fic: Wotan's Day 13/16
Title: Wotan's Day
Fandoms: Highlander, X-files, Invisible Man
Rating:NC-17 overall, PG-13 this chapter.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.
Background:The year is 2023. Methos, the oldest of the Immortals in Highlander, was living as a corporate lawyer in Denver. Alexander Krycek, the double-dealing ratboy of the X-Files, was living there as an art dealer, running a gallery in Aurora, Colorado. Mulder was retired, somewhere suburban.
Summary: No one gets what they want. No one likes what they hear.
Warning: Violence, surgery
Chapter 1
(Chapters link sequentially from there.)
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
"Madam, the commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes."
The Star Beast
"Pull off here, " Krycek said. "And find something to cover the car."
"What, so the helicopters can notice the odd, car-shaped mound of branches?"
He glared at me, then turned his eyes back to Kaos. "Fine. Do it your way, but don't get us caught."
As I drove, I considered. The easiest way out of this for me was to have us found by the authorities, but that was a short-term tactic. I needed a long-term strategy to survive this with my Quickening intact and without killing my husband. I'd killed spouses before. I didn't like it.
I picked out a side trail, then turned off that trail as soon as I found an area clear enough for the sedan Gantt had left us. The ride was rough, eliciting moans from our passenger in the back seat. I glanced in the mirror, and his eyes stared back, lids not yet repaired, which was quite opposite of Immortal healing. I shook my head once, tilted it toward Krycek in the passenger seat, and turned my attention back to driving.
I found a tree with low branches spread wide, and stopped the car.
"What?" Krycek asked. "Here? This is too open."
"I need my sword. I can cut us a lovely hidden garage in the branches. It'll have the genuine version of the rustic look you find so offensive in inauthentic places." I tried to appeal back to our former life, when we'd taken great joy in raking everything around us over the coals of taste.
He looked at me, and I could see him his shift his gears consciously to follow. It took too long, though. He must be distracted, or tired. A few hours ago, he would have taken the bait in order to reassert his imagined control over me. After too long a pause, he said, "Well, this is authentic rustic décor. Leave it to you to find accommodations I can't object to."
I put the car in park and popped the trunk, still weighing options. In the end, it seemed best to play along for now and see if Krycek would take this where I thought he was going. I took the PlaSteel Ivanhoe, not wanting to damage the edge of the steel sword, and hacked just enough of the low branches to fit the car underneath, then used the broken limbs to cover the opening. We would be invisible from the air, and hard to see by anyone looking for a car. To be sure, I took a smaller branch and obscured our tire tracks back to the road and a little beyond.
I heard a deep rumble of engines, but no sirens. It would be the fire trucks, not wanting to warn whoever set off the bomb. I went back to the car, stepping on rocks and piles of pine needles and leaves, leaving no easy trail. MacLeod could have tracked me, but I doubted the Coconino Sheriff's office had trackers on staff. I put the Ivanhoe back in the trunk, ducked under branches, and got into the car. Kaos had almost healed his face, and his hands were moving as if to check his control over the fingers. He was ugly, big, and still smelled of char.
Krycek barely glanced at me, other than to confirm that it wasn't someone else. "So what next?" I asked.
He didn't answer, but spoke instead to Kaos. "Can you talk yet?" Kaos grunted and shook his head. "But you can hear. Good. Now, do you know what this is?" Krycek held up his prosthetic, which looked hardly like a hand, and with the same deep snicking sound as last time, the long spike appeared.
This was my first chance to look at it closely. It had the same flat opalescent gray as the Ivanhoe replica, as the knife strapped to my arm. I was right that it was PlaSteel, the same material that Hobbes said was fused to Krycek's skull. Then I remembered what Gantt had said about the last one of these spikes at the DCI not coming back from loan to Heracles Composites, a subsidiary of Olympian Chemical, and makers of PlaSteel. It wasn't a breakthrough, it was alien technology.
The thought bothered me only momentarily, having too often been the one who brought foreign technology into isolated cultures. The main thought was to retire the idea of wresting Krycek's arm off to use the spike on Kaos. I had a weapon that should work. I felt myself uncoil, then wind again in a new way. The smile never reached my face, but inside, it was there.
"Do you know what this is?" Krycek said again to Kaos who looked at the spike, then me, then the spike again, or Krycek's face, I couldn't be sure. He nodded, his neck and lips noticeably thicker with a few more moments of healing.
