Summary: Krycek and Marita ponder their fates at the end of the game. Post Requiem, PG13. See also Pas de Deux.

Title: The Fugue
Author: CGB
Email: luberluber@hotmail.com
Web: http://Appelsini.tripod.com/Christine/
Category: S Krycek/ Marita
Rating: PG - 13
Spoilers: Tunguska
Summary: Krycek and Marita ponder their fates at the end of the
game. A post Requiem piece.
Disclaimer: 1013 and Fox own the characters but they seem to have
lost them. Finders, keepers, I say!


------------------------


Welcome to the end, he thought.

It was Ok, the end. A bit of an anti-climax but admittedly the bang
he had expected rather than the whimper had been a little unsettling.
Maybe he could go back now. Back to where, he didn't know. He
wondered whether there was really somewhere that he once called
home?

He lived in a house once. It was typical American domesticity but
with little clues scattered throughout that suggested a deviation from
the norm. Like the fact that they spoke Russian at the dinner table.
All right, he thought, not so little.

It could have been though. It could have been perfect in its
dysfunctionality. His mother and father spoke civilly to each other
and only ever argued when they thought Alex was asleep. His father
worked during the day and avoided them at night while his mother
stayed at home and watched soap opera (his father always did
wonder how she managed to perfect her English). His father, on
occasion would drink too much and lecture the young Alex at length
on topics designed to compensate for a lack of fatherly wisdom and
guidance in other times.

Not so special, really. Just another disease of the nineteen-seventies
suburban society. He had friends at school whose family life echoed
his own.

He attributed his salvation to the video arcade on the way home from
school. Without it he might have cracked in the same way Phil
Beazley did and hung himself from the Bakelite electrical fitting in
his room. Who said the old plastics were brittle?

'Space Invaders' was the game. He thought of it now as ironically
prophetic.

And in the final irony he was now incapable of playing those games.
He stared a while at his prosthetic arm wondering if he could
manipulate a joystick with it. He'd surprised himself with the utility
of his molded arm and here was something he had yet to try.

The Russian doctor who fitted Alex for his arm told him he was
likely to experience phantom feelings in his left arm but Alex had
yet to really understand what that meant. From time to time he would
reach for an object out of instinct only to find that he had nothing to
reach with, but he could not distinguish the absence of his arm from
the feeling of his a body as a whole.

It made him think of something that his father had said about a
Fugue. He instructed the young Alex to isolate a single voice from
the Fugue and to listen to its traverse throughout the piece. Then he
told him to listen to the whole and the voices that combined to
produce a single sound. A sum of all the parts.

His father pointed out that there was no way to listen to both a single
voice and the sum of all the voices at once. The two methods of
listening mutually excluded each other.

"You Alexei," he would say, "are the sum of your parts. All your
family, all who have gone before you. Or you are alone. But you are
never both."

His father was prone to fits of solemnity when drunk. He bordered
on tears as he spoke of his home country and the people, family, he
had left behind.

He never said why they left and he never talked about going back,
leaving Alex with the impression that being the 'sum of your parts'
meant leaving them behind. A sort of constant movement away
from experience. Ever forward.

The irony was that he was no longer the sum of all his parts, if he
ever had been, because one part was now forever missing.

And he knew that with it went everything his father had ever hoped
for him.

--------------------

He searched his pockets and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his
jacket. He lit one and gazed out thoughtfully across the motel car
park.

The end sure was quiet, but then he expected that.

And it was four am. He liked early mornings now that he didn't
sleep anymore. Half light suggested that the day would come and
there were nights when he'd gotten to thinking it might not.

But now is the end, and days can come and go as they please. It
made little difference.

He can hear feet shuffling across the linoleum behind him. He turns
his head to see a small figure in a large T-shirt standing in the
doorway.

"What are you doing?" she says.

"Can't sleep."

She snorts lightly and then sits down beside him.

