"Nostalgia"
By Viridian5
6/25/02

RATING: NC-17; Mulder/Krycek. If m/m interaction bothers you, leave now.
SPOILERS: "Terma."
SUMMARY: Mulder finds answers in unusual places.
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: The Basement. Anywhere else too, as long as you ask me first.
FEEDBACK: can be sent to Viridian5@aol.com.
DISCLAIMERS: All things X-Files belong to Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions, and 20th Century Fox. No infringement intended. Suing me would be a waste of time.
NOTES: Garbage’s Version 2.0 had a big role in getting this going. It’s an album that always makes me think of M/K.
Thanks to LaT for read-through and helping me see that my original title was best.
The Dew Drop Inn actually exists. They welcome fishermen, or so their sign often said.

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"Nostalgia"
By Viridian5
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Sitting hunched in a booth, Mulder stared into his coffee and let the facts, faces, and names shuffle through his head randomly, trying to let the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. It was when you unfocused your eyes and mind, threw away your expectations and jumped the rails, that the picture often became clear. Words and pictures flickered past him as he thought of the bloodied stone figure 8s in the woods, the disappearances, the local high school kids with their histories of alcoholism and drug addiction, time, youth, future/no future....

The kids had nowhere to go and nothing to do here. No future. Did that have something to do with what was going on? Figure 8s could be symbols for infinity. Mulder could almost taste a pattern now.

A dark shadow, someone, sat across from him. "Is this seat taken?" Krycek.

Krycek?

"What the hell are you doing here?" Mulder asked.

"Maybe I was in town and just wanted to say hi."

"At about 2:30 a.m. in Greentown, Pennsylvania. You were drawn by the charms of the largest man-made lake in the United States, which is about 20 miles away from where we are now anyway? You wanted to commune with truckers? What?"

"Are you saying that Lake Wallenpaupack has no charms for you, Mulder?"

Mulder snorted.

"I didn’t say that was the reason." Krycek’s mouth could be quirked in a smile or a smirk; it all depended on what angle you looked at it.

"I could take you in."

"You and what army, Mulder? It looks like even Scully is somewhere else, sleeping the sleep of the just. You’re tired. I can take you one-handed."

"The way you’d have to take me."

Krycek just shrugged, serene. Nothing Mulder ever said seemed to dent Krycek’s composure, piss him off, anymore. He missed the puppyish agent. And the desperate roughtrade renegade. And the.... Krycek continually shifted into new roles and facades, like Mulder’s mind shifted. Lately Krycek had become colder, stiller, but tonight he seemed warm, nearly human.

"Does this case have anything to do with the conspiracy?" Mulder asked.

"If it did, do you think I’d tell you?"

Mulder had a headache of near migraine proportions, something he’d been getting a lot lately. In his more morbid moments he wondered if he had a brain tumor, and the poetic justice of it appealed to him in a dark way. "What am I: your job?"

"Sometimes. Right now, you’re my hobby. It’s not like there’s much else to do around here. Is that any good?"

"What?"

"Your spaghetti."

Mulder had almost forgotten about it. He spun a tight web of meat-studded spaghetti strands around the tines of his fork, then put it in his mouth mechanically. "It’s good. Meaty." Although sometimes it looked too much like the remains he and Scully had examined today. Mulder ignored that.

"I would hope so."

"Will you be ordering anything?" the waitress asked Krycek.

"Spaghetti with meat sauce and a Coke."

"Separate checks," Mulder said.

Krycek gave him a wise-ass smile, then said, "Thanks, Anne."

"Sure, Alex," she answered as she left.

"Come here often?" Mulder asked.

"You might have noticed that there isn’t all that much around here. The lighting’s dim, and they keep refilling your coffee until you leave. Speaking of not much around here, where are you staying?"

"You don’t know? C’mon."

"I want to hear you say it."

"The Dew Drop Inn."

Krycek smiled again, but this one was open, even if it did have a tinge of wise-ass.

Mulder continued, "We’re lucky it’s an off season, because otherwise it would have been full up with fishermen."

"Admit it: you pick these places just to tick off Scully."

"I’m helping her hone her skills. She’s reaching the point where she can kill a man with her eyebrow."

It actually hurt to be sitting here, bantering, with Krycek. He wanted to tell him to stop pretending to be a human being. Hell, he wanted the good guys and the bad guys to stay constant and be easily recognizable, and it wasn’t like he got that either.

He had a weird relationship with Krycek. It reminded him of this cartoon where a wolf and dog do battle over a flock of sheep, with the wolf trying to steal them away and always being thwarted by the sheepdog. But at the end of the day the wolf and dog both punch out at the clock and say a friendly farewell and see you tomorrow.

Considering that the conspiracy was part and parcel of the government, it made Mulder wonder which of them was the wolf and which the dog. He guessed it depended on what the sheep were a metaphor for.

He and Krycek weren’t always on the clock when they met. The worst problems came when one of them was and one wasn’t, and it wasn’t like they each announced when they were on duty....

"You don’t look good, Mulder. Somebody should cut off your caffeine. There’s this thing called ‘sleep’ that you should try."

He could count his sheep. Oh, he was too tired. "Sleep’s for sissies."

Krycek’s food arrived, and he dug into it with more appetite than Mulder did. They seemed almost friendly eating together in silence, with Krycek eating and sneaking almost concerned looks at him while Mulder stared into space.

Mulder knew where this was going. He just didn’t know if he should stop it.

At about 3 a.m., a wave of noisy people walked in. At Mulder’s aggrieved look, Krycek said, "The bars close at 3 here."

