Work Text:
Eventually, Alex Rider lost his glimmer. He was a good agent, yes, even a great one. But by the time he turned 18, no amount of acting could allow him to blend in with younger crowds. Not with the dark circles bruised underneath his eyes, and the gauntness to his cheekbones that made him look a little dangerous - feral even. He also was recognizable at this point, with enough high profile missions against Scorpia and other organizations with similar reach, his face had become well-known within the criminal world.
So, as everyone knew it would eventually happen, Alex Rider was no longer a resource to be exploited by MI6. That didn’t mean he could go home (or what little was left of it). He was a ticking time bomb who knew too much. Given his explicitly voiced disdain of MI6, Blunt had little reason to trust he would not spill insider knowledge at the drop of a hat. Even if they did blackmail him into silence, he would require constant surveillance and security to ensure nobody extracted the information themselves.
The solution was obvious really. Given his blatant symptoms of PTSD and the impressive array of scars spanning his body, it was easy to ship him to the nearest mental institution. The more he fought it, the more it would seem like he belonged there.
Thus, on his 18th birthday, Alex was pulled out of a van (in cuffs) and swifty pushed into the psychiatric ward. When he cursed in every language and as colorfully as he knew how, he was pumped with sedatives and shackled to a hospital bed.
The first nurse who came in seemed downright cheery to be doing her job. Even though he was 18, they had decided he would be best suited for the pediatric ward. (Alex could hear the words mental retardation exchanged between nurses, he wasn’t fucking stupid). The nurse was wearing scrubs with smiling cartoon sunflowers on them.
“Hello, Alex!” She greeted as she walked in the room, a smile plastered on her face. “My name is nurse Sandy. How are you settling in?”
He had been kidnapped from his home and bound to a bed for hours with no food or water. He glared back at her in response.
“Oh, it’s okay if you don’t feel like talking much. That’s normal. You’ll feel more relaxed once we start your treatment!”
“And what does that treatment entail, exactly?” His throat was scratchy from all the yelling he had been doing earlier.
“Don’t worry about that right now, sweetie. You just need to focus on getting better!” The smile didn’t slip off her face even as she talked. She just spoke through those cherry red lips, cheeks clenched as if they were permanently deformed that way.
With all the hatred and anger he could muster in his drugged body, “ Fuck you Sandy.” It was an understatement.
“Oh, that’s not very nice. It’s good to have you here, Alex.” She moved over to his IV and fiddled with it, administering more of the drugs that made his head feel cloudy and his body heavy. “We look forward to helping you get better.”
Alex slipped in and out of consciousness for the first week of being 18. When he was awake, it didn’t feel much different from being asleep. His mind felt fried, a little bit like when he smoked a bit of weed with Tom after one of their football games. He had freaked out then too, disliking the lack of control he had over his mind. The vulnerability of being artificially relaxed was terrifying to someone on guard their whole life.
His mind tended to drift towards old memories. He missed Tom, and when he was lucid enough to wonder about it, he tried to think of what MI6 would have told him. Probably that he was dead, which started to feel more and more like the truth.
Jack once said she would never believe he was gone unless she saw his body herself. Alex actually laughed out loud remembering that, a bitter laugh that died almost immediately. The fact those words had come out of her mouth one tearful evening, a little drunk from the wine she had generously poured at dinner, was horrifying. Jack would be better off thinking he was dead instead of worrying herself sick every night he was away.
Better off dead. The words echoed in his head for a little while, like he was trying to get a taste for how they feel.
“Now, Alex. That is not a very nice way to talk about yourself. I’ll have to let your doctor know your treatment isn’t working out quite so well.”
Alex hadn’t heard anyone come into the room. He didn’t know he said the words out loud. When he tried to focus through the fuzz in the brain, he saw her fiddling with the machine by his bedside.
“Stop it,” he croaked.
“I just want to make you a little more comfortable.” She continued adjusting the settings, almost certainly administering more of the drugs he was already drowning in.
