Chapter Text
Egypt, Three Months Old.
Jack hadn’t known how to hold a baby until Alex entered her life when she was eight years old.
She was never really sure why anyone put them together. Maybe just because they were both kids, just because Jack happened to be around, needing a place to spend her summer holidays, and it made sense to keep the two children together, despite the discrepancy in their ages, and their various care needs. But it's not like SCORPIA had a consistent childcare policy; after all, before Alex, Jack used to be the only kid who was ever around in SCORPIA.
But she was never as important as Alex, Jack wasn’t the child of anyone, she was just a child.
She had been someone’s child once, a long time ago, long before Alex was ever born. But her parents had been dead for years, and with them, any real memories of who they were, of what it was like to be their child when they were real, living, physical people, rather than the names on her birth certificate and the owners of the bank accounts she will inherit when she turns eighteen.
That’s all she has left of them; stark realities. Jack’s parents are dead, but when they were alive they were bad people, who did bad things to make a lot of a money. She knows this because the people she lives with now are bad, and they do bad things, and have a lot of money, and so, being experts, are taking care of Jack’s money, for now.
But they treat her okay. She grows up with lessons, and nannies, and though she never asks for much, she never wants for anything material. She doesn’t exactly have a home, being shuffled around to various properties and caretakers every few months, but it’s not so bad.
She even asked to go to school last year, and they let her, and though her boarding house wasn’t quite the twee, sentimental, warm home she’d hoped for after ploughing through a set of old novels about girls boarding schools in England from the fifties, gifted to her by one of dozens of forgotten caretakers which had motivated her request, at least there’s a permanency to it.
But Jack was too smart to be disappointed by an unrealised fantasy for long; she’d always been smart, always had to be. She was too different not to be smart - her hair, her skin, her name - none of it made her belong; always different, never one of them, she’d still strived for excellence, tried her best to be clever and good and well behaved, in hopes that it might be enough to earn a place among a new family, one without a name as heavy as hers, and that they’d celebrate her, love her, and she’d finally be enough.
Just how unusual her intelligence, and maturity was for her age wasn’t something she’d realised till her first night at boarding school; when the lights had been flicked off and she’d laid in the dark on her bunk listening to the girls around her crying, while she stared at the ceiling, and thought about freedom. Meeting other seven-year-old girls made her realise how unlike most seven-year-old girls she had been.
At eight, Jack is even smarter. She knows well how little power she has, and does not wish to strain the generosity of bad people who are being kind to her.
Usually, when she is not at school, she is kept out of the way of business. But things had been different, recently. Last summer there had been a tension in the air, that no one bothered to explain to her. And now; a different guard, young and dark-haired, had picked her up when her plane landed that summer, in yet another different country she was spending the holiday in. And she wasn’t with her previous guardians, though she hardly missed them.
With the guard had been a plump woman with greying wispy hair, wearing an unrealistically warm smile and a knitted vest, she looked like she had been plucked from the pages of one of her books; some kindly fairytale grandmother. If Jack ever had a grandmother, she was dead long before Jack could know her.
She’d met her in the arrivals area, insisting on holding her hand as she led her to the car, explaining that she would be staying with Ms Rothman and Mr Rider, who had been her parent’s associates, and would be her guardians from now on, but they were very busy as they had just been promoted to the very tippity-top of SCORPIA, so Jack had to make sure to be a good girl, and remain on her best behaviour.
What’s more, they had a baby.
The house, which she thought of as a big, fancy, lavishly decorated sweet box that seemed the sort of place from a book where people would host balls and get betrothed and swish about in long skirts in, was big enough for her to avoid attention most of the time. Someone had told her it was from col-on-ial times, but she wasn’t really sure what that meant. Her room was at the back, in a part they called the nursery, even though Jack wasn’t a baby.
The nursery had turned out to be several rooms; she had her own, that was dressed up in flouncy pink frills, chosen for her apparently on the basis that she was a girl and should like pink and flouncy things, even though she didn’t. But she didn’t even have the option to switch, because, in the other room, was the baby.
The same plump woman with the broad smile, who called herself ‘Nanny’ had shown her how to hold him, to make sure his neck was supported, to sit with him on a pillow in case her arms got tired.
Admittedly, Jack wasn’t very impressed by the baby, at first.
Alex had been all pink and pudgy and kind of weird looking and he cried so much . In fact, he did nothing but squirm, and cry, and produce awful smells, and everyone in the house was utterly enraptured by him. She'd hated him for that, for a little while.
For being loved so easily.
One night when he cried and no one came to check on him for five minutes, Jack had padded across the hall and scowled at him in his crib, trying to convey her annoyance that his shrill cries had woken her up. To Jack’s surprise the baby's wails had quieted and he giggled - and that had made her smile, and then when Jack had leaned in to tickle his tummy to try and make him giggle again, he had closed a slobbery hand around her finger, which was gross, but had made her smile even more.
It was easy to love Alex, she quickly realised, as she grew to appreciate the squishiness of his cheeks and his big brown eyes. But more than that, she felt a certain kinship to him, as the other non-adult in the house, her for once not the only one.
The other person closest in age had been the agent that picked her up from the airport, Cossack. He was younger than all the other adults, but if Jack had hoped for a playmate in him she was sorely mistaken. Cossack babysat sometimes, which mostly included him sitting silently on the sofa, staring at Alex with a kind of reverent shock, as he slept in his arms, and letting Jack play with him when he woke. Cossack didn’t really play, but every now and then Jack would catch him looking at Alex and smiling.
She thinks he cares, so she trusts him with her little brother.
She only calls him that in her head. She knows that she is not allowed to claim Alex as her little brother, and knows she is not part of any kind of family here. No one is ever unkind to her, or cruel, but the adults here are always so busy, with so little love to spare that Jack would prefer it was directed toward the baby. She’s gotten used to not needing affection, but babies had to have love, she’s pretty sure.
