TITLE:  Sparks Fly Upward

AUTHOR:  Vehemently

E-MAIL:  vehemently@yahoo.com

RATING:  Strong R, for adult situations, sexuality, 
language and brief violence.

ARCHIVE:  Gossamer.  Others please ask.

WARNING:  Caveat lector.  Bad craziness ensues.

DISCLAIMER:  Characters and situations you recognize belong 
to 1013 and Chris Carter, who obviously haven't a clue.

NOTES:  at end.

SUMMARY:  We all know the friction is there.  I just gave 
it tinder to work with.

* * * * * * *

CANON DIVERGENCE:  This story takes place in the summer of 
1998, a vague while after The Red and The Black.  *Nothing* 
after that episode is taken into account: not The End, not 
the Movie, not 2 years of canon.  THIS IS IMPORTANT!

* * * * * * *
Sparks Fly Upward
by Vehemently
* * * * * * *

The day she came back to work, she barked her tender 
knuckles against a desk drawer and he watched the 
galvanizing pain stroke through her.  She lied and said it 
didn't hurt too badly.  Mulder hunted in his desk for 
something so she wouldn't see the frown on his face.  
Gingerly, and then with that diffident briskness, like a 
new broom stabbing cobwebs, they found their way back to 
routine.

He awoke in tears more than once, hearing her cry out for 
God on a hypnotist's unctuous leather couch.  If it was 
early, he convinced himself she didn't share his tendency 
toward nightmares.  But those times when it was late, when 
he jolted upright in the total silence of the gray predawn, 
he was unmanned by a vision of her cowering with a group of 
other blank faces beside a gnarled pine root, while a crowd 
of corpses surged and gyrated, roasting, at the dam above.  
He stopped calling her up in the middle of the night, so 
she wouldn't think he was worried about her, and so as not 
to scare her.

Summer waxed hot and strong, with mist rising off the river 
at dawn.  The afternoon that he made the decision, 
consultants and lobbyists were playing softball on the 
National Mall, sweating well into dusk and braining unwary 
tourists.  He stepped out of the building into the humid 
evening, listening to the paltry taxi traffic, and walked 
past the games while he tried to think.  Players called to 
each other, a small distant sound like migratory geese on 
the wing confirming each other's presence.  The decision 
having been made, he finally realized that thinking would 
do him no good.  Mulder got onto the Metro and went home to 
plan.

He came in to work the next day and cheerfully discarded 
tact when talking with others.  Scully staged a fight with 
him in the middle of Accounting, and spent all of the next 
day leaving impatient messages for him in offices where she 
knew he wouldn't be and where the gossip traveled fastest.  
Counseling Services called him up and he got in as many 
cheap shots as he could before the shrink hung up on him.  
The crowning achievement came the following week, when 
Skinner was so kind as to offer up his jaw for a fistfight 
in the hall.  The men who pulled them apart watched Mulder 
out of the corners of their eyes, shaking their heads.  And 
so it was arranged, quickly, as in banal genre movies, and 
with the inevitability of a landslide.  He was out of the 
FBI before he could tell himself that it was so.

There were a few sad consolations, from acquaintances.  
Those who knew him better were ferocious in their avowals 
of investigation, redress, revenge.  Mulder had to listen 
to a drunken telephone diatribe from Langly, about how The 
Man always got you in the end, while Scully rolled her eyes 
at him from across the room.  She herself offered no 
condolences and promised no promises.

A month was a good interval, a month in which Mulder could 
start drawing on his inheritance -- he had just about 
swallowed his tongue in shock and mortification when Scully 
told him how much he was really worth -- and build a few 
cover stories.  A month, in which Scully struggled alone 
with the unwieldy X-Files folders and gave the basement 
office a scrubbing it hadn't gotten since the Reagan 
administration.  She didn't let him know when she was going 
out of town and she didn't call him when she got back.

They let the month go by, and in the high, fine days of 
June the conspirators met in a coffee shop in Bethesda, 
dressed as tourists.  Three iced teas sweated into cheap 
napkins and grew tepid while they talked.

"Realistically," asked Skinner with a frown, "how much 
access will you get?  You can only trade so far on the 
family name."

"They'll want me to implicate myself," said Mulder, saying 
it out loud for the first time.  "They'll ask me to commit 
crimes."  Scully straightened in her chair, but said 
nothing.

Skinner was not so circumspect in his disapproval.  "You're 
officially out.  I can't necessarily offer you the kind of 
protection the Bureau affords to undercover agents."  He 
looked down at his accusatory finger, hid it in a fist.

A long silence.  Scully clenched her teeth visibly.  Mulder 
saw her fold her hands in her lap so as not to touch the 
back of her neck.  He stared at her the mass of what wasn't 
spoken, dense like lead.  Reaching out to touch her pink 
knuckles, he watched her purse her lips as if to object, 
and then subside as with a great weight pulling her down.  
She did not take his hand, but neither did she shake him 
off.

At last he relaxed into a slouch and shrugged.  "I 
understand.  I'll just take things as they come along."

"Do what you have to," said Scully, looking at the table.  
She raised her head and burned her gaze into him.  "Do what 
you have to."

He nodded tightly and ended the conference.

* * *

After that it was a straightforward affair.  The right kind 
of phone call, a few old chits of his father's, and he was 
sitting in the lobby of a high-toned office building in New 
York, feeling underdressed in jeans.  They made him wait, 
and the surveillance cameras crawled over him and through 
him and found nothing of note.  After twenty minutes of 
reading the security guard's Herald upside down and 
backwards, he was ushered by a man in a thousand dollar 
suit into a silent elevator to the top floor.

There was only one man in the dark wood room to which he 
was led.  The man nodded his white head and said, "Mister 
Mulder.  I am very sorry to see it has come to this."

"You aren't going to tell me it's my destiny?"  Mulder 
asked, and sat without being invited to do so.

"That would be melodramatic, wouldn't it?"  The old man 
smiled past his clipped, Continental consonants.  "What has 
caused this new turn of events?"

Mulder gazed at him, at the long poker face and the 
impeccable suit and the fingers tap tap tapping on any 
surface that could support them.  "I'm going where the 
truth is."

"I see."  The man took a seat opposite his prospective 
employee.  They faced each other in dark leather wing 
chairs.  "And your partner?"

"She wouldn't countenance your methods.  Things were tense 
between us, since the immolations in March.  We fought."  
Mulder was amazed to find himself telling large chunks of 
truth.  He headed off the old man's tight-lipped appraisal, 
volunteering, "I will not be her enemy.  I want her to be 
safe, and well.  I wish I could have told her where I am 
this morning."

"And you came to me because?"

"Because somebody in your organization tackled me in my own 
living room to make sure I knew about a certain Air Force 
Base."

"You are risking a great deal on the supposition that I am 
the specific source of your information."

Mulder felt the tight control over all his muscles.  He 
allowed the specter of a smile to cross his features.  "But 
I'm not wrong, am I?"

The old man stood and Mulder stood with him.  "You will be 
useful," he said.  "My associate in the front office will 
assign you to an appropriate forum for your training."

They did not shake hands.  Mulder left him alone in his 
enormous paneled room.

* * *

Scully knew a few things.  She knew that a man with an 
English accent liked to see her alive, a man whose 
telephone number had once been in the Manhattan area code.  
She knew that more than one ideology could rule a single 
group at any given time, even ideologies that were in 
direct conflict.  And she knew that she was empowered to 
seek out and expose crime by order of the Attorney General 
of the United States.

Wandering around her dim, cavernous office, she found 
herself trying to articulate aloud the miasma of personal 
and professional reasons.  She sat at her desk and looked 
at the clippings on her wall and knew she would continue 
despite Mulder's absence.

Is that what I am doing?  she asked herself, bitterly.  
Trying to spite him?  Sitting alone in an office, Scully 
would not hear a reply.  She looked over at the file 
cabinets, which he had left open on his last day.  A flurry 
of photocopying had preceded his departure, and when she 
had objected that a civilian would not be allowed to take 
official FBI records home with him, he had looked up at her 
with that sweet blank stare.  He had put on his solicitous 
face and tipped his pile of papers at her so she saw the 
photos of grossly pregnant women on gurneys, the creative 
scars on necks and skulls.

Scully had taken that opportunity to get some exercise by 
stomping around the block in a raging haze, and 
conveniently Mulder had disappeared with his illegal papers 
before she returned.  He had left the files all over his 
desk -- her desk -- as an unsubtle reminder.  Thinking 
back, she could not remember which made her angrier, that 
he presumed to know how she felt or that she had obeyed his 
expectations and spent the evening putting the papers back 
into order.

She pulled open a cabinet drawer, neat now and labeled with 
her impeccable penmanship, and felt the quiver of fear in 
her belly.  Unsure and unguided, she returned to her 
strength in the hard evidence.  She snatched up as many of 
the abduction cases as she could lift at once and brought 
them to her desk.

The absence of a partner who was suspicious and prone to 
guessing made her assign the role of seeker to herself.  
She brought home flimsy cardboard boxes full of files on a 
Friday.  She realized, with a strangled little laugh, that 
it was something Mulder might do.

She read his crabbed notes all over every page.  She 
traveled territory Mulder had already crossed, seeing with 
a different, and frankly a more exhaustive, eye than he 
possessed.  She perused the records and her own internal 
assumptions at leisure, sure with the dark knowledge that 
the connections were there to be found.

A scatter of salt, the victims lived all over the country.  
They would be wary of badges and official inquiries.  They 
might not talk to a man.  To a woman, they would talk.  To 
a fellow victim, they would.

* * *

U Street, District of Columbia, was that kind of 
neighborhood that was a slum until two years ago and in 
another two years would be evicting its poor in favor of 
artist's lofts and tony, chic restaurants.  Right now, it 
teetered on the edge, gaggles of black children in holey t-
shirts staring at the dinner crowd, and stealing plastic 
chili peppers from off the strings of lights in bar 
windows.

Mulder traversed this cultural minefield in jeans and a t-
shirt and a haze of uncertainty.  The children seemed to 
see that he was underdressed for a night on the town, and 
contented themselves with chucking rocks at him that never 
got near their mark.  Mulder didn't notice either way, 
embroiled as he was in his first date with the underworld.

Notice had come, by elaborately circuitous means, that he 
should meet his man at an address not far from here.  No 
name, no advice, no suggestions of what to bring to the 
dinner party.  He brought nothing, and rang the designated 
apartment number at exactly 6:30, as ordered.  The building 
was squat and square and had no doorman.

"What?"  screeched the intercom, a deep voice turned to a 
mechanical whine.

Mulder hesitated, leaned forward and said, "It's Mulder."  
He didn't know what else to say, and entertained the 
distasteful thought that perhaps his New York acquaintance 
was playing with him.  But then the door buzzed for him to 
open it, and he busied himself finding the apartment number 
inside.

The door was answered by a tall, broad black man.  The 
lines about his mouth gave the lie to the welcome he was 
speaking.  The man stood aside for Mulder to come in, but 
he did so without especial like or dislike.  Mulder 
realized this was going to be harder than he thought.

