No Return Policy SLASH. I have left a "slash space" so those of you who hate slash don't have to even see it. :-). There's also a bit of MSR in it too btw. GenieVB *Sequel to follow *** S L A S H S P A C E *** TITLE: "No Return Policy." AUTHOR: GenieVB RATING: NC-17. MT/MK Slash m/m sexual situations, m/f sexual situations. SPOILERS: "Milagro/Biogenesis" This story is free for archiving anywhere with my full permission and gratitude. But please let me know where so I can brag. DISCLAIMER: The X-Files series, movie, characters, are the property of Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions and the Fox Network. I don't want any credit, fame or fortune from X-Files, I only want to write about your show and characters to entertain myself and others. This story is fictitious. If there appear to be people bearing any resemblance to actual persons, it is by COINCIDENCE ONLY. I drool stupidly for feedback. avan@home.com or genyah@hotmail.com Summary: Mulder trades something for something and learns something about himself! *** No-Return Policy. I feel like a shithead because I hate lying to her. But here I am standing in the middle of a deserted four lane bridge in the middle of the night - and what a night, it's a cold bitch out here - like some Kojak with hair, waiting for my mysterious caller to show his face. I want to put flesh to that voice on the phone. He, whoever the hell he is, called me at work, and then faxed over some photos, telling me how interested I'd be if I just took my time and looked at them real close. He sounded like a salesman for a food freezer plan, that kind of salesman, the kind you want to say go fuck yourself to, and then slam the phone down on. But like a good little investigator, I didn't. I looked at the photos and here I am, standing in the middle of a condemned bridge in the middle of a D.C. night hoping the prick brings me a hot cup of coffee. He'd better or I'm not buying, I don't care what he's selling. I didn't have to lie to Scully but I did. When she asked me about the phone call and the fax machine I panicked. I don't know why, really. Maybe because she's been so more Scullyish than usual. I don't even know what I mean by that. She's been watching me a lot since I lost my head a couple months back and well, I've been watching her a lot since she sort of lost hers a month before _that_. I still get these cold aches in my belly when I think of her sitting on the bed with that Pagette guy. Furniture or no furniture, a woman doesn't sit on a bed with a guy unless they're at least thinking about getting raw and rowdy. They could have sat crossed legged on the living room floor. I digress. Scully asked about the phone call and the only lie I could think up was that I was thinking about buying a house and the call was from a real estate agent. You should have seen Scully's eyes. Scared me pee-less. She looked like she was wondering if it was two or three bedrooms and would there be room for her dining suite. Don't misunderstand me, it's a fantasy I've indulged in now and then - I mean Scully and me, a house, (her furniture, not mine), Scully in a bathrobe, Scully in our bedroom... Yeah, I've thought a lot about stuff like that but the thing is, I'm not quite ready for it yet. So now I'll have to make up another lie to cover this one. What do I tell her after she's flashed pretty hopeful eyes like that? - "Sorry, changed my mind, I think I'll stick with my tacky circa 1969 decor bachelor's paradise for another decade." The fucker had to call me at work! Even my mother doesn't call me at work. I'm about to call it a no-show when a hand grabs my gun from my holster, places it behind my right ear and stops my pacing dead on the spot. "Sorry I'm breaking our agreement of a non confrontational meeting, but you never know how a man is going to react when his worst enemy shows up, even if it is to offer him his heart's desire." FuckfuckFUCK!!! "Krycek." I said it like I always do - a curse. "Hey, Mulder, how ya' doin'?" Don't ask me how the son-of-a-bitch snuck up on me. There's nowhere to hide out here except behind the damned girders and I checked behind those. Paranoid to the last. "I'm fine," I answer him with a sneer. "But you must have me mixed up with Doctor Kimball." I try to get in at least one 'one-armed man' reference every time we meet. Don't want to disappoint him. "Did you look at the photos?" "What, no rejoinder? Yeah, I looked. They could be fakes." "Then why did you come?" Touche'. The bastard really isn't stupid at all, no matter how much I'd like to think he is. "Turn around." He says and I do. Same haircut, clothes, pinched expression, little turned up nose that must have driven the girls crazy in high school but makes me think of a wild pig. A rooter-upper