Alex Krycek (X-files), prompt #74 : dark
Title: Unexpected Quarters
Claim: Alex Krycek
Fandoms: X-files / Discworld
Characters: Alex Krycek, Death, Death of Rats
Prompt: #74 : dark
Word count: approx. 1,900 (plus footnotes)
Disclaimers: Not mine, never will be mine. No money made, no infringement intended, just entertainment. unmisha, gryponrhi, and wenchita did their best to clean up my messes; any remaining are, of course, purely my fault. Rated PG for, er, maybe some rough language. Written for crossovers100
Unexpected Quarters
Too many hours - days? had it been that long yet? - trapped had shot his reflexes all to hell, and Alex Krycek found he'd stabbed the stranger between the ribs before his brain had caught up enough for him to realise that he would have done better to have asked him questions, instead. Questions like: How the hell did you get in here?, or, Show me the way out and I won't kill you. Much. Well, *as* much., or even the more prosaic and far less satisfying, Help me. I'll pay you.
"I BEG YOUR PARDON," said a voice. It was a remarkably hollow voice, and echoed through the darkness as though it were carefully shaping each inch of it. Alex could have saved it the trouble; the room was relentlessly rectangular, and empty. Boringly, mind-destroyingly empty. Except for three things, namely: himself; the darkness - which after so long was a thing palpable in itself-; and a shape in the middle which was the rather less distressing (over the long term), yet still mind-destroyingly terrifying1.
Destroyed minds aside, there was something... just plain *wrong* about the way Alex's knife had gone through the stranger's cloak and sunk in between his ribs. There hadn't been enough resistance, somehow. Almost as if the *only* thing it had gone through had been the cloak....
"THIS IS YOURS, I BELIEVE," said the voice, and the knife was suddenly free of any encumbrance at all. "SORRY ABOUT THE BLADE."
Gingerly, Alex felt along the blade, but could find no imperfection.
He couldn't find anything that felt like it might be blood, either.
He shrugged, and sheathed the knife. Some things it was better not to think too closely about, especially when you were trapped in a dark room with them. As for the knife... he could sort that one out when he got out of here, and could see again. If he got out of here. "Hwd-" How did you get in here?, he'd been about to ask. But what came out was rather more croak than word, and he gathered what little moisture was left in his mouth and went for the one-word alternative, instead. "Drink?"
There was a rustling, as though pockets were being patted rather thoroughly, and were coming up empty. "AH," said the voice. "THIS IS THE SORT OF OCCASION THAT REQUIRES TEPID WATER INFUSED WITH DRIED PLANT SHREDS. AND OVER-BAKED FLOUR PASTE ENCRUSTED WITH SMALL SALINE CUBES."
"Is it?" Alex managed. The voice hadn't sounded entirely familiar with the concepts. Nor, for that matter, was he.
"YES." There was a pause. "I BELIEVE SO." Another pause. "IT'S NEIGHBOURLY."
That concept sounded as though not only was it unfamiliar, it was also not entirely comfortable co-existing with that voice, and was in fact considering setting up a Neighbourhood Watch group specifically to keep an eye on it. "Ah."
There was another rustling, and then something cool and metallic bumped his hand. "THIS WILL HAVE TO DO," the voice said apologetically. "IT IS NOT TEPID, I AM AFRAID. AND THERE ARE NO LEAVES IN IT." A thoughtful pause. "THERE ARE FLOWERS, I BELIEVE."
Alex took the object. 'Skeletal' was not a word his mind wanted to use in these circumstances2, so he tried to label the fingers that brushed against his as he did so a rather euphemistic 'overachievingly slim' instead.
His mind wasn't much for euphemisms, either. Skeletal, he admitted to himself. Those fingers are... just bone.
His mind may not have been much for euphemisms, but it still skittered away from the implications of that.3
The object turned out to be a flask, smallish, heavy, and incised with a pattern so fine it barely registered against his fingertips. He unscrewed the lid, and took a sip.