"Can I have one?" she asks indicating his cigarette. He hands her one
and she lights up. Neither of them smokes yet they take in poisoned
air like addicts. They're dead anyway.

He thought they were dead long ago but, well, here they are. He was
as surprised at her status amongst the living as she was at his. He'd
left her for dead and she'd left him to rot. They were soul mates
making a mockery of the term.

"Do you remember your family?" he says suddenly, surprising them
both.

She thinks for a moment staring out at the same spot in the parking
lot that has captured his attention for the last hour or so. There is
nothing out there and it captivates them.

"I have a photograph," she says finally.

"Of who?"

"My mother. At least I think it's my mother. I've always had it. It
says 'Vavara 1963' on the back so I assume that's her, Vavara, but
no, I don't remember her. Why do you ask?"

He shrugs, "just making conversation".

She looks at him disbelieving but says nothing, turning her attention
once again to the car park. He drags on his cigarette, once, twice.

"Do you know what happened to my parents?" It is a serious
question. He honestly thinks she might know. She's surprised him
before. What she knows, who she's in with. Layer upon layer upon
layer of deception. It's taken him this long to realize that her
loyalties are like his, placed in the self and like him, she had meant
to survive.

With some amusement he thinks that if she does know it's unlikely
she will tell him.

"No I don't. Your father was in political exile, you know that don't
you?"

"Yeah". He'd worked that one out before the devil tempted him from
his burgeoning career as an FBI agent with promises of the truth
behind his father's disappearance. His father's government job, his
complete disdain for his new country coupled with his lack of
interest in the affairs of his old country, and then he just came home
from college one weekend to find they weren't there. He called his
father's workplace only to find that he had left his job months ago.
No one saw them leave. No one missed them.

"What did they tell you in Russia?"

"That he worked in a university, that he perpetuated lies against the
state. You know, the usual."

"It could be true."

"Yeah. Maybe it is," he nods, "only academic intellectuals are of less
use to the American government than, say, former defense advisors
or economists".

She looks at him eyebrows raised.

He shrugs. "It's just a hunch. Who'd try to disappear an old literature
Professor?"

She stubs her cigarette out on the step and he hands her another
wordlessly. She drags once and turns to him again.

"You think he knew, don't you?"

"Yeah," he nods, "son of a bitch knew, and used it to play me like he
played Mulder for all those years. Like he played all of them." He
looks at her, suddenly. "What did he promise you?"

"Same as you. Information. Answers. My life. I told myself I could
take it or leave it, and I kept telling myself that even after I'd
escaped from the Fort. Even after he found me again and asked me
to work for him. I always thought I was in control," she shakes her
head. "Are there bigger fools than us out there, Alex?"

"Yeah," he grins wryly, "Fox Mulder".

They fall back into a comfortable silence. Daylight begins to break
around them.

----------------

And then he is back there again, on the night he came home and
found the house empty. There was food in the refrigerator their
clothes were still in their drawers. There was an unreal moment
when he even believed that in his parents had finally begun to
socialize and were currently sipping cocktails with his father's
colleagues from the civil service.

But as the phone calls tallied and the hours wore on it occurred to
him that they were gone. He rang the government officer where his
father worked only to discover he had not worked there for months.

After twenty-four hours he filed a 'missing persons' report. He gave
his university number as a contact and took the train back.

Because he could do nothing else he studied.

He had no reason to suspect that his entrance into Quantico was at all
coerced or calculated when he had such good grades on record. He
was known for his meticulous attention to detail, an ability to be
precise and methodical. He remembered attempting to forsake the
end of semester celebrations in order to spend the night double-
checking his application for the Bureau. He gave up when his
roommate physically removed him from his desk.

He'd spent that night drinking himself into a stupor, watching faces
whirl past him, smiling, laughing, yelling. If he had wanted to he
could pretend this was it. Just him. No family, no history. One voice.

