Chapter Text
They come for him in the night.
“Quiet,” Syl hushes, holding a hand over his mouth, pinching his nose closed. “Shh…”
He struggles, but he’s weak, weak, weaker. A finger jabs into a deep bruise lodged in his side days before by the wrong end of a bō; the accuracy of the assault belies the identity of the man behind it. Through shuttering eyes, Alex manages to glare at Mateo’s sneer.
“Not much longer now,” Syl whispers. “Be good.”
No air left to breathe, Alex finds his place in the unknown.
He groans himself to consciousness, choking down the noise as soon as he’s aware that it comes from him; it’s too late. Whimpering as he’s dropped to the floor—ground? when did they get outside?—a night-cloaked silhouette looms above him.
“Knock him out,” he hears through the cathedral-bell ring of his ears. The voice is clipped—Oleg.
“Gang’s all here then?” Alex rasps, smiling long after a punch to the cheek renders him dulled to the concept of life.
Eyes in the darkness; Alex meets each pair and laughs, laughs, laughs.
“Christ, the fuck is wrong with this kid?”
If not for the hand that slams his jaw shut, catching his tongue between his teeth and flooding his mouth with iron, Alex would say, ‘How long do you have?’
And then there’s a needle in his neck, and he thinks he sees the moon, and the moon swells until it bursts, fragmenting across the sky. He’s never seen anything so beautiful; the moon becomes the stars. Grinning, shedding diamond tears, Alex Rider dies under their shimmer.
Does he die?
He becomes something else.
He grows wings, claws; he thinks he can fly.
He thinks he can fly so he does, scattering coarse dirt under the beat of his feathers.
He flies so high up that when he rests, he floats in the hollow the moon left behind.
He’s with the stars. He builds a home in the cosmos. As always, his home fractures around him.
He falls.
Retching, Alex Rider wakes under the blind of the sun.
It’s a tricky thing, being caught between two worlds. For a spy, the first instinct is the best instinct. The hair that prickles on the back of your neck is the siren song of death; when your hackles raise, you run. This is how you survive. For a teenager, the first thought is often the worst thought. An underdeveloped frontal lobe does not the best decisions make. When Alex meets the world again, the first thing he wants to do is shout for help.
Whether as a spy or a teen, he knows no help is coming. He saves his breath.
Sitting up, he takes stock of his body, already so battered, bruised, broken. His tongue is torn, his lips cracked and bloodied. A stout split in the skin of his cheek nearly pulls a yelp when he brushes the tip of his pointer finger across it. But he has both of his hands, arms, and wonderfully, legs. His head might not be screwed on right, it certainly spins like he’s a mis-used globe in a classroom; it’s still there. All things considered, he’s no worse off than any other day spent at Malagosto.
Although…is he still on the compound? He’s no prisoner—or, he is, if only to himself and his waxing and waning desire for revenge—but he’s never taken the time to wander too far away from the hovels that mark the entrance to the base. Scraggly shrubs and craggy rocks surround him; he’s still in Malta. Hopefully. Any further accuracy is entirely out of reach.
So he’s lost; he’s been in bigger scrapes. Peeling up out of the dirt, Alex tells himself he’s saved the world before. Twice. He can save his own life, he can beat this test. It is a test, it must be. He’ll pass.
“Right,” he says, stretching tall and shaking feeling back into his limbs. “Right. I can do this.”
The breeze carries the salt-crusted scent of the sea; no birds call out to the ocean, no prey darts along the ground. It’s too quiet.
“Can you?” asks a voice to his left; Alex spins, dizzied as he tries to locate the noise. It sounded like—“Can you really save yourself?”—Tom.
“What are you doing here? You have to leave, you have to get out of here.”
Tom squats on the low and warped trunk of a paltry tree, sneering up at him. “I came here because of you. I always follow, don’t I? A good friend. What are you?”
Alex blinks; was Tom always so thin? His skin looks ready to slough off of his cheeks. He looks…dead.
“He’s a coward,”—and that’s Kyra, isn’t it? Only, her voice bubbles and catches as if she’s stuck in the sea, and when he turns, her back is to him. Water drip drip drips off of her fingers, pooling around her in the dust. “He’s a fraud.”
“What…what’s going on?” Alex asks, softly, mostly to himself. “You guys can’t be here.”
“No?” Kyra slowly, so slowly turns around. She’s bloated like a corpse. She smiles, and Alex is afraid. Whispering, taunting, she says, “We’re here, spyboy. We’ll always be here, now.”
Alex runs.
He runs like a spy, ever watchful of his surroundings, monitoring the cadence of his strides to gauge how much longer he can keep up this harried pace.
He runs like a teen, long legs catapulting him over low bushes and high boulders, pounding across the landscape with a haste borne of PE, not training to be an assassin.
