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where broken angels lie
darkstar
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The mind is all; we kiss everything.
We say we love, it's the skin we're in.
You're a retrograde, a vacancy.
You're the one I love
You're the hate in me.

- Monkey
Bush

A man has no reflection at the bottom of a shot of vodka. I like that. That I don't have to see who.....or what.....I am, all the things I've become. I hate mirrors. Maybe because every time I look myself in the eye, I see the ghosts of a hundred dead men staring back. I used to know them all by name. I should. After all I'm the reason they're ghosts. By now it's just too many to remember.

I do know one of the names.

Alex Krycek. Shot dead by life.

So we sit here, my ghosts and I, drinking ourselves into the netherworld awaiting us inside the dungeons of my mind. I can see it all so clearly, through the transparent liquor and the transparent bottom of the glass. It's like looking at the world without all the gilded masks and silken bandanges.

I see morning. Such a soft, innocent morning, rather like a newborn child that has been abandoned on my doorstep. A child I have slain. Her blood coats this world I've created, until the sky is the color of burning blood. A black hole sun dominates the horizon whose invisible fingers seek to pull all into his grasp. One by one, soul by soul, we are all slipping into the abyss.

I glance down at the vodka bottle beside me. Some of us fall faster than others. But in the end, it doesn't matter because all inevitably fall. Even the best of men....*especially* the best of men. I hate waking up to this life that is not a life, merely a game to see who can kill the most and die the slowest. Death, however, is not a spectral figure on a white horse but a roomful of polite old men who turn brides into widows and smile while children die.

(I've killed children.....shot them in the head like they were stray dogs just because their parents knew too much, and believe me, there's not enough vodka in all of Mother Russia herself to cleanse the blood from your hands, from your eyes....)

Once upon a time I scoffed at such things as Fate and Destiny, but now I welcome their existence. I couldn't have chosen this life- no, this *existence*- for myself. I burn in the hellish world of half-buried memories and familiar ghosts every time I close my eyes only to slip into a far more barren nightmare when I open them in the morning. To find myself alone. Always, alone, unless I paid her by the hour or am assigned to kill her before she wakes up.

Time for another drink. Good Russian vodka is a beautiful thing. It sears your nerves and cauterizes your soul until all you feel is the best kind of novacaine. When I'm drunk I don't have to remember that bright young man who signed onto the big boy's world of faceless identities, traceless guns, and endless lies along with all the other shining young men. One who drew certain lines in the sand and made himself swear never to cross them. No short years and endless days later, those lines are so far behind me that I doubt they ever existed. Regret.....no, regret was never an option. Not even when I had a soul. I ripped that from me so long ago, tossed it out with the rest of the garbage commonly called human emotions. I couldn't stand the stench of decaying ideals any longer.

Did I mention it was snowing today? Tiny white flakes that look to me like feathers plucked from the wings of angels. I am going to visit an angel. A fallen angel, perhaps, but not quite the demon I am. Call me a regular card-carrying, certified child of Lucifer himself if you will, but I never swore allegiance to his cause. Or agreed to sacrifice for it.

Not my life. And not the life of those I love.

Love. What a concept. My lips twist in a raw and bitter smile as I meet another swallow of liquor head on, embracing the trail of fire it burns deep into my gut. I wouldn't know the meaning of the word. I never even knew I was capable of it until I met....*her... ....but she.... I shove the thoughts away. The white godess Love is the tyrant that now demands the blood of angels for her wine. Or am I getting that confused with Our Lady Hate? Ah, but wouldn't it be easy to succumb to the temptation to get completely, utterly, wasted. To forget there ever was a "mission" and drink until I just don't care anymore. It's supposed to be so easy for me, the not caring. I am ice and steel no matter what you want to do to me, but the slightest whisper of the way she breathed my name does more than thaw me. It burns me alive on the stake of my own memory. And what a slow death it has turned out to be.

In fact the vodka hasn't dulled that ache yet, and I doubt it will ever be able to relieve the searing pain over the place where they used to spread rumors I had a heart.. Contrary to popular opinion, it's still there. I'll admit it's not much to look at- rotted black and mangled beyond recognition in the few places it hasn't hardened to total stone- but it belongs to me. I can say that about so very few things. My loyalties, if I ever owned them at all, are sold out quite regularly to the highest bidder. My conscience went for far, far less. When it came to my heart, things were different. I kept it frozen solid hoping, the tiniest bit, that someday I would have good reason to revive it. Ha. I should have known better. Now the time has come to surgically remove that cancer, that last shred of weak humanity within me. Other than the gun I sleep with, my heart is all I've ever considered my own.

(Fitting irony that is is the gun I cherish and the heart I tear away.)

My gaze staggers across the table to fall on my watch. 7:35 AM. A little early for a liquor buzz. In exactly one hour and twenty five minutes I have a very important appointment to keep. You could call it the only meaningful thing in my rather meaning*less* life. I have longed for this day and dreaded it since I first opened my eyes to see it as inevitable. Ask me where I'm going? Where else would you find fallen angels with scarlet wings, scarlet lips, and judas kisses?

Today I'm going to Hell.

The demon overlords who run it don't exactly call it that, of course. The walls aren't made of black gothic iron but of the most unimaginative kind of plain metal and plaster. It smells of antiseptic and chemicals rather than sulfure and smoke. The screaming of the condemned is muffled by drug-induced hazes of contentment until they don't even realize that they are being dissected body and soul to feed the lust of their masters. All they live for is another shot of synthetic A-ok. I travel frequently through those vortexs of despair but today I'm not going on any kind of "company business". Let's call it personal affairs instead of out and out rebellion. *That* seems to get my superiors into a fluster until they renew that pesky death warrant hanging over my head like Satan's personal pitchfork.

