Lights Go Out: Part One by Jintian

TITLE: Lights Go Out
AUTHOR: Jintian
E-Mail: cooljinbeans@yahoo.com
ARCHIVE: Yes to Gossamer, XFC, RaTales; anyone else please write me first
RATING: R to NC-17 for adult situations
SPOILERS: FTF, Season Six, the entire mytharc
SUMMARY: It's Colonization time, and Scully's in some unexpected company. A little warning: this is not a happy story.
DISCLAIMER: Everybody belongs to someone else, and -- <sigh!> -- nobody in this fic belongs to me. Well, maybe the desk guy at the mental hospital does. If I see him pop up in Season 7, though, it's okay. They gotta get inspiration from somewhere, right?

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Bonnie is the best thing about this story. Period. She spent a good deal of the summer beta reading the many different incarnations Lights Go Out went through, and all while writing her awesome fic, Value & Honor. Plus, this story isn't even in a category she likes. That's cause enough for mountains and mountains of appreciation. I wrote her a story (the kind she does like) to say thanks, but I don't think it was nearly enough. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Scully has been on long car trips before, of course. Six years in the X-Files and a childhood in the Navy have left her with snapshot memories of America in various geographies, faces, personalities. She has a good memory, not photographic but still sharp enough. She can pick a state and name an X-File, or a school friend, or an address in the housing area of a base. From Washington to Florida, Maine to California, her entire life has been spread out on a map in latitudes and longitudes.

In the driver's seat beside her, Alex Krycek makes a small throat-clearing sound, but when she turns he makes no acknowledgement. So she looks back out of her window and watches the scenery again, cocooned in silence.

The Great Plains of Nebraska unfold through the glass, golden in the afternoon sunlight. The landscape is not flat, but rather rising and falling, like huge ocean waves. They move north into the horizon, the car eating the miles and leaving them behind on the empty highway. The horizon also is empty, washed with the rays of the late sun and nearly cloudless.

Memorial Day weekend. Hard to imagine that the sky over the rest of the world has been torn apart, that as far as these two people are concerned, the rest of the world doesn't even exist anymore.

They ride without noise, Krycek's tiny interruption forgotten already and lost in the silent minutes. Scully loses the minutes herself, floats in and out of a doze, in and out of memory. Sometimes she is here in the car, watching the endless fields. Sometimes her daydreams take her to childhood, to girlhood.

Several hours earlier she'd switched off the car radio, because the only things coming over the static were rebroadcast transmissions from terrified journalists. Listening closely in the humming quiet of the car, she had heard screams and explosions in the background. That was when her hand had lashed out, twisting the off button.

Colonization has begun in the cities -- and, as Krycek has explained, Rebels have arrived in equal force to stop it. Reports pulled together yesterday have shown that most urban areas are the major targets in the most widespread holocaust in the history of human life. Bees, infection, gestation, destruction. The aliens themselves, Colonizers and Rebels in equal force seeming to have landed out of nowhere. Their black ships, hovering like storm clouds, raining fire down with their bright lights. Both tearing the sky and earth, burning cities and civilization, engaged in their fiery war with all the Earth sandwiched between.

She has already seen it on TV anyway, in the Texas motel last night when it first started and then again this morning, on the rebroadcasts. Amazing how tenacious the press is; while the rest of the cities are being exterminated with ruthless efficiency, they still manage to send out information -- not that the rest of the world needs to know what they are already experiencing. She had been able to hear the fear in the reporters' voices, the panic close to shock, the utter inability to comprehend what has happened -- the end of human civilization, and she wonders why the hell they're still trying. She'd never have thought journalists could be so brave.

But of course, if she turned the radio on now, at the end of the second day, there almost certainly would be only dead silence or static.

On the TV she has seen the Colonizers themselves, through snowy satellite transmissions sent right from live coverage on the streets, and the Rebels as well. Human forms without faces, and faces with alien forms.

Somewhere in the dark depths of her memory, she knows she has seen both kinds before. In the flesh.

But thinking about Mulder…. Thinking about him is like walking in a minefield made of glass. She pushes it away, pushes him away, because to go there…to go there…

But of course, immersed as she is in the dream memories, he keeps creeping up on her. And although Dana Scully has made a practice and a career of refuting what she deems unbelievable, this is something staring -- no, screaming -- her in the face.

Mulder is gone. After seeing the television reports she had dialed his hospital, and slammed the receiver down on the automatic out-of-operation message. She had dialed Skinner, every number she knew in the Hoover Building -- same automated voice. Her mother, her brothers, the Lone Gunmen, half-remembered numbers of friends scattered throughout the US. All gone.

"We have to go back," she had told Krycek, frantically repacking her clothes. "We have to go back to DC."

