Archive of Our Own

The spray of blood across his face is warm, more than anything.

"Alex."

Like sunbursts, radiating out in little blooms of heat where they hit his skin.

"Alex."

A loud crack rings in the air then, and Alex's cheek feels even warmer.

"Look at me."

Rough hand at his elbow. A familiar face pushing into his vision. Yassen. More than familiar.

"East exit toward the valley. Use the gravel path parallel to the access road."

Oh. Yassen had slapped him. The sunbursts are dripping in cooler tracks now, sluggish and heavy. His left cheek screams at him raw.

Alex drags in a breath against his will. "That hurt."

The skin between Yassen's brows flickers into a furrow for just a moment, there and gone in half a heartbeat, but Alex knows all the disquiet it hides, even in the cold slant of shadow. Alex is confident no one else in the entire world could have noticed it, could have picked it out. That thought is what careens him fully back to reality, mind reeling, playing catch-up.

He remembers the dead sprint down the dark hallway, auxiliary downlights the only thing keeping him on route around the sharp corners. Unfortunately not bright enough to warn him against the hulking, armour clad guard he practically ran right into, off his scheduled patrol position in reaction to the alarm Alex'd triggered, no doubt, something Alex just hadn't had time to prepare for. And then...

Alex can see the twitching at the corner of Yassen's jaw, now. He really doesn't want to get slapped again. Another shaky breath. "East exit," he repeats. "Gravel path."

The grip Yassen still has on his elbow eases. It moves down to his wrist. Yassen's thumb presses gently into the base of his palm, setting off more sunbursts. Then something hefty and slick is being pushed into his hand.

"Take this, make a scene with it."

And then, an AK had been whipping up toward his center mass, proximity maybe being the only thing that gave him the split second to realize he had no way out of this, then a glint of silver, flashing by on the breath of pure silence, followed by the most wretched, wet gurgling sound and that horrible radiation-burn heat splattering against his skin.

Yassen appearing like an apparition, still-twitching body dropping at his feet. Serrated edges of his knife stained and dripping, held in a reverse grip in his right hand.

Alex squeezes his fingers around the same knife now until the bones of his knuckles ache. Yassen's touch is gone. East exit, gravel path. He doesn't think for a second not to trust the plan with his life.

"Alex," Yassen says, haltingly, before Alex can fully turn the other way.

The dim lights flicker above them and Alex knows that this is not the time. Not yet. He exhales steadily and sets his shoulders back. "I'll be fine."

Yassen's nod is short. Alex finishes turning and runs as fast as he can, before he has to see him disappear just as silently as he came.

Alex tells time in months.

It's for his own sanity. If he admits to the years, he has to face them. And he's not ready to do that. Honestly, really doesn't know if he ever will be.

He didn't jump right back in. He'd carried on with being a teen, went on explosion-free holidays with Jack and Tom, had a girlfriend, even made it to exams—which had started to seem like a fantasy, at a certain point. Most importantly he'd been left alone. Jones had kept her word, miracle of all miracles, and the Department hadn't come knocking for anything. Alex hadn't gone searching, either, to be fair to the tallies, but that was the thing, wasn't it?

Alex knew his name was in enough ledgers that he'd never truly be able to leave.

Or that's what he told himself, at least, when they finally did ask. And if the adrenaline felt fire-bright in his veins, or if the feeling of doing something good gave him that addictive rush of purpose again…

Well. It really is just easier to tell time in months.

He doesn't see him, the first time.

He's sprinting into a skyrise stairwell, rough cement stained with mud and worker's paint a stark contrast from the post-modern white-on-white he'd just been flying through.

Up or down, is the question now. Alex is about dead in the middle of the building, so for better or worse he's got a choice. He quickly runs back through the sparse briefing he'd been given this morning.

Guards are meant to be posted only through the busiest levels close to the ground (although that information was, apparently, horribly incorrect), and employees only fill the bottom twenty. Near the basement access there are underground exits into the old subway tunnels, barely mapped and easy to loose a tail in, but their stability was undocumented.

Up is a flat roof with nothing much else than concrete pavers and a mechanical penthouse, but the neighboring building isn't even a dozen feet away, and is a story lower. There's stairwell access to all levels, and elevator only to the bottom thirty. The fourteen floors above that are keycard access only.

That last part makes the decision for him, much to his disappointment; he's really not looking forward to getting lost in the bloody sewers today. Alex's hand is reaching for the railing to swing himself around and down, already planning out the path he'll take through the floors to lose the guards on his tail, when he sees it. Doesn't know what makes him look, but is overwhelmingly glad he did.

They're lying under the barred emergency window, small and high up enough for it really only being good for getting a good view of the ground you'll never be able to escape to.

An electric blue keycard and a .45.

Alex's blood had been rushing so hard in his ears, his heart practically screaming in his chest, so he rather feels it like a gunshot when he stops breathing for a moment, air knocked out of his lungs with confusion.

The list of people that like Alex enough to help him is small.

Of those with means to help him is even smaller.

And of those that knew he'd be here at this exact time…

An empty list.

He snatches up the keycard. Wastes precious seconds staring at the gun.

In the end, the only thing that convinces him to take it is not willing to risk his empty list getting caught.

He doesn't run into anyone on his way to the roof, and though Alex keeps it racked and sans safety, he thankfully never has to use the pistol. He makes the jump between rooftops with only a scrape to the knee, and the gun does actually come in handy to break the access door lock with the butt of it.

He learns later, when back at HQ for a debrief (which he, for a reason he can't entirely put his finger on in the moment, leaves a few key things out of), that they had just gotten intel that the subway entrance at the bottom of the building had been filled in the week before. MI6 apologizes for the oversight, but tells him that it all worked out in the end, didn't it now?

So no, he didn't see Yassen in the building. And there were no reasons to think he'd been involved in the scheme he'd been sent to infiltrate, in any capacity. There hadn't even been a whisper of him in the underground since Bath. Most agency lists around the world had him filed away as dead. And as far as Alex knew, that was the truth.

But he knew he was there. Knew it easy as breathing.

It had even worked fine, at the start.

It wasn't every day. Not even every week, or even every month.

It just became that, somehow, grew into a beast with a will of its own and a leash of its own and bloody, bloody claws of its own.

The beast was good, though. The beast was doing good.

There was a memorable time on some now-redacted coastline, back in the earlier days, where Alex did his chagrinned parade into the evil villain's lair escorted by the two lucky goons of the day and really, really wondered why there wasn't a more capable, experienced agent available for this job.

They didn't bag or blindfold him this time, though, which meant that Alex got to catch the very second that Yassen recognized him flash by on the man's face.

If Alex weren't such a good spy, he would have laughed out loud.

If Yassen weren't such a good assassin, he probably would have rolled his eyes and let out a string of curses.

Alex could see it anyway, because he wasa good spy, and could read it all in the twitch of Yassen's posture and maybe most especially in the length of his glare.

God, he really wanted to laugh.

He didn't quite have the same feeling about a half hour later, which found Alex hanging on for dear life to the side of a small motorboat, Yassen at the wheel and not paying him and his struggles much mind at all.

"Would you slow down!" Alex yelled over the sounds of the motor and the crashing waves, a constant mist of rather needle- like drops slamming him in the face.

Yassen just flicked a half-hearted glance over at him and didn't deign to reply. He did pull the gas lever down, though, so Alex figured he wasn't too mad at him.

Alex's fingers were numb with cold by the time the boat slowed enough for him to risk lifting a leg up and over the side, and there was a nasty moment where his trainers got caught in a loop of rope and Alex really thought he'd be meeting the wake rather harshly.

He did eventually make it over in one piece though, no thanks to Yassen, who didn't move from his post by the wheel once. Alex stuffed his hands underneath his armpits, although with his jumper soaked through it didn't do much in the realm of warming them.

"Thanks for that," Alex muttered—or tried to mutter, it was tough to do anything else but shout over the wind whipping around them.

"You are welcome," Yassen replied over his shoulder, eyes still on the water. Alex tried not to pout, because Yassen had just saved his life.

He shuffled closer to the helm, pressing down on his heels with each step to try and squeeze the water out of them. He came up right behind Yassen's shoulder and followed Yassen's gaze out to sea. It was the closest they'd been since the van outside of Mrs. Jones' apartments.

