Windows by Jesemie's Evil Twin jesemie@hotmail.com CATEGORY: SA RATING: PG-13? WARNING: Character death. End of the world. Unresolved M/Sc *and* Sc/K tension. Oddness. DISCLAIMERS: I do not own these characters - they belong to Chris Carter, 1013, Fox, News Corp, etc., etc. I'm making no money off this. I'm just borrowing them, honest. Please don't sue, or I'll be forced to use the voodoo doll. FEEDBACK: Please. Give my good twin something to be jealous about. jesemie@hotmail.com THANKS: to Ms. Selby, who's compassionate, fast, delightfully snarky, and amazing, and at least nine billion times smarter than my two cats combined. Thank you, Jill, really. Also, thank you to Vehemently, who was an enormous inspiration, and whose stories and worlds are some of the very best reasons to read fanfic. - J.E.T. ~=~=~=~ I escaped from a city unraveling with smoggy stars, into a building that gaped like a saw-toothed trap, to watch while Scully knelt in a creek of crimson, Mulder's crumpled form beside her both wet with blood and the pale of death. I felt nailed to the doorframe, stunned. Scully's hair seemed to glitter, caught in the window's few teasing streaks. My mind filled crazily with lost melodies, copper-colored lullabies, harvest moons and babies in crippled cradles and love that departs too soon. Something in me decayed off-key, and I could not remember a truth that would justify what I was witnessing. Scully was pebble-delicate, eroding, tinier than I recalled. She stroked Mulder's hand over and over, rocking gently. ~=~=~=~ Three years later, everything had changed but the snow, which continued to drift with something resembling nonchalance. He was almost used to it, the casual snow that acted like an indifferent serial killer; it had no interior agenda, and it never claimed to be anything but cold. The sky, stooped and inky, drizzled into the forest beneath it. In the headquarters, from across the room, Krycek watched as Scully gazed out the window at the glowering evening. There were, in the past, times when he swore she was physically shrinking, fading, right before his eyes, her body tucking itself inside space, as though she could hide one molecule at a time. She might disappear and he'd be the lone person left who would notice. Tonight, in contrast, she seemed radiant, candlelit and quiet. But her eyes were fierce, and when she turned them on him he was acutely aware of his trespass. The rest of her features sharpened as he backed away slowly. He pondered that too sometimes, how she was able to appear complete and seamless when so many pieces were missing. He thought once that maybe she secretly replaced what she'd lost - time, children, Mulder - with vengeance, a recyclable supply of hatred for the men - their current employers, whose actions had stolen those things - and compromises made desperately. She was still alive, burning from inside out. Now, though, he walked outside and felt nothing but the needling ice, and wondered if she wasn't burying herself in the endless winter, saving him or someone like him the trouble of disposing of her body. He glanced up to the window where she sat, and the snow kept falling; most of the office light was eclipsed by her shadow, and he walked home in its dark blot. ~~~ Since she was confirmation, both of what had happened and what was to come, he had insisted on her survival; a small part of him remembered the necessity of preservation, of proof. And because a smaller part of him needed to know that he had saved, or tried to save, someone worth whatever might happen because of her, he protected her, against almost every instinct to dissect and dissimulate, to run as fast and as far as possible. He knew she allowed him the illusion of morality, of common goals and beliefs. /Cooperation/, he thought with signature cynicism. Most of the time, he left her alone. He thought she should be thankful for his distance, at least. She was aware that he studied her, yes, but he remained very carefully removed, never approaching her except peripherally. It was an interesting way to deal with ones accomplice. Trust, anyhow, was not an issue in their relationship. He was waiting for her to attempt escape. And she would attempt it eventually, whatever her reasons for staying this long. In front of Krycek, the television's reception scrambled and squiggled. He heard the drone of planes far off, like electricity just below his skin. His reflexes had been refined over the months with Scully, and he couldn't help thinking that eventually was venturing closer and closer. ~=~=~=~ She remembered the letter Krycek sent them four months before it happened; a single page with ten access codes that eventually yielded blueprints, bank accounts, foreign files, fingerprints, addresses, maps, supply lists, army routes, signed contracts, and finally, dates. A spreadsheet of timelines, a spider-web of stages and seasons, increments ticking towards zero. The end of the world, complete with variant viruses, bombs and rockets, cut communication, polluted water and food sources, leveled cities, and mass graves, typed up neatly courtesy of some nameless shadow-syndicate secretary and Excel. Scully didn't believe it, especially