Summary: "I just want something I can never have." Darkly conflicted Krycek/Marita, PG, One Son.

Title: Between Bites
Author: Laura Sorensen
Email: shutupmulder@yahoo.com
Spoilers: Through "One Son."
Rating: PG-13
Category: VA
Summary: "I just want something I can never have."

Disclaimer: They don't belong to me., they belong to
10/13 and Chris Carter. I'm just an underdog lover with
no cash.

Thanks to Nancy Floyd-Finch, who is one classy lady --
this whipped butter is for you.

I always accept constructive criticism and feedback at
shutupmulder@yahoo.com.


{Waves of regret and waves of joy;
I reached out for the one I tried to destroy.
You -- you said you'd wait until the end of the world.
--U2}

----------

I think I had him there, for just one minute. I think I
had him back.

I th . . . I th . . . but it 's so hard to think, to
breathe, to invoke deity. You know that D . . . that . . .
song, by those people, that band, the one that says God has
a sick sense of humor. I guess it only must be funny to
Him, because I sure don't get the joke. Correction. I get
it. I just wish it hadn't been on me.

Hmm, it's warm in here. They took away all the mirrors,
and later, the shiny things. I kept trying to see my face
in whatever would reflect it -- the bars of my bed, the
bottom of my spoon.

I used to be beautiful, did you know that? So beautiful
that Fox Mulder drooled out his questions to me as I stood
in high heels on a subway platform. But I didn't want Fox
Mulder, with his fey looks and that stubble that never
seems to get shaved off. So I left him. Oh heaven and
hell, did I leave him flat. I had the arrogance, then.
I had the beauty. I had power. And I wanted Alex Krycek.

I think I just wanted him from minute one. One day he
called up the New York office and arranged a meeting with
me. Course I didn't want to acq . . . say yes, because
I thought he was another Fox Mulder, with quests that made
me sad and sorry at the same time, and qu . . . queries
that took most everything out of me for days. But we met
in a little park with a fountain that didn't work and he
snared me. I was the asker, then, and he the person who
held back the answers till I panted and gasped the
questions.

At first it was my connections he saw. You never know when
an S . . . an SRSG is going to come in handy. So he said
one time afterwards, in a Motel 6 in Oregon. You never
know, he said. His hand moved on my hip. He had ten long
fingers back then, knuckles swollen from cracking them
nervously. His eyes often shifted around the room, as
though he saw people hiding behind chair legs and dust
motes.

Later, he admitted to me that he thought I was beautiful.
He used the adjective f . . . f . . . no, I'm going to say
it, I want to say it . . . flaxen. He made me fight him,
just so he could grab me too roughly. I bruise easily,
see. He liked to see marks on me. He spent a week at my

house, once, just seeing how my bruises developed. Oh, how
I loved him. I love him still.

----------

He touches himself in the head sometimes and says, "This
is where Scully was going to shoot me." He says it
reverently. Like she is the Madonna and I am the whore. I
hate her.

Oh. Non . . . s . . . sequ . . . itur, I guess that was,
except I wanted to talk about Tungus . . . ka and tell how
it was after then. He came back screaming. Somehow he'd
gotten himself taken to an embassy and called me, and of
course I got him out on the next transport plane. I got
the Synd . . . ic . . . ate to tend his wounds and I
promised them my soul if he should betray them again. I
guess they cashed in that bargain huh, even though I stayed
faithful, but I was talking about Alex, I will use up all
my strength to talk about Alex, and if talking about Alex
kills me, I guess he was going to do it some way.

I said he came back screaming and he literally did. When
he came to the specialist at the Syn . . . dicate lab, he
was cursing at the top of his lungs in Russian.
Nightmares, you see. I stayed by him for four days and
when he opened his eyes, he looked up at me with brown eyes
like hot sugar glaze and he said, "Fox?" So that's how I
know. When he realized it was just me, he turned his head
away. So I took my sharp fingernail and poked it into the
stump of his shoulder. He screamed again, shredding into
falsetto, but he didn't look at me again, no matter how
many times I did it. I stayed anyway for another hour but
then the doctors came to fit him for the prosth . . . the
false arm, and I went away. He didn't need my connections
after that, and so I was reduced to dreaming about him,
sticky in my bed in New York, while he bought a pair of
$10,000 binoculars and rented an apartment across the
street from Mulder's. Don't ask me what he saw there. I
hate Fox Mulder and his black-hearted partner. I don't
have the strength to talk about it though.


----------

The next time I saw him, he acted like he didn't know me.
We stared at each other over the bodies of forty-one
people, charred beyond recog . . . nition, and he told me
to kiss his American ass. I would have been charmed. I
would have done it right there, kneeling in ashes. But he
didn't give me the chance. He walked away, and then he
took the boy. Stole him right out from under their noses,
like a magician at a kid's party. And of course I got
blamed. Secretly, I hoped he'd make it to the end of the
earth.

Because of my supposed mistakes, the Syndicate gave me no
choice but to get the boy back - at that time, I still
wanted to be in full possession of my soul. Now, it
doesn't really matter anymore. They gave me instructions
and I followed them. I went to the boat and I confronted
Alex and then he shoved me up against the bulkhead so hard
that I could feel every tooth in the zipper of his jacket.

I think I'm talking better.

I felt like whipped butter when he was done and he told me
he was going to rule the world. I took his hand and only
once, between bites, did I ask him about Mulder. He didn't
answer. And then, for a long time, I didn't care. When I
came back to myself, he was sleeping, the one arm dangling
off the bed, brown hand limber in the half-light. I looked
at his hand and his closed eyes and I broke. I took the
boy, I called Mulder, and I betrayed Alex Krycek and the
Syndicate for the last time.

Remember how I said that Mulder's quests made me sad and
sorry? Well, sometimes it was like there were two of me,
and one was always trying to do the right thing. But that
one never succeeded. It's like that movie where the woman
misses the train: there were two of me, and the good one
never won, and she ended up killing the other one, the bad
one that survived. The last thing I remember for a long
time is the boy, pressed against the glass of the phone
booth with black slime oozing from his poor eyes. Then
both the good and evil mes are submerged and mixed, and now
there is only one me and I am dying. I have seen Alex
Krycek's face for the last time and he has one less arm to
reach for me and his eyes are shocked and cold, like we're
strangers.

----------

I know I am not beautiful anymore. They gave me a mirror
today and then they took it away again and shook their
heads, because I couldn't stop screaming. I do look like
something from "Night of the Living Dead." And now that I
am no longer beautiful and connected, he will never come
back to me. In the lab, only a week ago, he stopped for a
minute and I thought I had him back. I peered at him
through my hair, playing coquette, trying to make him want
me again. For one tiny second my universe began to right
its axis -- but Alex Krycek's gaze shifted to my companion
and I knew that he would rather have Spender than me, now,
because Spender had the connections that I had lost.

I wish often enough that I had never spoken to Mulder; not
that first time in New York, and not that last time in the
lab. "Not everything dies," I said, exposing myself like a
stupid deer with nothing better to do than get shot. Of
course everything dies. It may take a long time; it may
take forever. But of course everything eventually faces
its mortality. No one's invented a perpetual motion
machine. I think I'm close now. My heart will suddenly
cease its sprung rhythm, and my redrimmed eyes (I think I
can see ultraviolet now) will close graciously. I won't
fight it. I will close my eyes, like this, and turn my
head toward the wall, and feel nothing but the morphine
drip. I will watch the pattern of darkness behind my eyes
bend and whip and blur and ripple, and I will hope with all
my strength that I meet up with Alex Krycek in hell. At
least there, we'll have something in common again.

END