Chapter Text
Not Paid Enough (Or At All)
Slade Wilson’s phone dinged moments after he stepped into his command tent, planning to look over the maps again to make sure he hadn’t missed any spots when he’d sent his men out on patrol. He was still in his armor, mask resting on the table, so it took a minute to fish the phone out. There was a single text message from YG. Slade frowned. Yassen Gregorovitch wasn’t one for texting, at least not in Slade’s experience, so whatever he wanted was likely important. He opened the text message and saw a screenshot showing an image of Slade in full armor captioned, I’m not paid enough for this. The background of the image showed the same distinctive orangish-brown tents that had been provided to blend in with the Australian Outback for this mission.
Before Slade could respond, Yassen followed up with a text that said, I would prefer it if you didn’t try to kill him. Slade arched his eyebrows. That was unusually emotive for the Russian assassin.
“Is he paid enough for this? Slade shot back, curious. It wasn’t every day that an assassin messaged him to politely suggest that he didn’t eliminate a troublemaker.
“No, was the immediate reply. I do not believe he is paid at all for his services.
Slade was dialing before he had even really thought about it, feeling thoroughly disoriented. Yassen was being offputtingly vague, not unusual for the Russian, but there was something in the texts setting off alarms in Slade’s head. The Russian picked up after the first ring, voice cool and professional. “So who, exactly, are we talking about?” he demanded.
“Alex Rider.” Yassen sounded tired. Slade did some mental calculations and realized why. After John and Helen Rider died in a plane crash, their information had readily become available. MI6 hadn’t seemed to see any point in protecting the Riders after their deaths, even for the sake of their infant son. It had all been covered up again a few months later, but by then it was too late. John Rider’s entire history with MI6, and the tragic story of his family, was already out there for anyone who was willing to pay for it. The son, Alexander, couldn’t be more than sixteen, and if Yassen had been keeping tabs on his old mentor’s son, then Slade understood the exhaustion. A teenager that was volunteering for MI6 missions would only add another layer of unnecessary complications.
“And you would rather I not kill him for sentimental reasons?” Slade questioned, testing the waters. Yassen Gregorovitch might be half his age and unenhanced in any way, but Slade had no doubt that the assassin would show up to snipe him at some inconvenient moment for the police to find if this conversation went the wrong way.
“Not entirely,” was the bland response. “Alex’s threat responses tend to be rather explosive, and should you get caught in the blast, it might take your men some time to find all the pieces of you.” As if on cue, Slade heard a massive boom and when he glanced out of his tent, he saw a thick column of smoke rising up from the opposite side of the camp.
“So I see,” he said dryly, watching his men swarm like heavily armed ants towards the damage. There was no need to stop them. They would try to take the assailant alive if at all possible to get answers. They were far too professional to kill a teenager over an explosion. “Why is John Rider’s underage son working for MI6?”
“Blackmail.” Gregorovitch’s tone sounded as if he were contemplating how difficult it would be to eliminate the entirety of the organization. “MI6 somehow ended up with custody and Scorpia was not an option.”
“Understandable.” Julia Rothman’s infatuation turned hatred over Hunter was well known, and Slade had no doubt that she’d be petty enough to take it out on Hunter’s son.
“Scorpia’s loss will inevitably be someone else’s gain, provided they don’t try to bend his moral code.”
Slade hummed in understanding, a suddenly possibility turning itself over in his mind. Hunter had been absolutely deadly, likely capable of successfully taking down a metahuman if the need arose and he had proper time to plan. If Hunter’s son had even a quarter of his father’s cleverness and luck, then he would be a useful asset. “So the kid wants out,” is what he said instead of the possibilities racing through his mind. Gregorovitch waited silently on the other end of the line. The boy was young, malleable, and even if he was unwilling to take up the mantle of Deathstroke he could still be useful. “If I make him an offer, will he take it?”
“If you make him the right one.” Gregorovitch hung up before Slade could ask for further clarification.
The mercenary snorted. Gregorovitch was clearly still young enough to feel the need to have the last word. The flap of the tent swung open and one of Slade’s men ducked inside, looking more than a little ruffled. There was a burn on his cheek, some of his scruffy looking beard missing, and his armor was dented and scratched on the right side. “We captured the source of the destruction,” the man said, sounding more than a little awkward about the whole situation. “Greene has him in the command tent. He’s um-” The man started, faltered, and then tried again. “He’s maybe fourteen.” Slade understood the confusion. Most teenagers did not show up in the Australian Outback to blow up temporary warehouses.