The apartment he entered was strewn with mismatched 
furniture and empty beer bottles.  The kitchen was gray 
with grime and a man was standing surveying the nearly 
empty refrigerator in hopes something enticing would melt 
into existence.  More sounds from the living room.

He looked in, and looked twice, a jolt grabbing him like 
the feeling of waking from a nightmare.  He felt the 
adrenaline rush through him and saturate his extremities as 
he stood, staring.  Alex Krycek was sitting on the sunken 
couch, reading the funnies from the Post and eating a 
sandwich.  He had the paper spread out on a chipped coffee 
table and was dropping crumbs onto the page.  He looked up 
when Mulder's guide cleared his throat.

"Krycek, this is our new man.  Mulder."  Krycek looked up 
without surprise.  His eyes traveled up and down Mulder, 
weight and inventory and an unabashed assessment of mettle, 
then fell back to the comic strips he had been reading.

"Good," he said, and took another bite.

"I'm Abdullah," said the black man, and Mulder turned in 
time to see a sliver of apology in that half-smile.  
"That's Stanton over there in the corner, and Delehaye in 
the kitchen."

They stood there together for a long moment, cramped in the 
narrow hall.  Mulder shrugged his utter ignorance of vast 
conspiratorial etiquette.

"Make yourself at home, I guess.  Till he wants to talk to 
you."

And with that Abdullah gave his back and fled to the 
kitchen.  Two pairs of eyes visualized edibility into the 
fridge, with no more apparent success than one.  So Mulder 
stood, mentally akimbo, hands in pockets, waiting for an 
audience with the man.  This man, whose official record was 
a heap of implications and sorry results.  This man, 
recently a late-night housebreaker and monologuist.  
Utterly inexplicable.

"You don't have to stand there," came a mild voice behind 
him.  It didn't sound like what he remembered.  It was too 
calm, too straightforward.  It did not drip with hints.  
All it did was invite him to sit.  Mulder turned around and 
put himself into a chair.  He felt his ankle bones pressing 
together, a slow, excruciating grind, while he put his 
attention to his new boss.  Krycek.  Who was talking with 
his mouth full.

"The man upstairs sent you to me.  He's got a hell of a 
sense of humor, doesn't he?"  Mulder fumblingly thought he 
meant God at first, then realized it didn't matter.  He sat 
still and looked at his erstwhile partner.

Years had gone by -- how many, now?  Four?  -- and he 
seemed to be no different than that first day of proffered 
handshakes and excitement.  He was no different the way a 
cat in its winter coat is no different from the same cat, 
lolling in summer shade: Krycek had just taken off the 
freshness and pleasantry and sat in something more closely 
approaching his own skin.  The sandwich was put down, 
nearly finished, and Mulder found that dark glitter 
observing him in return.  He blinked and found something to 
do with his hands.

Which made Krycek wheeze a little laugh.  "They itch, don't 
they?"  He twitched his own fingers as in demonstration.  
Mulder noticed anew the agile hand and its awkward plastic 
partner, and was a little afraid.  Krycek murmured, "You'd 
love to reach out and break my neck.  It would be such a 
clean, symbolic thing to do.  You've seen it in the 
movies."

It was true; Mulder had seen it in the movies.  But he had 
also gone through standard FBI training and knew that kind 
of leverage required both surprise and a substantial weight 
advantage.  Strangulation was even slower, and with three 
other men in the house, he would never be allowed to finish 
it.  He sat back in the chair and grasped its arms.

Krycek smiled an open smile just then, seeing Mulder's 
gesture.  "Good," he said, and he seemed to mean it.  He 
lounged on the couch and caught Mulder's eye.  "If you were 
here for revenge, you would have tried it just now.  If you 
were a plant, you would have denied it."

Mulder opened his mouth in an obligatory rebuttal.  Krycek 
reached out with startling fluidity, his torso in flight, 
his palm an outstretched wing batting at Mulder's face.  It 
stopped, an inch from his cheek, and Mulder flinched away 
from nothing.  He felt the light tap of fingers on his jaw, 
a gentle echo of the sting he had avoided.

Fleeing the green-eyed gaze on him, Mulder watched Stanton 
across the room, and the other two in the kitchen, waiting 
for them to stare or object or shudder.  They did nothing.  
They didn't even look up from their self-assigned tasks.  
Only Krycek focussed on him, smiling.

"Good reflexes," he said.  Krycek took up his sandwich 
again, bit in.  "You want some of the paper?"

There was nothing to be done, under the circumstances.  
Mulder turned down his internal boil to a simmer and 
nodded.  He took up the front pages and began to peruse 
them, waiting for the real action to begin.

* * *

"This is unlike you," muttered Scully.  The greenish pallor 
of his skin, even in sunlight, said Mulder was not over his 
hangover yet.  He had insisted on Arlington National 
Cemetery as their meeting place.  They sat where the Union 
soldiers had buried corpses in Robert E.  Lee's flower 
garden and allowed passers-by to see a soldier on leave and 
his stateside sweetheart.  Scully hated it, but she allowed 
it.

"Some kind of initiation ritual," said Mulder, with a 
dismissive wave of his hand.  She held his chin in her 
fingers, turning him this way and that in the daylight, but 
nothing would fix those bloodshot eyes except sleep and 
hydration.  There was no aid she could offer.

They stood together, and wandered along the path.  She 
looked at the scoured gray headstones, but she couldn't 
read any names.

"Will they take you in?"  she asked.

He picked a black-eyed susan that nodded in the warm 
breeze.  "I think they will," he said, and plucked free the 
flower's petals one by one.

"Krycek," she sighed.

He agreed: "Krycek."

Butter yellow stained his hand; he wiped it on his jeans 
and they were stained as well.  Scully steered them along 
the crest of the hill, in the sun.

"I have been tracking down names," she blurted.  She 
stumbled a little, clumsy city shoes on the long grass.  
"Lapsed memberships in the groups, in the Network."  A 
code-word was needed, some language that could make what 
she thought about respectable or evocative.  There was no 
clinical jargon to be had, none untainted.  She weeded her 
words carefully.  "Not all of the lapsed names are dead."

"No?"  Mulder asked.  He was examining the trees that 
framed the old Lee household, one on the left side and one 
on the right.

She paused, let a pair of elderly tourists pass by.  "Some 
of them went underground.  Many.  Perhaps three of every 
twenty."

"Underground?"  Twirling his denuded flower, Mulder spun it 
away into the garden.  He wasn't looking at her.

Scully pressed on.  "They keep in touch.  I don't know how.  
Nobody will talk to me, yet."  He should have joked about 
ESP, or seized on the notion that they talked through their 
implants like teenagers hard-wired into their cell phones.  
But all he did was shrug and stroll, a long amiable gait 
like a prosperous sea-captain on the deck.  She wanted to 
grab at him, and didn't.

"They haven't given you a new partner, have they?"  He 
asked it over his shoulder as he strode from dappled shade 
back into the strong bright sun.  She saw how, so soon, he 
had shed the adversarial armor of policemen, that back-
tension that dresses one in a suit even when one is naked.  
Scully was unaccountably jealous and unaccountably afraid.

"No," she snapped, more sharply than she had intended.  
"Skinner is tying up paperwork as best he can.  I'll be on 
my own for a while."

They turned together, and found themselves staring down the 
hill.  The old house behind them, they faced the 
breathtaking run of grass, a free, unpatterned sprawl all 
the way to the bridge, far below.  Like a sunbeam through 
late clouds, or like an arm straining to reach, Memorial 
Bridge clasped the far bank of the Potomac, its terminus 
fist marshalled by great rounded statues of stone who 
pointed to the building beyond.

Forth, on in the field of view, ran the squat square of the 
Lincoln Memorial, its pondering inhabitant unseen behind 
marble.  Further, long grassy strips bounding the 
Reflecting Pool, flocks of ducks and puffing joggers on 
their lunch breaks.  The far point stood like an upbraiding 
finger, focal of every building around it.

Scully felt a little nudge of his hand on her arm.  She 
touched him with nonverbal thanks.  Together she and Mulder 
enjoyed their view.  The Washington Monument stood, 
unruffled in the paltry breeze, its sharp whistling edge 
pointing accusingly to God or outer space.

* * *

"Remember what I said," muttered Krycek, shifting in his 
crouch.  "If I go down, scatter."  Mulder crouched by his 
side, his black shirt itching and making him sweat.  Nobody 
else reacted so he didn't react either.

They didn't really all fit in the back of the van, even 
with Abdullah in the driver's seat turning around.  "I'm 
just here to get your asses out," he'd said, chuckling 
through the worry lines on his cheeks.  Those worry lines 
were deeper now.

Finally Krycek let them climb out of the van and into a 
dense, humid dusk.  Stanton and Delehaye ran off together, 
northward towards the front door.  Mulder stood with a 
silenced pistol in his hands and trickles of sweat 
wandering down his back.  He waited for a long time.

At last there were ragged shouts from the north, a zing of 
chain link being abused.  Mulder hadn't been listening and 
he couldn't remember what the other two were doing.  He 
felt an elbow in his ribs, and he started in towards the 
building, Krycek his slippery shadow.

No resistance.  The weapon heavy in his hand never pointed 
anywhere but the floor.  Krycek used a lockpick gun on the 
door and then they were into a catacomb of cubicles, 
grinning at each other like madmen.  "Easier than ripping 
off a 7-11," said Krycek, knocking over a file cabinet.

It was not small and it did not make a small sound as it 
hit the carpet.  Krycek was already on to the next one, 
smacking his dead arm here and there and laying things low.

"What are you doing?!"  Mulder hissed, but Krycek didn't 
answer.  He stood back, breathing hard, and surveyed the 
houseplants and loose papers and cabinets like corpses that 
littered the floor.

"Good enough," he said.  He turned and jogged toward an 
emergency exit, herding Mulder with his open hand.  They 
fell together into the alarmed crashbar, and stumbled out 
the door under the shrieks of the siren.  Under it all, 
Krycek was laughing.

The van wasn't there.  They had left by the wrong exit.  
Mulder felt a thin blanket of panic settling onto his 
shoulders, but Krycek grabbed his arm, pulling him away 
from the wall's paltry safety and towards the parking lot.  
They dashed, ducking, hands linked, to a beat-up hatchback 
Mulder had never seen before.

"You mean we're going to steal a car too?"  he asked, but 
Krycek was still laughing as he keyed open the door and 
shoved Mulder inside.  Krycek climbed in after, so Mulder 
had to jostle painfully past the emergency brake and into 
the passenger seat.

Krycek made the engine roar and the car leapt forward, 
hopping traffic barrier and sidewalk alike before it evened 
out on the road.  Across the six lanes of the avenue, 
theirs was the only car.

"What the fuck was that?"  In lieu of stuttering his 
fright, Mulder cursed long and loud.  "What was that, if 
we're not -- stealing something, or sabotaging, or 
destroying?"

Krycek tapped his hand on the steering wheel, turned the 
headlights on abruptly.  He chuckled.  "Sometimes I worry 
about your propensity to violence, you know that?"

