Hellbound, an X Files story by Glacis. Rated NC17 for violence and language, with a little
bit of M/K sex. No copyright infringement intended to Carter & Co.
et al. Spoilers for everything. Thanks to the Saturday Smut Gang for the
clarification of thought.
It was all going to hell in a hand basket. Alex Krycek
stared at the shaking shadow that used to be Marita Covarrubias, at the perfectly bovine incomprehension in the
flat light eyes of Cancerman's spawn, and fought the
urge to kill them both where they stood.
Didn't they understand?
They were all hellbound. They had no weapons left in
the arsenal. The fetus was gone, and with it any chance they might have had at
fighting the Invaders with genetics. The vaccine was a one shot wonder, and
what was left of Marita was proof they hadn't been
able to replicate the exact formula. Or she'd've been
dead. Usefulness expended, husk tossed out in the trash.
His right hand clenched in the dark leather glove, and he closed his
ears to Spender's bleating. His authority. How had
anyone as deviously brilliant and coldly ruthless as Cancerman
managed to whelp something this spineless? The fingers
relaxed suddenly.
Of course. Spender
wouldn't be a problem much longer. But perhaps he could perform one last task
before Daddy caught up with him and corrected his mistake. Hopefully, Jeffrey
wouldn't fuck this one up.
"That authority isn't yours, now is it? It's your father's."
His voice was soft as a whisper, compelling as the edge of a fine steel knife
against the jugular. "You've been a tool, just like your mother. A tool to take down Mulder. To stand in
the way of the X Files. To make sure the truth never sees the light of
day."
He watched the light, dim as it was, finally dawn in the flat eyes.
There was determination there, too, and Krycek hid
his triumph behind a solemn expression.
"Not for long." Spender nodded decisively.
"Hurry," Krycek hissed. "Before
your father stops you."
Spender tossed an uncertain look over his shoulder. "But what
about-"
"I'll see to her." Calm voice, reassuring. Spender bought it.
Fucking idiot.
He turned to Marita as soon as Spender was out
of sight down the corridor. He knew what he had to do, and so did she, but for
once, the familiar spark was completely absent. She looked drained, pushed past
the point of endurance to pain, as if she would welcome death.
She did.
Her body relaxed bonelessly against his in a
parody of satiation. He lifted a finger and gently closed her eyelids. She
weighed nearly nothing as he lifted her and placed her in a bed in the far
corner of the room, tucking her in, smoothing her hair against the pillow. She
looked, if anyone happened to see her, as if she was sleeping. Someone would,
eventually, discover that she was dead.
The smell would tip them off.
Mulder shook his head in disbelief. Why the hell would Scully
expect him to turn away from Diana? And get the Gunmen in on it with her? So,
his ex-wife spent time at Mufon meetings when she got
the chance. Well, shit, they started the X Files together, the woman was
interested in EBEs and their victims, why the hell wouldn't
she go to the meetings? Why was it, when it was a matter of her trusting him,
he was expected to balance his intuition with Scully's logic, but when the
situation was reversed, she expected him to make a choice between the two? They
did their best work when they trusted one another enough to disagree.
Don't make me choose, Scully, he cried to himself, but all he did was
slam the door behind him. The walls had been there a very long time, and they
weren't going to come down easily.
Even for Scully.
Three days later the world had taken another 180 turn. The bodies at the
hangar were gruesome, and he could tell from the porcelain pallor making
Scully's freckles stand out like paint spatters that there were some ugly
repressed memories bubbling to the surface because of them. Then Spender got
his head out of his ass and stepped back, as he should have in the first place.
A thought struck him, staring at his boss. Maybe daddy Spender was one
of the flambéed? With his power base gone, Spender wouldn't have any backing,
and he'd be wallowing back in the puddle of mediocrity where he belonged. A
shiver ran over his spine, and the short hairs at his nape stood up.
Nah. He'd never be so
lucky. Cancerman was still alive and kicking out
there somewhere, malignant as ever.
They stayed in their superior's office for another twenty minutes, going
over the top layer of the ton of paperwork they'd have to wade through to get
the X Files back where they belonged. Carting another half ton along with them
into the elevator toward their office -- their office, again, finally!
-- the shiver ran through him again.
"Mulder? You
okay?" Bright blue eyes peered up at him concernedly over her own pile of paperwork. Mulder answered automatically.
"Fine, Scully. Just a goose stepping … that is a weird expression. Predates
the Nazi storm troopers. I wonder if that's where the idea came
fro-"
The elevator doors open and he smelled it before he saw anything.
Blood.