He runs like a Rider, and he’s always had a love-hate relationship with that name, now more than ever, but as he runs, he finds himself more and more sure that a new headstone will be cropping up in the Rider plot in the coming days.
With no water to dilute the drugs in his system, he faces the effects of an unknown substance running through veins that feel like they’re withering away with each step. He’s forced to assume that Tom and Kyra were not-Tom and not-Kyra because he wouldn’t have left his only friends out here, he wouldn’t. He tells himself that he couldn’t; he tells himself they weren’t ghosts but hallucinations brought on by sun and circumstance. He tells himself a good few lies, and he prays that they’re truths.
(Alex Rider does not believe in God. At best, he believes in himself, not as the God, or a god, but as a reminder that life goes on after the smug hands of divinity abandon their charges.)
He runs.
He stops at the edge of a cliff, panting, mouth so dry he feels as though he swallowed the whole of the sea that roils below him, and followed his feast by gobbling up a desert.
“You can’t run forever.”
He knows it’s Nile. He doesn’t turn around.
“Clearly,” he wheezes, fanning his hands out at the boundary he stands before. “I’m not much of a Jesus-type.”
Oh, that’s new—the air shifts behind him. This one might be real.
“No,” Nile laughs. “No, you’re not.” He settles by Alex’s side, barely visible in his periphery. “Still. You have some…believers, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
Nile hums, kicking a pebble down into the ocean. It bounces off the cliff-face, jumping higher and higher with every beat against the stone. “Julia. She sees something in you, though I can’t imagine what.”
“She sees my father in me, doesn’t she?”
“I hope not. For your sake.”
Snapping his gaze towards the mountain of a man beside him, Alex is…lost. Well and truly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t like you, Alex. But even I wouldn’t wish you that ill.”
The silence they fall into is contemplative; if Alex weren’t flooded with adrenaline and drugs, dehydration-visions and grief that isn’t so new to finding him in the light of day, he’d call it serene.
“You said believers,” he says quietly. “Who else?”
“How’s that collar feel around your throat?”
“What?”
And no amount of twisting can dislodge the wide palm that wraps around his neck before his confusion fully ferments; no matter how hard he stomps at Nile’s feet or kicks back at his knees, he can’t budge the man’s grasp.
“Yassen Gregorovich,” Nile spits in his ear. “He likes you. He’s got you on a leash, hm? It’s mutual, I think. You’ve made him weak.”
Alex, struggling against the hold, falls still.
“All of us here? We earned our place. You—” Nile cuts off with a laugh, shaking Alex like a doll. “You waltzed in, some legacy kid, with skills, sure. But you’ll never kill. You’ll never be one of us.” Murmuring, now, Nile leans in. “He won’t save you. Not from me.”
The fingers tighten, cutting off blood supply to Alex’s brain entirely. He’s unconscious before the ground falls out beneath him.
His skull hits a boulder, splattering blood like sacramental wine.
His ankle catches on a vine, snapping up to his knee.
His chin knocks against a rock, wrenching his head back with a whiplash crack.
He hits the beach with a thud. For a blissful moment, he doesn’t yet know the pain.
Nothing lasts forever.
He wakes, and there are the birds. They circle. Vultures. Tracing their path with a shaking finger, their revolutions bringing them lower and lower still, he laughs. And there is the pain. It gurgles in each flail breath.
“Did I pass the test?” he asks the sky. “Did I pass?” Delirious, he giggles at the echo of his words. He tries again, louder this time. “Did I pass?”
No one answers. He doesn’t think they ever will.
He can’t move as the tide swings in closer, drenching his clothes with every slam of the waves. The rocky sand beneath him starts sweeping out to the ocean, and he sinks down into the shore. He doesn’t think Help me, or Save me. If anyone is coming then it’ll be to find a sun-bleached corpse, or a water-logged cadaver rent apart on the rocks. He’d put his money on the latter. He’s pulled out into the depths.
As he drowns—he knows a lot about drowning, he does; years spent scuba diving off of gleaming shores and icy banks imbued him with the inarguable knowledge that drowning is one of the worst ways to go—he thinks Finally. He might even think I won, because winning is such a foreign concept that it’s warped into rest and he’s tired.
“I won,” he tells the sea, breathing water as he laughs, laughs, laughs.
And his victory drifts up to the surface, breaking in bubbles that carry his final breaths.
“I won.”
Heaven isn’t how they sold it, is it? It hurts. Alex supposes that means he’s earned a ticket to Hell. He doesn’t want to hope he’ll see his dad, or Ian. He knows he won’t see his mum. Maybe he’ll be alone.
He’s always alone.
