Lights Go Out: Part Three by Jintian

Dinner, unlike its preparation, is a quiet affair. She carries the bowls of soup on a tray, out to the room with the desks. He has dragged one of them between two chairs, and she sets the tray in front of the place where he sits. He motions with his one hand for her to take the other seat.

They eat facing each other, avoiding eye contact, and the tension in the air is enough that she finds it hard to swallow, hard even to lift her spoon to her mouth.

Since there is no conversation, she tries to think of other things, to distract herself from his dark presence. She tries to think of something happy, to buoy her up and out of the depression of the day. But one truth of the human mind is that memory only works backwards, and everything in the past may be linked to something else in the past. Happy to sad, joy to sorrow.

The bland taste of the food reminds Scully of her brother, Charles, who made a living as a chef in one of Richmond's finest four-star restaurants. Cooking, and family. Charles was the youngest, but the first to settle down, with his college sweetheart Jen. Two boys, and a girl born just this past year. Her heart aches at the thought of the newborn, Melissa Rose, barely old enough to learn the world before it became a nightmare.

The last time she saw Charles and his family…. Was it Christmas? With everyone already assembled by the tree when she finally arrived at her mother's, late because she hadn't left Mulder's apartment until after two in the morning, after their exchange of presents. She had sensed that Charles was annoyed, just like Bill and everyone else, but unlike their older brother he hadn't shown it. And by the time he'd left at New Year's, they'd been just the same, the two youngest Scullys with their bond that had survived despite their physical distance, simply dusted off and shined anew.

Then she was sent to New York, and she'd gotten shot, forced to recover at home, with only her mother dropping in now and again and Mulder just about moving himself in. Charles had phoned to wish her well. And after they'd gotten the X-Files back, and her life again became the busy, case-filled whirl of days and weeks that went by too fast, there was a card for her birthday, a card for his. And then nothing. Silence and the ceasing of communication that happens between people who live completely different lives.

And now it's too late to do anything about it. She has only memories. There will not be opportunity to make new ones.

And she's so far away from any place she might consider home, sitting in this island of a farmhouse in the Great Plains of America, trying to avoid Krycek's hooded green eyes.

Why the hell has she followed him this far? She feels like a boat without a rudder, floating only where the waves push her. Where has her direction gone?

Well, she does know that. She followed him at first for Mulder, to find that elusive cure Krycek promised would silence the voices in her partner's head, but when the sky came down a week later in the cities, they still hadn't found it. By then, it didn't matter of course, because Mulder was still in DC, in the middle of it all, and you can't cure a dead --

Fuck, what is wrong with her? Back and back, she keeps coming back to that. Her mind circling it like a shark with blood in the water.

She remembers…she remembers waking up this morning, the sunlight being too bright on her face. When she got up to close the blinds, Krycek had walked in from the connecting door to his room, and said to her, "We're leaving."

Her mother's face floats in the waves of memory as well, soft and sad. God -- her mother. When she was dying of cancer, during one of those long despairing nights her mother had sat beside her on the hospital bed and stroked her hair and hummed, just like when she was a child with a fever.

Sitting in front of Krycek now, she lets a hand drift to the back of her neck, her fingers brushing the scar there. This chip means more than that. More than a cure. She remembers Cassandra Spender and the burned bodies. And part of her wails, No! I don't want to go that way! Not like that! Not to them!

"You…" and her voice is sore, for some reason, and she has to clear her throat. "You know I still have this chip in my neck, right? You knew about that, didn't you?"

He looks up, dropping his spoon in the bowl. She holds still as his eyes search her face, but she does not meet his gaze. "I knew about it."

His eyes narrow, she senses, maybe a millimeter, but as always his voice is a smooth blank. "Cataloguing. Keeping track."

He shakes his head, slow, deliberate. And for a second she thinks he's lying to her. But something in the tone of his voice bespeaks knowledge, experience. "No," he says. "They're not like homing mechanisms or anything, although they can be used to communicate impulses to the bearers."

