Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It does not take much for Alex’s life to fall apart.

Alex wakes to the lights of police cars outside his windows, the low murmur of sympathetic voices downstairs. He plods down the stairs, yawning and wiping at his eyes before he catches Jack’s eyes, pausing at her expression. Oh, he thinks. The policemen look awkward and unhappy, shifting from side to side. (Funeral voices, he calls them.)

Ian is dead.

Life goes on unsympathetically. The day of Ian’s funeral arrives as quickly as the rest of the days go by, and Alex finds himself dressed in a black jacket in cords. He climbs into the dark car that came out of nowhere, sitting a careful two seats away from Crawley.

(“You don’t have to worry. The bank will take care of everything. That’s my job. You leave everything to me.”)

“Did you know Ian?” Alex asks, as quickly as he can. Maybe if he says it fast enough Crawley will respond truthfully, fill in the thumbnail sketch with colour and make Ian real. The man who had no love life, no particularly strong likes or dislikes, the man who raised and loved him.

”Your uncle was an overseas finance manager, Alex. He was responsible for our foreign branches. You must have known that.”

It tells him nothing. Crawley must’ve heard the desperation bleed through his voice, fill his mouth with an iron tang. Knows that Alex has nothing but the ability to grasp at straws, standing at the mercy of the world around him to get the information he needs.

”What do you do? For your job."

Crawley looks at him strangely. “I’m a personnel manager at the bank.”

I know that. But what do you really do? Why is Ian dead now?

”But you know him. You knew him, because you’re wearing the Marks & Spencer tie he bought of the blue last month for a gift. Do you know that you just tilted your head the same way he used to do?”

Alex looks at Crawley's features, trying not to think of his mannerisms and the man that lies behind them. He should feel angry over this unremarkable man who came to his house as if Ian hadn't died the day before, face blank and unreadable, wearing his lack of grief like a shield. How could you not grieve him, Alex wants to scream. How could you walk in and pretend nothing has changed?

”…That’s a new one.”

The car pulls up to Brompton Cemetery, the shadow of the Chelsea football field overshadowing the graves. He knows exactly where he prefers to be on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, and it isn’t at a graveyard. Alex looks outside, frowning at the unfamiliar faces.

”I don’t recognise any of them. Did they really know Ian, or did you seriously pull thirty or so people out of their jobs to come to my uncle’s funeral?”

“We can hardly force people to leave their desks to attend a funeral," Crawley idly comments, in a tone that indicates they can do exactly that.

Mrs. Jones looks at him before sliding a file toward him. He cautiously opens it, staring at the man in the picture– short-cropped blond hair, cold blue eyes, a straight scar across his neck. Yassen Gregorovich, it proclaims, professional assassin. He lifts the top page up, staring at the blocks of black lines censoring most of his file. Maybe Alex doesn’t want to know anyways.

“His name is Yassen Gregorovich,” Mrs. Jones says, a bit redundantly. “We suspect he killed your uncle.”

Alex feels a numb, staticy feeling spread through his limbs. He wants to leave, to toss the file through the window and run. Alex wants to stop staring at his uncle’s murderer in the face, memorizing the man’s features.

“Okay,” he replies, very quietly.

“Alex, you need to understand that if you see him, report back to us. We will pull you out immediately– this isn’t worth risking your life for.”

Risking your life for, as if they weren’t already doing so by making him investigate the Stormbreakers. Like whatever Ian found hadn’t killed him. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. Maybe that was why Mrs. Jones always had a peppermint– to mask up the acidic lies that filled her mouth.

“Sure,” he replies.

Alex steps into his room, relaxing infinitesimally. He’s pretty sure that Sayle has the room bugged, so he takes out the Game Boy, inserts the Speed Wars cartridge, scanning it over the room.

(Turn the lights off first, Alex. The bad ones usually have a red or white flashing light. The better ones are almost always hidden better– where would you hide something that you didn’t want someone to find?)

Alex purses his lips until they’re a thin line, looking away. Trying to think of anything else. Ian is a gaping, bleeding wound, clawing from his stomach up, and he’s terrified of what’s going to happen when the dread and anger burst through. Alex finds one behind the painting hung in his room, next to the bathroom.