He had stood there with his one hand on his hip, looking at her like she was speaking in tongues. "What the fuck are you talking about? Do you see what's happening on that TV screen? That's the fucking Washington Monument exploding like a goddamn bottle rocket."

"Scully," Krycek said, his voice flat, "he's dead. Mulder is dead. They are all dead."

The words slashed at her heart, but she pressed on, glaring at him. "How do you know? There could be survivors, there could be -- "

"Not for long. Those bees are sweeping the country. You know what they do. And if we want to survive, we need to get to where it's safe."

So early this morning, they had gotten into the car and driven north. And north. And north. And with each mile, the distance between Scully and the world had steadily increased.

Gone. The word writes itself on the tall-grass prairie moving past, on the sky hanging overhead and motionless like a brilliant blue canopy. A wail swells in her throat, ready to break free and escape her, into that sky, from which the end of the world has so recently been born.

From the driver's seat beside her, Krycek breaks the quiet again, speaking for the first time in hours. "Scully."

At the sound of his voice -- even as her body comes awake from its doze -- her mind shutters down, goes blank again. The scream in her throat, with no thought or emotion to voice it, dies as she turns from the window to look at him.

His jaw is unshaven, dark and stubbled. Without looking at her he speaks again. "We should reach the compound before night."

After hours spent with him in this car, after spending well over a week sitting beside him on other such car trips -- although admittedly, none this dire, running for their own survival -- she knows he expects a response. She knows, but there is no one here to give him one. Just her body, a newly-formed vacuum, because Dana Scully has left, has gone down to hide, and taken the screams with her.

Her body knows what to say anyway, though, and her vocal cords compress and vibrate. Normal volume, normal word. "Fine." And again, "Fine."

After the inferno that burned the Consortium elders, Alex Krycek had gone into hiding. He had known it was no use believing that their end meant the end of the entire organization. There were, after all, elders-in-training and handymen of a lower rank than himself, all over the world, who had never been included in the plans for hybridization. Those ladder-climbers had probably begun moving into place with the first word relayed by scrambled cell phone.

He had lain low for weeks, assuming a new identity and moving back to Philadelphia, the city from which he had first emerged. He let the rumors spread that he had perished with the rest, hoping no one would notice that none of the blackened bodies was missing an arm. He kept his ear to the ground, eyes on the news, ticking off the names of each body identified and buried. None of the obituaries made any mention of conspiracies or shadowy maneuvers amongst the requisite surviving relatives (very few) and career highlights.

There were two he didn't find. The Spenders. Husband and wife at one time. And that meant, of course, they might somehow have survived.

If Cassandra had survived, she was with the Rebels. They would use her hybridized anatomy to unravel what the Colonizers had been planning with the Syndicate. If the smoker was alive --

Oh, but there was no way, no fucking way he'd be under that nicotine-sucking bastard's thumb again. The years of hell with the old man had been eating at his insides since the beginning, since he had first been yanked from the dark, crime-infested streets of Philly. He had been promised rewards of wealth, power, adventure. Never mind that the old man had snared and caught him as well as any helpless prey.

He was getting those promises, though -- without the old man. He'd been laying plans for over a decade. And he knew that now the time had come. He would act, but he would act from the shadows. A ghost, invisible and deadly. Careful, oh so careful, strengthening the foundations of his end goal. His dynasty. He would be the only one left upright when the Colonizers came.

Because come they would, if the Rebels could not work fast enough. But Alex Krycek would kneel to no one, alien or not.

It had been a simple matter to infiltrate the labs he'd done cleanup duty at before, in his past life as the Consortium's assassin. Simple, stealing technology he'd killed men and women for in the past to keep the secrets of their work on the Projects.

After his excursions there were no ripples in the Consortium, which was still rallying the remnants of itself. There were no visits from the cigarette smoking man, who had always seemed to pop up from the shadows like a cockroach. Even so, he stayed low. He kept contact only with Skinner in the months following the inferno, cementing the hold he'd so fortuitously gained on the assistant director. He didn't dare try anything else.

Until he heard of Merkmallen's death, and the discovery of the second artifact. No one had thought that there would be any left to find. In this Alex realized a sign of the coming time. He knew the timetable would be shortened now, once the Colonizers were alerted to this most recent exposure. And with Mulder and Scully stumbling yet again into an area of which they had no comprehension, the stakes were even higher.

His mistake was in trying to clean up the loose ends, to keep the discovery from the new Consortium. He was naive enough to go back to the same murderous tactics that the old Consortium had so long employed, instead of being creative, instead of warping the events to benefit himself. And even as he pulled the trigger on Sandoz, he'd known it was the beginning of the end. Perhaps that was why, in the next few seconds, he had dug himself even deeper into his hole.