"I mean --" began Mulder, peevish.

"I know what you mean.  We're doing this for a reason."  
Krycek took an illegal left against the light.  In rush 
hour, it would have been suicide, but the road was as empty 
as if the world had ended.  "Partly, it's to test you, make 
sure you don't bring task forces falling down around our 
ears."

Mulder didn't dare look at him.  He set his jaw and counted 
streetlights.  "Delehaye and Stanton --"

"Will be heading home with Abdullah.  They were just a 
diversion, anyway."  Krycek was only a dark silhouette in 
the driver's seat.  Mulder felt the pistol still in his 
hands.  After a moment, he tucked it into his waistband.  
"You assumed we were going to steal something because I 
didn't tell you different.  I really do have a plan."

In the heavy air of night, he waited.  Mulder wanted 
desperately to peel off his shirt, but didn't dare.

"It's a technique terrorists use these days."  Krycek 
worried at his own collar.  "In this country the white 
power extremists are into it, but they're burdened with 
being unbelieveably stupid."

"You're comparing us to the Aryan Nation?"  Mulder 
squawked.

"Help me with this damn shirt."  Krycek was pulling off his 
black turtleneck, or trying to, with only his one hand.  He 
steered with his knees.  Mulder put his hand on the wheel, 
to steady it and himself.  At a stoplight which Krycek 
decided inexplicably to honor, they worked together to lift 
the fabric of the shirt.  Mulder couldn't quite reach the 
dead arm on the left without climbing half out of his seat.  
As black cloth eclipsed his head, Krycek's muffled voice 
asked, "What's the basic problem with any conspiracy?"

Corruption; contempt for other people; underhanded means to 
achieve a goal...  "Whistle blowers."  Mulder paused, 
trying not to poke Krycek in the head with his elbow.  His 
forearm stroked Krycek's chin as he pushed the shirt down 
along the plastic arm as far as he could reach.  The light 
turned green and the car roared forth again, nearly 
pitching Mulder into the back seat.  "Or spies."

"Both," replied Krycek, glancing his way with a flash of 
teeth.  "Different sides of the same coin.  A conspiracy is 
structured as a limited circle of intelligence.  You're in, 
you know a lot, or at least who is directly above you and 
below you in the hierarchy.  They always catch mobsters by 
turning one guy, who spills about everybody else."

"Sammy the Bull Gravano."

"Yeah, Whitaker Chambers, that kind.  Our organization 
suffers from the same problem, which is why the hit squads 
are still on staff."

Mulder struggled to contain a shudder.  He felt Krycek 
eyeing him and knew he had failed.  Around them, a few cars 
were beginning to emerge, husbands and college kids on 
snack patrol.  There was an ugly, tingling excitement to 
knowing that the rest of the world went on around him, 
mundane.

"The Middle East has a lot of practice with terrorism, so 
they came up with it first."  Without looking Krycek 
reached over and plucked at Mulder's midriff.  "Take off 
your shirt, if you want to.  They cut out the entire 
intelligence structure.  Little cells of ten, or five, or 
one, take action as they see fit, without consulting any 
boss or master plan."

"Sounds very democratic," interjected Mulder, dry like the 
desert.  He kept his shirt on.  Krycek ignored the sarcasm 
and cut across three lanes of traffic to get onto the 
bridge.

"It is.  It also means that even if you do catch one alive, 
he can't possibly tell you who else is in the organization.  
There is no organization."

Whump, whump, whump, went their tires on the sections of 
the bridge.  The river below radiated cool upwards, a vague 
evening breeze.  The tumblers locked home in Mulder's head.  
"So anybody, or everybody, could be a terrorist.  It would 
be like trying to pull dandelions out of a back yard.  Pull 
one, ten more sprout up."

"Yes."  Krycek was so intense.  Mulder turned away from 
that gaze, in time to grab the wheel and keep them in their 
lane.  Krycek picked the intervening hand off his steering 
wheel with an indulgent chuckle.  "All you need is a shared 
ideology and a shared target.  Then some nut can get a wild 
hair up his ass and go shoot up the temple down the block, 
or an integrated kindergarten, or the local army reserve 
unit."

Now that they were in the city, a stoplight marked every 
block.  Mulder began to feel less like he would die in a 
fiery crash and began to really hear what he and Krycek 
were talking about.  His body folded in on itself as the 
word came back to him: terrorists.  Do what you have to, he 
reminded himself.

"There's a wellspring of angry radicals out there," Krycek 
continued, with a little grin.  "Lesbian Avengers, New 
Anarchists, woodland preservationists, those people who put 
G.I.  Joe voice boxes into Barbie dolls a few years back.  
They're out there, nursing a grudge, hungry for a clear 
target."

They pulled into a parking space in the business district, 
more than a mile from Krycek's apartment.  Mulder watched 
silently as Krycek took the car out of gear and killed the 
engine.  He looked up, examined Mulder with clear green 
eyes.  "That's what we're here for."  Mulder didn't want to 
look at him.  He climbed out of the car and stood on the 
sidewalk, uncertain what to do.

Krycek's head and shoulders loomed over the top of the car 
as he stood.  He was still staring at Mulder, who turned 
away to start walking and concluded, "So tonight's little 
visit to Masters, Inc.  was just a signal."  Krycek walked 
with him, close by his side.  He whispered.  "We're giving 
them a target."

"Yes," murmured Krycek, in the dark.

Mulder felt the sweat down his back, under his arms.  He 
wished he could take off his shirt; he wished for rain.  
"Environmentalists with attitude, that's the big secret?"

Krycek snorted laughter next to him, clapped him on the 
shoulder.  "Yeah.  Yeah, it is."  His arm flexed across 
Mulder's back and they walked down the street, leaning 
together like unsteady drunks.  "That's the big secret," he 
confided.

* * *

Flora Duchesney answered her front door in her bathrobe.  
"Oh dear, oh my," she said, fluttering her hands over her 
tangled gray hair, as she let Scully in.  "I'm sorry I'm 
not all proper this morning.  I had a late night with a 
friend who's ill."

Ill with a specific sort of cancer, Scully knew.  She let 
herself be led to a chintz living room and seated on a 
couch with sagging springs.  She looked around, diagnosing 
the undusted surfaces and dingy drapes that closed off the 
late-morning light.  The opposite wall was a mass of 
photographs, framed and hung, or tucked into frames.  Every 
photo was of a woman.

Scully was noticing a prayer card tacked to the wall when 
Flora asked her, "Dana, how do you like your tea?"

"Um."  She realized Flora wanted to get properly dressed.  
Well, and who wouldn't, with a federal agent in her living 
room.  "Milk, no sugar," she said with a polite smile.

With her host absent, Scully felt safe to examine the wall 
of photographs.  A wild array of women and girls, some in 
studio shots and some clearly captured by a handheld Kodak.  
This one was a little blurry; that heavily posed picture 
was in soft-focus, as if to hide the gaunt cheeks of the 
subject.  With an unsteady sense of discovery, Scully 
realized she was looking at a shrine of the dead.  Her 
throat caught hard when she saw a small group snapshot, 
matted and placed in a large walnut frame.  There were 
seven women she didn't know, with their arms around each 
other.  The eighth was Penny Northern, with her laugh lines 
and her gray-flecked black hair.  Penny when she had a 
healthy double chin; Penny when she still did have hair.  
Scully bit her lip and reclaimed her seat on the 
unwelcoming couch.

She had felt the humbling inside herself, as the days had 
gone on.  It was easy -- it had always been easy -- to 
stand in a doorway and weigh the victim in her mind.  She 
is fat; this one cannot be bothered to do anything about 
her acne.  That one wears threadbare terrycloth around the 
house; no wonder she was taken.  I who hunt through 
designer sale racks am not one of these.  There were fools, 
among the taken, and useless, dependent women.  But there 
were clever, brown-eyed women who bit their nails close in 
on the quick, and girls with flat hair and flat chests and 
flat, careful faces that only betrayed the fear to others 
in the know.

Scully sat in Flora Duchesney's dilapidated living room and 
cried a little.  It was hard, to surrender her superiority.  
The sculpted eyebrows and the leather briefcase she oiled 
every month and that prized pair of Ferragamo shoes did not 
make her better or safer than the dullest, dumpiest 
housewife.  In bitter solidarity, Dana Scully breathed 
once, twice, and wiped the tears from her powdered cheek.

Flora saw, as she carried her pink plastic tray in from the 
kitchen.  "Oh, cry, child," she said, putting down the 
tray.  "God knows I have."

But Scully was done with crying, for now.  "You knew who I 
was, before I showed my badge."

"Of course I did."  Flora handed her her tea.  The mug was 
old, its enamel worn down on the edge by a thousand 
sympathizing women.  "All of us know who you are."

Now it was out, like a wet dog wandering around the room.  
A vain cat, Scully's professional facade fled.  She paused, 
to gather the strength in her voice.  "Several people in 
your group have dropped out in the past two years, Flora, 
as I'm sure you know.  I'd like to know about the ones who 
haven't died."

Flora blinked.  "Well, I don't know," she said.  She 
pinched the back of her hand, leaving half-moons in the 
pale skin.  "People do move away.  What with all the 
sickness we've had, I haven't kept up my records that 
well."

It was so hard to phrase things properly.  "I understand 
your concern for privacy of your membership.  But I would 
like to meet some of your lapsed members, if they are 
willing."  A bit of a silence followed.  Flora wasn't 
looking at her any more.

"We want what's right."  Flora's voice was a low distressed 
wail.

Scully moved to sit closer.  "We all do," she answered, 
patting the woman's freckled forearm.  "We want to preserve 
this country for future generations."

Anxious brown eyes searched her face for trust.  Scully hid 
nothing and pretended nothing.

She said: "I'm always interested in meeting other 
environmentalists."  And inside her head she thanked Mulder 
for the code word she had been seeking.  Whoever had given 
it to him couldn't have imagined its use in this context.

It had the desired effect.  Flora's eyes went wide with 
comprehension, and she nodded slowly.  She put her hand 
over Scully's.  A hard squeeze, too hard for mere comfort.

"Nobody asks to join our club," she said, grave dignity in 
her frown.  "But once in, by God, nobody ever leaves."

* * *

It hadn't rained in days and the morning sky was warm and 
gray like the first water out of a long-dormant garden 
hose.  The air hung thick with a palpable stink from the 
sweet pepper bushes, blooming white bells in a horde along 
the bike path.  Too sweet to the point of sourness, it 
reminded Mulder of perfumed ladies.  He jogged on, feeling 
the cramps in his calves, trying to outrace his lungs.

The air didn't clear till National Airport, where the 
blessed aroma of dirty oil and ticking hot engines took 
over.  He slowed, bobbing on the path, to allow for the 
extra time he had made.  He consulted his watch and bolted 
through the trees towards Skinner's apartment building.

It was, of course, sheer coincidence that he happened to 
run by Skinner's building just as his old boss emerged 
through the glass doors.  They saw each other and Mulder 
barked a breathless hello as if in surprise.

