by brawlite
Fandom: The X-Files
Pairing: Alex Krycek/Fox Mulder
Rating: Mature
Wordcount: 3,108
Description: Handcuffed in the freezing cold, Krycek comes down on Walter Skinner’s balcony. It’s not ideal, but he’s had worse crashes in his time.
Tags: drug use, withdrawal, comedown, nausea, vomiting, canon-typical violence, canon-typical krycek abuse, whump, suicidal ideation, blood, unrequited love, unrequited hate, minor character death, falls, a small dose of masochism, a larger dose of desperate and unhealthy pining, violence in place of affection: it’s what’s for dinner, krycek: there’s nothing to do other than handcuff that man to various objects or places
Published: 2023-12-31
The district can be startlingly cold in the winter. That’s one of the first things Alex Krycek learned upon rolling straight out of the Academy and through the Bureau headquarter’s doors. He’d had a cheap enough apartment on the fringes of Capitol Hill back then, something with poor insulation, a bad roof, and even worse radiators. The river makes the air bitter and humid, the nights prone to ice and to sudden and unexpected drops in temperature. The milder days are fine, pleasant even, but the cold ones are a harsh reality that come with them, hand in treacherous hand.
He learns this again, now and first-hand, handcuffed to Walter Skinner’s balcony as a biting and unkind wind whips across the Potomac and through the corridors of Crystal City, cutting into his skin like blades.
He didn’t dress for this kind of cold. A leather jacket and a sweatshirt only provide so much protection from the elements.
He’s not sure what he was thinking, what he thought would happen once Mulder got his hands on him. Maybe he wasn’t thinking at all.
Krycek shivers, full-bodied, and backs himself up against the concrete part of the balcony to try to block the wind and the cold, a mostly-futile attempt to try and retain some of his rapidly-escaping body heat. The movement jostles his shoulder unkindly — wrenched from the truck’s crash and exasperated from Mulder hauling him around. He clenches his teeth against the pain, the way that it cascades down his spine and ripples through all of his nerves. His body is strung out, over-sensitive and exhausted, which only heightens the pain, making everything feel far worse than it is.
But Krycek has survived worse, he reminds himself. Being held captive on the Assistant Director’s balcony doesn’t even hold a candle to some of the shit he’s survived.
That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant, though. And it’s certainly not ideal.
It’s even less ideal that his body is currently betraying him, deciding now’s a good time to come down from the high he’s been riding since everything kicked into gear. Just like all the other guys, he’d taken a nice big hit of shitty blow right before shit went down, a morale booster. Since then, Krycek’s been running on a nice combination of cocaine, adrenaline, and pain.
And now that the adrenaline’s fading, now that the drugs are wearing off, and now that the acute bite of Mulder’s fists are nothing more than an aching bruise, a memory, Krycek is crashing.
He can tell he is — that familiar feeling. It’s the way his faculties are sliding out of his control, the way the nausea curls in his stomach like a snake ready to strike. His head feels scraped empty, too big for its insides, but perhaps worst of all, his body feels not like his own. It’s bad. He hates this feeling, no matter how familiar it is. In one way or another, Krycek’s body has never been his own — but that doesn’t make it any easier, each and every time he is reminded.
He tries to breathe through it. To mentally push past the discomfort. It helps, maybe, somehow, to shove his fingers into the bruises Mulder left him with. To remind him of the here and now, of the treacherous and duplicitous nature of his own body, the way it yields to pain the same way it yields to orders. And the laughable, violent, heartwrenching way it always yields to Fox fucking Mulder.
Krycek bites the inside of his mouth until the flesh yields and he tastes coppery blood. He closes his eyes to the way his body shakes, to the whirling nausea in his gut, and pictures Mulder. Ambitious, righteous, furious Fox Mulder. The way he looks at Krycek is like a drug. It’s like a prison. A death-sentence. Krycek’s never met a soul like him before and likely never again will.