His voice was harsh going into Sandoz's cell phone, cutting through her puzzled silence. "Seek your truth elsewhere, Agent Scully." Even as he husked the words he could feel them floating into the air, open and scannable to any instrument that recognized his vocal patterns.

So he had not been surprised when, the night after his return from New Mexico, he walked into his Philly apartment and was stopped by the ratcheting of a gun's safety. He had reflected, feeling the heavy coldness of the barrel pressed to his neck, that he should have known better.

Marita's voice was familiar as death in its iciness, despite the strange new rasp. Her accent was cold and lisping. "Found you at last, Alex."

Those five words. They might as well have been rounds in her gun, thundering into his flesh. There was only one person who could have gotten her out of that base, and it wasn't Spender Junior.

Her bony fingers dug at the small of his back as she removed the heavy weight of his gun. "I thought you'd come back to your old stomping grounds, but I had to wait for you to get back. Took a little trip, I see." Her blonde hair flashed in the corner of his vision as she perused the dim apartment. His gun cases were laid out on his bed; the aluminum surfaces gleamed in neon light from the window.

"You could say that," he'd said, forcing his voice around the lump in his throat.

"Don't start unpacking yet," Marita told him. "You've got a little meeting to attend."

He calculated how quickly he could thrust himself across the room, away from the gun, rolling with the plastic of his artificial limb held up like a shield. He thought if he could just unravel her a bit, he could overpower her. The last time he'd seen her, cowering behind the younger Spender, she'd looked weak as a piece of paper.

But he didn't know what reserves were left in her after all of the tests, or what might have been put in.

He'd had no choice, really. She was dead to him, gun trained without emotion. So he'd walked out of the apartment with her, locking the door behind them -- as if that could do any good now. All the while feeling her aim on him like a winter wind, he let her guide him back out to the street where her car waited.

Alex shifts in his seat, trying to ease the muscles in his ass and thighs, grown numb from sitting so long. His right hand moves on the wheel, and the car swerves. Prairie fields loom towards them.

"Shit!" he exclaims, correcting the direction. When the car is straight again he glances over at Scully.

She is still staring out the window, her expression blank as if she hadn't even registered there was a problem.

He looks back at the road again. They are at the top of a rise and he can see ahead of them for miles, how the land stretches on with no end, it seems.

Scully has not been talkative at any part of the trip, which is what Alex prefers, but there is something in her silence that has been gradually unnerving him all day. Glancing back at her again he notices the unkempt appearance of her hair, the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the wrinkles in her clothing.

Wrong. It all strikes him as wrong. Because this is not Agent Scully, this is not the logical and meticulous woman he has become accustomed to over the past ten days. There is no ferocity in her slumped posture, no strength in the listless way she gazes out the window. As if she's not really paying attention to what passes before her eyes.

Scully is hiding, hiding inside herself, and he knows why, because the world has been turned upside down, and she with it. She has tucked herself into a tiny ball, presenting the same blank face at every degree, so that it won't matter which way she's oriented, now. She'll simply roll whichever way she is pushed. And she says nothing, does nothing. Just sits and stares at the scenery.

They might be the last two people in the entire world still sane and alive, for all he knows, but the real truth is that Alex Krycek is traveling by himself.

Suddenly the wide space surrounding the car and the…the sheer brightness of it all -- the sun, the sky, the golden plains…suddenly it's too much for him. It's too much for a man who has spent his life in the dark and fighting his way out of tight spots. The silence is too much for him, one who has sealed bargains and betrayals in more languages than one.

He slams on the brakes, almost relishing the way Scully's body jerks forward and snaps against her seatbelt. The tires make a satisfying screeching sound that rips into his ears. And he realizes he's grinning, teeth bared.

The car halts in the middle of the road, throwing them both back in their seats with the end of inertia, and he's already got the door open, scrambling out of the driver's seat. "Get out," he throws to her, over his shoulder.

There is a wind outside -- he hadn't known, they'd been driving for so long in their closed steel compartment -- and it kisses his face, bringing scents of grass and something sweet and earthy.

"Did you hear me?" He raises his voice towards the car, where his door is still open. "I said get out."

"Fuck." He stalks over to the passenger side, loving the feel of blood rushing back to his lower limbs, yanks her door open and undoes her seatbelt. Grabs her arm with his one hand and pulls her, too hard so that she stumbles on the road. She follows her own inertia now and lands in the tall grass on her shoulder, rolls with the weight of her body onto her back.

Oblivious, he stands straight with legs spread, head tilted, and lets the wind caress him.