(The one they brandish to remind me of the consequences should I even dream of betraying them again. They think it can make me fear them. Idiots. As if they have ever seen anything even resembling fear in my eyes. Because if I wanted to, I could crush any of them as easily as I destroy their hapless victims. So who truly fears who.... the caged animal or the men who lock him up?)

Fear is an old friend of mine. I see it surface in a large percentage of the people I deal with, watch it flicker in their eyes like icy fire when I pass. I can even smell it on their breath like soured liquor when I talk to them. Fear. Just one of many side effects that come alone with my hard-won position as unchalleged deadliest of all the silent deadly men. The ones who harvest souls without mercy and without fail. We are the teeth of the withered old men who try in vain to hide their bloody hands inside their perfectly tailored Armani suits. Even they pretend otherwise, each of those little tin gods knows that to be true deep within the chasm left by their souls.

That fear has a use- as does everything I associate myself with. It inspires almost everyone under my (growing) command to take *any* order from me without *any* questions. Almost. The doctors and scientists are a stubborn and uncooperative bunch. They like to skulk behind the shields of their research, flaunting their invincibility since they are the ones to actually carry out the work, as they put it. To a great extent they are right. A pity, because theyre the only type of scum I loathe half as much as the whited sepluchres I report to once a month. And they tend to get fussy when you disturb one of their patients.

(As if they ever care about their toys past what they can take from them and how quickly they can read the lab results on it. All they live for the the ravaging of spirits in the blessed name of Science. Then when it's all over, they don't even take the time to name the dead when they bury them. If....they even bother....)

I finger the grip on my gun. It is quite a beautiful weapon, sleek and black and best of all completely untraceable. The clip is fully loaded with only the finest hollow point bullets, designed to explode within the targe, ensuring the kill. Messy, yes. But effective too, and today no one's going for neat and clean.

If any of them know what is healthy for the "work" they won't attempt to stop me. Not today. Although I must say I hope they will try. It's been far too long since I've killed one of their perverse breed, and at the time it held none of the.....personal satisfaction..... the death of these particular monster would bring. I won't say I hate them. Out loud I won't say it, because hate is pretty high on the list of forbidden emotions. It distracts from the almighty Mission.

Unless of course, it is the reason for the mission. Like today.

And the fires of Hades herself could not burn hotter in my chest.

Because I know, for the first time, exactly what they did to her. I had to steal the reports that told me in cold, detached words how they've been torturing the only human being I've ever entertained the thought of loving.

They started with the vaccination experiments, trying to cure the black oil within her not for her benefit but for their glory. To that end, they wracked her body with a host of specially designed drugs with side effects that rivaled the disease itself. They even found a cure, but oh they were just getting started. Next they cut out pieces of her brain -while she was wide awake to scream for relief she never got- to make sure she never spread their secrets again. That last, final step in the process was to ship her off to a harvesting facility to remove every last bit of her blood's DNA coding- which now contains the blueprints for future vaccination research. She's there now, as they kill her little by little, drop by drop.

But they didn't want me to know about it. That kind of reading might not inspire me to new heights of loyalty. Especially when I look beyond the words to figure out what they use her for between the experiments. The end result, you can be assured, is *not* that I end up too terribly thrilled to go out and smile while I kill for them.

(The killing isn't so bad by the pay is lousy and there's the constant risk of getting cancer via second hand smoke from my CEO)

It does, however, have a sole redeeming quality that dissuades me from seeking a more lucrative position elsewhere, as I once did. In a word? P-o-w-e-r. The best kind. I am guaranteed a winning stake in a bleak but inevitable future, whether the Syndicate itself wins or loses. And, as the plan goes, that power will let me find my harlot angel in one of Their most jealously guarded laboratories- one that I'm not even supposed to know exists- even without proper clearance. Once they figure out that I don't have it, of course, they party's over.

But not, I swear on everything I was, before I fulfill my mission. One of my own choosing, not handed to me in a manilla folder with writing the color of dried blood. You see, they stole from me one last thing I called mine once. Hope. Hope in the form of a woman who stumbled fatally trying to walk in my footsteps.

She. Was. Mine.

Not *theirs*. Not even *ours*. She belonged solely to me as much as my dreams were wrapped in her. Dreams of breaking our collective chain and disappearing forever. Only me and her and no one or nothing else. I watched, helpless, as those hopes died violently when they forced her to betray me, betray....us.....

Which is why, in one hour and fifteen minutes, I am going to set her free.

Not out of pity. Not out of love. I can't give her those things, though I remember a time when I thought I could. Even now, when I lie in the dark alone with days gone by, I still wish I believed that. But I don't. And when I go to her today it will not be noble and it will not be beautiful. This is nothing but revenge against the men who did this to me.

Pure, simply, revenge.

If only it were that easy. If only I remembered nothing but her betrayal and the loss and pain that felt like my soul was being cut out all over again. It's not that I've forgotten those things, only that with them come the memories of other moments neither harsh nor ugly, floating like lost specks of light in a sea of darkness. Moments like the first time I saw her. As if I could ever forget....

The thick smoke smothering the back room of some swanky nightclub in Rome that was beginning to annoy me. I wanted to get the mission on and get it done with. They said I needed a partner for that one. I said give me a gun and three hours and I'd show them how much I need help. But rank was pulled so there I sat, trying not to cough by moistening my throat with a vodka tonic. The nightclub itself was a front for their operations in that part of Italy- as fancy as anything the Godfather ever visited. In America, the Syndicate might perfer some semblance of tact, but let me remind you that the Mafia was born in Italy and old traditions die hard.

