Blue Lights

by J. C. Sun

Outside, it is rather cold.  Wet.  A wretched kind of weather for a wretched kind of day, a not-yet-wretched woman.  Rain fell, and the wind blew, and now the aftermath of the weather speckles the street with pools of silver, bits that throw back the cheap neon lights on the front of darkness.

A bard--they might have remarked that the sky had wept, that it had done it's grieving and now was the sad flatness afterwards.

The bar is illuminated by the street and the sickly bulbs of the bartender's and the bartender's cabinet.  There is the hard tight press of bodies, pungent sweat, the lonely click of her heels on the hardwood floor, and the way her suit is hard, unyieldingly grey in the throes of red and blue and brown fluidity.  A figure looks at her, taking in the small measure of shoulder and hip, fall of breast, upward curve of pantsuit on her crotch; she arranges her features in their least pleasing order, and lets some of that inner chill leach out onto her face.

She finds him lodged way back, way back, in the closest semblance of a private booth that this place offers.  Hunched over, dark, plastic limb resting heavy on the table, other hand fluidly stroking the stringent curves of a shot glass.  She blinks to clear the smoke from her eyes and notes that he looks thin, very thin.  He looks up and catches her with the little edges of green razor that are lodged within his eye sockets.

"You remembered."

The 'this time' is implied, and it goes through her like the blunt tip of a smoldering poker, the flesh sizzling back and peeling away.

He's got a funny voice really: very smooth, very rich, with edges dribbling off into sandy burlap, acrid smoke.  Very rough, like a bit of cloth that's had little bits of quartz included with the silk and the canvas, mahogany table with shards of glass jutting out, unpleasant to the touch, stabbing with unnecessary harshness and insinuating itself between your liver and your kidney, your heart and the bottom of your belly.  It didn't use to be like this, she remembers, with a guilty stab--much lighter, more melodious. It used to wrap around your ear like honey on silk, down the throat to warm your belly instead of abrading it into bloody shreds.

She blinks, pulling her consciousness in.

"What do you mean, this time?"

He laughs, but the sound is lost in the crowd, lingering only in the curves of his eyes and the sourness of her mouth.

"You've got guts," she says, finally.  "Calling me at work."

He shrugs.  "It's not like you gave me your home phone number."

She winces.

His mental i-guess-you-don't-do-that-for-one-night fucks beats in the air and she tries to push it away with her hand.

She composes her thoughts.

"If they put a voice ID on the receptionist's desk…"

He smirks.

"Not everybody's as paranoid as you are."  And he pauses, to allow the words to dig in to her skin; to her, they are bee stings rambling down the back of her palms and the insides of her thighs.  He regards her discomfort for a good long while, then fires forth:

"So, I hear Mulder's gone."

She doesn't answer and lets his bitterness, barely disguised, smack into the scarred table.

"I guess he must get tired of my bed every once in a while."

Her bluntness shocks him: crude, candid.  His eyes go wide and he cannot speak for a long time, until he realizes the edge in those words, the serrated edge.

And she gives him a tight bitter smile.

"Skinner," she says, finally.

"Skinner."  He reflects the word back at her.

"He's dead."

"Oh?"  The words are a neat, quiet little thing that bounce off the walls of the

"They… they found him in his apartment. Garroted.  Hands bound up, gag in his mouth, like it was some kind of bondage game."

He blinks.

"Whatever makes you think it was a game?"

She shivers once, and barely prevents her hands from flicking in the sign of the father, the son and the ever-so-holy Ghost.

He shivers once too, and involuntarily passes his fingers over disappeared wrists, expecting flesh and rope, experiencing only space, as his eyes dribble off into blankness.

Blue neon, starting out with thin, rigid bars of cerulean before a quick flick of his shoulders deliquesces them into ink sculpting languorous cuneiforms across his skin, which dance down the edge of his spine and stroke in the hinterlands of his back.  Carefully, she runs her hand across his skin, attempting to read the Nornic script across his back; her fingers stroke, then bite in frustration, as he shifts, and the liquid marks are gone, replaced by a flat plane of bluish illumination.

He grunts.

She sighs with something like equanimity: this is simply the latest in a long, long line of disappointments.

His missing arm--you don't really notice it. It's more like an empty space, a darker region, a place the blue lights don't kiss.  When she touches it, he hisses with an the sound of breath sucked through teeth, and his body tenses, tight; when she applies her mouth, he moans, soft.  Underneath her tongue, the scarred tissue is smooth, slick, lacking in texture: a slip of plastic plated over real flesh, without warmth, a thick layer of inorganic substance that is welded to the real stuff.  Lightly probing, she seeks the joint, and finds a small protrusion, a puckered edge, and she picks at this with the edge of her teeth.

