Title: After
Author: kbk
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Written for the_cube Dead/Alive week-long challenge.
Summary: Second person. Alex Krycek.

You've been dying by inches for most of your life, so it's almost a relief when the bullet drills through your forehead - it's a cleaner and a quicker death than many of the ones you'd imagined, though of course it's not the one you'd have chosen. You'd prefer it if you could have completed your objective first, but there's a guilty little spark of relief somewhere that you didn't have to be the one to kill him this time. You raged against the mission when it was given to you, demanded another option, but what you always forget is that nobody is not expendable. Not even him.

Of course, it would be nice if you had a little scenery, but you never followed a religion closely enough to start believing in its vision of hell, and of those that you've seen, this emptiness is probably preferable. And you don't really mind standing here with only yourself for company, because the company you've been in so many times would be so much worse without a couple of guns to back it up.

You don't even notice that your arm is back until you put your hand on his shoulder in one of those little hallucinatory flashes, and moreover you don't even care. Which is odd, because it really pissed you off to lose it. Still, it's not like there's much you can do with it now, so it doesn't really matter.

Perhaps (and this is just a suggestion, your brain mutters, so if there's anybody out there just pay no attention right now (and there isn't, of course, you don't believe in God (but you do believe in hedging your bets))) you ought to attempt to believe in something just to see if it changes your situation. Reincarnation, perhaps, though you'd likely end up as some kind of animal - not that that would be a bad thing, as moral dilemmas don't tend to apply to actual vermin as opposed to the metaphorical kind.

You think about it for a while, and while there are downsides aplenty you're starting to get bored with this grey empty nothingness, and you haven't even heard from Mulder in a while (and the last time you did he was old and muttering something about being ushered into the afterlife by a ratbastard that he never even liked no matter how pert an ass he had and that just wasn't so much fun for you) so you make a decision.

And (though you've always been standing) you stand up and (though you have no voice) you say, "All right then. Reincarnate me."

And nothing happens.