Title: Horses and Bourbon
Author: JC Sun

Category: VA, post X-files.
Rating: G
Summary: A day at the races with Krycek and Scully.

Disclaimer: Ain't mine. Don't want 'em.

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"It was in the newspapers for a while." Krycek says, taking a little sip of his bourbon. He has a scotch in one hand and a bourbon in the other, and he's wearing a navy sport coat with little gold cufflinks and a dazzlingly white dress shirt. The collar's open to show off his tan which is just the color to show off his eyes, which are dancing and laughing and falling all over themselves with lethal amusement. That much, at least, hasn't changed; you're pretty sure that he's got at least two guns on him and a throwing knife strapped to his shin -- in a Burberry holster, no doubt, to go with that shirt.

"Only the local ones," you say, looking at him for a moment before you look out onto the race track. There's a jockey on a horse pacing around the little earthen area where the horses come into the ring. "Funny that we both end up near here."

"Saratoga's beautiful this time of year," he says, also watching the jockey and his big, nervous chestnut.

You see a little flash of white on the other side of the stands, near the clubhouse that's on the other end. Umpty-billion dollar race-course, and they've only got one set of women's bathrooms, and that flash was probably your husband and his client and his wife. You know that the wife had brought a pair of binoculars, and you wonder what she's thinking as she looks Krycek over.

Objectively speaking, he looks pretty damn good, especially how considering the last time you saw him, he was missing an arm.

You wave back to the little flash of white, and then the flash of white goes off again. You could go back now. Take your leave, take your drink back to your husband and watch the races start.

"They cleared you, though," Krycek says, taking another sip of that bourbon. "Mulder was pretty convincing."

The sunshine and smell of grass which keeps you from flashing back to those interminable windowless dark rooms, full of long tables and half-shadowed faces and Mulder's face, more haunted tha -- the sunshine and sheer force of habit. Ten years of practice pays off, and your mind neatly skips off the topic, and you can look Krycek in the face. He had been at some of those meetings, sitting against the wall with a sling around his one arm and a baseball cap pulled down low to hide the scars which started on the back of his skull and reached halfway down his cheeks. "I never asked him to do it, you know. I didn't want to stay in the Bureau any more than he did."

"Yeah, well, I hear it's pretty hard to get an assistant professorship at Cornell when you're in jail for treason. Or marry a law professor who's partner in one of the largest firms in the state." The corners of his eyes crinkle at you.

"Hey, I have to live in _Albany_ for three months of the year." Both of you laugh at this, but when you guys both fall silent, you add, with just the slightest edge to your voice. "And Mulder didn't go to jail. In fact, I hear he turned out pretty well in the end. Somebody convinced the NSA that their town full of dead scientists and fetuses and schoolchildren just wasn't worth the bother."

You try to keep the pain out of your voice, but it doesn't really work. Kind of leaks over the edges in nasty little glass splinters, but Krycek has the good graces to pretend not to notice.

"What can I say? Something better must have turned up." He grins at you. It's a rather unsettling smile. His teeth are blindingly white and perfectly straight, but you're dead certain that Mulder personally smashed at least two of those neat teeth on a curb. . . Krycek's mouth had been a bloody mess, and it'd gotten all over your shirt.

The idea of Alex Krycek with dentures is profoundly disturbing. Besides, what orthodontist would replicate that little chip on the left top eyetooth. That's how wide he's grinning.

"A treasured souvenir from my childhood, " he'd said, touching it almost tenderly with his finger all those years ago as the two of you were locked in the shed at dawn. The smell of gasoline had filled the air then; to this day, in your dreams, you remember that shack and the sound of the ocean just beyond and the rustle of the pines in the high wind.

You're not going to think about just how you noticed that chip in the first place.

"Still haven't given up smoking these days, have you?"

"A man doesn't want to live forever, does he?"

Which is true, especially for him. He has his old smooth skin back, not to mention the arm, and those green eyes are even brighter and sharper these days, although there is a certain puffiness underneath them that suggests middle age. You're pretty sure, though, that Krycek'll be ninety eight and still have that flawless complexion. You wonder whether he trusts his arm or his body.

You don't trust your own, to be sure. You stare at yourself in the mirror, wondering if the seeds for a new species are still drifting around in your blood, and the surgery and burn scars still ache in cold weather; you wear long-sleeves to this day. Mark had been a little surprised by them, but you'd blamed them on a botched appendicitis surgery and a botched cooking experiment, respectively. You've told him that you spent your days in the FBI as the Bureau equivalent of a traveling morgue, dissecting cadavers and analyzing forensic evidence for rural counties too isolated to have their own. It's pretty close to the truth, except you were _Mulder's_ travelling morgue and that the things you dissected weren't always dead.

Mulder was the one who ended up in Tunguska and Hong Kong. You stayed in the US like the home-bred creature you are, but in all truth, that final investigation was American-bound. The only place you could really disappear and then reinvent a whole town, after all, was out in the flatlands of the West.

"So where is Mulder, these days?"

"I don't know. They turned him loose afterwards, I think. Sent him out West to get lost."

"And did he?" A magnificent bay walks past you. The jockey looks very small riding all the way up there, and when the horse rears up, it takes three grooms to get a grip on the horse's lead lines and calm him down. When they do that, the jockey gives the horse a reassuring pat, then turns up in your direction with a rather tight smile.

"That's my horse," Krycek says, laughing a little and raising his hand in return.

The noon glare is strong in your eyes, but you lean forward to get a better look of Krycek's horse. You don't know much about horses except for what you looked up to do this one dissection in Arizona, but this really is a beautiful animal, and the jockey's silks are some of the more tasteful that you've seen that day: a solid, rather pretty shade of green with a single golden diamond. You look back at Krycek, and with a bit of stomach lurch, notice that it's the same green as his eyes, as the field, as the rhodenderons you've got back home, as Mulder's had been that day he'd walked into the dark room and never come back. "Don't worry, Scully" Krycek smiles and says, taking a sip of his bourbon. "I'm sure our little fox found his back home."

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end

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