"Then you know what I'll do to you if you don't do as I say?"
Kaos nodded.
"What do you want him to do?" I asked, knowing the answer.
Krycek pulled my gun and put it to my temple, never once looking my way.
"Make me like him," he said to Kaos. "Do for me what you did to the clones."
I could see Kaos in the rearview, though his face was partly obscured by the reflection of Krycek's finger on the trigger of his gun. Kaos looked at me and raised his arm toward me, but it dropped back. He was not yet strong enough, and the look in his eyes said he didn't want to. Perhaps it was harder because he now knew me too well, knew too many of me to kill all by taking one.
"Krycek? Alexander?" I said, turning toward the gun and letting fear into my voice. "What are you trying to do?"
"To be like you," he said. He glanced at me, but did not turn, as if he did not trust his expression.
"Sasha," I said, mixing fear with command and appeal, and then he looked at me. There was hunger in his eyes, and he tried to make it look like desire for me, but he failed.
"I want to be like you. I want to live forever. I want to be with you forever."
There was a second where I wasn't sure how I would react. He must have seen something in my eyes that looked like what he wanted to see, at least for a second. I felt a certain tenderness toward him-there was no other word-but there was more amusement and pity than he was prepared to see, and I watched his face change as he read my expression.
Then I laughed. I laughed at him and it startled him enough that I could pull the knife out of its sheath on my forearm and cut the back of his hand to the bone while turning and pushing his face with my left hand. I pinned him to the door, his dropped gun lying between us, and took a breath, then looked directly at Kaos.
"I cannot let you live."
"I can stop," he said, his voice a hoarse whisper, not yet healed. "Move on."
"To what?"
"Something new. This game was beginning to bore me."
"Why play this game? What did they offer you, and why in hell did you take some of them up and sacrifice them on the vortex sites?"
"What happens if I don't tell you?"
"I'll kill you."
"You'll kill me anyway. I know you better than you know yourself."
He might have a point. I had no memory of killing an Anangu. Perhaps I had taken the head of someone who had. "Then you know what I'm capable of doing."
I picked up Krycek's gun, got out of the car, and made my way under the branches to the passenger side. I opened the rear door. "Can you get out?"
Kaos leaned his bulk forward, the tarp sticking to his back as if the healed skin had fused to the plastic. I gave the smallest of moments over to pity, then grabbed the tarp and yanked, ripping his flesh.
He did not scream, so I tore further, fascinated by what I could see under the skin. His anatomy was unlike anything human. The mechanics of motion somehow must have been achieved by smaller units than our muscle and tendon, and I doubted one could understand the substructures with anything less than an electron microscope. They had said the things were shape-shifters, which I had not believed, but the flesh on his back made me think it could be done.
He reached for me, but I dodged his weak attempt, then pulled again on the tarp. His breathing changed, and I watched fresh skin grow in from the sides. That gave me an idea, and I put the tarp back in place, forcing him to heal fused to it again.
"Why?" I asked. "Why did you do it?"
This time he answered. "They offered me a chance to go home."
Krycek asked, "And you believed them?"
Kaos shook his head and dropped it to lean on the back of Krycek's seat. "No. That's why I took the true Immortals up to the vortex sites. I used the power they released as a signal. The rocks amplified it."
"A bonfire on a desert island. And a religion?" I asked. "That seems extreme."
He sat up slightly, looked Krycek in the eye, and said, "It worked better with the willing."
"And you thought it was funny," Krycek said. "I never knew you guys had a sense of humor."
"You know nothing about us," Kaos said, and he lunged toward Krycek.
His neck was exposed and I remembered what they said about where to strike. I plunged the PlaSteel knife into him, just between where the fourth and fifth vertebrae would be on a human.
"No!" I heard Krycek yell.
Kaos spasmed, arcing backwards and driving the blade out the front of his throat. Green ichor bled out of both entry and exit wounds, but there was no spurt of severed artery. Given what I had seen, it would have surprised me more if there had been. I wondered what kind of circulatory system he had as I put my boot on his back for leverage and pulled out the blade.
"God damn it! God damn it!" Krycek screamed, with more raw emotion than I had ever heard from him. It was rage. It was grief. It was real. I ignored it, and bent my way through the low branches to open the trunk and arm myself. I could not have sat with the coat and the two swords, so I hung it on a low branch. With my knife cleaned and sheathed, gun re-holstered, and Krycek's gun tucked in my jeans, I felt whole.
