Pairing:  M/K

Not Your Usual Warning:  Kinky incorporeal sex acts.  Don't try this at
home.  Professional drivers on a closed course.  Autoerotic asphyxiation is
the single most dangerous sex act in the world.

Other than that, there's probably nothing in this story that will kill you.

Did I say "autoerotic"?  Mulder is asking himself the same question...

Wanted

by C. M. Decarnin
 
 
Agent Mulder was hugging Agent Scully.  They were just standing there,
hugging each other, and though Scully was too small to give a very
enveloping hug, it felt good, very good, to be held in someone's arms and
hold someone in return.  Finally Scully let go, smiled up at him, and said
good-bye.  He watched her walk away, sturdy and determined as she always
was, and wished she didn't have to go on her vacation just as they'd reached
the end of a murder case.  It was better when they could hang out and talk
it over.  Especially as this one had involved, about halfway through, a
shooting death, that they had witnessed.

Mulder had been present at more violent deaths than anyone in the entire
Bureau, except maybe the guys at Waco.  It was always such a shock.  You
went on, you did your job, but...

He walked back to his car.

All the rest of the day the thought recurred.  The man had been far from an
innocent bystander, but Mulder had gotten to know him a little, seen him
wave good-bye to his kids, eat a sandwich, buy a TV Guide.

He'd never get to watch the shows it listed.

One day they would all miss next week's shows.  That chilling truth didn't
make it easier to see another's life come to an end.  He was so unsettled he
suddenly got up and left when he heard the trampling of the general exodus
overhead, at five o'clock, rather than sit alone with his file cabinets.

On the way home he stopped at the Giant to pick up a few groceries, getting
some fruit and vegetation as a homage to his absent partner.  She probably
wouldn't give him many points for the iceberg lettuce, though.  He tossed
the bag in the back.

As he slid behind the steering wheel he felt an arm come around him, someone
lean into him from the passenger side, cover his front, impossibly, and
nibble his left ear.  He started skittishly and ducked away from the tickly
sensation before he registered how good it felt, big body up against him,
licking, now, going on along his neck, fingers sliding under his jacket,
touching in his armpit, through his shirt.  Oh.  That felt so...  The hand
slid up onto his shoulder, pushing his jacket back, while licking stopped
and someone kissed him.  It was a hot kiss, only a little tongue but a lot
of passion.  Mulder was sort of electrocuted into stillness, his arms
stretched out a little to either side -- he probably looked like he was
having a heart attack, if anyone was watching.  The fact that there was
simply not room for Krycek between Mulder and the steering wheel didn't
seem to bother Krycek's ghost a bit.

"At least," he said when he could get a word in, "let me shut the car door."
He reached out and closed it.  The body on him shifted, he heard a sound
like breath, and the window beside him steamed up.  The next moment in the
circle of fogged glass appeared the print of lips.

Mulder smiled all over.  Krycek moved off him, but only into the next seat.
Mulder knew this because the shoulder-belt lifted, fastened itself, and
stuck out as if around somebody's chest.  Mulder lifted his eyes to heaven
and turned on the ignition.  He sat there a minute, then let insinuation
enter his voice, and asked, "What are you wearing?"  He got no answer.

Krycek's ghost was a model passenger, sat up straight and didn't distract
him with conversation.  At one point it turned the radio on just in time to
hear "Love Shack" from the beginning, and turned the radio off again when it
was over.  Then Mulder started to feel something on his knee.  Like a hand.

A left hand.

He almost panicked.  He was in a car with a strange ghost!

The hand slid slyly onto the inside of his thigh, like a high-school kid
fondly hoping the girl wouldn't notice incremental changes.  He noticed.
His cock noticed also.

There was really no reason, he thought calmingly, for a ghost to be
one-armed; it was a soul.  Or something.

The hand had only made about half the length of Mulder's thigh by the time
they turned into Hegal Place, but Mulder had been aware of every lecherous
millimeter and felt as if he were sweating deliciously, while his greater
crotch area tingled with happy anticipation.  He parked on the street.  He
noticed the passenger-side door didn't open, but nevertheless he felt
something jostle into him as he climbed the porch steps, and when he bent
slightly to put the key in the door, a hand -- a left again -- settled
between his legs.  He straightened convulsively and lurched in through the
door.

"Krycek!" he whispered agonizedly, his back against the wall.  A hand
brushed his hair back soothingly.  He mumbled, "I don't have that much of a
reputation left to lose, I guess, in this building --"  Krycek pressed
against him, fore-playing his groin with movement, commandeering his mouth.
When he felt two arms encircle him, he jerked hard at the eroticism, and
Krycek held him more tightly, the harder he moved, till he suddenly felt
himself surrender, into utter desire; it was Krycek's idea that he move, he
was ready to spread himself there in the entry, whatever way the ghost
suggested.

