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Title: Breathe
Category: SRAO Schmoop alert.
Thanks be to Flywoman, for putting up with my general incompetancy. Also, to nonie, for wonderful, wonderful beta and asking all the right questions.
. Mulder's gone. Gone. Mulder had been looking at the collated forensic report again, reading it again, again, even though he knew every detail, every last entry; sometimes he would even close his eyes and mouth the words, the injuries, the location of the bodies, the names and the close to single-digit ages. His head was turned downward, and I remember watching the shadows slide across his face as he swung his head back and forth. I had told him to go home: I would finish the paperwork, I would do the reporting and the accounting, and he could sign tomorrow when I turned them in. Mulder swallowed once, then shuddered as he handing me the copy, lifting his coat off the back of his chair. There was a breath of a raspy kiss to my forehead, and then he was gone. Gone. Funny, how that word can echo. How it beats around the air with these empty wings and lodges in the back of your throat so that your eyes water and you blink hard against the pain. Gone. Like that. His apartment was mussed: clothing strewn on the floor, cushions removed from the couch and littered here, there. The desk, though, is in curious composure, though the drawers neatly tucked in, computer off. The fish were fed, and the soil in the chrysanthemum I gave him two weeks ago--the soil was damp. There was an opened bottle of Mango Madness on the counter, and the shoes were in a neat row except for his boots, which are missing, and papers were all there except for a book of poetry. There was a low, acidic stench lingering in the clothes and a curious blotch on the floor. Blood and semen, the techie told me. Blood streaked very thin, the faintest brown dash across cushions and semen dribbled on the floor. Curious pattern. The blood's Mulder's; the semen isn't: I remember how the lab flicked in and out, dusky and grey then fluorescent bright as Danny looked at me with dark, impenetrable black coffee eyes. "It's not blood enough to be anything serious," he said, softly, and I nodded. Gone. Signs of a struggle--scuffling on the floor, blood on the cushions. Downstairs heard something bumping around on the floor, but didn't say anything, being a long-time resident and used to Mulder's visitors. And now he's gone. There's blood and semen on his floor and the smell of cigarettes in the air. We finally caught a clue two days later, at a gas station on the New York chunk of I-95. There'd been a hold-up, and when the local police department ran the surveillance camera, and there was a snippet, before the robbery. Two men pulled up to the station, one got out in stop-jerk motion and filled the tank of a stolen car; the other sat and brooded in the passenger's seat. Advance a frame and the profile shifted to Mulder's face, and the man with the gas... I couldn't breathe for a moment when the techie in Image Processing upped the resolution. Krycek. And Mulder--that face turned up to the camera, wide blinking eyes and the half-open mouth, the eyebrow half-lifted. Surprise? Fear? Mulder then rose to a half crouch, stuck his face out the window and there was a frozen shot of Mulder leaning out of the car and yelling something, screaming something. Krycek then said something back and Mulder sat down and Krycek entered the store to pay for gas and brought out a box of chocolate donuts and a bottle of orange juice and a Snapple. Mango Madness. I remember falling back, having to brace myself against the edge of a Formica countertop, as I watched the world through a sudden oxygen-deprived blur. The van gives a creak and a sway over a pothole. The driver curses the wretched condition of this back-country road, and one of the dozing team members shifts his gun onto his knees, then curses the wretched condition of this hack driver. Crack of static, then Techie Morris then mutters about humidity playing havoc with our radio communications with Buffalo base. Across from me, Skinner pours himself steaming coffee from a thermos. It's cool in the mornings, cold by the sea, and he looks tired, aching, aged. I wonder if his bones ache: mine do. "Want some?" Proffered cup. I shake my head and he tosses his head; the feeble morning light catches on his glasses. It's wet here, it's damp and cold and chilly. I wonder how Mulder is, how he is today. I can't breathe again. "You should be taking something for that, Agent Scully." I make small noises about a busy schedule: let him think that it's a lung cold. He blinks once; there's sympathy in the quick movement of skin over eye. I cough, feel the Kevlar across my shoulders. "The town should be just ahead," I say to him, and he nods through the mist of coffee steam that's sticking to his glasses. . Alex tastes like toothpaste in the morning. Colgate Baking Soda-Peroxide Clean Mint, to be