Fox fucking Mulder, Krycek thinks, wrapping that name around his thoughts like a blanket of barbed wire before bodily shoving his shoulder against unyielding concrete until a pathetic grunt of pain is forced out of him, dredged out right from his gut.
The wind eats up the noise but leaves the pain, leaving only static in Krycek’s ears.
There’s not much to do in North Dakota. To entertain yourself, to strike up a bond with strangers, to keep warm. There’s nothing to do but survive.
Kyrcek did what he always does: he assesses, he assimilates, he yields.
In a way, everyone’s a little bit of a sucker for a kid with sad eyes and a sob story, with no background and an itch he can’t seem to scratch. It’s even better when it turns out that he’s handy, when he seems easy enough to manipulate through a steady stream of drugs and a warm place to sleep. To those idiots, he was just a kid with intel and intellect, with skill and drive and an indignant fire inside, but no real heading. They were too stupid, too greedy, too self-confident to see past the facade. Domestic terrorists are always an easy play.
Out of the things Krycek has done, it was relatively simple. Few loose ends, low stakes, and easy acting for even easier bait. But the unfortunate part about yielding to some necessary parts of that persona is that Krycek is only human — or human enough, given the shit he’s gone through, the shit that’s been underneath his skin and squirmed around his insides like a parasite. At the end of the day, his body is just as frail and fragile as any other. A knife through his heart would stop it in its tracks. A bullet to the back of the skull would take him out, nice and clean and easy. And, just the same as anything else, a non-stop, steady stream of drugs will take no prisoners. And now, Krycek is left at the mercy of his body’s failings.
His body has grown used to that steady influx of drugs. A base level high, a new normal.
The headache is a rough one. Ear-splitting and jaw-achingly bad. He clenches his teeth against it and imagines his brain melting out his ears. He imagines it feels similar to how he feels right now.
His stomach churns with something close to hunger. Adjacent. A chronically empty feeling, scraped clean and left bereft — just acid on acid on acid, churning and roiling in and upon itself. World’s worst storm.
But perhaps worst off, his emotions feel wrong. Topsy-turvy and slimy, stuck in a pit of tar. He feels used up, discarded, alone. It’s maybe even a little bit of fear, he thinks, the way his heart keeps jolting in his chest, the way he keeps flinching at every goddamn sound. And it’s a little bit of mania, too. Trapped inside the cage of his ribs, his heart races like a thoroughbred at full speed. Every sound digs in the spurs and keeps it thundering on.
He thinks about the crash of the truck, the way his body had jolted toward the windshield with the sound of the gunshot still ringing in his ears.
He thinks about the missile silo. The darkness, the wrench of his body as he expelled that thing from him. The way he had trembled from the cold and the way he trembles now. The way he had been stuck there for what felt like an eternity.
He thinks about Mulder, about the way his fist connects so perfectly with Krycek’s face. Like two pieces of a puzzle coming together for a whole.
No drug has ever delivered the same rush as Fox Mulder’s fist connecting with Alex Krycek’s body. And no physical intimacy has ever burned hotter than when those knuckles graze his skin like a cruel mockery of a kiss.
The facts are simple: no one has ever looked at Krycek the way that Mulder does. No one has ever seen him like that, hated him like that. There’s an intimacy to it, a kind of closeness that Krycek has never felt before. Not when he’s just a pawn in the larger game, a tool to be used. Someone like Alex Krycek doesn’t get intimacy; it was written off for him so many years ago, carved out with surgical precision, with nothing left in its place.
No one has ever lingered in Krycek’s mind quite like Mulder, either, burned there like an after-image from staring at the sun for too long. A brand that refuses to heal, perhaps because he keeps picking at the scab.
He sleeps in fits and starts, exhausted but also strung out, worn too thin to relax. His body and brain seem to recognize the inherent danger in his current position enough that real sleep eludes him, and he only is able to fall into it for periods no longer than a few minutes at a time. Every honk of a car horn, every squeal of tires from the streets below has him jerking back into awareness as if slapped across the face, backhanded like a lowly streetwalker and then spat on, laughed at.
