Title: Fragments in Red and Black: Sharp Blade, Blood Red, Bruised, Risk, Pain, Falling

Author: Crimsonsenya

Beta: Jynn

Rating: NC17

Pairing: Mulder/Krycek

Warnings: angst, violence, character death, implied rape (nothing very graphic), m/m sex, AU derivations from the show

Summary: Six thematically related vignettes. The story of two shattered lovers.

A/N: A big thank you for the beta goes to Jynn. Any mistakes after correction are mine. Cookies go to Siberian Skys. These vignettes were inspired by Griva’s M/K blend called “Hold On” that can be found on her site, Strangelove. See link on intro page.

Disclaimer: The characters don't belong to me but to Chris Carter, 1013 and Fox.

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Sharp Blade

When he had first arrived in the United States, his aunt had taken him to his first Chinese restaurant. The waiter had invited him to visit the kitchen. The smell of garlic, chilli, and sesame oil had invaded his senses, while the sizzling woks, steaming rice, clanking lids and shouts of the chefs created a magical atmosphere. It was a place both exciting and frightening like the witch’s kitchen in Hansel and Gretel, his favourite fairytale. Alex had watched intently as the broad sharp knife cut through the baby corn, peppers and onions faster than the eye could follow. The weight and the gleam of the steel had him completely mesmerized. He had been six years old.

Over twenty years later, Alex had mastered all possible knife tricks; from chopping carrots to slicing somebody’s stomach open. He liked to cook. Even if nowadays, he rarely could, having been on the run for the past year. If there was one lesson he had learned as a teenager on the streets of New York, it was that you had to know how to take care of yourself. And that included feeding yourself when you were starving and your mother was sleeping off her hangover. The Chinese restaurant around the corner had been the best place to go to grab a meal, as the chef had really taken a liking to him.

His mind had time to roam, while he was handcuffed to the steering wheel of Mulder’s car, very hungry and extremely pissed off, without any chance to free himself whatsoever. Even his favourite blade had been taken away. And Mulder was probably humping Marita, as the blunt metal of the cuffs just kept digging deeper into Alex’s wrists. Struggling and thrashing didn’t help. He only managed to make the situation worse by turning the chafed skin into a bloody, raw mess. For the hundredth time, he cursed his overactive need to escape. Yeah, he was a rat bastard, a rat bastard who would bite and tear to get rid of whatever held him down. And he was damn proud of it.

If he were to die, he would choose a blade, because there was something almost orgasmic in the coolness of a razor-sharp edge against his palm. He had been stabbed when he was younger. The pain of the blade had been a quick sting that had filled him with an indescribable bliss, once he had drawn breath in his lungs and realized he was still alive. Alex knew there were differences in pain, degrees and variations, and he was familiar with them all. The suffocating dread of being locked up behind concrete with something that had no name but terror was worse than any nightmare a child could dream of. Then, there was the nerve-wrecking irritation from a paper cut or a pair of obtuse handcuffs boring into flesh that could drive any man insane. But still, the most gnawing pain Alex had ever experienced had to be the memories of what could have been; hot sex and gazes that could devour, a mad hope of what might be, if Mulder had acted on his hard-on that had pressed against Alex’s butt at the Hong Kong airport.

Once Mulder came back to the car and decided to take Alex with him to Russia, Alex got to learn that he hadn’t experienced the whole gamut of agony after all. As Mulder’s aftershave and bodily heat permeated his senses, and Mulder’s indignant voice thrummed in his ears, Alex thought again about all the sharp blades he had ever owned. He almost wished for the swift relief of a blade penetrating his skin and bones. Anything would have been a degree of pain less than sharing the same air with Fox Mulder.

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Blood Red

One could already tell after seeing the colour of his Speedos that he liked red, even if he couldn’t discern it from green. Red was the colour of Scully’s hair. The ribbons in his sister’s hair, apples, and heart shaped cards on Valentine’s Day; they all shone in a joyous shade of red. It reminded Mulder of everything innocent, warm and safe. All the things that, ultimately, made one feel like home.