"Come get some coffee with me," said Skinner, who had been 
known to scoff at the caffeine boutiques that dotted his 
neighborhood.  He let Mulder bounce beside him, panting, 
till they found the right kind of place, buzzing, busy.  
Mulder claimed them a tiny table in the back while Skinner 
stood scowling in line.  He came back with a pair of plain 
black coffees in paper cups, grumbling something about 
Sumatran beans.

There were a few calm minutes in which Mulder drank his 
acrid coffee and savored the ambient mutter of the crowd 
around him, everyone proceeding with his or her day, 
unknowing.  Skinner, companionable in front of him, 
struggled to contain his worried frown.

At last he asked, low, "What's gone wrong?"

Mulder blinked.  "Nothing," he muttered.  "I still can't 
believe it.  Working with him," he finished.  Scully had 
clearly briefed her boss, who understood the significance 
of 'him' without prompting.

An astute observer, Skinner sat still and waited.  So 
invited, Mulder cleared his throat, trying to articulate 
his guesses.

"He seems --" But Mulder couldn't quite say it yet.

"What?"  asked Skinner, his voice strangely kind.

"-- awfully friendly."  He paused.  "Well, no.  It's just 
that whenever I look at him, he's already looking at me.  
And if I have anything to say, he leans forward like he's 
giving me full attention.  It's just a little unnerving."

Skinner chuckled, playing with his hands.  He leaned back.  
"I think you underestimate the force of your own 
personality."  Mulder leaned forward on his elbows, and 
husbanded the last steam from his coffee.  "People pay 
attention to you."  Skinner's chair balanced on two legs as 
in the fervent practice of a contrary schoolboy.

"No," said Mulder, burning brightly, "I don't think that's 
it."

They sat for a while and said nothing.  A certain angle of 
the head launched the concept, and the sudden settling of 
chair legs to earth received it.  Skinner covered his mouth 
with his hand, clamping off his entire jaw in voluminous 
hairy-knuckled fingers.

Mulder looked around at the other customers of the 
coffeehouse.  "This complicates things," muttered Skinner 
at last.  He leaned in close, but not too close, and kept 
his voice low.  "Are you sure?"

"I don't know."  Mulder felt the point of his chin, touched 
his lips.  Wondered.  "Most of the signs are there, I 
think."

They sat that way a little while, then suddenly Mulder 
withdrew his finger and grasped his cup hard enough to 
collapse it.

Skinner asked, "Have you talked to Scully about this?"  He 
dropped his eyes after only a few moments.  "Of course you 
haven't."

Mulder wanted to say something; he wanted to hear something 
that would make sense; he wanted to undo the last month or 
so and be back in the FBI, where rules could be applied.  
He kept his mouth shut and waited for Skinner's advice.

"I'd never ask this of an undercover agent," he began.  
Mulder gave him time to articulate the self-contradiction, 
but it didn't come.  They didn't look at each other.

"That's not what I am, is it?"

That was not what he was, and both of them knew it.

"No.  So I'm asking you."  Skinner looked hard at him, 
knotting the fingers of his hands together.  "Are you 
prepared to do whatever's necessary to get access?"

Mulder stood, scraping back his chair.  "I'll do what I 
have to," he replied with cynical flair.  He left his 
crumpled cup for Skinner toss out.

* * *

Agent Scully drove up to the roadblock and saw that the 
building was still smoking.  Weary firefighters in their 
heavy coats wandered here and there, checking she didn't 
know what.  Danelle Pelletier from Arson poked at a 
blackened window with some kind of pike.  She wore her hot 
pink helmet askew, showing a stretch of bright red neck.  
As Scully parked and got out of the car, Danelle left off 
her digging and came to greet her.

"Madame X!"  shouted the woman, tall and horse-faced in a 
pleasant sort of way.  "Not much that's fantastical about 
this one, I'm afraid."  Scully startled at the new 
nickname, realizing that if Danelle would say it then 
everyone at the Hoover building had been using it for 
weeks.  She felt around that new name, shy like an 
adolescent, while Danelle shucked off her coat and thumbed 
down wide, woolly suspenders.

"It's murder wearing all that in summer," she said.  "Why 
the firebugs can't restrict themselves to January I don't 
know."  The chitchat rained down around Scully, useless 
talk making a strange sort of comfortable padding against 
what was coming next.

"What happened here?"  she interrupted.

Danelle swiped at her cheek, left a ray of soot there.  
"Oh, it's arson.  Seems pretty amateur, at first glance.  
Accelerants were alcohol, paint thinner, household things 
like that."

"Alcohol and paint thinner?"  asked Scully, crossing her 
arms.  They stood together in front of the building's 
blackened frame, their faces warmed by the radiating heat.  
Mulder would hate this, Scully thought suddenly.  She 
shuddered a little on his behalf.

"Yeah.  Them, and maybe a couple other things too.  I'll 
have to get into the lab and do a spectral to be sure."  
Danelle led the way to her miniature lab apparatus, glass 
jars full of different kinds of oily ashes.  "There 
something I should know about this particular little 
conflagration?"

A middle-aged housewife named Flora Duchesney told me to 
look here, thought Scully.  It was so unbelieveable, even 
to herself, that she had to fumble for a plausible 
explanation.  "Ah, I was starting an investigation into the 
company that uses this building."

"Oh, Masters Incorporated has their hand-wringing little 
rep over there."  Danelle gestured vaguely towards the 
Virginia police cordon.  A little man in civilian clothes 
was gesticulating at a particularly angry firefighter.  
"They're federal contractors, so I got to come visit.  You 
can say you're with me, if you don't want to show your 
hand."

"Thank you."  A wind was coming up, the sort of hot wind 
that only exacerbates tempers and makes everyone wish for 
rain.  Scully surveyed the concrete building before her.  
Ten or twelve windows gaped black, sooty vomitus staining 
the walls around them.  Only ten or twelve windows, of a 
building that large.  She resolved to ask what had been 
housed in those rooms.  And then realized that if it really 
was a consortium company, they would just lie and she would 
never find out.  "Is anything salvageable from the burned-
out section?"  she asked Danelle, who was crouching amid 
her ashy vials.

"I don't think so," replied the woman, who stood up to her 
full height and dwarfed Scully.  "Maybe the geeks can do 
magic on a hard drive or two, but I doubt it.  You know," 
she added, "I talked to the first officer on scene.  He 
said Masters had reported a break-in only about a week 
ago."

Jays in the trees somewhere screamed at each other, ugly 
cries.  Traffic noises from the avenue.  Scully turned away 
from the building, remembering fire in her disordered 
experience.  The awful stink of human flesh, the 
desiccating crackle, that terrible invitation.  It could 
hypnotize her, as she saw it in her mind's eye.  Someone 
was being funny, setting the Masters building alight.  
Bitterly funny.

She couldn't countenance it.  Too many segments of her 
personal logic-structure depended on the rule of law, on 
orderly redress for even the most grievous wrongs.  It was 
a crime, a felony, and she was sworn to arrest the 
perpetrators of such a crime.  She couldn't countenance it.

But oh, she could understand it.  It pained her; in her gut 
she felt stabs of vengeful pleasure.  Unsteady, she fled 
for her car, trailing an uncertain Danelle behind her.

"Call me if you see any more office fires done by these 
kind of amateurs."  She unlocked the car, already 
calculating in her head.  Danelle stood with her hands on 
her hips, eyebrows wrinkling.  One look back at her 
colleague and Scully realized she was acting like Mulder at 
his most crabbily terse.  "Just ask for Madame X," she 
added, and at Danelle's mischievous grin she broke into an 
awkward, reluctant half-smile.

* * *

Stanton couldn't make it, and Delehaye went home early.  
The three who were left sat and plotted well into the 
evening, detouring through a discussion of why the Orioles 
sucked, and back to the topic at hand.

"We have to worry about your profile, Alex," remonstrated 
Abdullah, finishing off another beer.  He seemed to become 
both more familiar and more honest the further into his 
cups he got.  "You're playing to two different crowds at 
once.  You have to be visible so people notice the targets, 
but every time you are visible the big guys wonder what the 
hell you're doing.  You're too famous."

Krycek rested his elbow on his knee and massaged his neck.  
"We've got an information flow problem here, Mulder," he 
explained.  "When the fringe newspapers report something, 
it gets dismissed.  But an anonymous break-in to an obscure 
company, well, that must mean something."

"They trust you, even if they don't know it's you they're 
trusting," said Abdullah.  Mulder glanced at him, still 
agog at the idea.  "And in the meantime, you're practically 
shouting to the organization that you've got a second 
agenda."

A sour laugh.  "They've come to expect that from me."  
Krycek looked at the floor.  Mulder had never seen him 
ashamed before, and wondered if he was seeing it now.  
Krycek shifted on the couch, and grumbled, "So we reserve 
Stanton and Delehaye for decoy missions.  They'll rob a few 
banks.  Convince the big guys I'm a fool out for money."

Abdullah laughed, hooking empty beer bottles in his 
fingers.  "You are a fool, fool."  He transported the 
bottles to the kitchen, where a gentle clinking said he was 
arranging them along the counter.  Mulder sat on the other 
end of the couch, uncomfortable with the quiet.

The temptation to say something was overwhelming.  He 
didn't know what was going to come out of his mouth, as he 
opened it.  But Krycek looked at him, lazy-eyed, and 
shouted into the kitchen, "Any more beers in there?"

Abdullah's reply was a long, low "Sheeyit" and the high 
clarity of glass on glass.  Mulder sat uncertain, in a 
quandary between offering to go for more and waiting to be 
ordered.  He ran his hands up and down the fabric of the 
couch, making an uncomfortable warmth from friction.

"There's a twenty in my jacket," called Krycek.  "Get us 
another six-pack, will you?"  Mulder tensed his legs to 
stand, and Krycek's hand landed on his knee.  "Not you, you 
moron.  He'll go."

Mulder looked at the hand, and Krycek removed it.

"I don't want you going through my jacket."

"Oh."

The sounds of Abdullah grousing in the kitchen filled the 
apartment.  The only other noises were the breathing and 
crying of the city outside, a dog barking somewhere.  The 
couch made a sound like a zipper as Mulder ran his finger 
up and down the fabric.

"Don't go saving the world without me," Abdullah 
admonished, and he let himself out.  The door clacked shut 
behind him, the locks falling into place one-two.  Mulder 
sat on the couch and said nothing and looked at nothing and 
didn't know what to do with his hands.

Krycek's breathing was loud next to him.  Finally, he 
heard, "Will you stop that?  You'll wear a fucking hole in 
it."  Mulder realized his finger was still making zipper 
noises on the arm of the couch.  He snatched his hand away 
as if it burned him.  Krycek asked, "What's with you?"

A glance grew to a stare.  He looked into Krycek's eyes.  
The pupils were like camera lenses, circles inside circles, 
never betraying what it was they captured.  Krycek turned 
towards him, blinking his uncertainty.

"Nothing," Mulder said, and stood up.

"Look," said Krycek, steady and quiet behind him.  "You're 
here tonight for a reason.  I wanted your opinion, and you 
haven't said anything all night.  If I didn't know better," 
Krycek chuckled a little, "I would say you're spying on 
me."

