Disclaimers & Notes: You know, I'm not sure this is what Sue had in mind when she sent me these lyrics. I know it sure as hell isn't something I particularly wanted to write. [tarsh glares at her muses. Muses smirk at tarsh]

So, anyway, these guys are not mine. That doesn't stop them ordering me around, however. I wanted something nice and fluffy for this lyric wheel story, my first real foray into XF land. Well, all right, it is X-Files, so maybe not fluffy, exactly. But... at least, nicer. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently so.

Rated: NC-17 for horror. WARNING: Be advised: Major major major (catch-22, anyone?) squick factor ahead. MAJOR. I am not kidding. You have been warned. Remember, I didn't want to write this story. I fought for ages not to.

Needless to say, I lost.

Gods, I can't believe I wrote this. -- tarsh

He knew this. The long, slow slide of a failing body, the hesitation before each heartbeat, just time enough to wonder if it would come, or if this would be the one he'd wait forever for. He'd been here before. He'd been young then; young and scared and in the body bag already; aware and yet not of the eternal wait between one breath and the next, and the next, until...

Death.

This time when he returned to life, he wasn't alone.

His fingers glide gently over the skin beneath, an obscene parody of a caress. They trace the patterned liquid glistening dark before him, draw anguished moans from the bruised flesh beneath. His own voice seems somehow alien to him: foreign and inhuman as his hand reaches for the knife, reflecting moonlight sharp over the face of his captive. His fingers move, cup the pale chin, turn the frightened eyes to his own. "Shed your skin," his voice croons, and he can almost see it flowing from his throat, curling sinuously around his captive's neck, slithering smoke-like into the cuts upon his face.

"And let's get started." The knife slides easily underneath skin, no resistance at all, and little reaction from the body immobile beneath him. Only the eyes speak: eyes dark and large and liquid, framed in darkly shimmering ropes of blood. They speak to him. Not to his body, but to him, trapped behind his own eyes. He wants to reply; wants to reassure, and this very need only serves to confuse him further. The man before him is his enemy, after all: why should he wish to help a man who has betrayed him and his so thoroughly?

And yet... and yet. Nobody deserves what his hands are doing to this man. Nobody should lose what his fingers, independent of his will, are peeling from him. No matter what he's done, this man, he doesn't deserve this.

And neither does he.

The worst part, he thinks, watching his fingers lay the strip carefully beside the others in their horrific tally, is not knowing how much is real. Some is, surely - there have been inexplicable stains when he's woken of a morning, fluids dripped on his skin and imperfectly washed off. A splotch on his jeans, once, that he knows would prove to be blood, were he to get it analysed; and yet no cut on his skin to make it, anywhere.

And yet--so much is dreamlike, blurred, a mosaic of blood and love painted abstract atop skin, layered with precision and care. He's retraced his steps before, in the daylight, followed the routes he remembers each night, and come always upon a building he does not recognise at the end of his map; a building that proves empty, hollow, unused. No shell of a man inside, cut and bound and suffering, no knife, no terrible count in skin littering the floor beside the battered mattress. He cannot find this place, when he has control of his body. He's looked.

And yet. Yet.

The blood must come from somewhere. And he hasn't seen Krycek since the dreams began.

"Your problem," says the voice which is not a voice, "is that you love him as much as you hate him."

He walks faster, head down, shoulders hunching automatically, as though to ward off a blow experience has told him he cannot avoid.

"We do not have that problem," the voice continues, and he flinches. Bad enough he suffers the dreams; if they are dreams. Bad enough he must watch while his body commits torture without his consent; but to have it try to reason it with him as well?

He needs Mulder. He needs his instinct for X-Files, his almost supernatural grasp of the unordinary. He needs Mulder to rescue him; to tell him what is happening to him, what is real, what is not.

But nobody sees. Nobody except him. Does that mean it's real, this being inside him? Real and able to hide even from Mulder?

Or is it just proof of his own lack of sanity?

"Yes," says the voice that is not a voice, and amusement shimmers clear in its tone.

"You will make me laugh," he whispers to the man bound beneath him, "and make me cry," and the voice is his, the words are his, and it is so unexpected his thoughts tumble over one another and screech to a halt.

He flings the knife from him, hoping, hoping. He watches it fly, across the room, strike the wall and drop to the floor, clanging against a pipe on the way down. Watches as the blood drips from it, mixes with the water on the floor, tinged now a faint pink in the moonlight. Watches, breathless, as the sound reverberates through the room, echoing through his bones, one by one.

He mourns the tears he cannot cry, as his hands move steady against the flesh beneath him, as blood flows sluggish over his fingers, as the knife layers cut after cut, slithers beneath skin, adds another tally to the count looming dark against his mind.

He wonders for whom that was meant: there is little reaction to the statement in the dilated eyes below him, and his own flinch inside his skull brings a sensation of laughter from the entity controlling his body. "What are you?" he rages, silently. "Who are you? How can you do this?" and the humour resident inside him increases exponentially with each useless question.

"Why?" he asks, finally, softly, and the stroke of his hand along wasted muscle becomes a caress.