"That’s inhuman."

"Tell me about it. You want to leave? It’s just going to get noisier as people straggle in."

Mulder felt like he had tiny drunken people smacking his head with mallets. "Yeah."

Krycek waved Anne over. Once they had their checks and set down tips, Mulder took another quick swallow of his coffee before they went to the cashier.

He felt more awake once they walked outside, the cool, somehow thickly green air seeming to flow through his brain, stirring it up. It smelled sweet. He could hear the occasional truck flying down the nearby highway. The stars looked so close and plentiful out here in a way they never did in the city. At his most tired, Mulder got paranoid about stars sometimes, but it was better to see them.

It could be the motto for his whole life.

When Mulder checked his backseat before opening his car door, Krycek gave him an approving look. The lights of the nearby gas station and the restaurant parking lot fitfully illuminated him in two different shades of light, white and yellow-orange, with velvety shadows.

"You’re almost a Creamsicle," Mulder found himself saying. Maybe he wasn’t awake after all, just high from the mountain air. He felt far too open.

"Okay, I’m driving you back."

"Like hell." He hadn’t taken his keys out yet, so Krycek was out of luck.

Krycek pushed him back against his car and rooted one-handed in Mulder’s pockets, using his prosthesis as a wall on Mulder’s other side. Mulder refused to enjoy the frisking or move, though he flinched when Krycek’s hand ghosted along his gun.

Krycek finally pulled Mulder’s keys loose and shook them jauntily. "Get in. On the passenger side."

"Sometimes you sound a lot like Scully."

"I knew you were a kinky bastard, Mulder."

"What about your car?"

Krycek just smiled. So he wasn’t working alone.

Mulder sighed and obeyed. Maybe he’d find out something this way.

Krycek drove well one-handed. The rental car being an automatic helped. The miles back passed in a kind of blur of cool, sweet darkness studded with bright light bounced off reflective guides and signs at the sides of the road.

At the junction Krycek turned left instead of right, and it took a minute longer than it should have for Mulder to catch it. "Krycek--"

"I’m taking you to my place."

He didn’t ask why, being too tired to achieve that level of denial.

It only took three minutes to arrive. Mulder could have walked to Krycek’s motel from his. Fucker.

Krycek parked in the lot and tossed Mulder the keys back as they left the car. Mulder caught them and followed him almost mindlessly, letting the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. In the dim light of one desk lamp, Krycek’s room was larger and a little more modern than his, although the almost acrid scent of air conditioning and the neutral color scheme matched. It could be any motel room anywhere.

When Krycek turned to face him, he just kept walking forward until they locked together, body to body, erection to erection. Mulder sucked at Krycek’s neck, tasting salt, smelling leather, sweat, metal, and plastic. And something else, something like soil, clay. Had Krycek been digging somewhere? The hand clenching on his ass sent his thoughts scattering.

They ripped at each other’s clothes, and at one point Mulder’s shirt gave in a way that suggested a button had been torn loose. He didn’t care. It chastened him for a moment that he knew exactly how to unfasten the prosthetic arm’s straps by now. He mouthed the smooth, raised scars on Alex’s stump, enjoying Alex’s twitches and gasps. It should have been him, it should have been his.... Sometimes he felt like Alex was his shadow, the him who took the outside scars while he got the inside ones. Though his forehead should look like Frankenstein’s monster’s by now after all the times his head had been knocked around and broken open.

Hot skin to skin, they rocked together desperately, Alex murmuring as Mulder occasionally fisted his cock. It all felt too raw, with even the scratchy feel of the bedspread against his back and ass amping up his lust and desperation. Mulder came when Alex bit down on the base of his neck where it met his shoulder and whimpered as Alex pulled away, then opened his legs as he felt a slick finger ghost over his hole.

"Yes," Mulder hissed. "Need this...."

"I know."

He pushed down on the fingers opening him up from the inside, welcoming the burn and pressure and sparks of pleasure. "Now. Fuck me now." He needed to be filled.

"Demanding as usual." Was that a smirk or smile? It depended on your angle.

Alex thrust in cleanly and swiftly, making Mulder yell at the sudden intrusion. Yes, this was exactly what he wanted. He locked his legs around Alex and found a rhythm they both liked. Mulder wallowed in the deep sensations and Alex’s weight on him. For a while, he felt complete. But eventually Alex’s thrusts became more ragged, faster, before he moaned and let go with one last shot that Mulder felt at the back of his teeth as the headboard hit the wall.

Alex pulling out felt too raw too. No future.... Mulder passed out into sleep with Alex sucking on his collarbone.

He woke up alone on top of the bedspread. Oh damn, it was 10 a.m., late. But Mulder felt good. Achy, but good. Clear.

As he went off to shower at high speed, he found no trace of Alex in the room at all, but he hadn’t really expected to. But Alex had left Mulder’s gun and keys, both unmolested, on the counter.

The shirt had lost a button near the bottom, past where it would be tucked into his pants. Its collar would hide his hickeys.

Once dressed, Mulder ran down to the front desk and flashed his badge to get information out of the attendant. Alex had checked into the room three days ago as Valentin Turla and checked out an hour ago. He couldn’t have known that Mulder would show up yesterday. Could he?

As Mulder got into his car and started to figure out what he would tell Scully, he knew that he would try to interview David Farrell again today. That kid was the lynchpin somehow. Mulder was certain of it.

Whatever anyone could say about his methods, they worked for him.

**********************THE END***********************