A jerk went through Mulder's body.  He didn't turn around 
and he didn't say anything.

Sound of a great sigh, and the couch squeaked as Krycek 
stood up.  "You don't know what it's like," he said.  
Mulder crossed his arms.  "To plan every play in advance, 
to send your subordinates on a mission they're too stupid 
to see is suicidal.  Abdullah's just the publicist.  He 
takes what I say and makes it better than I could have 
thought of myself, but he doesn't have to make the 
decisions."  Footsteps crossed the room, came near to 
Mulder's side.  "You're smart," muttered Krycek, 
practically in his ear.  "You're still learning, but 
already you can see things I might miss."

"What are you saying," said Mulder.

"That I could use a little fucking help around here!"  A 
low roar, and Krycek turned away, pacing across the room.

Mulder spun on his heel, took an angry step forward.  "What 
is this about?  Huh, Krycek?  What the hell do you want 
from me?"

They stood staring at each other across the open space, 
chests heaving and fingers trembling.  Mulder saw the open 
face in front of him, that tic in one cheek that leapt at a 
heartbeat's rate.  We have always been this way, he 
thought.  Fighting, fighting.  Krycek's face darkened.

"I want you to quit being an observer and get involved."  
His words came louder and faster and higher, the way a 
woman will sometimes become shrill as she realizes her 
opponent is not listening.  "I want you to stop puling 
about justice and help me get the job done.  I want you in 
my corner, not hemming and hawing around the edges."  
Krycek began to pace again, back and forth between Mulder 
and the far wall.  He shouted at the wall, "What the hell 
is wrong with you?"

Mulder didn't answer.  He stood with gangling arms and 
wondered whether this was what a nervous breakdown was 
like.  Him?  Or me?  Maybe both.  It was hard to tell.

"Do you want me to apologize?"  Krycek's hand made clean 
stabs around the room.  His torso swung, a solid, limber 
presence, and the dead arm fishtailed quietly behind him.  
"I'll apologize."

Mesmerized, Mulder watched.  He couldn't reply.  Krycek 
staggered to a halt, panting from his own rage.  His 
shoulders jumped and fell, stuttering breaths to his 
starved lungs.  He put his hand to his head, touched his 
temple.

Around to Mulder, who stood where he had been standing, 
knees loose as if for flight.  Krycek approached, a slow 
tread against the carpet.  Long behind him, a distant 
siren.  It cut off suddenly and all again was Krycek's 
shoes and Krycek's hard breaths and Krycek's words, slow 
and heavy and like chilled syrup.  "Do you want me to beg?"

A tremble in the thigh, a twitch.  Krycek's hooded eyes 
turned down.  Mulder watched him descend to his knees.  
Mulder watched the large hand come up, a pale suppliant 
palm, that turned itself over and pressed itself to the 
inseam of Mulder's jeans.  Krycek looked up at him.

"I'll beg," he said.

* * *

Her sleep had been disordered for months, ever since her 
little jaunt to Ruskin Dam.  Scully jolted awake suddenly, 
ready to fight, in the hollow gray before dawn.  It was 
raining, a slow morning patter.  Mulder was sitting beside 
her on the bed.  Immediately she sat up, asking if 
something was wrong.  He didn't answer, only leaned close 
to her and put his nose in her hair.

She wanted to ask him questions.  She wanted to know how 
long he had been in her apartment, poking through her 
refrigerator.  She wanted to know why he had been staring 
at her as she slept, and for how long.  He transmitted to 
her a little passionate shudder and she said nothing.

What is this?  she wondered, and then, feeling his arms 
tight around her, Why now?  She could not make sense of it.  
After five years of enforcing the border, a detente.  He 
breathed across her neck, careful, and she felt that low 
twinge like a hollow in her.

There was something autonomic about the way her hands came 
up around his shoulders.  Scully struggled to become day-
self, to consider consequences and implications, but he was 
right in front of her and night-self wanted to clutch.  She 
thought hopefully that he would cry; he had done that 
before and she knew how to think about that.

He didn't want to cry.  They breathed in rhythm, her 
breasts against him, his sweat everywhere in the room.  He 
was heavy and tense under her forearms, shifting, muscular.  
He hadn't yet spoken a word.  Scully felt his hand against 
her back, a strange, tense parody of the way he guided her 
through professional hallways.  But this hand, a broad, 
rough palm, found its way under her top and piloted her 
bare flesh.

This was the time when she could stop it and back out 
honorably.  The millions of reasons were still there in the 
room, and he had always relied on her to be the cooler 
head.  Suddenly sick with resentment, she realized she 
didn't want to be cool or logical.  She wanted his big 
prick, in as far as it would go.  And it would be nice, for 
once in so long, not to be lonely.  To be able to say of 
herself: I had sex with a man I care about.

But oh, later.  When she couldn't blame it on sleepiness 
and the muttering dark: she didn't want to think about it.  
Time enough to sabotage herself later.  She found his 
clavicle, plied it with her lips.  He made a noise into her 
hair, and his bold hands became bolder.

She lost all of her clothes, Mulder only some of his.  He 
lavished attention on her, muttering into her body.  She 
pushed him back, once, grabbing for his belt.  He snatched 
her hand away with a low grumble and in a trice he had both 
her wrists in his huge fingers.  He stretched her out on 
her back, raising her arms as if she were a captive, but he 
smiled as he did it.  Then he let her go and slithered down 
her silhouette, kissing as he went.

He smelled sharp and pungent, like his own sex.  It was in 
his hair and his mouth and every other place she could 
touch on him.  He thumbed her clit so intently she knew she 
would be sore later.  It was easy to let him do what he 
needed to, and save the questions for some other time.

He brought her to orgasm just before her alarm clock went 
off.  As the radio droned the morning's news she had to bat 
his hands away to get to the shower.  "You don't have a day 
job any more," she laughed at him, "but I still do."  When 
she emerged from the bathroom, warm and vigorous and new, 
with her hair splattered around her head, he was curled up 
asleep in her bed.

Scully tucked up her towel around herself and examined him 
as he lay.  His arms were turned in, fists nestled under 
his chin.  The jeans he wore made red marks against his 
waist.

The covers had been kicked to the floor in her earlier 
thrashing.  She pulled a sheet up and over his sleeping 
form, tucked it in.  With a quick rummage through drawer 
and closet, she gathered her clothes for the day and 
tiptoed out of the room.

She dressed in the kitchen that morning, and came to work 
with wet hair.

* * *

Mulder returned to the U Street apartment after a day's 
interval as uncertain of himself as on the first day he had 
made that journey.  The wait for the front door to be 
buzzed open; the eternal elevator ride; the heavy, slow 
atmosphere between his knocking on the door and its 
opening: each silence might have been the sweet rejection 
that freed him from his disconcerting trajectory.  But each 
door opened, and so he went forward.  Krycek smiled at him 
and let him into the apartment.

They crowded into the hallway, and Mulder heard low 
conversation in the living room.  He shifted, apologizing 
for his elbows, when Krycek turned him around and kissed 
him, a light warm brush of lips.  It felt the way he'd used 
to kiss his sister goodnight when she was a baby, before 
they'd both gotten older and it had turned weird and he'd 
stopped.  Nobody had kissed him that way since he was ten, 
not even Scully.

He pulled away.  "...not in front of them," he muttered, 
gesturing down the hall.

"Oh, they don't care," laughed Krycek, in an undertone, and 
kissed him again.  This time it wasn't chaste.

After a few moments Mulder disentangled himself, shoved 
Krycek a little when he lingered.  "Cut it out."  Krycek 
leaned back, resting his head against the wall, studying 
him.

"If you're going to go all crisis..."

"No," answered Mulder, quickly.  "It's just -- it's been a 
long time.  I'm, um, out of practice."

A slow, wicked smile.  "I'm not so sure about that."

Mulder spat sarcasm.  "Oh, yeah, let's run away together 
and forget all about --"

With a visible flex of his shoulders, Krycek launched 
himself from his reclining position.  He repositioned his 
feet, staring at Mulder, chasing him when he hid his gaze.  
"My mission trumps everything else.  If I had to abandon 
you to be set on fire, I would, and I expect no less from 
you.  This is as serious as it ever gets."  A shudder 
passed through and over Mulder, while Krycek watched.  "But 
barring the worst case scenario, I'd like to have you with 
me.  We're an even match."

Mulder tasted something bitter in his throat.  "Baader to 
your Meinhof?  Tupac to your Amaru?"  Krycek gave a great, 
put-upon sigh.

"You have no idea what it's like to have a helpmate, you 
know --"

"A partner?"

"Yeah."  Krycek looked at the floor.  "Yeah.  I've never 
had one before."

"What about the guy you killed Melissa Scully with?"

Krycek leaned forward suddenly, his jaw set.  They were 
practically nose to nose.  "He tried to kill me twelve 
hours later."

"I didn't know that."

Resting his forearm on Mulder's shoulder, Krycek let out 
another long, deflating breath.  "Look," he said, and 
hesitated.  "Look, if you don't want your revenge, just say 
so."

The sounds swirled together in Mulder's head.  I'd never 
ask this of an undercover agent -- Do you want me to beg?  
-- Do what you have to.  Krycek, uncertain before him.  
Mulder didn't say anything.  He closed the gap and kissed 
his fellow terrorist.  Together they walked down the hall 
to the living room, where their little cabal awaited 
instructions.

* * *

It had rained in the morning, and then the sun had come, 
robust in the achingly clear sky.  Scully had waited all 
day under that sun, feeling the freckles grow.  She had fed 
on hot dogs and pretzels with salt the size of gravel, and 
quenched her thirst with 'real', 'natural' lemonade, all on 
the federal dollar.

In a lot of ways, her day on the National Mall was no 
different from a stakeout, except for the Hare Krishnas.  
Somehow over the years the Fourth of July's annual Folk 
Life Festival had gone fast and loose with its definitions, 
and now a group of hennaed, pony-tailed, raga-dancing baby-
boomers claimed the big square of grass in front of the Air 
and Space museum.  All the bluegrass and zydeco in the 
world wouldn't eradicate the experience from her memory.

Rubbing elbows -- and the occasional roaming hand -- with a 
million of her closest friends, Scully made the round of 
her assigned meeting points.  Mulder wasn't at any of them, 
but she spied a group of half-naked young men being busted 
for the liquor they had brought.  She came back to her 
little quilt in all the madness, staked out and guarded by 
a bald, bespectacled man arguably having less fun than she 
was.  Now that the sun was nearly gone, poor Skinner had 
finally shed the floppy hat that protected his pate, but 
nothing would remove the scowl from his face.

"A girl over there just threw up," he said, as Scully 
collapsed beside him.

She didn't answer, and they sat together, contemplating 
their misery.  Normal people want to be here, she reasoned.  
Normal people pack up beach chairs and coolers and come 
early to get the best spots for the fireworks.  Last year 
she had been on a case on Independence Day; she had been 
with Mulder in Miami and they had come out on the balconies 
of their concrete hotel and looked South toward the Keys in 
the twilight.