The stars, he realised after a moment, probably weren't natural. In fact, it was becoming increasingly improbable that they were even real. They were, however, extraordinarily pretty. He wondered idly if his body was still attached; it seemed awfully far away of a sudden. There was a faint tingling in what could possibly, by a rather convoluted stretch of the imagination, be considered his toes. The room was a good ten degrees warmer than it had been, too. And he wasn't entirely sure where the chanting was coming from, or the smell of honeysuckle and roses. But maybe the monks knew where he could get some dinner....
Twin blue suns appeared in the spiralling galaxy above him, peering somewhat worriedly into his eyes. If, that is, suns could be said to peer. Or to worry. "PERHAPS I SHOULD HAVE WARNED YOU."
"Don't worry about it," Alex said vaguely. It seemed to him that *he* should be worrying about something, but for the life of him he couldn't quite recall what. And the chanting was really quite pleasant. "Anytime." He hadn't felt this good since... he hadn't felt quite this good. Ever. "Absolutely."
The suns were still peering at him. "IT'S THE NECTAR," said the voice. "IT TAKES MORTALS LIKE THIS OCCASIONALLY4."
"Like what?" His attention was still more galactic than planetary, apart from the chanting, and was that a steak frying somewhere nearby?, but it only seemed polite to ask.
"LIKE A VISIT FROM DELIGHT." There was a pause. "OR DELERIUM. THAT REALITY IS ANOTHER'S REALM. I FORGET TO KEEP TRACK."
"Have we met before?" Alex was very sure that he would have remembered an encounter with a talking skeleton, particularly one offering a drink that packed the sort of punch that came complete with chanting monks and pretty lighting effects; and he was equally sure that there was nothing of the sort anywhere in his memory banks. Not even in the hidden and dusty corners nobody ever went into, and if by chance they did, they generally kicked, screamed, and left uneven heel-lines in the dust. But a nagging sense of familiarity was nonetheless starting up in the back of his gut, and it had very sharp claws.
"YOU SEND A LOT OF BUSINESS MY WAY."
There didn't seem to be a lot to say to that. Alex took another sip of the nectar, instead. He was starting to get used to the overwhelming sensory impact... and if you can't be hedonistic when you're trapped, in a rather terminal manner, in the dark, alone with hallucinations and horrors - when can you be? "Pleasure doing business with you?" he hazarded.
"I AM NOT HERE ON BUSINESS."
There was relief, rather a lot of it in fact, somewhere in the part of his mind that had been refusing to acknowledge what skeletal fingers and a locked room mystery might spell when put together, and especially not to acknowledge that it might be only five letters long, and end in D-E-A-T-H. "Ah?"
"MY COLLEAGUE IS."
The relief vanished rather abruptly, leaving enough of a hole - unacknowledged or not - that it unbalanced the nectar-induced contentment and served to focus his attention somewhat more completely on the present. "Ah?"
"SQUEAK."
About ankle height, twin blue pinholes looked up at him. Alex blinked. "Ah. Hello?"
"SQUEAK." Apparently satisfied, the pinholes vanished, and there came a scuttling as of four very tiny bone paws travelling very quickly over a concrete surface. Alex waited while his mind completed the paperwork necessary to file it away as 'noises we don't want to remember, and especially not in dreams, thank you very much'.
And he could still smell the steak, faintly. "Food?" he asked hopefully.
"SAUSAGE-INNA-BUN?" the voice inquired. "I AM AFRAID IT IS ALL THERE IS ON THE MENU CURRENTLY. MR. DIBBLER'S LATE CUSTOMER ASSURES ME IT IS INDEED ANKH-MORPORK'S FINEST CUISINE."5
Alex worked that one out. "Hotdog?" It wasn't steak, but it was food. "Please."
This time, the stars were psychedelic. Or psychotic. Possibly both. His body was currently *far* too closely attached, and the discordant 'ping' of a rock-hard-where-it-wasn't-unpleasantly-squishy mouthful of sausage-inna-bun forcibly ejected by offended tastebuds and making up for it by rebounding back and forth off walls at high velocity echoed unpleasantly.
And whatever drugs the stars were on, they weren't sharing the good stuff.
There was a familiar pair of worried blue suns staring at him.
"Urgh." He spat, gagged, and spat again. "That was *food*?" He spat once more, for good measure, and wondered whether shooting the voice would do any good. If he'd had his gun, of course.
He considered trying his knife again, but he still wasn't sure what had happened to the blade the last time.