"It's beautiful," he said, because it really was. Shining emerald-blue and glistening in the afternoon sun.

Yassen hummed. The boat bobbed and bounced with the waves beneath their feet and pushed cool, salty air into their lungs. "And with one more body added to it."

Alex wanted to sigh in exasperation, but hearing Yassen's ever-pragmatic dry snark again was actually, ridiculously, near to comfort. "That guy going to get you in trouble?" Alex asked instead, tipping his head toward the stern of the boat where the other guard had gone flying off earlier.

Yassen shrugged. "He won't be missed."

That was good enough for Alex.

He breathed in the air, tried not to pay attention to how icy-cold it was making his skin through his damp clothing. The boat kept on skipping through the water, and the sun shone against their backs.

"I missed you," Alex said, only just realizing it. The words just came falling out, a simple truth that had nowhere else to go. Alex told himself in the following silence that it was ok, since he wasn't looking him in the eyes. They could both pretend Yassen hadn't heard over the wind.

So much for that. Yassen finally turned his head, looked right at him with his face open, relaxed, unreadable. His eyes searched Alex's, and Alex, to his own surprise, was content to let him.

Alex watched as the sun glowed through the flying strands of his hair and threw shadows across his scar, then as the corner of Yassen's mouth twisted up, just slightly.

It felt warmer than the sun.

"This is your stop."

Alex looked around. Open ocean in every direction, besides the sliver of land in the north west. He hadn't even noticed Yassen slowing the boat down.

Alex grimaced. "You can't bring me any closer?"

Yassen tilted his head disappointedly.

"I'm going to freeze to death before I even get halfway there!"

"Alex," Yassen reproached, "You'll be fine. Remember our training."

Alex huffed at him. Looked out at the beautiful water, looked back at Yassen and his unshakable, flat stare and his warm, imperceptible smile. With a sigh Alex trudged back over to the side of the boat and began wriggling himself back over the edge.

"We're going to be down a man now." Yassen said over the breeze, casual, eyes already back on the rushing water ahead of him. "Shame we'll have no one to cover the three a.m. shift."

Alex paused before pushing off the other side, just so he could grin. "See you next time!" Alex called with a laugh, and then he let go.

His shore contact luckily came to pick him up on a Sea-doo eventually, before his muscles could give out and he sunk to the bottom of the sea. He was sure Yassen had known his radio was still working before stranding him in the ocean. Mostly sure.

But that's the moment, looking back on it Alex knows, the moment that it all became indelible and inevitable.

He dreams about that water a lot.

He thinks Smithers might have known about Kyra, honestly. Or at least known that he'd been getting tech help from someone that wasn't him, and it really wouldn't take a genius to flip through Alex's very short list of friends and pinpoint which one out of the three he had actually had the skills to help him.

Or, well. Technically four, but.

Well, Alex really doesn't think friend entirely covers what Yassen is. And he really doesn't think Smithers needs to know about him.

He loses Kyra eventually, at least as someone he's willing to put in danger just for his own whims and aims.

Kyra called it hubris. It was her decision, in the end, prefaced by an ultimatum that came so, so close to chaining and muzzling the beast.

He'd been angry, then. Now he knows better, and is surprised she stopped at just hubris.

He still knows how to reach her. Remembers the codes and addresses and passwords. But the Alex she wanted had never deserved her, and the Alex she deserved is dead.

So Smithers must have known about Kyra, once upon a time, back when the mission reports would come in with technical discrepancies and actions based on information that never should have been available to him.

Now, Smithers might know something else. If he looks at the mission reports that have him taking out the bad guy with weapons never issued to him, or making daring escapes in no-win situations. Alex really hopes that he never figures out who the shape of that something else resembles.

He's got a lot more to lose, now.

Alex comes careening to a halt about halfway across the dam. It's the middle of the night, and the only thing he can see by is moonlight from a waxing gibbous overhead.

"Alex," Yassen hisses. He comes to his own stop a few feet behind him, much more gracefully than Alex's skidding stumbling.

It's not the first time Yassen has said his name with that tone tonight. In fact, Alex thinks this might be a new record for the amount of times anyone has said his name in such utter irritation. It's rather impressive. Alex would have relished the power he had to make someone as hardened as Yassen stress like this if he weren't equally as panicked at the moment. He does think he's also a bit more excited than his companion, though. He double-checks his location and then reaches through the rail at the dam edge and feels around.

"My turn," Alex throws over his shoulder with a grin. He doesn't get one back. "Ah ha!" There it is. He tosses the rig he'd un-velcrowed from the outer ledge to Yassen and starts preparing the matching one already on his back. "Mrs. Jones sprung for the backup this time. I think I'm finally growing on her."

Yassen turns over the rig in his hands like it might contain a wild animal. "Did she equip you with a weapon?" He shoots back, squinting down at a zipper.

And, well. Alex doesn't have entirely much to say to that. Even in the dim moonlight Alex can see Yassen's deep frown at his lack of response. Alex shifts on his feet and continues his checks with the suit. "That's what you're for."

Alex really hadn't thought the frown could get deeper.

"Alex," Yassen says, calmly. "I am not jumping off this dam."

Alex grins as he walks over and takes the pack from Yassen's hands. "Did you know it's the tallest artificial wall in the world?" Yassen closes his eyes and mutters something in Russian, and Alex is so shocked by the reaction that he laughs out loud. He adjusts the rig, hold it up for Yassen to strap into, and Alex has to admit to some surprise when Yassen actually does without another glare or complaint. He helps Yassen get set up, and keeps the smile on his face the entire time no matter how nervous he gets.

He brute-forces that feeling into longevity, refuses to think about all the reasons why this was a ridiculously stupid idea and all the ways they might messily die in the next minute.

They help each other over the rail, and look down into the inky shadows below.

God, was this stupid. He can't believe he'd actually agreed to this extraction plan back in briefing.

"Don't forget the parachute," Alex says, and then jumps.

Alex falls to the Earth with nothing but a backpack strapped to him, overcome with the whip-crack thrill, wind rushing through his air and stomach lurching over itself and that beast roaring from his lungs again, everything brilliant for a few infinite moments.

Alex look out over the dark, sprawling valley and at the epic mountains in the distance and thinks that yeah, there really are worse way to die, if it all did go wrong in the next handful of seconds.

He turns his head to see Yassen a little ways above him, and despite all the posturing and complaining from before, he somehow looks more graceful than anybody else Alex has ever seen BASE jump before.

It's over quickly, which is both a blessing and a curse, and Alex does take a second to thank the universe for both their parachutes deploying when they needed them to.

Being on the ground again actually sends Alex into a fit of dizziness, the stillness jarring. He laughs hysterically, trying to comprehend the last sixty seconds and tripping on his feet as he keeps his neck arched back to make sure Yassen lands safely. He stumbles over to Yassen as soon as the man lands, probably crowding him horribly but not finding it in him to care much.

Yassen, the bastard, barely has to work to catch himself on his feet. He does close his eyes though. "You are going to give me a heart attack one day, Alex," Yassen says after a few long moments, breathing heavily through his nose.

Alex giggles silently, heart still beating wildly in his chest. "No, one day I'm going to take you Kapowsin to wingsuit fly, and we can laugh about this after." 

Yassen gives him a look, eyebrow raised.

Alex looks back, still catching his breath. He just nods at Yassen, smiling widely. He means it.

Yassen looks up at the sky and turns his back to deal with his parachute. "Move quickly. They'll get down here soon enough," Yassen dismisses him, but Alex can hear the smile in his voice anyway.

Yassen working in the shadows behind Alex's new villain-of-the-week, a clandestinely friendly face behind a wall of danger. The ghost of Yassen's presence in a place the man would have absolutely no reason to ever be, leaving gifts and hints exactly when and where Alex needs them.

Yassen for a split second in a hallway, whispering the way to run. Yassen half a mile away on a rooftop, saying hello to Alex with the clattering of bullet casings. Yassen's voice over an intercom, giving him a countdown in a voice that says good luck.

They just keep running into each other. It's enough to make truly Alex question the size of the criminal underworld.

The one time Yassen points it out, disgruntled and covered in blood that's luckily not either of theirs but still Alex's fault regardless, Alex just responds with a cheeky line about fate and is met with a silent, narrow-eyed reprimand. Yassen never brings it up again, and Alex decides to follow suit, at least for the now.

