Disclaimer: I do not own the X-files or any of its characters, nor am I making any money off of this piece of writing. The X-files belongs to Chris Carter and the Fox network.

The Alien in the Room

Author's note: Read and review!

The rink smelled like the night before a heavy snow. It was an ominous smell, similar to the confusing whiffs of ozone that precedes a storm. Alex Krycek inhaled as deep as his lungs could draw. His body hovered over his skates. The air horn signaled the beginning of the period.

He was clever on the ice. Marita always enjoyed watching him, although she rarely had the time. She often couldn't tell if he was skating forwards or backwards, so quick and smooth were his powerful, lean legs. A flash of powdered ice sprayed from his skates after a quick stop. He switched directions, kept his position between the attacking man and the goal. When the puck began to skitter in every direction at once under the fast taps of the attacker's stick, Alex's lunged just as fast on the ice. He anticipated a move and dove forward. His stick slapped the puck away.

Marita felt an itch to clap for the good move, but she never allowed herself this little pleasure. There were a few young women in the empty stands. They tossed their ponytails and hollered their boyfriend's names through their cupped hands. Marita stood away from this cluster of chatting women. She leaned against the short wall of the rink with her gloved hands shoved into the pockets of her black overcoat. Alex flew by her. The wind from his speed was exhilarating and made her breathe faster, but she quickly calmed herself. She would have to calm him as well. Though his game was pleasing to watch, she had a job to do.

Alex was already skating towards the exit off the rink next to her when the period ended. His teammates jeered at him to get back on the ice, but he ignored them. There were still two periods left, yet he crouched on the bench anyway as he unlaced his skates.

"What's up," he asked in such a dead voice that it didn't sound like a question. Sometimes his cold manner startled Marita and though she would never admit it to herself, it made her heart sink sometimes. She had to bolster herself and so used an equally chilly tone.

"We have a live EBE to take care of."

Alex smirked as he tied the laces of his skates together. He hung the loop around his neck and held the blades of the skates against his chest.

"An Extraterrestrial Biological Entity," he said more out of amusement to himself than for anyone's edification. He whistled a low, mournful sound which echoed in the stadium. He grabbed his gear, put on his shoes, and followed Marita out the stadium.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Have you ever noticed how the Air Force always gets involved in these things?" Alex asked. He leaned his forehead against the glass partition. The medical equipment inside was enough to make him feel slightly queasy. Tubes and wires hooked to heart monitors flowed from the wrecked body. The thing blinked its flat, black eyes.

"Well, they've always had a rivalry going on with the CIA," Marita answered. "I've heard they keep a tally."

"Of what."

"Bodies. Crafts. Who knows."

"Well, this one they won't get to mark up for their score," Alex said as he cracked his knuckles through the thick, black leather of his gloves. Marita smiled as she followed him outside the observation room.

They were inside Johnson's Air Force Base. The empty potato fields of Idaho looked menacing in the dark. There was so much of nothing that surely there had to be something hiding from anyone's sight. The thought had made Alex shudder in the driver's seat of their rented Ford. He concentrated on the guard's station to calm himself. The flash of one of their many badges had given them access.

"What's your plan?" Marita asked.

Alex appeared to hesitate. He glanced at Marita and narrowed his sharp, green eyes. Her pulse hastened. She looked away to make sure he couldn't see her blush, but her own anger over such a silly reaction overcame her embarrassment. She glared back at him and reminded herself that his stare wasn't as sexual as she secretly wanted it to be.

"He doesn't trust me," she repeated in her mind. It was a daily mantra and moan.

"I'm going to take some samples from it first," Alex said after the long pause. He waited to see her reaction. Marita tried not to look too shocked. It was hard not to let her voice rise.

"For what?"

"None of your business."

Marita resisted the urge to slap him. Alex felt the tension and prepared to catch her strike, but her rage passed. Her blue eyes cleared and he felt her stinging loyalty. It made him want to grab her from behind and kiss the spot behind her ear he had been eyeing for weeks. But he chose to gather the scalpels and tissue sample containers from the pre-op room instead. He filled a flask with formaldehyde.

Marita and Alex each pulled on a rubber, bulky gas mask over their faces. Alex stuffed his leather gloves in the pocket of his black pea coat in exchange for a latex pair. They entered the air lock. Marita shut the door behind them. Air pressure fluctuated and made her eardrums ache as Alex opened the inner door. The gentle and constant blip of the EKG assured them that the alien was indeed alive.