He tilts the Game Boy up to scan the clock hung up above the door frame. It isn’t beeping, but it never hurts to make sure… Alex drags a chair over and takes the clock down, sticking his fingernail into the battery pack and twisting until it pops open. Alex peers inside, shrugging when he sees nothing other than two batteries, perfectly fitted. Replacing the clock on the wall, he pushes the chair back into place, noticing the bunk bed placed against the wall.

Bunk bed. Huh. Alex is pretty sure Sayle was planning on only awarding one winner, but he’s glad to not share his room with anyone. It would be difficult enough, hiding the fact that he’s a spy without another hapless kid roped into whatever conspiracy MI6 is convinced Sayle is orchestrating.

He chooses the bottom bunk in the most likely case that he needs to run— quickly clambering down a ladder in the dark doesn’t exactly sound fun. Alex takes a seat at the desk and glances out the window, staring at the security guards wielding semi-automatic machine guns. Morbidly, he wonders how fast they would tear into someone’s body, how many bullets could hit before they fell to the ground. He grimaces, pushing the dinner plate a bit farther away from him. All of a sudden, Alex doesn’t feel too hungry.

The last person who had been here was his uncle, and knowing Ian, the man had also chosen the bottom bunk. Alex climbs into a dead man’s bed, blinking up at the space above him.

Wedged into the frame of the bunk bed, is a triangle of white, carefully folded and hidden– the only way someone can see it is by lying on their back, the same way Alex lies right now. He sits up and plucks it out, unfolding it to stare at his uncle’s handwriting, a twisting, strange design with a reference number beneath it. Alex stares at it, heart twisting before he quickly picks the Game Boy up to scan the images and send them over to MI6.

Possessed by some strange impulse, maybe to get away from his uncle’s message, maybe to see if there were more notes, he climbs up the second bunk, flipping over various blankets and pillows. Alex almost gives up before he sees a second note, stuck in between the mattress and ladder.

He plucks it out, frowning at the message sitting innocently in his hands. It’s not Ian’s handwriting- rather, a scrawled, messy note that seemed to be hastily folded and hidden.

‘All is well–

Varna investigation?’

He folds it back into its original shape, shoving it into his pocket. If Ian is dead, then what about his mysterious roommate?

Sayle’s body lies limply against the floor, blood trickling out of his bullet wounds. The boy– Alex Rider, Hunter’s child, tears his gaze away, his expression queasy. Yassen holds the gun in his hand despite the lack of threat the boy poses to him, walking over Sayle's body and kicking it lightly. He shot once in the heart and another in a major artery– Yassen believes in thoroughness rather than theatrics, although he supposes the extra shot was unnecessary. Alex steps forward, somehow daringly and haltingly at the same time.

“You’re Yassen Gregorovich.”

He nods, his face blankly expressionless.

“Why did you kill him?” Alex asks.

“Those were my instructions.” He speaks softly, reasonably. “He had become an embarrassment. It was better this way.”

“Not better for him.”

Yassen shrugs.

“What about me?” Alex asks.

He runs his eyes over Alex, weighing the boy up. “I have no instructions concerning you,” he says. No instructions specifically concerning Alex Rider. It was a bit of a stretch, but SCORPIA did not need to know and he would not tell them.

“You’re not going to shoot me too?”

He allows the tiniest bit of humour to shine through the quirk of his mouth. “Do I have any need to?”

There’s a pause, holding something fraught and dangerous all at once. They gaze at each other over the corpse of Herod Sayle.

“You killed Ian Rider,” Alex says. “He was my uncle.”

Yassen pauses, staring at Hunter’s child. Perhaps, he thinks with a confusing mix of anger and wry irony, something has gone amiss.

“I kill a lot of people,” he replies simply. Maybe it comes off too gently, as Alex opens his mouth to say another reckless, frustrating thing. “But I did not kill Ian Rider.”

“You’re lying,” Alex chokes out, taking a hasty step back. He looks young, dangerously close to showing the vulnerability the child spy has been carefully holding back. “No. Stop lying!”