He says it so casually, she almost shudders. His voice is so matter-of-fact it's an offense against the memory of the day she found out, staring at the CT scan with parched eyes, seeing proof of the doctor's words and her own suspicions in sophisticated X-ray. Staring for almost an hour before finally pulling her cell phone out, not dialing Mulder's number until she could be sure her hands didn't shake. Until she could take a breath without shuddering through unshed tears.

"Then, what?" And damn this constant, cloying stream of questions she can't help but ask, damn the fear and this situation where Alex Krycek is the only one to turn to for answers. "What if they try to call me again, like those first mass incinerations?" Why is she even asking him this, as if he could give her some reassurance?

He keeps looking at her, and finally she meets his eyes. She has to control the thought, the feeling, of being sucked into them, as if they were dark whirlpools. He speaks finally over her thoughts, "You're asking what I'm going to do. If I'm going to just let you go if that happens."

That's not it, really, as a matter of fact his words imply that she should expect a future with him. She doesn't want to know if he will let her go. She wants to know what will happen if she is forced to let herself go.

He keeps talking, "No, I'll take care of you. I know some of their plans for the test subjects, and believe me you don't want to be part of them."

I'll take care of you. Jesus. She opens her mouth to speak, to say anything, but he stands, holding his empty soup bowl.

"Look, before we talk anymore about this," he says, "I've decided we should leave here in the morning. We can't stay, they'll find out about this place somehow. And the best place to go is north."

"They have trouble maintaining a satisfactory rate of gestation below a certain temperature, below about sixty five degrees Fahrenheit," he explains, walking towards the kitchen. "And there are enough warm climates on Earth to facilitate their needs, so they won't try to infect much of the populace in cold areas. They'll just kill them to squelch any resistance, then leave. By the time we get far enough north, that phase of Colonization will be over."

She hears him putting his bowl in the sink, the sound of the faucet. How much longer, she wonders, will there be running water? How long will it take for them to get as far north as will be safe? How long will it take before she begins to feel them calling her, through the chip? She shivers. For that matter, why haven't they tried to call her already?

She feels the waves of persistent memory trying to crash back over, to cover her head so that she can float again in the non-reality, back where it's safe. But at the last moment she gasps for air.

What comes back out is half a sob, but the sound of Krycek in the kitchen is close and she clamps back down on it. She will not cry. She will not cry.

Instead, she stares dry-eyed into her half-empty bowl, as if that could give her better answers to her questions. But as she sits there, her thoughts move only in circles.

Once, when he was locked in the missile silo with the ship, Alex had regretted that so much of his life was paved with lies. It had struck him before, of course -- that notion -- most notably when he and Mulder were partners, knowing that Mulder's quest was for his ever-elusive Truth, and that in actuality their lives had been woven into a web of deceits. Mulder had had no real knowledge of his presence in such a web, at least not to the degree Alex did, living the lies day by day. He had reflected on the irony then, but the only time he truly wished he had lived his life differently, wished he had lived Mulder's way rather than his own, was in the missile silo in North Dakota.

Of course, once he was freed, he didn't have any more time -- or use -- for regrets.

Now, though, at the end of so many other things, it seems fitting that he should re-evaluate what he has time for.

For something to do, he starts packing the car with what supplies he can find in the house -- canned food, gasoline, bedding stripped from bunks. First aid kits, making a mental note to find a pharmacy at the next town they come to. He doubts anyone will be there.

He shuts the trunk of the car, thinking he should ask Scully what would prove most useful to pick up at a drug store. She is a doctor, after all.

Ah, but they'll need more than just bandages and ointment to fix all that's wrong with them -- such damaged and desperate creatures as they are.

The night sky spread out over the farm is a heavy thing, reminding Alex of a cloak, a blanket. The stars could in fact be holes cut in the fabric, places where bits of light from the outside shine through. If only one could break out, get to the other side of the darkness, what might he find?