Alex had only said it to lighten the mood (which despite Yassen's glare, Alex knows he totally achieved), but as the months pass with longer and longer stretches of violence and adrenaline and sacrifice, made bearable only by the blips of Yassen's presence, Alex begins to think there might be a little merit to the idea of fate after all.

Alex spends the first few hours in New Zealand making a mental map in his head of all the places he wants to come back and visit on his own time. It was stunning—mountains ringed with fluffy clouds stretching into the blue sky, waves pouring gently over infinitely long stretches of tan sand, pools dotting the land the color of pure turquoise. He wants more than anything to come back with a camera in hand, with no Mission Objective, and maybe a hang-glider or two.

All things for a far-off future though, because Alex is presently tasked with making his way to some scientific research bunker and retrieving a key player in the biochemistry field. Any information further than that is, to quote: "Not necessary to your mission, and out of your purview."

As per usual.

One of these days, Alex is going to get the bottom of what his Department actually does. Because the death-defying stunts they send him on half of the time just don't seem to align right with a cut and dry retrieval mission of a civilian package. He just doesn't quite understand his role with MI6. He's been working for them in some capacity for years now, and Alex still can't even tell whether they trust him. Half the time it feels like they're just playing with him, testing his limits for fun. He's starting to wonder if they just throw darts at a map and then spin a wheel to pick what kind of mission they want to send little Alex Rider on this week.

He works himself into a bit of a fit over all this as he makes his way to the research station, his foul mood building like a storm cloud, at complete odds with the peaceful beauty of the world around him.

But that's another thing, isn't it? Trekking through a rainforest, temperate or not, is really never a good idea when all you were provided with was a spotty sat phone and a tiny first-aid pack.

There's just no way any other agents were dragged around as ridiculously as he was, or he would have heard something around the water cooler about it by now. Or, you know, he thinks he would have, if any of the other agents ever actually talked to him.

Another grievance to add to the list. Whatever. When has loneliness ever killed anyone anyway?

Of course, by the time Alex has stomped his way over a mile into the forest, thankfully able to stay on a muddy, narrow road for most of the journey, he's met with only an empty building and an obvious set of footprints leading out the front door and off into the brush.

As per usual.

And really, how important could this guy be to go hunting through a forest for him? He'd already seen at least a dozen different species of spiders, most of which had a non-zero chance of inducing nightmares at some point down the line, and at least a few of which totally looked like they could bring him to his knees in a minute flat.

Whatever. He had the one job, right? Prize-wheel spun or not. So Alex begins his journey into the spiders, which quickly turned into spiders and bats, then spiders and bats and large slimy worm-slug things that had alien antenna and dozens of squirming little legs and... eventually Alex just decides to determinately hyper-focus on the flora rather than the fauna.

Amongst all those significantly less creepy bushes and mosses is his trail, which Alex is finding very easy to lose beneath the thick layer of plants on the ground if he's not paying rapt attention. His target has a heavier gait than he'd have expected from a scientist, he notices, but who really was he to judge?

He walks for ages.

The scientist was sent a communication about his arrival, though they'd never heard any reply back. Mail took awhile, this far away from civilization. They hadn't worried.

Alex begins to, now.

No matter how he spins it, Alex can't figure out why the man would have run out to the forest away from any sort of settlement or roads. Not with the little information he has, and not with only one set of footprints.

The mud starts to grow a little wetter. It takes him a while to really notice it, but there's a staticky noise growing louder and louder around him, and he spends longer than he would like to admit entertaining Lost-esque fantasies before realizing that the most likely culprit would be a waterfall somewhere nearby. There had been a few on the map of the area he'd memorized before the flight down. He didn't realize he'd walked far enough to reach them.

"Somewhere nearby" turns out to be less than a few hundred yards away, and Alex is extremely grateful that he had started slowing his pace a bit ago and hadn't gone toppling off the edge of the rather sudden drop-off.

The ground had turned from thick mud to slippery rock rather quickly, bringing Alex to a long cliff-side—the side of a basin, it seemed, a deep blue cove below and the thick forest continuing around on the other side. There're waterfalls cascading down from all around the basin, and Alex realizes that he's actually come out on a wide ledge himself, not quite at the very top. There's a waterfall chute a good few yards to his left that starts a good few feet above him. He sees trampled leaves and dirt smeared across the rocks headed toward it, and Alex follows them until the water is all but roaring in his ears.

He would have taken a moment to be astounded by the incredible view that had opened up in front of him if it wasn't for the growing, disquieting question of why the scientist's footprints had taken him here.

"I was hoping they would send you."

Alex freezes. The blood in his veins rushes ice-cold and the hair on the back of his neck stands straight up.

It is not good, in his line of work, to be recognized. Especially by face.

Alex turns slowly. A man comes out from the tree line a few feet to his left, down by the boulders that stack up toward the crest of the waterfall.

He'll say this: the man does not look like a scientist. Alex still isn't in a position to judge, but even if he wasn't expecting a labcoat and ill-fitting spectacles, the build of the man is enough to have Alex on edge, the width of his biceps unflexed enough to posit that Alex is, maybe, way out of his depth.

"Of course," Alex replies, trying not to let the tension seep into his voice. There's a chance that he's overreacting, that he misheard the emphasis on you, that he's getting too jumpy for his own good and there are a million sensible reasons for a jacked-up researcher to have led him on a goose-chase to a scenic overlook. "An envoy from the British government, just as you were informed."

Too good to be true. As. Per. Usual.

"No, no, you ain't just an envoy, are you, Alex Rider?"

And that just sucks, because Alex actually is, just this once, genuinely just an envoy.

The man stays looming in the treeline with a wide stance and a dangerous, sickening grin and Alex is suddenly aware of just how wet and slick the rock beneath his feet is.

He needs an escape route. He takes one look at the definitely-not-a-scientist and thinks he might have a chance at out-running him, the man's width not being exactly forest-friendly.

"See, that's not fair." He tried to buy time to think of a plan. "You know my name, but I don't know yours."

The man laughs. Still doesn't budge. Alex realizes he's waiting for Alex to make the first move, not looking worried in the slightest. That really doesn't bode well. He has to be smart, here. He takes a few steps forward, but edges farther out toward the brink of the cliff, getting closer to the man but also closer to the waterfall.

"Care to share?" Alex asks, the water misting and hitting his skin, almost making him shiver.

His plan works. The man steps closer, off the sturdy forest floor, unable to hear him over the rushing falls.

"You're face is just so banal," Alex continues, a bit louder, "Sorry, I just really don't remember you."

The man unfortunately doesn't rise to the bait and never stops that ugly, smarmy grin. "You're going to come with me," he nods at Alex, as if they'd just come to an agreement.

"Sure," Alex scoffs. Right after you catch me, big guy, he thinks. He's got a grip on the rocky surface below him, grooves of his boots dug into a small, scraggly section in the stone. He can turn and make the jump straight into the trees before the man could even think of doing the same, and then it's a dead sprint. He can run or hide or climb better and faster in this environment, he knows he can. It's just a matter of finding the right distraction he needs to get that split-second head-start.

Alex was always really good at pissing people off.

"How'd you end up stuck out here?" Alex gives him his most bratty, shit-eating smirk. "Waiting ages all alone to get some action, and all you got was little old me? I'd be honored, but…" He gestures to the man from head to foot with a curl to his mouth.

The grin doesn't quite go away, but he gets a narrow look, and the man takes another step, fully onto the wet stone and no longer with his feet in a wide stance underneath him. He's almost close enough to touch, if he really reached. "The honor's all mine, Alex. You've got such the reputation in certain circles."

Alex shrugged. "Well, I have heard I'm rather annoying. I just don't see it, personally."

The man tuts. "Oh, no. Rather that you're impossible to kill." He loses the smile. Leans forward. "He has quite the soft spot for you, don't he? Gregorovich."

Alex's heart stops beating in his chest. The man's grin comes flashing back, viscous, victorious.

"I'm going to make a show of you," he laughs.

People still underestimate Alex. It annoys him, most days. Other times, it's his biggest asset.

He doesn't think.

It's too easy.

Alex can't hear the crunch of skull over the rush of the waterfall.

The blood splatters out in a spray that gets lost in the mist from the falls and dyes a few of the puddles around his feet a deep, shining scarlet.

