AUTHOR'S TEDIOUSLY LONG NOTE: This is very much an idiosyncratic, stream-of-conciousness story. It is also a Mulder-Krycek dash fic, as opposed to a slash fic. Slash means sex! Dash means "relationship" (as it were)! Ok? There is no M/K sex in this story! Not even a sexual fantasy. Sad, but true. Moving onward. The tense changes in the fic are intentional. If you are looking for a story with a plot, this is not that story. I suggest you move along now, before you get annoyed and decide to flame my ass. And, finally, the title and running theme of this story is a line I got from a short Stephen King story, about a living oil slick and a lake and a bunch of stupid teenagers. I can't quite remember the title. Excellent short story! However, I'm not sure which came first; me thinking of the story and then making up the line and realizing Stephen King had the same line, or me thinking of the line first and centering the story around it. So... is this a legit quote or not? How much am I ripping off of S. King? Help me, someone, please. P.S. This is a most unhappy fic, filled with death and misery. Why is miserable stuff so much easier and faster to write than happy stuff? This is very telling of me, I know...
FEEDBACK: My Inbox is lonely. Please lift its spirits. E-mail me at raietta@yahoo.com
DO YOU LOVE?
by Raietta
"Do you love?"
--Stephen King
"Please," the man begged, "please." Blood bubbled from his nose, wheezed in his slowly filling lungs, oozed from the gash on the back of his head. More of the blood, a darkening crimson, stained the windowless room in which he lay, his hands raised in weak supplication. His killer kept on with his work, silently. He didn't speak once. The man on the concrete floor continued to beg, "Please, please," and the only noises for a long time in that room were that same word, uttered over and over again, and the sound of flesh tearing. After a while, those sounds stopped, too. Then there was nothing but the tiny echo of a dripping blade, the rustle of cloth as the killer cleaned his tools, the soft squelch of his rubber-treaded boots as they tramped through red puddles.
Then the click and beep of a mobile phone as cleaners were called in.
The man left the room, tracking scarlet boot-prints behind him, which he didn't bother to clean. It didn't matter, here. He took his tools and left the room, which was cold and concrete, splashed with blood, the dead man still, stretched out on his side.
"Do you love?" the man asked, the first time he'd spoken in hours, to the corpse on the floor, before leaving. The words echoed oddly in the stillness, the waiting hush. Then he was gone.
***
The trees shook. The green-eyed man watched them, traced their shivering branches in the wan, dying wash of light that gleamed poorly from a nearby guttering lamppost. It was summer time, so each twisting hook of bone had a flesh of leaves, silvery green in the pathetic lamplight. The trees danced in place, swaying. The dimly illuminated face of the watch on his right wrist, his real wrist, said that it was three forty-two a.m. The man turned back to the shaking trees, and watched them play with one another in the wind for another half an hour, then left.
***
"Go to the party. Your mark will be in a black tux with a white rose in his buttonhole. Very original. Take him in the restroom, use two bullets; one in the head, one in the chest. Leave him there. Don't use the Glock. Use the gun you'll find in the safe deposit box at the aforementioned bank. Wear gloves. Leave the gun. Leave immediately afterward. You'll be contacted by the usual means."
The shirt was a starched, gleaming white, the shoes expensive hand-sewn leather. The tuxedo he wore had cost enough money to feed a third-world country. It seemed to absorb all of the light in the ballroom, reflecting nothing back. A sort of fashionable black hole. A certain color-blind FBI agent would be very interested in such a phenomenon, he was sure. He grinned, briefly, allowing himself that one single indulgence, before shunting the unwanted thoughts away. His temporary companion, a sultry blonde in a sheer red dress that also, no doubt, cost more than most nations' defense programs, caught the look and giggled, thinking it was aimed toward her. She had the kind of breasts that made such assumptions permissible. He grinned again, a purely stupid, shallow, happy playboy grin, and she giggled again, sounding like the femme-bunny at the end of "Bambi". A well-known politician wandered past his elbow, talking earnestly with a slightly less well-known doctor. He eyed them surreptitiously, his perusal unnoticed.
"Really, you should try the champagne," his companion told him in a low, throaty voice. "The bubbles are delicious."
Where the hell was his mark? "Never touch the stuff," he replied in his own phone-sex voice, giving her a polished, subtle leer. "It's like drinking pop rocks. Gross. And the bubbles go straight to my head."
"Exactly," the vamp purred, linking her arm more tightly through his. "That's why they're so delicious."
