TITLE: Retreat and Regroup AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com) SPOILERS: During- and post-Ascension CATEGORY: Weird post-ep psychological parboiling ARCHIVE: Gossamer. Others please ask. RATING: PG-13, for adult situations and sexuality DISCLAIMER: Characters and situations you recognize belong to Chris Carter / 1013 and are used in loving violation of Title 17 of the U.S. Code. NOTES: Ambress the Comma Enforcer was beta. Cheering section at various times by Meredith, Madgeleine, and the et al who will not be named. SUMMARY: A battalion of detachments. * * * * * * * Retreat and Regroup by Vehemently * * * * * * * Even in August in the nation's capital, it is a rare man who dares violate the dark-suit dress code of urban professionals. Mulder obeyed the rules in navy but Alex Krycek wore his tan suit with sweaty ignorance and the false bravado of the newly damned. He killed a man at sundown and stuffed him in the trunk of an FBI fleet car and then he had to drive to the top of Skyland Mountain, remembering how the ice cream used to melt when his grandma drove home with the groceries in the trunk. Atop the mountain Mulder watched wild-eyed as lights span a weft across the darkening sky, but from the hill's shoulders Krycek couldn't have seen it. They met up at the summit in confusion and a hesitant drizzle that muted the low clouds. Mulder kept a hand, both hands, always touching Duane Barry's lumbering shape, even after Krycek guided them both into the lodge. They stood inside while the search and rescue squad spread willy-nilly through the trees. Krycek pretty well knew they wouldn't find her, and Mulder, silent beside him, tasted lead on his tongue, knowing the same thing. Their prisoner between them groaned and chuckled to himself, wheezing. Then the paramedics took charge and Krycek got a look at his partner -- his target -- and Mulder's head resembled a wet hedgehog, the rain still streaking down his temples. He found a scrap of towel so Mulder could at least look presentable when he ripped into the prisoner. Rip he did, and even as he did it, even as he felt the thundering carotid under his thumbs, even as his spittle hit Duane Barry in the face, Mulder felt himself slipping into a stereotype of outrage. It was anger and reassertion of power in the face of helplessness, and he had never felt as far away from Scully as when he forgot to worry for her. Her fate became more and more baroque in his mind, as if, freed from her calm counterpoint, his imagination knew no bottom limit. Staring out the window and into the darkness which had taken her, Mulder tried to decide whether thinking her into grotesque torture was more or less abject than acknowledging the likelihood that she was already dead. It was to Krycek's advantage that his target suffered these throes; he saw that faraway look and took his opportunity to stop up Duane Barry's raucous rambling permanently. The distrust in Barry's eyes told Krycek he wasn't as charming as could be hoped; but then, when the succhinylcholine took hold it wouldn't matter. After that it was some weird kind of relief to have Mulder drag him out to the hallway and berate him for interference. And then Skinner showed up, sweeping into the particle-board office with his wing of gelled and suited agents. Ten or fifteen men bumped shoulders, huddling in too-small rooms and taking turns casting glances askance at Mulder's loud insistences. But Mulder argued on, after Duane Barry finally stopped breathing, after the body was carted away, after even Skinner made it clear he didn't want to hear it: he hammered again and again on the confluence of coincidences that had brought him to this hilltop. He pointed to Krycek for corroboration of the strange delay of the tram which might otherwise have brought him to the rescue. Krycek nodded, eyes wide and hands trembling. They left the conference of agents tired and disgusted, Mulder stumbling with the drunken balance of a man with tunnel vision. It was just the same with Krycek; having killed two people in one day, he didn't think he would stand up to scrutiny. Instead he watched as Mulder wordlessly climbed into the passenger seat and allowed his keeper to drive him home. Mulder's bleak inarticulation of earlier in the night congealed into jaw- clenching malevolence, and, awake now for two days, he didn't sleep though the miles were long and boring. Distracted but alert, he accepted Krycek's offer to guide him up to his apartment, and even then he was unconsciously anticipating what would happen next, but Krycek just wanted his duties finished and a good private place where he could throw up. There was no pivotal moment when they looked at each other and it all became clear. Rather, they fell together by mutual obstinacy: Mulder mulishly stupid, standing in front of his own door; Krycek, cursing the zombie he was sworn to surveill and reaching into Mulder's pockets for the keys; and then two men grappling, at first in mimicry of a fight, and then not so. The waves of red frustration that came from Krycek's pores found echo and magnification in Mulder. They shared a confusion nobody else would understand; but Krycek, who knew just enough not to want more, steered them from the intellectual to the carnal without any resistance. Mulder displayed the sexual manner of the painfully shy, feeling the leather of Krycek's belt but unable to unbuckle it himself. Krycek obliged, and when they were both naked Mulder exhaled, as if crossing a threshold, and began to reach out for the things he wanted. He neither spoke nor cried out: as if his voice box had been removed, his mouth moved in some silent monologue. If the minds of both men strayed across the same tangled territory, neither of them mentioned the coincidence. They wrestled like schoolchildren at play, and as with schoolchildren it turned aggressive without warning. Lacking experience or technique, they fell back on a parody of hetero play, rolling each other over, fumblingly unclear on the mechanics of compatibility. Mimesis helped them deny, for now, what would later become distressing as each wondered in retrospect at this unique night. In Krycek's low chuckle and Mulder's traveling fingers was a conspiracy against context and social reality. It was a collusion of men against the masculinities they would reassume when daylight returned. It improved Krycek's mood, who slept, satisfied, through Mulder's dream contortions. And when he awoke at five in the morning, alone in someone else's bed, he dressed without a word and went to meet his superior. It was just a cherry on top of the whole putrid sundae that his detour to Maryland, to drop the dead body that was beginning to stink up his trunk into the Anacostia