Mancandy Tuesday: Alexei Kruschniev

Now if you know me well enough, you'll probably have an idea of who I'm talking about here. But since not even Bertha cares to know me well (she's always screaming urgh! It's dank and sticky in there! I don't want to stay in your mind Charlotte no don't make me!) I think I'm going to have to explain.

I don't want to, though. Mainly cos it's embarrassing. But at this point my whole life is just one huge embarrassing mess so what the hell, here goes. Alexei Kruschniev is actually Alex Krycek from the X-Files, who I loved so much that I actually invented a fake Russian name for him, in my head.

That's right. I had whole great worlds going on in the alternate X-Files that lurks within the dank recesses of my mind (Bertha: see. I told you it was dank!), and I did things like invent a massive Russian past for him complete with mountains and a stupid name and things that are probably sooooo not Russian that it's embarrassing not just for me, but for Russia. I mean, I know that the name Alexei Kruschniev is about as Russian as an idiotic moron from West Yorkshire. I know it. It sounds like chicken kiev, for a start.

I named the Alex Krycek in my head after an ill-made item of food that no-one wants to eat. What was wrong with you, fifteen year old self?

But God, how I loved him. I remember vividly starting out in love with Mulder, and buying the video boxsets with the express purpose of ogling him forever and ever. But then somewhere around the episode Apocrypha, I knew things were starting to shift in Krycek's favour. I mean, just look:

You can understand, can't you, Bertha? He was deadly and dangerous and a Russkie double agent. He had eyes that were too wide set and an upper lip that seemed to rise steeply over his teeth and for a long while, I thought he was the most perfect looking man to ever exist. In fact, I kind of still do think that. There's just something about the combination of his different features that still gets me every time, even though objectively, he's a bit hamster-like. Also, he's never done a shirtless scene and I sorta suspect that he's a little chunky or at least has a weird tattoo just above his navel.

Not that things like that bother me. Nothing about Alex Krycek bothers me. He's my Russkie double agent super spy, who has lived a whole other X-Files in my head- so much so that sometimes, it's almost as though I have a set of memories for things I never actually lived or watched. I can remember all the stuff I shoved into my ridiculous 300 page fanfiction just as clearly as I can remember real life events, which seems at best, ridiculous.

At worst, completely mental. No-one should ever have memories of apartments that don't exist and events that didn't really happen, especially when the events are so totally ludicrous. Aliens! Sex under heating vents! More aliens! Doppelgangers! Being punched on trains! Someone as handsome as Alex Krycek crossing oceans of time for what was, essentially, my Mary-Sue!

And yet I do think about it, often. I think about being that fifteen year old girl, who somehow so believed that her life would turn out to be something exciting and wonderful. I mean, she wasn't daft or mental enough to believe that Alex Krycek was really going to turn up one day and tell her that actually, aliens had wiped her brain and replaced it with another one and then mysteriously decided to make her a boring nobody with nothing going for her until one day the Goblin Ki- he comes along and whisks her away to Made-Up Russia.

But I am crazy enough to know that the reason I think about those fake memories so often is because I know I let her down. I didn't even finish writing the Fake X-Files. I kind of want to write them today - names changed of course and less about people who bleed fizzy green pop - but something in me puts a halt to that all the time, now. Those days of writing that clumsy, silly, but ultimately bristling and electric fanfiction are long, long gone.

I reread it, and could hardly believe it was me. All those punchy sentences. God, what a glorious bitch the heroine was! A glorious, bloodthirsty, inescapable bitch, like something I wrote while on the top of Mount Doom, typewriter clenched between my teeth, all the fury in the world in me like that howling chaos whirlwind thing from the Red Dwarf books.

And now there's just this. That me is gone and I'm just this...this wet, cowardly milquetoast who could never be the equal of Alexei Kruschniev. I could never write the character as I wrote him then, because he wanted someone angry and all I can give him is simpering, silent, afraid.

God I want to rage, rage, rage against the dying of this light.