"YES."
He considered that. "No," he decided after a moment, rather definitely. "It wasn't."
"ARE YOU SURE?" The voice sounded, of all things, surprised. He didn't think it was a sound the voice wore very often. "MR. DIBBLER SELLS6 QUITE A LOT OF THEM."
"I'm sure." He remembered the flask, and sipped the nectar. Instantly quite a number of things improved, among them his sense of smell, the '70s decor feel to the sausage-inna-bun induced hallucination, and the flashing red and blue police lights. He thought perhaps his tastebuds were even considering re-establishing lines of communication. He took another sip, in an attempt to further convince them.
"AH. PERHAPS THE DINER, THEN. IT IS ONLY A HALF-MILE SOUTH OF HERE. YOU COULD REACH IT BY MIDNIGHT IF YOU BEGAN WALKING NOW."
The nectar may have been heavenly, but it takes an awful lot of heaven to counter a mere smidgeon of a suggestion of the sort of hell contained inside a single molecule of Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler's sausages-inna-bun. The acid flashbacks were improving, but Alex's mood was sliding right back up towards 'pissed as all hell'. "The door's locked. And bolted. And probably welded shut, knowing the old bastard who left me here," he said irritably.
"THE CONCEALED TRAPDOOR BENEATH THE FLOOR ISN'T."
A few moments later, an embarrassed cough echoed through the silence. Unfortunately7 it sounded rather like a gunshot, and Alex found himself ducking reflexively. "SORRY." The voice sounded rather apologetic. "I THOUGHT YOU KNEW."
"I didn't." Alex kept it clipped, and brief. He didn't particularly want to hear himself screaming again. And he *really* didn't want to provide a targeting fix for the sausage-inna-bun missile still half-heartedly pinging from wall to wall.
"SQUEAK."
"WELL," said the voice brightly. Or what it imagined was brightly. The dark didn't seem terribly convinced by it. "IT'S TIME WE WERE OFF. I SHALL STOP BY FOR SOME HOT WATER INFUSION AND A SALINE-DUSTED HARD FLOUR SQUARE OR TWO WITH CONVERSATION NEXT TIME I AM IN THIS REALITY."
And the skeletal hallucinations - did they count as hallucinations if you never really *saw* them? - the voices disappeared, and echoing silence slowly crept out of the corners and took over the silo again, impeded only by a faint but lingering smell of horse.
Hope proved much more difficult to dispose of. Alex Krycek dropped to his knees8 and started feeling the floor carefully, inch by inch, for cracks which, when investigated more thoroughly, simply *had* to be the outlines of hidden trapdoors. That opened. And were accessible.
It was a good thing the mind eventually got used to terrifying. The trapdoor turned out to be practically underneath the alien ship he'd been very deliberately not thinking about.
At least it opened downward.
---------------------------------------
1 The mind eventually accepts 'terrifying', and works around it. 'Empty', it keeps trying to fill. And the human mind is capable of producing far more lurking horror than *actual* horrors can manage, even on their absolute worst days.
2 Namely, circumstances in which anything describing him in the uncomfortably near future was likely to use said word. Prominently.
3 At least, the conscious parts skittered. The subconscious and unconscious parts had spent the better part of recent history running around in circles whilst gibbering in fear, prompted by watching his body vomit up a pile of remarkably oily alien goo, and shortly thereafter discovering they were now looked alone in a dark room with it. And that they weren't entirely sure where 'here' was, to boot. Fortunately for his overall sanity, they had finally managed to run head on into each other, knock themselves out, and give the rest of his mind some peace. Thus the conscious parts were really the only bits that mattered.
4 That is, on every occasion.
5 The voice hadn't quite gotten the hang of 'sarcasm' yet.
6 If 'taken (usually without payment) and used as ammunition in brawls, riots, and street parties' can be considered to be 'sold'.
7 Actually, fortunately, as the piece of sausage-inna-bun chose that precise moment to whizz through the point his head had occupied a moment before. Alex's sense of disasters-narrowly-escaped was still in recovery, however, and it took several minutes for this realisation to catch up with him.