Alex is loved, at least a little, she thinks. One of her new guardians, Julia, who must be Alex’s mother - though this in itself seems a complicated topic, which had earned a tense silence from the adults she’d asked it off, and made her resolve not to bring it up again - visits every now and then. Jack only has the archetypes of a mother from her books to compare Julia too, and in that sense the woman doesn’t seem to quite fit the role.
Julia tended to look at him like she was confused, an expression Jack learns is rare from her, like she can’t quite figure him out. When he inevitably got upset and started crying, she was quick to hand him off to anyone else - like she was frightened she had hurt him, upset him, and was certain she couldn’t make him better.
But it wasn’t as though she’d dump him and flee, overwhelmed by the difficulty and foisting off the messy business of taking care of a baby for someone else to deal with, so she could return to something she valued more. Often, she would hover, looking as uncertain and out of place as Jack had ever, and would ever see her, as if wanting to direct a nappy change like a tactical operation, before he was placed back into her arms for a nap.
Of all the adults, her other gaurdian, John is probably the nicest to her. Nothing that ever confuses her, makes her think of him as any part of her family, but when he comes to sit with her in the nursery to watch over Alex, he asks her about school, about the classes she liked and the sports she hated and all the extra-curriculars she was excited for, and how when she went back next year she’d start Saturday school as well with the rest of the big kids in year four. He also makes sure no one asks her to take care of Alex, believes her when she says she enjoys it, that she doesn’t mind, but encourages her to go and make her own fun without responsibility.
Fun without responsibility is a very foreign concept to Jack, even at eight years old. She plays, she has toys and books and a garden to run around in and invent make-believe games, but she finds herself worrying about Alex before too long. There’s a lot of things she can’t do, feeding him, changing him, cleaning him, but she worries when there’s no one to watch over Alex. There’s so few people she trusts in that house.
When Nanny tells her John’s brother might be coming to join them to take care of Alex, she’s tentatively excited; John was an ally in the house, a protector she could trust with Alex, this uncle could be the same.
It’s not a particularly warm welcome, when he does arrive.
She had wondered if everyone would line up to greet the uncle at the door, and tour him around the house. Wondered if she’d need to wear a dress and her nice shoes and to make a good impression.
Instead, one night, Jack watched from the window in Alex’s room that had a better view over the driveway than hers, as an armoured convoy pulled up, and an unconscious, bound man in desert camouflage was carried into the house, followed by an angry looking John, and the silent Cossack.
Ian Rider hadn’t been what she was expecting. Dirty, with dried blood caked to his forehead, hands cuffed like a prisoner or a criminal.
When she’d been summoned, and reluctantly passed Alex over to him, Ian had stared at her, appalled, though she didn’t understand where his horror came from. Alex’s uncle had looked surprised at everything, like a deer in the headlights, and Jack realised quickly that he likely hadn’t come willingly. Perhaps he hadn’t known he was coming at all.
It was explained to her that at the end of the month, he and the rest of the Rider family - Alex included - would return to Malagosto, where Ian would be properly trained to join SCORPIA.
Jack has never been to Malagosto, though she’d heard of it before. They tell her it is not a place for her, not a place for children. But Alex apparently belonged there. She hates how often exceptions are made for Alex; only a baby and yet somehow not a child, even less of one than Jack.
She can’t quite imagine what happens at Malagosto, what series of lessons and events produces soldiers like Cossack, like Hunter.
She wonders if Ian Rider will lose his name like the rest, be replaced by a codename and the disposition of a hardened criminal.
She hopes not.
Part of her worries that he won’t be able to handle it. Because over the weeks, she’d become tentatively fond of Ian Rider.
In the first week, Ian had mostly walked around with his eyes unseeing, still in shock and reeling from the sudden change of direction in his life. Everywhere he went, he was followed. Often by Cossack, or another silent soldier, walking a few steps behind. Very occasionally by John, pushing the baby in the pram, who chatted at him conversationally, trying to respark some old fraternal bond. It doesn’t seem to work very well.
Primarily, Ian spends time with Alex, and so, by extension, with Jack. At the start, he looks at her like some tragic puzzle to be figured out - asks about her parents, asks who is taking care of her, if she feels safe, and happy. Talks to her like a child.
It’s nice, a bit. But Jack isn’t a child, so she tells him not to. She tells him about her parents, about the precarity of her position, about SCORPIA. A part of her delights in having the information an adult needs, having played this game for far longer than Ian had. But he listens, patiently, carefully. He treats her with respect, and acknowledges her intelligence, and her maturity. He never promises that things will be okay, never tries to reassure her that she doesn’t have to worry, that her fear is somehow a kind reserved for adults.
Jack thinks that Ian mourns for her childhood, despite it. Jack finds it hard to do the same. She doesn’t really understand what she’s missing out on.
By the end of the month, she is sad to be leaving them both. Typically her long, boring summers dragged on so that she was excited for school to return at its end. Not this time.
She goes first; a car to take her to the airport waiting in the driveway as she says her goodbyes.
John wishes her luck, but is pulled away with an annoyed, apologetic look by a phone call, leaving just the three of them. Alex, having discovered his hands in the last few weeks, bids her farewell with a clumsy but curious pat to her cheek, and Ian hugs her, properly, solidly, squeezing her safely in his arms in a way no one has for years and she has to remind herself not to cling to the only adult that could be a real ally, when she forced herself to detach from him.
She tries not to watch as the car pulls away, Ian still waving, Alex reaching out his arms toward her as though calling her back, a confused, upset expression on his face, like he couldn’t understand why she would ever leave him.