“No, I don’t need more.” He intended them to come out strong and determined, but they warbled in his mouth and sounded slurred. He sounded stupid to his own ears.
As the nurse continued administering more, she reached over across him, perhaps to grab the record sheet hanging from the side of the bed. It’s the closest anyone had been to him in a week. Without a single thought, Alex surged forward and bit the god-awful nurse in the arm.
She shrieked, backing away horrified while clutching at her arm. Security rushed in at the noise, and did what Alex always knew was going to happen, pumped him full of more sedatives or whatever the hell those IVs fed into his arms. He knew he should feel some sort of remorse or self-disgust (especially when he tastes a bit of copper on his tongue afterwards). But through it all, until darkness closed in and he was forcefully put to sleep, he just felt smug. That horrible smile had finally split off her face.
Apparently the punishment for biting a nurse was solitary confinement, which Alex thought was reserved for prisons and not for pediatric psych wards. It wasn’t as if there were anyone he could have voiced his complaints to anyways.
As the days went by, or so Alex assumed based on the meals and medicine that were routinely delivered, he started to have visitors. Not real ones, of course. Those were better off thinking he was dead and going about their lives without him. But the ones his mind conjured up, even when they were mean or angry, were nice to see.
Tom popped by everyone and a while, and would sit on the edge of his bed for a long while. Sometimes they chatted but usually they just sat in silence. Every once in a while he would remind Alex of what a selfish friend he had become in the last few years.
Jack’s face was always welcomed, but she was angry a lot of the time. She would tell Alex how she has moved on, moved back to America, and is far happier not having to take care of him anymore. Alex would just nod along solemnly, promising to leave her alone but thank her for stopping by.
He managed to not take his medicine one morning, by tucking it away in the hollow of his cheek and only pretending to swallow. He didn’t have any visitors that day, but his brain felt a little less like mush and by afternoon, he even found the energy to stretch his tight muscles in the corner of his room. The victory was short lived, however, once the staff noticed the change in his demeanor. They went back to injections after that stunt.
As the days went by, and the injections became more frequent, Alex was bedridden most of the time, even after being released from solitary. He was given time outside, time in group therapy sessions, and free time to roam the residence - but unless forced out of bed by a nurse, he preferred the artificial safety of his room. Things were more predictable there, since the only people he had to interact with were the ones conjured up by his drug addled mind.
After exactly one month of being there, Yassen visited for the first time. He appeared in the shadows, smoothly stepping out from them as if he had been there for ages.
“Oh. Hey,” Alex croaked from where he was sitting on the floor, wrapped in his comforter. It had been a little while since he had spoken last.
“Hello, little Alex. It’s good to see you.” The assassin sounded genuine, with a tinge of concern perhaps. His voice was softer than Alex remembered.
“It’s nice to see you too. Unless you’re going to be angry with me, because I’m a bit tired. You should come again later if you are going to be shouting.”
The corner of Yassen’s mouth twitched up, perhaps as close to a smile that Alex’s brain can imagine.
“No, I’m not angry with you, little one. I suppose I just missed you a bit.” Alex actually scoffed bitterly at that. “Did you think that I would not?”
“I dunno know. I sort of thought the whole not-interfering-with-your-missions thing would be kind of nice for you.”
“You had become a bit of a welcomed nuisance in my life.” Yassen tilted his head, clearly evaluating the state of the former spy a bit more closely. “How are you, really?”
No one had asked him that in weeks. None of the other hallucinations seemed to care. To his utter mortification, hot tears welled up in his eyes. At the sight of his distress, Yassen immediately moved towards him.
“Oh, little Alex. I am sorry you are here.” But when his hand reached his forehead, as if to brush the hair away from his face, the hallucination vanished all together.
In his absence, Alex let the tears fall without abandon. A few minutes later, a nurse came in, chiding him for his heightened heart rate. He let the tears dry on his face as a nauseating haze came over his body once again.
