Author: Misha
Rating: PG
Fandom: X-Files
Spoilers: "Two Fathers" and "One
Son"
Summary: Alex Krycek muses
Length: 1900 words
Disclaimer: Chris Carter, Fox, etc. own
the universe and characters. I’m just
playing with them.
Feedback: Relished at mishamcm@livejournal.com
Copyright
(c) August 1999 Misha
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"We all want something
beautiful."
It's rather an odd thought to pop into
my head, don't you think? So many
pearls of wisdom my British associate left me with, and I find myself pondering
the meaning of an off-the-cuff throwaway he once uttered.
But I can't get it out of my head,
so I guess I'm stuck with it.
What did _he_ want? A cure for the
black cancer? No, that was just a
tool. He wanted his grandchildren to be
able to live as human beings. I suppose
that's something beautiful. Not all
childhoods are as ugly as mine.
The smoking man. He wants a world ordered by his design,
running in accordance with his directives.
Does he care what _kind_ of
world it is? Probably not. Whatever it is, heaven or hell, he'll be
pulling the strings. Just so long as
the Bills never win the Super Bowl.
Small victories. No, maybe not
so small, to him. His stamp, his seal
of approval, proof that he can order things the way he likes. What else does he actually care about?
I suppose to him it's beautiful,
insofar as anything is.
What does Mulder want? "Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that
is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." But that's only part of it. Hey, I've listened to his regression
tapes. He wants them to be out there
and also to be benevolent. They said
Samantha would be okay, that he would see her again. That's what he wants to believe.
What could be as beautiful as knowing everything's going to be okay?
Give me a tough one. Okay, kid, how about Scully? An ordered universe, in which things happen
for rational, scientific reasons. She
may not know the answers. The answers
may be as bizarre as some of Mulder's theories. But there is an answer, there are rules, there is causality. Mulder isn't really so flaky -- the
scientific method is just as applicable no matter how ludicrous the truth might
be.
But there's more to her than that,
there's that Catholic spirituality underneath it all. Just force of habit, a relic of her upbringing that she can never
quite eliminate? No, it's that demand
for rationality again, for rules and reason.
God can hang out in heaven with the souls of the dearly departed, just
so long as He doesn't go mucking about in the physical universe. He built it, He made up the rules, He should
just let it run its course. The
Celestial Plan is built right into the design -- God doesn't have to cheat to
keep it on track. Perfect separation of
Church and State. What could be more
beautiful than that?
So what do I want? What does Alex Krycek want?
I was first introduced to Jeffrey
Spender at the Social Club. That’s
where we sometimes met with our foreign counterparts. The Social Club was a cozy cellar deep below Wall Street in
Manhattan. The legend was that it was
originally the headquarters of a secret society dating back over three
centuries to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The Europeans liked to call it “Peter Stuyvesant’s place,” but we
preferred the more anonymous designation.
Of course, I’d been watching Jeffrey
for some time. The smoking bastard
wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on him, and my British associate advised me
to do the same. But this was our first
formal introduction. It wasn’t long
after the demise of my aforementioned mentor, as a matter of fact. That was when I was brought back into the
fold; the smoking man wasn’t the only person who was too useful to the
Consortium to remain on the outs.
I was watching the lab vid on
Marita, as it happened, my first day back on the inside. I know what you’re probably thinking, that I
was hardly on good terms with her at that point; in fact, I had plenty of
reason to enjoy her fall from grace.
However, my mentor had put heavy emphasis on not letting things like
betrayal interfere with pragmatism – “utilizing well is the best revenge,” he
liked to say. I'd more than gotten her
back anyway. When the dust cleared, I’d
come out of that one better than she had – I got a mentor, and all she’d gotten
was a one-way ticket to a lab cage.
Besides, her betrayal had been pretty mild, comparatively speaking. The smoking man was the only one I held a
real grudge against.
Which brings us back to the
aforementioned Jeffrey Spender. I still
laugh at that name – my British Associate revealed to me that Spender wasn’t
the smoking man's real name any more than his other pseuds were. They referred to Cassandra as Patient X, so
Jeffrey X is just as good a name. Or
Smith, or Jones, or just about anything else you can think of.
So Jeffrey was talking to Diana
Fowley, another of the little puppets dancing to the smoking man's tune. And like a bolt from the black I knew: No way that boy's getting out of this
alive. He'll run his dad's errands, but
sooner or later he's going to have to make a real choice, and there's no way
he'll choose the way his father did. If
he knows the real score he won't be able to do it. Not many people can.
There's a reason the Consortium needed the smoking bastard -- even they
couldn't do it. My British associate
couldn't.
Could I?
I'm not sure. I'm not sure even I could go that far.
But I suspect Fowley could.
And then I realized something really
beautiful. The smoking bastard could do
just about anything. Turning Cassandra
into a lab rat barely fazed him. But
Jeffrey was another matter. He was
going to feel it when Jeffrey turned against him. It was going to twist in his gut like a knife. So I made my decision.
I was going to be the one to turn
Jeffrey. And nothing was going to
happen to that boy. I wanted to know
that the smoking man was the one who would pull Jeffrey's plug. I wanted to know he was sitting there
watching everything he cared about bleeding into the carpet. I wanted to know he was as helpless, as
unable to function as when it was his own blood.
See, the holes in his chest
eventually healed. This time would be
different.
I knew it wouldn't be hard. Jeffrey was just a seedling, not ready to be
exposed to the cruelty of the elements.
His father was hardening him off, slowly, slowly, ever so slowly. But eventually, Jeffrey would have to know
about the EBE's. That in itself would
be enough to push most people off the deep end. But for Jeffrey that would be just the tip of the iceberg. For Jeffrey it would mean _everything_ had turned upside down. It would mean Cassandra was telling the
truth. It would mean Mulder was
right. It would mean that the X-files were
actually something worth investigating, the X-files that his father had tossed
into Jeffrey's lap to be buried.
