Mulder choked.
"N--n--you're dead. You can't be," he spluttered. "No!"
"We thought you were dead, too," Krycek's expression dropped. "But you proved us all very wrong."
Mulder stopped and stared up at Krycek, who now towered up over him. Realization washed over his face and most of his panic backed away. He breathed, feeling suddenly very hopeless as he remembered what had happened in the parking garage. Then he remembered something else.
"You're not going to kiss me again, are you?" asked Mulder, bitterly.
"That depends. Do you want me to?" Krycek retorted with a very sharp leer.
Mulder replied with a dumbfounded look.
Krycek snorted and, to Mulder's simultaneous surprise, relief and apprehension, backed off. He walked hurriedly towards the window and peered through the blinds.
"I don't know what you're thinking, but--" he turned back to Mulder. He smirked. The other man had stood up and now had his gun on him.
"I had no problem with seeing you fall back then, don't think my mind has changed now," Mulder said in a voice that would make hydrochloric acid slink away in pain.
Krycek cocked his head, lifted his gun by a finger, and dropped it to the ground.
"Put that away, Mulder. You're not going to get anything accomplished by pulling that trigger."
"Oh really? I think I'd be doing the world a favour."
"'sides, you don't have it in you to kill me. You never did," Krycek continued smoothly, his hand now in his pocket. His eyes locked with Mulder's, yet they seemed a lot less caustic then they ought to.
Mulder caught the connection. He almost faltered, but stopped himself.
"What the hell do you possibly want?"
"Exactly what you want, my friend."
Mulder gritted his teeth.
"Don't you DARE call me that!" he screamed, drawing closer, pressing the gun into Krycek's chest. "I am no friend of yours, you son-of-a-bitch. Do you hear me?!"
Krycek blinked.
Mulder squeezed the gun with strangulating force, then relaxed.
"I'm sick of it. People like you, who exist only to burn and break everything around them. Why? Did you ever once give it a thought?" he continued furiously, voice straining over its own intensity. "What about your own life? What about your parents?"
Krycek's expression went from stoic to grim.
"My parents are dead."
"Well, that's something we have in common, no thanks to you."
Krycek had lived to obey and betray. He had learned to sever the cords that bound his head to his heart, his mind to his soul. Yet through all of it, it seemed they had reattached. Now, they were taut and trembling with a rage that had suddenly forsaken its eternal dormancy.
With a sudden jerk he flailed his arm up and smashed Mulder's wrist. The gun flew from his hand, and Krycek pushed him backwards.
"You think I like it? Being exploited and lied to in a sick game entitled "The Truth", where the rules mean do as your told and believe it to be right? Wanting to rewrite the rules every step of the way, but without the pen?" he roared, slapping Mulder to the ground. "When there's no choice but to play their game, or to lose everything?"
Krycek shook, sweat forming on his forehead, his face reflecting every emotion he'd been told to conceal; the same emotions that had come forth before he was shot, but replayed tenfold.
Mulder looked up from where he had fallen, rooted to the spot. He opened his mouth but found no words. Never had he considered Krycek to be frightening; he had only hated him, been disgusted by him. Yet here was the first time Mulder felt fear in his presence. It was not the fear like the fear one gets of the monsters under their bed or the things that go bump in the night. It was the fear of something very, very real.
Abruptly, Krycek stopped shaking. The sweat seemed to dissipate from his face and his hand unclenched, burrowing back into the safety of his pocket.
"You and I have more in common than you know, brother."
The silence was strangling. Mulder stared with a glazed expression as his mind waged a civil war on what to make of it all.
Krycek stepped towards Mulder's gun, laying helpless. He picked it up, and turned back towards Mulder, who flinched. Krycek simply stepped towards him and knelt. He took the gun and pressed it gently into Mulder's hand, then closed his fingers around it. Then he looked up into his face.
"What I want, Mulder, is not to tell you what to do. It's to help you in what you do. There's no way you can fight a one-man battle against these people, these things...no matter how noble you think you are. It doesn't work like that. You need help," he said quietly.
"There's a good book out there about a little boy and a hungry wolf, Krycek, I think you should read it. How do I know you're not lying this time?" Mulder murmured.
Krycek gave him a hard stare.
"Remember what I told you when we first met?"
Mulder did. He flew back in time to the moment the tacky-suited, eager young man had first extended a hand that was left unshaken. He nodded weakly.
"Mulder..." Krycek trailed off a little and his gaze broke slightly. "Those weren't lies."
The other man had no response. His profiling mind was lifting its head and sniffing the air, cogs and wheels starting up again as they burned up new, raw material.
Krycek continued to stare into his face, studying every inch though with each analyzing sweep, his eyes never stayed on Mulder's for longer than the shortest instant.