when the source was revealed. But Krycek revealed himself, stepping into Mulder's apartment one weekend like an old friend dropping by for a visit. The early dinner of pepperoni pizza and current caseload were abandoned while guns were pulled and voices raised and evidence proffered. "Why should we believe you, Krycek?" Mulder asked, flippant, sounding bored. Scully was impressed at his lethargic method of dealing with murderous spies. He could have been filing his nails, or knitting, for all his supposed disinterest - his eyes masked all of the horror she knew he had felt in the last months as their findings uncovered the trail of tombs, the labyrinth lies. He would not look at her. "It's your choice, friend. It's me or them," Krycek replied, equally flip. She wanted to roll her eyes at both of them, but when she shifted in the chair Krycek spoke again. "Do you really want to find out whether I'm telling you the truth the hard way?" He hesitated. "Of course, my way isn't exactly easy. But when have either of you ever gone in for anything simple?" Mulder didn't respond. Krycek slipped from his chair to rummage in the kitchen. Scully glanced at Mulder, trying to be amused, but he would not look at her. She could hear Krycek opening the refrigerator, and it struck her as strange that sadists would get thirsty. Krycek plunked a can of cola in front of her. "I asked you a question." His voice was calm, like he was speaking to someone unable to follow the conversation. "Why should you tell us the truth? You've used us for your own ends; any help you ever gave us was strictly by default," Scully said. Krycek laughed. "'By default,' that's great." He flattened his palm on the table and leaned toward her. "Your ends and my ends are the same. We want the same things, Scully. We all want these bastards to pay for what they've done, what they're going to do. We can terminate them with this." "Thanks for the offer, but I don't think I'd make a very good mercenary, Krycek," she said. Something crossed his features then, and she felt a searing in her lungs. In that moment, Scully knew how to wound him, how to break him. /He's scared/, she thought. /Scared we'll say yes, scared we'll say no; scared that we can't disprove him. He's right, and he wants to be wrong on this/. Krycek's eyes were green, she noticed for maybe the first time, not black, not shifting silver. They absorbed her, and he would not squirm as she stared at him. Scully didn't know why, but she admired that. "It's a complicated plan, Krycek. Any and everything could go wrong. It's a huge risk." He shook his head a little, dismissive. "Sure. Staying and doing nothing's a bigger risk." Afterwards, when it was too late to doubt, when she didn't want to believe it, she still knew somehow that she had to. That's what frightened her - the stark, extinguishing faith she carried, replacing every sliver of her that remained to wish for justice or peace. Krycek brought them methodical, emotionless fact, indisputable and pure, and she had never hated her science more. Mulder was listening to Krycek's departing gait echoing in the hall, and Scully thought again that it was not fair that truth should be this hard. Mulder would not look at her. It would be hours until she went home, hours before she came back. The reticence between them would barely be breached before she would lose him forever to that faint muteness. ~~~ "What do we do? How do we stop this, Scully?" The desperation in Mulder's voice was like a chisel. His apartment was shadowed, scented with leather and garlic. She couldn't speak. They sat on his couch, steel tension pulling them together and apart. While headlights fogged and scissored the night through his window, she curled her body to his. They slept, his fingers locked behind her back the way a child folds his hands for prayer. In her dream that night, Scully saw Mulder grab a framed photograph off his mother's mantle. The picture inside, perfect airbrushed people in a posed portrait, like professional clones of his family, bubbled behind cracked glass, separating the film of flesh, church clothes, proud smiles. Somewhere a cell phone rang in a pocket. His mother sopped up spilt milk on her new carpet, the fibers sucking stains that spread and curdled. There would not be enough time for forgiveness. Outside, light flashed and rumbled, sheets of satin green, deeper in the distance, like orchestral timpani mimicking thunder. The last sensation she felt was Mulder's hand latched to hers, and Scully thought, /Good. Neither of us can get out/. The windows buckled. Sirens wailed and wailed, and she was deaf beneath them. ~~~ Defeated, her medical training useless against the damage, she held her best friend's hand as his slit arteries slashed six pints of blood onto the floor of their office, spreading out around them like a gory Valentine's heart, bottomless red, her profile glistened in violet-black. Having found them, Krycek stood in the doorway, unmoving, expressionless. When Scully finally spoke, all she could think to say was, "He didn't do this to himself." Krycek toed the knife by the wall. "Of course he didn't. Why would he?" There was something tight in his voice, trailing