Pressure pushed him toward the elevator, into it, out on the fourth floor,
to his apartment.  Kissed all the way.  Ghost-tongue played with his,
friendly and mating-like; as he melted under it, willing, wanting.  He heard
a click and his door opened and they were in.  His keys dropped on the hall
table.  His suit-jacket started to be pushed back off his shoulders and he
arched out at just the implication of his being peeled of his protective
layer, of him laid bare, to whatever the ghost called on him to accept.  The
jacket fell off, his tie was gently tugged loose, with many tiny tugs and
slidings, the tail finally slipped out through the knot and was discarded on
his shoulder as shirt buttons started to unbutton of their own accord.

The shirt pulled to either side, the stripe of nakedness touched with
ethereal stroking, before his pants unzipped.  He choked out a moaning sound
in rhythm with the sway his hips had taken up, pleas in both the song and
motion.  Kissing moved off his mouth and down his neck, along his
collarbone, detouring onto both his nipples, and down onto his belly as his
pants were slid seductively all down his legs, and hands were slid behind
his knees, and the length of his hard needing cock was greeted with sweet
kissing.  His moaning escalated into breathing, pure, caught gasps.
Krycek's fingers trailed down the backs of his thighs, encouraging bentness
to his knees.  Then Krycek pushed Mulder's thighs shut around him, pulled
Mulder forward onto him, held on, and stood up.  Mulder was lifted into the
air, by nothingness, and carried, turning, by the ghost into his bedroom,
onto his bed, shoes and pants still prisoning his feet, shirt wantonly open.
Invisibility straddled him.  He felt himself lying there, his skin flushed
with warmth, limbs sprawled, clothing half-off, dishevelled, ready to be
despoiled, but there was no lover into whose eyes he could look pleadingly,
no arm he could reach up to stroke, no gaze of answering desire.  He felt
his cock held, and the tip touch something -- part something -- enter
something -- exquisitely -- Krycek's hands came back to him, stroking gently
up his chest as the ghost sank onto him, endlessly, and Mulder's heels dug
into the waterbed, sloshing him gently under the onslaught of Krycek's
envelopment.  Mulder pushed himself upward with his feet, feeling a
ravishing slide of impalement thrill down his cock, softness touch his
balls, press down, push him back onto the bed.

The hands on his chest moved up, took the ends of the tie that had clung
onto his shirt.  It was a favorite, an abstract with squarish blobs, what
Scully had described to him as pinks and peach and pale yellows on dusky
lavender, that had got him possibly more censure in the Bureau hierarchy
than any case he'd ever pursued.  One end dragged over his lips, silkily.
Then it went around under the back of his neck and out on the other side,
closing a silk band around his throat.

Plumes of hot shame swept his skin, burning his face.

Krycek kissed him.  Kissed his hot face, kissed his mouth communingly.

Krycek knew how he...  He couldn't even finish the thought.

Krycek kissed his throat.  Cupped strong hands on his face.  Kissed his
forehead.

How could he even know it was Krycek, now that it was a ghost with two
hands?  He tried to turn his face away, but the mouth was laid on his again,
the lips gently demanding, loving, moving on his mouth coaxingly, and the
tongue touching his in invitation, solace.  The mouth said a thousand silent
things to him, all of them ending in "I love you."

Only one ghost could kiss like that.

Mulder's shame was taken like a precious gift, in understanding, into love.
The waterbed rocked him gently, as Krycek moved and made him move, the jut
of his cock massaged by every motion.

Krycek leaned forward, pulling partly off Mulder's cock, then sank back onto
it unbelievably, bringing Mulder's hips up off the bed to jam up, grind,
sink under pressure, till Krycek rocked away again, kiss still in Mulder's
compliant mouth.  His hips pushed up as Krycek pushed down again, making him
realize he wanted speed, a fuck rhythm, the maximum sensation all on that
small part of him.  But Krycek sat down on him, squirmily, and caught his
hand.  Distracted, trying to fuck in place without success, he felt the tail
of his tie knot around his wrist.  Hot breath on it, a hot kiss on his palm,
tongue licking heat on his lifeline; chill tickling up his arm, and through
his core.  The big end of his tie around his other wrist.  Held there by a
very hard ghost grip.  The invisible hands had him in bondage.

