Title: The Fugue
Author: CGB
Email: luberluber@hotmail.com
Web: http://Appelsini.tripod.com/Christine/
Category: S Krycek/ Marita
Spoilers: Tunguska
Summary: Krycek and Marita
ponder their fates at the end of the game. A post Requiem piece.
Disclaimer: 1013 and Fox own
the characters but they seem to have lost them. Finders, keepers, I say!
------------------------
Welcome to the end, he
thought.
It was Ok, the end. A bit of
an anti-climax but admittedly the bang he had expected rather than the whimper
had been a little unsettling. Maybe he
could go back now. Back to where, he didn't know. He wondered whether there was
really somewhere that he once called home?
He lived in a house
once. It was typical American
domesticity but with little clues scattered throughout that suggested a
deviation from the norm. Like the fact that they spoke Russian at the dinner
table.
All right, he thought, not so
little.
It could have been though. It
could have been perfect in its dysfunctionality. His mother and father spoke civilly to each other and only ever
argued when they thought Alex was asleep.
His father worked during the day and avoided them at night while his
mother stayed at home and watched soap opera (his father always did wonder how
she managed to perfect her English).
His father, on occasion would drink too much and lecture the young Alex
at length on topics designed to compensate for a lack of fatherly wisdom and
guidance in other times.
Not so special, really. Just
another disease of the nineteen-seventies suburban society. He had friends at
school whose family life echoed his own.
He attributed his salvation
to the video arcade on the way home from school. Without it he might have cracked in the same way Phil Beazley did
and hung himself from the Bakelite electrical fitting in his room. Who said the old plastics were brittle?
'Space Invaders' was the
game. He thought of it now as
ironically prophetic.
And in the final irony he was
now incapable of playing those games.
He stared a while at his prosthetic arm wondering if he could manipulate
a joystick with it. He'd surprised himself with the utility of his molded arm
and here was something he had yet to try.
The Russian doctor who fitted
Alex for his arm told him he was likely to experience phantom feelings in his
left arm but Alex had yet to really understand what that meant. From time to
time he would reach for an object out of instinct only to find that he had
nothing to reach with, but he could not distinguish the absence of his arm from
the feeling of his a body as a whole.
It made him think of
something that his father had said about a fugue. He instructed the
young Alex to isolate a single voice from the fugue and to listen to its
traverse throughout the piece. Then he told him to listen to the whole and the
voices that combined to produce a single sound. A sum of all the parts.
His father pointed out that
there was no way to listen to both a single voice and the sum of all the voices
at once. The two methods of listening mutually excluded each other.
"You Alexei," he would say,
"are the sum of your parts. All your family, all who have gone before you. Or
you are alone. But you are never both."
His father was prone to fits
of solemnity when drunk. He bordered on tears as he spoke of his home country
and the people, family, he had left behind.
He never said why they left
and he never talked about going back, leaving Alex with the impression that
being the 'sum of your parts' meant leaving them behind. A sort of constant movement away from
experience. Ever forward.
The irony was that he was no
longer the sum of all his parts, if he ever had been, because one part was now
forever missing.
And he knew that with it went
everything his father had ever hoped for him.
--------------------
He searched his pockets and
pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket.
He lit one and gazed out thoughtfully across the motel car park.
The end sure was quiet, but
then he expected that.
And it was four am. He liked
early mornings now that he didn't sleep anymore. Half light suggested that the day would come and there were
nights when he'd gotten to thinking it might not.
But now is the end, and days
can come and go as they please. It made little difference.
He can hear feet shuffling across the linoleum behind him. He turns his head to see a small figure in a
large T-shirt standing in the doorway.
"What are you doing?" she
says.
"Can't sleep."
She snorts lightly and then
sits down beside him.
"Can I have one?" she asks
indicating his cigarette. He hands her one and she lights up. Neither of them smokes yet they take in
poisoned air like addicts. They're dead
anyway.