precise. With a touch of Scope. Plax--the red kind--and Johnson and Johnson's floss to boot. He says that the drugstore varieties don't do the job. "I think you missed a piece of spinach." He doesn't turn around. Keeps on scrubbing away at his teeth in the little shard of mirror over the kitchen sink. "And Alex, halitosis is nothing to be ashamed of." I shift against the wall, trying to find a comfortable position for bare skin. "Really, it isn't. There's prescription medicine to take care of it nowadays, and I'd be glad to accompany you to see the doctor if you're embarrassed." He puts his toothbrush and cup away and measures out a length of floss. "Mulder, the problem with you is that you never know when to shut that big, ugly mouth of yours." "Oh." Pause, accompanied by what feels like a hideously huge grin on my face. "I thought you liked my big, ugly mouth. You certainly sounded happy last night." "Depends on what you're doing with that big, ugly mouth." Pause as he stares at his reflection in the mirror. "You're good at some things, but othe--" "Dickhead." There's muffled laughter until he finishes with the floss and tosses it into the waste-basket, and then he stretches, bones popping. His back roils, hard objects under smooth skin, and I restrain the urge to reach out and touch. My stomach reminds me that it's breakfast time, and it then mutters that since you can't cook worth diddly shit, you can't bed Alex until at least after he's made something to eat. Still stretching, Alex pads over to the stove and peers up into the dry foods cabinet. "What do you want for breakfast?" "Anything besides that lumpy pisspoor excuse for oatmeal you made yesterday." I'm still not used to Alex laughing--not real laughter, rich and warm and a dark, smooth chocolate mahogany, streaked with gold and easy to the touch. It's a funny sort of sound, but not half as fucked up as my own laughter. Or so he assures me. "And who was the one that distracted me while I was cooking?" He snags the frying pan off the hook, and settles it on the stove, which gleams softly in the morning light. Alex Krycek, housewife extraordinare, lecturing me on the proper way to clean ovens. Alex Krycek sprawled full length on the wooden boards, smiling up at me in the afternoon sunshine, all shy and quiet, running his left hand through my hair, thumb trailing along my cheek and then closing his eyes to kiss me. "But, Mulder, since you love oatmeal so much, I'm going to make an exception and cook it again." I settle into a chair, and Alex opens the pantry door to pull out the ugliest kitchen apron ever made. It's also probably the only Art Deco kitchen apron ever made, too, the most ugly shades of green and yellow plastic known to man. Alex seems to like it for some godforsaken reason. "Bull-fucking-shit. Why is that frying pan on the stove?" I rock back in the chair, bracing myself against the table. "Well, you seem to like burnt oatmeal so much..." "Fucker." The word trails off into laughter as Alex Krycek, cold-hearted triple agent, struggles to put on an apron. Adjusting the neck part is no problem--the back, though... He goes through convolutions worthy of a sideshow contortionist. Finally manages to tie it on by backing into the pantry door, propping one of the apron strings on the doorknob, then using one hand to carefully weave the other string into the first to create a knot of some sort. And when he takes one step, the whole damn think drops off. I laugh my ass off. His eyes flash murderously in my direction, and when he finally does get the apron tied on, he says, "Since you're Mr. Idle, Mulder, why don't you go beat some eggs?" He points to a bowl and fork set on the counter. "Eggs in oatmeal?" I open the fridge and pull out four eggs, relishing the bumpy coolness in my hand. I crack the eggs on the rim of the bowl; he affects a Russian accent. "Old Russian recipe. It make you strong. Like the bear. Like that Alexander Krycek." I laugh, toss my head. He grins, sharp and happy as he lays a few strips of bacon on the frying pan, and for a long, sweet moment, the only sounds are the crackling fat and the fork clinking against the sides of the bowl, swishing of egg. I lay the beaten eggs at his elbow, then lay a kiss on the rim of his shoulder, on the flow of bone and skin. Carefully, I wander across the curve of his collarbone, lifting up the apron string, then slipping my tongue up, around, onto the shoulder blade: even his skin tastes like soap. Clean. His nipples are smooth at first, a splotch of grained silk amidst smoothness, but they jump into sharp relief after a swipe of my thumb, and he arches back, laying head to my shoulder, and when I roll his nipple between forefinger and thumb, he sighs through a half-open mouth, tongue lolling dark red and half- curled, the inside of his lips damp and slick. "Why are you wearing pants?" "What?" His eyes pop open;he subvocalizes an obscenity. "Pants." I murmur into his ear, my fingers tracing the