of things. One that gets itself into where it doesn't belong. Other than that, it isn't ugly I suppose. "What do you want, Krycek?" "Why, you of course." Ah. He wants to play "mind". Fuck him! "I mean, for the photos. Specifically the location of the person in the photos?" "First I like to assure you that the photos are real. It's her, in the flesh, alive and as healthy as the proverbial horse." "How do I know you're not lying?" That's when the car drove up containing two of his delightful companions with the real thick necks and biceps. I hate those kind. Krycek, that smirk I've grown to loath pasted all over his traitorous face, jerked the gun toward the car's rear door. We both got in, me sitting on one side and Krycek and my gun on the other. "You don't." He said. *** I've learned not to trust Krycek as far as I could throw his mechanical left arm. But didn't the son-of-a-bitch tell the truth for the first time in his life and actually drive me directly to see the subject in the photographs over which we had yet to haggle a price. Up until that point, I'd been playing cocky asshole right back to is cocky asshole because, quite frankly, I didn't believe him. When you get lied to as much as I do, you start not believe in a whole lot, not even when the truth is staring you right in your face. That's what I came face to face with. I didn't know where I was (I knew it was a house in little suburbia), but they'd blindfolded me on the way so I spent a queasy forty minutes counting right and left turns and mile estimates until I was so completely fucking lost I probably would have guessed Toronto, if asked. But soon I was being escorted up steps, across a porch and into the warmth of a living room. Living rooms smell like wood oil and carpet, that's how I knew it was someone's home and not just a warehouse that they took people to perform whatever was still on the "To Do" list for that day. I'd imagined "beat living shit out of Mulder" written on scrap in someone's pocket. But, no, this was a house. When my blindfold was removed, I wasn't even given a second to adjust my eyes when she walked up to me. I stared at her with my squinting, stupid eyes over nostrils flaring with doubt and a lovely sloppy, gaping jaw. Maybe it was shock. When I was twelve, my mind, heart, and every goddamn part of my soul outside and in, had frozen to a mass of frightful images of her being taken from me in all manner of grotesque and violent ways. I'd never believed those images. They had come mostly in my dreams when I lay trying to sleep in my bed or when in the middle of the night I'd go crawling into hers and lay there, sleepless, wondering and hurting so badly inside I thought I was sick. Those images had barely moved in twenty-six years. But this petite woman with the brown, short cropped hair, upturned nose and sad expression walked right up to me, took my head between her hands and cried into my shoulder, saying: "Fox, oh Fox. Fox, Fox, I thought I'd never see you again. I thought you were dead. Fox, Fox...." And at first, for just a few seconds, I thought: No. no, it isn't her. Samantha had long hair, forgetting that people do change. They grow, they marry, they cut their hair... And then I thought: Could it be? Samantha is alive? Really? I was hurting, so afraid to believe, so terrified that it was a lie all over again. My heart just wasn't up to it. Not again. Never again, I thought. And then this woman speaking my name over and over, crying into my shoulder, kissing my cheek, took two slim fingers and began twisting them in the hair at the back of my neck. Just like Samantha used to. This woman didn't look like Samantha as much as I thought Samantha should have looked like as an adult. She had short hair. But she sounded like her and her face was the same simple prettiness like Samantha and she twirled her little fingers in my hair just like Sam used to do when she couldn't sleep and would come crawling into my bed.... And I fucking cried. I don't think I've ever cried that hard in front of anyone. Especially not in front of those gorilla sized thumb-breakers who's expression held nothing but contempt for the Fed' pussy bawling his eyes out over a woman. I didn't give a half shit what they thought. Twenty-six years ago my life had ended, I thought. I soon figured out it had just taken one bad turn. And then another and another. How could they know what I was feeling right that second when my baby sister was touching my hair the way I hadn't felt in more than two decades and I knew she was the real thing? Samantha had disappeared and I know that though I'd repeated by rote that I believed she was alive all those years and that one day I would find her, I was lying. My lie to myself to keep it together one more day. To keep from going crazy. 