He thought they were dead
long ago but, well, here they are. He
was as surprised at her status amongst the living as she was at his. He'd left her for dead and she'd left him to
rot. They were soul mates making a
mockery of the term.
"Do you remember your
family?" he says suddenly, surprising them both.
She thinks for a moment
staring out at the same spot in the parking lot that has captured his attention
for the last hour or so. There is
nothing out there and it captivates them.
"I have a photograph," she
says finally.
"Of who?"
"My mother. At least I think
it's my mother. I've always had it. It says 'Vavara 1963' on the back so I
assume that's her, Vavara, but no, I don't remember her. Why do you ask?"
He shrugs, "just making
conversation".
She looks at him disbelieving
but says nothing, turning her attention once again to the car park. He drags on his cigarette, once, twice.
"Do you know what happened to
my parents?" It is a serious question. He honestly thinks she might know. She's surprised him before. What she knows,
who she's in with. Layer upon layer
upon layer of deception. It's taken him
this long to realize that her loyalties are like his, placed in the self and
like him, she had meant to survive.
With some amusement he thinks
that if she does know it's unlikely she will tell him.
"No I don't. Your father was
in political exile, you know that don't you?"
"Yeah". He'd worked that one out before the devil tempted him from his burgeoning career as an FBI agent with promises of the truth behind his father's disappearance. His father's government job, his complete disdain for his new country coupled with his lack of interest in the affairs of his old country, and then he just came home from college one weekend to find they weren't there. He called his father's workplace only to find that he had left his job months ago. No one saw them leave. No one missed them.
"What did they tell you in
Russia?"
"That he worked in a
university, that he perpetuated lies against the state. You know, the usual."
"It could be true."
"Yeah. Maybe it is," he nods,
"only academic intellectuals are of less use to the American government than,
say, former defense advisors or economists".
She looks at him eyebrows
raised.
He shrugs. "It's just a
hunch. Who'd try to disappear an old literature Professor?"
She stubs her cigarette out
on the step and he hands her another wordlessly. She drags once and turns to him again.
"You think he knew, don't you?"
"Yeah," he nods, "son of a
bitch knew, and used it to play me like he played Mulder for all those years.
Like he played all of them." He looks at her, suddenly. "What did he promise
you?"
"Same as you. Information.
Answers. My life. I told myself I could take it or leave it, and I kept telling
myself that even after I'd escaped from the Fort. Even after he found me again
and asked me to work for him. I always
thought I was in control," she shakes her head. "Are there bigger fools than us
out there, Alex?"
"Yeah," he grins wryly, "Fox
Mulder".
They fall back into a
comfortable silence. Daylight begins to break around them.
----------------
And then he is back there
again, on the night he came home and found the house empty. There was food in
the refrigerator their clothes were still in their drawers. There was an unreal
moment when he even believed that in his parents had finally begun to socialize
and were currently sipping cocktails with his father's colleagues from the
civil service.
But as the phone calls tallied
and the hours wore on it occurred to him that they were gone. He rang the government officer where his
father worked only to discover he had not worked there for months.
After twenty-four hours he
filed a 'missing persons' report. He gave his university number as a contact
and took the train back.
Because he could do nothing
else he studied.
He had no reason to suspect
that his entrance into Quantico was at all coerced or calculated when he had
such good grades on record. He was
known for his meticulous attention to detail, an ability to be precise and
methodical. He remembered attempting to
forsake the end of semester celebrations in order to spend the night
double-checking his application for the Bureau. He gave up when his roommate
physically removed him from his desk.
He'd spent that night
drinking himself into a stupor, watching faces whirl past him, smiling,
laughing, yelling. If he had wanted to he could pretend this was it. Just him.
No family, no history. One voice.
------------------
Marita starts on her third
cigarette, resigned to her newly found identity as a smoker. Funny, Alex
thinks, that the old guy inclined them towards rather than repelled them from
smoking. The old bastard would have liked
that. He enjoyed watching people fall.