The man's legs are already half dangling off the side and it takes no effort at all to push the rest of him into the cascade and drop the body into the rapids below.

It's for the best, to have an incomplete memory of it, Alex thinks to himself later, crouched dizzy and retching bile over the plastic bowl in an aeroplane washroom.

He vows never to come back here.

He thinks of those beaches that he dreamed of bringing people to though, sometimes, and feels overcome with waves of sadness that are too big to explain.

That was the first time. Taking a life directly, purposefully, wanting too—

It never gets easier. His nightmares about spiders and other childish things quickly turn to bulging eyes rolling back into heads and blood gushing down waterfalls instead of water.

He never once regrets that one, though. Never once.

Alex has a flat—a mattress with a real iron frame, a shower caddy with all the sparse soaps that you'd expect from guy just starting out on his own, a few boxes of trinkets and medals and the like from his youth. He even has three flatmates, though he's pretty sure they'd all have to dig up their lease to recall his last name if asked.

But the point is, Alex has all these things, they're his, and together they make a semblance of a life.

There might never be food in the pantry for when he gets home beaten and blue in the pre-dawn hours, and he might not have a matching tumbler on the drinks trolley from that time the others' had all gone bourbon tasting at some new bar down the street together.

But he has a loop on the keyring holder nailed to the wall. And an old comic book that Tom lent him is pretty much permanent decoration underneath their telly, and no one seems to mind much.

He exists in this place, however impermanently. He tries to make the most out of it, build something solid for himself. He tells himself to be proud of what he has so far. He has a bed, flatmates, things.

Just not many prized things, things that are suppose to hallow the halls of a real home.

Those things of his are mostly intangible, anyway. Like Jack's new mailing address, memorized right next to Tom's same old phone number.

They both do get pulled out and dusted off sometimes, he has to remind himself. They do.

He's thankful for the memory exercises his uncle used to force him through, though. Because if it weren't for them he thinks he might have forgotten both a while ago.

They get to talk, sometimes, instead of just bleed and run.

They're in a waiting room at a train station, alone with the door locked, in a rare quiet moment where no one else in the world knows where either of them are. They sit side-by-side on the connected plastic chairs that fill the space, looking out through the one-way windows that run along one wall and peer out onto the platforms beyond. Alex has just pointed out a lady with a small Pomeranian in her absolutely gigantic purse, when it suddenly became two, then three, and Alex finds himself unable to hold in his incredulous laughter as the tiny furry heads just keep popping up from the top of the bag.

"There's no way she's fit a fourth in there, has she?" He says while trying to catch his breath.

It's even got a small smile on Yassen's lips. "If she has, I think one of us would be obligated to go out there and try to recruit her."

This sends Alex into a further fit of laughter.

They both have to go their separate ways soon. But for now, Alex can press his arm up against Yassen's and people-watch, pretend to live a life where they're just two regular, normal people with nothing better to do than waste time together.

He's got enough money to get out.

Everything Ian left him, and everything his parents left Ian.

Anywhere in the world.

It sounds lonely.

"Alex, you have no idea how many people want to see you dead."

Alex looks at him.

It's in the way he says it: aloof enough for it to be an indisputable fact, angry enough for it to be personal. And not just personal in the I don't want you to die, Alex way. No, Alex has heard that before. Years ago, in the poisonous shadows of Malagosto. Hears it in chorus any time they cross paths, in the knives Yassen shoves into his hands and the blood Yassen spills for him.

A lot of people discount Alex in the field of perception. Maybe see only quick and crafty, but don't linger on the idea that he could be discerning.

He is, though. And Alex listens to the timber Yassen's voice, thinks back to the high GCSE scores he has sitting in a bin back at his flat, quickly flips through his recent catalogue of run-ins with faces from his early days.

And comes to the conclusion:

"It was you on that roof."

Luckily for the sake of conversation, Alex has never doubted Yassen's perceptiveness. Alex confirms this for himself as he watches Yassen respond with nothing but two quick blinks, and then silence.

That's alright; Alex didn't need a confirmation.

"How many?" He asks instead.

Yassen takes a deep breath through his nose, eyes locked intensely on Alex.

Enough seconds go by that Alex starts to wonder if he might not get an answer after all.

Alex takes the time to think a little more. Through the lists of people that want him dead, and all the times Yassen's been there. Eventually he thinks back to the one that started it all.

It hits him hard, like a bullet to the chest. The one it seems he's been spared from a hundred times over.

"Yas. My clone—Grief's clone, was it—was that you too?"

Yassen can yield silence like a weapon.

So many things rush through Alex's head. The clearest is that sunset, pink gold and blue, setting over his life of spies and violence and sacrifice, or so Alex had thought. Had dreamed, at the time. That sunset and his best friends walking by his side and his future so bright ahead of him and that barely-there, cork stopper pop echoing from so far away. He remembers how he'd turned to look, then.

A lot of things run through Alex's mind. He aches something fierce.

"You're focusing on the wrong things, Alex," Yassen says eventually.

And Alex really doesn't fucking know what to do with that.

The beast has fun.

Good fun.

He thinks it might be strangling him in the process. It almost feels intentional.

"Think you'll ever have a use for that skill, when you're retired?" Alex asks into the walkie-talkie he pilfered from the ground. He takes care to not look too closely at the bodies littering the reddening snow.

It's safe to use the comms. No one else is on them. Alex is sure of that—it was Yassen he was talking about, after all.

Alex looks up and squints. Yassen gracefully moves to his knees from his spot lying on the roof, turning his rifle over to rest horizontal on his lap. He shifts to pick up the matching radio Alex can see sitting on the building ledge next to him.

"You'll have to tell me," comes the familiar accent, signal clear and strong with the proximity.

Alex is still catching his breath. He chokes out an unsteady laugh and turns away, beginning his long hike back to the safe-house.

Doubt is a funny thing.

See, these run-ins with Yassen, they aren't exactly new. It really wasn't that long ago that Alex was seeing Yassen everywhere he went. He had been younger and less experienced then, yes, but why he was seeing Yassen hasn't exactly changed this time around.

It was just that… something… about the man.

(There's a reason he scored so low on his English exams, alright? )

The face that launched a thousand ships, or in his case, Alex thinks wryly, the face that launched one incredibly sad teenage psychotic break. Said "psychotic break" actually ended up saving quite a few lives in the end, so Yassen is really doing much better than Helen on all fronts.

Alex really doesn't think prolonged exposure or war-time codependence (or whatever other ridiculously pitying phrases his old therapist might have conjured up if given the chance) from his time with Scorpia really affected his mind that much. Aside from all the other general unpleasantness with Julia and Max and the other recruits it was… well, Alex usually decides to keep the sappier, more senseless words to himself and just stick with good, those weeks spent with Yassen. Actually getting to know him. Train with him. Talk with him. Argue with him. Just listen to his voice.

Off topic again.

Really, his therapist would probably be proud of how well he's managing to look at the bright side of things.

But all those times he saw Yassen before, before he knew him at all beyond a flicker-quick meeting in the halls of Grief's prison… he never quite got a clear answer on how many of those times were actually real, did he? Sometimes he wonders the same thing now.

Which is absurd. Even ignoring the physical proof, Alex knows Yassen had to have been there all these times. There are too many things that he simply couldn't make up himself. Yassen is looking out for him. Alex is absolutely sure he is.

At least, he's sure about most of the times.

Almost all.

Alex thinks you can only really combat doubt with faith.

Or maybe need.

This, this is the kind of mission that grabs Alex by the back of his head, tears at the roots of his hair, and makes him look hard and heavy at the fucking mess he's made of his life.

It's the kind of mission that cuts him to pieces, metaphorically just as thoroughly as literally.

The kind of mission that makes him distrust his judgement at a base level, that makes him hate himself, more than words, for letting himself become Ian and his father so easily, without even a fight.

Shame. Most of all, shame.

He wonders what Tom and Kyra are doing right now.

The next slice comes down the inside of his thigh. It's deep, fuck is it deep, and Alex sees red and wonders just what exactly isn't whole together inside of his leg anymore.

Just that idiot orphan kid from Chelsea, Alex thinks, who chose this.