From then on, Yassen was Alex’s most frequent visitor. Unlike the others, he only ever came at night, but he tended to stay longer than the rest. Alex was thankful for his presence, especially as he was able to drift off to the quiet voice of the assassin, and sleep with relatively fewer nightmares plaguing him.
Conjuring up Yassen was the best thing those drugs ever did to him.
Alex became a less aggressive patient. Sure, he didn’t cooperate with the demands the nurses made, and he downright refused to speak in group therapy. But he stopped cursing and screaming (and biting, though that had only been a one time thing). No one seemed to question the clear change in his behavior nor bring up the conversations he would often hold with himself. Sandy simply congratulated on how well he was coming along, and reminded him that this is why following their treatment plan was so important.
He could passively listen to the lies he was told each day with the reminder that Yassen would be there in his room when it was time for him to fall asleep each night.
Tonight, Yassen was reading him a story, a Russian fable that was supposedly one he read frequently as a child. (It was times like these, when he was lucid enough, that Alex was impressed with his own imagination).
When they were about halfway through, Yassen turned to him. “What’s bothering you tonight, little Alex?”
Belatedly, Alex lifted his hand to touch his cheeks. They were wet from tears streaking down them.
“Oh. I’m not sure.” He felt a burst of anxiety well up within his chest, seizing at his heart. He didn’t want to upset Yassen, or do anything to chance his leaving. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad that I can be here too. I enjoy your company.” The words warm Alex’s heart, even though he doesn’t quite believe them. Maybe if Yassen joins the company of mentally ill teenagers who did little more than make quiet conversation from their bed.
More tears slipped down Alex’s face, beyond his control. In a choked up voice, he confessed, “I wish I could leave.”
For the first time, when Yassen reached towards Alex’s hand, he didn’t disappear at first contact. Alex swears he feels the warmth coming from Yassen’s calloused hands. “Alex, we can leave together soon, I promise.”
The words were nice to hear. Alex was glad he was getting better at imagining the comfort that the man was offering.
Months went by, and they maintained the same routine. Each night, Yassen was there to read him stories or simply stay by his bedside until Alex was soundly asleep. Sometimes they could touch, but other times when Alex tried he would make Yassen disappear altogether. Alex didn’t try much.
And when Alex was almost asleep, barely cognizant of the world around him, he would hear the whispered words, “I’ll get you out of here, little one.”
One night, Yassen broke the routine. He wasn’t waiting for Alex in the shadows that night when Alex returned to his room.
Trying not to panic, Alex patiently waited in his bed while his heart pounded almost painfully against his ribcage. Desperate to not alert a nurse, he tried doing the breathing exercises that had been drilled into his head. They helped, a little, but not enough for him to fall asleep. He gathered up the comforter, sat in the corner of the room, and waited for Yassen to appear.
Finally, in the early hours of the morning, he heard a soft buzzing noise that started him. Equal parts curious and afraid, Alex approached the window that the sound seemed to emanate from. With wide eyes, Alex realized someone was drilling through the bars on his window. The infiltrator was equally likely to be friend or foe, but Alex lacked the energy to be afraid. In the back of his mind, a voice darkly whispered that he would not mind if someone were here to put him out of his misery.
Yet, when the last of the bars fell away and the window was delicately opened, it was Yassen’s face that appeared. With the moonlight casting a glow on his face he looked a lot like an angel. Alex pinched himself, hard.
Yassen must have noticed the movement because he smiles gently. “Little Alex, would you like to leave this place?”
Alex laughed a little in disbelief. “More than anything.”
Alex struggled to climb down the vines and branches that Yassen had easily scaled. His muscles had almost completely disappeared, but he was fueled by enough determination to make it down (albeit twisting his ankle when he jumped to the ground).
When he looked up the stars, and felt his heart leap with the excitement of his new freedom, he was nearly overcome with emotion. Lacking the words to say everything he wanted ( thank you, I love you, please don’t leave me) he simply threw his arms around Yassen.
Under the moonlight, they embraced and the stars twinkled in the sky.