I looked up from a last minute inspection of my weapon to hear the sound of footsteps at the door. The earth froze. She walked with a unconscious slowness, like she was some kind of goddess deigning to grace us with her presence for a few moments. Her dress was black satin and clung to her body like it was painted on. I'm supposed to be a professional so I won't admit to staring.

The American agent with her said her name was Marita and she would be working with me that night. Our task was simple. One of our agents planned on defecting along with everything he knew about our operations. She was the prettily wrapped bait, and I was the unpleasant surprise waiting for him after he took it. It was no easy assignment. He would be paranoid to the extreme, aside from being trained to watch for traps like the one we were laying for him, and wouldn't even think twice about shooting her if he caught on. To top it all off, she was a rookie.

On our way out of the door, one of the Italian agents remarked that it was a good thing she was new, since it'd be a pity to waste someone with more experience. I smiled. And told him if he considered life so cheap then maybe he wouldn't mind giving up his. He shut up. Quickly. I still don't know why I defended her like that. It wasn't in my nature, to say the least. Maybe it was the look I had seen on her face. Scared.....vulnerable.....even innocent in the tiniest way. I had never seen that look on an operative before. I have never seen it again.

Once we got to the destination- another nightclub across town where intel had pinpointed the Target. At least there I had an excuse for never taking my eyes off her. I was to keep surveillance until she made the catch, so to speak. There was no small amount of doubt among us that she could actually do it, and as I sat at the bar watching her approach his table, I shared in those doubts. She looked too soft, too fragile for this kind of work.

Then it happened. She didn't change.....she *transformed*. The shy angel vanished and something entirely posessed her from the very core of her being. Before I could finish one drink, she had him on the dance floor and willing to do anything she so much as hinted at. Believe me, she did more than play her part. She f-l-o-w-e-d around him like liquid energy, one second demure and the next seductive. The silver light from the mirrorball slid over her skin to melt into her dress and her hair. For a few moments I was actually jealous of a man I knew was being led to his death. I remember wondering if it might not be worth it for just one dance like that.

But soon enough the music stopped and her adoring worshipper followed her into an alley behind the club where I shot him between the eyes. I don't know if it was inexperience or if she didn't have enough time to move, but somehow she stood too close. Blood sprayed from his body to splatter hers. At first I thought she was going to throw up or burst into tears. Again, I was surprised when she did neither. She merely wiped the gore away from her eyes, congratulated me on the accuracy of my shot, and asked me where we were going to dispose of the body.

That was when I, quite literally, *fell* into love with her because to this day I believe she pushed me. With nothing more than her eyes.

The vision fades and reality slams into me like a huge steel fist to the gut. Why is the vodka suddenly gone? A surge of anger rides my veins like chained lightning and I hurl the empty bottle across the room to shatter against the wall into a million glittering shards. I hear the crash of breaking glass like it was the screaming of her soul as they raped it and suddenly I am seeing our future in the fragments littering the floor. Broken pieces of humanity left in so many pieces it is impossible to ever be what we once were.

Never.....Such a long, lonely time.

I whisper a curse and pick up my gun, sliding it into my holster before putting on my overcoat. Duty calls, but it beckons me in *her* irresistible voice and I am powerless to refuse. But it is still revenge. Never love. Never mercy.

Yeah, sure, I believe that.

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One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.....

What comes next? I forget. At least the mystery gives me something to think about that doesn't fit into the category of rational thought. Not that anything does, not anymore.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.....

They took logic away from me the same time they took everything else. Time doesn't exist around my world. It stagnates, freezes, and binds me in still motion along with it. It stopped the first time I felt a needle sink into my bare flesh and it has never started again.

One. Two. Three. Four....

Light the sky on fire, consume the moon, devour space and all that would remain is white. Ugly, corrupted, hateful white. I despise the color. Brides wear it because they say it's pure but I'm bathed in it daily because I'm not. No, my shade of white is harsh and cruel. White lights blind me while they torture me each day with a new kind of needle, a fresh drug, a different test. White walls laugh at me when I cry or scream. White....like numb.....which I only wish I could be.

One. Two. Three....

My eyes rest in quiet contemplation of the heavy leather straps binding my bird-like wrists to a bed. They got me a brand new pair, thicker since I chewed through the last after an especially painful experiment. They beat me too. Beat me and....other things.... then doped me up on heroine until I didn't care but at least I showed them. Proved I could still do the unexpected. You always do that. The things they'd never dream you would do.....

One. Two....

HE taught me that, the man I never loved but dream of with every waking moment. I would say every *day* but there are no days here. Or nights. Only an eternal web of *white* that holds me fast while the spiders feed off my blood ever so slowly until one day I will finally be all dried up and die. Oh but I want to die. Rest in peace so they say, and more than anything I want one breath of that.

One.....

One....

My name is Marita...and....and I don't know what comes next.....the numbers are gone, vanished back into the shadows of my diseased mind. But I know my name. I know I had a past. I know.....I know.....

Even if I cannot find it.

The demons inside my mind spin drunken cartwheels over each other as I push against the iron gates locking coherent memories away from me. We have lots of demons here, all kinds really, but they masquerade as humans in white labcoats or scrubs. White again.....did you know it was also the color of angels? Irony lives though the earth may perish. I used to dream of angels but then sleeping with devils and their spawn is no way to earn your wings. All I ever wanted to do was survive. They promised me that if I was a good little girl and did everything they told me to, they wouldn't hurt me.