I pulled open Krycek's door to find him kneeling backwards in the seat, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest with the forearm of the prosthetic. "He would have killed you," I said. He didn't answer. He looked pathetic and broken. Pathetic, I believed; broken, I did not.
"Get out," I said. "We have to burn the car and destroy the retrovirus in his blood."
He shook his head, wiped his face and gathered control. "You're not up on your retroviruses. Exposure to air will destroy it."
"I don't want this found." The truth was, I was so unnerved by what had happened when I carried Kaos, smeared in his blood, that I wanted to be sure his destruction was complete.
Krycek was calculating, scheming, rational and correct when he said, "We can't hike back into town. I cant," he raised his bloody hand and continued, "I can't use my fingers."
I could see that the cut was deep. He would be able to curl but not extend, and all movement would be painful with his hand bones destabilized.
"Wait here," I said.
"Like I'm going anywhere," he muttered as I crouched my way under the low branches back to the trunk. If Gantt was as good as he seemed, there would be a field medical kit, rather than a standard first aid box. I wasn't wrong about Gantt.
I stashed my swords again, took the kit back to the driver's side and got in, opened the box and found what I needed. "Let me fix it." At his look I clarified, "Your hand. I've been a doctor several times. There are needles and string in here and I know how to sew the tendons back. It will take a while, but you'll get full use back in time." I put on my best bedside manner.
"What, like You break it, you fix it? You are sick," he said. "I wouldn't need your fucking sutures if you'd just let me have what I wanted."
"Sutures, right. I'd forgotten the technical term," I lied. If he'd gotten what he wanted, I would be no more. If he'd not lied about his motivation, I would feel differently
"Fuck you," he said. "Just how long ago were you a doctor?"
"Hmm?" I threaded the first needle, a curved one good for sewing near bone. "Oh, about the time Mary Shelley first published Frankenstein," I answered as I laid out the forceps I would need, then smiled at him in a Cheshire cat's grin. "You might say I was an inspiration to her."
"You sick fuck." He drew away as I reached for his injured hand. I touched my forehead, a salute and a reminder, then held out my hand, palm up. He looked at it, then up at me. The expression on his face was hard to describe. He hated me, but he saw me again. For that moment, at least, I had bested him. He had to pay attention.
He put his hand down on mine, and I placed it on the elbow rest between us.
"Think you can hold still?"
"Try me," he growled. He was angry, but he needed to prove something-to me or himself, I wasn't sure-and it didn't matter. I gave him an Oxycontin I found in the kit, and he swallowed it dry. I began to work before it would have any chance to affect him. He took the pain, and I stitched together the tendons, tacked muscle, and then closed the skin with a Ford interlocking pattern that could take the stress of him trying to move his fingers. It took hours, and would have gone faster and been more neatly done with magnifying glasses, but the results would allow him to use his hand.
In the end, I covered the wound with an antibiotic ointment with an analgesic built in, bandaged it, then gave him two more of the modern equivalent of tincture of poppies, plus an oral antibiotic. We might have problems with infection, given the circumstances, and peripheral injuries were more prone to such things.
I found myself, despite all the preventive measures, ambivalent about whether he regained use of the hand.
~~~~~
He was never one to seek advice. He had never taken direction well, but he sensed that MacLeod would send him out on his ass if he complained. They had driven out into the Red Rock State Park, and were performing katas on rough ground. Mulder felt old and out of shape, then admitted to himself that he was old and out of shape. His muscles did not want to respond, and MacLeod's careful lack of judgment was worse than any outright criticism.
He held up his hand. "I think I'm done."
"You've barely started."
"I meant for today."
"Push it. You'll heal."
He regarded MacLeod's sculpted chest and mentally contrasted it with his own. His own flesh sagged in some places, bulged in others, and at this moment everything burned. "Five minutes, at least."
"All right. You stop if you want." MacLeod took a breath and took position, working through more difficult moves than he'd shown Mulder.
Mulder watched for a moment, then asked, "So what do you think happened to Krycek, Gantt and Bierce?"
"No idea. I'm sure they'll show up soon."
"With Kaos?"
MacLeod sliced the air with his sword, and answered, "Or with his head." He flipped his grip and stabbed an invisible enemy behind him.
"That would be a bad idea. Those things bleed a retrovirus."
"Bierce can handle it." MacLeod brought his sword to the center, breathed twice, then looked at Mulder. "Immortal, remember? He's survived plagues before."