8 It was pure coincidence that this also put him below the height of the eternally pinging piece of sausage-inna-bun.9
9 Really. It was.
Claim: Alex Krycek
Fandoms: X-files / Discworld
Characters: Alex Krycek, Death, Death of Rats
Prompt: #74 : dark
Word count: approx. 1,900 (plus footnotes)
Disclaimers: Not mine, never will be mine. No money made, no infringement intended, just entertainment. unmisha, gryponrhi, and wenchita did their best to clean up my messes; any remaining are, of course, purely my fault. Rated PG for, er, maybe some rough language. Written for crossovers100
Unexpected Quarters
Too many hours - days? had it been that long yet? - trapped had shot his reflexes all to hell, and Alex Krycek found he'd stabbed the stranger between the ribs before his brain had caught up enough for him to realise that he would have done better to have asked him questions, instead. Questions like: How the hell did you get in here?, or, Show me the way out and I won't kill you. Much. Well, *as* much., or even the more prosaic and far less satisfying, Help me. I'll pay you.
"I BEG YOUR PARDON," said a voice. It was a remarkably hollow voice, and echoed through the darkness as though it were carefully shaping each inch of it. Alex could have saved it the trouble; the room was relentlessly rectangular, and empty. Boringly, mind-destroyingly empty. Except for three things, namely: himself; the darkness - which after so long was a thing palpable in itself-; and a shape in the middle which was the rather less distressing (over the long term), yet still mind-destroyingly terrifying1.
Destroyed minds aside, there was something... just plain *wrong* about the way Alex's knife had gone through the stranger's cloak and sunk in between his ribs. There hadn't been enough resistance, somehow. Almost as if the *only* thing it had gone through had been the cloak....
"THIS IS YOURS, I BELIEVE," said the voice, and the knife was suddenly free of any encumbrance at all. "SORRY ABOUT THE BLADE."
Gingerly, Alex felt along the blade, but could find no imperfection.
He couldn't find anything that felt like it might be blood, either.
He shrugged, and sheathed the knife. Some things it was better not to think too closely about, especially when you were trapped in a dark room with them. As for the knife... he could sort that one out when he got out of here, and could see again. If he got out of here. "Hwd-" How did you get in here?, he'd been about to ask. But what came out was rather more croak than word, and he gathered what little moisture was left in his mouth and went for the one-word alternative, instead. "Drink?"
There was a rustling, as though pockets were being patted rather thoroughly, and were coming up empty. "AH," said the voice. "THIS IS THE SORT OF OCCASION THAT REQUIRES TEPID WATER INFUSED WITH DRIED PLANT SHREDS. AND OVER-BAKED FLOUR PASTE ENCRUSTED WITH SMALL SALINE CUBES."
"Is it?" Alex managed. The voice hadn't sounded entirely familiar with the concepts. Nor, for that matter, was he.
"YES." There was a pause. "I BELIEVE SO." Another pause. "IT'S NEIGHBOURLY."
That concept sounded as though not only was it unfamiliar, it was also not entirely comfortable co-existing with that voice, and was in fact considering setting up a Neighbourhood Watch group specifically to keep an eye on it. "Ah."
There was another rustling, and then something cool and metallic bumped his hand. "THIS WILL HAVE TO DO," the voice said apologetically. "IT IS NOT TEPID, I AM AFRAID. AND THERE ARE NO LEAVES IN IT." A thoughtful pause. "THERE ARE FLOWERS, I BELIEVE."
Alex took the object. 'Skeletal' was not a word his mind wanted to use in these circumstances2, so he tried to label the fingers that brushed against his as he did so a rather euphemistic 'overachievingly slim' instead.
His mind wasn't much for euphemisms, either. Skeletal, he admitted to himself. Those fingers are... just bone.
His mind may not have been much for euphemisms, but it still skittered away from the implications of that.3
The object turned out to be a flask, smallish, heavy, and incised with a pattern so fine it barely registered against his fingertips. He unscrewed the lid, and took a sip.
The stars, he realised after a moment, probably weren't natural. In fact, it was becoming increasingly improbable that they were even real. They were, however, extraordinarily pretty. He wondered idly if his body was still attached; it seemed awfully far away of a sudden. There was a faint tingling in what could possibly, by a rather convoluted stretch of the imagination, be considered his toes. The room was a good ten degrees warmer than it had been, too. And he wasn't entirely sure where the chanting was coming from, or the smell of honeysuckle and roses. But maybe the monks knew where he could get some dinner....