That was nothing more than a bitter lie from the start, even before they sent me to rot in this end of ends. They hurt my soul when they forced me to tell lies and kill simply because my body could get me places even they couldn't gain access to. But they didn't stop there. They hurt me in other ways too, after the missions were over and I only wanted to go home and forget..... only forget....but that was never what happened. Instead I had to smile a smile that tasted like arsenic on my lips while the Smoking Man- my direct superior- and others of his kind took "full advantage" of my "abilities." It never mattered what I really wanted. They had the power, and if the only thing I had to win some of it for myself with *was* myself, the smiles had to keep on coming no matter how much I wanted to scream.

I did scream, though, if only into the recesses of my mind while I died ever so quietly inside.

So when I was introduced to a dark haired man with darker energy and a slight Russian flavor to his voice by the name of Alex Krycek, I connected him with the rest and feared him as such. I didn't need to be afraid, not of him. Strange because everyone else seemed to be, even the Smoking Man, just a little. He had such a wild unpredictability about him, one that gave credence to the whispers that he was one of the very few men living who had double crossed the Syndicate and remained a "man living".

I can only remember pieces of my so-called past, but the more they strip my mind, the more the memories of our first mission together remain sure. We worked surprisingly well together. I wore a tight black dress while I seduced some unknowing operative into the alley, and he wore black gloves when he shot the man in the head. We dumped the body in a river and went to a safe house to await our debrief instructions. I expected him to make the same demands of me everyone else did. He didn't. Instead we sat and I got my first taste of vodka while we.....talked.....

"Who gave you those bruises?"

His voice was quiet, oddy thoughtful, as his fingertips brushed my arm just above my elbow. I stiffened at his touch, pulling away and staring down into half-full glass.

"What bruises?"

"The ones on your left arm. The makeup did a good job of hiding them, but it's wearing off and I want to know who put them there." Why he asked, I didn't know. I didn't care. Everything that was common sense screamed for me not to tell him the truth, because I always lied to Them when I could. I broke one of my only rules when I said

"A man's."

"What man?"

"He smokes cigarettes and controls my life." The freak had stood by smiling while his goons had "taught me my place" after some sort of infraction, real or imagined I could never tell. He never did like to get his hands dirty. Krycek listened calmly, the muscles in his jaw twitching slightly, until I was finished. Then he picked up my glass, draining it in one gulp (a feat which amazed me because I thought the stuff was fire in liquid form) and didn't speak until he'd put it down again.

"You shouldn't let him do that. Or anyone else. You deserve better.....why do you let him?"

Let him. Now that made me mad. I shouted right in his face that how could he understand because they didn't do that kind of thing to him, and the choice wasn't mine to make anyway. He stared me right back with eyes that must have been born in the heart of a supernova and asked me in that same calm voice if I wanted to learn how to make my own choices. How to control the men who controlled me.

I made my first choice.

I said yes.

That was an eternal three years ago. When we both were foolish enough to believe we had a chance at life, at freedom, at each other. At first it was so beautiful, so much like heaven to share my heavy fate with another. We did all we could to keep it a secret from our controllers, meeting only when we went on assignment together, which was more frequent than not. As I said, we worked well. It wasn't all hot and heavy passion, though. Sometimes we did nothing more than talk over a bottle of vodka, like we did that first night.

(I found out how he lost his arm but he never told me in words how he lost his soul. I only know that he believed he found part of it somewhere inside me. Where, I'll never know.)

Other nights we did nothing but sit and feel what it was like to be near one another. Of all those crystal moments, the most treasured were right we parted ways for who knew how long. When we each silently wondered if this was the last time we'd see each other...feel....each other. We always chose to believe that we *would* meet again, that the inevitable would be stayed by the power of our need alone. The same words were exchanged each time.

("Are you going to forget me," I'd ask, "When they try and erase me from your mind are you going to forget?"

"I love you." he would reply. "I don't know how to forget it.")

At times he sounded more regretful that he could not than that he was leaving. But we never said goodbye. Goodbye meant we would never meet again. That it was over. In time our secret got out, but we tried to ignore it. I never mentioned to him the cost of our relationship. Never told him what they did to me during the weeks or months when he was gone and I had to return from missions alone to something neither human nor gentle. But that secret was discovered as well, one rainy night in September when we were in debrief after a joint assignment.

The Smoking Man decided I should stay long enough for a more *personal* report. Alex was in the next room......he heard my scream. Two heartbeats later he was coming through the door, pulling the monster away from me and proceeding to beat the fear of God into him. I think he would have killed him, if those security men hadn't closed in.

Oh God, it was awful. The Smoking Man made me watch it too. Alex was one of their best fighters. He took two of them down- one of those two permanently- before they beat him to the ground. And hit him. Again. Again. Again. I can still hear the sickening dull thud of boots against fleesh. The Smoking Man laid his hands on my shoulders and asked me how long I was going to let that go on before I cooperated.

No, there was not a choice that time. I bowed my head and followed him out of the room like any obedient slave, trying to ignore the crushed look in Alex's eyes. I knew he had put himself on the line for me. I also knew he didn't do that for anyone. And in the moment our eyes tangled, I realized for the first time that we could never be what we were meant to. Not in the life we lived.

Memory lane is a barren wasteland for me. I have no idea why he's been on my mind more today than any other. Why the memories fade in and out with relative ease. I did have a dream last night, an actual dream instead of the nightmares filling my brain when the lights go out. I dreamed that freedom would come to me today, and that he would be the one to bring it.

Dreams are but demented children of an idle brain.

Krycek may have been "Alex" to me once, but we are dead to each other. As dead as I am. As dead as he is. He had his chance to rescue me, when all he had to do was look the other way and I could be free, but he left. Left me standing alone in hell. I hate him for that.