"Still, not a good idea to bring the head into a populated area."
MacLeod said, "I was speaking figuratively. Five minutes are up."
Mulder stood and was not as sore as expected. They began the kata again, and he felt his muscles begin to respond like they knew what they were doing. In another hour he felt as if there was strength beneath his skin.
"That's enough," MacLeod said, and he wiped the dust off his face with his shirt. "Let's get cleaned up and go after them."
"Do you think they're in trouble?"
"Maybe."
Mulder could sense that the answer was really yes, but he kept his peace. It was strange how he could sometimes feel emotions from MacLeod, and he wondered if it were a two-way street. They drove out of the park and up the road into town, quiet until Mulder broke the silence. "I feel different about the world."
"It happens," MacLeod said.
"No, I mean, the things I care about are different."
That earned him a sharp glance. "How so?"
Mulder wasn't sure how to say what he felt, and the unfamiliarity of the situation made him more reticent. He regretted speaking.
"How so?" MacLeod asked again.
"I don't want to go home," Mulder said, only recognizing the truth when he heard himself say it.
MacLeod smiled, misunderstanding. "If Dana Scully-Mulder is anything like Eryna described, I'm sure she can handle it."
Mulder did not voice his thought, but he had images of her aging, old, demented and wheelchair-bound. "I'm not sure I can handle it," he said to himself. "I don't want to watch her grow old and die. I don't want her to see me not age. I don't want to ask her if she knows who the father of our children is."
MacLeod said nothing, and Mulder was grateful for it. They made no further comments, and parted ways at the hotel, each seeking his own room. Mulder had stripped for the shower when he heard a knock. The peephole showed Johnson's worried face. He grabbed a towel and opened the door.
"Agent Johnson?"
"Agent Mulder." Her eyes flicked down from his chest to his towel. "I'm sorry. I'll come back later." She turned, then turned back. "Sir? Your wife called me. She's worried that your phone is off."
"I'll call her on the land line when we get a minute." Mulder closed the door. He felt nothing. He shouldn't feel nothing.
He looked at the hotel phone. As an experiment, he picked it up and called his home number.
Their outgoing message began, and he almost hung up before he realized that she would not recognize the number, and would not answer the phone. He listed to the message Samantha had recorded during her last visit from college, then at the sound of the tone said, "It's me. I'm okay, but my phone is fried. I'll call again when I get a minute."
When he hung up, he felt only relief that she hadn't answered, and then, again, the odd blankness at the sound of his daughter's recorded voice. Not his daughter.
He started to call into the office at Quantico, but realized with a start that it was Saturday. No one he wanted to talk to was likely to be there. He took a shower, turning the water as hot as he could to try to get his shoulders to relax, taking it through to scalding and feeling the sensation of the healing of first degree burns. When the novelty wore off, he dried himself, turned on the TV, and flipped through the channels until he found one that showed skin. He let the pornography further detach his mind, knowing that there was something, some idea, that wasn't coming to the fore. Nield's absence was bothering him. The example of how they had dealt with the twenty Immortal clones made him very worried about how they could take on nearly a thousand.
An idea came to him, and he looked up at the gang-bang on the screen. He spent a moment contemplating the geometry of the five-on-one before calling Skinner at home. Mulder didn't remember to turn off the TV until Skinner said something about cheesy music and moaning.
"Now what's this about the Krycek case?"
"The murders you sent me after are pretty much irrelevant to the entire story. Krycek may or may not have killed some of them, many of them didn't even stay dead, but it turns out the so-called art dealers were more involved in a conspiracy to create an army of clones that can't be permanently killed unless you cut off their heads."
Skinner rubbed his eyes under his glasses. Mulder expected the remembered long-suffering sigh, but Skinner surprised him by saying, "Olympian Chemical, right?"
"You knew?"
"We suspected, but we wanted independent confirmation."
"And Krycek?"
"For the moment, he's working for us."
"But you didn't trust his information."
"Right."
"Now what?"
"Use the contacts you've made there to find the clones. We haven't had any luck."
"Okay. You should know that we think the compound of the alien bounty hunter who calls himself Aleister Kaos was hit by a truck bomb."
"Interesting," Skinner said. "No word on whether he's still alive?"
"No sir, and may I add that you're not sounding very retired at the moment."
Skinner scowled, and Mulder knew he was on to something.
"CIA?"
"Agent Mulder, I play golf."
The phone screen went blank, then returned to standby. "Shit." He said.
