Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine; they belong to Chris Carter and 1013 Productions.  Events take place during 'Amor Fati'.  Lyrics sent by Josan, listed at the end, and the ones used have a * at the end.  The third, still unconnected, story of the 'I Don't Care' lyric pieces.
Rated: PG-13, I suppose.  It gets a little rough at the end; consider yourself warned.

Conclusions

"I've been looking forward to this."

The gravelly whisper warned her of imminent death as nothing else could have.  "Alex."  Her voice was nearly as husky as his, low and rough-edged and oddly pleasant to listen to, most days.  "Still running his errands?"

"I've been talking to the people you call your friends," he commented instead, still invisible in the gloom of her apartment.  "You should have had better taste."

Diana Fowley understood perfectly why her foyer light hadn't come on when she flipped the switch.  Her light bulb hadn't blown out; her time had run out.  But she was perfectly willing to try to stall him.  "Really?  I didn't think we had any friends in common, Alex."

"No," he agreed, "we don't.  Mine know better than to sell me out, for one thing."  Dark leather and dark hair slid away from a shadow and shaped themselves into his profile.  "Feel free to put your purse and keys down, Diana."

She considered the gun that seemed an extension of his hands and did as he suggested.  "What's my going price, then?  I might be able to beat it."

"This once," he said calmly, "I'm not in it for the money.  I just want to kill you."

"Taking things personally, Alex?  That's not like you."

"Really?  And since when do you know anything about me?"  He waved at the couch, unnervingly motionless otherwise in the edges of the shadows.  "Have a seat.  No sense being completely uncomfortable until I kill you."

"So what did I do?" Diana asked as she smoothed her skirt under her and sat.  "I can guess why the old men want me out of the way, Alex, but I didn't think I'd done anything to you, after all."

He emerged into what little light came through the drapes and under the door, matte black gun in black gloved hand.  "A few things, Diana.  Don't go for your gun," Alex added in a deceptively mild voice.

"So what's the plan, Alex?"  Diana leaned back into the couch and absently ran her palms down the top of the skirt, smoothing out wrinkles or just burning off tension as best she could.  "Drag my name down into the dirt, make me a public scandal?  Or is this going to be a very private suicide?"

"Diana, you've always been a disgrace to your badge," Alex told her in that same pleasant voice.  His gun had yet to move, and the lamp painted an unwavering bar of light onto the metal that was beginning to unnerve Diana.  "And I don't care what you say.  You're not going to change anything."

"So tell me why, Alex.  Why you.  What makes this so damn personal?"  Her composure shuddered, not quite crumpling yet, but... soon.  One hand clenched into a fist under the couch pillow.

"The hand, Diana.  In sight."

"What are you going to do?  Kill me?"  Her sarcasm slid off him, dropping without a ripple into those dark green eyes.

"I never said we had to do this the easy way."  Silent offers of pain spun through his eyes and she moved her hand back into sight.  "Good move."

"So, now what, Alex?  I'm not going to beg for my life.  I know you better than that."

His lips were full, invitingly curved, almost cherubic, and too sweet for the cold face.  Now they lifted very slightly.  "Nice of you to give me credit.  And you're right.  It wouldn't help."

Diana shook her head firmly.  "Sorry, Alex," she told him, voice husky as ever.  "I'm not playing your game.  If you're really going to kill me, go ahead and do it.  Otherwise, get out."

Surprisingly, he did smile.  "Always a hardcase, Diana.  Always had to be tougher than the men, didn't you?  There's a stamp on the table to your left.  Lick it, put it on the blue envelope, and put the envelope back on the table."

"And if I say no?" she asked thoughtfully.

"Then I start by gut-shooting you," Alex told her pleasantly.  "A quick clean death, or a very slow one.  Up to you.

"What's on the stamp, Alex?"

"Death." 

He watched her with the careful, impassive, unwavering eyes of the assassin he was.  Diana growled, "Looking for tears, Alex?  Look somewhere else.  You won't catch me crying just because I can't win."