'Cause when I was a kid, as odd as it may seem for a brother to say this about his dumb kid sister, Sam was my life. Dad had his work and mom had her social clubs and I had Sam. So how would Krycek's ugly hulks fucking know how it feels to lose your life and then get it back? "Sam." I said. That was all I said. It came out a pathetic screaming sob of joy balled up in a grief-filled whine. "Oh Sam." I said. Just that and that was all. *** It wasn't long of course, before I was again escorted via blindfold and neanderthals back to the waiting car. They'd left the motor running for Christ's sake. "When can I see her again?" I demanded. "All in good time." Krycek loves this cloak and dagger shit. Keep the prisoner guessing at his future, spoonful by spoonful. "Where are we going?" Politeness was something I always left at home whenever, while wearing a blindfold, I was seated beside a one-armed man (with my own gun trained on my eyeball) without knowing my destination. Call it a personality quirk, but I figure, what the hell good is "please" and "thank-you" going to do me in those situations? I mean, it was pretty fucking plain we weren't going clubbing. "The Bargain Basement." Humor, Krycek style. Ah. A warehouse, I thought. *** Turns out a cozy little apartment was what surrounded me when the blindfold came off for the second time. Dark green couch and easy chair; that "man-made material" fabric. Poor man's leather. Coffee table. Lamps. Fireplace too. Real fire. Krycek still had my gun turned on me. Guess he didn't much trust me either. But he was dismissing thebig thick humans. Though, after closing the door behind them, I could tell they were going to hang around outside just in case. "When can I see Samantha again?" I was sick of this shadowy rendezvous in the night crap. "First we discuss my price." "_Your_ price? I thought Cancer Stick was running the show?" "Not this gig." Krycek walked toward me and I had the distinct image flash across my mind of a sleek cat strolling across the linoleum to its food dish. He stopped in front of me with eyes green like a cats, his pink tongue darted out from between thin lips and it laid out his bargain. "You're the price." Yes, of course I stupidly didn't get it at first. "What?" "You're the price. You. You become mine when I say and how I say." Blunt. Still a bit obscure for my dozing senses, (I'd really used up a great deal of my reserve tanks coping with the events of the evening thus far), but blunt. It should have been easy to understand but I was not practiced in the arts of being loved, desired or even tolerated. The files were pretty dusty down there. The "machinery" hadn't been primed in a long time either. But I got it eventually. "Are you out of your mind?" "In one or two ways, probably. That's the price. Or we kill your sister." I almost fucking dropped to the floor with that. Krycek actually had to steady me with his plastic lump for a hand and guide me over to the couch. "You're...you're fucking crazy." I whispered. "Why show her to me only to threaten to take her away?" I swear Krycek's face actually registered something besides that "I love myself" veneer when I looked up at a him with those questions. I must have looked pretty bad, pretty damn devastated to have evoked an actual emotion from the prick. "There was no other way." "No other way? For what? What the fuck-?" "No other way to get you willingly." Krycek was nothing if not cryptic. He walked to the chair and sat down. It didn't suite him. None of the furniture here did. I clued into the fact at that moment that this wasn't _his_ place, it was just A place. Rented by the hour maybe. ("Yes, I'd like to rent one of your condominiums for the purpose of dark Conspiracy heavy meetings with mysterious visitors. Um, do you have take-out?") All this fucked up shit went through my aching head as I watched him watch me from his green poor man's leather chair across the coffee table. It reflected our two likenesses in its surface. A second Krycek and Mulder, flat and distorted. "Oh, Christ." I whispered when I realized what he was saying. I, as in _I_, me, myself, my body and flesh, etc, etc,.. was the price. For him. For the one armed bandit who stole my dad with a bullet. Who had assisted the Wrinkled Cigarette Sucker with stealing Scully and my sanity for those horrible weeks. Who stood beside me saying almost all the right things when I was falling apart before his eyes because I loved her, and he turning out to be just another dirty on the inside squeaky on the outside Smoke-Boy. I hated Krycek then, when I found out what he was. I hated Skinner, too, for not seeing him. I hated myself most of all. "I don't understand. You spent years trying to kill me. Why this? Why now?" "Because