Chapter 14
Fandoms: Highlander, X-files, Invisible Man
Rating:NC-17 overall, PG-13 this chapter.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.
Background:The year is 2023. Methos, the oldest of the Immortals in Highlander, was living as a corporate lawyer in Denver. Alexander Krycek, the double-dealing ratboy of the X-Files, was living there as an art dealer, running a gallery in Aurora, Colorado. Mulder was retired, somewhere suburban.
Summary: No one gets what they want. No one likes what they hear.
Warning: Violence, surgery
Chapter 1
(Chapters link sequentially from there.)
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
"Madam, the commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes."
The Star Beast
"Pull off here, " Krycek said. "And find something to cover the car."
"What, so the helicopters can notice the odd, car-shaped mound of branches?"
He glared at me, then turned his eyes back to Kaos. "Fine. Do it your way, but don't get us caught."
As I drove, I considered. The easiest way out of this for me was to have us found by the authorities, but that was a short-term tactic. I needed a long-term strategy to survive this with my Quickening intact and without killing my husband. I'd killed spouses before. I didn't like it.
I picked out a side trail, then turned off that trail as soon as I found an area clear enough for the sedan Gantt had left us. The ride was rough, eliciting moans from our passenger in the back seat. I glanced in the mirror, and his eyes stared back, lids not yet repaired, which was quite opposite of Immortal healing. I shook my head once, tilted it toward Krycek in the passenger seat, and turned my attention back to driving.
I found a tree with low branches spread wide, and stopped the car.
"What?" Krycek asked. "Here? This is too open."
"I need my sword. I can cut us a lovely hidden garage in the branches. It'll have the genuine version of the rustic look you find so offensive in inauthentic places." I tried to appeal back to our former life, when we'd taken great joy in raking everything around us over the coals of taste.
He looked at me, and I could see him his shift his gears consciously to follow. It took too long, though. He must be distracted, or tired. A few hours ago, he would have taken the bait in order to reassert his imagined control over me. After too long a pause, he said, "Well, this is authentic rustic décor. Leave it to you to find accommodations I can't object to."
I put the car in park and popped the trunk, still weighing options. In the end, it seemed best to play along for now and see if Krycek would take this where I thought he was going. I took the PlaSteel Ivanhoe, not wanting to damage the edge of the steel sword, and hacked just enough of the low branches to fit the car underneath, then used the broken limbs to cover the opening. We would be invisible from the air, and hard to see by anyone looking for a car. To be sure, I took a smaller branch and obscured our tire tracks back to the road and a little beyond.
I heard a deep rumble of engines, but no sirens. It would be the fire trucks, not wanting to warn whoever set off the bomb. I went back to the car, stepping on rocks and piles of pine needles and leaves, leaving no easy trail. MacLeod could have tracked me, but I doubted the Coconino Sheriff's office had trackers on staff. I put the Ivanhoe back in the trunk, ducked under branches, and got into the car. Kaos had almost healed his face, and his hands were moving as if to check his control over the fingers. He was ugly, big, and still smelled of char.
Krycek barely glanced at me, other than to confirm that it wasn't someone else. "So what next?" I asked.
He didn't answer, but spoke instead to Kaos. "Can you talk yet?" Kaos grunted and shook his head. "But you can hear. Good. Now, do you know what this is?" Krycek held up his prosthetic, which looked hardly like a hand, and with the same deep snicking sound as last time, the long spike appeared.
This was my first chance to look at it closely. It had the same flat opalescent gray as the Ivanhoe replica, as the knife strapped to my arm. I was right that it was PlaSteel, the same material that Hobbes said was fused to Krycek's skull. Then I remembered what Gantt had said about the last one of these spikes at the DCI not coming back from loan to Heracles Composites, a subsidiary of Olympian Chemical, and makers of PlaSteel. It wasn't a breakthrough, it was alien technology.
The thought bothered me only momentarily, having too often been the one who brought foreign technology into isolated cultures. The main thought was to retire the idea of wresting Krycek's arm off to use the spike on Kaos. I had a weapon that should work. I felt myself uncoil, then wind again in a new way. The smile never reached my face, but inside, it was there.
"Do you know what this is?" Krycek said again to Kaos who looked at the spike, then me, then the spike again, or Krycek's face, I couldn't be sure. He nodded, his neck and lips noticeably thicker with a few more moments of healing.
"Then you know what I'll do to you if you don't do as I say?"