approximate line of his sweatpants, between the ribbed band and his waist, sweep of index finger across streak of hair, the muscle underneath. "Why're you wearing them?" "Oh." Squirm. I can feel his shoulders working back and forth as he slides his legs outside of mine, cloth dragging faintly across bare leg. "Last time I tried frying bacon without pants or an apron, I couldn't have sex for a week." He winces; I laugh. "That would suck." Shrug of muscle, then slips out of the apron, calmly laying it out on the counter before he turns around and looks at me with these half-smiling eyes gleaming lazy citrine in the morning light as I move in front of him, pinning his hips to the counter. Alex tilts his head, half-smile, then runs a hand across the back of my neck, hand light and easy, brushing the vertabrae with padded calluses, move of roughness against still-tender bruises. Flicking the corner of his tongue across his bottom lip, Alex traces the bruises down my side and says into my shoulder, says so soft I crane forward to hear him, "I'm sorry about that." "I rather liked it." Soft, whispered into the fuzz of his hair, shifting my hips a little, and the corner of his mouth twitching as he braces my ass against the counter. Kisses the bruise, tongue pushing against the tenderness and making me yelp,arch a little. Alex smiles, kisses my shoulder, all sweet and gentle so that I blink, rather surprised by the easy brush of his mouth across my shoulder, the way he follows the clavicle down to the sternum, across the belly, to the side, moving down, licks his lips now, touch of wetness, and now he's right above the hi-- Alex's eyes go wide, and he stands up and, and a moment later, I can hear the crunch of *something* on the gravel too. . Sweet mother of God. It's Mulder, staggering out into the sunshine: he looks dazed, stumbling, turns his head here and there. He moves slowly, carefully, pauses on the raised doorstep, listening to some noise. Yawns in the sunshine, he stretches, sunlight across bare muscle, catching in the fold of those damn boxers. Wriggles his shoulders, then tilts his head, directly towards me; for a minute, I think his eyes, soft and quiet, rest on me, but then his expression is so glazed, so dulled. . . Drugged. My fingers tighten around my gun. "Idiot." The noise is hissed, it carries in the quiet morning; the voice is familiar. Mulder turns, eyes half-lidded; his expression is unreadable. I bite my lip and close my eyes. Krycek has a gun tucked into the band of his sweatpants: Mulder's face registers, shock, surprise, and then he forces a blank neutrality that tells of these past few days, and only his teeth on his lower lip shows any anxiety. He turns his head away from Krycek, looking over his shoulder towards the sea, and the movement shows off a livid redness ringing his neck and down his side. My stomach contracts, and I push away against the bitterness filling my throat. I can't breathe. I'm going to kill that fucking bastard Krycek. I'm going to stand there and put my foot on his windpipe and then I'm going to push down. I'm going to brea-- Krycek turns around carefully and Mulder's stance wobbles a little, shivering. The words carry in the morning light. "I don't see anything." Mulder's voice is rasping, gritty, and I bite my lip against the raw edge. "Let's go back inside." "You sure?" Krycek is smooth, oily, and he smiles, the faintest twisted lift of the lips. "I think I like the outside." He steps up close to Mulder, who goes stock still except for a little quiver in his clenched fists. Mulder's breathing quick, fast: I can see his lungs heaving and he stares at Krycek with wide eyes. "I..." Swallow. "The cleanup is so much easier outside." Mulder closes his eyes, and a muscle jumps on his jaw. Krycek smiles again, nasty, and his hand lingers down around his waist. There's the gleam of steel--he's drawn the gun, and is he drawing the safety back? He's lifting the gun, bouncing its weight in his hand and Mulder's staring down at it, hypnotized. And then Krycek stops; he takes it by the handle, steps back a few paces, lifts it to chest height and-- The sound of a shot recoils in the air. ... It's a blur of men, people--black bodies streaming out behind us and I'm stumbling blindly across the rocks in my bare feet, cursing my stupidity. Alex is ahead, running with a steady lope, unimpeded by things like sharp rocks and he tosses a bemused grin back at me. He's done this often, I say to myself, my hands balling into fists. He's done this before, he prepared. He'll get you out of this: he's running for their van. They had to have a van to get up here. Or a helicopter. Even better. Does Alex have a pilot's license? There's a big white blotch at the edge of my vision--that must be it, in the lilac copse. Damn vehicle practically screams 'conspiracy, consortium, bad- government-types within', and Alex gshoots forward, the sight emboldening him. I follow after, stumbling with sore feet