He laughed softly, a rich, thoughtlessly cultured sound, and strolled with the blonde further toward a tight knot of well-groomed men, all of whom the man knew by sight, some influential, some merely expensive pawns. There were no women in the group. He wasn't surprised.
"All these incredibly important men," the blonde mused, slinking sinuously along his side. "This whole soiree is comprised totally of important, rich men." She curved a knowing, appraising look at her companion. "Only the cream of the crop were invited to this little get-together. What, I wonder, got *you* in the door?"
"My spiffy attire, of course," he replied immediately, and she laughed, a light, chiming affair. "Nobody ever questions the tux." There. Black suit, white rose. Silver-streaked hair, genteel carriage, smile lines about the eyes. Finally. There.
One hour and thirteen minutes later, in the bathroom, silver taps on, water splashing musically into the marble basin, he shot the silenced gun once, twice, between the eyes and through the heart, let the body drop to the tiled floor with its own sudden gravity, dropped the gun, peeled off the gloves, left.
"Please," the important man had begged, ringed hands raised in supplication. "My wife. My daughter."
"Do you love?" he had replied, and fired the gun.
***
Yes, he remembered this place. He remembered this warm, roomy house, these expensive glass ornaments, these priceless paintings on the soft cream walls. He traced the hard, smooth edges of table tops and armoires with his right hand, remembering the same silky feeling from a lifetime ago. The white vase of red roses and zinnias. An interesting combination, one that only the inhabitants of this house could successfully pull off.
Soft lights caressed soft chairs, hard surfaces, sent white shadows over golden floorboards. He remembered this Persian rug, which matched the cat sleeping on the bed perfectly. The ornate fireplace. The bronze plates, the smiling photographs. His memories of this place were as distant as old snows, but he still remembered them. He remembered the mask that he had worn for this particular job. He remembered. Yes.
Quiet as a panther, a ghost, he moved through the bright halls on silent feet, disturbing nothing, until he reached a door. The lock was easily picked. The lock to the safe was also easily picked, the documents held within tucked quickly away. Then the computer, rifled through, passwords coming easily to his blurring fingertips, access easily granted. A disk, save, then everything put back the way it had been before, doors relocked, windows reshuttered, and he was gone, a mere glimpse of movement in the darkness.
***
The flat, alien landscape of Kansas streaks past the windows of the stolen Ford Explorer and he is flying down the highway, the yellow ribbon on the road below his tires merely a reminder, no to be taken seriously. The fields that flash by are purple, the grass shorn bare, occasional clumps of wheat breaking up the odd monotony of endlessly rolling plains, slight slopes, gentle ridges and short, squat, washed-out cliffs. The colors of the landscape are old and faded, like a hand-tinted photograph. It is mutedly beautiful, mutable, subtle and strange, like a friend's secrets. The sky stretches onward forever, and he is racing toward it, the speedometer registering over one hundred miles an hour, how much over one hundred he can't tell, the needle halts at one hundred twenty.
He is flying. His past, which he can shed at will, snake that he is, flutters behind in the resulting wind. He loses it all, the empty rooms, the old stains that set into permanence, the hooks and joints, the belts, the smell of gun oil and cordite and exposed intestines. They scatter in his wake, to settle like paper tossed to the floor in their own drifts and heaps, and the strings that are his lifelines stretch, thin, and eventually snap.
He that would strangle an infant in its crib, if so instructed by his superiors, but they don't instruct that.
He that dreams in neon.
His life is such a kaleidoscope of personalities, roles, masks with eyes that blink, that he is no longer sure which facet is real; the red stone, or the blue? The colors all tumble together, suits in a closet, waiting to be put on. Which suit is actually bare skin? Which suit will he wear tomorrow?
Inside, deep down, an old dragon sleeps softly.
He thinks of odd things as he drives. Black oil. Popcorn in the microwave. Checkered flags. Tulip bulbs. Trees that shake in the wind. A small redheaded woman, who grates his nerves, an itch that needs to be scratched away. A tall, hazel-eyed man, sharp and strange, another kaleidoscope. Blue Christmas lights. An Uzi. A shallow grave half-filled with rain. The shine of magazine pages. Milk in a frosted glass. A red moon.
Geese or swans arrow toward the far horizon, pointing to the next small town. He follows them, flying in his own way. The scenery which flashes by is sere, as if burnt away a hundred years ago.