Kaos nodded.
"What do you want him to do?" I asked, knowing the answer.
Krycek pulled my gun and put it to my temple, never once looking my way.
"Make me like him," he said to Kaos. "Do for me what you did to the clones."
I could see Kaos in the rearview, though his face was partly obscured by the reflection of Krycek's finger on the trigger of his gun. Kaos looked at me and raised his arm toward me, but it dropped back. He was not yet strong enough, and the look in his eyes said he didn't want to. Perhaps it was harder because he now knew me too well, knew too many of me to kill all by taking one.
"Krycek? Alexander?" I said, turning toward the gun and letting fear into my voice. "What are you trying to do?"
"To be like you," he said. He glanced at me, but did not turn, as if he did not trust his expression.
"Sasha," I said, mixing fear with command and appeal, and then he looked at me. There was hunger in his eyes, and he tried to make it look like desire for me, but he failed.
"I want to be like you. I want to live forever. I want to be with you forever."
There was a second where I wasn't sure how I would react. He must have seen something in my eyes that looked like what he wanted to see, at least for a second. I felt a certain tenderness toward him-there was no other word-but there was more amusement and pity than he was prepared to see, and I watched his face change as he read my expression.
Then I laughed. I laughed at him and it startled him enough that I could pull the knife out of its sheath on my forearm and cut the back of his hand to the bone while turning and pushing his face with my left hand. I pinned him to the door, his dropped gun lying between us, and took a breath, then looked directly at Kaos.
"I cannot let you live."
"I can stop," he said, his voice a hoarse whisper, not yet healed. "Move on."
"To what?"
"Something new. This game was beginning to bore me."
"Why play this game? What did they offer you, and why in hell did you take some of them up and sacrifice them on the vortex sites?"
"What happens if I don't tell you?"
"I'll kill you."
"You'll kill me anyway. I know you better than you know yourself."
He might have a point. I had no memory of killing an Anangu. Perhaps I had taken the head of someone who had. "Then you know what I'm capable of doing."
I picked up Krycek's gun, got out of the car, and made my way under the branches to the passenger side. I opened the rear door. "Can you get out?"
Kaos leaned his bulk forward, the tarp sticking to his back as if the healed skin had fused to the plastic. I gave the smallest of moments over to pity, then grabbed the tarp and yanked, ripping his flesh.
He did not scream, so I tore further, fascinated by what I could see under the skin. His anatomy was unlike anything human. The mechanics of motion somehow must have been achieved by smaller units than our muscle and tendon, and I doubted one could understand the substructures with anything less than an electron microscope. They had said the things were shape-shifters, which I had not believed, but the flesh on his back made me think it could be done.
He reached for me, but I dodged his weak attempt, then pulled again on the tarp. His breathing changed, and I watched fresh skin grow in from the sides. That gave me an idea, and I put the tarp back in place, forcing him to heal fused to it again.
"Why?" I asked. "Why did you do it?"
This time he answered. "They offered me a chance to go home."
Krycek asked, "And you believed them?"
Kaos shook his head and dropped it to lean on the back of Krycek's seat. "No. That's why I took the true Immortals up to the vortex sites. I used the power they released as a signal. The rocks amplified it."
"A bonfire on a desert island. And a religion?" I asked. "That seems extreme."
He sat up slightly, looked Krycek in the eye, and said, "It worked better with the willing."
"And you thought it was funny," Krycek said. "I never knew you guys had a sense of humor."
"You know nothing about us," Kaos said, and he lunged toward Krycek.
His neck was exposed and I remembered what they said about where to strike. I plunged the PlaSteel knife into him, just between where the fourth and fifth vertebrae would be on a human.
"No!" I heard Krycek yell.
Kaos spasmed, arcing backwards and driving the blade out the front of his throat. Green ichor bled out of both entry and exit wounds, but there was no spurt of severed artery. Given what I had seen, it would have surprised me more if there had been. I wondered what kind of circulatory system he had as I put my boot on his back for leverage and pulled out the blade.
"God damn it! God damn it!" Krycek screamed, with more raw emotion than I had ever heard from him. It was rage. It was grief. It was real. I ignored it, and bent my way through the low branches to open the trunk and arm myself. I could not have sat with the coat and the two swords, so I hung it on a low branch. With my knife cleaned and sheathed, gun re-holstered, and Krycek's gun tucked in my jeans, I felt whole.
