Consequences

Fandom: The X-Files

Category/Rated: H for horror, Slightly slashy.

Year/Length: ~2028 words

Pairing: Mulder/Krycek

Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit, only having fun.

Author's Notes: Okay, I ought to be shot for this one. I am giving fair warning that it's horrid and I don't know where it came from. It was the song that did it. I can't imagine any other way to interpret the song. It was written for the Lyric Wheel, and was derived from a song sent to me by Tangental Thinker. Words are at the foot of the story. The theme was a horror wheel - Monster of the Week - and I think I managed that.

A shot, a death, and the world keeps right on spinning.

The grim-faced man nods, satisfied. "You just go. I'll get him."

The other, stunned, nods in response, but his mind is blank with shock. This might not, he thinks, have been what I was aiming for. Turning without further words, he leaves. He'll think about this later, when he can deal, but for now, he'll submerge himself in the need for action and try to forget.

Later, watching the new child, he wonders how it all happened. He recalls a husky, earnest voice, saying, 'barren, barren,' and the tears he thinks he'd die rather than shed prickle the backs of his eyes. It may be the only memorial service that Alex Krycek will ever know.

He takes the baby from Reyes and holds him tentatively, trying hard to see Scully's features in him, or his own. It's a fact that affords him no joy at all that, like all infants, the baby resembles Frohike. With a bubble of grief swollen hard in his chest, he gives the baby back and walks away.

In the midst of life we are in death, and the world spins on.

Weeks pass, and he's alone inside his head, no comfort anywhere to be had.

He's dead inside now, a completely different death from any he's suffered before, and he doesn't know how it happened, only that it's real.

Scully infuriates him. She's sleek, satisfied and cow-like as she gurgles and coos, milky fecundity positively oozing from her, and she's boring, boring, boring.

He's foot-loose but un-driven for the first time in his adult life, and he no longer wants to believe. He drinks too much, the alcohol numbing his body, although his memories still haunt him, and on a day some three weeks after Krycek's death, he packs the few things he keeps at Scully's and leaves.

It's suddenly plain to him that the one thing he really wanted has been lost forever. He's not really sure what he wants to do with the rest of his life, but he knows one thing, it's not this. Oh, God, not this.

Alone, his world folds in around him. He's always seen things the way he wanted them to be, and it's easy for him to shut out the rest of the world as he tries his best to re-visit what he's lost. He studies, his world narrowing down to a place in which there are only books hand written on vellum, bound in leather and full of arcane information. He attends séances, purifies his body, learns the ritual of the sealing of his nine openings, and considers the way of the left hand path.

Time passes, but as ever his single-mindedness of purpose pays off in the end, and he finds what he needs. It's the early hours of a rainy morning when he finally achieves his goal. No eye of sheep, no wing of bat. He uses blood and spittle and semen spilled with Krycek's name on his lips, and waits.

There's a swirling otherness, a merging of dust motes, and his beloved enemy steps out of the darkness, sad eyed and beautiful beneath the fury of Mulder's intense gaze.

"Fox," says the fetch, the soft, husky voice sending shivers down Mulder's spine.

"I miss you," whispers Mulder, knowing as he utters the words that he's never spoken truer in his life.

"You stood there and let me die." The shade steps forward into the light, and the blood wells up from the sudden hole between the lustrous eyes.

"I didn't know." Mulder's grief is enormous.

"Ignorance is no defense in law." The beauty and truth of the tenderly uttered words make Mulder gasp, and at last the hard, tight knot in his chest bursts, releasing the poison he has kept there for so long. The tears begin to flow, and once they do he can't stop them.

"How can I make things right between us?" he asks at length, and the apparition ducks his head, smiling, the light playing over high, marble cheekbones and catching lustrous eyes that gleam from pooled shadow. Mulder feels his heart thump painfully in his chest as he sees the familiar mannerisms.

"Why would you want to?" asks Krycek's memory, dispassionate despite the intimacy implied by the bedroom voice.

"Because I loved you; I still do," Mulder responds, knowing as he says the words that they are true, and wondering why it's taken him 'til now to realize the fact. "Without you, I have no more reason for being."

"If that's the truth," says the fetch, "Then you must call me forth."

"It's the truth; it's all the truth there has ever been."

"Once the wrong done me is righted, we can be together forever, if that's what you want." The ghostly presence is fading now, smoke and ivory attenuating, leaving behind only the memory of the intense face and the slowly vanishing glitter of lustrous eyes.

"Wait," cries Mulder. "I don't know how to call you."

"You will." The echo is inside his head, as he is left alone.

For a moment he believes he's been abandoned, but then there is a wind that springs up from nowhere, swirling around his apartment, tossing books and papers this way and that, and riffling through the leaves of one large book that lies on the floor beside his deplorable couch.

When the air is still once more, the book is open at a page which describes a particular summoning ceremony.

"I will call you, Alex," he whispers as the tears burn his eyes once more. He stands for a moment more, watching, hoping that Alex will return, but of course he doesn't. At last he makes his way over to the couch and begins to read.

"Hey, Walt, long time, no see." The voice on the phone is cheery. Assistant Director Walter Skinner smiles, recognizing it as Fox Mulder. He'd had little or nothing to do with Mulder since that night in the parking garage, and had wondered if Mulder had decided to cut him off the way he appears to have done with Scully.

"Mulder, good to hear from you. What are you doing these days?" Smalltalk is not his forte, but he does need to discover what Mulder suspects. It's no longer a simple matter to head him off from one of his intuitive leaps.

"Oh, study, for the most part. This and that, you know?" Mulder sounds breezy and alive in a way Skinner hasn't heard before. It makes him nervous.

"Good to hear," he says, cautiously.