Instead of answering the call he sits on the trunk of the car -- his weight makes the entire thing sink a little -- and tilts his head back, looking up. He has spent much of his waking life in the night, perhaps more in recent years than he has spent in the day. But he has never really had the time or the use for stargazing, either.

It is hard to imagine how one of those stars, looking so promising in such twinkling brightness, could be home to the Colonizers. It is difficult also not to get philosophical, although Alex is good at keeping his mind on the action. He had never thought, before he met the smoking man, about the question of other inhabitants of the universe -- of aliens. It was a question only for science fiction movies and stories, and Alex made a hobby of neither.

But once he had learned the truth of the question, he had simply taken it into his stride. Of course, it was shocking. He hadn't lied to Jeffrey Spender about initial reactions. But once accepted, the knowledge he carried was surprisingly easy. Perhaps this was why so many people like Mulder believed without ever having proof.

What it came down to for Alex Krycek, though, was that the Colonizers and the Rebels, for all their physical differences and alienness, were very much like the creatures of Earth. The basic urges, procreation and self-preservation, were at the heart of every agenda. The Colonizers needed space and resources for their ever-expanding species, and the Rebels sought to gain their own independence by battling the Colonizers at every turn. The motives were nothing that human civilizations, and animal species as well, hadn't used on Earth for as long as they existed.

Because they were so similar in these aspects, Alex was able to deal with them, to make bargains just as if they were humans as well.

Scully had stopped him for a moment there, wondering if she should take out the chip. Bad enough that the one in her neck is not the one she originally started out with. But a subject without any chip at all is an experiment with no results.

Perhaps the deal with the Rebel had fallen through -- damn that icy blond bitch anyway he growls to himself -- but it's just as well. Colonization is under way, and from what his knowledgeable eye could tell on the last television reports, the Rebels are losing. The Colonizers could use Dana Scully to finish the hybridization project that Cassandra Spender's death had sabotaged. He'll just have to make his deal with them.

Thank God they'd made it here before the shit hit the fan. He doesn't want to think what might have happened to him if he'd been stuck in one of the cities yesterday, caught up in the confusion and destruction. Now all he has to do is get her to the last remaining silos, nestled up in the heart of North Dakota. The Colonizers would already have sent a dispatch there to claim the last of the ships the Consortium had been storing for them. He'll contact them, arrange to meet and attempt to make a bargain…

He's heard this voice before, speaking to him when he was trapped in the missile silo. It had said to him, stronger-voiced then because he had been weak and nearing desperation, You wouldn't be here, buried alive with that monster-thing and that monster-ship, if you lived a different life. He had listened to it, in between screaming, vomiting his throat raw, and banging on the metal door.

But the voice slithers around in his head anyway, escaping him. You know what they do to them. You know what they do.

Fuck! He gets off of the car, bowing his head and turning his back on the stars. I can't help that. I'm looking out for me, Alex Krycek.

Oh but who did you used to be? Alexei Kritschniskaya. Your mother used to sing you to sleep, your father once bought you a set of toy race cars, and it wasn't even your birthday, it wasn't even Christmas. You played with them all day, and snuck out of bed that night to play some more.

Dead world he hisses at the voice. And they died a long time before all of this, anyway.

There's an image of Scully now, her face turned up towards him in the kitchen. For a moment he had wanted, out of some inexplicable urge, to touch her, like he had touched her face on his TV screen. To fit his palm gently to her cheek, to smooth the delicate arch of her eyebrow with his thumb.

Jesus! He obliterates the image, blacking it out through force of will alone. He lifts his gaze, as if by filling his vision with stars he might clear his head.

This is who I am. No regrets. He pushes away from the car and stalks back into the house. But still, he can sense the voice following him, waiting for another moment to speak.

Her apartment is empty, of course, but he makes a quick search of the rooms anyway, not bothering to turn the lights on. The layout is different from what he remembers -- it is a different place, after all, from the scene of Cardinale's mistake -- but most of the furniture is the same. He opens her closet and runs his gloved hand along the line of severe suits.