So much had happened in one year that it didn't bear 
thinking about.  "How long till the fireworks?"  asked 
Scully, and Skinner grunted his ignorance.  He plucked at 
grasses, shredding them with engrossed intent.  All around 
the edges of the blanket, a yellowing hay of his nervous 
detritus.

They talked no small talk.  Scully listened to snatches of 
conversation in the people walking by, and heard the 
orchestra show come tinnily out of speakers.  She thought 
she heard Robert Goulet, spreading his lugubrious smarm for 
the audience on the eastern lawn and on television.  As the 
darkness fell and spread, she didn't have to find something 
else to look at.  Only flashlights and cigarette butts and 
the klieg lights illuminating the Washington Monument 
interrupted the anonymous dark.

When a voice asked, "Is this seat taken?"  Scully nearly 
leapt out of her skin.  Mulder knelt down beside her, his 
teeth shining a grin.  "Didn't mean to startle you."  He 
settled himself on a corner of the quilt.  His body was so 
warm, hovering near hers, that she noticed for the first 
time the evening's chill.

"You're in time for fireworks," said Skinner.  He didn't 
say anything more.  They sat in a row that way, silent, 
waiting.  Mulder put his hand on Scully's knee in the dark, 
and she twitched.  She heard him exhale, but the hand 
stayed.

It tightened into a fist when the speakers began to screech 
the opening violins of the 1812 Overture.  "Here they 
come," he muttered, humid into her ear.   And in a few 
moments, they came.  From down near the reflecting pool the 
rockets began to take off, flying sparks a hundred yards 
into the air.

Fireworks made night blooms and a great racket, a glittery 
rain of green and blue and hottest, hissing white.  Scully 
looked to her left and could see Mulder clearly.  He was 
looking at her with that strange tenderness, as if she were 
still dying, as if she were in need of rescue.  Then he 
blinked and hid it away, and told her about the plan for 
next week.

"Our mutual friend has finally agreed to hit up the German 
Company."  His eyes twinkled the mischief of using code 
words, but Scully didn't think it was funny.  "Did anything 
come of the Masters people?"

Behind her she could hear Skinner shift to listen.  "You 
should read the newspapers," she admonished.  "The Virginia 
office was firebombed two weeks ago.  We haven't let out 
yet that their Idaho facility was ransacked and sabotaged 
this past weekend."

"Environmentalists?"  In the sudden glare of a red 
explosion, Mulder's eyes turned black with wine-dark 
centers.

Scully lowered her head.  "I assume so," she lied.

"Anti-terrorism is up in arms," added Skinner, leaning in 
close.  "If you need people, I know that department well 
enough to recommend a few --"

"No," said Mulder, interrupting.  He paused, let a few 
fireworks light up the sky.  Around them, the crowd sighed 
its appreciation.  "No.  The fewer who know, the better."

With that edict, they sat and watched the display.  They 
sat so close that the fireworks seemed to be going off 
right above them.  Scully felt her eyes water as she stared 
into the burning white, as if she were looking at the sun.  
The finale came in thunder and yellow flashes, sparkles 
higher and higher and falling down slowly, wandering on the 
light wind, till they extinguished themselves in midair.

Around them, a smattering of claps and hurrahs.  They stood 
up like everyone else, and Scully shook out the quilt, 
folding it.

Behind her, Skinner muttered, "You do what you have to."

"Right," replied Mulder, perplexed.  

And then he was by her side, holding the corners while she 
finished folding the quilt.  She allowed him a peck on the 
cheek, but nothing more.  She watched his confident, 
physical silhouette moving away from her until he 
disappeared into the crowded night.

* * *

It became a routine, those early morning wake-up visits.  
Sometimes he showered after leaving the other one's bed, 
sometimes he didn't.  He didn't come every night, but every 
time he came, she took him in under the covers.  And got up 
an hour later to shower alone.  She left him sleeping in 
her bed while she went in to the office.

She wasn't always in the mood, when he came by.  She 
resented a little the violation of her private morning.  
But she never turned him away from her sheets; it was too 
rare, too precious, and too likely to end with silent 
recriminations.  She took what she could get now, whether 
she was in the mood or not.

Now and then he came to her still hard, and they swam 
together in long slow glorious strokes towards the finish; 
other times he only wanted to play, to blow cool air over 
her breasts till her aureoles crinkled and blushed like shy 
adolescents.  He couldn't get it up twice in one night, she 
realized.  It wasn't hard to guess from his wants what had 
gone on earlier, elsewhere.  On his body was writ the 
signature of his other lover, and Scully sent him back the 
next day marked with her own script.

They began a correspondence, this shadow-person and she, 
bites in sequence down his clavicle and livid circles under 
his chin.  They became acquainted through him, even if they 
didn't know each other's names.  Or even if they did.

It was three weeks before she was really sure.  And when 
she was, she waited for Mulder to tell her whom he had been 
fucking in the early hours of the evening.

He didn't say anything, as was his wont.  Always the 
martyr, she thought.  She hated him sometimes, for 
implicating her in his grand sacrifice; other times she 
wanted to pull him down into an amnesiac erotic welter that 
would absolve them both.  She wanted the mission to 
succeed.

They did enjoy the compatibility of their bodies.  His hip 
fit with hers like a matched set of knives.  She liked the 
way his clumsy hand fit perfectly over her breast, covering 
it more modestly than a bikini top.  He called her skin 
fine china and licked her all over till she doubled up 
giggling.  She told him he didn't have to be so damned 
careful; that she wasn't china and wouldn't break.  Their 
bodies were not brittle together.  She just wished it 
weren't so --

* * *

Apparently hardened criminals don't believe in air 
conditioning.  It was hot, desperately hot, the bright blue 
sky fading to an angry dark slate around the horizon, hazy 
and vague so it might be pollution or it might be the sweet 
relief of a cloudburst.  Mulder was at Krycek's house, 
watching Delehaye talk into the box fan for the funny 
sounds it made.  He had to sit on the floor to do it, and 
Mulder asked why didn't they just plop the fan into the 
window and get some cooler air into the house.

Nobody had a good answer but Krycek.  "It doesn't fit, you 
bonehead," he said.  He stared across the poker game they 
had going, right into Mulder's eyes.  He looked like he was 
in the mood, but too hot to bother.

They were playing for jellybeans, and Krycek had declared 
the licorice ones worth ten of any other color, which was 
on the whole lucky because nobody liked them.  They were 
all eating the rest of their stakes on the sly, or even out 
in the open.  Krycek reached across the pot in the middle 
to snatch a green one from Mulder's space, grabbing it 
between his ring and pinkie knuckles.  Mulder saw a flash 
of his cards, just enough to recognize royalty in the hand.

They were all in undershirts, and Krycek had taken his arm 
off hours ago.  None of the guys seemed to notice one way 
or the other, so Mulder said nothing.  He felt the ready 
blush in his cheeks.  Krycek ate the green jellybean and 
flicked two pink ones into the pot.

"Nobody wants them girly ones anyway," muttered Stanton, 
seeing the two pinks and raising a purple.  Mulder, next to 
him, examined the unhappy integers in his hand and wondered 
whether seeing Krycek's cards meant he should fold now, or 
play along for a while.  He saw the three -- he didn't care 
which colors -- and added another.

Abdullah put in his jellybeans and the bet came back to 
Krycek, who said, "Delehaye, will you come on back to the 
table?  It's like we're playing bridge over here."  Mulder 
agreed: it was irritating, listening to a grown man bark 
into a fan's blades like he was six.  Delehaye couldn't 
play worth a damn, but Krycek didn't seem to care.

He put in a black bean.  Eyes swung to focus on his 
fingers, then up to his face.  He was looking only at 
Mulder with a dark grin.  The sweat rolled off everyone and 
Stanton folded.  He didn't have any more pink ones to dump, 
anyway.  

Mulder poked a licorice bean into the pot.  He had only two 
besides that, and precious few of any other color.  He felt 
the clamminess on his abdomen, a cloud of self-created 
humidity he couldn't escape.  "Hey Stanton, get me a beer, 
will you?"

Stanton muttered a curse, but he stood up and shuffled 
towards the kitchen.  Abdullah played and then it came to 
Krycek again.

He settled his elbow on the table, flicking the fan of his 
cards closed.  "I know you don't have it," he told Mulder.  
His eyes were shiny bright.  No matter the temperature; he 
had decided to bother.

Krycek leaned back in his chair and flicked another black 
jellybean towards the middle of the table.  It landed, 
spinning.  "Call," he said, and it trundled to a halt.

Mulder anted up, with a foolish grin on his face.  Abdullah 
grouched as he folded.

"What are you, Stanton, brewing it yourself?"  shouted 
Mulder over his shoulder, to draw out the tension.  Krycek 
made a noise in his throat and Mulder confessed his 
terrible cards with a chuckle and a loose-fingered throw.

He got a green-eyed smile in return.  Krycek mixed his 
cards into the deck without revealing how completely he had 
won.  He handed the deck off to Delehaye as he stood.

Krycek at his shoulder, radiating heat like a planet with 
its own damp atmosphere.  Mulder took the offered hand, a 
little shy and a little bold.  "Let's go," he said, so 
quiet it didn't carry over the laboring fan.  He screeched 
back his chair and left the table, following his partner in 
crime.

When Stanton got back from the kitchen, it was just 
Abdullah and Delehaye at the table and the bedroom door was 
closing.  "Hell," he said, as Delehaye began to deal.  
"I'll drink it myself."  He took a swig of the beer as 
Krycek clicked the door shut.

* * *

The heat broke like a fever soon after they were done.  
Mulder got up naked to go look at the sudden rain.  The 
walnut trees on the sidewalk were lashed from side to side, 
the tempermental wind coming to blow relief after the cool 
had come.  He could tell, looking at the blackened sky, 
that it was a quick storm, hustling through so it could 
play itself out over the Chesapeake, further east.  When it 
was gone the ground would steam for a while, and then the 
flowers would wilt again and the oppressive humidity would 
be back.

"You think they ate all my jellybeans?"  asked Krycek from 
the bed.

Mulder shrugged and snorted, keeping his back to the room.

"You do realize you're flashing the whole neighborhood."

He turned, examined the man on the bed from head to sheeted 
toes before he asked, "Are they surprised by anything that 
happens in this apartment?"

This made Krycek laugh.  He grabbed a pillow, held it to 
his belly while he giggled.  "You think I'm such a badass.  
That's what I love about you, man."

Scouting around on the floor, Mulder found a pair of 
underwear.  He put them on, sitting on the bed.

"Come 'ere," said Krycek, crawling towards him.  He hooked 
his arm around Mulder's torso and bit into his trapezoid, 
then let go.  "Don't tell me you're doing the guilt thing 
again."

Mulder denied it feebly, reached up to touch the chin that 
rested on his shoulder.  Krycek sucked the offered finger 
into his mouth, worried at it like an ingratiating terrier.  
After a while, he seemed to guess Mulder wasn't feeling 
playful and desisted.