I say that with conviction, maybe to convince myself that there is really no chance left for us. It is easy to hope. And I am afraid of that, afraid to fall when those hopes are betrayed yet again. Perhaps in a way he did give me freedom today. Freedom in the memories that usually run from me. The only kind, I fear, I will ever know.

The time to think has been stolen from me. The door is opening and the monsters are back and it's going to hurt again. I press my body against the scraggly pillow behind me, despite the way it stinks of disinfectants and try not to start crying as my muscles tense along my back. Despite my best efforts, I flinch away as the door swings fully open and the unmistakable sound of combat boots on tile announces my visitor's presence. My eyes are squeezed tightly shut as I wait in chaotic darkness for rough voices and rougher hands to drag me back into another penance session. Back to Purgatory to suffer for the crimes I have done. For the momentary silence to be shattered by screams I honestly don't know how to hold inside.

(I never did like pain.....that's why I surrendered my life to them in the first place......I can't stand......and here I am drowning in it.....)

Nothing is happening. It takes a frozen heartbeat for me to figure out that my guest is alone and unmoving. A scientst? I shudder. Not that.....again.....please. Whoever it is, he's staring at me. It is a he, I'm certain. I can feel it in his eyes even though I can't see them, feel my skin start to burn under an intensity so much like.....No. It's not. It can't be. He never came for me though I used to believe and pray that he would.

But who else stared at me like he did, as if I were the ocean and he was begging permission to drown in me?

"Rita."

Oh.

His voice.

Even if someone could capture his stare, they could never mimic the paradox of rough softness in the way he says my name. Not Marita or Miss Covarrubias. Just Rita.....

My eyes fly open to see my judas lover standing at the foot of my bed, perfectly unmarred and unemotional. I have hated him so many times in the past months. I hate him and I hate him, but nevertheless he takes my breath away. I am forced to remind my heart that beating is not an option as my cracked lips open in a dry whisper of his name.

"Alex."

So at last he's come. I thought I dreamed of this, but now I look into his eyes to see things which I have never named. Almost pity, not quite mercy, a tinge of bitter hate, all wrapped in the dead emeralds that are his eyes.

Something that turns me cold.

* * *

"You're alive."

I know I'm just imagining that actual shock bled though my voice. I am Alex Krycek. Nothing shocks me. Ha, take that all you ghosts of dead emotions. There are so many ghosts around here, a host of things thought long buried in the shadowlands of the past. One of them is lying in the bed, staring at me with every expression possible. I can feel the others around me, fluttering inside my chest and pressing against my sould like bat-winged creatures of the night. Until now I had half-hoped she would have been dead and things would be simple again. But here she is. Against all odds. Alive.

"I wouldn't quite say that." Her voice, that beautiful voice she used to wrap around her target like arsenic tainted lace, is destroyed. Made raw, splintered, like she's been screaming a lot.

(Now why does that make you hate? Make you want to kill the men who did that to her? She made her choices just like you did. It's her fault she wasn't tough enough.)

I know that. I knew that from day one. But I pushed her anyway. As much as I wanted to protect her, to love her, I wanted to create her in my own image more. To make her into someone strong enough to do more than survive- to win. It was so easy to stitch together the pieces of her ripped and bleeding soul. But I never.....never.....meant to hurt her. It was to heal her and heal myself in the process.

(Then she fell apart at the seams and now she's here and I'm here and we're bleeding inside. Yet again.)

Ever since I passed her and that weasel Spender in the hallway, her image has haunted me through dark nights and darker days. She was so....gaunt. Haggard. Trembling and pale like Death's favorite child. Nothing like the seductive woman made of angel's blood and dying stars that I used to dream about. Make no mistake....I wanted her to suffer as I had suffered, wanted it so very very badly until I saw it. Then I nearly parted ways with my lunch for only the second time in my life. Maybe part of the reason I came back today was to try and prove that I hadn't really seen her in that hallway, but instead nothing more than a spectral nightmare that faded when stared full in the face.

I"m staring. As hard as I can. She's not vanishing. In fact she's returning my gaze maximum force and I can only taken so much of those bloodshot eyes. (Eyes that used to be blue but now are burned to clear). My feelings are beginning to stir again, whispering and hissing in my ears and around the corners of my brain. I strike at them madly, wondering who let them out of their cage.

I think I know. I think she's looking at me right now.

(So at last we know the truth. Why you never came back, and hated her, and cursed her name as a traitor. Because she could make you feel. Forced your to be human when you preferred to leave that skeleton buried. It was ok when everything was good, but when the trouble started to hit, humanity hurt. So you butchered it for the second time. You said it was the final time. You're here now because you've fooled yourself into thinking you're prepared. That you can face her again. Well gues what, Alex ol' boy. You were wrong.)

"Why are you here?" she finally breaks the silence, not aware that it was seconds away from breaking me. "Did you come to pay your *respects*? If you have, then know you're far from the first." Her lips curl in a bitter sneer, but her eyes betray her. They are pleading with me to say that I am not here for that. As that. I was never able to teach her how to totally hide her feelings from her eyes.

Who, Rita? Who was the first, or the second? Did any of them ever see you as anything but a pretty face? I want to ask the questions, but all I reply is a simple "No."

She doesn't speak, her gaze falling from me to the bed like it is far too weak to remain aloft. It is then I notice the brutal straps pinning her to the bed like a butterfly to a vivsection table. Heavy, leather straps that are bruising her paper flesh. I tell myself I'm glad. I don't believe it.

Because it's a lie. Not the first I've spun for myself over the years, but one of the more current. I can still remember when I created it.....

(A ship, a rotting, disgusting ship. The perfect hideaway for our little Dimitri, our key to freedom. No matter how powerful they tried to be, the men of the Syndicate felt the threat of the faceless aliens. So they needed me once again, even though at the time I wasn't in their service.)