River, made him late to his before-breakfast meeting. They talked in a concrete garage on a summer's dawn, Krycek squirming against raw skin and new sensations. He didn't mention his night's activities. It would be hard to explain, considering his previous lack of interest in men. To misdirect attention from his flustered sexuality, he asked questions he should have known were unwise. About Scully, about the whys of a situation in which he was rationed only what and when. He was snapped at, which was to be expected; but his superior heard with critical ears and considered on Krycek's assignment. Even as he congratulated himself for his redirection, Krycek was being scheduled for his own professional redirection, into a different role in the organization, one in which why questions were unnecessary and dangerous. He was evacuated from the scenario that night, while Mulder was unraveling the path of his allegiances. Their mutual evening went unremarked by both men, as a sea unexplored on a Renaissance map. Mulder sat in his apartment that evening, his backside aching as he shifted in his wooden chair. He would compose another sentence of his damning report, a paragraph white-hot in righteous rage, following the natural convergence of events like a car hydroplaning across a snowy highway. Then his fingers would falter, even as he searched for a word, and he fell into silent fugues of sense-memory and thwarted conjecture. Why did he really -- how did he know -- what was I -- And always ground to a halt, raising a deflectory hand as if his computer screen were poised to accuse. Each time he turned the motion into a gesture, a smoothing back of hair or infinitesimal readjustment of his glasses. But the contemplation would not stay banished and ambushed him again and again. It took him all night to complete the report, and he sat in Skinner's office articulating the thoroughness of Krycek's duplicity on caffeine and manufactured outrage. He got what he wanted, in a way. He backtalked his boss and scratched at his unshaven jaw and writhed internally, believing that Skinner read in every word the sex Mulder wasn't thinking about. He got what he wanted, despite Krycek having disappeared before dawn like any good night creature. He got what he wanted and instead of reclaiming his office in the basement he went home and ate Saltines over the sink and alternately wallowed in and recoiled from shame. Both of them spent that day thinking the same thing, if only they had known it. The one in his own home and the other in a featureless week-to-week apartment a hundred miles away, each isolated that night and its sensations into a separate compartment and hid it deep. It was not, realistically, a ruinous thing; neither would have been fired or swamped by scandal. Mulder, indeed, knew with doomy but mistaken surety that Krycek had done his job and then reported the sweaty details to his commanders; he had already decided not to respond to blackmail attempts. For his part, Krycek felt the garrote of paranoia crawling tighter and tighter against his skin. Each man succumbed to the unreasonable instinct to hide which thrummed through him, a bass beat that became a hypnotic metronome as day aged and became evening. It was easy, after enough repetition, to say: this never happened. A relief, as the sun turned red, for Mulder to remember Scully's absence. In a wash of savagery he forced himself to see her, scowling up at Duane Barry from the trunk of her car. He admired her for that, imagining the scalpel-sharp rebuke she would have offered, but for the gag. Only rarely had Mulder riled her to cursing, but she had her cursing face on in that photo. Dead, or -- something else. With a little sleep and the failing light of day his mental imagery was more subdued, but he had read enough abduction accounts to feel justified in his horror. That Krycek's people should have taken her not in her own right, but only as accessory to manipulation of Mulder himself: it doubled the horror. It gave him something else to wallow in, a familiar mantle of guilt he could shoulder. If she would only come back, all could be forgiven. Everything would be like before, his mistakes and hesitations canceled. He hoarded all of his hopes in the specter of her, placing the terms of his continued existence into the someday of her return. There was no choice to make, now, between the scenarios of grotesque torture and death. She was alive; she must be; or everything else lost all reason. In the feverishness of his wishing was the desire to unmake his actions and unopen the door Krycek had helped him push ajar. He wanted everything to be like it had been before. For Krycek the internal argument was more circuitous. He himself had denounced her to the council; his own actions had ensured the state Mulder was in when they turned to each other and -- But they hadn't warned him he would be required to mow down civilians right and left. It was a hard thing to theorize, that his superiors had calculated the degree of his horror to such exquisite exactitude that they could foresee his succumbing to the pull of sex. That he was caught up in a massive dumbshow of marionettes was obvious; obvious too was the fact that he was supposed to pull the strings allotted him and not worry about the rest. That he might himself be a marionette was occurring to him only now, like a low-grade fever of jumbled anger. He sat in the window of his anonymous room, shaking his head convulsively in that sort of denial which acknowledges the very thing from which it retreats. A guitar string, strung too tightly, popping with a discordant ping in his mind. The deep shudder of being thrust naked into cold air, involuntary muscle tension trumping dignity. Someone had to be blamed. The sun set, while he was thinking. In the city he could see few stars, only a thick dark haze, purple streaked orange with streetlight glare. Only the evening star like a white dart marked the sky, a single pinpoint of clarity. Before it left his window he built in himself bulwarks of rage to shore up his faltering sense of himself. If he ever saw Mulder again, he would be sure to strike first and gain the advantage. He would make that man sorry. As for Scully, well, she was gone. There was nothing he could do to her. Damnation in absentia just wasn't effective. Eyes searched the Milky Way. From the top of Skyland Mountain, the stars were clearer than from a grimy urban window. Mulder sought pattern in that astral sprawl; Krycek looked, with a dull hopelessness, for revenge. But they both looked skyward in the night -- an ingrained human response to uncertainty, perhaps -- and wondered when Scully would return. * * * * * * * END (3/00) http://www.gypsymuse.com/vehemently/