I'm in love with you." Krycek immediately snorted at his own lie. "Well, in lust for years. Maybe it's more, I don't know. But I've known where Samantha was for years, it's just CancerMan who thinks it's best you two be kept apart." "Why?..." "Don't you get it, Mulder? To keep that fire under your ass lit and burning. She was taken for a similar reason. I mean, he had to find out what kind of fighter you are. What would have happened if she'd been returned to you? The fire would have been snuffed out before it got going really good." "When can I see her again?!" I was tired now. Really tired. Ready to kill him tired and the neanderthals could then feel free go to town on my corpse, I didn't care. Krycek came over, crouched beside me and, though not putting the weapon down, he didn't point it at my head either. What a gentleman. "Tomorrow. Tonight you stay here with me." "What if I refuse?" "Then she dies. I promised the "C-Man" that you'd go along with this and cooperate in order to see your sister on a regular basis. He agreed but with the condition that if you refuse or balk anywhere along the way, she dies." "How do I know you're not lying?" Krycek uncocked the weapon and placed it on the table beside me. "Go for the gun, Mulder. You can kill me, kill those goons outside,...but Samantha dies if I don't report in tomorrow morning with a good word." "This is insane, I,..I don't feel well. I don't know if I can go through with it." "I'll help you and maybe it won't be so bad as you imagine." I don't know. I can imagine a whole lot of bad. *** Don't think I'd ever had a fantasy about Krycek (beyond murdering the double-crossing little shit), because I'm not into men. I'm into hairless, curvy pretty females that feel good and smell good. Krycek had shown me my sister, Samantha, and I knew beyond the smallest grain of question that she was the genuine article. Krycek had told me the truth and I, stupid idiot that I am, had agreed to this transaction without first checking the price-tag. "I need to be drunk." I told him. "Preferably brain-soaked smashed." Krycek blinked a few times. It was always hard to know what he was thinking. I'd never, even when we were partners, been able to figure him out, but he seemed a bit hurt. (Good, I thought, let him know the thought of his greasy hands all over me makes me sick to my stomach). Back then, I hadn't trusted him at all and let him know it right off. Later, through his very convincing acting and well thought-out bullshitting, I'd grown to believe that he was not the sleazy spy I'd pegged him for, just a fresh-faced kid with an attitude. I was wrong and in retrospect I wondered whatever the hell had I been thinking? Trust No One. Fuck! Trust _NO_ one, and I'd trusted him. Stupid Mulder! Stupid Mulder! I was gullible. Someone had come along and ripped Scully and my heart away from me and I needed someone I suppose. Maybe that's what I had been thinking. Maybe I was so fucking lonely anyone at all would have done. Like I said - stupid Mulder. Krycek left me sitting on the fake leather couch and went thorough a doorway. I heard rummaging around and cupboards being opened and closed. He returned with a bottle of Barcardi and two plastic cups. He poured me out a respectable measure - six ounces at least - of rum. And then another. He had a drink or two. Maybe he was losing his nerve or maybe he couldn't get it up without a few snorts. That thought made me chuckle but I didn't tell him why when he asked because there was that other thing playing through my head at the same moment: I was drinking straight rum from a plastic cup so I could get drunk enough so I wouldn't have to later remember that Krycek fucked me. I wanted to wake up with this night wiped from my mind: A naked Krycek fucking naked me. After finishing off the bottle together (me downing 3/4's of it), I was so drunk I couldn't stand. Krycek took my left arm with his right arm and lead me to the bedroom door but at the threshold, I came to my senses and started struggling. I tried to hit him and pull away but, hell, the booze had done its job and I was too drunk to even walk by myself never mind beat up the slut next to me. So instead I stared crying like a fucking baby. I did not want that man's hands on me. I suppose I hoped that if I appeared wimpy enough, he might get so disgusted he'd lose interest and I could go home and forget all this insanity. But then Samantha would die. That's most likely the other reason I was crying. Krycek was going to do whatever he wanted with me because, as he'd informed me, he'd had a perpetual hard-on for me for years and if I didn't go along with the double-crossing, lying, murdering, faggot he would have my sister killed. So I had no goddamn choice. *** Continued in Part 2/3