Rita showed up. I knew they would send her, because she was the best they had and as much as we acted like we hated each other, eyes and ears were everywhere. It was almost ironic, that she was now being sent against me in the same type of mission that brought us together.

"You think you can pull this off, don't you?"

I kissed her like I had been wanting to kiss her for a long time. "They give me what I want...." I reply. "I'm going to rule the world." King and queen, and no one or nothing could ever take her from my side again.....ever hurt her again. We'd have everything we could ask for.

"We've got them on their knees, Alex. Let's get out of this hole."

I didn't want to think about consequences right then. So we left, went to some hotel that I barely remember now. Because when I got back to my refuge, an impeccably groomed English man was waiting for me, and my pawn, my salvation was gone. Instinct screamed through the shock that SHE had dared to betray.....ME.

I believed those instincts. They had plenty of time to convince me during the seemingly endless days I was locked down there like some kind of animal without food or water, and only the Englishman's not so tender mercies to keep me alive. I hated her then. With a passion. I defiled her memory with every blasphemy I knew in English *and* Russian.

But when the man asked me over and over where *we* had hidden the boy, I knew she hadn't come to me as some assignment. She was playing the game I had taught her, trying to work both sides and come out on top. I knew then she was going to Mulder, that she was trying in her own way to get freedom. I knew and I didn't care. I was starving and thirsty and it was so much easier to be angry with her.

That's why I never looked for her when I heard she'd disappeared. I knew I could find her, but I didn't want to. Love had proved a fatal weakness within me that They were now able to exploit, so it had to be rooted out. They told me she was dead and I let myself believe in what I knew to be a lie. Then the nightmares came.

When I helped them take Scully from Mulder a long five years ago, I saw the pain and hollow despair in his eyes and I laughed. Until the evil jester of Fate twisted me into the same dark place, a prison where I would wake up in the middle of the night stifling screams and sweating because I *saw* things- unspeakable things- that they did to her. I felt her screams inside me, heard her call out my name. But I couldn't stop them. Not even in the dreams when I had two good arms.

Only now it's worse.

Now I look at her, and I'm not so sure they were dreams.

* * *

"So are you planning on telling me to what I owe the honor of this visit?"

I prefer the silence but one of us has to speak sometime and I'd rather it be me. Why? Well I don't have reasons for anything I do so how would I know? All I can say for certain is that talking keeps my mind off how much I really missed that self-serving little fiend. And ok, I'll admit I'm more than a little curious. He completely ignored me the last time he saw me.....and then it would have been so easy for him to help me. So what is he doing here, now, when I know he doesn't have access? Why the risk? He has to want *something*. But I don't have anything to give. No power. No juicy tidbit of information. No silky beauty. No nothing.

(Except for one thing. That small dream deep inside me where I close my eyes and wake up anywhere but here. He can't know about that. Nobody does.)

I remember he always used to tell me he knew me better than I knew myself. Usually when he was trying to reassure me that we'd get away with something that nine times out of didn't we didn't. He tried to teach me how to maneuver around the punishments like he did, but I ended up learning better how to stand still and take a beating.

"Is it that much of a surprise that I would want to see you?"

The muscles in my back stiffen again as I glare at him. "Yes, actually, considering you wanted nothing to do with me the one time you actually could have helped me.... for once." I notice his jaw tighten and plunge ahead, pleased to know I'm getting somewhere. "But that wouldn't have worked, now would it? You wouldn't have gotten anything from the deal. Just me."

And he used to think I couldn't play parts. Outside I'm all steel and poison, but inside I'm crying blood and wondering *why* I wasn't enough.

"I couldn't." He's so calm, so assured. I find myself wanting to smile instead of snarl. He hasn't changed a bit. But then he has. There's something.....melancholy.....inside him today as if he is..... regretting?

Not my Alex. No way.

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He continues to speak. "There were complications then. And I had my own reasons."

"Didn't you always?

That draws him closer, pulling him in until he's standing at the foot of the bed. I watch him fight to contain the emotion rippling just under the taut mask of of stoicism. He does a better job of hiding them from me than he used to. Someone's been practicing. "Before you fling your daggers, remember that *you* were the one to betray *me*. Not vice versa. If you had waited, everything would have worked out."

"How many times did you tell me that? Reassured me that you'd fix everything. If I listened to you, you'd set me free- wasn't that the deal?" So he wants daggers. I can do that. He hasn't seen a sliver of the fury churning at a slow boil deep inside me all these months to know that the one person who ever cared about me had deserted me. That fury is awakened now, exploding from me with the mad abandon of a supernova and he can kill me if he wants when it's all over. The truth is no longer my cross to bear. Let him hang on it. See if he likes the way it feels.

He almost speaks but I don't let him. I'm not finished. "You had more than your chance, Alex. And all you gave me was one continual string of 'tomorrows' and 'yesterdays' every time you left me alone. I tried to keep the faith.....believe me that I did.... but somewhere along the way their bruises and their pain overshadowed your empty promises. I never *let* you go." I pause, letting my eyes press into him before I went on. "They had to beat you out of me."

His voice cuts the air, the edge on his metallic words dull but glowing hot, not so different from the knife that he said took his arm. I wonder if he notices. "But you betrayed me anyway. Just like I was one of your victims. Like I was....*nobody. Did they ask you to kill me too? To put a bullet in my brain?" His control is slipping, just enough to let the acid seep through. "Were you supposed to do it before or after you kissed me and whispered how much you loved me?"