Alex got to work. He scraped a few skin samples into a sterile tissue container. He punctured the skin with a hypodermic needle and filled a vial with the acidic, green blood. The creature stirred. Marita handed Alex a scalpel. She hated playing nurse or sidekick on their missions, but sometimes she would admit that Alex knew more about what he was doing than she did. If there was an officer to bribe with information exchange, that was her department. She was more of a diplomat. But Alex was a spook, a spy, an evidence eraser. She raised an eyebrow as she watched his confident skill with the equipment. He drew another vial of blood. He also seemed to have picked up a few medical skills recently, though Marita couldn't guess where. She sensed that he was taking her in his confidence at the moment and didn't want her to ask questions as he snapped off a few elongated fingers with the medical shears. The alien stirred, but was ultimately too weak to even cry out in pain. Of course, it did shriek in its native telepathy, but neither Marita nor Alex could sense this.

"Do you have enough?" Marita asked. But enough for what? That was the real question she wanted to ask. Alex silenced her with a look of his hard eyes. A bead of sweat ran down from his hairline and got lost in the concentrated folds of his forehead.

"Yeah," he said as he packed all the samples into a plastic bag he found discarded on the floor. "Let's get rid of it," he continued, his voice short and clipped.

"Will you do it," Marita asked. Her voice was soft and apologetic. Alex nodded. He withdrew the gun tucked away in its holster beneath his coat.

"Get out of here," he murmured. Marita left without argument. As soon as she shut the outer airlock, the quick snap of his silenced gun went off. He followed her soon after with the body wrapped in the plastic sheeting that had been the poor thing's bed. Alex hoisted the light weight over his shoulder and stalked down the hall without bothering to tell Marita to follow him.

Two rooms over, three guards watched a rerun episode of Temptation Island on their little black and white TV with rabbit ears. They would later be tortured and executed for failing to guard the EBE.

Alex always skipped the last step of each flight of stairs and landed gracefully on the toes of his boots. Marita followed more slowly as she set the heel of her shoe down on each step with slow, eased movements. She was well practiced in the art of walking in heels down stairs, but that didn't mean she liked it. She sighed and wished for not the first time that she could be as free as her partner who could run and walk so much faster. Sometimes she felt like a cripple around him.

When they reached the basement, Alex shrugged the body off his shoulder. Marita opened the furnace door. The fire blazed. Without a second thought, Alex pushed the body through the small opening. He pushed the body's head completely inside the burning furnace with the heel of his boot. Marita handed him the plastic bag full of tissue samples she had been carrying. They left the base without incident, although the shot-like cracks of Marita's heels echoed down the halls.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Five years ago, when Alex and Marita first began working together, a Consortium bureaucrat made a mistake. This clerk worked in a D.C. office, far removed from the Consortium New York Headquarters. He handled most of the daily accounting for the secretive society. When they needed new champagne glasses, he paid for them out of the institute's Swiss bank accounts. When the members wanted new limousines or Lincoln Town Cars, so they could be driven around the city in style, it was this bureaucrat who filled the orders and paid the registration fees. It was also this bureaucrat who handled their travel expenses. And five years ago, this bureaucrat mistakenly reserved only motel room for Alex and Marita's first assignment. Although Marita had written to this bureaucrat's office, the letter never actually made it to the correct desk. The mistake was engraved in the bureaucrat's records. So over the past five years, Alex and Marita faced the same scene at every motel they had stayed at.

"The reservation is under the name John Arntzen," Alex said to the attendant behind the desk. "Two rooms?"

"No sir, I just have a reservation for a single room with a double bed."

"I suppose the foldable cots are all packed away for the night," said Marita. It was her one line in this script. The manager scratched his flaking scalp and frowned at the clock, which read 2:36 am.

"Don't bother," Alex said finally. After the two of them left with their one key to the room, the night manager sighed and took a sip of his coffee. He hunkered down in his chair and fell asleep sitting up.

Marita and Alex had faced this same annoyance so many times that it stopped being annoying. They were used to it, like soldiers, they slept where they were ordered and made the best of it.

The room was like any motel room across America. The bible lay in the drawer under the boxy phone. The bed cover pattern looked like spilt paint of the neon spectrum. The carpets were clean though.