The end of the world had painted the sky coral, a wide dark stroke of blood over the terra cotta earth; it’s terrifying, despaired intensity was only marred with flashing stripes of purulent yellow, the scourge marks of heaven. The alien invasion was the ultimate proof of him having been right all along, the fiercely mocking culmination of his life-long search for the truth that now laughed in his face, as he lay on the bed like a crumpled paper bag, fading away. Between him and the bright, red-hot hell, was standing the devil that wore the mask of a wrinkled man over his grooved, sanguine skin, black smoke seeping out from his mouth and nostrils.

It was Krycek who had woken him up. His anger and furious disappointment at Mulder’s betrayal were like ruby flames and a haze that burned as wildly as Krycek’s willpower. His fire latched on Mulder’s skin, the force shaking him to his core, making him wake up to the reality that still wasn’t as painful as the dream.

The next time they met, Mulder punched him like always, because that was red hot too, and nobody bled as prettily as Alex. There was a deep red cut on Alex’s pale cheekbone, and Mulder’s tongue plunged in to lick away the oozing blood. His fingers dug in to make more red marks on Alex’s arms, and Alex bit him on his pec so hard that the hurt sparkled behind Mulder’s eyelids. The next day, the insides of Mulder’s thighs too had purple splotches on them. The thrill, the lust, it was all red, the colour of passion. Mulder loved red, but it was being rivalled badly by the white-hot, bursting pleasure that drained away everything else but the serene, calm lightness of a dove’s feather.

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Bruised

How could lips as beautiful and smooth as those of Alex’s cut so deep when they brushed over Mulder’s skin? Alex’s mouth had always been a mystery to him; luring and carnal beyond what a young green agent rookie should have been permitted to have. There was a demanding, rough and sinful quality to his lips when they covered Mulder’s, which acutely contradicted everything Alex appeared to be. Later, it seemed that the more betrayals, violence and blood came between them, the more gentle and lingering Alex’s kisses became. They sparked alive a flame of unsolicited yearning in the most hidden corners of Mulder’s heart and mind, while eradicating all sincere efforts to resist him.

Regardless of the perpetual half-light that shaded their meetings, Alex’s mouth always glowed red like a fresh bruise. Mulder would have preferred receiving actual bruises from him. Instead, Mulder was forced to surrender to the assuredly possessive and enticing touch of Alex’s lips that left invisible scorch marks on Mulder in their wake over his shivering body. Even the quick kiss Alex gave him, after sharing the information about the alien resistance, was one more sign of his self-conceited power over Mulder. A shameless peck on the mole on his cheek, a declaration of how it belonged to Alex along with everything else in Mulder, and how he could go unpunished for murder and treachery simply because of Mulder’s weakness.

For a long time, Mulder tried to fight back to no avail. He didn’t kiss, he bit and crushed, blemishing Alex’s skin with visible bruises; tangible, undeniable proof that their irrational, feverish and downright desperate encounters weren’t just Mulder’s burden and doom. Yet, as soon as Alex’s touch was absent, and the memory of his gentle marks on Mulder faded from infuriating to painfully arousing, Mulder began to crave him. Each time, he promised himself that next time, he would pay Alex back with an equally sensitive delicacy that would leave him as overwhelmed with a maddening passion as Mulder was. That much Mulder had finally admitted to himself; the welling sea of emotions towards Alex, in which Mulder had been swooped up in ever since he had pulled Alex in an embrace after the shooting of Augustus Cole.

But it took a long time, with even more mayhem, pain, flames, violence, and fear, before Mulder understood Alex was as bruised inside out as he was himself. Mulder was lying in the hospital bed, after having risen from the dead like an alien Christ that still harboured the death in his holy flesh and blood. Mulder had been astrally standing there in his room, the sunlight running through him, coolly observing his own bruised body, when Alex entered and sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. He had leant over to kiss Mulder’s forehead, and Mulder could feel a soft warmth brush through him. When Alex pulled back, his mouth had been as pale as the semi-putrid cadaver he had just touched, and his lips were distorted with a pain that permeated the whole room, obfuscating all colour. Too busy absorbing the flare of Alex’s eyes, two black torches ablaze with suffering and desolation, Mulder almost missed noticing the needle that sunk into the bend of his lax arm.