Which is a stupid sort of thing, considering the reaction: in a swift, knee- jerk explosion his elbow jabs up into her gut and her inner organs get jammed together.  She's slammed back down on the mattress, and his hand yanks her head backwards, exposing the long line of her throat to the scimitar of the blue light.  Her eyes blink up at him quiet, rather surprised, and then he relaxes, smiling a little at her faux pas.

She shrugs a little and settles his weight onto her, then slides her knees to his sides in a quiet, blatant invitation.  And he rolls back onto his haunches and traces the crease under her thigh, running upwards before slipping to touch her vulva, once.  She chokes, once: the feel of calluses, hard, surprisingly rough; she thinks she can distinguish each tiny ridge on his thumb caressing.

She's always considered it one of her many defects that she's never been able to say to herself 'he's stroking my clit' or 'he's touching the labia' or any other such thing.  Down there, everything is one giant mass of flesh, tender nerve endings that she doesn't use very often, and pleasure, sensation, it takes the shape of a vaguely formless *thing* that crackles up her spine and makes her head sigh.  He's doing something between her legs and it involves his fingers and it feels pretty good, but that's all she can figure out.

Until he slides a long, thin finger into her and she convulses upward.  The top join runs on the sides, lightly stroking, and she makes a sound halfway between a whimper and a profanity.  She squirms up, down, all around him, but when he actually puts it in, she calms down.  When he starts moving, she just smiles softly and runs a little hand down his chest.

And when she comes, when the world runs into a long streak of crackling magnesium lights, she permits herself to cry Mulder's name out once, once into Krycek's obligingly muffling hand.

It is a hoary, over-used cliche that when villains sleep, they are innocent, that the evil is leached from them, that they resemble choirboys.

Occasionally, however, it *is* true.

It's just that he's painted in all the wrong colors: everything twisted dark, shifted a gradient the wrong way and corrupting what should have been angel- fine blondeness into a prickly, sweaty dark mass clipped brutally short. Eyebrows have been imprinted with the same harshness, and the cheeks dip in a little too much.  The shape of the lips is retained--delicately made, sweet--but a little too pale, for the edges blend into his skin, which, incidentally, is too opaque.  The beige and sand tones reduce the translucence, and hence, the veins only push vaguely out from the skin; they are visible only at vulnerable junctures.  She can't see the eyes right now, but the eyelashes seem right: dark, incredibly thick and full, but the wrong shade entirely, because combined with the shadows, he looks like both of his eyes have been thoroughly blacked.  Slashing downward even as they curl, entirely too hard.

Gently, she runs her hand down the flesh, experiencing the peculiarly cool quality of a man's body while he sleeps; all the blood, it moves to some inner core, leaving the fringes cold, lifeless, the assurance of life prompted only by the pulse of blue veins underneath slack skin.

He whimpers suddenly, a low frightened sound that echoes around the stilled room; a shiver, a trembling reflex, which is smoothly stilled by the stroke of her hand across his neck.  A long, shuddering breath as her hand hovers over the creases between neck and shoulder, exhalation, the forceful stilling of limbs.  Vaguely, she can feel a series of stripes running down his back, in neatly laid horizontal lines--long healed over, but still visible, touchable as thin welts; she controls a sudden urge to lay her face down against these hidden hurts and weep.

Instead, she busies herself with arranging his clothing neatly across the armchair, tucking his billfold into the pocket, sliding the holster underneath the pants, checking to make sure that the safety is on.  For a moment, she considers leaving her home phone number on the pad beside the phone, but decides otherwise, to protect the perfect symmetry of this moment, the correspondence to another liaison eight years ago--she'll just leave, locking the door quietly behind her and making sure that the room is paid for.

Mulder, he comes back to her on a Wednesday night, when the moon is full and comes down through the Venetian blinds in long blue strips. He's sitting in her armchair, hands tucked underneath him and staring at her like he's going to kill her.  He probably is, she thinks, dispassionately hanging her purse up on the rack by the door.  She should probably shoot him, but, instead, she shucks off her trenchcoat and hangs that up too, all the while waiting for him to say something.  She goes and pulls off her shoes and is in the proccess of taking off her suit jacket when his words grate through the air.

"You slept with him."

The words startle her a little, and she blinks once, before she regains her composure and quips that her vibrator ran out of batteries.  It's a line he used on her once, describing how he didn't want to have sex that night, and he remembers too: he winces.

She shrugs, like it was the little matter that it was.  "Where've you been?"

"Here.  There.  Chasing that ratfuck son of a bitch."  Mulder glares at her.  He  pauses, then moves his arm with an awkwardness that makes her think that he's been hurt.

She blinks, and goes up to him, going down on her knees and her hands going up his shirt, flicking the buttons aside to disclose a bloody slash crusted over.

"How'd you get this?"  she asks, running her fingers easy over the skin.

His shoulders hunch up, and she has a fairly strong suspicion that he's about to cry.  And when he does, she's there, pillowing his head in her lap and softly running her hand stripes of light on his back, reading them.

End

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