"I was calling to see if you want to come over and watch the game tonight, drink a few beers and catch up." The invitation surprises Skinner. Mulder hasn't been one for this kind of thing in the past. "What do you say?"

"That would be great. You want me to bring some pizza?"

"Now you're talking. Good call. See you later."

As Mulder hangs up the phone, he leaves Skinner puzzling over what this is all about. Eventually, he shrugs. Sometimes, he tells himself, a cigar is just a smoke. He'll find out later, and for now he has work to do.

Mulder's apartment has always had a peculiar, lifeless air to it. As Skinner enters, ushered in by a Mulder who seems almost feverishly cheery, he sniffs the air and wrinkles his nose.

Who knows what Mulder keeps in his apartment, he thinks. I can't say it smells good, but it's Mulder, and I guess by now I ought to be used to it. He gradually forgets about it as Mulder pours him a beer and the game begins. Before long he's hopping up and down as the players compete, calling out advice and comments right along side his companion.

The pizza is a memory, and they've had a lot of beer, but when Mulder suggests one for the road, it's easy to say yes. Mulder is good company when he puts himself out, and tonight there has been no prima donna gamesmanship, just two guys, doing guy things, bonding. He raises the glass to his lips and drinks.

There's a bitter aftertaste that he can't identify. He frowns, attempts to stand, and slumps sideways onto Mulder's aromatic couch, wondering what the hell is going on.

"Mulder...?" he says, and then nothing further.

Mulder's face is alight with some emotion that Skinner can't decipher. He grins down at the half conscious man and checks his watch. "Thanks for the pizza, Walt. I had a blast, but it's time to set things straight. It's time to make amends for what you did."

Skinner's eyes open wide. He can't move, can only watch, uncomprehending, as Mulder fetches a large book, leather and brass bound, from whose pages emanates the smell he's been detecting. The thing smells old, with a combination of dust and spice and corruption.

He's a little scared now, but this is Mulder, and he does crazy things but somehow they always seem to work out. No doubt he'll find out what this dumb prank is all about sooner or later.

As he watches, Mulder begins a ritual. The live chickens, one black, one white, provide the blood as they expire, decapitated. The ex-FBI agent, who Skinner is now convinced must be mad, carefully swabs out Skinner's mouth to gather saliva, and then proceeds to lower his sweats and generate fresh semen without any apparent embarrassment. He speaks, but Skinner can't understand what he's saying, and finally stops trying, merely waiting as he strains futilely to move muscles that refuse to respond.

When it's over, and Mulder sits down with a satisfied smile, the air in the apartment is thick and still. Skinner gasps for breath, wishing that he could scream. The tense feeling of something about to happen saws on nerves already abraded by the strange ritual he has just witnessed, but still he cannot move.

Time ticks slowly by and sensation begins to return to Skinner's limbs. He feels a tingling in his extremities that excites him. He can move his fingers. He lies still, trying not to indicate his newfound abilities until such time as he can subdue the madman by his side.

The end comes suddenly. There's a sound a wet, squelching thump, and Mulder lifts his head, an exhilarated smile transforming his features. Splintering, cracking, the groan of tortured wood, and all of a sudden the smell heralds the appearance of Alex Krycek, walking back to happiness.

The smell.

Alex Krycek has been three months dead. He isn't pretty. Tatters of flesh hang like rags from the once husky frame. Matter leaks from sockets that once held eyes that would fetch ducks off water, and his boots make a squishing sound with each step he takes. What's left of him is blackened, disgusting, and as he enters the apartment even Mulder looks nauseated.

The thing comes to a halt in the doorway and surveys the room. When it speaks, Skinner's skin prickles to hear Krycek's voice emerge from this charnel house of decay.

"My turn, Walter," it says, and lurches forward.

Walter Skinner suddenly finds that he can scream after all.

Mulder watches as he once watched Krycek gunned down before his eyes, seemingly without emotion. The corpse's teeth are sharp, and after a while, they're red. When the thing stands up once more, the ruin that once was Walter Skinner is no longer recognizable, and he feels a strange, sharp tingle in his groin as the creature he has summoned turns toward him.

"Fox," it says, a gloating tone to its voice. "Together forever, right?"

Time seems to thicken, slow, and Mulder's body trembles as he looks at the thing that he has released. "Alex," he whispers through a mouth rendered dry and clumsy by panic.

The creature moves towards him, and suddenly it's Alex, Alex come to claim him, pure and clean and whole as he takes Fox in his arms and leans to kiss him.

"I love you," he mumbles, turning his face to the embrace.

He never even feels the teeth...

Helen Shapiro - Walking Back To Happiness
Billboard #1 10/19/1961

Funny, but it's true
What loneliness can do
Since I've been away
I have loved you more each day

Walking back to happiness, woopah oh yeah yeah
Said goodbye to lonliness, woopah oh yeah yeah
I never knew I'd miss you
Now I know what I must do
Walking back to happiness
I shared with you
(Yay, yay, yay, yay ba dum be do)

Making up for things we said, woopah oh yeah yeah
And mistakes to which they led, woopah oh yeah yeah
I shouldn't have gone away
So I'm coming back today
Walking back to happiness I threw away
(Yay, yay, yay, yay ba dum be do)

Walking back to happiness with you
Said farewell to lonliness I knew
Laid aside foolish pride
Learnt the truth from tears I cried

Spread the news I'm on my way, woopah oh yeah yeah
All my blues have blown away, woopah oh yeah yeah
I'm bringing you love so true
Cuz that's what I owe to you
Walking back to happiness I shared with you
(Yay, yay, yay, yay ba dum be do)

Walking back to happiness with you
Said farewell to lonliness I knew
Laid aside foolish pride
Learnt the truth from tears I cried

Walking back to happiness again
Walking back to happiness again

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