The weight on him raised, his cock dragged him after it, ineffectually, but
then the ensheathement lowered down on him and his push up achieved a thrust
of bliss.  The rhythm took him, owned his muscles, speeded, sweated him, lit
his pelvic cradle with sweet fire, Krycek sheathing him at killing angles,
each infinitesimal change a whole new universe of pleasure he barely touched
before it opened to another.  Trousers around his ankles limited him, he
could not move his arms, he wrenched and threshed and Krycek rode him
expertly, as if he were an unruly bronco able to buck and rear but not
escape.  He liked the idea of his cowboy, rammed up hard, thought he felt a
startled swerve backward and did it again, rapture soaking down through him
from the thrust that wouldn't let him stop, threw him into pulsing fucking
for the climax, then just as the massed pleasure broke and spilled, Krycek
pushed his wrists apart, tightening the silk tie hard around his throat.
His whole body coruscated with orgasm.  As his air was cut off he struggled,
tight muscles scintillating in floods of ecstasy at every thrust and wrench,
his defiant soul forced deep into its pleasure without forgiving, without
surrendering, without submitting to desire.  Trust no one.  He hit the end
of his oxygen, and blacked out.

In a matter of seconds he woke up again.  His silk tie was slipping from
beneath his neck.  It piled section by section at the end of the pillow, and
then with an unmistakable gesture of dismissal, was flicked off the edge of
the bed.

Mulder blushed.

What did some ghost know about taste in neckwear.

A smile ambushed his lips, and he looked around, confused into the depths of
his soul.  He couldn't feel the un-weight of the ghost, but he sensed it was
still there.  Sensed an attention.  Another blush overran him.  Without
thinking, he asked softly the one question he hadn't dared to want the truth
of.

"Are you real?"

Slowly, as if coming into focus from a totally diffused distant image,
Krycek appeared beside him.  He was lying on his side, head propped up on
his hand, observing Mulder.

"Why do you have your clothes on?" Mulder asked.

Krycek made a gesture like a flasher pulling aside his overcoat:  he was
naked, lounging there like a newly virgin houri spread out for Mulder's
delectation, relaxed, X-rated mischief in his eyes.  His body was --

-- beautiful.  Mulder wondered if it had looked that way in life.  Despite
all they had endured together, he had never seen his enemy and partner
naked.  Even in Tunguska.

Anguishedly glad it didn't show three terrible gunshot wounds.

Krycek closed his imaginary trenchcoat.  But instead of the gray FBI suit,
the clothes that appeared were jeans and, a moment later, after Mulder had
had time to relish the place where vulnerable belly disappeared under denim,
a t-shirt with the words "As is" across the front.  Mulder laughed, but it
turned into a wistful heartache.

"Just because I can see you doesn't make you real."

Krycek reached out and touched his hair, looking sad.  The last time Mulder
had seen his eyes unhappy --

He looked away.

"So Mulder.  Does that mean you missed me?"

The velvet voice started a shiver up his spine.

But Mulder wouldn't answer.  Wouldn't look at him.  He turned further away.

Krycek moved close up against his back, and took him in his arms.  "If you
go too deep into the nature of reality, Mulder, probably neither one of us
is all that real."  The voice, textured and flavored, like curls of
cinnamon bark, touched all Mulder's senses, even sight, as he heard the
deeply hidden smile that lurked Alex's intensity.  Humor, in him, was like
the play of a wolf, instinct with predation.  He leaned closer still, in
over Mulder's shoulder, and murmurred against his cheek, "I'm flattered that
you think I'm conjured up from your subconscious.  I didn't know I was in
there."

He didn't answer.  He hadn't known it either.

"You've trusted your own perceptions in the face of everything everyone told
you, Mulder.  Why not now?  If it's because you don't trust me, I think
there's a flaw somewhere in your reasoning.

"If I'm not real," he pointed out, when Mulder still said nothing, "I can't
very well be lying to you."

"It isn't right."  The words twisted out of him.

"Because I was a wicked man?  I'm not a man now, Fox."  The soft voice in
his ear said nothing he didn't know.  "Is that really it?  '...And your
quaint honor turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust...'  Mulder, tell me
you weren't saving it for marriage."

Silence.

"You didn't murder me.  You don't have to be hung by the neck until dead to
deserve an orgasm."

His silence filled with pain.

"Look at his eyes.  He'd already made up his mind.  Nothing you could have
said or done was going to stop him, Mulder."  The name was a caress.

Seeing, the thousandth time, the dark remorselessness of Skinner's eyes.

That wasn't the point.

He hadn't tried.

A kiss on the line of reddened skin under his jaw.  Another.  Kisses
followed the congested band where silk had strangled him.  Krycek kissed it
to the back of his neck.  "You're so forgiven, Mulder.  I don't want you to
die.  You know how dangerous this is."

A hundred forensic photographs

It just felt... freeing.

He hadn't thought about the symbolism.

The ridiculousness of that smacked him in the face like a wet mackerel.
Fox Mulder, Profiler to the Stars!

Krycek forgave him.