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Risk

The one constant in his life was taking risks. His entire existence was based on the principle of an uncertain goal and the challenge to achieve it. Risk was the means and the cost. There were certain choices Alex had had to make that were too high risk or less wise, such as kissing Mulder and giving him the gun afterwards. The results of his actions were sometimes disastrous too, like with the whole fucking trip to mother Russia. But Alex never took downright foolish chances or blindly base jumped over cliffs –unlike someone he knew all too well. It was absolutely ridiculous how one could get Mulder to do practically anything by just flashing the keywords “alien” or “information” or “conspiracy” in front of him; the more unavailing the quest, the greater the probability of Mulder rushing in head first.

Still, his high-tuned self-preservation instinct non-withstanding, there was one completely idiotic risk Alex wanted to take before his life ended. After Mulder pulled his most stupid trick ever by launching the search for that UFO in Oregon, Alex was almost certain he would never get the chance to take it. What more, leading Mulder to the crash site was his only regret in life, because, even if Alex didn’t admit it to himself, the only part of his brain where the Rat subsided was the storage of memories and thoughts concerning all things Fox.

There was no way Alex would not have saved him from turning into an alien replicant. It wouldn’t do any good if the hero of the story –no matter how absurd the tale– had been killed. And what would have become of the villain if he hadn’t been allowed to fulfil his last wish?

The night after Mulder was released from the hospital, Alex broke into Mulder’s apartment deliberately loud, yet Mulder had already been standing at the doorway with the gun in his hand. A couple of controlled moves of their usual, deadly courting dance later, Alex had Mulder pinned against the wall by the groin, while Mulder’s gun pointed at Alex’s cheekbone. After what seemed like an eternity of locking eyes, Alex slowly grasped Mulder’s wrist. Instead of yanking the hand back, he pulled it down, sliding the barrel across his cheek, over his jaw, and down to his neck where he could feel his own pulse pounding against the cool ring of metal, at the same time languidly tilting his head to the side in rapture. He didn’t want to keep his eyes open; for a moment, he wanted to imagine it was a lover’s caress, and not a game with death. All he could hear besides the bubbling of the fish tank was Mulder’s quickening breath. Their bodies were pressed so close that everything suddenly became too painful. Alex felt like stumbling in the dark, reaching for Mulder who was only a vague reflection of the man that had been snatched away by the beam of terrifying light.

“What…” Mulder cleared his throat, and Alex’s eyelids shot open. “What do you want, Al- Krycek?” he asked, but there was no challenge or annoyance in his voice, just exhaustion and recognition. Mulder’s expression was wound up, and his eyes were dim, but he was too tired to wear his usual mask of indignation. Alex brought his head so close to Mulder their breaths mingled. Tentatively, he raised his hand to Mulder’s face; carefully, he settled his fingertips on the spots where the alien device had pierced Mulder’s skin. The image of those fucking green-blooded aliens mutilating him hurt Alex’s guts. It filled him with an impotent rage over the black filth that had desecrated what beauty there was still left in the world –Mulder.

Mulder gasped and quivered, leaning into the touch that started searing holes through what seemed like a thick layer of ice over his soul. It was as if something had uncoiled in him, and even the lines around his eyes appeared to smoothen. Alex knew where Mulder had been, what had been done to him. There were more agonizing memories than he cared to acknowledge. His and Mulder’s lives had collided and coincided in so many ways it was beyond kismet.

“I didn’t wish this to happen to you,” Alex said, and the words rasped as if they were refusing to leave his mouth. He watched how the realization dawned to Mulder, watched as his body lost all tension. Alex covered the distance between their lips, and Mulder’s mouth was already open when they connected. Mulder felt as if the deep cold of rotten soil and alien alloys started seeping out from his cells. Alex thought how it was time to cease everything that moved, the rotating of the planet on its orbit, the fight for the future. It was time to just be, to slowly stroke Mulder’s tongue and the ridge on his sweatpants, and to take chances no more.

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Pain

It had been a simple equation, in fact, the simplest thing in Mulder’s insane life. Him versus Krycek, the hero versus the antagonist, the suffering of his soul set against Alex’s physical pain. As he watched Alex collapse on the harsh dirty cement of the garage with a rivulet of blood running across his face, a dreadful, blank weariness crawled into Mulder’s heart. The sensation was as uninvited as the black oil, and it petrified Mulder from the inside.