The next one isn't from a knife, Alex doesn't think, but his left eye's been swollen shut for a good while now and he can't see his torturer come at him. It feels more like a needle, sharp and electric-hot and dragging, deep deep deep into the thin skin at the side of his neck and then there's a burst of cool rushing through him that sends racking shivers through his body and turns his gut, and then the pain is pulling out, slowly, back through through his flesh but Alex is already not entirely aware it, the sparking needle-prick pain becoming less of a feeling and more of a thought, a confused one at that, and god, was it cold in here? He could really use a blanket, and or a cuppa, maybe he should ask—

He curses behind clenched teeth. This is not good.

His torturer laughs at him. "Don't try to fight it, kid. We've heard about ya. Double-dosed it in preparation. You're a very special guest, did ya know that?"

Alex hasn't know that. He's been down here for hours, and this is the first time they've spoke to him.

It was alright, really. The started with the hanging—hardly the worst, and by the ankles, Alex supposes to keep the blood-flow interesting. Then it had been some of the usual beating, run-of-the-mill fists and boots. Ow, yeah. But nothing he couldn't compartmentalize.

The knives had come out last.

Alex didn't much care for those.

At least his torturer finally deigning to speak to him would keep his mind off the pain. Only downside is that Alex is pretty sure that was some sort of truth-serum-esque agent in whatever he'd just been injected with, and whoo was he feeling it.

"So!" The man says with a clap, and it echoes around the stone walls of the room and rings against the walls of his skull. "Ready to talk? Mr. Vasquez has been so excited to get to know you."

Alex tries to roll his eyes, but doesn't get very far. He probably looks like he's having a seizure. "See," Alex huffs out, trying harder than he ever has in his entire life to focus. "Normally I'd love to, but you're just not the best conversation partner are you?"

Ooh, ow. He's forgotten this one doesn't take well to snark. Alex didn't even see him pick up that one. Luckily he doesn't remember any vitally important arteries being in the shoulder.

The usual parade of threats and violence. Luckily Alex is aces at karaoke. Focus on that, focus on creating the backing tracks in his head to upmost precision, and not much else could be pulled out from the depths of his brain in the meanwhile. At least if you're a trained perfectionist like Alex.

It gets him by for long enough. He tells himself that he barely even feels his torturer play with the rest of his knife-set.

He really is reaching the worrying end of the Jake Bugg songbook though, when Alex hears splashing. It's far away, but his senses are just wired and confused enough from whatever drugs they pumped in him to make it out as a ringing anomaly amongst everything else.

"Who's that," he asks, dumbly, breaking off mid-chorus. Alex will later be embarrassed to admit he was definitely slurring at this point.

His torturer shoots him a confused look. Sadly for him, that would be the last unfortunate expression to ever grace his face.

The firing of the gun is loud, reverberating around the room, but it could have been worse—Alex doesn't think any blood got on him.

There's a muttered curse. Alex recognizes the word enough to know it's Slavic, recognizes it as Russian because he'd know the voice in his sleep.

A jostling. Oh, his legs. He'd forgot about those. Pins and needles, is the term. It rather hurts.

That familiar voice, quiet, by closer this time. "Oh, Little Alex. What have you gotten yourself into this time?"

He's suddenly overcome with a horrible, horrible feeling in his gut, feels shell-shocked with it. "Sorry," Alex can't help but mutter, over and over again, because he's failed, and it doesn't matter—the world, Vasquez and the bloody MI6, not one of them matters, only he matters, and Alex is slumped bloody and listless in from of him now, because he failed.

How is Yassen suppose to love him back now, when he can so easily get himself as fucked over as this?

Yassen hushes him, but Alex keeps saying sorry as he feels Yassen untie his hands from the back of the chair and as Yassen lifts him up with an arm around his waist. He keeps pressing apologies into the man's neck as he moves them toward the door and Alex trips on his feet.

Yassen squeezes Alex's waist and Alex tightens his arm over Yassen's shoulder and squeezes the hand holding his arm there in return.

There's more splashing now, louder, beneath their feet, carried on the echoes of narrow stone walls. Alex squints, and there's light, dim and watery, but he isn't sure where it's coming from.

"Focus on the pain, Alex." Yassen tugs him in one direction and Alex goes, stumbling, trusting. "It will keep you awake. Feel it."

"I don't like the pain."

"This way, come on."

More splashing, and through the swells of squishy feelings his nerve-endings are trying to send him he thinks he feels his torn-up socks getting wet, and he thinks that might be the worst part of it all.

Another corner turned. The light doesn't change. Every stone wall looks the same. He's dripping a steady trail of blood into the puddles below them.

"It hurts." Alex chokes out, tripping again, and again. Yassen doesn't loosen his hold and they do not slow down. "Soooooo many things hurt, d'you know that?"

Yassen's grip around his waist tightens.

Alex presses into his hold—it's a very nice one, and he really can't be blamed. Alex would much rather focus on this, than all the pain and the failure. He rather likes how heavy it feels, like a weighted blanket. Alex is barely feeling his wet feet on the stone, now, thank goodness. Nor much his dripping thigh. "Y'must be magic. It's starting to hurt less."

Yassen hisses his name, and then they're turning another corner sharper than the one before, the shift in momentum tugging the breath from Alex's lungs and making him feel like hurling. He blinks his eyes open and the light burns, so he closes them again. "Focus on the pain, Alex," Yassen says again, and he's quite mean with it, isn't he? Rude bastard.

"Pain's overrated. Why can't we just focus on nice things?"

Yassen sighs, gets tight and huffy with it. Alex would try to roll his eyes at him if it weren't already so hard to keep them open. "Like what, Alex?" Yassen eventually replies, and Alex tries a grin. Win.

"Sooooooooo many nice things, Yas. D'you have nice things?"

Yassen doesn't respond, and it's probably just because he's right in the middle of carrying his half-dead weight, but Alex still feels a little sad, anyway.

"S'okay. You can have some of mine. They're just…" Alex thinks very hard for the word. The short pants of their breathing and the echoing clatter of their footsteps is suddenly very loud in the air. Yassen jostles him, and it feels a bit more intentional than the par-for-the-course stumbling of the past few minutes. "Thoughts," Alex says on an exhale, and yeah, that's it. All his nice things are those. "I like to imagine a… little cabin, somewhere. Where Blunt and Jones can't find me. Somewhere with no one else around, so I can't trip into any more giant conspiracies. No pain there."

Yassen hums at him; or maybe it's just a grunt, Alex did just drop more of his weight on him. He didn't realize how fast the feeling in the whole leg would go once his thigh finally checked-out.

"You're there too," he muses, picturing rather nice things indeed, that little cabin and tall trees and a fireplace. No one around for ages, just him and Yassen. Not a weapon in sight. Maybe a dog. "Somewhere in… France, maybe. We can learn French. No one would know who we are."

Yassen breaths weirdly again. Alex starts to wonder if he's hurt too. "I already speak French."

Of course he does. "Brill. Then you can teach me." Alex can't feel either leg now. God, is he really tired.

"D'you want that one?" Alex asks. "That thought?" He really hopes Yassen does. It's one of his best ones.

"It's a beautiful thought, Alex," Yassen says. His voice is really quiet, Alex can barely hear him. He hopes he's not too out of breath from basically carrying him. Alex thinks that he's never heard Yassen say the word beautiful before. He begins to wonder if Yassen was just humoring him, or making fun of him. He frowns.

"I mean it," Alex stresses. "Even if it's silly. Y'wanted nice."

"It's not silly." They turn another corner quickly and Alex, oh, Alex thinks he might actually throw up this time.

"Then you like it," Alex tries to smile. His vision is fading a bit. That's alright—Yassen's here. "We should get a dog."

He's brought out of it a moment later, with Yassen's voice right in his ear. "Italy." Alex turns his head toward the voice, thinks maybe he feels some warm part of Yassen against his temple. "Italy is nice, this time of year. The trees are turning gold."

Alex turns his face into Yassen's neck again, shielding his eyes—the light through his eyelids feels slightly brighter, but he really can't tell. Italy sounds nice. More than nice. "Promise?" He mumbles.

Yassen doesn't respond. That's alright, too. Alex never expected him to.

The light fades. He drifts off with the warm press of Yassen's body against his the only thing his mind knows.

He's got to wear his clothes in and out of the bathroom at his flat, now, long sleeves and all.

He supposes he doesn't have to, but Alex is drained, and just the thought of coming up with another story, of making his life into another lie, makes Alex want to claw the flesh from his bones.

