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A Boy and His Rat by C.M. Decarnin Part 2

It wasn't as if he'd never wanted anything that didn't want him. School, training, a place in the game. Holding on by the skin of his teeth to what the Consortium had.

Women. The psychos and traitors glommed onto him like limpet mines, the ones worth having sensed something in him and ran a mile. All he ever had time for anyway was a quick fuck, that probably gave them a clue.

That was a game he never understood the actual rules to, till now, when he suddenly understood everything. It was so different from what he had imagined. It wasn't a matter of selling someone on his integrity and devotion; it was a matter of actually having those things; being them. Inside. Whatever Mulder thought, whatever Krycek couldn't make him believe, the winning hand was what he had in his heart.

Prioritizing with his back digging into the burners of the gas stove and Mulder's body rigid and hot all over him wasn't easy, but Priority One came to him with more certainty than it might have to most: Mulder needed the world to live in. Luckily, Krycek was his best chance of keeping it. Not a good chance, but no one knew more than Krycek about what they were up against.

Priority Two would have to be Mulder's friends. He drew his strength from them, he needed them. A weakness, but a part of Mulder, to be protected. Leaving them out of the equation not a mistake he would make again.

Priority Three --

-- Jesus God.

Mulder had moved against him and unmistakably felt the hard-on jutting along under his jeans; after a hesitant instant, pressed down upon it, and every thought Krycek had evaporated. His head relaxed back and to the side, his mouth open, his eyes closed. His breath came preciously, as if directly cradling the sensation that held him in its sweet bonds. Oh god. Oh Mulder.

He had thought he was open before, but now he was nothing but the honeyed heat Mulder's movements propagated in him. His own body moved, helpless. He felt Mulder's fingers against his cheek and shuddered, felt Mulder's lips touch the corner of his mouth and gasped, and then the hot wet point of Mulder's tongue touched between his lips and he came, pure and clean as a thirteen-year-old at the first hand along his virgin cock.

He didn't know how long he'd been staring off into space. His most organized thought was to hope Mulder didn't want him to reciprocate, because he couldn't move.

Mulder could make him come with a kiss?

He was in deep, deep trouble.

So what else was new.

He dragged focus across his field of vision. There. Mulder looking down at him, analytical, intrigued, shrewd.

Mulder said, "And I thought I was hard up for dates."

Krycek laughed, genuine as a boy.

He was still smiling as he asked, "Why did you do that?"

Mulder still looked wary, sizing him up. Profiling. "To see if you'd back down."

Krycek's smile faded. "You don't know me very well."

"I doubt if very many people do."

"You'd be surprised how word gets around. Need someone who doesn't draw the line, who's not afraid to lie down with dogs and get up with a senator's dick in his throat? Put Krycek in."

The edge of derision came back into Mulder's eyes.

"You don't believe me." Krycek laughed, short and hard.

"I want to believe."

"I bet." Mulder would savor the image of him on his knees, or better yet on his belly, getting just what was coming to him. No use bursting his bubble. Most powerbrokers had other ideas of what a hard boy in a black leather jacket was good for.

Mulder ought to know that, with his fancy psych degree. Maybe he really did want to believe.

You want to kill me, Fox? Or...

Fox. He tried the name secretively. Next he'd be writing "Alex K. Mulder" in the front of his schoolbooks. He remembered the many-flavored shock and strange thrill the first time he'd seen that done with his own last name. Even then snooping in his classmates' desks, trying to fathom what and who they were, that was so different from him.

Another curiosity, much younger, was in the hazel eyes. Mulder asked, "You do deep throat?"

He suddenly felt a strong identification with Dana Scully. "God Mulder, you're such a -- guy."

"I'm only thinking it will come in handy where you're going."

"You wouldn't take me in. You know I wouldn't make it through the first night."

"You're losing me. I don't see the cause and effect relationship between those two ideas."

Krycek said softly, "I don't think you could watch me burn."

"I'd bring marshmallows, Krycek."

Hot and screaming. Is that how you want me, Mulder?

He learned something more. Mulder needed to hate. Needed something to hit and to take it out on, all those years of frustration, stopped dead at every turn he took, smacked down, deflected, circumvented, checkmated. The lies making every step a tectonic nightmare, nowhere to stand that might not shift and crush him. It must be so good to have a sure simple hate, a thing to hit, hurt, hammer into the dirt guilt free -- Now that Krycek's life had been spun away from him like a toy slapped out of his hands, he needed too... The burning faith in Mulder's cramped, almost cringing body, the searing pain never far behind his eyes, probably there since the night he had been forced to watch his little sister taken to god alone knew what horror, the blaze of intent, the anguish, adamantine -- It held Krycek like a magnet, now that he had no master.

Even now Mulder was letting his anger rise. "Do you even know what it means, that you killed my father? Does that have any significance for you?"

Lie?

Mulder needed truth like a desert needs water.