Twin blue suns appeared in the spiralling galaxy above him, peering somewhat worriedly into his eyes. If, that is, suns could be said to peer. Or to worry. "PERHAPS I SHOULD HAVE WARNED YOU."
"Don't worry about it," Alex said vaguely. It seemed to him that *he* should be worrying about something, but for the life of him he couldn't quite recall what. And the chanting was really quite pleasant. "Anytime." He hadn't felt this good since... he hadn't felt quite this good. Ever. "Absolutely."
The suns were still peering at him. "IT'S THE NECTAR," said the voice. "IT TAKES MORTALS LIKE THIS OCCASIONALLY4."
"Like what?" His attention was still more galactic than planetary, apart from the chanting, and was that a steak frying somewhere nearby?, but it only seemed polite to ask.
"LIKE A VISIT FROM DELIGHT." There was a pause. "OR DELERIUM. THAT REALITY IS ANOTHER'S REALM. I FORGET TO KEEP TRACK."
"Have we met before?" Alex was very sure that he would have remembered an encounter with a talking skeleton, particularly one offering a drink that packed the sort of punch that came complete with chanting monks and pretty lighting effects; and he was equally sure that there was nothing of the sort anywhere in his memory banks. Not even in the hidden and dusty corners nobody ever went into, and if by chance they did, they generally kicked, screamed, and left uneven heel-lines in the dust. But a nagging sense of familiarity was nonetheless starting up in the back of his gut, and it had very sharp claws.
"YOU SEND A LOT OF BUSINESS MY WAY."
There didn't seem to be a lot to say to that. Alex took another sip of the nectar, instead. He was starting to get used to the overwhelming sensory impact... and if you can't be hedonistic when you're trapped, in a rather terminal manner, in the dark, alone with hallucinations and horrors - when can you be? "Pleasure doing business with you?" he hazarded.
"I AM NOT HERE ON BUSINESS."
There was relief, rather a lot of it in fact, somewhere in the part of his mind that had been refusing to acknowledge what skeletal fingers and a locked room mystery might spell when put together, and especially not to acknowledge that it might be only five letters long, and end in D-E-A-T-H. "Ah?"
"MY COLLEAGUE IS."
The relief vanished rather abruptly, leaving enough of a hole - unacknowledged or not - that it unbalanced the nectar-induced contentment and served to focus his attention somewhat more completely on the present. "Ah?"
"SQUEAK."
About ankle height, twin blue pinholes looked up at him. Alex blinked. "Ah. Hello?"
"SQUEAK." Apparently satisfied, the pinholes vanished, and there came a scuttling as of four very tiny bone paws travelling very quickly over a concrete surface. Alex waited while his mind completed the paperwork necessary to file it away as 'noises we don't want to remember, and especially not in dreams, thank you very much'.
And he could still smell the steak, faintly. "Food?" he asked hopefully.
"SAUSAGE-INNA-BUN?" the voice inquired. "I AM AFRAID IT IS ALL THERE IS ON THE MENU CURRENTLY. MR. DIBBLER'S LATE CUSTOMER ASSURES ME IT IS INDEED ANKH-MORPORK'S FINEST CUISINE."5
Alex worked that one out. "Hotdog?" It wasn't steak, but it was food. "Please."
This time, the stars were psychedelic. Or psychotic. Possibly both. His body was currently *far* too closely attached, and the discordant 'ping' of a rock-hard-where-it-wasn't-unpleasantly-squishy mouthful of sausage-inna-bun forcibly ejected by offended tastebuds and making up for it by rebounding back and forth off walls at high velocity echoed unpleasantly.
And whatever drugs the stars were on, they weren't sharing the good stuff.
There was a familiar pair of worried blue suns staring at him.
"Urgh." He spat, gagged, and spat again. "That was *food*?" He spat once more, for good measure, and wondered whether shooting the voice would do any good. If he'd had his gun, of course.
He considered trying his knife again, but he still wasn't sure what had happened to the blade the last time.
