partners

Damn. This was not the time for a communications failure. He was crouched in an open hallway with little if any protection from spying eyes if the timed loop he'd placed on the surveillance camera ran out before he could get inside the office and out of sight. He doubted if he could come up with a plausible explanation if the cameras caught sight of him.

"Like a fly to sugar," a voice came out of the shadows behind him, barely above a whisper but unmistakable in its sardonic amusement.

Mulder flinched and barely managed not to spin around. Nightmare images of Frohike and Byers prisoners or worse, dead, flashed in front of his eyes as he assessed the situation. Fucked-up didn't begin to describe the situation.

"Don't worry, they're not dead. They'll enjoy a brief nap and then, if they follow the instructions I left for them, they'll be out of here before anyone is the wiser," Krycek said smoothly.

With a sharp exhalation of the breath he'd forgotten he was holding, Mulder turned around to face his captor. Mercy wasn't one of the adjectives he'd have assigned to Krycek which meant that letting the Gunmen go was part of a greater plan. The gun in Krycek's hand was held in a relaxed grip, but Mulder knew that Krycek was anything but relaxed. Posturing had always been one of Krycek's few weak points. Mulder suppressed the urge to lunge for the gun. Krycek was just far enough away to make that a suicide move.

"What are you doing here, Krycek?" Mulder snarled, more because he suspected Krycek expected a snarl than from any real need to express his dislike. Give Krycek what he expected and maybe he'd relax enough to give Mulder at least an infinitesimal chance to escape.

"I don't recall that we ever formally terminated the relationship. You need more than a couple of amateurs to watch your back, Mulder," Krycek replied calmly as he gestured with the gun for Mulder to step back. Mulder's stubborn streak suggested defiance, but his survival instinct moved him away from the door.

"You tried to kill me. I think that's sufficient reason to end a partnership," Mulder replied trying for a nonchalant calm, but knew his grievances against this man were seeping through in his voice. "Besides, I'm not with the FBI any longer, so I'm not in the market for a partner," he concluded gruffly.

"And you returned the favor. I'd say that made us even," Krycek said with a ironic glint in his eyes as he slid a card key into the slot in the door. "And don't even think of bringing up your father. If he'd actually gone through with his threat to tell you everything, you'd be a corpse. You owe me one."

Mulder clamped his mouth shut before the angry tirade of wrongs done by Krycek slipped out. Getting into a loud argument in the middle of the hallway of a top-secret facility would be reckless, even beyond his usual standards. He saw Krycek smile and knew he was enjoying the situation. Whether he was actually working for the men who created this lab was rapidly becoming a question.

"Every good relationship has these little ups and downs," Krycek said with a grin of satisfaction as the door clicked open.

"After you." Krycek gestured Mulder towards the door. With a shrug, Mulder complied. He'd traveled a thousand miles to get through this door. Getting back out again was now going to be the problem, but even the threat of death couldn't keep him out of this room.

Mulder heard the door latch shut behind him, but paid it and Krycek little heed. On the wall in front of him was a map of the world with tiny lights scattered across the continents. A computer terminal sat under the map with a screen saver composed of a double helix spinning around another double helix in a pattern Mulder had never seen before. For a moment, Mulder felt the impact of reaching Nirvana until he heard Krycek's soft whistle behind him. He might have achieved the ultimate goal in his quest, but he doubted if he would live to make use of the knowledge gathered here.

Mulder wondered if Krycek even realized he was talking out loud. His voice sounded awed as if Krycek had finally encountered something beyond the ability of his cynicism to explain away.

"She said to follow someone with an itch to find what's best left lost and cold; someone with a soul as restless as mine and with as little to lose," Krycek whispered with a throaty growl.

Mulder felt a shudder ripple through him and roughly squelched the errant feeling of attraction he often felt for Krycek at the most inopportune moments. At times like this he wasn't sure whether he wanted to kill Krycek slowly or find out if the attraction was mutual. Mulder never thought of himself as being attracted to the dark side, but Krycek had a way of turning upside down a lot of his preconceptions. Bringing his mind back to the problem at hand, Mulder mentally tossed a coin and decided against his better judgment to trust Krycek, at least for the moment.

"Why me?" Mulder asked distractedly as he walked over to the map to get a closer look. The lights obviously marked cities, but whether they meant cities the aliens controlled or cities they wanted to control wasn't clear.

"She didn't say. She just laughed and said that it was time two lost gypsies joined together and stopped fighting each other and started paying attention to the abomination: her word, not mine," Krycek said hastily. He had a distracted look on his face, but Mulder saw that this in no way affected the competent way he held his gun.

"You're trying to tell me that a gypsy woman told you about this facility?" Mulder blurted out in astonishment. "When did you start consorting with gypsies?"

"She rescued me from a bunch of Tunguskan krestyani who thought it would be amusing to cut off my arm. No thanks to you I still have that arm, I might add," Krycek added sharply. Mulder looked at him blankly before realizing that Krycek had run into the same people with an unnatural obsession about amputating arms he'd barely escaped from.

"She told me to find you and you'd lead me where we both needed to be. After that, she said it was up to us whether we squabbled the life of the world away like children or started acting like soldiers in a war. I thought she was crazy, but now. . . ." Krycek's voice trailed off as he moved to stand beside Mulder staring at the map on the wall.

Mulder's mind reeled from too much information thrown at it too fast. The notion of Krycek as an ally was by itself enough to make him question his sanity. However, putting aside the fact that Krycek was a cold-blooded assassin and probably worked both sides of the street, if not the middle at well, he was also the most dangerous man Mulder had ever met. Krycek made for an extremely untrustworthy ally with his allegiances uncertain at best. Ever since Scully had disappeared, Mulder had made one disastrous decision after another in what he suspected was a downward spiral towards self-destruction. If so, then joining up with Krycek had to be the ultimate in suicidal impulses, but somehow it felt right to be standing here with his mortal enemy staring at the nerve center of the human alliance with the aliens.

"Why should I trust you?" Mulder asked casually as he set about memorizing the locations of each of the tiny spots of light.

"You shouldn't. I don't trust you," Krycek replied just as casually, but Mulder sensed amusement underlying his words. "You're crazy. I'm probably crazy to associate with a fuck-up like you, but maybe it takes crazy people to fight this war," Krycek said in an odd tone that reminded Mulder of his ancient Russian great-grandmother commenting on the vagaries of human behavior.

"So, what do you know about hacking into computers?" Mulder asked brightly as he sat down in front of the terminal. He wasn't ready to trust Krycek, but if he could help him break into the files stored on this computer, he'd ally with the devil.

"Not a thing," Krycek admitted with a shrug. "We'll have to wait until your geeks wake up which will be in about two minutes. In ten minutes the guards are going to start getting suspicious. After that, I suggest we get the hell out of here and then decide if we're going to kill each other or work together. I don't want to kill you, so I strongly recommend the work together option," Krycek said in what Mulder considered to be a patronizingly insulting tone, but decided he was in no position to argue. Later, perhaps. Much later. If they were going to be traveling companions, there would be plenty of opportunity to thrash out their differences and maybe find out if they had any common ground. He wouldn't go so far as to call this the start of a beautiful friendship, but he was willing to concede necessary alliance.