and then I catch a foot on a stone, a piece of driftwood, I don't know. The breath hisses out of my lungs, liquid acid searing my innards. I stumble, tripping ahead; my legs falter and Alex hauls me upright. He pauses, he goes backward, he pulls me up and I lean into his arm, bite my lip and let my head loll back, but he thrusts me forward. "Can you run on that ankle?" I nod, hobbling forward; his hand stays firmly clenched in mine, and I can hear the pu-- He lurches forward, carried forward by the momentum of the bullet, but then there's a second crack, and his torso jerks, twitches, and there's a spray of red flying out to the path above. Little gobbets of internal organs, lungs--the gun whirls out, flying away at a tangent from spasming fingers, clattering as it hits the pebbles and Alex himself makes a thunk as he trips and slams into the ground. It's a wet, squelching sound. "Alex," I scream, turning him over. The footsteps behind slow. "Alex." The sound is soft, weak and pitiful, not a proper keen at all. He blinks at me, grins half-like, then shudders, pawing at the pebbles, catching one in his palm. There's a rasping noise when he breathes, this hissing, and his entire chest is a gory mat of just-freed blood spilling down, cascading down in long sheets, creating a blotch on the rocks. Some small part of my stupid fucking brain identifies it as one of the Rorschach patterns. It distinctly remembers seeing that shape on a heavy stock flash card in freshman psychology. His eyes roll upward, but I think for a moment, he's trying to laugh--there's a metaphor if you'll ever hear one, and then the bubble of dark brown rises on his lips, hovers for a moment, perfect, shining softly, and then breaks in a puff of wind. Footsteps, and my hands clench around a wet pebble and I rear back to throw it. It's a hand at my bare shoulder turns my head and I see that it's Scully, thin white face and with a halo of red staring down at me with something like relief. A gun dangles in her right hand, the pebble from mine. "Mulder--thank god you're all right." I think I'm crying when I hit her. ... Mulder wakes up late afternoon. 2:23 PM, in this sterile white room of smooth metal surfaces and antiseptic linoleum floor. The split lip from Mulder's punch is scabbed over, still a little stiff when I bring the diet coke to my mouth. The sun comes through the curtains is a vague fuzz, no match for the perfect white fluorescent turning everything blue white. The magazine--an old Avon catalogue--is crinkled, folded, the glossy pictures lined, and I wonder whether I should open the curtains. Would Mulder like that? If Krycek kept him mainly in darkness, which Mulder's rapid blinking seems to indicate, that might injure his eyes and the doctors didn't check him for that an-- Mulder's eyes flick around desperately, and his dry mouth works desperately. I hand a pre-filled Dixie cup to him, and he tips it into his mouth with shaking hands, barely manages to get the water into him. "We had to knock you out to get you here." I say, just to breach the silence, make the clank of the ventilation seem less loud. Mulder sets the cup on the bedside table, leans back into the pillows, but his eyes keep darting around. "Where am I?" "Hospital. I wanted to check and make sure everything was OK." Shift in my seat. Mulder blinks at me, then says, "Where's. . . Krycek?" "Krycek's dead." Pause, as I lay my hand on his wrist, comforting him. "I shot him." For a moment, he just blinks at me, then tilts his head and opens his mouth and screams. Maybe the word there isn't scream: scream implies sound, and there's that note of desperation, but Mulder's mouth just works desperately. And then he stares at me with a dazed silence before all the fragments of his mind swing together into a knot, and then he's shaking, shaking, fingers twisted into a tangle of white bone. Mulder's not crying, he's not crying at all, it's just that he's shaking. Fine little tremors shooting through the edges of his frame, and when I reach out, he shudders violently and snarls. . It's raining, raining, heavy grey drops against the windshield, I'm going to dream about the sound of rain, the smell of it, the color. I'm going to dream about the way it slides down the glass and the way it catches light through a rounded lens. Scully shifts in the driver's seat,; she takes her eyes off the long, black interstate and says, "Do you want to stop somewhere to eat?" I don't say anything. Her hands shift around the steering wheel. "Are you OK?" How the fuck am I supposed to answer that? What the fuck am I supposed to do? We were going out of the hospital, going down the stairwell to the parking lot, and she was taking me down the steps, her hand on my elbow as if I might decide to climb over the railing and jump, as if I might slip and shatter on the concrete. And she was leading me down the steps, and I really did need her help because I was stumbling through an old memory of being on the