while he glanced at Mulder and Scully, as though of all the scenarios he'd contemplated, this was an impossibility, beyond his range of improvisation. None of them were supposed to die before they even left the building. Behind them, the clock on a co-worker's credenza chimed midnight. Mulder's blood dripped from her hands like warm suede gloves. She tried to stand, only to slump back down to the floor a foot away. Krycek, haggard in the verdant glow of the exit sign, stayed silent. "Why him? Why him and not me?" /After missing time and microchips and alien ships and dead babies and Duane Barry - why Mulder/? "They could have killed him a thousand times, could have killed either of us a thousand times, but they didn't. Why now, and why just him?" "This might kill you in a different way," Krycek offered, straightening, testing cruelty in the way where he seemed most fearless and competent. "Besides," he added, almost whispering, "you're the one worth something." Scully's head snapped up, a growl in her throat. "I mean, you were his proof. And now you're theirs." She spat, "Proof of what? Their own experiments? Their lies and their treacheries?" Krycek clinched his jaw before speaking. "Proof of their mistakes." He stepped into the hallway and glanced in both directions. The empty building seemed full of white noise, smothering her. Krycek turned back around. "We have to leave immediately." "I won't follow you. I won't help you." "We made plans, dammit. You agreed. You read the mandate, Scully. You know what's coming. It's beginning now, and either you take your chances with me or you take your chances with them." "Why should I take any chances at all? Besides, this isn't the beginning. It's the end, right?" Her words felt flat and narrow in the space where I sat between a body and a desk. Krycek gave her an odd look, one indicating his express annoyance at her melodrama. "People will survive this. Why shouldn't you?" "I should have died years ago; and it's not like you didn't try to help them." He flinched, and Scully watched guilt glint in his eyes. "Fine. You're right. Good luck, then." He left, abrupt, each footstep down the hall distinct, deliberate. Like he was stamping prints on the linoleum, a clear path to her and Mulder. When she looked up, though, Krycek was back, nothing but rough energy, pulling Mulder's trench from the coat rack. He scrutinized Mulder for a minute, then covered him with the coat, almost reverently. The whole scene struck her as completely ridiculous, her wedged on the floor by a pool of blood, Krycek cloaking Mulder, practically saying a prayer, and she giggled. /Imagine that - I'm giggling/. A smile broke her face open, and she snickered hard. /Oh, Krycek's looking at me with pity, I think. Or disgust/. He reached for her, grabbing her left forearm and tugging her into a standing position. Softly, his crush bruising, he said, "We have to go *now*." Scully swayed, still giggling, and he caught her head with that same brutal grip. She stopped grinning. His eyes locked on hers, grim and full of unnamed grief, and she realized he was a mirror, reflecting her with hideous accuracy. In his eyes, she was monstrous. And he would not leave her, for reasons unspoken and unsettling. "Please," he whispered. In the dim light from the hallway, in those acute shadowed angles, he was the most dangerous thing she'd ever encountered. There was some sick comfort in that. She shrugged away from Krycek and stepped out to the hallway, never slowing her precise pace, never glancing back at Mulder. Matching her stride, Krycek followed her. ~=~=~=~ I'm still following her. ~~~ Three years later and two hours ago, the first, final warning was announced, as the soldiers remaining will not be coming back. On TV, the evening news anchorwoman, held together with fake fingernails, hair spray, panty hose, and super glue, chirped about bravery, while the sweaty Secretary of State, projected on a screen behind her, fidgeted with his tie. No one mentioned the thousands who have already died. I heard the news five days ago, so I've turned off the television. There's no mail today and my phone rarely trills; Scully calls an average of once a week, when an assignment must be completed. She never asks how I'm doing. I'm exhausted and thinking about the circus. Quaint, I know, probably even delusional. There hasn't been a state fair in this country since, well, since this stopped being a country. The air outside my window is hazy peach, an unnatural color for night, cold fog and haze from the almost-halted snowfall echoing the battered streetlights, and it reminds me of the jumbled hues of a circus: red and white peppermint stripe canopies; cotton candy pink; rust at the edges of the blue tilt-a-whirl; neon orange jackets on roustabouts; the paisley blends crowds fan out, children and parents staggering through concession stands and roller-coaster lines and mazes of livestock. I've been thinking of the tent attractions, and finding some sort of vague, bullshit pop-psych connection to my own life. Knife tossers. Freaks eating live insects. Clown parades. The way spangled trapeze artists toss each other and dangle virtually at the big-top peak