It's not a big deal. It just a a few extra minutes of sticky uncomfortableness in the humid, unventilated room. It's such a minor inconvenience that Alex almost feels silly being wound up by it, except for the fact that it's such a stupid inconvenience to be having in his own home, and every time he has to change in that room instead of his bedroom on the off-chance that one of his flatmates might pass by in the halls is another time that he has to think about how he got the scars, about why, and those thoughts are vivid and bloody and palpable.

But he knows it's really not a big deal.

He doesn't even see him, his favorite time.

It's the time that sticks in his memories the longest, too, despite how little actually happened, simply because it was fun, and also the first time that Alex realizes there might be the slightest chance that Yassen is serious, about that nebulous future that Alex likes to envision sometimes. He thinks about it when he's either distressed and in need of a distraction or when he's bored out of his mind—so pretty much all the time.

It'd been in Morocco. He'd been sent after an assassin who had come up on the radar after an extremely extended spell in hiding, and MI6 had sent him after her with speed of capture as the imperative before she could go back under.

She was quite the character, Alex had though while reading her dossier, most interesting being her proclivity for disguises. Like Mission: Impossible, Alex had thought with a grin. Beya (and that's all she went by, a mononym with no surname attached, which Alex secretly thought was somewhere between ridiculously self-important and kinda cool), also had a rather brutal reputation for killing on site, and was credited for almost half-a-dozen international agent deaths at the top of her very long rap-sheet.

So, naturally, the British government decided to send their greenest field agent. The CIA had been the ones to bring the intel to them and would be sending their own agent to meet Alex on the ground, Jones had told him. He'd be fine.

Alex almost said something about it. The beast didn't let him.

He was happy to be here, though. Alex wished he had more time to slow down and look around. The bazaar was bright and colorful, tents and blankets draped at every corner and everything and anything you could think of hanging down around you, jewelry and pots and scarves, a hundred voices all chattering over each other in dozens of different languages. It was all just plain exciting, in an all-encompassing way Alex hadn't felt in a long while.

Unfortunately, there was an assassin using this place for a rather not-so-good-for-the-world meeting at some point today, so Alex had to temper his delight until he caught her—or she killed him, whichever came first.

The most immediate problem was that penchant for disguises, Alex realized, and as he looked around at every manner of clothing and wraps and scarves you could think of, in every color, he began to wonder if his mission was even possible.

That's when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He tucked himself between a stall selling rugs and a mudbrick wall before tugging out his burner for the mission from his pocket. A text message had just come through:

Blue saree, braided blonde hair.

Alex frowned. He wondered for just a second if this was his CIA contact that Jones had promised would meet him. It's the only thing that made sense—the Department had been the only ones he'd sent the number to after he bought it this morning. But it was so informal, and broke procedure horribly. It didn't feel right.

A couple of children came crashing into his hiding place, screaming after each other in what seemed to be an intense game of tag. They didn't pay him any mind, running back out of the alcove as quickly as they came, but it shook Alex back into action. As he started walking the streets again, he kept an eye out for any blue sarees, just in case.

The lack of information was driving him crazy. He didn't even know who Beya was meeting. All he had was a blurry CCTV photograph and a general idea of the time. Another fruitless half hour passed and Alex was about to start just accosting every single person he walked by when there came another buzz from his pocket. This time:

Get out of the West quarter.

Alex pressed himself against the side of another nearby building and bit the inside of his lip. Ok, so whoever this was could see him. Or at least track his location. Whether that meant they were actually nearby or using digital tech was unknown, but neither option boded well for Alex. Or, well, they wouldn't, if it weren't for the strangely helpful tone of the messages. It's got to be the American, Alex concluded. Some Maverick that blew past procedure and decided to have a little fun with the job and spook the Brit for kicks. He could respect it, Alex thought. At least someone was having fun assassin hunting.

He got out of the West quarter.

It was about fifteen minutes later when he finally saw a blue saree stopped at a stall a feet yards down the street. He squinted trying to see the resemblance with Beya, but the woman's back was turned. It gave him a good view of her straw-colored braid, though.

He decided to take the risk. He begun making his way toward her, but only got a few feet before the woman turned, clocking his gaze almost immediately. There was a second where she froze, and before Alex could think to do anything she was running away and around a corner, too fast for Alex to dream of catching up to her in these crowds.

There's another buzz. A poor attempt at spywork.

Alex scoffed. Wow. He was offended for a few seconds more, before the implications of the message hit him.

His mystery texter couldn't just see his location, but could watch his every move.

Nobody else that Alex could see made a move, toward where the saree-wrapped woman went or toward Alex himself. It was looking less and less like his CIA operative.

He walked a bit more cautiously now, eyes peeled for the bright blue garment. He tried to reconcile the distant face he'd seen before and the photograph he had, but the latter was in black and white and had Beya in heavy make-up that made it hard to distinguish her features.

He just didn't know for sure. But something in him wanted to trust that the words in his phone weren't leading him astray.

He was operating, stupidly in retrospect, on the knowledge that that cyan color would be hard to miss. What was easy to miss was an innocuous stall owner, coming up to him with a tray of silver kitchen utensils and a wide, experienced-marketer smile. Alex was geared up to smile back and politely decline, when all of a sudden said utensils were flying toward him and a familiar braid was swinging out of a hastily pinned-up hood.

Alex made it out of the way of the of the knife that came swinging at him from one of Beya's hands, but wasn't quite so lucky with the fork.

Which, ow, Jesus, why on Earth had anybody sharpened these things so much? He was not going to have a fun time explaining this scar. He kicked out and stumbled backward, and it felt like he caught at least something bony in her torso.

Alex ran (more like flailed) into his ticket out, which happened to be a large tray of spices laid out in beautiful towers at the stand behind him. He managed to grab it before Beya was on him again, and with a shouted, very genuine apology to the owner who was already yelling at him in rapid-fire something, he lifted it over his head and swung down as hard as he could.

He clocked her right at the top of her skull and brought her to her knees, which was great, but also sent a cloud of spices into the air so thick that Alex couldn't breathe. He'd luckily closed his eyes before the impact, but it seemed like Beya might have not been so lucky if her shouts were anything to go by. Alex coughed and stumbled blindly to the side, trying to put some distance between them while the spices still lingered in the air.

People were shouting and screaming around him now, and the chaos they'd caused seemed to have made people a dangerous mix of scared and angry. The man who'd owned the spice was coming toward him, wielding something that looked large and heavy and waving it at him, a beyond angry look on his face, and a couple of other enraged stall-owners were making their way toward him too.

Alex didn't know Arabic, or any other of the many languages spoken in this place, but he could understand tone. And as much as it killed him to leave Beya when she was at her most vulnerable and he had the best chance at completing his mission, it seems the locals weren't about to give him much choice.

So with one last look at Beya's hunched form, Alex took off down the street.

He tried to circle back, maybe come around from the opposite direction and see if he could still take advantage of his giant spice-debacle, but the second he started heading that way he got a text that simply read Bad idea.

He would have been rather upset if it weren't just plain funny, from a certain point of view.

Good job with the spices, came the next text, though you might want to think of a disguise yourself.

Which… was a good idea, because he's pretty sure he had cumin up his nose and that his shirt started out white this morning, not bright orange.

He felt a little bad about the stealing. Alex had to keep reminding himself of the bigger picture.

The next text came as Alex was making his way through the North quarter, containing another outfit description, even including a change in hair color. Alex was pleased to note that he forced her to cover pretty much her entire body to hide the spice detritus.

It became a bit like a scavenger hunt, turning corners looking for little clues he gets over his device, hints changing every every now and then and the adventure starting all over again.

Then he got a text with a picture, this time, of an aerial view of a building Alex vaguely recognized with a turquoise-tiled courtyard. It was accompanied by the two words Go now.

Alex had had a feeling for a good while, and he was sure of it by now. He stowed the burner and ran.

He ended up, rather unfortunately for all involved, having to jump out of a low first floor window and tackle Beya to the ground like a rugby player. It'd careened them into another couple of stalls, and Alex was really, really starting to feel horrible about it.

They tussled through the alleys and streets for a while, picking up items off of walls and tables and using them as weapons. Alex realized quickly that if he hadn't had the environment to manipulate in his favor, she would have bested him a long time ago. She was agile, and crafty, and, apparently, scarily dangerous with a pair of ornate iron fireplace pokers.

