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Yassen is not all that surprised to see Alex, but Alex is clearly surprised to see him.
“You - you’re not dead!” the boy exclaims.
Yassen looks him over with a somewhat critical eye. Beneath the grime and the bruises, Alex looks terrible. He looks like he hasn’t slept well for months. He looks like he’s lost weight. He looks like all the life has gone out of him.
Slowly, Yassen raises an eyebrow. Alex flushes and glares. “I thought you were dead,” he mutters.
Understandable, really. Yassen had believed he was going to die when they last spoke too. Though it is interesting that no one told Alex that he survived.
“Leave us,” Yassen orders the guards who had dumped Alex in a crumpled heap at his feet. “I’ll take care of him.”
The guards nod and disappear without a second’s hesitation. That’s always nice. This has not been such a terrible place to work. However, if Yassen does not handle Alex carefully, it is likely that both his current employer and his current place of work will end up as ashes. Perhaps rubble.
Alex shifts warily, then climbs to his feet when Yassen doesn’t react. He is at least clever enough not to try attacking him or fleeing.
“Hello, Alex,” Yassen says. “It is good to see you again.”
Alex looks a little confused at his civility. From what Yassen has seen of his mission reports, MI6 usually only send him after frothing lunatics, so perhaps he is unused to polite conversation. A pity.
“Hi,” he says shortly. “What now?”
Yassen’s employer is working out of a skyscraper in Shanghai. They are currently in Yassen’s office on the fourth floor. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately given Alex’s record, most modern skyscrapers are not equipped with dungeons, or anywhere dedicated to storing prisoners. The easiest thing for him to do - well, second easiest - would be to lock Alex away for the next thirty hours while the most delicate stages of the operation he has been hired to oversee go through.
“Perhaps we can catch up,” Yassen suggests mildly. “Come. Sit.”
Yassen sits down in his desk chair, and gestures to one of the two sitting opposite his desk. Alex looks like he’s considering fleeing again, but his defiance quails under Yassen’s expression. He slinks over to the chair indicated and sits.
“You are a long way from home, Alex,” Yassen says. Alex hunches his shoulders under his regard.
“Yeah,” he mutters.
He doesn’t say anything else. When Yassen last saw him, he’d been a lot mouthier.
Yassen waits. Alex glances up at him through his eyelashes, then looks away when he sees Yassen watching him patiently.
“What have you been up to?” Yassen asks.
Alex’s eyes flit up again. “Nothing exciting,” he says, with enough bitterness that even if Yassen hadn’t been keeping an eye on him, he would know exactly what he’d been up to.
“Come now, I’m sure that’s not true,” Yassen says. “After all, you’ve ended up in such an exciting part of the world. Something must have brought you here.”
Alex’s shoulders are up around his ears. “You know why I’m here,” he mutters.
Yassen’s current employer is about to launch a cyber-attack on a number of major world banks. Yassen is not particularly skilled at cyber-crime. He is there to coordinate the logistics of his security, and to act as a go-between between him and Scorpia, who have provided some of the specialist equipment required for such an act. Alex is presumably here because an analyst at MI6 is concerned that the attack will destabilise several London institutions. London cannot take much more destabilisation.
“I can take a guess,” Yassen concedes. He probably knows why Alex is here better than Alex does - Alex is rarely given more than the bare minimum of information by MI6, even when they do actually have the intelligence. “Though I am curious as to why they thought you were the ideal candidate. Your age and ethnicity hardly allow you to blend in here.”
Alex actually looks at him at that, and for a moment there’s a spark of something in his eyes, though it quickly fades back into the exhausted blankness he’s been wearing the whole time.
“Dunno,” Alex mutters. “Stopped asking a while ago.”
Then he looks surprised, like he hadn’t meant to admit that. Yassen raises an eyebrow.
“I see,” he says. He checks the clock in his room. It is eight pm, and he has nothing urgent to do until midnight. “Come with me.”
He gets up and heads for the door. After a moment, Alex follows him. Yassen has no doubt that he’s looking around for a way to escape. He also has no doubt - well, very little doubt - that Alex will stay with him. Alex has proved himself intelligent before. There is little to be gained by attempting to escape now.