***
An alleyway. A briefcase. A file. A garrote. Betrayal splashes itself luridly across the brick walls, almost as a neon sign. The green-eyed man slips away, briefcase and file in hand.
He punches in the number on the cell phone.
*Click.* "Yes?"
"Mission accomplished."
"Very good. Proceed as planned." *Click.*
He tosses the phone in a Dumpster, and is on his way.
***
Steak and eggs. He hadn't had them in a while. Years, really, if he wanted to think about it. A low, thin fog rolled itself against the windows of the shabby greasy spoon he ate at, hiding the building across the street from sight. He shoveled in another mouthful of eggs, wondering if he should add ketchup. More pepper and salt, at the very least. He poured it on.
"Refill, honey?" the bored, overweight waitress asked him, looking and acting and speaking so exactly like every bored, overweight waitress he had ever seen in movies and on TV that for a moment he wanted to shout with laughter. Surreal. Life imitating art. Or, life imitating trash imitating art. Well. Something like that.
"Sure, thanks," he replied, and watched a stray wisp of graying hair fall over one murky brown eye as the waitress bent to fill his coffee cup, which was a plain white, and chipped on the edge. She straightened, steam now rising again from the cup, and he smiled at her.
"Thanks," he said, and she grunted in reply and walked away. He leaned forward and took one careful sip, then renewed his efforts at cleaning off his plate. For dessert, he had cherry pie. Odd combination. It was great. Getting to his feet, he left payment and a nice tip, and then disappeared out the door, into the fog.
***
Hawaii was a very nice state. Very Japanese. He'd dated a native Hawaiian once. They'd been living in Ohio at the time. She'd told him she missed all the Asian people milling about, buying up land and building golf courses. Very sarcastic girl, she'd been.
"I'm probably the second-to-last really and truly native Hawaiian left," she'd also told him, once. "I should be put on the endangered species list."
"There's no such thing as a really and truly native Hawaiian," he'd replied, smirking. "It's a myth. *You're* a myth. Like Big Foot and the Abominable Snowman."
"Shut up, white boy," she'd replied.
That night, he slept on a beach of black sand, the surf in his ear. The dark forest behind him rustled with animals, wild pigs, brilliantly colored birds. His knife was warm along his arm, his gun an old, comforting friend at his back. The black sand sparkled strangely in the moonlight, which also rippled over the ocean's skin.
His dreams that night were lonely and hard. He was sitting at a breakfast table, and Mulder was sitting across from him, slumped back in his chair.
"Rice Krispies?" Mulder offered, holding up a box, and he shook his head, no.
"Sure?" Mulder looked at him, then filled his own bowl, only the cereal that came out of the box wasn't Rice Krispies, but something else. Chex, maybe. It didn't matter, but it was strange.
He couldn't move, in his dream, or speak. He sat at the kitchen table and watched as his ex-partner ate his breakfast, watched TV, then followed, ghostlike, as he took a long run, bought groceries, skipped stones along a lake. All the normal, mundane things. Taking out the garbage. Paying bills. Washing dishes. Sleeping, even. And he had stood by, silent and still, unable to move, to touch, to interact in any way. Mulder spoke to him, sometimes, a question, an odd comment. But he was never able to reply.
***
"Please," the woman says, "please." She holds up her hands in supplication. She is, by now, missing an eye. Hot, clean blood trickles down her cheek.
"Where's the money?" he demands, allowing a harsh, gritty edge to his voice, instead of the usual passionless monotone. "Where's the money?"
"Please, please," she gasps, her own voice raw from screams. He is creative, and eventually she tells him what he needs to know. This time, he has to take care of the body himself. He isn't so creative on this. The usual shallow hole in an old gravel pit suffices.
"Do you love?" he'd asked her, just before her remaining eye turned forever sightless. She hadn't replied.
***
It was a meaningless fuck. They did it in a hotel room that shivered with cock roaches, and it had been as uninspiring as brushing one's teeth, as meaningless as two strangers exchanging a handful of words while waiting for the subway. He couldn't remember what she looked like an hour after he left the hotel.
***
His new arm was a marvel of high technology, nanotechs, to be precise. He could hardly tell that it wasn't real flesh, anymore. The Well Manicured Man had been kind in death, that was for sure, and even now, so long afterward, the arm was still a marvel. His present employers paid well, when they paid him. Being a spy and a professional assassin, steady jobs were somewhat hard to come by. One month he was living at the Ritz in New York, the next he could barely afford a place slightly better than a park bench. Where did the money go? It was expensive, being a spy and a professional assassin. Thievery helped, of course, but not a lot.