“Good work,” Slade said, phone still in hand. “Take some of the others and patrol the perimeter. I’ll see to our guest.” The man nodded, motion jerky, and hurried out of the tent. In the past few days they’d relaxed considerably around Slade, but this situation seemed to have brought back some of that tension. Slade would worry about alleviating that later. For now, he had a teenager to persuade.
--
Alex Rider had been in worse situations, or at least he thought he had. It was getting hard to tell, honestly. Was getting captured in a camp run by Deathstroke the Terminator better or worse than going undercover around a bunch of murderous clones? He honestly didn’t know. Alex swung his legs back and forth in the air, amused by the way his current guard stared at the motion. The man looked more than a little disgruntled, as if he wasn’t sure how to handle having a teenager tied up in a chair. That was hilarious in its own sad sort of way. Most of the people her acted against on MI6’s behalf had grown comfortable with the idea that their operatives were going to be facing a teenager instead of an adult, so they hired and trained their muscle accordingly. Whoever these guys were, they hadn’t been given the same spiel.
Alex worked on undoing the knots around his wrists and kept swinging his feet. His guard kept an eye on him, the disgruntled expression never fading. Alex smiled innocently at him, hiding a wince as it pulled on the healing wound on his upper lip from the previous mission in Scandinavia. The knots were loosening. It was slower going than he would have liked, and Yassen would have absolutely caught on to what he was doing several minutes ago, but apparently this guy wasn’t expecting a sixteen year old to be able to untie himself from a chair. Either that or he expected to be able to take said teen down. Regardless, Alex was going to give him a very unpleasant surprise in a couple minutes. That, of course, was when Deathstroke himself walked in.
The man guarding Alex snapped to attention almost immediately. He wasn’t nervous, or at least Alex didn’t think he was, so that meant the mercenary was someone he respected, at least a little bit. Alex could understand that, at least a little. He respected Yassen, career choice disputes aside, and he even sort of respected Nile. The thing was, at the end of the day the respect Deathstroke’s men had for him was going to count against Alex during any escape attempt. Briefly, the teen wondered if his last text ever was going to be him whining to Yassen about not getting paid enough to deal with a metahuman.
Deathstroke dismissed the guard and then pulled off his mask. Alex took in the eyepatch and the silver spattered through dark hair, wondering if this was a good or a bad sign. He really doubted that Deathstroke the Terminator was the kind of man who would underestimate a teenager, even if Alex looked younger than his actual age, so it was probably a bad sign. He was really wishing he’d just dropped the whole mission the moment he’d caught sight of the metahuman striding between the tents. Why was it that all his mission with ASIS turned into such utter bullcrap?
“Alex Rider,” the mercenary said. Alex had heard the dramatic reveal of his name far too many times to be surprised, just tiredly resigned that another random human had put together who he was. Some days, bitterly, he wondered just who MI6 had managed to keep him a secret from. Then Deathstroke said the last thing Alex expected him to say. “Gregorovitch asked me to keep you alive.”
“What?” Alex said intelligently. He wondered if maybe he’d gotten a concussion. There’d been a lot of debris in the wake of the explosion, and then there’d been the fight with the goons afterwards. It was possible that he’d been clipped in the head at just the wrong spot to get concussed, but he wasn’t sure that auditory hallucinations were part of your garden variety concussion. Deathstroke looked amused by Alex’s reaction, at least if the teen was reading him right.
“Yassen?” Alex questioned, for lack of anything else to say, still feeling lost. Sure, the Russian assassin could be kind of protective, but generally he left Alex to figure out how to get out of his own problems. Having Yassen step in now was puzzling, to say the least.
“He seems rather fond of you,” Deathstroke said, and Alex wondered if he’d finally found someone who thought they could use him to get to Yassen. If so, that was a hilariously naïve notion. Yassen liked Alex, sure, and probably even got a little parental about the teen in his own weird homicidal way, but the man also had a healthy sense of self-preservation. Alex would die before that particular ploy worked.
“How do you know Yassen?”
Alex didn’t expect to get an answer to that. Jack was the only person in his life who gave him any straight answers, even Tom circled around what was truly bothering him most days, and every highly trained individual he’d ever met danced around the truth like professional ballerinas. Today was apparently a day for surprises though because Deathstroke said, “It happens when you’re one of the best in this business.”