It does nothing to help his headache. Or his mental state.
Bite your tongue, Krycek had thought, as Skinner had dragged him out to the balcony, as he had cuffed him to the rail while Mulder waited, lingering in the doorway, those cold and angry eyes narrowed like he were looking at Krycek from a scope, mapping out the best trajectory for a kill shot.
Now, Krycek wishes he hadn’t stayed quiet. Wishes he had said one last thing to Mulder just to keep the sound of Mulder’s voice in his ear with whatever retort he might have had. Maybe he would have even left the warmth of Skinner’s apartment to gift Krycek one last punch, one more reminder that Krycek has built himself a home in Mulder’s head, however rotten, however malignant.
But instead, Krycek had done the smarter thing for his continued survival and had kept his mouth shut. The regret aches like a toothache, like a lingering burn.
He can’t even pretend that the last punch Skinner slugged him with, straight in the gut, had been from Mulder. His ribs still hurt from it. The two of them approach violence so differently that it makes Krycek’s head spin just trying to reconcile it. Skinner is a strong man, military in background, and that shows in the way he doles out violence; his punches wind up and hit a round shot from a tank, precise and cutthroat. Mulder, however, is not so rigid in his demeanor; he snaps like a rubber band — lashing out at Krycek at the most unpredictable moments. His hits are sharp, fast, and catastrophically ruinous. And, like a kiss, he has a tendency to aim for Krycek’s face.
Though more destructive, Skinner’s punches somehow never hurt quite as much as Mulder’s.
And Krycek doesn’t like them as much, either.
It’s not the same surge, the same rush. He’s not addicted to pain — just pain from Mulder. Anything that Fox Mulder could give him, really. Krycek would take anything Mulder gave him and thank him for it, even a killing blow.
He thinks about it, sometimes. What it would be like for Mulder to press the muzzle of a gun right to Krycek’s forehead, more intimate than anything he’s ever felt. How close Mulder might stand to him, body heat radiating between them right before he pulled the trigger. He thinks about how everything would stop, then. The pain, the struggle, the endless running. And the aching, too. The wanting. Sometimes, Krycek thinks it would be better than continuing on like this, stretched thin and run ragged, scared of his own shadow. He thinks about how, at the hands of Mulder, it might be like a gift. The nicest thing Mulder could do for him — except Mulder would never be so kind.
Seventeen stories down, a car horn blares through the crisp, cool night and Krycek jolts out of that particular spiral.
Krycek doesn’t want to die. He wants to live. He wants to look at Mulder again, he wants to feel Mulder’s skin against his, and he wants to keep wanting him, deep and aching in a way that hurts better, burns hotter than any fucking drug he’s ever tried.
He wants to live for Fox Mulder. It’s what he’s been doing for long enough now, anyway. So long that it’s habit, an addiction. That itch he just can’t fully scratch.
Even this, being cuffed to Walter Skinner’s balcony in the middle of D.C.’s dreary winter and crashing hard enough that he feels like he’s about to crack, is better than being over a thousand miles away in North Dakota. Here, Mulder is close enough that Krycek can practically feel him in the bite of the air, in the press of the low-hanging, humid sky.
Krycek’s bruises ache with the phantom press of Mulder’s fingerprints. He shoves his fingers into them again and swallows down a groan.
He wants to live for Fox Mulder. He needs to live for Fox Mulder. There’s simply no other way forward.
He falls asleep again, thinking of Mulder at his throat, snarling like a rabid dog with sharp teeth bared.
He wakes retching and dizzy, shaking like a junkie in the glaring morning sun. It’s too bright, too painful. The light of day makes everything hurt worse, burn worse. Even his emotions feel too close to the surface, raw and glaring.
By the time the man comes into Skinner’s apartment, Krycek feels bad. Worse than before and with an aching in his teeth that speaks to utter exhaustion, to impending demise.