His senses are alight tonight. The bedroom and bathroom are permeated by a distinct scent, feminine and…. His mind mutters to him, trying to place the perfume. White Linen. He finds a large bottle of it on her dresser.

Back in the living room, the clock tells him it is almost eleven. Her flight has touched down and she should be on her way home at that very moment. He does not sit, but continues to walk through the rooms, keeping the nervous energy at bay.

He has a plan, but as with anything that depends so on the emotions and reasoning ability of another person, nothing is sure. His gun nestles its heavy, familiar weight at the small of his back, but he will only use it in self-defense. He is here tonight not to kill, but to ensure his own survival.

She is the last one. The last piece of evidence. She is the only woman left from the tests, the breeding experiments to create the alien-human hybrids. And so perhaps the only human of any value to the Rebels. Or the Colonizers, once they arrive.

Alex Krycek is nothing if not adaptable. And nothing if not a master at making deals, making bargains.

From her perch in the back room Scully hears him banging in and out of the house, carrying things out to the car. Finally he comes in for the last time -- she knows by the finality of the door slamming -- and she listens to his heavy tread as it clumps into the kitchen.

Scully is going on a trip through memory, sitting in this farmhouse in the middle of Nebraska. She is remembering the time before, when her world was not turned upside down but only a little bit sideways in comparison.

God, after Africa she'd been so tired. The plane had landed at Dulles, jarring her out of a restless sleep in which Mulder screamed incoherently and she was swallowed by quicksand on the wrong side of the Atlantic. That thing, that huge frightening thing the diminishing waves had revealed… She'd actually touched it, with her bare hands and feet. She'd actually taken the piece of metal with the Navajo on it, the artifact. It was in her carry-on bag, having had to be removed from her suitcase so that the customs officials could inspect it after the metal detectors went berserk.

What did it mean? Something so obviously unnatural, embedded in the western coast of Africa. She had been unable to secure the funds or manpower to bring in a site evaluation team. The staff at the US Embassy had lost patience when she was unable to pin a label on what, exactly, she had found. And, they informed her, she was wasting her time. They could not send anyone, anyway. She was told that it was outside of their jurisdiction, tied up in paperwork. The Ivory Coast government had even filed an official complaint with the Embassy the third time she'd gone to the capital, searching unsuccessfully for someone who could lay claim to whatever was buried in the beach.

But truly, even as she badgered bureaucrats and ambassadors, she hadn't been able to answer their myriad questions with straight answers. "So what would you say it is, exactly? And is it dangerous? Does this constitute an environmental emergency? How long has it been there?"

She had hidden behind her scientific demeanor, refusing to commit either way. "That's what I'm trying to find out."

She knew, though. She knew exactly what it was. But to accept it was to accept a multitude of other horrible, impossible things.

Eventually, she'd had to leave it there, parts of it covered and uncovered by sand with each tide. More of it revealed each day.

She would be back within a week at the most, she'd decided. Fuck it, she'd bring an army of scientists to study the…whatever it was. If that was what it took to get it out of the beach --

The nurse on the phone was polite, but firm in her admonition that it was past eleven o'clock, well past lights-out hours for the patients. All she would say was that Fox Mulder was stable, his condition -- his condition! Scully's mind repeated -- was the same as the last time she called, less than twenty four hours ago. But the nurse would tell her nothing of whether there had been change or upheaval in between now and then.

Scully thumbed off her cell phone with a sigh -- no one was left to call her on it now, really, not this late at night. She put her key in the ignition, starting the car up and letting the rumble of the engine push aside her heavy thoughts. She snapped the radio off as she pulled out of the parking lot, listening to the hum of the car on the night street.

It is a hypnotic sound, drawing her mind into a blank. She drives with unseeing eyes, letting her body's memory guide her home, to Georgetown. Home where she can shed her clothes, slip into a bath -- God! Clean water! -- and then into bed, closing her eyes on the past two weeks of hell.