"You're the only person I can think of who can turn full-
on, get-down gorilla sex into high drama," he said.

Mulder sighed.  "It's not --"

"She doesn't approve," interjected Krycek, talking into 
Mulder's ear.  "She thinks you've gone dirty."  Mulder 
shifted warily, aware that they didn't need to specify who 
she was.  "But she's the one letting things go on around 
her without making a stand.  She can keep on with her laws 
and her procedure till kingdom come and she won't change a 
thing."

"I don't even know what she's doing any more," complained 
Mulder, shivering his vague unease.  "For all I know she 
could be on her way in with a SWAT team to arrest us both."

Krycek kissed his neck and murmured, "Then you were brave 
to come here."

"Brave?"  Mulder teased.  He turned a little and Krycek 
clutched him tight, kissing him sloppily.  "Mmf, you 
nymphomaniac.  I gotta go."

Krycek let him stand up and sat back against the headboard, 
gloriously naked in the breeze.  He lay still so that 
Mulder could look at him, and he watched Mulder get 
dressed.  They were smiling goofily at each other when 
Mulder was ready to leave.  "Back tomorrow?  We should hit 
up that lobbying firm soon."

"Can it wait till next week?"  asked Mulder, stretching.  
"I'm sore."

Krycek laughed out loud, and Mulder couldn't help but join 
him.  "Next week it is.  But," Krycek paused, searching 
Mulder with shy eyes, "you'll come back tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," Mulder confirmed, waggling his eyebrows.  He 
got all the way to the front door before he remembered it 
was raining.  He let the wind blow his hair into a typhoon 
as he walked away.

* * *

Since they finished the new terminal of National Airport, 
it looked less like a depressing institution and more like 
a depressing mega-mall.  Scully wandered along the glass 
walls, watching the airplanes taxi.  She didn't look for 
her contact; her contact would find her.

She was beginning to think how much it bothered her, to be 
so easily identifiable by people she had never met, when a 
teenaged girl sidled up to her.  "Got a light?"  asked the 
girl.

"No," replied Scully, surveying the state of adolescence in 
the specimen before her.  Excessive black eyeliner, a 
revealing lace jersey, and combat boots made a severe 
contrast with the teddy bear backpack the girl brandished.  
"And I don't think --"

"Chill, Scully," grinned the girl.  "Just checking.  Flora 
said you'd be here.  You can call me Marky."  Like an 
expert, she steered them down the concourse and towards one 
of many coffee shops.  Scully felt her arm in the grip of 
the girl's black fingernails, felt herself being pulled 
along by a force as enthusiastic as Mulder at his best.  It 
was easy to accede and be led along.

They sat together at a little table, sipping coffee.  "I 
would never drink this," remarked the girl.  "Normally I'm 
a total veg.  None of this nasty processed stuff in my 
body.  But you gotta make sacrifices for the sisters, you 
know?"  Scully sat fascinated by the lithe gangliness of 
her companion, realizing that they might very nearly be 
mother and daughter to a casual observer.

"The sisters?"  asked Scully, in an undertone.

The girl bobbed her head, swinging the twin buns that held 
her hair.   "What do you call us?"

Scully didn't answer.  She touched her hair, and asked, 
"Marky, do your parents know where you are?"

"Actually my name's Catherine," she said, with a dewy 
fragility that belied the grin on her face.  "But everybody 
in the know calls me Marky.  I think it's cause of my 
muscles."  The girl skinned up one sleeve, flexed a wiry 
bicep.  "You know, Marky Mark.  Nice bod."

Scully persisted, leaning forward.  "Catherine, do --"

"Of course they don't, Scully."  Her grin turned to a 
grimace.  "They wouldn't let me go meeting strangers, 
especially on a school day.  I've been on my own for a 
year."

The black table between them stretched eternal, a gulf of 
professionalism and polite formality.  Only with effort 
could Scully reach out to hold Catherine's hand.  With that 
permission, the girl hitched a hard breath.

"They threw me out," she whimpered.

Tamping down her outrage, Scully scooted her chair closer.  
"Because they didn't believe you?"

Catherine sniffed.  "No, they caught me making out with a 
girl."  She smiled through teary eyes, and Scully smiled 
back at her.  "But --"

She stopped, mouth working.  Her hand strayed to her nape, 
stroking the skin unconsciously.  Scully watched as she 
tucked her chin into her neck, unable to hide her bleak 
expression.  Scully touched her shoulder shyly, then braved 
a hand on her cheek.

"What if being taken," stuttered Catherine, "what if that 
made me like girls?"  She hung her head, crying quietly.

Scully let her cry for awhile, then asked, "What do you 
mean?"

"Like," She looked up, her eyeliner making black streaks 
down her face.  "I don't know if I'd still be a lesbian if 
all that -- stuff -- hadn't happened.  You know?  Even 
that's been..."

"Tainted."  Scully thumbed tears from the girl's cheeks, 
swallowing hard.

"Yeah," said Catherine, and smiled the ruined smile of 
mutual recognition.  "I guess I'll never know."

Scully let her agreement come in silence.  She examined 
their twined hands, her own manicured nails and the black-
painted, bitten nails on Catherine's long fingers.

"You're cool, Scully," she pronounced at last.  "You should 
meet some of the other sisters."

"Call me Dana," was her automatic reply.  She swallowed a 
shy smile, then let it forth under the lumens of 
Catherine's returning brightness.  "My coworkers call me 
Madame X."

"Can I tell others about you?"

Wary of fame, Scully answered slowly, "I guess so.  How 
many do you know?"

"Only five.  But each of them knows, like, ten.  And each 
of those ones knows more.  We don't all know each other 
personally.  It's safer that way."

"But how," asked Scully, wrinkling her brows, "do you 
recognize each other?"

"We use code words, the way gay guys met each other before 
Stonewall."  Catherine fumbled in her teddy bear backpack, 
brought forth a mashed cigarette.  "You ask a woman if 
she's got a light.  'Have a spark,' she says back, and you 
know you're among sisters."

Scully found herself mimicking the gesture of flicking her 
thumb down a lighter's wheel.  The imaginary flame 
illuminated the girl Catherine, who grinned and put away 
her cigarette.

* * *

There was world enough for it, and time.  August stretched 
and unkinked in its languor.  The children who had shrieked 
forth in June turned into cats and slept in great heaps on 
deck furniture, their sweaty, milky heads marked from 
resting on their forearms.  Summer had never seemed so very 
long.

There was enough time to leave one bed and approach the 
other in the same night, or close enough.  Sunrise came 
later and later and he mapped each body in dusk and dawn, 
or any time he could persuade one of them into bed.  He 
couldn't get enough of either of them.

It was a selfish pleasure, keeping each one waiting for 
him, not having to choose.  Mulder acknowledged, in a deep, 
thoughtful way, his transformation into the inverse of that 
truthful, crusading, celibate monk he used to be.  But in 
the forefront, he relished his new life, craved it, woke up 
from dreams about one or the other of his lovers.

As long as Scully and circumstance allowed it, he would 
continue to pursue his twin goals.

Krycek woke up, one sultry afternoon, and lay staring at 
Mulder in the harsh late daylight.

"They're going to take you away from me," he said, in a 
voice of half-dream certainty.  "You're too big a name to 
stay here in the trenches with me forever."  He rolled over 
and rested his chin on Mulder's bony shoulder.

"You think so?"  Mulder joshed him with an elbow and went 
back to his book.

"I know so.  Every CEO makes his son work in the mail room, 
but only for a few months.  And besides," Krycek chuckled, 
"we're not even getting anything done, these past few 
weeks."

"What can I say, you wear me out."  Mulder ran a hand down 
Krycek's flank, put on his seductive stare.

But Krycek would not be detoured.  He pushed Mulder's hand 
away, frowning.  "Success or failure, you'll be recalled to 
New York.  Maybe even before the end of summer."

Scully never gets philosophical after sex, Mulder thought 
to himself.  But he knew he wasn't being fair; she was 
physically incapable of philosophy before her first cup of 
coffee.  But there were other pleasures in this bed; and 
over time he had realized how much he enjoyed the contrast 
of Krycek's blunt wit.

In New York, he wouldn't have access to either of them.

"I won't go," he said, and turned another page.

Krycek turned away, talking into the pillow.  "Oh, you 
will.  They own you, now.  As much as they own me."  The 
bitterness in his voice was hard to ignore.  Mulder put 
down his book.

"You're not doing this of your own free will?"  He reached 
out, touched Krycke's back, settled his hand there.

But Krycek spoke, when he did, to the wall.  "I have a 
little leeway from the man upstairs.  We happen to agree on 
strategy.  But if he sent me back into the hit squad I came 
from, I'd have to go."

"Have to?"  Mulder tugged on his shoulder, turned him 
around.  He studied the narrow lines around Krycek's eyes, 
at the corners of his mouth.

"Unless I care to go rogue again."  Krycek shook his head.  
"Let me tell you truly: it's the loneliest existence you 
can think of.  You have no idea how hard it is."

A silhouette, in an office with Chinese characters on its 
door.  An unshaved chin, a pair of bloodshot eyes.  Short-
tempered, flippant, paranoid, fleeing down the foreign 
street dressed all in black.  Bloody, bargaining for his 
life with his back literally against the wall.  Mulder 
thought he had an idea how hard it had been.

Looking at that bleak face, Mulder could have confessed 
anything.

"And anyway," added Krycek, "It's you we're talking about, 
not me."  He propped up his head, looking sadly into 
Mulder's eyes.  Mulder looked back, saying nothing.

* * *

"Scully, I think you better get up here."  His telephone 
manner was himself, only more so.  Skinner bit off his 
words as he said them.  Scully dropped the phone into the 
cradle and ran for the elevators.

He didn't make her wait in his anteroom.  Striding forth 
from his desk, Skinner took her by the arm and steered her 
into the hallway.  He was wrinkling her suit, but he didn't 
notice.  His bullet head swung back and forth, sweeping the 
busy hallway as they walked.  She had to trot to keep up.

"Krycek is in danger," he muttered, nodding to a security 
guard.  "Under the circumstances, unofficially is the only 
way I can proceed."

Scully's reply came as fast and sharp as the jerk with 
which she freed her arm.  "What kind of danger?"  They 
turned a corner into a blank concrete stairwell and she 
straightened her shoulder pad.  "What kind of danger?"

Always, he rearranged his posture before saying something 
unsavory.  He turned half away so that his face was in 
shadow, hiding the twitching of his hands in his pants 
pockets.  "Someone pegged him as an informant to those 
environmental crazies Mulder was talking about."

She cut him off.  "Pegged how?  Will it stick?"  He turned 
away from her thrusting chin again, around like an hour 
hand.  She chased him, ticking the minutes, always catching 
up.  "Is it just him or his whole group?"

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know," came the 
singsong chant.  Scully grabbed his forearm to hold him in 
place.  "They might take him out just for the allegation, 
or not.  We know it's true, or Mulder thinks so."

"And why," Scully asked the gray walls, "would you bother 
killing one person, when you can kill five?"

Skinner grunted agreement, and played with his glasses.  
Scully was gone before he had resettled the bridge piece.