He has a point and it hurts to think that he would believe I only used him for my amusement, that I would ever seduce him for seduction's sake like I did all the men we killed.... "I accepted the orders to kill you." I admit. "But I never intended to obey."

"It doesn't matter." The mask is firmly back in place almost before I could notice it was gone. We are both performing in rare form today. I hate that. I want a magic word to turn everything back to yesterday. For him to look at me in the way he used to when he thought I was asleep or merely not paying attention. If he would just do that, all this horror would fade away, purgatory slain by heaven's brilliance. There is no heaven for us, no ever after or sweet paradise. If we ever found Eden in one another, our sins have exiled us and destroyed all roads leading back. There is precious little left of what we thought we'd always be. The thoughts ebb away the hate inside me, and when I speak I find my voice to be slow, deliberate rather than widly accusing.

"They already knew." His good fist clenches then releases suddenly. He didn't know that. I feel my throat constrict as the crystal needles of tears prick at the back of my eyes. "Right after you left to get Dimtri, they came. Yes, I gave them the details......after they broke three of my ribs, dislocated my shoulder and bruised my jaw. There was a choice. Either I got to you, or they would. I'm not as stupid as you think. If they had sent anyone else, do you think you'd be standing here? I couldn't take another one your grand schemes. Another failure. I couldn't stand to think of what they'd do to me.

"So I was going to take the boy, steal back my life, and leave you to play James Bond's evil twin. I was so sure you'd forget about me within a week....." The adrenaline was gone and I fall back against the pillows, exhausted. The tears being to smudge my vision and thicken my voice as I continue.

"No one was supposed to get hurt.....*this*.....was never supposed to happen."

My eyes at last betray me and the tears escape to spill in tiny rivers of silent pain down the diseased landscape of my face. I can't look at him anymore. It hurts, far too much to bear. The heavy veils of my eyelids descend to hide me from his cold condemnation. The darkness behind them is moist and thick but unable to mask the sadness that impregnates the very air we breathe. Head bowed, I await the axe of his final judgment to fall on me.

Silence.

(Why can't he just get it over with? Why does he drag it out?)

Pain.

(Has the man not even one shred of mercy within him now that I am so obviously, pitifully broken? Haven't I paid double for my sins?) The heavy weight of a body sitting down on the bed close- so close- beside me startles me. The implications stop my heart. I know he did not just....

He did.

And now he's touching my face, the curve of his thumb gliding against my cheekbone to brush away my tears. His fingers are so uncertain, hovering around my skin like he is afraid I'll shatter under his touch. It is strange, that touch, and it paralyzes me. I am deathly afraid to open my eyes.

(What if this is only a dream.....and I'm about to wake up..... what if he's only toying with me to punish me fruther....)

I've forgotten how to breath. Or move. As it is, I have to remind my heart that beating is necessary for life. I search for spite in his tone when she speaks, but his voice mirrors his touch as he pulls my chin toward him. "Rita. Look at me."

I shake my head and try to stop my hands from trembling. I can't. I can't. It will destroy me. Destroy me. But again his voice travels through the darkness around me, calling my name like he used to in the old times. "Look...at me."

My eyes creep open, giving my soul time to brace for an onslaught of harsh words and bitter hate. Where is it, where is the contempt? Not in his eyes..... There is only that regret, that sad pity I do not understand. His face is inches from mine and every word he speaks cuts me flesh to bone.

"I'm sorry they hurt you."

That.....I was not prepared for. Dumb shock strikes me mute as he continues.

"I'm sorry I couldn't save you from this. From the men who did those things you never told me about. From myself." His hands again skim the surface of my face, following the lines of my forehead to capture the latest tear from my eyelashes. "But more than anything else I'm sorry that it has to end this way."

The same hand that caressed me reaches into his coat and withdraws something shiny and black and metal. I'd know his gun anywhere. He used to sleep with it under his pillow......

I still can't breathe but this time it's only because I know why he's come. I 'm going to die.

* * *

She shrinks away from me as far as the straps will allow, cold horror awash in her face and eyes. I feel a sickening revulsion in my gut as I bring the gun out into the light. It was supposed to be so easy. Walk in and relieve both our pain in one gunshot. But now, the feel of her skin eating away at my fingers like acid, the fear in her eyes burning like something far worse, I.....can't..... I can shoot children and husbands and mothers but I can't pull the trigger on a woman who betrayed me once, and who now is everything but dead.

But the mission must be fulfilled. Just not this way. There can be only one ending to this.

"No....no...." I reach out for her face, aching to feel her skin under mine, but she flinches away. "This is yours." Her eyes widen then cloud with confusion, and her voice is hesistant. "W-ha-t?"

"For you." I lay the gun beside her on the bed and undo the straps on her wrists, more than glad to see the hateful things off. She stares at me, traces of fear still crackling in the corners of her eyes like static electricity. I wish she wouldn't make me tell her what's happening, that she would figure it out all on her own.

"I'm offering you a choice. *The* choice." I eject the clip and remove every bullet save one. One silver finger of Death, deadly to the extreme. When I jam it back into the gun, realization is dawning on her face like a rising sun. "You said I never gave you anything. Well now I'm giving you one chance- just one- for revenge or for freedom. Shoot me if you will. Free yourself if you choose."

Silence is not golden, it is velvet. I can tell that as her fingers slowly trace the edge of the gun, almost like she is caressing it, and I feel the kind of quiet that chokes off thoughts and smothers words before they can be spoken. When I looked in the mirror this morning, I was still a young man, but now I feel old. So old.

(But they don't care how young we are.....how innocent....she....was....they use and they use until all we can do to save the ones we love is hand them the means to end their suffering.)