Yassen leads him to the bank of elevators and takes them up to the twenty-second floor. All of the leads in this operation who need to be on site have suites of rooms up here, though Yassen had requested that he be given rooms closer to the ground as well. His suite up here has not been used much.
Alex follows him into the rooms. Yassen sees his nose wrinkle in the mirror hanging in the hallway.
“What is this?” he asks, exhausted and unenthused.
“It’s late. I’m hungry,” Yassen says. There are staples in the cupboards in the small kitchen here. Most people eat in the various cafeterias, but Yassen has always preferred to cook for himself. “Would you like something to eat?”
Alex blinks at him slowly. “Would I like something to eat,” he repeats. “Why on earth would you make me something to eat?”
Yassen pulls rice, pickled vegetables, and a tin of spam out of the cupboards. He also finds a jar of chilli crisp which has yet to be opened, and adds it to his collection.
“Should I allow you to starve?” Yassen asks. “Sit down.”
Alex sits. “That’s how it usually goes, yeah,” he says.
Yassen tuts. “Terrible standards of care,” he says.
“Most of them don’t plan on letting me live,” Alex says. His exhausted blankness is suddenly a hair tenser than it was a moment ago. “Not much point in feeding someone about to die.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Yassen says. The rice cooker will take at least half an hour, which is far longer than it will take to heat up the vegetables and slice the spam. He sits at the kitchen table’s other chair. “I’m afraid I’ll have to confine you here until Thursday morning, but after that, you’ll be free to go.”
It is Tuesday night. Yassen has his doubts about anybody’s ability to keep Alex Rider confined for that long, but he supposes he has a better chance than most people.
Except MI6, apparently. The thought brings a somewhat bitter smirk to his mouth.
Alex watches him suspiciously, but nods after a moment. “Okay.”
Yassen raises his eyebrows. He doubts it will be that simple, but Alex doesn’t say anything else.
They sit in silence for twenty minutes. Yassen doesn’t even pretend he’s not observing Alex. After a while, Alex stares right back.
He’s grown up, but not much. He was always on the thin side, but whatever baby fat he’d had at fourteen has melted right off his face, leaving him looking nearly gaunt.
“How did you survive?” Alex asks, eventually. “Do MI6 - of course MI6 know.”
Yassen smiles thinly. “I was resuscitated by paramedics at the scene. Your people had the bright idea of shipping me off to a blacksite to try and turn me. They bit off rather more than they could chew, I’m afraid.”
Alex actually snorts at that. “Was it the pay? They’re pretty tight fisted.”
“The pay certainly would have been inadequate,” Yassen says, amused.
Alex looks unwell, but he’s still a mouthy little brat. Yassen finds he is relieved at that.
Yassen fries the spam and warms the pickled vegetables, then spoons the mixture onto the bed of rice. Alex hesitates, but takes the bowl and chopsticks Yassen hands him. He seems to accept that refusing would be silly - if Yassen wanted him poisoned, or unconscious, or anything else his morbid little mind can come up with, refusing to eat dinner wouldn’t save him.
Alex eats with alarming alacrity. Yassen made too much, and when he catches Alex glancing at the still-warm rice cooker, he smiles.
“Are you still hungry, Alex?” he asks.
Alex sets his jaw at his tone. “I’m fine.”
Yassen smiles wider. “Would you like some more to eat, Alex?” he asks.
Alex stills under his gaze, like a small prey animal that realises it has attracted the attention of a far larger predator. After a moment, his head bobs.
“Yes please,” he says. His voice cracks in the middle.
Yassen gets up, and makes up another serving for him.
“Thank you,” Alex manages, when Yassen sets his bowl back down in front of him.
“You’re welcome,” Yassen says. He sits back down and goes back to his meal. After another moment in perfect stillness, Alex picks up his chopsticks and starts eating again.
They finish the rest of their meal in silence. Alex doesn’t look at him, like he can avoid drawing Yassen’s attention if he sits still and quiet enough.
A futile effort. He has had a dangerous percentage of Yassen’s attention for nearly two years now.
“I think you should wash up,” Yassen says. “I cooked, after all.”
Alex glances up at him for a split-second. “That sounds fair,” he says quietly. He collects the various crockeries and utensils that they’d used, and fills the sink with water.