I pulled open Krycek's door to find him kneeling backwards in the seat, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest with the forearm of the prosthetic. "He would have killed you," I said. He didn't answer. He looked pathetic and broken. Pathetic, I believed; broken, I did not.
"Get out," I said. "We have to burn the car and destroy the retrovirus in his blood."
He shook his head, wiped his face and gathered control. "You're not up on your retroviruses. Exposure to air will destroy it."
"I don't want this found." The truth was, I was so unnerved by what had happened when I carried Kaos, smeared in his blood, that I wanted to be sure his destruction was complete.
Krycek was calculating, scheming, rational and correct when he said, "We can't hike back into town. I cant," he raised his bloody hand and continued, "I can't use my fingers."
I could see that the cut was deep. He would be able to curl but not extend, and all movement would be painful with his hand bones destabilized.
"Wait here," I said.
"Like I'm going anywhere," he muttered as I crouched my way under the low branches back to the trunk. If Gantt was as good as he seemed, there would be a field medical kit, rather than a standard first aid box. I wasn't wrong about Gantt.
I stashed my swords again, took the kit back to the driver's side and got in, opened the box and found what I needed. "Let me fix it." At his look I clarified, "Your hand. I've been a doctor several times. There are needles and string in here and I know how to sew the tendons back. It will take a while, but you'll get full use back in time." I put on my best bedside manner.
"What, like You break it, you fix it? You are sick," he said. "I wouldn't need your fucking sutures if you'd just let me have what I wanted."
"Sutures, right. I'd forgotten the technical term," I lied. If he'd gotten what he wanted, I would be no more. If he'd not lied about his motivation, I would feel differently
"Fuck you," he said. "Just how long ago were you a doctor?"
"Hmm?" I threaded the first needle, a curved one good for sewing near bone. "Oh, about the time Mary Shelley first published Frankenstein," I answered as I laid out the forceps I would need, then smiled at him in a Cheshire cat's grin. "You might say I was an inspiration to her."
"You sick fuck." He drew away as I reached for his injured hand. I touched my forehead, a salute and a reminder, then held out my hand, palm up. He looked at it, then up at me. The expression on his face was hard to describe. He hated me, but he saw me again. For that moment, at least, I had bested him. He had to pay attention.
He put his hand down on mine, and I placed it on the elbow rest between us.
"Think you can hold still?"
"Try me," he growled. He was angry, but he needed to prove something-to me or himself, I wasn't sure-and it didn't matter. I gave him an Oxycontin I found in the kit, and he swallowed it dry. I began to work before it would have any chance to affect him. He took the pain, and I stitched together the tendons, tacked muscle, and then closed the skin with a Ford interlocking pattern that could take the stress of him trying to move his fingers. It took hours, and would have gone faster and been more neatly done with magnifying glasses, but the results would allow him to use his hand.
In the end, I covered the wound with an antibiotic ointment with an analgesic built in, bandaged it, then gave him two more of the modern equivalent of tincture of poppies, plus an oral antibiotic. We might have problems with infection, given the circumstances, and peripheral injuries were more prone to such things.
I found myself, despite all the preventive measures, ambivalent about whether he regained use of the hand.
~~~~~
He was never one to seek advice. He had never taken direction well, but he sensed that MacLeod would send him out on his ass if he complained. They had driven out into the Red Rock State Park, and were performing katas on rough ground. Mulder felt old and out of shape, then admitted to himself that he was old and out of shape. His muscles did not want to respond, and MacLeod's careful lack of judgment was worse than any outright criticism.
He held up his hand. "I think I'm done."
"You've barely started."
"I meant for today."
"Push it. You'll heal."
He regarded MacLeod's sculpted chest and mentally contrasted it with his own. His own flesh sagged in some places, bulged in others, and at this moment everything burned. "Five minutes, at least."
"All right. You stop if you want." MacLeod took a breath and took position, working through more difficult moves than he'd shown Mulder.
Mulder watched for a moment, then asked, "So what do you think happened to Krycek, Gantt and Bierce?"
"No idea. I'm sure they'll show up soon."
"With Kaos?"
MacLeod sliced the air with his sword, and answered, "Or with his head." He flipped his grip and stabbed an invisible enemy behind him.
"That would be a bad idea. Those things bleed a retrovirus."
"Bierce can handle it." MacLeod brought his sword to the center, breathed twice, then looked at Mulder. "Immortal, remember? He's survived plagues before."
"Still, not a good idea to bring the head into a populated area."