“Why would I have a reason to lie? You pose no threat to me.”

Alex skitters back like a wounded animal before visibly pulling himself together. It would be a somewhat fascinating progression to watch, if Yassen did not care for the boy. Unfortunately, he does not wish for Alex to end up dead, searching for clues as his uncle did.

“I don’t know, maybe you just want another problem off your hands,” Alex spits out. The boy raises his chin defiantly, staring him in the eyes. “If you didn’t kill Ian Rider, then tell me who did.”

Yassen raises an eyebrow. Insolent child, he thinks, with a bit too much fondness than necessary. “And why should I?”

“If you killed Ian Rider, I’ll kill you. Or you can point me to the right person, and I’ll kill them instead.”

Yassen resists the urge to sigh. There are days when he wishes that he had run back to Russia, disappeared into its unforgiving winters and buried himself into Moscow’s streets, and today is not a day he expected to feel such a thing.

“A lot of people have tried to get information out of me and failed. You will not be the last,” Yassen smiles. “Believe me,” he says, “it would be better if we didn’t meet again. Go back to school. Go back to your life. And the next time they ask you, say no. Killing is for grown-ups and you’re still a child.”

He turns his back on Alex, ready to climb into the cabin when he hears footsteps coming from behind him. Yassen very carefully does not break Alex’s hand when the boy grabs his arm. Maybe the boy has already forgotten the dead body laying on the rooftop, a few feet away from them. Or perhaps it has given Alex the wrong idea: he himself was rather grateful to Hunter for shooting him through the neck and killing a man to protect him, after all. Yassen tightens the grip he has on Alex’s wrist, ignoring the creak of his bones and the wince that crosses the teenager’s face.

“You are still a child,” he repeats, firmly and coldly. “Do not get involved in this, Alex. Forget about your uncle and this side of the world.”

Alex wrenches his wrist out of his grip, stumbling back. His shoe dips into the growing pool of blood underneath Sayle. A helplessly furious expression plays over his features and Alex clenches his fist, rubbing at the blooming ring of bruises. Something in Yassen’s chest twists uncomfortably, and like every event that’s happened so far in this cursed day, things only get worse when Alex opens his mouth.

“Do you really think that I can just say no? That they’ll let go of me, just like that?” Alex laughs, harsh and bitter. “Why do you even care about whether I’m involved or not? Just tell me who murdered my uncle and you can erase the idea of me from your non-existent conscience.”

MI6, of course. To his own surprise, a flash of fury grows in the pit of his stomach. “There is a price to everything, little Alex. Especially going through with what you plan to do with that information,” he says, quietly. “MI6 has likely hidden the files detailing your uncle’s death, but Sayle kept records of all his employees.”

Alex’s breath catches in surprise, and this time, the boy allows him to turn and leave without interruption. He turns the engine on and the helicopter rises. He chances a look outside, noting the boy still standing there on the roof. Some strange impulse hits him, and Yassen waves at Alex, decidedly amused when the boy waves back.

Subject: Alex Rider

Receiver: John Crawley

Reporter: John Crawley

[Begin Transcript 00.00.02]

Alex:

[BEEP]

"Hey. Mr. Crawley, right? Uh."

[SOUND OF METAL RATTLING]

"Hm. I don't think this door opens. Right. This is awkward."

[WIND DISTORTION OF AUDIO]

"I can't believe Ian used to [INDISTINCT]. I don't know where I am, but I can see Canary Wharf from here and I'm on the roof of a modern, glass-fronted skyscraper. Oh yeah, there's also a helipad."

"It's a bit chilly up here. Do you mind arranging for a faster escort? Thanks."

[BEEP]

[End of call 00.58.28]

As it turns out, trying to get access to Sayle’s files is far more difficult than the task sounds. Doing it under MI6’s nose? Practically impossible— Alex has little to no experience in hacking and isn’t even sure Sayle put the files online in the first place. His life is spiralling out of his control and nobody is safe. Yassen Gregorovich could be lying. He could do it without consequence, without realising (or perhaps worse, out of his own amusement) and watch Alex’s life drip down the drain, erased along with MI6's machinations.