Hell has a beat. One-two, one-two, one-two, one-two. Hell’s rhythm is like the Bee Gees, and—
Huh. Hell has a taste. It tastes like blood, which makes sense. He knows how he got here. But it also tastes like…cinnamon?
Hell has a sound, too, and it’s not the screaming he would’ve expected. It isn’t the useless wails of tortured souls, or the gleeful cries of demons. It’s Come on, Alex, and Stay with me, and You’re not allowed to die now, too. It sounds strained, and it sounds angry, and it sounds scared.
It sounds like Yassen.
Yassen shouldn’t sound scared. Calm, cool, collected—in control. Confident. A lot of ‘c’ words, isn’t that odd. Alex laughs, and he rises out of eternity.
“Ow,” he whispers; Yassen doesn’t seem to hear him. He wrings out compressions on Alex’s chest with precision, grinding the edges of splintered bones together. “Ow,” Alex whines. “Stop,”—and that gets through to the assassin.
Yassen pulls back, resting on his haunches. He’s soaked. “Alex,” he says, deflating in relief. “You…”
“I won,” Alex says airily. He snicks out a grin at Yassen’s confusion, reaching up a trembling hand; he hums as it’s caught, gathered close to a heaving chest. “I passed the test, didn’t I?”
Yassen sighs, unfurling Alex’s fist, pressing a kiss to his palm. “There was no test. You shouldn’t have been out here. You shouldn’t have been alone.”
“I’m always alone.” It sounds petulant when he says it, but Alex thinks he’s earned it. “‘m always alone, Yassen.” When did he start crying? The tears are hot on his frigid cheeks; he never expected to feel warmth again. Yassen’s fingers brush over his temple, and they scald a fiery trail. See? He did win. “You’re alone, too.”
“Alone together then, yes?” And when did Yassen start crying? It’s a pitiful display they make, weeping saline grief that leaves no stain against the sea-water weighing down their clothes.
Wryly, Alex informs him, “That’s not how it works.”
“Why not? Who says we can’t make the rules?”
“Rothman.” Alex writhes on the beach, groaning as every ache reminds him of its existence; worse are the agonies. “The Department, society, take your pick.”
“You’re in pain,” Yassen murmurs, gently laying Alex’s hand on the sand. “How badly are you hurt?”
“Have you ever been hit by a tank?”
Yassen blinks, clearing Alex’s bangs from his eyes. “Yes. I fail to see what that has to do with anything.”
“I was gonna—” A lash of pain, sharp and barbed, stabs down Alex’s spine. He contorts to the side, spilling sick from his lips, inviting waves of anguish along the ripples of his torso. Coughing, propped up by Yassen’s hands, Alex moans weakly. “I was gonna say that’s how I feel.”
“Ah.” Yassen carefully lowers him back down, tugging him away from the sour puddle of vomit.
“Why have you been hit by a tank?”
Yassen smiles wanly. “A story for another time, I think. We need to get you out of here.”
“Do you think they’ll laugh?” Alex asks softly. Yassen only stares blankly back at him; his eyes are always so dark. Even in Alex’s nightmares, the ones that plagued him after Point Blanc, those eyes never seemed cruel. It isn’t one of the ‘c’ words Alex attributes to him, and isn’t that odd, too. “When we get back, do you…do you think they’ll laugh at me?”
“We’re not going back.” Yassen stands, raining down water as he stretches. “I’m taking you home.”
“No! No, I need—”
“It’s too personal for you. You’re not objective, you’re not safe.” Cold. Cold fits in Alex’s mental rolodex of attributes—only sometimes. Yassen takes a deep breath, and he sounds tired. “I made a mistake. You don’t belong here.”
Alex glares, flinching away when Yassen moves to pull him up. The full-body wracking hurts, but it’s nothing compared to Yassen’s words. “I don’t belong anywhere, so why can’t I make my place here?”
“You think this was a test? This was fun. Are you having fun, little Alex?”
“Don’t call me that.”
Alex stares, and Yassen stares back, and they’re two mules on a one-cart road daring the other to try and pass. Why does Alex feel like he lost when Yassen grunts and walks away?
“Where are you—don’t leave me,” Alex says, starting as a shout and petering off into something small, something little. Something that feels alone, but never is, and is terrified of what life would look like spent in seclusion. Here, now, it would look like death.
Yassen freezes, shoulders falling. “I’m not leaving you. I need to bring the boat in closer.” Haloed by the dwindling light, he looks like he has wings. “We’ll go back to Malagosto. You need medical treatment, and I don’t have time to make up papers to take you to a hospital.”
“Don’t take me home after that,” Alex begs. “Please. I need to finish this.” He breathes out haggard relief when Yassen nods tightly, then starts off again into the dusk. “Will you stay with me? When we get back?”