Marita and Alex dressed for bed. Years ago, Marita changed into a modest set of silk pajama's and matching robe in the bathroom while Alex put on his sweatpants and t-shirt in the room before she returned. Now they simply turned slightly away from each other, one on each side of the bed, and stripped. Marita made a point to never take a peak at Alex's lean body. Alex watched her with his peripheral vision. She put on a clean pair of silk panties, which Alex noted were somewhat diaphanous, but she always pulled on a light t-shirt that just covered the curve of her bum. The shirt had the faded logo of Harvard written in a small emblem just above her heart. The material had been washed so many times it was threadbare. Alex just pulled on a pair of sweats which had the tiny red star symbol of Moscow University.

While Marita washed her face and plucked her eyebrows, Alex had the habit of keeping watch out the window. He leaned against the wall with one finger dragging down the plastic rungs of the blinds.

"Check this out," he called over his shoulder. Marita tip-toed across the carpet. Her hair was pulled back with a headband. "It's our friends, Agents Mulder and Scully," Alex said in a low, deeply amused voice. Even Marita had to smile. The two agents looked so agitated. Mulder thrashed his arms and paced circles around Scully, who pivoted as she spoke with her partner.

"What a coincidence," said Marita.

Alex snorted at the joke. Although Mulder and Scully never knew it, Alex and Marita were usually one step ahead of the pair, and consequently they usually checked into their motel before the agents did. And more often than not, in these little towns on the empty plains there was only one decent motel to stay. Once Marita and Alex's room had been right next door to Mulder's, and he never knew.

"He can be very hard on her," Alex said.

"Mmm-hmmm," Marita answered as they continued to watch the duo.

"She does a lot for him, and I don't think he lets her know enough how much he appreciates it." Marita wondered if it was really Mulder and Scully Alex was talking about, but she didn't want to interrupt him during one of his more talkative moods.

"I'm sure she helps him because she has good reason."

"Why does she help him?"

"Because she loves him."

This shocked Alex back into silence. His eyes flickered between the calming agents outside and Marita, who never stopped watching the two agents standing around in the parking lot outside their motel room doors. Scully reached out and stroked Mulder's arm.

"She loves him?"

"Of course, why else would she follow him to these god forsaken places?"

Alex studied his knuckles for a minute. They were purpled with bruises.

"He's over the moon for her," he muttered eventually. Marita had to stop every muscle in her body from jumping into his arms. Her lips twitched to kiss him.

"Let's go to bed," she said instead as she pulled on the cord which flipped the blinds shut.

They burrowed beneath the thin, polyester covers. Years ago they had discovered it was just easier to spoon in a double bed than it was trying to stake out half the space and refrain from touching each other. Marita tucked into the S-shape Alex made with his strong chest and bent knees. He wrapped his well-defined arms around her shoulders and hugged her closer. His face rested against her hair. Marita felt so perfectly calm and pleasant that she fell asleep almost immediately.

Alex, on the other hand, awoke approximately every hour or so. His senses unconsciously checked for changes in the night time noise, for moving car lights, for the musky odor that accompanies a gun. When he felt that they were alone and safe, his mind took some time to calm. It was during these moments between snatched sleep that he let himself completely love the woman in his arms.

The skin on her elbows was so soft. Alex's fingertips felt rough against the supple area. The crook of her arm was even softer and gave him a thrill that shot up from his groin to his chest. With movements so slow, it looked more like he was still, Alex shifted his weight around Marita's thin body. He leaned down and captured her lips with his own. The way her mouth didn't pucker or move made it feel so gentle and smooth that he felt drunk from kissing her. Alex tried his best not to get hard, but that was impossible. After a few soft kisses, he reversed his slow movements back to his original spooning position. He pressed his cock against her rump and forced himself not to notice it when she pushed against him and arched her back.

As soon as he knew that she was awake, when her breath became fast and fluttery and her hands roamed hungrily over her own body, Alex made himself fall asleep. He counted backwards from 1000. 211 was the last number he could remember repeating to himself.

Marita huffed and tried to squirm away from Alex's grasp, but he would never let her go.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More to come! Find out how a couple can be in love for years without ever openly acting on their desires. Find out how Marita and Alex originally met. It will all come soon in chapter 2.

But first you have to review or else I just lose interest.