the world that I should have avoided getting into bed with. But I had been high that day—on dreams of the world we might make together, on getting the upper hand on all those who would have ground me down beneath them, who had tried and tried.
As I had tried, and then turned away and got silently dressed when it didn't work. Not wanting to see the contempt in her eyes. Or the pity.
But there had been none of that in Mulder's eyes, not even the anger that I had grown used to seeing, and Mulder's hands had been firm but gentle as they
reached down to hold me. To stroke me. To send me driving upwards through his fingers. Hot again after years of cold, of an endless Siberian winter. Waking a cock that had come to hang as useless and unfeeling as a lump of plastic where your left arm used to be.
And maybe he never knew what he had done to me that night. And maybe, he had. Certainly, his eyes had been bright, pure and piercing, as he laid me out across his bed as if he had absolutely no worry that I wouldn't remain there, and kneeled up to take off his own clothes. Slowly, precisely, as if he wanted to make the moment last. Or so that I could look my fill.
Perhaps, he had thought, as I had, that this time would be the last as well as the first. It wasn't, but we hadn't known that that night. We hadn't known that we would get four more chances to prove fate wrong. Or right, as the case may be. Three times more in the same bed and once in a motel room where he fucked me hard enough to bleed and then knocked me into the wall afterwards just like old times. For Skinner, this time. For what he had read in Skinner's mind.
And in mine. All my dirty secrets laid bare, including that little game I was playing with his boss.
I should have known better than to go to him after that, but he'd almost died on their table that day and I couldn't have stayed away if my life depended on it. I had had to see him. To know that he was okay. To tell him...to tell him that there had been nothing I could have done.
That I had had no choice but to leave him in that stairwell.
To the indifferent mercies of fate and Fowley and his old man. Only they could have saved him and only they could have destroyed him and I had no way of knowing which it would be. Not until it was too late.
But it was always too late, wasn't it?
Even before he turned telepathic and threw me out for it. Back into a cold that had only grown colder by comparison, and by the loss of the one thing in the world that mattered to me anymore.
Why couldn't he have read that instead? But maybe, he did. Perhaps, that had been my final, fatal sin—loving him when no one else did, not even Scully. At least, not the way he wanted her to. Me, whose love must have disgusted him. Whose true self had appalled him.
Our last time together, and I hadn't even cared when Spender picked me up after. When he had me chucked into a place so close to hell as makes no difference. My final fall from grace. Or, at least, from paradise. Or the closest I'd ever gotten to it.
The paradise of Mulder's arms and Mulder's bed. The night closed tight around us and no words but the sound of our breathing, of our bodies whispering mute approval as we slowly slid together. Clicking into place like two keys in a puzzle box.
He'd fucked me bare. Uncaring of the past or the future. He'd fucked me sharp and deep and hurtful...or had that been me? Had that been what I'd needed and he'd just been kind enough to offer it. Who knows anymore. I never asked and he never told and now it's too late, way too late, to find out.
Five times was not enough, and more than I ever expected. And now my cock hangs limp and empty again and I don't even bother to try to wake it, to touch it. What would be the point?
Mulder could bring back the dead, not me. I'm just a ghost without him, or a ghost of a ghost. A shadow without regard and without purpose. Without even a name to call his own, or a face that anyone would care to believe.
I walk amongst the silent shades and the crows and the snow around me is stained with blood. My blood and Mulder's and the blood of the countless millions who will die to make this brave new world. A paradise for those who have fallen from heaven, down to this bleak and miserable and unaccountably lovely piece of spinning stone.
One tiny pebble tossed into an endless sea.
One drop left in a chipped blue glass. The bottle I'd brought empty in front of me now. The only thing keeping me from the bottom. The only thing remaining.
As all the rest has run out. Slipped through my fingers no matter how tight I closed them around it. Clenched them until bone and muscle screamed protest, until I knew that there was no real use for it anymore, and simply let my only living hand slid gently open.
Releasing the last taste of Mulder's skin and the broken sparkle of light that would catch in his eyes as he came and how those long limbs had felt enfolded around me and how his cock always made me feel warm inside. Alive. Like a real person.
Like someone who could know...love.
And, maybe, he'd seen that for the lie it was, too. Maybe in reading my mind that day he'd realized that what he had invited into his bed was no more than an illusion, after all, a hollow necessity. That I didn't really love him because I couldn't love anybody, not even myself. Most especially not myself.
It must be true. He knew everything at the time. He must have known me better than I knew myself. The real Alex at last. The one cowering behind that last impenetrable mask.
If he even still exists anymore. Because if Tunguska didn't kill him then Tunisia certainly did. Or he was left somewhere half-way between Oregon and the cool stars. Screaming where no one could hear him but the other dead. But the slender angels in that white white room.
Who didn't give a damn.
Who probably don't even know how.
But the last of the booze is long gone now, like the man himself, and there's no more bottles under the sink. I know. I've looked. I've looked everywhere, but he's nowhere. And I don't know why I should even bother because he knows I never loved him. That I never could.
Because that glass was always chipped, wasn't it? It would rip your lip wide open if you weren't careful and Mulder wasn't very careful, was he? He was always chasing after things hell-bent and half-mad with what truths he already knew and those he thought he knew and even after he finally found his sister it wasn't really over, was it? Because it wasn't her he had wanted in the end, but the one thing he'd never had. That they had stolen from him when they took her.
All those lost years. His youth. His hopes and dreams. His innocence. The look in a matching set of eyes in a picture in a file that no one but the already damned ever look at.
What I...what no one could have given back to him. Even if they did love the bastard.
But all of that's over now. And I've swallowed that last drop and there's nothing more to drink. Nothing more to do. No one left to talk to. Nowhere left to go.
Nothing, Mulder. Nothing.
And, maybe, that's all there'd ever been. Maybe, you knew that better than me. And that's why you tried so very hard and held me so tight when you held me at all and fucked the two of us into oblivion so demandingly. As if you knew, deep down, that was the only real truth.
But I know there's one other. And it's cold, not warm. Crude, not graceful. And certainly won't kiss half as well.
But it's strange, Mulder—a real X-File—because it tastes of you, underneath the slickness of metal and oil, and it reminds me of how you once felt in my mouth. How you filled my mouth and the sounds you made and how you held me, how you stroked your fingers through my hair over and over again, as I sucked you off. Though you never screamed and I wanted you to scream, to let it all go, to let me take you to that forbidden place if no one else could.
If no one else would.
But I never loved you. And you never loved me. And the world is just a stone dragging me down, making me fall harder and faster than I've ever fallen before, and the eyes of the waiting crows are black, Mulder. Black as their eyes as they stand over you. Black as death.
And as cold, Mulder.
As cold as...as...shit...
Oh, God, Fox, I did love you. Didn't I? Didn't I?
One
by Garnet
Post-Requiem
for Kristina, who knows what real belief is