Yassen says nothing. His silhouette melts into the shadows. Alex closes his eyes, and he sleeps.
He sleeps through the jostle of Yassen picking him up, cradling him close and walking him to the boat.
He sleeps through the rumble of the engine and the pound of the waves, the spray of water onto his face.
He sleeps through sleep until sleep becomes unconsciousness and he hovers closer to death.
He sleeps through No, no no no, and I’ll stay if you stay, and There’s nowhere else I would go, but I can’t follow you there.
He sleeps until he feels the Bee Gees slammed out over his heart and cinnamon on his lips, in his lungs, and then he smiles, and he concedes to Just a little longer, please.
They don’t laugh. The trainees line the hall as Yassen carries him to the infirmary, wrapped in a coarse grey blanket sodden with water and blood. They don’t laugh.
Nile nods, half looking begrudgingly impressed, half wearing his ‘congratulations, you didn’t die’ smirk that heavily implies yet. Even he cowers at Yassen’s glare.
“What happened?” Julia asks as Yassen lowers him onto the exam table, so hard and cold beneath him. It’s not lost on Alex, nor Julia, apparently, that Yassen puts himself between the table and SCORPIA’s leader.
“Fun,” Yassen says simply.
Julia breathes in sharply. “I see.”
“I’ll take care of him.”
“No, you go handle the others.” Rothman’s command is firm; her eyes keep darting towards Alex, and he’s never felt more like a slab of meat hanging in a cooler. “I’m sure you’ll show them the error of their ways.”
Yassen shakes his head. “With all due respect, he’s—”
“Right here,” Alex rasps. “He’s right here, and he’d appreciate it if you didn’t forget that.”
Julia’s smile is strained; Yassen’s is free, a bit crooked. Alex smiles back. Only at him.
“Of course,” Julia says, returned to her usual calm. “Keep me updated, Yassen. Take good care of him.” Her heels are overloud in the quiet of the infirmary, a steady clip of steps that dims in volume.
“I can’t believe you just told her to fuck off,” Alex beams.
“I did no such thing.” Unwrapping the blanket, Yassen’s brow raises at the mess of blood he reveals. “Besides, she has no medical training.”
“Fair. She probably would’ve given me that all-powerful healing gas—which did absolutely nothing, by the way—and then told me to get back to it.”
Yassen goes still. “What gas, Alex?”
“Some…I don’t know, it was like, the mask for a nebuliser with some cartridge in it. She said it would help me heal.” And he really doesn’t like the look on Yassen’s face now, pinched up and grieving. “Why? What…what’s wrong?”
Retrieving a pair of shears from under the table, Yassen retreats into himself. He cuts through Alex’s shirt, the flimsy excuse of a jacket they tugged over his arms when they stole him from bed. Alex watches warily, not yet raising a fight.
“How bad is it?” he asks quietly.
“Have you ever been hit by a tank? That’s how you look.”
“Funny man.” Worrying the hem of his sleeve, Alex sighs. “Really though, how bad?”
“Bad.” Yassen turns on his heel, rifling through a cabinet. He pulls out capped vials and packaged syringes, alcohol pads and plasters. “The biggest risk now is secondary drowning. You’re likely to get pneumonia from water inhalation. And the CPR.”
Alex shifts on the unforgiving surface of the table, hissing as he unleashes new pain. “All's well that ends well, huh?” he wheezes.
Yassen sends a smirk over his shoulder. “Sure. What’s a few broken bones, anyway. Tell me, how many fingers am I holding up?”
“You’re facing the wrong way.”
“Give it your best shot.”
Alex sneers. “One,” he says. “How about me?”
“People have died for far less, little one. Put that away.”
Guilty, Alex folds down his middle finger and pouts. “How did you—you’re no fun.”
“What happened to ‘funny man’?” Yassen says, walking back to methodically place the supplies on a side table. He draws a syringe with well-practised motions, seemingly about to pull his own sleeve up before he twitches his lip and sets the needle next to Alex’s arm. When was the last time Yassen did this for someone else?
“Will you stay with me?” Alex asks again; he whimpers at the ruinous discomfort of touch when Yassen cuts his sleeve. A cold press of alcohol and the threat of a needle in his elbow; again, Alex asks, “Will you stay?”
Perhaps it’s easier to speak to unresponsive ears; Yassen runs his fingers through Alex’s salt-stiff hair, ruffling it before he withdraws, snapping on a pair of gloves.
“You’ll feel better when you wake.”
“I doubt it,” Alex says lightly. He winces as Yassen extends his sore arm, sliding the syringe into his vein. “Please stay.”
And it’s warm, the whole of life fuzzy and grainy along the edges, but it isn’t nice until Yassen smoothes a plaster over the hollow of his arm, and whispers, “Okay.”