She's so tired that she doesn't even notice the van following her, cutting through the darkness like a ghost.

Entering the room he catches Scully in the middle of a shiver, but though his eyes flick sharply towards her he doesn't speak. Instead, he stands just inside the doorway and says, "We should get some sleep. We've got a long drive north tomorrow."

She finds herself nodding, head bobbing like a dandelion in wind, like the grasses of the land outside. But she doesn't make a move until he turns around and looks at her.

Is he saying this to her now? Or is he saying this through the fog of memory? Is it now or this morning, when they first started driving?

"How do you expect us to get anywhere if you're just going to flake out like that? You need to get it together -- "

The words are coming from somewhere far away. No one has ever spoken to her like this, she recognizes. She should know, she's in the memories now and that has never, ever happened. She has always been in control, always been aware.

no not always you weren't always Duane Barry

No, of course not, no one can maintain that sort of iron hold, of course not, but in her lifetime Dana Scully has given it a damn good try. There were so many times, for example, with Mulder --

"Scully let's go to sleep!" The voice is hard and the hand that pulls at her shoulder is much too rough --

She jumps up and makes for the door. He follows her down the hall, into one of the rooms with bunkbeds. She flops down onto the lower bunk of one, turning her back to him so that all he can see of her head are locks of oily red hair.

"Shit…" he mutters as he unholsters his gun and turns off the light. "You'd better fucking be normal tomorrow morning or -- " But the rest of his words are muffled as he gets into one of the lower bunks, stretching out on his back with his gun beside him. The sheets rustle, covering his voice.

Lying there, with her eyes squeezed shut the way she once did after childhood nightmares, Scully remembers the first time she saw Krycek after coming back from Africa.

As soon as she had stepped into her apartment she had known something was wrong. Just a feeling, a shiver of nerves she'd had too many times to count since being partnered with Mulder.

A dark bulk moved in the corner of her vision, and when she turned her head she saw him. A man, face hidden by shadows.

Her hand was already on its way to the light switch, an automatic gesture. The lamps around the living room cut on just as he said, "Don't move."

His face was enough to turn her blood to ice water. She'd last seen him several years ago, just before that time Mulder disappeared into Russia. Alex Krycek stood not ten feet away in her living room. With a gun in his hand.

She held very still, watching his eyes as they flitted over her, dark and impersonal.

He was close, closer than she'd ever thought someone like him could get to her alone. There was no one to save her if he decided to pull the trigger.

Her body didn't exist anymore, numbness flashing through all of a sudden. It was as if everything below her neck had disappeared. There was a rushing sound in her ears. She could only stand there, staring.

Something crossed his face, like a ripple of water, and he stepped closer. "Do it, Scully." The gun was black and huge in her vision.

Memory shivered, remembering a time long ago when she had said something similar to someone else. When she'd still been naive enough to think that three months of missing time was the worst they could do to her.

Forcing her legs to move freed her voice. She took a breath. No trembling, good. "What do you want, Krycek?" She sat on the edge of the sofa, hands as near to her knees as possible in case she had a chance to move, do something, lunge for his throat…

He perched on the arm of the armchair across from her, pointing the gun in her general direction. His motions were fluid, muscular, but she noticed his left arm hung strangely. "I'm not going to shoot you unless you do something stupid." She met his eyes. The murdering bastard -- he had the nerve to grin. He looked like a ghoul, face round and smooth-cheeked. "I'm actually here to help you, to give you some options." He rested his left arm on his knee, and then his gun hand on top of his wrist, watching her. "I heard Mulder's been indisposed."

She stared; he was black-leathered death in her living room. "You're a fucking liar, Krycek."

His laugh was a knife cut. "Funny how I'm only called that when I'm telling the truth."

"All right, then, explain what you're talking about." She watched his eyes, wondering if she'd really be able to catch a lie.

He shook his head. "It would take too long to convince your scientist's mind, to just talk about it. I have to show you."

It's written all over her expressive face. Of course she doesn't believe him. There's no reason to. He can't remember if he's ever said even one true thing to her in the few cataclysmic times they've had contact.