"YES."
He considered that. "No," he decided after a moment, rather definitely. "It wasn't."
"ARE YOU SURE?" The voice sounded, of all things, surprised. He didn't think it was a sound the voice wore very often. "MR. DIBBLER SELLS6 QUITE A LOT OF THEM."
"I'm sure." He remembered the flask, and sipped the nectar. Instantly quite a number of things improved, among them his sense of smell, the '70s decor feel to the sausage-inna-bun induced hallucination, and the flashing red and blue police lights. He thought perhaps his tastebuds were even considering re-establishing lines of communication. He took another sip, in an attempt to further convince them.
"AH. PERHAPS THE DINER, THEN. IT IS ONLY A HALF-MILE SOUTH OF HERE. YOU COULD REACH IT BY MIDNIGHT IF YOU BEGAN WALKING NOW."
The nectar may have been heavenly, but it takes an awful lot of heaven to counter a mere smidgeon of a suggestion of the sort of hell contained inside a single molecule of Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler's sausages-inna-bun. The acid flashbacks were improving, but Alex's mood was sliding right back up towards 'pissed as all hell'. "The door's locked. And bolted. And probably welded shut, knowing the old bastard who left me here," he said irritably.
"THE CONCEALED TRAPDOOR BENEATH THE FLOOR ISN'T."
A few moments later, an embarrassed cough echoed through the silence. Unfortunately7 it sounded rather like a gunshot, and Alex found himself ducking reflexively. "SORRY." The voice sounded rather apologetic. "I THOUGHT YOU KNEW."
"I didn't." Alex kept it clipped, and brief. He didn't particularly want to hear himself screaming again. And he *really* didn't want to provide a targeting fix for the sausage-inna-bun missile still half-heartedly pinging from wall to wall.
"SQUEAK."
"WELL," said the voice brightly. Or what it imagined was brightly. The dark didn't seem terribly convinced by it. "IT'S TIME WE WERE OFF. I SHALL STOP BY FOR SOME HOT WATER INFUSION AND A SALINE-DUSTED HARD FLOUR SQUARE OR TWO WITH CONVERSATION NEXT TIME I AM IN THIS REALITY."
And the skeletal hallucinations - did they count as hallucinations if you never really *saw* them? - the voices disappeared, and echoing silence slowly crept out of the corners and took over the silo again, impeded only by a faint but lingering smell of horse.
Hope proved much more difficult to dispose of. Alex Krycek dropped to his knees8 and started feeling the floor carefully, inch by inch, for cracks which, when investigated more thoroughly, simply *had* to be the outlines of hidden trapdoors. That opened. And were accessible.
It was a good thing the mind eventually got used to terrifying. The trapdoor turned out to be practically underneath the alien ship he'd been very deliberately not thinking about.
At least it opened downward.
---------------------------------------
1 The mind eventually accepts 'terrifying', and works around it. 'Empty', it keeps trying to fill. And the human mind is capable of producing far more lurking horror than *actual* horrors can manage, even on their absolute worst days.
2 Namely, circumstances in which anything describing him in the uncomfortably near future was likely to use said word. Prominently.
3 At least, the conscious parts skittered. The subconscious and unconscious parts had spent the better part of recent history running around in circles whilst gibbering in fear, prompted by watching his body vomit up a pile of remarkably oily alien goo, and shortly thereafter discovering they were now looked alone in a dark room with it. And that they weren't entirely sure where 'here' was, to boot. Fortunately for his overall sanity, they had finally managed to run head on into each other, knock themselves out, and give the rest of his mind some peace. Thus the conscious parts were really the only bits that mattered.
4 That is, on every occasion.
5 The voice hadn't quite gotten the hang of 'sarcasm' yet.
6 If 'taken (usually without payment) and used as ammunition in brawls, riots, and street parties' can be considered to be 'sold'.
7 Actually, fortunately, as the piece of sausage-inna-bun chose that precise moment to whizz through the point his head had occupied a moment before. Alex's sense of disasters-narrowly-escaped was still in recovery, however, and it took several minutes for this realisation to catch up with him.
8 It was pure coincidence that this also put him below the height of the eternally pinging piece of sausage-inna-bun.9
9 Really. It was.