The papers hit the floor and his gun was in his hand before he thought
about it. Scully mirrored his action, flattening against the wall, her own Sig Sauer out and ready. One glance between the two of
them, and they slunk down the corridor, he going in the door high, she low, of
course, as it should be.
Spender.
Well, what was left of him, anyway. The single
gunshot had hit him in the face, not doing much to the plain features other
than giving him a third eye in the vicinity of his left nostril. The real
damage was in the back, where most of his skull, a great deal of blood, and
more gray matter than Mulder thought the younger man had possibly possessed
were splattered across the floor, the wall, and the coat rack.
Not waiting for Scully to verify the death staring at him from the blank
eyes, Mulder punched the quick dial button for Skinner. Waiting for it to ring
through, he said thoughtfully, "You sure you want a desk down here,
Scully? Maybe they'll give you combat pay." He smiled into her glare, then reported the corpse to his boss.
Welcome back to the X Files.
It didn't take long for his allies in the Resistance to fill Krycek in on the ambush at the hangar. It took a little
longer to get confirmation from his source in Russia that the compound for the
vaccine was too unstable to replicate in large quantities, and given the
problems the lab rats were having getting reproducible results, the damned
stuff could have been a fluke.
That left the inoculated.
Himself. Mulder.
Scully. Marita, if she
hadn't been used up by the idiot doctors at the research lab, to the point
where he'd had to put her down. The few remaining clones, perhaps.
Some of the inmates of the gulag. A
few of the Mufon mothers. They had few viable
alternatives, but they were in the middle of a war, and they would use whatever
weapons they could get their hands on. If they didn't, if they could bring
nothing to the table in any show of strength, the allies would become just
another enemy, and Earth would be relegated to nothing more than a battleground
for Titans.
He really didn't want to see his planet turned into the galactic
equivalent of
Now to convince his reluctant Human allies. At least their boss wouldn't be a problem. He still had the trigger for
those little dam-builders lying dormant in Skinner's veins. And he'd use them. Without a trace of hesitation.
Actually, that was kind of fun. He grinned for an instant, then got down to business. He had a world to protect. A people to save. An ass to cover.
Wary of Cancerman, who by now would know just
who had slipped the Resistance the information about the meeting at the hangar,
unable to pin down an exact count of who was still unroasted
in the Consortium, Krycek was extremely cautious with
his approach. He avoided Scully, knowing she'd shoot him before he could get
his mouth open.
Mulder, on the other hand … Mulder had not seemed unreceptive to his
reasoning that night in the apartment. And he surely knew what that salute on
the cheek had meant. He'd felt the shudder along the angled jaw.
Brothers in arms. Allies in a crusade.
A slip of the tongue away from fucking one another
on the living room floor.
Yeah. Mulder would listen.
It was a hell of a lot better than background checks and piles of
manure, but playing at Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore was a stretch even
for him … not to mention for Scully. Mulder was glad to be home, happy to be
away from the Stepford community that had housed the
most recent X File. He slumped onto his couch, wondering for the umpteenth time
why he couldn't remember getting a waterbed, where the lava lamp had come from,
and why it didn't bother him more than it did.
Before he could come to any conclusion, a metal clamp closed over his
windpipe and he stopped breathing.
"Hello, Mulder."
Well, shit. He'd kinda hoped Krycek had been one of the toasted skeletons in that
hangar. Not that his luck ever was that good. Unable to respond to the purred
greeting, he gurgled. The grasp eased fractionally, and he dragged in a
grateful lungful of air.
"Sorry about that," came a chagrined
whisper. Mulder didn't buy the contrition. "Still
getting used to these new gears. They're a little stiff."
A heavy body slithered over the side of the couch and settled beside him
on the cushions. Mulder managed to unpeel one of his hands from the gloved claw
holding his throat hostage, and weakly attempted to poke one of Krycek's eyes out. The clamp, to his surprise, didn't
tighten.
"Can the foreplay, Mulder. We have important things to
discuss."
He rolled his eyes toward his tormentor and gurgled again, inquiringly
this time.
"Everything is totally fucked up. Plan B is blown, plan C is shit,
and I need you to make a plan D."
The metal hand was steady as a rock against Mulder's
skin, but the fingertips were rubbing very gently against his carotid artery. Almost a caress. Damned distracting.
Mulder forced himself to ignore the circular motion, and his own Pavlovian response to submission combined with danger,
focusing all his attention on Krycek's soft voice.
"There are elements in the Resistance who don't want to work with
the Humans. They don't trust us, not surprising since the
Consortium has been collaborating with their masters for the last fifty fucking
years. But that leaves the rest of the Underground out in the
cold."