Yassen watches him work. He’d relaxed for a moment earlier, enough to ask Yassen about his survival, but he’s tensed up again.
He washes everything up neatly, and piles it all on the drainage board. His shoulders must ache with how stiffly he keeps them around his ears. It’s making Yassen’s own shoulders ache in sympathy.
Yassen checks his watch. He still has a couple of hours before he has anywhere to be.
“Come,” he orders, and leads Alex through to the small sitting room. He sits on the sofa. Alex hovers in the doorway.
“Come here, Alex,” Yassen says. He can see the moment Alex starts to fear that Yassen is planning on taking advantage of him. Alex is a brave little thing, though. He stands in front of Yassen with barely more than a wobble in his lower lip.
Yassen reaches up to put his hands on Alex’s thin, bony hips and drags the boy into his lap. Alex holds himself stiffly, kneeling up to minimise the amount they’re touching.
Yassen sweeps one hand up his side, feeling the alarming jags of his ribcage through his sweatshirt. His other hand stays curled around Alex’s hip, the sharp jut of bone digging into the centre of his palm.
“You’ve lost weight,” he murmurs.
Alex is almost trembling with how desperately he’s trying to hold still. “I hadn’t noticed,” he says.
Yassen smiles and sets his hand on the nape of Alex’s neck. “No? I think you have lost too much weight,” he says. “You look tired, Alex.”
Alex’s hands flex at his sides. “Been a long week,” he says.
“Just a week?” Yassen asks. “Last week was alright, then?”
Last week, Alex had been in a backwater town in Wales, stopping a billionaire lunatic with plans to release a strain of a parasitic fungus that would have devastated the planet’s forests. Three weeks before that, he had been sent to infiltrate a school in Russia in order to get close to the son of an oligarch who had been buying British intelligence from a member of the House of Lords. The week before that -
Alex’s face twists into a scowl. “It’s hardly my idea,” he mutters. “I just want to go to school.”
Alex has no chance of passing his GCSEs. He’s been out of school more than he’s been in it for well over a year.
Yassen hums. Alex shifts his weight in an attempt not to sag down into Yassen’s lap. Yassen reaches up and cups his face, running his thumb over the shadows under his eyes delicately. “Poor Alex,” he murmurs. “Someone ought to take better care of you.”
Alex bristles. “I don’t need taking care of,” he says. “I just need to be left alone.”
Yassen smiles. He feels the lean muscle of Alex’s thigh, careful not to make the touch overly sexual. There is no fat on him. He is half-convinced that if he took Alex’s shirt off, he would see his stomach distended from the meal they have just eaten.
He presses down on Alex’s hip gently, and with great unwillingness Alex settles himself on his thighs. His backside is as bony as the rest of him.
“They are going to kill you,” Yassen observes. “They are going to use you and use you until you are all used up.”
Alex glares. “Great. Thanks. Not sure what you expect me to do about it.”
Yassen pinches his waist sharply. “Perhaps you ought to allow yourself to fail more often. They wouldn’t use you if you weren’t effective.”
Alex scowls at that. “I can’t just let these things happen,” he mutters. “If I can help, I should.”
Yassen shrugs. “As you say.” He rucks Alex’s hoodie and tshirt up so he can settle his hand on the soft skin of his waist. Alex freezes, somewhere between terror and mortified arousal, but as the minutes tick past and Yassen advances no further, he slowly and unwillingly relaxes.
Poor Alex. Warm, full, and as safe as he ever gets, it is easy for Yassen to soothe him into a drowsy, compliant state. In less than half an hour he is all but asleep against Yassen’s chest.
“I could get you out,” Yassen murmurs.
For a moment, he thinks Alex hadn’t heard. Then he stiffens, sitting up and flushing and looking desperately curious.
“You could?” he asks.
Yassen smiles. “I could.”
He watches the gears tick in Alex’s brain. Watches him realise what that would mean for the rest of his life. “That’s okay, actually,” he eventually says.
“As you like,” Yassen murmurs. “Time for you to go to bed, I think.”
He pats Alex’s bottom and the boy scrambles out of his lap, flushing furiously. Yassen wonders if his inexperienced skittishness means Alex has yet to experience the very worst kinds of violence. He finds he hopes it does.
“Right,” Alex mumbles, staring at the floor.