And it wasn't like he was ever going to need a noose again to get off, if
a hot spook kept coming around to ride his rocket.

"I always hated that poem," Mulder said grouchily.

"It's a piece of disingenuous crap," Krycek proffered readily.  "And god
knows you aren't playing hard to get.  You genuinely are hard to get.
When I finally got you hard, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven -- oh
wait, I had died and gone to heaven --"

"Is it too late to wish you back invisible again?"

"If Scully sees me will you believe?"

Abruptly silenced, Mulder felt himself strangely huddled down in the cage of
Krycek's arms.  "Scully is on vacation," he said, subdued.

"Hold that thought," Krycek said, gave him a little squeeze, and vanished.

Mulder sat up with a gasp, and felt around him.  The ghost had gone.

There was something sticky on him.  Semen or ectoplasm, one.  He shucked out
of his shoes and rucked-down pants, and shirt, put the laundry in the hamper
and the trousers over the back of a chair and went to get a washcloth.

His cell rang.

He put down the wet cloth like a loaded gun.

He ran down the hall and stared at his ringing suit-jacket on the foyer
floor.

He could just not answer it.

He picked up the jacket and patted it down like a suspect.  "Mulder," he
said when he got the phone to his ear.

"Mulder!  Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."  He started walking back toward the bedroom.  He was talking to
Scully on the phone naked, and he didn't feel embarrassed.  All he felt was
cold chills.  "What happened?"

"I don't know how to explain this, Mulder."

"Where are you?"

"I'm on the veranda of the Coco Point Lodge in Barbuda.  I..."  Mulder came
through the bedroom door and Krycek was leaning against the wall next to the
bed.  He had on a white tropical-weight suit with an open-collared shirt,
and sandals.  And a tan.  Set off by a natty straw hat with a wide
straw-fringed brim.  "Mulder I..."  There was a lip-chewing pause.  "I don't
know how to tell you this...  I just saw Alex Krycek."

Mulder let his head fall forward.

Scully's voice was a little higher than usual.  "It's evening here... just
before sunset... I was sitting in this incredible chaise longue, looking out
over the water, listening to the waves, and suddenly... there he was.  He
came out of nowhere.  Literally.  I'm sure I wasn't asleep...  He was just
there.  And he said to me, "Call Mulder."  Then he just looked at me for a
minute, and then he... he was gone.  Mulder..."

"Oh."  He didn't know what else to say.

"Mulder, are you sure you're all right?"

"Yeah.  It's... it's okay, Scully.  He was just trying to prove a point."

"What?"

"Krycek.  He's... here.  There.  And everywhere.  I guess."

"What?"

"Here, I'll put him on."

Krycek dropped his cool Island pose and made hand-waving erasure gestures in
the air, eyes wide.

"He doesn't want to talk to you.  Don't worry, I don't think he'll be back
there."

"I'm here for a whole week of peace and quiet, Mulder.  If I see him here
again he's going to get his ectoplasmic ass kicked."  There was a slight
pause.  "What's that sound?  It sounds like someone having hysterics."

"It's Krycek.  He's rolling around on the bed laughing."

"Rub it in, Mulder.  I know I must have dozed off, but honestly I could have
sworn --  It really is peaceful here, like another world.  In the daylight
the water is an incredible clear turquoise, the sand is white.  You should
have come."

"Way out of my price range."

"The chaise longue is wood slats.  It's shaped like a fish.  I'm drinking a
mint julep.  Next week I'm going to Ambergris Cays and learning to scuba
dive."

Her voice was dreamy and refreshed.

"I'm really glad you're having a good time.  Enjoy your blue water and white
sand."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm having a good time too.  In my own strange way.  See you in two weeks."
He clicked off, and smiled at Krycek sprawled out on the bed.

He looked like a kid in somebody's grown-up clothes.

The phrase Wanted, Dead or Alive, ran through Mulder's forebrain.

"I feel like Topper," he said.

"Now there's some subtext for you," Krycek teased.  "You think they had a
three-way going?"

"Why did you come back?"

Alex shrugged, arms spread wide on the bed.

"Tell me.  Make it make sense."

"You're the guy with the theories, Mulder."  His head was turned so he could
look lazily up right at Mulder's eyes.  "It was like... all there was was
this one thing I'd always wanted and never had...  There wasn't anything,
anywhere else, I wanted to go; and it was ...this."

"Why didn't you show yourself?"

Krycek's eyebrows peaked.  He smiled, without answering.  Mulder had a vivid
image of himself reacting to the unannounced appearance of an amorous,
though dead, Alex Krycek.

"So you're here because you're horny?"

"Don't play innocent, Mulder, I'm here because you're horny.  Or to
translate it from the Guy, lonely.  Sad.  Miserable."

Mulder's soul panicked, as his eyes prickled.

"Don't be afraid, I'm not going to burst into 'There's a Place for Us'."
And Mulder had to laugh, it was so exactly not what he was really afraid of.
Or not afraid of, any more, after he laughed.  He felt humbled.  The place
where the fear was had transformed, into a ball of golden warmth.  Someone
didn't want him lonely and sad and miserable.  He could... he could accept
that.  The wetness in his eyes now just a shine.

"The one thing I always wanted," Krycek said matter-of-factly, "was to make
someone I loved happy."

Mulder profiled, appalled, what that said about Krycek's childhood.  And
then heard the words, "I loved".  The traitor had had a strange way of
showing it.  He looked at Krycek lying there, open and defenseless.  A far
cry from any stance he had ever seen him in in life.

He said, "You had no clue, did you?"

"I told myself I was messing with your mind.  Turned out the mind I messed
with was my own.  Mata Hari Alex had intel on everything except himself."

"You said before, you'd died and gone to heaven.  How do you know it was
heaven?"

"Well, duh, Mulder."

Mulder felt a slow burn start on his cheeks.

"I never went toward the light, or through any Pearly Gates, if that's what
you mean.  I just had this sense of -- choice."

Mulder's cheeks burned.  "What was the other choice?"

"I don't know.  I didn't go that way.  It might have been -- all the
answers."

"And you chose this?"  It blurted out of him.

"Shocking, eh?"  Krycek grinned teasingly, and stretched his arms up above
his head.

It was.  That Krycek had had everything Mulder had ever wanted to know
within his grasp, and had given it up for --  It didn't seem possible.

"How come it took you so long?"

Krycek shrugged.  "It didn't seem long to me.  It felt just right."

"All of this could still just be in my fevered brain."  Scully's phone call
as easily hallucinated as the look of Krycek there upon his bed, rich and
luscious.  "Maybe I'm not Topper.  Maybe I'm Elwood P. Dowd."

Krycek looked up at him with bright, steady eyes.  "If you want," he said
softly.

Mulder's confusion spiked up into anger.  "Oh, don't give me that!  It's not
up to me if this is real or --"  He choked before the alternative.

"No."  Krycek stood up and took Mulder's face between his hands.  "All
that's up to you is what you believe."

Mulder felt himself shaking.

"If you don't believe it, Mulder, it doesn't matter if it's real.  You'll
still feel this pain.  And that's not what I'm here for."  Krycek's eyes as
he spoke looked into Mulder's, serious and brilliant with life.  They were,
Mulder suddenly realized, the most incredible color.  A color he had never
seen before.  It was deep, and beautiful, and not grey, or blue, or anywhere
near yellow, it was completely, utterly different from anything he had ever
seen in all his life, it enthralled him, it --

It was green.

"Oh my god."

He staggered back from sheer realization.

Krycek caught him from stumbling.

"I can see your eyes!"

"Hey, hey -- take it easy."

"I can see the color of your eyes!  I'm color-blind!  I'm red-green
color-blind!  Your eyes are -- incredible..."  He hadn't been able to take
his gaze off them.

Krycek looked nonplussed.

"I couldn't have imagined that," Mulder gasped excitedly.  "Because it's
something I had no precedent for.

"On the other hand," he chattered on, eyes widened, "it means you are
affecting my perception, directly in the brain, because I don't have the
red-green cones in my retinas to distinguish --"  His mouth was suddenly
shut up by a full-lipped kiss of stunning lushness.  Oh, he thought.
Hands on his back made him arch inward and drop his head back, the kiss
following, burningly.

Oh.

Hot tongue-tip flickering inside his lips.  Warm body firm against him.

Krycek pressed his hips into the soft sweet swelling at Mulder's groin, and
swirled against it.  He slowly separated his mouth from Mulder's and
whispered, "Fox...  There's one more obvious reason I came here.  It was
because I knew I could make you happy.  Knew you wanted me -- needed me --
what I could give you."

Mulder hadn't known it, and even now, felt a faint distress from the
contradictions waver through him.

Krycek whispered on, "It's simpler now."

It was.  Whatever the past, he knew he could trust Krycek's ghost never to
harm him, always to be on his side.  The ghost might only love him and
nothing more, but that was so what he needed, so much the one thing that
would give him strength and saturate his life with happiness, that he
marvelled at how perfectly it fit him.  "Spooky" finding his match.

Mulder groaned.  "If anyone finds out I'm dating a ghost I'll never hear the
end of it."

Krycek said stiffly, "We prefer 'corporeally challenged'."

Disconcerted, Mulder felt his face freeze.

Krycek's mouth turned up very slowly at the ends, and his eyes warmed and
sparkled with green laughter.  He murmurred, "I'm just yankin' your chain,
Mulder.  Ghosts don't have politics."

"Maybe you should.  The Astral Panthers.  Phantoms of the world unite, you
have nothing to lose but your clanking chains."

"I'm sorry I brought it up."

"We could sit-in at diner counters.  Just the fact that a person is
invisible shouldn't be any reason they --"  Krycek abruptly vanished, and
Mulder felt soft lips kissing on the side of his neck.  He gasped in air,
and closed his eyes.

"Admit it," Krycek breathed in his ear.  "My incorporeality turns you on."

"You have no politics, yet you have a sense of humor.  How can this be?"

Krycek's voice got lower.  "I'm beginning to understand how you remained
single all these years.  I'm confronting you with the mystery of life after
death here.  Where's the awe?  Where's the wonder?"

Mulder pressed his stiffening erection against responsive nothingness.  "I
got your awe and wonder right here, Wraith-Boy."  But the pleasure took most
of his breath away, and his voice was thready and pleading instead of
aggressive.  Krycek's kiss moved onto his mouth.  He found he could breathe
right through it, and shuddered deeply.  Hands cradled his head.  He tried
to hold the invisibility to him, but there was nothing there that his hands
could grasp.  He could only passively let the ghost take him, and at the
thought shuddered all over, and could not stop lightly shuddering with a
lust that he could not act upon, only trust another to allay.

But then Alex slowly reappeared in his arms, he could feel him, pull his
body to him.  He gasped, "I want to be in you!"  Lips kissed assent.  His
genitals tingling deliciously, leading, he gently pressured Alex back toward
the bed, realizing at the same time that he had reappeared naked, ready.
Alex put one knee up on the softside waterbed, slid further onto it, and let
himself fall gradually back as Mulder fitted to him, arching and opening his
thighs wide to him so Mulder's hardened rod touched right where it wanted to
be, and all Mulder had to do, gently, exquisitely, a micron at a time, was
push in, to feel the build of pleasure, feel warmth lip around him, feel the
entry and the sinking into, in, Alex's body, that moved, at the same time,
under him, slicked with sweat, gasping, "Mulder!" at every fraction he
pressed inward, feeling arms around him, hands sliding down, onto his
buttocks, a cry, "Oh Mulder!" as he flexed to the touch, sank deeper, and
still, inexorable, with infinite care, filling the tough, heavy body with
his presence, with his hard sexual need, with his delight.  Krycek writhed.
Heavy thighs clutched the tops of his hips, Krycek tried to push onto him,
but he maintained his own pace, and Krycek cried out at being so slowly
mastered, so intensively denied and yet fulfilled.  The hands on Mulder's
buttocks stroked in pleading circles, and Mulder felt the beauty fill his
body.  Felt urgency under him, Alex's need.

He had buried himself, at length, in Alex, completely.  He butted a few
times against Alex's crotch, to drive home the totality of his possession.
Alex cried out, arching up and flinging his arms wide out on the bed.  He
butted harder.  "Oh God, Mulder!  Oh --  Oh God!"

Instinct bade him start to pull out, though something else wanted him to
stay.  He was inside, wrapped in the hot flesh, deep in the sacred body of
the one who loved him, it would be so good, so good, to wrap his arms around
him, and stay here forever.  But already pleasure pulled him back, drawn
irresistibly by the love of the sensation along his penis, the delicious
shock that shot the length of it a hundred times as he withdrew, the
inevitability at the same time leaving Alex with nothing but panting
outcries against the bliss and torture of the drag over agonized pleasure
centers.  Careful, careful, so careful not to hurt him, but now he was
opened, begging, body helpless with the need too great to speak, and Mulder
felt it, turned hot with it, and plunged deep and hard in.  Alex's thighs
opened, Mulder glimpsed his fists clutching the bedclothes, his cock was a
hard ridge under Mulder's belly as he fell on Krycek's body and thrust in
deep again and again.  Hips swerving, abandoned to the rhythm of utter
possession, Mulder responded to every cry and every lurch with harder
fucking until he felt the clench of muscle beneath and around and within
him, felt liquid between their bellies and smelled cum, and was suddenly
jetting his orgasm with one long straight spear into Alex's heat, every
muscle in his body arching him tight, then every nerve cell bending him to
wave on wave of exquisite ecstasy.  "Oh, God, oh, God," he cried, "you're so
good, you're so good --!" and fell into long spasms of unbearable pleasure
on Alex's sweat-soaked body, his own perspiration dripping off his face like
a counterpoint to the last trembling spurting of his semen.  "Alex..."

At last he collapsed.  Under his ear he could hear the pounding heartbeat,
feel the recovering breaths, the smells of sweat and cum mixing in heady
incense like a kind of sex itself.  He slid himself out and inched up beside
Alex.  But his eyes were closed, tracks of tears running down from the
corners.  Mulder touched his face.

The green eyes opened.  They glistened with tears, but when they turned
toward Mulder, it was with an expression of absolute amazement.  His mouth
opened, but he could not speak, and Mulder stroked him, kissed his cheek,
and gave him time, stroking along his shoulder and his arm.

Krycek made another effort, and managed a broken, "I never knew..."

Fresh tears welled in his eyes.

"Fox..."

He turned, and laid his heavy arm over Mulder, and pulled him close gently.
Relieved, Mulder realized whatever it was was a good thing, and was content
to let him have his time.  The bliss of sleep was stealing over him, but he
resisted, waiting, till Krycek finally whispered, "Every pleasure you felt,
I felt a thousand times.  Every happiness I gave to you came back to me in
millions.  Sex... I... Fox..."  He again lost all words.  Mulder pulled back
and saw the stunned, angelic eyes still without focus.

Something could surprise the dead.

Well that was good to know.

It would be boring, an afterworld without any X-files left him to
investigate.

And this was good.  It could make him the last of the red-hot lovers.

Good, because he wanted to gratify Alex's every immaterial desire.

He wanted Alex's moans to wake the neighbors in the other world.  He wanted
Alex to come like the next freight train to Hell, he wanted --  He stretched
out his hand and felt slowly down the damp small of Alex's back to the
smooth broad round of his buttock.  Alex squirmed closer against him, and
Mulder flattened up to the hot flesh reflexively.

"I want you," he breathed passionately.

He heard a throaty sound from Alex, and the ghost pushed against him till he
pushed him over onto his back, then pushed up on his arm and Mulder looked
up into a face closed, eyes shut in the fierce grip of discovery.  Mulder
reached up and touched his cheek.  Krycek looked down at him.  "That's it,"
he said concentratedly.  "That's so exactly it.  The thing I never had.  The
thing that, if you don't have it, nothing else means anything."  He looked
earnestly down at Mulder.  "That you want me.  That I love you and you...
you like it..."

Yet again Mulder felt the deep, distant undertow of pain, guilt, history
ripple beneath his bodily sensations, the weight of Krycek on his thighs,
hips, abdomen, the vision of Alex's green eyes, the smell of him, waft of
his warm breath...  Krycek was looking at him with understanding.

"I don't know how to tell you... all that is past.  It's..."  Alex looked
down, thinking.  "I don't know how to say what...  This really is another
world."  His voice had become very soft and almost whispering.  "Tell me
what you're remembering right now."

Caught, Mulder's instinct was to deny.  Instead, he ran the back of his hand
down the underside of Krycek's forearm, saying, "You telling me you'd just
as soon blow my head off."

"You know what a liar I was."

"You said it with a great deal of sincerity."

"I was a really good liar.  Especially to myself.  Mulder... you know what
happened when I finally thought I had to murder you.  I couldn't pull that
trigger.  You were the one thing..."  He paused.  "The one thing in that
life..."  He gripped Mulder's arm as if he had to hold him down.  "The one
thing outside myself...  You were all I had.  You were..."  After a moment
Krycek smiled faintly.   "I think, to me, you were all the good I had left
in me.  If I killed you, it would damn my soul to Hell... besides being...
so painful I couldn't..."  Krycek's voice was actually choking up with
sorrow, and sadness empathetically permeated Mulder, starting tears in his
eyes.  "I couldn't stand it..."  Krycek put his forehead down onto Mulder's
chest.  Mulder's hands instinctively rose to pet Krycek's head.  With anyone
else he might have suppressed the gesture, but with the ghost it somehow
seemed normal to act on his first impulses.  Just as the ghost seemed to do.
He smiled, thinking of Krycek in his tropics clothes.  The lighter side of
criminal psychosis.  You could sort of see how it connected, what Alex might
have been, with a different upbringing, or one or two less damaged genes.
He, Fox Mulder, had for some reason gotten the worst and the best of this
entity in his life, "to have and to hold," he suddenly thought, "in sickness
and in health" -- the ghost didn't stay around much though, he thought
regretfully.  It only seemed to come when Mulder needed it.  Is that
because that's all the more relationship I can handle?  The thought made
him wince, but it was not at all outside the realm of possibility.
Meanwhile, he had a sad ghost on him.

He slid his arms down around Krycek and held him tightly.

"Just imagine," he said softly, "if you had.  Imagine if it had been my
ghost coming back to haunt you."

This image, however, didn't seem to amuse Alex.  He still lay heavily on
top.

"Kry-y-ycek.  Kry-y-y-ycek!" Mulder went, in a wavery, drawn-out high voice.
"I am the ghost of Roswell yet-to-come!  Repe-e-ent!  Repe-e-ent!"