Suddenly everything would come pouring in on him, aliens and rebels and
green blood and needles to the base of the skull. He'd be off balance, easy to manipulate.
Now that's got to be the
understatement of the decade.
Funny how what Jeffrey wants never
seems to come up. His childhood was
dominated by his mother's abductions, her message to the world. And Jeffrey may not have been aware of it,
but his father maneuvered him into joining the FBI. He never seems to have much of a say, does he? What does he really want, anyway? He wants to be one of the big cats, I
suppose.
Hell, why shouldn't he? He'd love to be the one making the calls for
a change, instead of the one always being buffeted about by what someone else
decides.
I almost feel sorry for him. Maybe I'll show him a good time before the
end.
So is that what Alex Krycek wants,
the perfect revenge? It's hard to tell
whether that seems grand and glorious or just petty. I've never been much on revenge, really, considering all the
times I've been screwed over. But the
smoking man is different.
Maybe it isn't really revenge I
want. Maybe what I want is not to get
screwed. Hell, that's what I'm fighting
the alien invasion for, right? It's not
like I really care what happens to anyone else. And to avoid being screwed you've got to hit anyone who screws
with you, give them worse than what they gave you.
So
there I am, fitting up for combat, the red and the black, the blue and the
gray. But no uniforms; the byword for
this war is camouflage. Why should the
aliens have all the fun?
It took about five minutes of
reviewing Jeffrey's file to come up with the wedge. Just tell him how his father turned his mother into a guinea pig,
how he was working even now to ensure that the experiments continued. And my chance to set the game in motion came
soon enough. There we were, Jeffrey X
and me. He was sitting in a chair, just
watching the alien body decompose, unable to move, just staring at it. I stood there cleaning the green ooze off my
weapon, and just as smoothly as I slid the needle into the rebel's neck, I slid
my sharper blade into the base of Jeffrey's skull. In thirty seconds he was as dead as the alien, only he didn't
know it yet. But it was as inevitable
as those nanomachines in Skinner's bloodstream.
That left me free to get on with the
real business, fighting the future. But
then it all went to hell. The rebels got
to the Source first, and that was the most valuable bargaining chip, even more
than the antidote to Purity. So what
now?
The funny thing is, everything
coalesced at that moment, and it was all right in front of me: the perfect revenge, the perfect weapon,
Alex Krycek's Something Beautiful, all rolled up into one handy package named
Fox Mulder. You see, I knew the secret
about Fox, something not even the smoking bastard knew. Project Wellspring had been shelved by the
time he joined the inner circle, but my British associate knew about it. Wellspring was the opposite tack to the
hybrid project, an attempt to distill the magic of the purely terrestrial
genome, and Fox Mulder was its only product.
Eidetic memory and high intelligence to counter the alien's superior
technology. Colorblindness to throw off
mind-control technologies adapted to the human visual cortex. And that one special element, the talent
human beings had which the aliens lacked.
Fox Mulder had luck.
Not just everyday, run-of-the-mill
luck. Luck powerful enough to reshape
reality. Luck so powerful that when Fox
Mulder went looking for the supernatural, the universe twisted itself to give
it to him. Luck so strong that even a
malfunctioning UFO engine, pouring out a gravimetric field capable of warping
time and space, seemed driven to give Mulder what he wanted.
All that, and fucking beautiful too.
When I saw him lying on the floor,
having the mother of all nervous breakdowns, I was so angry at him I couldn't
even look at him. Seeing that all fall
apart was even worse than losing the alien genetic material.
So what now, Alex Krycek?
I guess it's back to the drawing
board.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mr. Jones
(Adam Duritz/D.Bryson)
Down
at the New Amsterdam staring at this yellow-haired girl
Mr.
Jones strikes up a conversation with this black-haired flamenco dancer
She
dances while his father plays
She's
suddenly beautiful
And
we all want something beautiful
Man
I wish I was beautiful
So
come dance this silence down through the morning
Cut
up, Maria! Show me some of them Spanish
dances
And
pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones
Believe
in me, help me believe in anything
'cause
I want to be someone who believes
Mr.
Jones and me tell each other fairy tales
Stare
at the beautiful women
"She's
looking at you." "Ah, no, no
she's looking at me."
Smiling
in the bright lights
Coming
through in stereo
When
everybody loves you
You
can never be lonely
I'm
gonna paint my picture
Paint
myself in blue red black and gray
All
of the beautiful colors are very very meaningful
Well
you know gray is my favorite color
I
felt so symbolic yesterday
If
I knew Picasso I would buy myself a gray guitar and play
Mr.
Jones and me look into the future
Stare
at the beautiful women
"She's
looking at you." "Uh, I don't
think so, she's looking at me."
Standing
in the spotlight
I
bought myself a gray guitar
When
everybody loves me I will never be lonely
I
want to be a lion
Everybody
wants to pass as cats
We
all want to be big big stars but we all got different reasons for that
Believe
in me because I don't believe in anything
And
I want to be someone to believe
Mr.
Jones and me stumbling through the barrio
Yeah
we stare at the beautiful women
"She's
perfect for you, man, there's got to be somebody for me."
I
want to be Bob Dylan
Mr.
Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky
When
everybody loves you, son
That's
just about as funky as you can be
Mr.
Jones and me staring at the video
When
I look at the television I want to see me staring right back at me
We
all want to be big stars, but we don't know why and we don't know how
But
when everybody loves me I'm gonna be about as happy as I can be
Mr.
Jones and me, we're gonna be big stars.