Yassen catches his chin and tilts his head so their eyes meet. “Help yourself to anything in here. I’ll be back in the morning. Behave until then.”
“Okay,” Alex grits out. Yassen smiles.
“Good boy,” he says. “Sleep well, Alex.”
Yassen returns just before eight the next morning. He expects that Alex had tried very hard to leave the apartment, but Yassen has the only key card to the door and even if the windows did open, he was twenty-two floors up. He slips in silently and sets his bag on the kitchen counter before going to check on Alex.
He finds him curled up in a ball on his side under the comforter in the bedroom. He has switched the air conditioner off, probably because he isn’t used to sleeping with the sound of one. They aren’t common in the United Kingdom, Yassen knows.
Yassen notes that the shower has been used. There are no toiletries, but he must have rinsed the grime and sweat of the last week off. He does not appear to have used the kitchen.
Yassen puts the toiletries and clean clothes he’d bought in the bathroom. Back in the kitchen, he unpacks the glutinous rice rolls he had bought from a street vendor for breakfast and sets them on a plate, then covers them with another one.
Alex slinks out of the bedroom just after nine, dressed in yesterday’s clothes. He looks at Yassen blearily, like he hadn’t slept well at all.
“Good morning, Alex,” Yassen says.
“Hi,” Alex says.
“I brought you some things to occupy yourself with,” Yassen says. “Breakfast is on the counter, if you are hungry.”
Alex’s eyes flicker over to the covered plate. “Thank you,” he says. He takes the plate and sits at the kitchen table opposite Yassen to eat the rolls.
“I got you some fresh clothes, and some things to wash up with,” Yassen tells him. “They are in the bathroom.”
“...Thank you,” Alex says. He sounds confused more than hostile, which is mildly amusing and mildly tragic.
Alex hesitates once he’s finished. “Have you eaten already?” he asks.
“Yes,” Yassen says. He watches as Alex covers the two remaining rice rolls and stands up to put them in the empty fridge. Then he watches as Alex shifts in place.
“I’m going to go get changed then,” he mumbles.
Yassen smiles blandly. “As you like.”
Alex flees the kitchen. Yassen listens to the sounds of the shower. After a while, he hears Alex make his way into the living room.
Leaving Alex unsupervised for too long will doubtless result in either arson or criminal demolition. Yassen heads to the sitting room, to be met with the sight of Alex fiddling with the television’s wiring. He freezes when he sees Yassen.
“Alex,” Yassen sighs. “What exactly are you trying to achieve?”
Alex scowls and hunches defensively. “Thought I could watch telly,” he mutters.
“And the pile of shredded tissue?” Yassen asks, more amused than irritated. Apparently Alex has realised that the door to the apartment is not opening unless Yassen opens it. Setting off the fire alarm might have made that happen. “Come here, Alex.”
Alex eyes the door to the hallway, but Yassen is closer and faster. He’s trapped and he knows it. He trudges over to Yassen with the air of a man walking to his execution.
Yassen instead guides him to the armchair and sits him down. He puts a nintendo switch in his hands. It is preloaded with animal crossing, whatever that means.
“Entertain yourself,” Yassen orders him. The device cannot be connected to the internet, something the clerk at the store had been happy to show him how to do.
Alex blinks up at him owlishly. “What,” he says.
“I have books if you would prefer,” Yassen says. He is currently reading a compilation of Qing dynasty poetry. He also has a text on the history of the Parisian sewer system, if Alex would prefer that.
Despite himself, Alex clutches his switch tighter. “That’s okay, thanks,” he says.
Alex spends the entire morning glued to the device. Yassen allows it. He makes lunch, and Alex sets the device on the table within arm’s reach when he’s called to eat, like he’s afraid Yassen is going to take it away.
“I’m going out,” Yassen says, while Alex is washing the dishes. “Be good now.”
Alex turns to look at him. Yassen smiles patiently.
“I won’t try anything,” Alex mumbles.
“Good,” Yassen says. “See you this evening, Alex.”
He does his work. He orders them takeaway for dinner, as he does not feel like cooking. He gets it delivered, and takes the bag up to the twenty-second floor.
Alex is asleep on the sofa when he gets in. His switch is on the cushion beside his head, like he was lying down while he played and dozed off that way. In repose, he looks younger than his sixteen years.