"How long do you think we've
got?" she asks.
"Who knows? Weeks, months,
years. Maybe days."
She nods, "You know, we could
go to Russia".
"Won't help. They'll find
us."
"I know," she pauses, "but we
could go for us. We could find those answers
they promised us. Between the two of us we have extensive access to a variety
of sources - which is why they'll be in such a hurry to find us - but we still
have time. We still have enough time.
"We're it, Alex. We're what
is left. It's our right."
He hears the words 'we' and
'us' bouncing around his brain as though they are words that don't get used
around him that often. For a moment he
considers that she may be joking. He
has a pretty clear vision depicting his death when he's around her, and it
clearly involves a gun wound to his chest with Marita holding the offending
weapon. They'll catch up with her,
promise her answers, promise her a place on the team again and she'll turn
faster than he can be out the door with his prosthetic arm in tow.
He knows, because they'll do
exactly the same to him.
She's not insincere in her
invitation. She just hasn't had a better offer yet.
He plays a game of 'she knows
that I know that she knows' until his head begins to spin. He knows when she's
lying because he hears his own voice back at him. He knows she will betray him
yet he trusts her implicitly. It could
well be true love.
He takes a long look at her
in the dawn half-light. She hasn't washed her hair in days and it is flat and
dry framing her in a manner that suggests androgyny. Marita must have been
beautiful once. Still is, but without the youthful charm and laughing eyes to
offset her fine features.
He thinks he probably looks
pretty bad himself. He should shave, get some clean clothes from somewhere.
They had dressed for the end
only it was taking its time coming.
History waited for him in
Russia. History and possibly his death
at the hands of the slightly built enigma that sat beside him on the steps to
their motel room.
It occurred to his sleep
deprived state that his arm waited in Russia as well. He wasn't sure where.
Buried out in the bushes near Tunguska, rotting into the soil, waiting for him
to follow.
In the end, is location
important?
He catches her eye and holds
it, intently.
"Do you want me to be the one
that does it?"
She nods slowly.
"Yes. And don't worry, I
forgive you."
"You too," he says.
-------------------
Before they left she showed
him the photograph. He couldn't decide whether it was the truth or an elaborate
lie but he knew that it didn't matter.
When such thought and care
has been put into a deception it is only by seeing its fruition that it can be
exposed. If she had constructed her
story in order to lure him to Russia, then it was only by going to Russia that
he would learn otherwise.
At the airport she bought a
packet of Morleys and they smoked cigarettes outside until their flight was
called. The sun was warm and they were clean and well dressed. They traveled as
Mr and Mrs Fox.
He remembered that the
individual musical parts in a fugue are seemingly unrelated until they
are played together. They can be brilliant musical compositions on their own
but when placed together they harmonise pleasantly.
And as the listener he has to
decide which to hear, the parts or the whole.
He couldn't make up his mind.
-------------------
Somewhere in time, a young
man sits on a park bench not far from Quantico, the training ground for the
nations finest law enforcement corps.
He reads from a book with Russian on the cover, Detstvo. An older
man approaches him with lines drawn in his face like rivers forking into
streams.
The older man flicks a
cigarette butt to the ground.
"Alex Krycek?"
"Who wants to know?"
"Alex, I knew your father. I
know what happened to him..."
"And?"
"I thought you'd want to
know." He fixes the younger man with a stare that speaks of secrets bigger than
the disappearance of his parents, bigger than anything he'll find at the Bureau,
"You see Alex, I know how much you want to be complete."
----------------
Anteater: Fugues have that interesting property, that
each of their voices is a piece of music in itself; and thus a fugue
might be thought of as a collection of several distinct pieces of music, all
based on a single theme, and all played simultaneously. And it is up to the
listener (or his subconscious) to decide whether it should be perceived as a
unit, or as a collection of independent parts, all of which harmonize." -
Douglas Hofstadter Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.