He is not the first child soldier out there. He is so alone he could crawl out of his own skin, gasp in a breath like he has to ration for the next in case they steal that from him too.

“Alex?”

He pauses. Tom grins at him, carefree and unknowing from ahead, bouncing on the soles of his feet. Alex is jealous, in the way that doesn’t make him envy his friend but hate his own life. He doesn’t want to feel this way.

“Tom, hey. How’s it been?”

“It’s been pretty good! Mum ran off for a few days cause she got so mad at Dad, so Jerry’s been back helping out with groceries and everything. But whatever, I got this new videogame on the Game Boy. Ah, could we go over to your place to try it out?”

Alex thinks of MI6. Damn it, he deserves a break.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “I’m sure Jack won’t mind.”

Tom whoops, pumping a fist into the air. His friend runs past him, pulling him along, and the world aligns, just for a second once more.

A few weeks later, Tom has seemingly forgotten about his mysterious disappearance, only giving Alex a couple worried half-glances when he thinks Alex isn’t looking. Then Skoda starts selling drugs to kids at Brookland and well, Alex knows just how to topple his ego from under his feet.

He wakes up in a jail cell to Crawley standing above him, in that perfectly pressed suit and boring tie.

He wonders what he would see, if given the Rorschach inkblot test. Maybe it's better that he doesn't know. In case MI6 tries to hire him.

The driver stays damningly quiet. Alex huffs, slouching back into his seat. The drive ends quickly, and Crawley leads him to Blunt and Mrs. Jones, standing among a sea of grey. It seems to encapsulate their entire personalities; consume them whole until there's nothing left but the unsmiling, uncaring people underneath. Absentmindedly, Alex wonders if Gregorovich is the same, an assassin stripped down to the bare minimum of being human, just lithe danger and a cold, amused persona.

They need him for another mission.

"What actually happened to Ian?" Alex blurts out, and Blunt's hand twitches on a file resting on his desk. Blunt pushes it out of his view, clearing the desk in front of him.

Mrs. Jones speaks up. "Alex... whatever Gregorovich said to you may not be reliable. You are still young, and we are hesitant to use you this way, but you are a valuable asset to us."

"Then you know he killed Sayle in front of me."

Damn it, Crawley. He knew the man couldn't keep a secret from MI6.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," Jones says, sympathetically. "Alex, your safety matters—"

"He could have killed me. But that doesn't really matter, does it? I did what you wanted me to do, and whatever mission you're demanding of me now, you could've found another poor kid to use. But it's fine as long as I'm not in the middle of a mission, right?"

Jones doesn't flinch, but a frown stretches across her face and her hands cross over each other, as if providing herself comfort would do anything for him.

"Don't recklessly run in to face Gregorovich because you want revenge. To waste your life on such a thing," Blunt huffs. "Mrs. Jones will arrange for a more appropriate appearance. Either way, it's good to spend your school vacation studying, since you've missed a few weeks."

Blunt turns his attention back to the documents scattered along his desk, as if he's already forgotten Alex is standing there.

"Well? Time to go, isn't it?" Jones nods at the same time and leads Alex out with her. She closes the door behind her, walking off as if she doesn't want to see his face anymore, afraid of the child staring back at her. Alex glances down the hallway through the window, thinking of the file on the desk. It was labelled SAYLE ENTERPRISES: DEBRIEF.

He pivots, sharply turning to march down the hallway. Crawley's office is down the hall, isn't it?

“Crawley,” Ian's nephew says, swinging open the door. John Crawley sits up in chair, surrounded by paperwork and a few half-used, open pens. Despite the messiness of his desk, the rest of the room is carefully ordered with a few plants to liven it up. It doesn’t make his office feel any more comfortable, but he thinks he deserves a few points for effort. “I need something.”

”Rider,” he greets tiredly, running a hand over his face and sitting up straight. “Contrary to popular belief, I do have a job I am required to do and forms to be filled out.”

“And contrary to what MI6 believes, I’m still a schoolchild who shouldn't be coerced into doing their bidding, but we can’t all get what we want, can we?”