Alex had only managed to come out on top with the aide of another poor stall-owner's tangia. It had shattered when it made contact with the back of her skull, unfortunately, but the boiling stew inside had definitely helped close the case, so Alex was only so sorry about the damage.

Alex heaved in a few breaths after, staring down at the woman and half-expecting her to pop up and immediately try and start round three. Thank goodness, or thank the numerous head injuries, Beya stayed down for the count. Eventually he turned back to the owner of the tangia, and saw that the neighboring stand wasn't fairing much better than the one he'd rugby-tackled Beya into. That storefront, displaying long and intricately detailed tapestries hanging from the walls, stood with slightly more damage than the stew stand, and their owners were huddled between the two clutching at each other with wide-eyes fixed on him.

Alex put his hands up by his head. "Hey. Hi. I am so sorry. I swear, it's over."

The woman seemed to relax, but once the fear of violence and property damaged vanished, immediately started talking over each other in rapid broken English. Alex sighed and looked up at the sky, covered in stew and spices, and really wanted to just sit down and find some edible lunch.

Beya was finally detained and taken out of Alex's hands by the American agent, who had finally decided to show up once the ruckus Alex was causing had probably disturbed his vacation or whatever, and Alex had gone back to his cheap hotel and all but collapsed face-down on to the mattress.

And he'd felt the outline of the cellphone cutting into his ribs, and for a second, entertained a thought.

A second was all he needed.

Thanks.

Least he could do.

Alex sat there and stared at the screen for what felt like hours, but was only probably a handful of minutes. There was no reply. Of course there wasn't.

Alex placed the phone on the table underneath the window and walked into the bathroom, taking a much deserved shower and trying valiantly to get the turmeric stains out of his skin.

When he finally padded back out into the room there was a simple You're welcome. sitting on his screen. Alex exhaled and plopped down on the edge of his mattress, phone clutched in his hand.

Feel a bit bad about how much of the bazaar I wrecked.

The next one came within the minute.

I'm sure those people would rather a lost afternoon's sales over having a killer in their streets.

Yeah, one of them actually tried to give me one of her tapestries for free. It was huge, it must have taken her ages to make it.

The next response wasn't as swift. You should have accepted, was the text that rolled in after the longest minute of Alex's life. Followed almost immediately by: It would have looked nice in the cabin.

Alex read the messages with a skip in his heart, and a fair amount of embarrassment flushing under his cheeks. He tapped his thumb swiftly against the hard plastic of the phone for a few long seconds, then typed out a reply with a huff of nervous laughter, as if trying to convince himself of the joke.

Better in our summer cottage on the beach.

Alex didn't think he breathed for a long while. Eventually he threw the phone against the headboard and shoved himself up on the other side of the bed, curling into himself as tight as possible. He fell asleep decidedly Not Thinking about things.

He woke up the next morning with a single message on his burner.

I'm sure. I'll defer to your judgement.

It's not much at all. But Alex couldn't wipe the grin off his face.

They're running through the moonlit woods in Florida (although woods is an overly nice and pretty erroneous term, and moonlit makes it seem much more bright and peaceful than it actually is), finally, it seems, on the same side for once.

At least to put it broadly. Yassen has just shot a high-up Scorpia agent point blank after he threatened Alex. If that doesn't align them at least for an evening, Alex doesn't know what would.

The man's wife, unfortunately, had been standing right around the corner, having evidently chosen the worst night possible to snoop on her husband's surreptitious business affairs.

Even more unfortunately was the fact that this Scorpia agent and his wife were rich rich, the kind of rich that had private security guards on-site at all times. Ones that greatly out-gunned and out-numbered them, and were more than happy to give chase through kilometres of undeveloped brush and foliage hunting for murderous intruders.

Which is totally untrue at least on one count, because the man of the house had invited both of them in himself, just… separately, and with vastly different intents.

Regardless, Yassen and Alex now find themselves both on the run together, and if the situation wasn't quite so deadly Alex actually would be pretty excited by it.

The scrub just seems to go on forever, and Alex wonders nervously if Yassen's plan is just to go until they hit ocean. Luckily, it isn't too much longer before Alex feels Yassen's firm grip on his arm, jerking him sharply to the right and not letting up steam. He wants to ask where they're headed, but he can't risk the sound. The twigs breaking under them are already bad enough.

The grip never lets up on his arm, tugging him in what feels like a wide arc. Then Yassen is slamming him around again, this time to the left, but it's so rough that Alex goes tumbling.

His back hits a tree, and he's gasping in an involuntary breath right before Yassen is crowding him and pressing his palm over Alex's mouth. They breathe there together for a moment, too close. Then Yassen is making the shushing motion with his lips and grabbing Alex by the shoulders, slightly shifting him to his right to slot better between him and the tree, lining up their feet and thighs. It—Alex doesn't know how he feels about that. No one has ever been allowed to manhandle him like that. Or even ever moved to try. The fact that Yassen just did it so easily sent… something… flittering in his stomach.

Yassen leans closer to him, somehow, and Alex is all of a sudden hyper-aware of every single point where their bodies meet. Yassen's breath against his ear makes his whole body shiver against his will. Alex barely hears what he's saying to him over the pounding in his ears. He blames the sprinting.

"We are around a clearing. Tree is best bet. Do. Not. Move."

Alex exhales against Yassen's cheek. Actually tries to pay attention. Nods, carefully. He turns his head just a slight bit in the direction Yassen's face isn't and sees the smattering of trees around what Alex trusts is a clearing, which is just out of view behind him. The trees look strange, he realizes, and it finally clicks why Yassen has him pressed so intimately into the trunk of theirs.

The base of it is pretty standard for a tree, wide and round. But whatever species of plant this is is weird, because once you move up a foot or two the trunk shrinks and twists, losing its width and growing branch stems that look more like those you'd find in flowers. The leaves at the end of the branches are palms, which provide good coverage where they are but aren't exactly numerous enough to completely cover two grown men.

It's what Alex would call doing in a pinch, by his standards. He's a bit disappointed that it came from the Yassen Gregorovich.

"This is your great plan?" Alex whispers incredulously, turning his head back, his cheek ending up pressing right against Yassen's. His breath punches out of his chest with a jolt when Alex realizes that it's the cheek with the scar, and he clenches the muscles in his stomach and refuses to breathe, trying not to do anything to brush up against it. Doing so would feel… invasive. Too intimate, something that crosses a line that Alex doesn't feel like he deserves to cross.

Yassen tilts his head closer to his ear, moving his scar away from Alex enough for him to pull in a shallow breath of air. "Hush, Alex," Yassen repeats even quieter, yet somehow still managing to sound annoyed and reprimanding.

It irritates him, honestly, because Alex did not ask to be shoved behind a tree, thank you, and he was just trying to be so considerate. Alex tries to pull back to glare at Yassen, but only gets a couple of centimetres away before the smooth bark of the palm is stopping him.

All it really achieves is bringing their faces closer.

"There is no way this works," Alex hisses. Yassen stares daggers at him. "What exactly is the back-up plan?"

Yassen's eyes flick past Alex, out somewhere into the clearing, and it doesn't look like he likes what he sees. God, this plan is going to get them killed. Alex refuses to sit there like ducks, and has his mouth open to say so when Yassen moves.

He had, somehow, forgotten all about where Yassen's hands were. Hadn't felt them move from his shoulders at all.

But they're at his sides, now, lower, squeezing around his waist tight and heavy and there's a pressure at his hips from Yassen's thumb and forefinger pressing in hard enough that Alex knows there'll be shadows of bruises, and it all rushes through him like a bolt of electricity just as much as it freezes him completely still.

He realizes, belatedly, that Yassen's upset with him, and this is suppose to hurt. Alex is feeling quite the opposite of that.

Alex's minds blanks. He feels like has no more breath in him. He forgets what they were even doing. The only things he can focus on are the large palms wrapped around his sides and the molten-hot pressure of Yassen's fingers digging into the flesh above his hips.

"Alex." Yassen hisses one more time at him, barely audible, punctuating the words. "Be. Quiet."

Alex looks at him in the darkness and feels a lot of things, all at once, a lot of things that crash over him gently like a wave on the shore, things that might have been building and cresting for ages, things that settle excitably and happily next to the heavy-beating of his heart and the electric-heat of Yassen's hands on him.