"I don't care what you say, Diana."  The flat statement shut her bravado down.  "And I don't really care what you finally did to piss them off.  It was too little, too late to save you from me.  Lick the stamp, Diana.  Last chance.  Otherwise...."  He shrugged, one-shouldered, and the gun shifted down to point at her knee.  It paused there, then lifted to point at her heart again.

Diana stared at him, measuring out the moments of her life in that implacable face and the too-level eyes.  "It is personal, isn't it?  Oh, I don't care what you say, either, Alex.  It's obvious.  Hoping that if I'm out of the way, you'll have a chance?  Well, I won't be there anymore, so you might," she added calmly.  "Why not?  No woman ever quite managed to be what Mulder needed, although the dangerous ones almost did the trick....  Maybe you'll pull it off, so to speak."  She reached for the stamp, then paused.  "Quick, you said?"

Her words had hit somewhere, Diana knew that, even if he hadn't moved forward.  The line of neck to shoulder had changed, tightened as muscles clenched... visible even through leather.  She smiled, then.  "Alex?"

Alex Krycek nodded then, slowly, teeth clenched around words he wouldn't give her.  Only after she'd licked the stamp and put down the oddly-heavy envelope did he smile mockingly at her.  "Quick enough, Diana.  Quick enough."

"What did you do?"  Her composure ran out then, corroded away by the bittersweet metallic afterbite on her tongue.  "Damn you, Alex, what is this?"

"The same thing Mulder got," Alex told her, and the laughter under his words was a cold, predatory thing coming out to feed at last. 

Colors spun across her vision, the opposite of what she'd thought the Oileans must do.  This wasn't a black sheen but a kaleidoscopic, iridescent explosion that looked as if her field of vision were constantly changing, tunneling in and out, expanding past the limits of human eyes.  The smell of his own, unique scent, tinged as it was with something not quite human, burned across her.  Diana Fowley barely heard his next words. 

"Only you're not Mulder, Diana.  They haven't spent years changing you as they did him."

A rising tumult of voices spun up around her, too many voices:  loud, soft, male, female, young, old.  Children's piercing shrieks of pleasure and play and pain, an old woman's regrets as she died over the children she'd raised and lost, a soulless man's gloating over a boy's pain, the satisfied tone of a policeman who'd just pulled over and arrested a drunken driver who would never hurt someone as his niece had been hurt--  

"Too much," Diana tried to moan but could get no words out.  Her mouth was moving but slowly, so very slowly, as her heart sped up.  Her mind spun faster and faster, synapses firing in a hideously quick, inexorable progression as she tried, desperately, to process what she was hearing, seeing, smelling, sensing....  Air hissed in and out of her lungs as they attempted to keep pace with her heart, her heart with the demands of her brain, her brain with the ongoing changes caused by whatever she'd been exposed to.

Alex stood there, an immobile black shade among the shadows, and watched.  He watched as Diana flushed a dark crimson, as her pulse strained and danced along over-inflated veins.  Her eyes stared madly at nothing, hands twitching to reach for things that weren't there... and then went slack as she fell sideways on the couch.  Those maddened eyes stared at nothing for a different reason, then, and her right hand lay motionless on her hip, palm up and fingers curled loosely around some truth she could never grasp now.  The color drained slowly from her face as he stood there, blood pooling gradually downward with the inevitable progression of gravity's demands.

Alex shook his head once, then, and moved at last.  His gun slid back into its holster with the smooth ease of practice, and he moved very carefully, working only with his false arm and the wood ruler he'd left lying there to ease the blue envelope into a lead-lined box.  He'd seen what exposure to this odd relic had done to Mulder, and then to Diana.  The remnants of oil in his system might save him... or not.

But he'd gone to a great deal of trouble to steal it.  It might be useful after all -- cardiac arrest, that had looked like, and Alex laughed softly at the thought.  A very sarcastic M.E. he'd met during his FBI days had once pointed out that, yes, in the end almost all deaths could be attributed to the heart stopping.  It was the reason behind that stopping that the M.E. was supposed to look for.  Somehow, he thought Scully just might get this one and he couldn't wait to hear what she made of this death... and what she'd say in her report.

~ ~ ~ finis ~ ~ ~

"I Don't Care Anymore"
Phil Collins, Hello, I Must Be Going

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