He shook his head fractionally, holding Mulder's drill-bit eyes. "All a father was to me was someone who used me as his own personal Acu-Jak. Till I was too big to be completely helpless." His voice twisted under close control. "Then he auctioned me on Saturday nights. Left me to the highest bidder." Crying and pleading while his father was miles away, fucking, it turned out, Alexei's little brother Kolya. Terrified in the hands of strangers with unspeakable passions. Puking his guts out at two in the morning when the highest bidder was the three or four men hot and cold enough to pool their resources for the beautiful boy they all wanted.

The Black Oil tearing itself out of his cell structure...

That was the fucking trouble with truth. It could seize you.

Mulder's eyes were still pinning him.

"Well. That apple didn't fall far from the tree."

"I never sold you!"

"You rat-assed moron! You sold yourself!"

Something filled him, like a balloon, or a cock the size of his entire body, transfixing. A money trail. Rubles changing hands, the hand accepting cash became his own, the men who bought him only cold, at last, but ever cruel, the passions he could satisfy more esoteric, till only a consortium could meet his price... His father's hands firmly holding him in position--

"You did what he told you to do. You became what he told you you were."

He realized it was a voice outside himself. It had felt like his own mind.

Mulder. Psyching him. Turning him. Pushing it. Ramming a truth so big up him it could never be withdrawn.

It was Mulder's hands on him. Mulder holding him down upon this really -- really -- painful stovetop. He couldn't stand the pain. He moved, his mouth twisting. His voice came out a cry. "Maybe your father was different! But I don't think so!" His teeth clamped down against the pain, he ground out, "The only difference was he sold your sister instead of you."

Kolya --

He'd been twelve when he'd carried Kolya out of the house, and obstinately walked five hundred miles with his brother in his arms, before he stopped at a place he hoped was safe, and left him there, telling him never, ever to reveal to anyone his true name. He hadn't gone back. Partly fear of someone making the connection between the two of them and their father, partly fear of what he might find. Sometimes he pictured Kolya dead of neglect in a tiny grave. But he taught himself to think he'd been adopted, loved, grown into a normal kid -- married, maybe made his big brother Alexei an uncle... He should have gone back when he was older... but by that time, it was just safer if no one in the world ever knew Alexei Krycek had a brother. He wondered if Kolya even remembered him...

Mulder, oddly enough, hadn't hit him yet.

"You had someone too..."

Krycek froze up. How? How did he get that? He stared up into Mulder's eyes -- the eyes of the FBI, the U.S. government, its allies, its enemies -- and his mouth stayed a straight closed line. A second later he realized he should have looked puzzled, or laughed, or --

I'm a conduit. Straight to every hell humans build, straight to an alien slaveship, death by fire, life as unimaginable horror. No! Not Kolya!

He hardly ever even thought about Kolya. How the hell had they got into this? Sliding down into his own past, right back where he came from, as if everything he had done since then had been for nothing. How had Fox Mulder brought him here?

Fox had kissed him and suddenly his little brother was in his arms, trusting and cranky and precious beyond everything.

Krycek blushed.

The look in Mulder's face went beyond strange. He had followed every nuance of expression as Krycek leaped from name-rank-and-serial-number stubborn to realization of his mistake, to fear, questioning desperation, memory, softness -- but surely he couldn't know the meaning of the blush, so red it felt like it was burning him, deeper and deeper -- he hardly knew the meaning of it himself. Except -- the theft of Kolya from his father had been the last, the only, act of his life that could be called selfless -- heroic. His blush deepened still. The feel of the baby in his arms had turned him inside out, made him want to give everything, sacrifice everything, brave anything, even the horrible, terrible wrench of leaving him alone to live or die at the mercy of strangers. He had walked across Russia in a strangely erotic haze, ignoring hunger, cold, darkness so Kolya wouldn't be afraid, doing whatever it took (for the last time, he'd vowed to himself -- a vow broken so many times since) to keep them alive, immolating himself on an altar of baby innocence. And then he'd left him; because he knew he'd been fingerprinted when he started school; that hadn't happened to Kolya yet. And because he feared his own cowardice, that he'd break down if anyone threatened him, the way he always cringed before his father; that he'd confess, and if he and Kolya were together when that happened, they would both be sent back into the monster's jaws; he would never be able to plead, to justify why he had run away: that they had -- that men had -- he would die, he would die of shame -- he couldn't. Even if he could bring himself to say the words, surely they would still send him back. He was bad, bad deep inside, only bad men wanted him, no one else would. He'd explained why he had to leave. He'd told Kolya he had to be a man now and not cry. When the moment came it was the hardest thing he'd ever done, leaning in like a grownup and kissing Kolya's soft cheek, then smiling, as he said, "Good luck, comrade."

Oh god.

Oh god he'd forgotten.

Completely, completely forgotten that --

He felt himself slowly, faultline by faultline, shatter.

End of Part 2

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