She had never used the blue police bubble she kept in her 
glove compartment, but she used it now.  Through red lights 
and on the wrong side of the street when necessary, she 
made all possible speed towards the address Mulder had 
given her.  She only slowed when the traffic thinned 
outside of the business district, and she might be noticed.  
At the building's front door, she hit every doorbell on the 
row until someone buzzed her in.  The intercom squealed 
with annoyed residents as the door swung closed behind her.

She took the stairs to avoid notice, and had to clench her 
fists to walk rather than run down the hall.  Her nails cut 
into the skin when she realized the apartment door was 
ajar.  With sickness in her belly and rage in her cheeks, 
she pulled her weapon and charged the door.

Kneeling on the dingy carpet, Scully covered the two 
inhabitants of the apartment.  One of them stood in the 
living room in his underwear, gaping at her.  The other lay 
at his feet, certainly dead.

"What the hell are you doing here?"  hissed Krycek, 
stepping over the fresh corpse to point at her.  She kicked 
the door shut before she answered, and took her time 
standing up.  She saw the aborted motion in his knees and 
kept her weapon trained on him.

"I'm rescuing you."

"Not to a federal prison, you're not," he contradicted, 
eyes wild.  This close, she could smell a strong, hard 
smell on him, something ticklingly familiar.

"Not to prison," she agreed.  "Yet."  She holstered her 
weapon and kneeled to examine the body.  She pulled off its 
unseasonal black balaclava and saw that the windpipe had 
been crushed by something wide and flat.  Krycek stood over 
her, breathing hard.  There was a mark just below his knee 
that explained to her how he had done it.  The body stank 
of whatever Krycek smelled like.

The whole room was heavy and pungent, a strange, dangerous 
scent.  Scully felt the panic in her diaphragm.  "Gasoline.  
You --"

"Let me get some pants on," Krycek replied.  He fled to 
another room, leaving her with the body and the fire-ready 
room.  She stood shaking, noticed the water marks on the 
coffee table, saw the discarded gas can on its side in the 
corner.  Krycek returned faster than she expected, dressed 
and bearing a knapsack.  "Let's go."

"Disable the fire alarm," she said, her voice a-tremble, 
"if you want to destroy the whole apartment."

"Already did," he replied, and headed for the door.  She 
followed, patting her pockets for matches.  They stood in 
the doorway, and Krycek brandished his lighter, a shining 
silver thing.  Does a spark fly upward?  It does.  She 
wanted to reach out and touch it in his hand, but didn't 
quite dare.

"I'm driving," she warned.

He chuckled.  "Lead on, ma'am," he said, and set the room 
ablaze.

* * *

Even as he stepped out of the Metro, Mulder could tell 
something was going on.  People stood in their doorways and 
on their concrete stoops, too many people.  Everyone was 
talking, a low atmospheric rumble.  He wandered up U 
Street, attempting nonchalance.

He didn't get far.  The police had cordoned off the whole 
corner, the fire trucks parked haphazard in the street.  Up 
on the third floor of Krycek's building, a window blazed 
red, orange, yellow.  Mulder didn't have to do any figuring 
to know whose window it was.

He stood amid the small crowd that had gathered, hands in 
pockets.  He could feel the hot breeze, an oven blast 
against his face, even from here.  Firefighters in their 
heavy jackets danced through puddles of their own making, 
dousing the rest of the building with their hoses.

Over the whoosh and crackle, bystanders gossipped with 
doubt and disbelief in their voices.  "A half hour ago."  
"I was standing right in my doorway, and what a noise!  
Like the whole world up and exploded."  "KeShawn and 
Debbie, they back at my place.  Had to come out the 
building at a run."

Square men came out of the building's front door with soot 
on their faces.  Mulder watched them shake their heads.  He 
fumbled in his mind for what Krycek had told him, on that 
first mission.

"Something happens to me, you're each on your own.  Pick a 
hotel, stay there till the shakes go away.  Go start your 
own revolutionary cell.  Or retire, for all I care.  Just 
don't ever speak to each other again."

There were no familiar faces in the crowd.  He didn't dare 
ask how many bodies had been found.  Mulder listened to the 
dull roar of hungry flames for a long moment, seeing how 
the smoke stained the building, the roof, the sky.

He turned his back on the scene and trudged away, brain 
whirling.  He didn't have a hotel to stay in.  There was 
only one place for him to go.

* * *

The unseen eyes of paranoia trailed her until they were 
both inside her apartment and all the blinds were drawn.  
Krycek answered the question she had not phrased: "I don't 
think anyone saw us."

He plopped down on her couch, unslinging his backpack.  
"Have a seat," she growled.  Flicking a quizzical frown at 
her, he picked up her remote and turned on the TV.  Scully 
paced behind the couch, trying to think up her next move.

"There won't be anything on the news about it," he said, 
relaxing back into the couch.  "All those damn buildings 
are firetraps."

She added, "If the body burns completely enough, they won't 
be able to tell how he died.  They'll probably assume it's 
you."  Krycek nodded absently, clicking back and forth 
between lunchtime news hours.  She set her jaw against his 
maddening calm.  "You were too obvious," she rebuked.  "You 
should have been stealing secrets, or anything, at every 
place you broke into."  She crossed her arms.  "You got 
sloppy, Krycek."

With a slow turn he faced her, watchful.  "Mulder's been 
briefing you," he guessed.

"I've been briefing him."  She laughed a hard laugh at his 
ignorance.  "Of all the people in the FBI, don't you think 
I --"

"Jesus," he interrupted, pale.  "You're one of them."

"You should know.  You're the one who made me that way."  
She could feel the tremble in her ankles, a hot pressure 
gathering somewhere behind her solar plexus.  She quenched 
the fire by force of will.  "That's the past.  The question 
is what to do with you next."

"I know valuable things," he pointed out.  "You need me."  
Scully felt a startled pleasure spread through her at his 
ingratiating seriousness.  She knew then that he was 
afraid.

She couldn't help baiting him, just a little.  "We'll go 
on, with or without you.  You're just one man.  We were 
fighting before you started to help, and we'll keep 
fighting.  You just made it a little more convenient."

Krycek turned away slowly, clicked off the blaring TV.  He 
sat silent with his back to her for a long moment.  "This 
is a perfect opportunity for the man upstairs.  He wants 
Mulder back in New York, and he never did like me.  Mulder 
can coast into the upper ranks on the victory of having 
exposed a traitor."

"Bully for Mulder," she told the thick air around her.  She 
stood in her hallway and watched Krycek gain his feet, 
looming over her.  He hadn't shaved this morning, she 
realized.  Well, he'd been in a hurry.  He came very close 
to her, nostrils flaring, shoulders flexing as he took deep 
breaths.  Without saying a word, he leaned forward and 
inhaled the scent on her hair.

"Oh," he said, curiously flat.  "It's you."

"And you," she snapped back.  He cocked his head, as if 
calculating whether he could take Mulder away from her.

"I suspected," he murmured, "but I wasn't sure.  He washes 
his hair with something girly-smelling.  Yours."  His eyes 
tracked up and down her body, measuring.  Scully stood up 
straight, confident under his scrutiny.

"I knew.  Do you think I don't know how far he would go to 
get the information we needed?"  But it was a lie, and she 
knew it.  She thrust her chin at Krycek, daring him to 
understand.

He shifted his posture, shoulders nervous or excited.  "He 
gives great head."

"Yes, he does," she replied, feeling triumph.

"He won't throw me to the wolves," Krycek warned.

She retorted: "It's not his decision.  He'll be in New 
York."  Scully advanced on him a little, to see him 
retreat.  He didn't step back, and she had to stop or crash 
into him.

Green eyes narrowed to slits, gauging her.  "You won't 
throw me to the wolves either," he told her.  She looked up 
at him, feeling the flush in her neck.  His breath stirred 
her cheek.

"Of course I won't," she murmured.  "I'm one of the good 
guys."  He stood so close, and with hooded eyes as if 
hypnotized.

The world was circumscribed outside the diameter of their 
shoulders, distant.  They stared combustion at each other.  
His hand moved forward, at his side, then retreated.  "Say 
what you're thinking," she ordered.

She had never seen Krycek blush.  He lowered his head, as 
if to whisper.  She leaned close.  "I always wondered what 
he saw in you," he confessed.

Scully rested her cheek against his, spoke clearly into his 
ear: "And I wondered what he saw in you."  And the only 
sound was each breathing into the cup of the other's ear, 
slow hitches of excitement.  She touched his chest, to feel 
his heart hammering against his ribcage.  He hunched his 
shoulders, leaning lower, and with delicate fingers he 
shifted the collar of her blouse.  His unshaven face, 
buried against her clavicle.  The sharp hint of teeth.

Men were so weak.  There was spiteful satisfaction in 
leading him to the bedroom, his befuddled stare, the ways 
he wasn't Mulder.  She inflicted her resentments on Krycek, 
who groaned and took them as gifts.  She lay in her bed and 
listened to the little whimpering noises he made as he 
breathed, how he muttered into her thighs about beauty and 
devotion and want.  He promised her anything, everything, 
while he felt for the right places.  She didn't know what 
to ask for.  She said nothing.  They rolled together on 
angry waves to some kind of mutual satisfaction.

When he could talk, quite a few minutes later, he said, 
"I'm rogue now."  He covered his eyes with his forearm.

"I'll send you to people who can help," she whispered.  He 
snorted his doubt, his chest heaving.  She curled in close 
to him.  "They've kept themselves from notice, they can 
keep you under wraps."

"Why are you helping me?"  he asked, panting.

She didn't answer.

"If you think you can seduce me into being a federal 
witness, you're wrong."

She took a handful of his sparse chest hair and yanked.  
His eyes came wide open then, his arm tightening around her 
back.  They could smell each other, were breathing each 
other in.

"You're a formidable ally."

"Thank you," she said.  She opened her mouth, baring teeth 
to bite his chest.  At the last minute she changed her mind 
and snapped her teeth shut very close to his skin.  He let 
out a long breath, and she could hear his lungs at work.

"So is Mulder."  His chest hummed as he said it.

Scully grunted, burrowing herself into the warmth of his 
body.  His ribs tensed for small laughter, and she felt his 
long-fingered hand on her belly, collecting sweat from 
under her breasts.  They lay that way together, quiet, for 
a few minutes.  Their heartbeats slowed in tandem, offering 
the allure of sleep.  And then:

"He'll be here soon."  They both exhaled at once.

"I know."

His hand on her hair.  Her head rose and fell on the tide 
of his breathing.  They waited.

* * * * * * *

END (January 1, 2001)

NOTES: Intense thanks to nevdull, who took my pretentious 
arguments and provided logic.  It is thanks to her that I 
now know what the story is actually about.  Audrey Roget 
also took a crack at beta, and came up with "Feeling 
betrayed, much?", for which I thank her, since she was 
right.  Ambress deserves credit for her valiant efforts to 
free up time, and for recognizing the source for the title.

And yes, for Bostonians who remember that far back, this 
is, indeed, jellybeanfic.