***
The order came from on high. "The information is at the following location. Destroy it, once you've read it. Do exactly as you're told. You will find the plane tickets at the following location. Weapons will be provided. Do exactly as you're told. Any deviation from the plan *at all* will be treated with your immediate termination. Failure will not be tolerated. Do exactly as you're told."
The job was done exactly as per instruction. He did not deviate from the plan once. He was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Termination, in this case, did not entail getting fired. It ran more along the lines of a certain aptly titled Schwarzenegger flick.
***
His mother had smelled like that, he thought. Like a soft, white musk. He stood still for a moment, lost in the crowd of people in the street, and inhaled deeply, remembering.
Remembering.
***
He couldn't seem to get up. Something was wrong with his legs. His arms. His skull felt like it had shattered, porcelain, and he needed vinegar and brown paper to patch it back together again.
Then pain came and washed him away, like dross from a beach, rocked him as like a boat, a mother's gentle arms, a cradle.
***
Yes, he remembered this room, this apartment. From the one time he'd seen it as a junior agent, a partner, and then from the other times when hed come in to set up surveillance, remove video footage, leave tempting breadcrumbs.
While the agent was out chasing Martians or woolly mammoths or leprechauns, he broke in, surveyed the place: the homey, beat-up leather couch, the disused bed, the blank computer, the swirling fish, the dirty dishes in the sink. He set up the bugs quickly and efficiently, destroyed a few that weren't his own, and, on the way out, decided to be perverse and fed Mulder's fish.
All in all, a fun night.
***
The stray dog growled low in its throat, jaws clamped on a decaying chicken leg. Passing the dog by on his way through the alley, he gave it only a cursory glance, and left it alone.
***
a memory, then.
five years old, playing in the grass.
a bee flying up, buzzing drowsily.
see the bee, he is calling, see the bee.
is this Russia? what language
is he speaking in?
five, and a blue ball with gold stars. bright in the grass, which has clover.
eating something sweet on the porch. gums his teeth up. can't speak so well.
laughing.
a memory, then.
***
The African drum gleamed tan and red in the gentle halo of fluorescent lighting, framed by plate glass and swirling snow. He tapped two fingers against the glass and smiled at the drum, which seemed to smile back. Snowflakes touched down on his short-shorn head, hatless; they brushed his shoulders, his eyelashes. He smiled at the drum through the store window, and the drum, a happy little thing, smiled back.
***
The dragon woke.
When he came to, there was dried vomit and urine crusting his shirt. It took him a while, but the memories came trudging back, eventually, and he took care of things.
***
He crouched in the closet and listened to his mark sing along to Roberta Flack, and in his own mind he sang along, too. "The first time ever I saw your face..." he silently mouthed, and his mark, banging hair brushes and belt buckles and bottom drawers, sang lustily back, practically shaking the walls with his rich baritone. For such a slow, loving song, the mark could certainly belt it out. He wondered, briefly, if the fact that he was wearing a Tool t-shirt (his favorite shirt to kill in) and miming along to Roberta Flack at the same time was really as bizarre as he suspected.
When came the part with the joy filling the air and lasting 'til the end of time, he stepped out of the closet, gun already raised, and fired quickly and effortlessly and accurately. The mark's voice had made for an excellent audial bead.
He stepped over the prone body wheezing into the carpet and got what he came for. He paused on his way out to stand at the dying man's head. "Please... please..." the bloody man whispered, barely loud enough to be heard over the last strains of the song. He tried to raise his hands, but found that they wouldn't move.
"Your face... your face... your face..." the green-eyed man sang, staring down at the prone figure, then quickly finished him off.
***
Dark places, dark places. He began to scream.
***
The mother and the little girl were holding hands, waiting for the bus to come. He stood a respectable distance from them and watched the girl swing on her mother's arm, hang from it, her mother indulgently glancing down at her daughter every so often. The child was talking, a constant stream of balloon-like words, high and sweet, rising up into the autumn air. He watched the girl gather fire-colored leaves and give them to her mother, who smiled and accepted them, putting them in the front pocket of her coat. He smiled to himself, listening to the little girl, watching the mother only give her half her attention, the other half no doubt fixed on debts and mortgages and shoes and what to get for dinner, whether to just eat out. The child's breath steamed a little, and her mylar voice, high and sweet, airy, drifted his way.