beach with Alex. I was slow taking the turn, so for a moment, the edge of her suit jacket tugged up and there, snug on the rim of her hip, she had her gun. The Smith&Wesson, and because she was fussing over how she was going to report this, it would have been simple, easy, really, to just reach out and snatch the gun out of the holster. Flick the safety off with a little jerk of the thumb, and then I'd have a sublime moment of deciding whether to blow her brains out or mine. My hand twitched, and I felt myself leaning out, fingers open, moments from the holster and then-- And then she made some small inane comment about Accounting, about needing me to go through the papers because she couldn't read my writing. And then, then I wanted to ask her whether ccounting'd gotten the stick out of its ass long enough to approve a replacement for my cellphone. Alex. Alex. Alex, you bastard, you just had to get shot by her--by her, that makes all the difference in the world--you had get shot and die and put me in this fucking situation. Alex-- Ale-- And I'm starting to lose it already. Already--was the sky more blue or more grey that day we left? That day, did you smell more like leather or like cigarettes? What kind of car did you steal, and what was the name of that diner by the road? And Scully's sitting next to me, the line of her eyes and her mouth and her throat, the aggressive cut of her jaw and the sharp line of her suit clear and clean against the pale grey light. Mulder, you shit. What am I supposed to do? The pebble's in my pocket, and I'm sitting next to her with my hands in my lap. We catch the edge of a puddle, then there's a long riff of water shooting up both sides of the windows, shooting up around the windows. Scully curses, and for a second, her eyes are on me, and they're so full of love and care that for a moment, I can say something, tell her something. And the moment passes, and it's quiet in the car again as she pulls onto the off-ramp. Scully takes the turn with such elegant, deft little movements of her wrist. I'm going to dream about the rain tonight, the rain, the rain. . I've made a mug of instant chicken noodle on the coffee table because he ate hardly anything at all at the diner. He's in a tight knot on the sofa, face pressed into the leather, and my hand is hovering over his shoulder. He pulls away. I pull back. I watch the thin, white fingers clenched around the edge of the blankets. "What did he do to you?" And I have the sudden feeling that if Mulder had the strength to kill me, he'd do it. Rise up out of those blankets and take me by the throat, one hand above the other. Lay my head across the counter and push down onto my larynx, throwing the weight of his entire body onto my windpipe until it breaks with a crunch and I suffocate on the kitchen counter, kicking against the linoleum. He shivers again, draws those blankets around his shoulders. "I--" His head snaps away from me. I bow my head; my hands are clenched white and sharp in my lap. And then he pushes out of the couch and moves across the room, clutching the blanket around him, striding around the room with great flaps of his blue-green wings. He stops in front of the window, outlined in broad flares, the sunlight coming in on his hair. There is this long thin quaver and he clenches his fists, crossing them across his chest and collapsing inwards, giving a short, sharp painful cry as his head bites down into his collar. I don't dare go to him. And he rocks, finally wrenching his head upright and looking straight into the sun, very erect head lifted at a hundred-and-ten degree angle. A few shuddering breaths that lift his shoulders and let them down again. He turns his head for a profile, and I watch him close his eyes very slowly, very carefully. I open my mouth and say a stupid, "You've got to talk about it someday." He smiles all crooked and bitter and hurting, and returns a quiet, rusty nod, all without he opening his eyes. I close my own eyes and I rock back into the cushions of his couch. I don't say anything. I lift up my purse. I leave, closing the door carefully and quietly on him as he looks out onto the sun, caressing that small pebble. And when I am standing on the sidewalk, looking upwards, for a long moment he is profiled against the window, one arm raised, pebble catching with a sheen of light. And then the pebble hurls forward, with a crash and splinter of glass falling downwards in a glittering arc that tinkles upon the concrete and falls apart, the pebble lying next to my foot, the stone still amidst the quivering shards. I pick it up: cool to the touch, heavy smoothed granite. Dark grain, mottled with small, flaking brown streaks: dried blood. He's standing at the winding, watching me with blank eyes and a half-open mouth, and then he turns away and pulls down the shade. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. .end Feedback to anasile@aol.com
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