without blinking, and the way tightrope walkers teeter, holding parasols and penitence; they swing and grab ankles and tiptoe and wobble and each accepts that they may fall. There's usually a net underneath, of course, but it's a long way down nonetheless. I've almost lulled myself to sleep on the couch when I hear footsteps on the front porch. I open the door with such a lack of caution I'm tempted to close it and try again, like I was in a cartoon sitcom where none of the other characters would notice. I must be getting slap-happy. My business partner of three years stands at the bottom of the porch stairs, shadowed and shivering. Suddenly, I feel like caffeine has been injected directly into my brain; Scully never makes social calls, and I assume her arrival now is one I'll probably regret viciously by morning. ~~~ "I need to make sure she got out okay." "Who?" As usual, I can never catch up to Scully. "My mother." Ah, the impenetrable Mrs. Scully. "How do you propose we find out? Going back is going to be awfully tricky." Aside from the good chance we'd be executed for disobeying our superiors, there is the good chance that we'd be killed by so-called accident just traveling to her mother's house. Half of me desires very much to cut Scully with the reality of our situation. Venturing out for a goodbye visit to mom would entail literally walking through land mines. My other half feels nervousness draw a chilly finger down my spine. If she's serious, she'll go. Which means I'll go too. But I really don't want to. Scully pulls her jacket around her tightly. "Oh. Well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow then." No argument? No thinly-veiled contempt? She actually leaves, head bowed slightly against the refreshed snowfall. Confused, I chalk this minor encounter up to sheer exhaustion and return to my dry couch. I should not be surprised when I startle awake early in the a.m. hours at the answering machine's beep, a tinny, familiar voice on the message saying, "She's gone home," and zip else. I'm not surprised, but it's like wading into an ocean of glaciers just the same. ~~~ The house remains, stoic and eerie. By the time I reach the second floor, I've replayed a dozen horror movie scenarios involving me losing more limbs. I drop the smart-ass attitude when I spot her. She is dwarfed in the room of cherry furniture, ivory against the burgundy bed post. The morning swallows her. Mrs. Scully is nowhere to be found, not that I thought she would be. Scully rounds on me, meaning, I think, to scream; she's inhaling oxygen and dust almost asthmatically. I don't know what to do, have never known what to do where's she's concerned except fight against her, or with her, or for her. But I don't know what I'm fighting. She does not scream. I think we may have used all the words in the world. All that's left is anger and ache. I could kill her, I suppose, and it might be mercy. If I ever knew the distinction between right and wrong, I don't anymore. I have not touched her since Mulder died. Touching her might be an omen, I think. I am not supposed to touch her. I do know this. And I have never claimed to understand her mind, much less her heart, but she has become my truth. I hate and love her in equal measure, and there is little room left for me in that duality. ~=~=~=~ "Is this complicated?" he asked, his hand still tangled in her hair. The back of her head was hot and damp, and he recognized how quickly he could snap her neck. "No," she said. She wanted to trace his jaw on newsprint in charcoals, to smear out the hard curve with her fingertips. There wasn't anything soft where she was right then. Nothing palatable. "No," she repeated, "this is easy." He might have nodded in agreement. She wasn't sure. He looked out the window. The shadows of airplanes swooped over the lawn like ghosts. She frowned; they were flying too low again. The new pilots weren't as well trained as the first batches. The new pilots weren't expected to win, however, only slow down the process. They were the paperwork of a brand new bureaucracy. He moved his thumb across her forehead lightly. She looked up at him, surprised he was still capable of something that would have, once upon a time, been considered tender. He had the advantage here, could expose her, turn her out, push her away. He released her head. "It will be soon, won't it?" He imagined her as a little girl, asking in the smallest possible voice, her arms wrapped around a huge stuffed teddy bear. "Sure," he said, the confident adult. "It will be within hours." Bitter little shards in her throat; she could have choked. She turned around to walk to the door. He caught her wrist. /Cold/, he thought. /All her bones are icicles/. "If this had ever been simple, would you have really stayed this long?" She thought about it. She pushed the sleeves of her sweater down. He had let go of her wrist but it was ringed lightly pink, the first bracelet she'd been given in years. "Probably not," she decided. "I like a challenge. I like to prove how smart I am," she answered in a light tone. "Keep trying," he said, smirking. "Maybe you'll outwit them yet." "Maybe I'll outwit you too," she said. She smiled, as though