It isn't murder, no matter who dies here today. It's only murder if you're alive. I never was. She used to be, but sitting face to face with her, I know the woman I loved is dead. It's my responsibilty to set her body free.

It feels like violent hate and hurts like violent love.

For timeless seconds her fingers dance around the gun until they close around the handle. The spider veins just under her transparent skin stand out in garish shades of blue and purple and red as she pulls it up. Toward me. It takes all of her strength just to hold it level with my head as her eyes meet mine in a very quiet, solemn way. I meet hers in much of the same.

"I don't want to kill you." she says, and the gun drops into her lap. Her words hang in the air like abandoned children. "I might have once. But now....no."

I claim survival as my god, but part of me wishes she would. That I would be the lucky one, the one spared by being destroyed. She knows what I am giving her. Not death so much as an ending of life. The terrible, slow sickness of life that will kill her in a far more horrifying way if I do not intervene.

And why not take her with me? Defy the odds and spite in the face of Fate while I carry her out of the compound not caring what they'll do to me. Because I can't. It's something Mulder would do for his Scully. He wouldn't care if she had cut his heart out and danced on it, or that she might just die if she didn't get the limited medical care that accompanies the tests. He'd just carry her away. And he'd succeed.

I am not Mulder. I used to envy him his role as the shining hero. I even went so far as to want to be that kind of white knight, even if the armor was black. But not for the world and surely not for some pathetic Truth. For just one woman. Then again, she is no Scully. And I am no one's hero.

Deep inside I know that even if I was, even if I did take her with me, she'd die. Her health is shattered. They'd catch us before we crossed the state line. Me, they'd shoot on sight. They wouldn't be so kind to her. She would be dragged back here, to continue living death. This is the only escape I can offer her. The only way I can fulfill the promises I made to set her free. I never dreamed I'd have to kill her to do it. Or watch her kill herself.

(Can you watch....that.....)

"Alex?" It is her voice that reaffirms that no, I could not watch. She won't look at me, staring straight at her index finger as it traces figure eights on the sheets around the gun. "Was there ever a time when you said you loved me.....and meant it......?"

Her words sink deep into my mind like flower petals made of molten steel. I can hear in my mind what I want to say to her. (That there was never a time I did not mean it....even when I hated you....especially then .because I wanted you even more......which is why it burned every time I woke up beside another woman who was not you.....)

But that is not what I tell her.

"Yes."

Her face softened for the merest heartbeat with something out of place in this inhuman room. When I see the color of her eyes, I don't have to hear what she's going to say. I already know. But it doesn't mean I want to acknowledge that. "I've made my choice." she says, once again caressing the gun.

"And.....I think it's time for you to leave."

There is no reply I can make other than to rise in silence to my feet, my hand covering hers just long enough to feed one last time my addiction to her skin. One step to the door.....two steps.....three steps....I pause. Something feels incomplete. Undone. Something.....

I turn and walk back to the bed and pull her face toward me, brushing a feather light kiss on her forehead, just underneath her hairline. Her eyes close, and I touch my lips to her eyelids ever so softly, remembering when she used to taste wine made from forbidden fruits, heady and seductive.

".....Goodbye.....Rita....."

It is not enough. It will never be. But I walk away nonetheless.

And I don't look back.

* * *

Silence.

Cold, unfathomable silence.

He's gone. He's not coming back. I know that.

Why is the room quiet now with such a unearthly silence unlike any I have ever head? Why is it so empty? There is no trace that he was ever here, save the gun in my hand and the ghosts of his kisses on my face. On my eyes, like a blessing or was it a eulogy?

There have been few choices in my life. He has been a part of all of them. And now, the final decision lies before me, mine and mine alone to end. The instrument is in my hand. All that remains is my actions to fulfill the ritual. Freedom is a mere three inches of hot lead away from my grasp.

He's gone. And he told me goodbye. We never said goodbye. It sounded so much like forever.....but that's what this is. There will be no more secret meetings and stolen kisses and whispered dreams. No more pain and despair and aching of love lost. (Lost but not totally forgotten.)

My fingers slide over every line of the weapon, every angle. Such cruelty. Such beauty. With the slowness of death's carriage, I remove the safety. The click is as loud in my ears as the gunshot itself. It makes me jump. My hands are firm, however, as I guide my savior to rest against my forehead like a corruption of his kiss. Then again, maybe this is always what his kisses were.

And suddenly the white is fading, that hideous white which as tortured me so long. The pain is fading. I am so very....very.....tired..... My eyes fall shut like the curtain closing on the final act of a play. But I don't see the dark. I don't see the demons that have eaten my mind until it is all but destroyed. I don't have to look at the body they succeeded in demolishing.

I am sitting in a dark room in Rome, wearing a black dress and drinking vodka with a stranger. He's asking me.....

(Do you want to have a choice.....haveachoicehaveachoice.....)

"Yes." I whisper.

And I decide.

* * *

(Was there ever a time?)

Her voice posseses my mind, growing louder and louder until it ricochets off every corner of my brain, a crescendo of whispsers hurtling toward my senses with the hissing fury of a tornado.

Then I hear the gunshot.

Then I hear silence.

T.S. Eliot was wrong. The world ends with a bang, not with a whimper, and no one but me has noticed. Nothing tangible has changed. The mission is over. Done. Was it sacrifice or was it revenge? In this land where broken angels lie, the two are hopelessly entwined, twin serpents sharing one head and the same glistening fangs. But whether or not I'll ever know the truth, every time I close my eyes and see her face, i'll whisper "I love you" forever.

Even if I know very pit of my being that it is the only true reason she had to die.

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finis. all opinions and feedback are welcomed, so it's ok to feed the starving author. :)

thanX for reading darkstar