But, he thinks, all she needs to do is realize how desperate this situation really is, how impossible it is for her to reach Mulder now. She'll understand then that he's the only one with any means or information to help her.

"Do you really think Mulder's condition took anyone by surprise?" he asks her. "If it did there would've been Consortium goons all over him at the first indication, and you'd probably have no idea where he was right now. They would have taken him, just like they took you, for tests. Just like they took Gibson Praise."

Her eyes widen in recognition before she regains control. "The Consortium doesn't exist anymore. Those men were all burned to death."

She's bluffing, and she's terrible at it. "You know an organization that powerful would have more members than just the old men," he tells her. "It's far from over."

"He told you, didn't he, what happened to him in Tunguska? How there were other men subject to the same tests?"

"That and a lot of other things about your involvement with them," she snorts. Her head is so high, so defiant, one could never tell he had a gun on her.

"Those experiments have been going on for years, and similar ones in the US, although they were unsuccessful. Infection by the black oil, an alien race, the same one that's poised to colonize in the immediate future. All the men infected with the Tunguska strain would still have lingering effects because of the alien DNA that was put in their bodies. No matter if they got the vaccine or not."

His eyes narrow -- perhaps with impatience, perhaps with the memory. "I don't know why. It's an alien life form, for Christ's sake. But I was never infected with it. I received the vaccine, like all the people there, but I was never a test subject."

There's recognition on her face, but still disbelief -- of him, of what he's saying. God, he knows she's seen enough things that this is making sense to her. Can she still not believe an inevitability he came to accept years ago?

He leans closer, making sure she can hear every word as clearly as if it's inside her own head. "But the thing is, Agent Scully, the thing you've gotten hints at with your DNA tests and your artifacts, those aliens aren't the new kids on the block. They're not just colonizing. They're re-colonizing."

"And that is actually the only correct thing you'll ever learn about the existence of life before humans. They were first," he enunciates.

He watches her expression cloud as she struggles with some inner voice. "What does all of this have to do with Mulder?"

"Scully, artifacts like those have been found for years before Merkmallen and Sandoz were even born. Their effects on men like Mulder, men who've been tested on with the black oil, have been well-documented. But it seems like these new pieces, which no one ever foresaw finding, are different. Even just a rubbing of them can make someone who had the Tunguska strain go apeshit. That's how Mulder got into all of this."

She's seething. "So this…this Consortium has known about this kind of reaction for over fifty years, long enough to develop some kind of -- I don't know, a cure or a treatment -- for it, but instead of helping Mulder they're trying to cover it up?"

"Now you're getting it." God, if her gaze could actually cut flesh, he'd be sliced to ribbons now. "Mulder's run out of supporters in the Consortium. The new generation could never understand why the old men kept him alive for so long. They never knew his father. They've probably decided that the next mess he gets himself into will be the last."

"And that's this one." She watches him nod, her gaze suddenly cold. "So why do you want to help him? You killed Bill Mulder. Aren't you part of the new generation?"

He laughs, a sound like rasping sand. "Hardly. I'm probably the only person left who recognizes Mulder's usefulness. Your usefulness."

He stands and bends slightly, still holding the gun, and uses the gloved prosthesis to push a piece of paper across the coffee table to her. She watches his hand, and he sees her register puzzlement at its stiff movements.

"When you decide, page me at this number. I'll call your cell phone then and give you directions on where and when to meet."

She picks up the paper, glancing at the number written there. "Where would we go?"

He half-smiles. "You'll have to page me to find out." Keeping eye contact, he holsters his gun in the front of his pants. She's still sitting on her hands. If she makes a move, he will be faster than her. He warns, "You've got twenty-four hours to contact me, and then I'll be gone. Don't let this chance slip by, Scully. I'm Mulder's only hope."

Then, lightning fast, he opens the front door and slips out. The door slams shut behind him, leaving her sitting on the couch, still defiant.