“Huh,” Alex said, more than a little thrown at getting an actual answer. “I guess that makes sense.” It also provided the mental image of a killers for hire convention, and Alex was absolutely going to use that to try to drive Yassen up the wall next time they ran into each other, if there was a next time that is.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Alex turned what little information he’d managed to get from Deathstroke over in his head, trying to match it up with what he’d gotten from MI6 and ASIS like he was trying to put together a particularly frustrating puzzle. None of the pieces really seemed to fit. Alex was in Australia on loan to ASIS from MI6 in return for a favor the Australian intelligence agency had done for the British one that nobody wanted to talk about. ASIS had then basically launched Alex into the wilderness with relatively few supplies, two of which were a compass and a map marked with a cheesy black X like he was on his way to find pirate treasure. Alex had been told by the agent that had dropped him off in the middle of nowhere that he’d find armed men and three temporary warehouses. He was supposed to destroy the warehouses and get out, to a rendezvous point five miles away, conveniently marked by a red dot on his map. Alex had managed to blow up exactly one warehouse before he’d been caught and subdued with surprising gentleness. Seriously, he thought he only had a handful of bruises from the fight after he’d been spotted and not a single one of the hired muscle had tried to shoot him. It was weird.
“Do you know why you’re here, kid?” Deathstroke asked finally.
“Are we talking about here as the place, or in a cosmic sense?” Alex replied, because he had no sense of self-preservation.
The mercenary stared at Alex just long enough for the boy to wonder whether or not this was the time his snark actually got him fatally shot before saying, “The place,” in a voice that was somehow drier than their current surroundings.
“Because ASIS dropped me off with a map, a compass, and some explosives,” Alex answered, seeing no reason not to. He didn’t mention that the ASIS agent had heavily implied that Alex would be shot as a traitor if he returned without blowing up all three buildings.
“Do you know what is in the warehouses?”
“Basically nothing.” Alex grinned when Deathstroke’s eyes narrowed, the man’s full focus coming to bear on him now. It was almost the same look Yassen gave him whenever he exceeded the assassin’s expectations. “I checked in the boxes, since sometimes there’s items inside that help make a bigger explosion, and they’re all empty. Either whatever they were storing has already been shipped out, or they’re just decoys to throw ASIS off your trail, but either way its not my problem.” Maybe it would have been a year ago, when the missions were still new. It might have been his problem even now had a metahuman been involved, but there was no way Alex was going to try to go toe to toe with Deathstroke the Terminator. “I’m just supposed to blow up a few buildings so some grouchy ASIS agent doesn’t have a conniption and try to shoot me when I show back up.”
“And if you had another option?” Deathstroke settled casually into a chair across from Alex, his posture shifting from cold military precision to smug lion. Alex scowled. Suddenly this conversation had Yassen’s grubby little fingerprints all over it. Metaphorically speaking of course. Yassen would never been sloppy enough to leave actual fingerprints behind.
“I’m listening,” Alex said.
“Gregorovitch may have mentioned that you want out of MI6’s hands,” Deathstroke said. “And I am looking for someone I might be able to pass my mantle onto one day.”
“I’m not interested in killing,” Alex said bluntly.
“And I’m not interested in an unwilling apprentice.” The mercenary seemed unbothered by Alex’s line in the sand. “There’s too much trouble in that. I’m also not interested in leaving you with MI6. You snuck into my camp without being sighted until you’d already blown up one of the buildings. With a little more time, you might grow up to be a viable threat.”
“So where does that leave us?” Alex asked. The ropes were finally untied behind him, so at least he had a fighting chance, no matter how marginal it was.
Today was apparently a day for surprises because instead of immediately deciding to murder Alex, the mercenary said, “At a compromise of sorts. I have someone else in mind who may yet be willing to take on my mantle. Until then, having someone to gather intelligence and handle clients would be useful, especially since my current partner is getting older.”
Alex’s heartbeat suddenly sounded very, very loud. He clenched his fists around the rough rope he was still holding behind him, hoping to ground himself. He wanted out of MI6’s clutches very badly, but every offer anyone had ever made him had come with strings attached that he couldn’t abide by. This time was different. This time he was being handed what was essentially a research and communications job by someone who absolutely had the power to keep British intelligence away from him indefinitely. He felt a little breathless at the implications spread out before him.
“I wouldn’t have to kill anyone?” Alex asked, just to be sure.
“You won’t,” Deathstroke replied. “I have no interest in training someone unwillingly and giving them the tools to end me.”
“Crap,” Alex muttered softly to himself, smiling a little. “I’m going to owe Yassen a fruit basket.” Yassen would absolutely hate it, which was all the more reason to go through with that little plan. “Okay, I’m in.”
“Good,” the mercenary said, looking smug but not at all surprised. “You can stop pretending to be tied up then. We have work to do.” Alex blinked and then snickered a little bit despite his best efforts not to, dropping the rope on the floor. His mind was already rushing a hundred miles a minute. He’d have to text Nile later so he could figure out where to send Yassen’s fruit basket. For now, Alex had a feeling he had a couple more warehouses to blow up.