they were joking, as though laughter was right at the surface, like sunshine threatening to topple the horizon. ~~~ She had expected the shrapnel noise, and the way the bombs seemed to explode in slow-motion, monster chrysanthemums of ash. She was almost disappointed that the fires hadn't burnt longer, lovely autumn mustards and saffron flames, white at the edges. She had not expected the blank silences that followed every attack. Debris and smoke hissed as it fell into the trees, and then hushed. In the cemetery soundlessness, she wondered if even speaking would cause landslides of wreckage, an avalanche of everything broken and discarded, burying the few things still whole, as though they'd been living in a landfill all along. He, actually, hadn't been impressed by the silence, since to him noises rose scepter-like from each abandoned building. At the corner of their street, an ice cream truck lay overturned, the double-headed speaker suspended over the windshield still, in his mind, playing some pre-recorded festival tune, pipe organ pops and whistles, macabre merry-go-round music. When he heard that, on his way to find her, the sensation -- of being a small child again, running up to the van, coins rattling, hand outstretched for a cone of steely sherbet -- curled in his stomach; he nearly threw up. Future things, unpredicted or foreseen suspiciously, once full of fear, had long since ceased to frighten him. He understood intensely that it was much more terrifying to be possessed by the past, by something lost without hope of retrieval. ~~~ "The rosary," she answered, when he asked what she was rummaging through the nightstand for. "Mom used to keep one beside every bed, in case we needed . . ." Her voice became muffled behind the bed as she knelt to look in the bottom drawer. "Funny, my mother always just used night-lights." "What?" He wasn't making sense again. "You know, 'to light your way.' I bet your mom said things to you kids like, 'Never forget to walk in the light.'" He imagined her mother dropping the rosaries like uncoiled snakes into their hands. He made a melodramatic praying gesture, his hands pressed together in a pointed steeple, his eyes scanning the ceiling. "I guess my mother wasn't as concerned about our souls as she was that we'd stub our toes when we got up to pee in the middle of the night." She almost chuckled, but achieved more of a hoarse, wet gasp. Her eyes stung. She needed to leave, to first find the rosary, with its marble-cold, razor-like icons, with guilt and sin pressed onto every bead, and leave. Get away from him before he ripped her head off her shoulders. He must have noticed her panicky look, or the way her hands shook. He crossed the room and started opening drawers in the secretary. She stood up. "I think I should go," she said. "Go where? Where are you going to go?" He opened a satin-covered box. No rosary, but ten years worth of receipts from department store lingerie. /Her mother must have gone through bras like Kleenex/, he thought. "I don't know. Someplace else." "Nothing's safe. You'd be killed instantly. Civilians stupid enough to walk outside are bonus points." He paused to watch her. She was reaching out to touch a figurine on the shelf next to the door. The ceramic boy held a ceramic stick while standing on a ceramic lawn, and a ceramic dog an inch away begged on his hind legs. "If we stay here, we have a much better chance of surviving. You know they've already finished with this part of the city. They're moving on." "Do you think she made it to the border safely?" she asked, already knowing the truth. "We'll probably never find out," he said, not unkindly. "You knew this was coming." "Doesn't matter what I knew. What I know. I wish she was here." "I know, and I'm sorry. But your mother's strong, she'll be fine." /Maybe we'll be fine too/, he didn't say. "What about your contact?" "She knows where we are. She's the only one who knows, actually. She said she'd try to communicate with us in a few days, weeks. Whenever. If she could." If. He wanted someone to tell him when small words and daydreams had rebelled and become more powerful than facts and gunfire. They stopped talking. The floor growled, the walls trembled. Manufactured lightning flickered outside and shredded the quiescent grayness of the room. She took three steps forward and grabbed his right hand. He stood shock-still and felt her pulse, threading fast and warm, through her palm. /Melting/, he thought, and the idea that she would puddle at his feet like some swooning, glossy-eyed, fear-struck teenager, was so inane and hysterical that he thought he might cry. ~~~ Later, she said, "I would have stayed no matter what." She paused. "This is all I know." He might have smiled. She wasn't sure. "As if I ever gave you a choice." This was simple. So. The airplanes had crashed beyond the neighborhood; the soldiers were asleep and hemorrhaging. No one was knocking on the front door, no one was searching for them. She was breathing softly, her head on his shoulder. His fingers were in her hair again. They stared out the window, at the wind, at the lilting glow simmering from miles away, like the lights from a carnival. ~=~=~=~