Just don't insult me trying to make me understand. Mulder had been right; nothing Krycek could have said would have made Mulder understand what he didn’t realize until after Krycek’s death. Once Scully and the baby had been escorted to the hospital, and Mulder was back home, he looked at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. He shuddered at the sight: a haggard, battered man in jeans and a leather jacket, on the run and constantly looking over his shoulder, his dilated pupils giving the now dull green hazel eyes a feral look. He was completely numb of feeling, except for the nauseating aftershock of a turbulent adrenaline rush. It was horrifying. He had become… he had become… the man he had hated with such a pure, righteous rage, the man whom he had left for dead without a second glance.

And Mulder couldn’t help it. He spewed his guts out. Then, bundled up on the cold tile floor, with all the strength drained out from his overwrought body, a kaleidoscope-like vision started to spin before his eyes. It couldn’t have been Alex. No. Perhaps Mulder had been so emotionless because he believed in the back of his mind the true Alex –his Alex– would have never killed him? The man in the garage couldn’t have been him; ergo, killing him hadn’t been worth reacting. Mulder’s fingers were frozen, and his pulse that just a while ago had been racing ten thousand miles an hour seemed to have stopped beating altogether. There was room for rent in a huge hole in his chest, right where his slimy heart had run out. He was feeling nothing, the same way he had always thought Krycek did; an empty space inhabited solely by himself, while all the other people’s shadows played on the walls.

Mulder’s equation had inescapably shifted and broken. As memories segued in flashes, he had to admit the equation might have been impossible even in the first place. He pictured how the shards of two battered bodies and souls had been stirred in a bowl and then glued back randomly to the two men, who couldn’t separate anymore which pieces had originally belonged to whom. Everything Mulder remembered –and he did remember everything in excruciating detail– screamed at him how true the image of the blurring and melding was, until to the very point when even discerning their minds turned impossible.

When Mulder had gotten his telepathic abilities, he had been able to accuse Skinner of having somebody else on the case, as the mental images and sounds that had pierced his brain had been so blindingly clear and sorely intimate. The reason was that the man shadowing Skinner’s office had been Krycek. When Mulder had been squirming in pain on the stairway, he had taken such an overwhelming dive into Krycek’s mind as he had walked by that Mulder had outright refused to feel all the sharp-edged, well-defined, painstaking emotions he had found there –especially, everything that could only be called love. The strangled, despised and raw, yet resistant and fiercely elemental emotion that somehow had twined itself around the motivations and goals and passions in Krycek’s heart and mind.

Mulder was good at denial, a life-long habit he had surely mastered. One more lie hardly counted. He picked up, labelled and filed away all the times he had met Alex Krycek; every said and unsaid word, gesture and tone, everything that could possibly ever remind Mulder of his humanity. He was dazed by the amount of stubborn memories of Alex that had clung to him for the past seven years, and Mulder was outraged by his own passionate response to them. Exactly when had Alex become a person worth all that reminiscence? Mulder sorted out all the pictures, scents and sensorial memories in small boxes that would be easier to hide in dark rooms with solid walls that occupied a great part of Mulder’s mind.

By sunrise, Mulder was very calm and blank again, though chilled to the bone. “Even if you can’t feel the cold burn, it still hurts like hell,” a voice whispered to him. “It has always come down to the inexorable fact that we are connected by pain.” The stony dam Mulder had built against the roaring flood of sensations threatened to bend and give away, but Mulder didn’t give in. He couldn’t give in. This pain would have to go unnamed. The sun smouldered copper on the morning sky, lighting up the taped x on his windowpane, but grim storm clouds slowly slithered over the shining rays that filtered through them, turning the dusky blue into a stunning shade of dark gold.

