Chapter Text
To my friend—
I won't lie— I'm surprised it went on this long, given your affinity for things that care nothing for your well-being and my affinity for attracting things that want me dead. I hope my death brings you some peace, though, now that the danger I drag along will have no hand at the end of its leash.
I do wonder— did you think we would get so far when we met? I was so green I could almost photosynthesize and you were too stubborn to see that the FBI would eat you alive for your antics. I knew you hated me; hated my hair gel and my dripping ears and yet you agreed to work with me anyways, if only to keep our pencil-pushing overlords out of your hair. You tolerated me until a higher power claimed my capabilities as their own asset, and you did your best never to think of me again. See, it wasn't so simple for me. I kept your face in my mind right up to when I met a missile silo in North Dakota and kissed the wall of a filthy Chinese airport and tasted a lack of hope blacker even than the oil dancing in the eyes I knew you'd memorized the exact shade of despite your best efforts otherwise. We were joined in our hopeless obsession. I knew as much was true when your gaze burned a hole in mine in that filthy alley and it became immediately clear that your obsession lay on the far side of hatred when mine wrapped its tender fingers around the neck of affection. It wasn't love, but it wasn't supposed to be. Love wasn't a word for people like us.
Then we went to the motherland together to uncover secrets that would make your throat bleed if you'd dared to utter them aloud and I discovered the searing, terrible embrace of a hot knife across tense muscle fibers and bone rich with years of near-ritualistic milk drinking while you slept off your medical experiments in a cushy senate hearing room. You'd left me for dead, but I hadn't learned how to die yet. I made some plans and some allies and rewrote my dictionary's definition for power, kissing wrinkled ass all the while to keep close to my own most valuable assets: your inner circle.
Something broke partway through my plan and I brought a gun to the face of my alleged savior. He didn't take kindly to that, oh no. One thwarted assassination gave way to one year in a hellhole in Tunisia, stripped of my plastic arm and my fabricated dignity and left only my thoughts to keep me company. When they brought me back, I was still sane, by some miracle, and your utility had blossomed, but it seemed that those long, long months had fermented your feelings into something more potent than vinegar and it was only my hand on Skinner's shoulder that kept my skin out from under your fingernails. I saw it then — the primal rage that flared up when you heard my name. Your obsession had stripped you of your humanity when mine returned it to me, what little was left.
Then you got swooped up by our little grey friends and I got swooped up in finding answers to unaskable questions until you were returned in a box as impersonal as its senders and my plans went on pause with the stretching of my lungs. There was a way to save you — I had held it in my hands — and I would be damned if I could not place your life back in yours, hatred or not. It cost me, but it was worth it to see your eyes flutter back open, to feel the ghost of your wind-dry cheek under my lips one more time before I gave my life to protect what you believed near and dear to your heart.
Every plan, every betrayal, every corpse, every minute spent stewing in the oily silence of a thousand motel rooms and wishing for those chiseled shoulders to lay my chin on, everything I've done lends itself to that pivotal moment, and while I cannot say for sure, I would bet a year of the President's salary that you will not give me the dignity of killing me yourself, because sharing in my death in that way would be such a primally intimate moment and you will not let yourself express intimacy like that; not with her, and certainly not with me.
And when the dust has settled I do hope you'll visit my grave, if only to spit on it and curse my name. Everything in my possession I leave to you — a lawyer will give you the details when it's safe. Think hard before you refuse. Save the world when you get a chance and know that I will save my final thoughts for you.
Yours always,
Alex Krycek