"Shut that damn kid up," an old, grizzled-looking man muttered next to him at the bench of the bus stop, glaring sightlessly at the buildings across the street. He wore a blue yarn cap. His body, mostly just bones, sat awkwardly on the bench.
The green-eyed man briefly considered killing him, but then decided that that was just a little extreme.
The bus came. They all got on, and drifted away from one another, fleetingly joined, now apart again.
***
And then, one day, came the order from on high.
"Agent Fox Mulder has outlived his usefulness. Take care of him."
"Ok," he said, and took the gun handed to him.
"Take care of the body. Make sure he disappears without a trace."
"Ok," he said, and turned and left.
***
Now, again, silent in the murky room, thin wedges of light filtering in through the window, the rumbling, gurgling fish tank, the muted television. Here again, only this time there were no devices to plant, no red herrings or genuine articles to leave behind. He stood, half-crouched, in the pooling shadows, and looked over the room. Dusty and messy, with piles of junk splayed haphazardly all over the place. The coffee table was barely visible underneath all the papers, books, videos, pizza boxes, and various other odds and ends that swarmed over it. The floor was equally swamped. He knew that the bedroom, which Mulder used as a storage facility, would be just as bad. He gazed briefly at the computer, which was sporting an X made of duct tape, a screen saver humming and bumping behind it.
He looked down at the beat-up leather couch and the man who slept on it, on his side, one hand tucked under his pillow, the other under his chin, legs slightly curled into a faint imitation of the fetal position. He shouldn't be sleeping. Mulder never slept. Light from the TV set washed and ran over the sleeping man's face, softening and sharpening the features at the same time. The killer turned to look at the TV, and recognized the movie on the screen as "The Big Chill". He watched for a moment, scenes rolling across his own eyes, his own shadowed face. It was a video, he saw, glancing down at the VCR softly blinking its own message: Twelve o' clock, twelve o' clock, twelve o' clock...
The agent's face, when asleep, in repose, was soft. The hard lines disappeared from his face, his mouth relaxed, his brows lost their eternal downward draw. Soft dark hair fell across his forehead, his delicate eyelids. The killer could see two-thirds of the t-shirt Mulder had worn to bed; gray, with some sort of logo on it that he couldn't make out. The rest of him was covered by a blanket, except for his bare feet, which poked out from the hem below, tucked into a couch cushion.
The agent's breathing was deep and even, without sign of nightmares.
The green-eyed man pulled out his gun. The safety was already off, and this gun didn't need to be cocked. Truth be told, no automatic needed to be cocked, but Hollywood didn't know that. The clip, fully loaded, was already in, and waiting, the first bullet already primed. All he had to do was aim and pull the trigger.
The odd thing was, he couldn't seem to do it.
Behind him, the movie rolled on, building a story out of words and actions and old friendships.
He watched the scenes play out across the sleeping man's face for another five minutes, then left.
***
It didn't make sense. It didn't make sense that he couldn't pull the trigger. He sat in the stairwell and tried to think.
So this, he supposed, was love. Or the state of being in love.
What a stupid turn of events.
He just couldn't do it. Couldn't, couldn't. He could kill the man's father, and his best friend's sister, could torture him, hurt him, mislead him, confuse him, enrage him. But he couldn't kill him.
It seemed a stupid sort of love, hardly useful for anything. Except to get a certain one-armed assassin killed. And he would be killed, unless he took out his employers. It would be hard, but it could be done, if he really wanted it. He was that good.
He sat in the stairwell and tried to think. His body was perfectly still, a wooden image, his eyes locked and distant. The gun rested quietly in his lax hand, muzzle pointed down.
He tried to think, but all he could seem to conjure up was an image of a tree in the wind, bowing and rising in slow motion, a sort of ballet. The leaves, bright as mint and thin as tissue, fluttered, letting the sun glow through their faint veins, casting light green shadows on the ground, on his upturned face. The tree was laughing, its laughter the wind running through its branches. It was playing. He longed to climb up into that tree and sit in its branches and let the mint green leaves flutter over his face, but he got to sit in a dimly lit stairwell instead.
The tree bowed and shook, laughing, emerald and umber, the color of his latest mark's eyes.
The dragon smiled at him patiently, kind.
The gun rested heavily in his slack hand. It waited, too, also kind, in its own way. It knew better, ultimately. So did the dragon.
Ah, hell.
"Do you love?" he asked aloud, and stood.
THE END