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Falling

“Pain only means that you can still feel.” The smoky tone caressed him. It danced softly on his frayed nerve ends, numbing the sharp burn in his body into an almost lulling ache. The voice continued murmuring in the background; strange calming vowels and consonants in Russian, and Mulder waited for his mind to reach the zone, the merciful state higher than agony. There was gravel on the cement floor, scattered from the soldier’s boots, and pebbles scrubbed against Mulder’s bruised face. The fingers of his right hand had been broken one by one, and his left wrist had been twisted. His arms were practically useless now. There was a gash on his right Achilles heel, preventing him from walking straight, or even attempting an escape whenever he was dragged to the interrogation room through the endless corridors of the bunker complex.

Once more, Mulder had been tossed in the corner of his cell, though this time, not after the long torture of extracting information, but a session of the soldiers kicking and beating him for fun. Most of the times, rising up required too much effort, and yet, Mulder had to try. At least, he had been shifted to another, slightly better cell, one that even had a cot and a quilt. He lay on the thin, ripped mattress, quivering with fever. Alex’s fingers on his neck and forehead were cool, soothing –perfect. It was a bittersweet cosmic joke that of all the ghosts in Mulder’s life, Alex was the one to come to him.

It seemed that nowadays Mulder always felt either too hot or too cold. The soldiers regularly tore off his orange prison overalls, opening half-closed wounds, to throw a couple of buckets of ice-cold water at his grime and blood-crusted body. To warm himself up, he conjured up memories of smothering July nights, spent naked and entangled in sweaty, muscular limbs; moments when Mulder had felt damn good and unbelievably powerful after fucking Alex seven ways to the moon. He had craved Alex’s pliant, taut body with an insane heat. After the betrayal, when he met the true Alex, the one who would bend Mulder over, Mulder had lusted for him even more. He regretted it now, not having slept with Alex more than six times after they were partners.

Every move Mulder made added a new edge to the blinding pain. He leant stiffly against Alex, as Mulder was bruised, and his muscles felt constantly tense. The scent of Alex’s spicy aftershave lingered so strong in the heavy air of the cell Mulder wondered why the soldiers didn’t notice it. Mulder’s ribs had been broken and then, surprisingly, patched by a doctor, as he had started spitting and gorging his own blood in such amount the soldiers had feared Mulder would die on them before the military was through interrogating him. When he was recovering he got a pause from the beatings, but then he had been cuffed immobile to the pipes and reamed rough and dry, over and over again. He couldn’t move, lest he might have torn open the stitches, or his ribs might have pierced his lungs. Blood oozed through his bandages, colouring the world furiously red, and he imagined it was Alex inside of him. He had ascended, outside and above, the body that the soldiers were cruelly punishing.

“You would have killed me much better,” he said to Alex.

“Yes, I would have, and you would have loved it,” Alex purred, lips hovering over Mulder’s ear, his tongue coming out to touch his earlobe. “It would have been face to face and with a blade.” Both of them knew Alex would have never triggered the gun he had pointed at Mulder at the FBI’s garage –way too banal for both Alex and Mulder.

“Tell me,” Mulder demanded.

“I would have pressed the sharp edge of my cold blade to your throat. But it would have been at the exact moment when you’d have wanted to die. I would have been there, fulfilling your darkest and last dream, as nobody else could have. Beside the caressing blade, I would have been touching you too. I would have penetrated you so deep the back of your throat would have throbbed of desire and blood until you couldn’t have chosen which one you’d have wanted more, to die or to come. And I would have given you everything you wanted, and I would have taken everything I wanted. It would have been pure, mindblowing, animal love that neither one of us would have wanted it to end… It would have been your last and best orgasm. The whole time, you would have looked me in the eyes –because you are headstrong and daring– and you would have been as determinate and thorough in dying as you were in your quest while living.”

There were houses grumbling, and the earth was shattering from explosions in a world far away beyond the bars and concrete.

“Are they coming?” he asked Alex, possibly speaking about two different things at the same time. His friends, the aliens, his alien friends? His friends… Mulder would be happy if they were safe somewhere out there, perhaps still fighting, hopefully even remembering him.

“They are looking for you.” Alex didn’t know when they would find him. Or maybe he knew but didn’t tell –the bastard.

The night he died, he dreamed of falling for the first time in ages, but this time he wasn’t falling alone, and at some point, the wild spiralling downwards morphed into flying with a dark angel who never let go of him.

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