------------------

Marita starts on her third cigarette, resigned to her newly found
identity as a smoker. Funny, Alex thinks, that the old guy inclined
them towards rather than repelled them from smoking. The old
bastard would have liked that. He enjoyed watching people fall.

"How long do you think we've got?" she asks.

"Who knows? Weeks, months, years. Maybe days."

She nods, "You know, we could go to Russia".

"Won't help. They'll find us."

"I know," she pauses, "but we could go for us. We could find those
answers they promised us. Between the two of us we have extensive
access to a variety of sources - which is why they'll be in such a
hurry to find us - but we still have time. We still have enough time.

"We're it, Alex. We're what is left. It's our right."

He hears the words 'we' and 'us' bouncing around his brain as
though they are words that don't get used around him that often. For
a moment he considers that she may be joking. He has a pretty clear
vision depicting his death when he's around her, and it clearly
involves a gun wound to his chest with Marita holding the offending
weapon. They'll catch up with her, promise her answers, promise
her a place on the team again and she'll turn faster than he can be out
the door with his prosthetic arm in tow.

He knows, because they'll do exactly the same to him.

She's not insincere in her invitation. She just hasn't had a better offer
yet.

He plays a game of 'she knows that I know that she knows' until his
head begins to spin. He knows when she's lying because he hears his
own voice back at him. He knows she will betray him yet he trusts
her implicitly. It could well be true love.

He takes a long look at her in the dawn half-light. She hasn't washed
her hair in days and it is flat and dry framing her in a manner that
suggests androgyny. Marita must have been beautiful once. Still is,
but without the youthful charm and laughing eyes to offset her fine
features.

He thinks he probably looks pretty bad himself. He should shave, get
some clean clothes from somewhere.

They had dressed for the end only it was taking its time coming.

History waited for him in Russia. History and possibly his death at
the hands of the slightly built enigma that sat beside him on the steps
to their motel room.

It occurred to his sleep deprived state that his arm waited in Russia
as well. He wasn't sure where. Buried out in the bushes near
Tunguska, rotting into the soil, waiting for him to follow.

In the end, is location important?

He catches her eye and holds it, intently.

"Do you want me to be the one that does it?"

She nods slowly.

"Yes. And don't worry, I forgive you."

"You too," he says.

-------------------

Before they left she showed him the photograph. He couldn't decide
whether it was the truth or an elaborate lie but he knew that it didn't
matter.

When such thought and care has been put into a deception it is only
by seeing its fruition that it can be exposed. If she had constructed
her story in order to lure him to Russia, then it was only by going to
Russia that he would learn otherwise.

At the airport she bought a packet of Morleys and they smoked
cigarettes outside until their flight was called. The sun was warm and
they were clean and well dressed. They traveled as Mr and Mrs Fox.

He remembered that the individual musical parts in a fugue are
seemingly unrelated until they are played together. They can be
brilliant musical compositions on their own but when placed together
they harmonise pleasantly.

And as the listener he has to decide which to hear, the parts or the
whole.

He couldn't make up his mind.

-------------------

Somewhere in time, a young man sits on a park bench not far from
Quantico, the training ground for the nations finest law enforcement
corps. He reads from a book with Russian on the cover, Detstvo. An
older man approaches him with lines drawn in his face like rivers
forking into streams.

The older man flicks a cigarette butt to the ground.

"Alex Krycek?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Alex, I knew your father. I know what happened to him."

"And?"

"I thought you'd want to know." He fixes the younger man with a
stare that speaks of secrets bigger than the disappearance of his
parents, bigger than anything he'll find at the Bureau, "You see
Alex, I know how much you want to be complete."


End
----------------


"Anteater: Fugues have that interesting property, that each of their
voices is a piece of music in itself; and thus a fugue might be thought
of as a collection of several distinct pieces of music, all based on a
single theme, and all played simultaneously. And it is up to the
listener (or his subconscious) to decide whether it should be
perceived as a unit, or as a collection of independent parts, all of
which harmonize." - Douglas Hofstadter, "Godel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid".