by Pares

Scully's perfume was still in his nose, as delicate as crushed flowers but somehow lemony. He squinted at the listing stack of folders that were crowding his coffee table, and reminded himself to ask her what that scent was when he saw her in the morning.

Mulder noticed he had a hole in the toe of his sock, and he sighed, settling back against his couch, his cheek turned to the cool, forgiving leather. Propping his stockinged feet on the coffee table, he deliberately shoved the stack of files off the table with the foot that featured a holey argyle.

The corners of his mouth turned up with stale satisfaction.

He batted the square, sour pillows off the arm rests and folded himself on his couch, studying the round edge of his toe nail with a kind of numb serenity. He would do his best to think of nothing-- except perhaps the elusive name of Scully's fragrance-- and hopefully he would fall into a deep and trance-like state of rest. He felt his hair crumple under the press of his skull against the leather and rolled his shoulders a few times.

Digging his hand under the seat-cushion, trying to re-shape the creaking cowhide into something more yielding and marginally more comfortable, he felt the greasy grit of a thousand fragmented potato chips pack under his fingernails, and the cool roundness of lost dimes. Some random threads, and a plastic bag-- no, wax paper from a deli sandwich, and a leather glove...

A leather glove?

Mulder swung his legs off the couch and sat up, prizing up the flattened cushion, and stared at the unmistakable empty hand of a fingerless black leather glove.

Lust hit him so hard he was almost dizzy.

His cock was throbbing in his jeans by the time he finally remembered how this ostensibly innocuous article of clothing had gotten there.

Picking it up, he laid it across his palm, felt its cool weight spread across his skin.

Then he flung the glove on to the scarred, coffee stained surface of his coffee table and glared at it.

Shaking, so hard he was going to pop the snap on his jeans without any manual assistance, Mulder wanted to chew it, wanted to bury his nose in it, to jerk himself off wearing it and nothing else. The only thing keeping him from doing all these things was an equally gut-clenching desire to spit on it, carve it into strips with a dull steak knife, douse it in lighter fluid and watch it *burn*.

//horns of a dilemma//

Breathing hard, he consciously relaxed his hands and leaned back against the couch.

The backs of his eyelids were painted with murals of memory, red and orange with recalled lust.

Coming back to his apartment after Spender's corpse had been found stiffening in the basement office, Mulder had almost turned the lights back off after a few hundred watts had illuminated Alex Krycek, in a torn T-shirt and greasy jeans, kneeling on a carpet spattered with what Mulder could only assume was Krycek's own blood. His teeth were outlined with it, and still, he smiled.

He smiled when he lifted his good hand to his lips and stripped the glove off with his teeth.

Then he'd thrown it in Mulder's face, slapping him from across the room.

"You wanna know what happened?"

Mulder had been planning to ask, wondering if he'd find the body of the loser later, under that monstrosity of a water bed-- or perhaps even somehow stashed *in* the mattress itself-- but the strangely genteel insult of a *thrown gauntlet* had distracted his imagination.

"Wait, let me guess," he said, instead. "You tripped, and now you're lining up a real bitch of a lawyer?"

Krycek almost rolled his eyes.

"You know what, Mulder? You have a real attitude problem. Well, a gratitude problem, anyway."

"Krycek, unless you're going to surprise me with a case of club soda and a Stanley Steamer I don't think I have a hell of a lot to be grateful *for*."

"Asshole*. You think bleeding on your carpet is my idea of a fucking *hobby*?"

"Is that a trick question?"

"Look, I have some information for you. I bled for it, actually, so I want you to be appropriately appreciative when I give it to you."

"Appreciative," Mulder murmured. "Tell me what you know, Krycek, and I'll send you a nice fruit basket, care of your court appointed attorney."

Krycek glared at him, and wiped his split lip with the sleeve of his leather jacket. Mulder wondered if Krycek's mouth was sour with the copper tang of blood, and if the kneeling man was worrying the swollen flesh with his tongue, enjoying the almost-pleasurable sting of a bruised and abraded lower lip.

"I have an address for you. It's a safe house for the Rebels."

Another line of bullshit that he apparently expected Mulder to eat with a fork and a spoon.

"Get out," he said. Why bother to reach for the gun? Passive resistance would work just as well. He was tired; the gun was heavy. He already had three bullet holes in the walls.

Krycek didn't want him dead, although the thought had a certain bleak appeal at the moment, bone weary as he was, and Mulder found himself looking for the taped outline of the last man who'd bled on his carpet.

"You're learning," Krycek said, and Mulder thought he could hear a certain approval in his low, serpentine voice.

"Yeah. I'm not as gullible as I used to be."

Krycek smiled at that.

"You're getting soft, Mulder."

"You're getting on my nerves, Krycek. Leave the Alien Conspiracy Handbook on the coffeetable and don't forget to lock the door behind you, huh?"

He slung himself into his couch and flipped the television on, keeping his face studiously directed toward the flickering screen.

Even when Krycek began to make his way towards him.

Something sensual and disturbing about a man walking on his knees.

In the present, Mulder's apartment was dark and silent.

No distracting murmur of CNN, no stink of blood in the air.

No Alex Krycek spreading his naked palm against the placket of Mulder's zipper.

Mulder's resolve was as pliable and as tasteless as chewed gum, and easy to let go in favor of reliving the sticky heat of that moment.

Mulder closed his eyes and lowered his zipper; Krycek's hand had been tacky with drying blood and fresh saliva. He'd spit on his hand after undoing Mulder's trousers.

Sighing, the heavy sigh of a man who's giving in *again* when he's promised himself not to, Mulder curled his fingers around his straining cock and pumped it twice. The he paused and *squeezed* it, until the pressure was almost pain.

He gritted his teeth, and the movie playing on the backs of his eyelids continued, lurid and and full of sound and scent...

"Ignore me all you want, Mulder. I'm here to *stay*." And then the tight, burning grip, branding him, marking him-- the slow rub of a callused thumb dragging across the tender head of his dick.

Mulder flinched, remembering, and his thumb worried the seeping slit, and he drew a whistling breath past his teeth.

There was no soothing tongue, no hot swallowing throat, no graze of slick lips against the swollen skin of his penis... just the slow friction of skin against skin, pulling him towards a flinching climax.

He'd refused to meet Krycek's eyes, concentrating on the fascinating shape of the news anchor's head, the aggressively cheerful pattern of her scarf. But he'd made no move to stop Krycek as he'd ruthlessly kneaded Mulder's blood dark cock into an ecstatic, raw spasm.

Krycek had wiped his hand on the thigh of Mulder's suitpants and then zippered his jacket closed, climbing to his feet.

Mulder opened his eyes, hand slopped with semen, erection softing off in his cramping hand, and half expected to see Alex still grinning at him.

Alex had walked out, leaving no information, useful or otherwise, behind. Leaving nothing but some new blood stains and a right handed glove.

With his clean hand, Mulder picked up the glove he'd tossed on the coffee table.

He sniffed it thoughtfully, touched it with just the tip of his tongue...

Then he wiped his hand off on it and stuffed it back under the couch cushion.

Turning the television on he stared sightlessly at the pink glare of the anchorwoman's bright suit.

He could still smell Krycek reeking of sex and drying blood and falsehood and now, with it, the grace note of Scully's perfume: grapefruit and sea salt, and new grass.

Mulder knew he wouldn't ask her its name.

END