He barely even thinks when the man comes out onto the balcony. He acts on instinct, on blind autopilot. With bile high and acidic in his throat, he hauls the man off the balcony with the last of his strength and drops him without a second thought. He doesn’t need to protect Walter Skinner’s apartment or anything in it, but he does need to survive and he’s taking no chances.
He feels like a cornered animal on its last legs, so strung out and high on a brief and refreshed rush of adrenaline that he barely even registers his own fall and the way the cuffs stop him, wrenching his already aching shoulder as the weight of him jolts it out of the socket. He might cry out, he might not.
He’s not sure if he hears the body hit the ground or if it’s just his imagination, his expectation. Krycek knows what a body colliding with pavement sounds like, what it looks like. Past experience fills in the blanks with ease, reminding him keenly what would happen if he were to fall, too. The lurch when he jolted over the rail still echoes in his gut, in his head, or maybe that’s just the ever-present nausea failing to leave him even now.
He breathes hard and heavy. The air is cold and burns his lungs.
It’s difficult to ignore the way the handcuffs dig into his wrists, supporting the weight of his body. He tries, futilely and feebly, to pull himself up, but there’s no use. All his strength is gone and his body will do nothing but shake and shiver, suspended seventeen stories above the ground. A traitor to him once again.
There’s nothing to do but hang there and wait. For Skinner. For the police. For maybe even —
Krycek tears himself away from that thought like it might burn. A fire hotter and more dangerous than any he’s ever set in the name of destroying evidence. Hope is all well and good, but Krycek’s never been a romantic. Fox Mulder is not going to swoop onto the scene and pull Krycek to safety.
Fox Mulder is not going to save him.
Besides, at the end of the day, there’s no saving Alex Krycek, not really.
After a while, Krycek can feel the blood beginning to drip down his arm, soaking into the cotton of his sweatshirt. It makes him even colder despite the heat of the pain. Every little sway of his body makes the cuffs dig in differently, yielding another slow cut of metal into skin. Every breath feels like too much in terms of movement. Every heartbeat, too.
The sirens come, wailing and echoing through the corridors of Crystal City, and Krycek drifts.
He wonders how long the metal of the cuffs will hold. Or how long the bones might, too. Enough blood, enough force, and his hand might slip straight through that tight circle keeping him aloft.
Threatening darkness clouds the periphery of his vision, a warning in black and not unlike that sludge that slipped inside him — but he doesn’t dare close his eyes. Looking down is bad, but losing consciousness would be worse. He holds onto that fear, to the familiar swoop in his stomach, clenches his teeth, and waits, dangling there like a fish caught on a line.
Mulder’s handcuff against his skin isn’t any different than a fish hook through his cheek. Not really.
Krycek isn’t sure if it’s minutes or hours that pass before he hears footsteps on the ledge above him, but either way it feels like a dream.
It feels even more like a dream when he gets a fuzzy glimpse at the face that peers over the railing at him. That scowl, those hard, piercing eyes.
Krycek feels like he’s still falling again. Like maybe he never stopped. Like the metal of the cuffs finally gave out, ground rising up to meet him fast.
There Fox Mulder is: Alex Krycek’s unwilling savior.
The expression on Mulder’s face speaks volumes. There’s no warmth there, no space for compassion. He knows that Mulder will not pull him up gently, he won’t want to. He will never spare any kindness for someone like Alex Krycek, not when he could punch him first.
He is not wrong. Krycek chokes on a scream as Mulder pulls him up from where he hangs. The pain is wretched, awful. Worse than anything yet today. It shocks him straight down to his bones. And yet here Mulder is, saving him. Riding in on his white horse and making a daring rescue, even as he grabs Krycek unkindly around the wrist, digging metal into raw and bloody skin. Making it hurt just because it can.
Krycek hates him so much that it makes his teeth ache.
Feverish and furious and shaking, he wants Mulder to save him again and again and again.