A brief look around the apartment tells him that either Alex has not attempted any mischief, or has learned some subtlety in the six hours he has been gone. Given his obvious exhaustion, Yassen suspects the former.
Yassen does not want to wake him, but the food will get cold and he is hungry.
“Alex,” he calls softly.
It’s enough. Alex jerks awake, curling into a defensive position as he sits. There is no clumsy flailing.
“Hi,” he says once he realises what’s going on. “Smells good.”
They eat the takeout together, fried noodles and peanut sauce-drenched beef and crunchy vegetables. Alex eats less ravenously than he did yesterday, but he still accepts a second serving when Yassen offers.
After dinner, Yassen coaxes him into the living room. Alex is clearly nervous after yesterday, nervous and curious despite himself, flustered and horrified at his own curiosity.
It is so hard to be sixteen. Yassen is not nice enough to find the whole thing anything but amusing.
He sits on the sofa. Alex inches his way towards the armchair.
“Come here, Alex,” Yassen says, smiling pleasantly. Alex comes obediently, clutching his switch to his chest.
Yassen tucks Alex against his side, wrapping an arm around him to stop him from escaping but otherwise leaving him be.
Yassen has something of an excuse for this - if Alex is left unsupervised, he will undoubtedly start devising plans to get his hands on Yassen’s keycard. While Yassen is in the apartment, Alex must be attended at all times. There is, however, no reason for him to be in the apartment. And the attending could probably be less tactile.
After a few long, agonising moments of stillness while Yassen reads his poetry and Alex hardly breathes, Alex shifts against him to sit more comfortably. After another moment, he turns his switch on.
An hour passes. Alex droops against him, growing closer and closer to sleep. His hair brushes Yassen’s neck. His breathing slows down and evens out, though he keeps playing his game.
He’s warm.
Eventually, Yassen has to leave to do his job. Alex squints blearily at him when he goes.
“Can I go tomorrow?” he asks.
“So eager to get back to your masters?” Yassen asks. “You may. For now, sleep well, Alex.”
Yassen locks him in, and goes to do his job. Scorpia have mostly reverted to taking smaller clients, fewer of the kind that would end or debilitate the world. Yassen prefers it, as if his personal opinion has any bearing on what he’s willing to do.
He does his job, then gets a few hours of sleep in his third-floor suite. He wonders about Alex, nineteen floors up, curled up in a bed that Yassen could slip into.
The next morning, he finds Alex already awake and eating yesterday’s leftovers.
“Good morning,” he says. “Did you sleep well?”
Alex nods, chewing. “Yes, thank you,” he says when he’s finished his mouthful. It’s a lie, but a predictable one. “When are you going to let me go?”
Yassen feels faint amusement at his persistence. “Finish your breakfast. I’ll escort you downstairs at ten.”
Alex nods rapidly and takes another bite of the rice roll.
He’s all but vibrating out of his skin when ten o’clock rolls around. Yassen notices that he’s left his switch on the kitchen table.
“They’ll just confiscate it,” he mutters, when he sees Yassen looking at it. “I put a lot of work into my island. I’m not letting Jones get her slimy hands on it.”
Yassen raises his eyebrows. “You’d rather I had it?” he asks.
Alex flushes. “You did get it for me,” he points out.
Yassen cups Alex’s cheek and tilts his chin back. Alex goes very still. “You ought to thank me. Didn’t I take good care of you?”
Alex goes even redder. He’s clearly torn between pointing out that Yassen essentially kidnapped and molested him, and never ever mentioning that again. In the end, he bites his tongue.
“Thank you,” he grits out.
“You’re welcome,” Yassen says mildly.
He takes Alex down to the skyscraper’s lobby and walks him right up to the door. “Do try to say no, next time, Alex,” he says. “But I suspect I will see you soon regardless. Take care.”
Alex scuffs his foot against the floor. “Thanks for not killing me, I guess,” he mutters.
He’s been biting his tongue this whole time, Yassen thinks. He must have questions for Yassen, about his father, about his uncle, about Scorpia. He must have been too afraid that irritating Yassen would lead to violence to ask.
“You’re welcome,” Yassen says. “Off you go now.”
Alex looks at him one more time, before nodding and leaving the building.