For a wild instant, Mulder was convinced he was stuck in a World War Two
movie, and Krycek was going to morph into Christopher
Plummer in the heart of occupied
The eyes were about right, though.
"Did you hear me, Mulder?" No, he thought, and gurgled
encouragingly. Yes, that was definitely a caress. "The Resistance took
back the alien fetus, so we don't have the option of genetic engineering as a
weapon. The lab boys are having a hard time replicating the vaccine against the
Black Oil. That leaves us."
"Us?" Hey, no gurgle. Sometime during Krycek's
'save the world' monologue the clamp had relaxed completely and was now wrapped
around his neck, rubbing little circles at the nape of his neck. If he wasn't
sure Krycek would kill him if he did it, Mulder'd be melted over his lap purring like a cat in a
field of catnip.
One knee edged up on the sofa as Krycek turned
to face him, the metal hand drawing Mulder into a mirrored position. Brilliant
green gold eyes pinned him, and Mulder found himself
willing to listen to anything.
Trust no one, except the one person in the world you should trust the
least. Him, you trust.
It made a twisted sort of sense.
As Krycek laid out his plan to keep Humans
from being the forgotten victims in an intergalactic civil war, complete with
Scully harvesting tissue samples from Mufon members
and he and Mulder sneaking back into Siberia (avoiding the peasants, this time)
to smuggle out blood samples from inoculated prisoners, Mulder made the
unwelcome discovery that he would follow Krycek to
hell. He had no idea why. It just was.
When the plans finally ground to a stop, he smiled gently at Krycek. "You're out of your fucking mind."
Krycek growled. Mulder
shivered. The clamp at the back of his neck pulled him forward, and a mouth
rivaling the Flukeman's attached itself to his,
making a damned good attempt to suck his tonsils out through his tongue-tip.
Oh.
Yeah.
Shit.
They never made it as far as the water bed, still depleted in its big
wooden frame. Good thing, too, because Mulder wouldn't have been able to stand
that much visual stimulation. Porn videos were one thing, but that mirror on
the ceiling over that bed would give him a heart attack right about the time Krycek ripped his jeans open and swallowed his cock whole.
When he gave up the fight and held his own knees back for Krycek
to fuck him into oblivion, the image would have surely caused him to stroke
out.
He was relieved, in a little corner of his mind that huddled in the
corner and took notes, that his neighbors were used to
screams coming from this corner of the building. He'd hate to have to explain
this to the Metro police.
Sprawled like an auto accident victim between the couch and the coffee
table, feeling every inch of rug burn on the small of his back and along his
shoulders, he ran his palms lazily up and down Krycek's
shoulders, trying not to think how easy it would be to snap his neck as he lay
there. The dark head rose from his chest, the darkened eyes caught his, and
Mulder revised his definition of 'easy.'
"You're a homicidal maniac," he ventured in a conversational
tone, not easy when he was still panting like a racehorse after the Kentucky
Derby.
"You're pretty psychotic yourself," Krycek
responded pleasantly. Compliments exchanged, he got down to business. "You in?"
Mulder glanced down at the puddle of sweat and semen that had, five
minutes earlier, been Krycek in him.
"Isn't that your line?"
Krycek grinned at him,
and Mulder found himself grinning back. Maybe Krycek
had a point. This was all pretty insane. "What's in it for you?" he
couldn't resist asking. Krycek lost the grin.
"Life. I don't
want to be burned alive, don't want to be a walking receptacle for an oilspot, don't want to be a
feeding trough for baby aliens. And I don't want to lose."
There was truth in the softly muttered words, and in the steady gaze
staring down into his. Mulder considered it. He could trust the truth. Even this truth. Even Krycek's
truth.
At least, this truth.
"You get to break the news to Scully," Krycek
put in before he could figure out how, or even if, to share this newest
revelation. The prospect of trying to explain an alliance with Krycek, shapeshifter Rebels, Mufon moms, Russian labor camp inmates, and the X Files
wiped everything out of his head.
"Fuck."
"Yes, thank you," Krycek answered
politely, and did.
Mulder pounded his head against the floor, ignored the rapping from the
neighbor below them, and decided the revolution could wait until morning.
So could Scully.
Mid-groan, he started to laugh, shaking his head when Krycek paused to stare at him quizzically. How could he
explain? He didn't understand it himself. But it would be okay. He didn't know
how he knew, but he did. They were going to win. It was gonna
be the hardest fucking thing any of them had ever done. They were going to go
to hell. But they were going to come back.
If he was heading to hell, at least he'd have damned good company.
FIN