"It...it was always interesting to hear. Back at the academy. How the X-Files should have been closed. How you should give up. What was truly fascinating about it was how you never did. Few of us stood up for what you did down there, and it was not always because we believed in the paranormal, but because of your tenacity. Your pure belief in what you did. It was...admirable," Krycek's head gave a strange, small jerk as he spoke, and the flicker of a smile passed over his lips.
While his eyes remained entwined with Mulder's, their hardness had ebbed away. Realizing this, he quickly pulled his jaw back into line, clenching the muscles in his neck.
Mulder realized that Krycek's hand was still holding his to the gun. The Russian stood, and the grip was released. The gun dropped back to the floor.
Krycek sat on the bed, folding one leg up so his ankle rested on his knee. He laid his hand on his thigh, and didn't speak.
Meanwhile, Mulder's head raced. In describing Krycek, the word currently coming to mind was "soft". He realized, however, that was somewhat inappropriate. Krycek was many things, but soft was not one of them. A more suiting word, he decided, was "brittle". Something that had once been hard, but had taken too many blows, too much weather. Even the biggest mountain could only take so much.
Pulling himself off the floor, Mulder hesitantly took a seat beside his adversary, who didn't even glance his way. Something that felt forebodingly similar to guilt pricked at Mulder's heart before he chased it away.
"I know how to kill the supersoldiers."
Suddenly shocked out of the realm of woe, Mulder swivelled his head towards Krycek, who was staring off into space. He was about to frantically ask "how", but thought better of it.
"What do you want in exchange for that, then?"
"Trust."
Mulder scoffed.
"Give me a good reason why I should trust you now, of all times."
Krycek still didn't return his gaze.
"Because I never gave up on you, and I'm not about to just because you refuse to see past the dimensions of your own reality," Krycek moved his head towards Mulder, but his eyes didn't meet his. "I always wanted to believe, Mulder, and in the time where you didn't I was the one who restored that faith."
Mulder's mind glanced back to the night in his apartment as he sat at gunpoint on the floor.
"What I gave you was hope, whether you believed it or not, and I..." Krycek broke off.
Was that a voice crack? Mulder was beginning to realize the increase in the frequency the word "I" came up.
"You..."
A word that offered a personal attachment...something an assassin would never use.
"You were my hope, Mulder. Hope for resistance; for standing up for what was right, despite the naysayers. Despite people...people like me."
He turned away again, darkness engulfing his features. Mulder's face was stoic, but he remained bewildered all the same as he watched Krycek, who's voice had pinched near the end of his sentence. Silence moved on, and Mulder fought with what to say or do. He felt more confused right then than he had for a long time.
"I thought it would end when I killed him."
The cacophony of Mulder's thoughts dispersed and he stared worriedly at Krycek.
"Killed who?"
"C. G. B. Spender," he enunciated every syllable.
Mulder gawked. His mouth hung open and his head began to lean strangely to one side.
"No way. You don't just..." Mulder realized Krycek wasn't making any attempt to do anything and his sentence died. "You realized that's twice that you've killed my father."
Krycek gave him a half-hearted, hurt glare.
Mulder looked away as the impact of the revelation hit him full force. He always expected Krycek to betray everyone he worked with, though he never saw it working that way with the Smoking Man.
"How many men need to die for something they call the 'greater good'?" Krycek murmured, once again fixated on the darkness.
Once more, Mulder held no response.
After some more time remaining in the sickening silence of the black, dingy suite, Krycek finally stood and moved shortly towards the door. Mulder reached out to grab his arm, to restrain him, but was intercepted by Krycek's hand. He felt paper between his fingers as the hand left as quick as it came and Krycek's ragged, frosted voice pierced through the black.
"My hotel and room number. Call me some time," he said dryly, then continued towards the door.
"Krycek, wait. Why...why don't you stay here?" Mulder asked, voice wavering a little uncertainly.
Krycek stopped and looked back at him, his face lacking the usual stone etch and now coated with what could have been mild astonishment.
"Don't get any ideas, it's not because I trust you," Mulder clarified. "Actually, it's the opposite. I want you here to keep an eye on you. Nothing you've said has me convinced that I'm safe here, let alone with you out there."
Nodding jaggedly, Krycek shrugged and turned back to face the bed, and Mulder.
"So do I get the bed or the floor?" he asked with a trace of contempt.
"Try the bathtub," Mulder grinned maliciously as he moved to pick up his bag.
Krycek stared.
"You can't be seriou--"
"You want my trust, how about stick around for more than a day without killing somebody, huh?"
Lips hardening into a thin line, Krycek skulked towards his would-be bedroom.
"Wait."
He stopped, rather peevishly, and looked back once more.
A pair of handcuffs dangled around Mulder's index finger.
Krycek smirked.
"Kinky."
"Shut up, Krycek."