Crawley cringes. “Yes, I suppose so,” he says, eyes still lined with a sturdy steel. Duty over choice; greater good over morality. Crawley thinks it'll never end. There's something terrifyingly alive under Alex's skin, the tenseness of a live wire and electricity alight in the boy's eyes. There's a glimpse of Ian behind him, wound still raw and aching from the loss of John Rider, holding an infant in his arms and just about controlled to not go running off to chase leads. Carefully, he puts the thought away in the recesses of his mind to be forgotten.

"The man who was partnered with Ian when he was killed. I need to talk to him."

Martin Wilby. The man who he personally took off the case because Crawley suspects that he was the one to kill Ian. If Alex finds out... it can go a plethora of ways. Perhaps the boy just wants catharsis, the act of knowing that the man who killed Ian is in jail. If Crawley can gather enough evidence beforehand, maybe. But he likes to think of himself as somewhat of a pragmatist, and he knows for a fact that it's not likely.

"I can't do that. We can't pull an active agent off a case to meet you, Alex," Crawley says, looking the boy in the eye.

"Fine. Then afterwards, when he's done with the case."

It would buy him time, at the very least. MI6 wouldn't approve of Alex meeting Wilby, not that Alex needed to know the fact. But perhaps Crawley can balance it; this careful, fragile trust in Alex's words and the looming burden of loyalty to his nation. The broken shards of Ian's life lie between them, and he wonders when one of them will carelessly step on one.

"I'll see what I can do. Go home, Alex. You need to pack any necessary belongings before Mrs. Jones comes to pick you up next morning."

Alex walks home, tilting his head up to feel the breeze against his face. He turns down a corner, spotting his house and a man standing at the door, talking to Jack. The man nods and waves, turning when the door closes and walking down the steps.

"Hey!" Alex calls, as loudly as he can. The man stops to look at him, a slightly apprehensive expression on his face. "Who are you?"

"Martin Wilby. I ah, used to work with your late uncle. My condolences for your loss," Wilby replies, an odd emotion flashing through his eyes. Alex freezes, his heart pounding against his chest all of a sudden. He can't mess this up. If this man knows who killed Ian, if he can get his hands on Sayle's employee files to confirm...

Alex forces himself to take a deep breath, to force air into his lungs and calm the adrenaline rushing through his veins. "Were you there? When... before he got into the car accident. You two went to Cornwall for a banking conference, right?"

A million questions press under his tongue, begging to be asked. Maybe if he slows down, waits until he can wheedle the right information and play his cards right Wilby will answer him truthfully, blind to the desperation that belies them. Alex stands at the mercy of the world around him and begs that it be kind to him.

Wilby relaxes, smiling at him. "Yes, I was. I'm not taking any cases or clients right now, so I have a fair bit of free time. Say, if you ever get into any trouble, feel free to contact me. I know this might be a bit strange, but my coworkers like vultures- if they ever start to bother you about your uncle, I can help you out with his will or escaping it all."

He presses a business card into Alex's hand and gets into his car, driving off and disappearing within a few seconds.

One of them is lying. Crawley or Wilby. But Wilby can't be on duty, not if he had visited Jack. There's a note sitting in his room, something about the Varna investigation and a business card burning its way through his pocket. 

It has to do something with the Varna investigation, something that Wilby knows about. MI6 has done nothing and refuses to do anything, and they'll use him and won’t hesitate to do it again until Alex knows one day he'll break.

They're hiding the truth from him to keep him trapped with them.

In the depths of his mind, that fourteen-year-old boy whose uncle died and left him in the hands of people who cared not about him screams, furious and helpless. Inexplicably, his mind trails to Yassen, somehow the only person who told him something. The Russian assassin, who killed a man in front of him. Alex doesn’t even know what he should do with that. Maybe the fact that he isn’t all horrified says something about his mental state.

Alex needs to figure out who killed his uncle from Wilby and get those files from Crawley. If he lets his uncle's murderer leave with Ian's blood on his hands, Alex doesn't know if he can forgive himself.