"God, this is beautiful. Who needs a fucking city. Where the fuck have I been my whole life?" He speaks aloud, the sound of his own voice rising up into the sky.

What brings him back down is a natural urge, a press in his groin telling him to urinate. He almost laughs, the irony of Alex Krycek coming into this heartland to piss in it.

He walks to the side of the road, close to where Scully lies on her back in the light brown grass, unzips and lets himself go. He watches her. Her eyes are closed and she looks too pale, too still.

It shocks him. Had she fallen the wrong way or something? What the fuck, Alex, can't you pay any attention to something as important as this?? What are you going to do if she IS dead? Finishing up in a hurry, he takes an apprehensive step toward her, penis still hanging out, to get a better look. But as his shadow falls over her eyelids she opens them.

The moment is ridiculous and embarrassing, Alex stuffing his dick back into his pants as she looks up at the sky with unsurprised blue eyes. Zipping and avoiding her gaze -- not that she's making eye contact anyway -- "You need anything?" he babbles, as if it hadn't even happened. "Want to stay here a little longer and rest?"

No answer, but at least her eyes are open and blinking, at least there is that small movement now. Finally he stops talking, closing his mouth with the realization that it's a useless activity. She's not registering anything, not his questions, not his penis hanging over her.

What if I did leave her here? he thinks. I bet she'd just lie there. She wouldn't even realize I was gone. He imagines her body, dead and decomposing in the same position, because she still hasn't moved.

But of course, instead of leaving he sits down on the other side of her, watching her eyes watching the sky, and notices that the two blues are the same color.

Marita had gotten out of the car when they stopped under the bridge, but apparently the plan was not for her to accompany him further. She motioned with her gun that he should walk. He kept his head up as he moved, his stride confident.

Cigarette smoke burned the air, a scent he knew in the bones of his memory. The smoking man stood in the shadows. Darkness emphasized the stoop of his shoulders.

Of course, Alex thought. The king of the weasels always comes out on top. Had he really dared to hope the old man might have burned with the rest?

In a way, he had. They had each gone to a personal hell because of his plans, his lies. And true to form, he had walked away from it unscathed. And still holding the reins, if Marita's new errand-girl status was any indication.

The voice was silky, almost happy. "Well, long time no see, Alex. You've been busy, I hear. But…not too busy to conduct a little errand for me, I hope." He took a drag on his cigarette, expelling smoke as he started to speak again.

Through his anger Alex listened, wondering at the future in the black words. How the hell had he ended up here, anyway? It was as if nothing had changed in the past weeks, as if he was still someone the smoker could order, with impunity, to kill.

"She is the last survivor with a chip. Cassandra Spender is dead. And it is imperative that all of the evidence be destroyed. That's as much as you need to know."

Jesus, spoken just as if it were years ago, when the smoker could just say gun and Alex shot. His mind raced. He had no idea if this was the new Consortium's agenda or the smoking man's own. He had no idea if the new Consortium even realized the smoker was still alive.

"And if I don't?" he muttered, snorting defiantly at the wafting cigarette smoke.

"It's just as easy to assassinate the assassin, Alex," the old man hummed around the glow of his cancer-stick. "You know that."

Alex glanced back at Marita, the glimmer of moonlight on her pale hair. He stayed silent this time, listening again.

"You have a week to complete the assignment. Afterwards, we'll meet in New York and I'll inform you what to do next."

The old man paused, dragging on his cigarette. "Mulder will be handled. He's not your responsibility."

Not his responsibility. As if she could be, in any normal world. But of course, this wasn't a normal world, not the one Alex knew. "What you're having me do will change everything," he said. "Is it really -- "

"You know only what you need to know. The rules are different now. I'm the only one you answer to."

The fuck he says! "So they're all dead, then? The other test subjects? You're sure of it?"

Alex shifted. "Why me?" he asked finally. "Why not her?" He jerked his head in Marita's direction. "Or Fowley?"

"Think of it as…your reparation for past mistakes. A week, Alex. Don't disappoint me."

The cigarette dropped, a fall of orange spark crushed into the gravel beneath the old man's foot. More gravel crunched as he walked away, melting back into the shadows towards the car Alex had driven in with Marita, silent and wraithlike in the passenger seat, her gun still aimed. He watched them, she now in the driver's seat, heard the car doors shut and the ignition start. Heard the spin of tire wheels as they drove off.

Back in his apartment, Alex locked the door and stalked over to his bed. His gun lay next to the other weapon cases. He hadn't realized Marita had left it there. He picked it up, caressing the grip with a thoughtful right hand. There were nine rounds left in the cartridge, he knew. And if he followed the old man's orders, by the end of the week one of them would pierce the back of Dana Scully's neck, smashing the chip and ending her life.