MacLeod said, "I was speaking figuratively. Five minutes are up."
Mulder stood and was not as sore as expected. They began the kata again, and he felt his muscles begin to respond like they knew what they were doing. In another hour he felt as if there was strength beneath his skin.
"That's enough," MacLeod said, and he wiped the dust off his face with his shirt. "Let's get cleaned up and go after them."
"Do you think they're in trouble?"
"Maybe."
Mulder could sense that the answer was really yes, but he kept his peace. It was strange how he could sometimes feel emotions from MacLeod, and he wondered if it were a two-way street. They drove out of the park and up the road into town, quiet until Mulder broke the silence. "I feel different about the world."
"It happens," MacLeod said.
"No, I mean, the things I care about are different."
That earned him a sharp glance. "How so?"
Mulder wasn't sure how to say what he felt, and the unfamiliarity of the situation made him more reticent. He regretted speaking.
"How so?" MacLeod asked again.
"I don't want to go home," Mulder said, only recognizing the truth when he heard himself say it.
MacLeod smiled, misunderstanding. "If Dana Scully-Mulder is anything like Eryna described, I'm sure she can handle it."
Mulder did not voice his thought, but he had images of her aging, old, demented and wheelchair-bound. "I'm not sure I can handle it," he said to himself. "I don't want to watch her grow old and die. I don't want her to see me not age. I don't want to ask her if she knows who the father of our children is."
MacLeod said nothing, and Mulder was grateful for it. They made no further comments, and parted ways at the hotel, each seeking his own room. Mulder had stripped for the shower when he heard a knock. The peephole showed Johnson's worried face. He grabbed a towel and opened the door.
"Agent Johnson?"
"Agent Mulder." Her eyes flicked down from his chest to his towel. "I'm sorry. I'll come back later." She turned, then turned back. "Sir? Your wife called me. She's worried that your phone is off."
"I'll call her on the land line when we get a minute." Mulder closed the door. He felt nothing. He shouldn't feel nothing.
He looked at the hotel phone. As an experiment, he picked it up and called his home number.
Their outgoing message began, and he almost hung up before he realized that she would not recognize the number, and would not answer the phone. He listed to the message Samantha had recorded during her last visit from college, then at the sound of the tone said, "It's me. I'm okay, but my phone is fried. I'll call again when I get a minute."
When he hung up, he felt only relief that she hadn't answered, and then, again, the odd blankness at the sound of his daughter's recorded voice. Not his daughter.
He started to call into the office at Quantico, but realized with a start that it was Saturday. No one he wanted to talk to was likely to be there. He took a shower, turning the water as hot as he could to try to get his shoulders to relax, taking it through to scalding and feeling the sensation of the healing of first degree burns. When the novelty wore off, he dried himself, turned on the TV, and flipped through the channels until he found one that showed skin. He let the pornography further detach his mind, knowing that there was something, some idea, that wasn't coming to the fore. Nield's absence was bothering him. The example of how they had dealt with the twenty Immortal clones made him very worried about how they could take on nearly a thousand.
An idea came to him, and he looked up at the gang-bang on the screen. He spent a moment contemplating the geometry of the five-on-one before calling Skinner at home. Mulder didn't remember to turn off the TV until Skinner said something about cheesy music and moaning.
"Now what's this about the Krycek case?"
"The murders you sent me after are pretty much irrelevant to the entire story. Krycek may or may not have killed some of them, many of them didn't even stay dead, but it turns out the so-called art dealers were more involved in a conspiracy to create an army of clones that can't be permanently killed unless you cut off their heads."
Skinner rubbed his eyes under his glasses. Mulder expected the remembered long-suffering sigh, but Skinner surprised him by saying, "Olympian Chemical, right?"
"You knew?"
"We suspected, but we wanted independent confirmation."
"And Krycek?"
"For the moment, he's working for us."
"But you didn't trust his information."
"Right."
"Now what?"
"Use the contacts you've made there to find the clones. We haven't had any luck."
"Okay. You should know that we think the compound of the alien bounty hunter who calls himself Aleister Kaos was hit by a truck bomb."
"Interesting," Skinner said. "No word on whether he's still alive?"
"No sir, and may I add that you're not sounding very retired at the moment."
Skinner scowled, and Mulder knew he was on to something.
"CIA?"
"Agent Mulder, I play golf."
The phone screen went blank, then returned to standby. "Shit." He said.
Chapter 14