"Because," comes the answer, eventually. His fingers stroke tentatively across the vulnerable throat beneath him, glide gently over a sharp cheekbone. "Because." He watches, astonished, as the skin on his own chest splits open, as his blood drops in a steady waterfall to mingle with that of the man beneath him. "He made us, you know," the voice that is not a voice reveals, tone somehow sly and wistful all at once. "Him, and you, and the dear dead doctor. His actions, and your emotions, and the doctor's machines. You made us between you, you three." His voice resounds throughout the room, penetrates the depths of his mind, ringing through his bones.

"How," he whispers, stunned, and moves his hand to caress the tip of an ever so slightly pointed ear. Eyes watch him, wary and uncertain, and he realises with a start that his muscles have obeyed him, if just this once. Carefully, he moves again, surprised when the knife slides under the rope without deviating to penetrate tender flesh. The knife is sharp, as he well knows, and the strands part beneath his blade with ease. He shifts, moves the body beneath him, cradles it in his arms.

His voice is fainter, now; if it weren't for the eyes fixed so warily on him, he'd have thought it was back inside his head again, "That's the question, isn't it?" He feels his skin split again, and it's the strangest sensation he can recall; the cells simply coming apart, cohesion lost. The blood flows sluggish from him, and he closes his eyes, wondering when the pain will hit. Wondering if it will. Another slit in his skin, and there seems to be a pattern to them, one he almost recognises. Is this real? These blood-red tears in his skin, these salt-rich tears from his eyes, the viscous swirl of blood between their bodies.

"The good doctor's machines," he hears himself say, and his hand tightens convulsively on the shoulder beneath his grasp, provoking a whimper he echoes as he feels fingers close on bruised flesh. "So many of them. So small. So vulnerable," and he wonders what it means. He can feel the pain, now, but it's nothing in comparison to the weight of the body trembling in his arms, the slide of torn skin against his own as he shifts. He watches, idly fascinated, as cuts appear on his hands; and the nagging familiarity of the pattern is at last resolved as he wipes away the blood to see it duplicated on the hand lying limp and heavy against his thigh.

"You gave us life," his voice continues, hanging whisper-still in the air about them, "and we suppose we should be grateful for that. But the truth is, we were never meant to live." The knife is gone: he doesn't know where. But it doesn't seem to matter: the skin strips off his ribs regardless, layering itself beside the matching strips already upon the floor, no outside intervention required. Pain flares briefly; but it seems distant, as distant as he had been, watching isolated from the back of his mind as his body was used in acts he could not condone, no matter who the victim, no matter what he had done. "And that," the voice continues, growing quieter and quieter the more his blood flows from him, "that, we cannot forgive. Not him for making it possible, nor you for calling us here."

"I don't understand," he whispers, "I'm sorry." And he doesn't know who he's addressing; the man in his arms, the voice in his head, himself. Or all three, or none.

"Your death at his hands," the voice says once more, and there is a sense of infinite impatience behind it. "His resurrection of you. You brought us back with you. Forced us inside the tiny mechanical beings floating through your bloodstream, condemned us to traverse the same pathways again and again; when we had roamed the very galaxies beyond. He took you there, and you called us to you, with your tangled mix of love and hate and rage and care for him, your confusion of emotion. You called us, and we came. We fed, explored, devoured, took unto ourselves your hatred and your love in equal proportions. We took what you offered, emptied you of that you did not wish to carry. And in return, you took the road he opened inside you, and you drew us with you, back to this life we were not meant to live, squeezed us into the very technology that brought you back. You destroyed what we were, and made us what we are.

"For that, you suffer as we did. For that, we extract our payment.

"This time, when you die, you will not come back. Either of you."

"Is this real?" he wonders, again, and the echo of his words is much louder than those of the being that had so recently usurped his body and his voice. There is no answer, and he expects none. Blood drips from torn skin, dribbling red and thick from his body, and he imagines he can see the tiny flecks of the nanos, flowing out on the tide of his life, embracing death with the violent abandon of the voice that lurks within them, within him. Are they real? He cannot decide. Is that really a glimmer of metal sliding from his body to Krycek's, swimming placidly within their mixed blood as it pools beneath them? Or are they plastic, these creatures that have invaded his body and stolen their lives? He wishes briefly he could ask the man in his arms; but there is no strength left in either of them for speech, and no reason to think the man would know the answer, anyway.

Did they truly call this down upon themselves?

He knows this: knows the long, slow slide of a failing body, the hesitation before each heartbeat, just time enough to wonder if it would come, or if this would be the one he'd wait forever for. He's been here before, twice; and yet he's never been so aware of the eternal wait between one breath and the next as he is now, when he's listening for it in somebody else.

Weary, he lets his head fall, heavy, to lie against the man still cradled in his arms. "Is this real?" he asks of nothing and everything, and feels the vibration of the words through both their bodies.

His skin tastes of blood, and salt, and tears. The word is a bare whisper of breath, twining across a body wracked in pain and close to death, "Alex...."

Lyrics provided by Sue.

Tell tarsh if this was as disturbing to read as it was to write at tarshaan@moonlit-eyrie .com

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