"Goofball," Alex said somberly into his chest.

"I could pop up at crucial moments and spoil your aim."

Krycek's arms stole around him.

"Or I could have gone to haunt the Cancerman.  I bet that would have shaken
his fucking sang-froid.  Repe-e-ent, you black-lunged son of a bi-i-itch.  I
might have scared him into a heart attack."

Alex grunted.  "Or humiliated him to death."

"You don't think I'd make a good ghost?"

"I think it's a good thing we don't have politics."

"Hey.  It's no piece of cake being the hauntee, here, either.  I mean, you
put me in compromising positions --"

"Ho yeah," Krycek breathed appreciatively.

"-- you make me look like I'm talking to myself, pretty soon people are
going to think I have a giant invisible rabbit friend, whether I do or
not."

Krycek sneaked a kiss.

"You didn't hear a word I said, did you?"

"Wanna fuck?"

Mulder paused.

Finally he said, "That was a rhetorical question, right?" and Krycek
complied, spreading Mulder's thighs apart under him and snuggling into
position.  Mulder's whole body blanched with heat, he grabbed around Krycek
with all four limbs as the point of his cock found entry and without even
pausing slid long and heavy into him.  Mulder cried out in ecstasy.  It was
like the first time, unbelievable, unbearable, just the presence of the
ghostly thickness flooding pleasure out through every tiniest nerve of his
body.  "God!  Oh god!  Ah!"  Krycek responded to his cries with hard
breathing and movements that sent pleasure soaring through all boundaries,
to a pure white almost revealed as pain.  "Alex --  Alex --  Alex --  Alex
--"  Krycek rode on his rhythm then, half-speed to his pounding need and it
was perfect, counterstroking sensitivities he hadn't known he had, making
his body beg, clutch, arch -- scream as big muscles clenched/released with
bliss while Krycek only increased his speed, rode into him with gasps of
force and a bolting strength behind the thrusts that opened Mulder into
utter submission to all the pleasures that shook him, till the molten
quaking came glowing into all the muscles around his genitals, in novas of
ecstasy:  Everything but pleasure was obliterated.
 
 

Mulder crawled back into the world gasping and whining, grovelling before
the devastation of such power.  They were stuck to each other with sweat and
cum and heat and weight and exhaustion, Krycek groped his arms around
Mulder's feeble movements comfortingly.  Mulder finally wheezed, "That's --
not -- natural!"  Sucked deep breaths and emphasized, "That's
supernatural."  Hauled in more breath, "What you did."  And more "Isn't
it."  Then realized what a lot of the problem was and finished, "Off."

Krycek mewed a protest, snuggling.

"Asphyxi.  Ation," Mulder threatened.

Krycek practically hurled himself to the side.  "Oh.  Wow.  Sorry.  That was
-- so --"  He looked for a word.  "Real."  He felt himself across the ribs
and down the abdomen.

"Yeah, I think you -- gained about fifty -- keys of reality -- at the end
there."

"Wow.  You got off though, right?"

Mulder wheezed weakly.

"Good."  Krycek smiled brilliantly, right at him.

It didn't matter, Mulder decided, if Alex had put an orgasmic whammy on him
or if it just happened, a normal result of angel rut.  Its by-product of
happiness welled through him.  He wanted for nothing, except to wish that
everyone could feel the same thrilling heights of happy excitement and
expectation of good.

Ghost.  Ghost, not angel.  Back for its own pursuits, not as a messenger of
God.

As if there were any living or inorganic or ghost thing, on earth or up
above it, that was not, here in time and in eternity, a messenger of God.

Wo.

Where had that come from.

Fuck a ghost and lose your atheist street-cred?  I think not, he thought
determinedly.  He hadn't meant, like, "God", he'd meant like a kind of force
in the universe, that included everything and fused it all in a bliss that
rang in every stone and molecule and star and soul...

Definitely not God.

Sex with Krycek always seemed to get him metaphysical.  He giggled.
"Meta-physical."

Krycek giggled too.  Pretty soon they were both too weak from giggling and
metaphysicality to do more than lie there, each with one hand on the other.

"You want to sleep over?" Mulder murmurred with his eyes fallen shut.

"Sure."

He didn't know... would Krycek be there in the morning?  It didn't matter.
He was here now.  Warm, close, beautiful to touch.  He was here when it
mattered.  Him and his green eyes.  He was the strangest thing that had ever
happened... in a long life of strangeness... that often had been so sad or
fearful... this strange though... so wonderful.  As if it all led up.  His
mouth curved up.  Alex in his beach-lizard clothes... white sand...

As sleep accepted him, it was like slipping into a clear turquoise ocean of
limitless happiness.

The End

10/7/02