He's got just enough annoyance left in him to jut out his chin and whisper, quieter yet firmer than anything before. "Make me."

It should have been more of a shock, Yassen leaning forward and kissing him, but instead it feels like the perfect, natural culmination of everything they've ever been and done for each other. Yassen presses Alex against the tree so hard that his spine aches, slots their lips together, so perfectly like they're puzzle pieces. He squeezes Alex's waist so tight that all Alex can do is grab onto his forearms and pull him closer, press into it.

It's just pressure, plush and heavy, but it's the best kiss Alex's ever had.

And then Yassen pulls away and Alex feels a pain deep behind his ribs, his heart jumping, no no no no no running through his head, and Alex is jerking forward to capture Yassen's mouth in another kiss before the man can even open his eyes.

Alex can't think about anything else but the way he feels against him, is just too overwhelmed, and takes as much as he can. Yassen lets him.

Eventually Yassen pulls away again, but doesn't relent his grip on his sides and stays close enough that their noses brush.

They stand there, still aside from the rising and falling of their chests, sharing space, and Alex thinks that maybe he's never felt true contentedness before this moment. A bit later he's thanking his lucky stars that Yassen's dumb plan did, in fact, work, because Alex had utterly and entirely forgotten about everything beyond their little bubble by the time Yassen is taking a few tentative steps away to peer into the clearing, what feels like a million and one lifetimes later. 

Yassen comes back to Alex with a slight nod, and Alex's heart squeezes when he steps back into Alex's space as close as they were before, almost stutters right out of his chest when Yassen fits a hand back over the permanent-imprint he'd left on his side.

"Stay quiet and follow me," Yassen whispers. Alex nods, watching him as Yassen takes a few moments to scope the area around them one more time. "Ready?" he asks, looking back at Alex. Alex meets his eyes and can't help but to just grin, wide as he ever has.

As they sneak their way through the Florida brush, his lips still tingling and the phantom warmth of Yassen's hold still on his hips, Alex has the inane thought that he is starting to owe Scorpia quite a lot. 

"Alex… what do you think about coming to mine for Christmas? I've got the tree, the eggnog… you can stay 'til New Year—"

"Jack, I'm so sorry. I think I'll be away over holiday."

"Jack? Jack, you there?"

"I'm here, Alex."

"Look, I know, I know, but the world doesn't stop just because it's Christmas! My job has to come first."

"Does it really? Let someone else save the planet for once. I'm not going to let you be alone at Christmas again, Alex."

"It's alright! I'll be off traveling the world, meeting a ton of new people, it'll practically feel like a vacation. Trust me, I've had worse Christmases."

"…I mean—Jack, you know I—"

"Alex, just. Forget it. Come home to me."

"I just can't, Jack. I'm sorry."

"Yeah. I know you are."

"It's good to hear your voice, Jack. Happy Christmas."

"Uh huh. Happy Christmas."

He re-breaks his foot on a dumb mission that Alex doesn't even care to remember the details of. Medical tells him that it's going to heal crooked, much slower this time around, and that he'll probably have pain on-and-off there for the rest of his life, nothing they can do about it. They shove him in a boot and send him on his way.

He can still do his job. Mrs. Jones doesn't seem worried, at least—she tells him breezily to take the day off and then report back bright and early the following to catch up on reports.

It hits him deeply, hits him harder than he knows how to explain. For some reason it's worse than all the scars collecting on his skin. This is something permanent, something that he won't ever be able to recover from or put behind him. He is always, for the rest of his life, going to be able to feel this painful reminder of some stupid mission he won't remember in a year, some stupid mission that won't ever have mattered in the long-run. He can't move on from this. If he even survives to live any sort of life outside of MI6, he will never be able to completely put these days behind him like he sometimes dreams of doing.

He wonders how Yassen deals with things like this, or even if he ever has. He want to know what he would say, if he would comfort him or tell him to suck it up with a single unimpressed look. Wishes there was a way to speak to him, just get a simple message to him, instead of having to wait for their red string of fate to desultorily tug them together again. He lets himself be maudlin and miserable that night, as he curls up on his bed with an ice-pack melting under his sheets. He wishes Yassen were here to just hold him, like he had that night after their kiss. Yassen's lips and gentle hands feel so far away, now, like they'd only been a dream. He worries, all of a sudden, that it was.

That worry doesn't leave him until the next time Alex runs into him, which is probably far too soon after his injury yet still nowhere close to soon enough. It's quick, one of those times with no moment to really exchange words, but Alex takes the precious seconds as he's making his escape to veer off and drag the two of them behind a large column.

Yassen slips a micro compact into Alex's back pocket as Alex leans in to press a urging kiss against his lips, but even the ecstasy of that feeling isn't enough to quite quash the ache spreading through his foot like wildfire the entire time.

Months—it goes this way for months.

He sleeps more nights in hotels and plastic airport chairs than he does in his own bed.

If he's not dreaming about his eyelids held open on hooks or feathered arrows carving through his ribcage or poisonous gas filling his lungs, he's dreaming of that cabin in Italy, tapestries hanging in a beach house, and the dog running between his feet (he had been high off his gourd when he'd mentioned he dog, back in the tunnels, but ever since then its featured prominently in his mind, and he's found himself growing haltingly fond of the idea). There's a figure picking vegetables out in a garden, maybe, or that figure reading a book by a fire with calloused hands on the pages. Dreams of those hands on the small of his back up sets of narrow stairs or wrapped around his waist at a kitchen counter or in darker, warmer rooms tracing patterns along the planes of his stomach and curve of his side.

Alex doesn't know what he's still doing, living out this life he hates. There's just a part of him that keeps whispering, every time he wakes up with Yassen's phantom touch on him, that there's still so much more he could do.

Alex hopes that, one day, he'll think this scar is wicked cool. Tom certainly would. Who knew that barbed would leave behind such a decorative pattern as it tore through your skin?

It wraps around from the inside of his left hip to below his shoulder blade on the same side, and if it didn't stain his sheets scarlet and feel like a million white-hot needles branding his skin, keeping him awake and screaming silently for days and days and days, he might already see the vision.

As it was, Tom was nowhere to be found to give any uplifting attitudes, and Alex didn't think that he'd appreciate being called up after so many months of silence just to be told about this.

The worst part is, is that Alex is finding himself bent out of shape at the fact that Yassen hadn't been there. Which is ridiculous, because despite everything the man had ever said and done, it isn't his job to be Alex's keeper, and Alex wouldn't want him to be. It's just that every other time that Alex had found himself in something this serious, something truly this close to the wire (ha), Yassen had found a way to be there. Or the universe or whatever-the-hell had put him in Alex's path. He has grown—well, not accustomed, entirely, but so comforted by the fact that Yassen had become a person that would be always there to catch him, the only person, that being confronted with him not being there—

Well. It hurts, in a weird, selfishly indignant way that makes no sense and confuses Alex just as much as it pisses him off.

He doesn't like that. That this life was turning him angry. He's never been that type of person, but with every day it just seems easier and easier to fall into irritation and irrationality. He's always been eager and passionate, and they'd been his greatest strengths both as an agent and as a person, but his double-life is slowly turning those things into impatience and fury, and Alex barely recognizes himself anymore.

And the fact that he was mad at Yassen—for the first and only time since he'd found out who killed his uncle, at the one person who had never, ever let him down…

It kills him, inside.

He hates who he's becoming. Who he thinks he might have already become.

Yassen is dabbing at a shallow cut up Alex's forearm when he accidentally presses a bit too deeply and sends a burning zing up his arm. Alex sucks air in through his clenched teeth and wrinkles his brow. Yassen doesn't spare him any pity, just pulls his arm back to the table none-too-gently and gets back to work.

Alex huffs and drapes himself more along the table, jostling Yassen and his evil cotton-ball again. "When are you taking me away from this horrible life," he groans, looking forlornly up at the ceiling and putting up an act of put-upon victim. He's rather honed the role, he thinks—it used to work wonders on Jack, at least to make her laugh at him whenever Ian started off on one of his ridiculous demands again.

"Just say the word," Yassen says, humoring him, unable to hide the fondness and amusement in the raise of his eyebrow. "A jet, a yacht, a rocket ship, just give me a call, and, I'll send it your way." His playful words are tempered by the fresh swab of alcohol he shoves against Alex's wound.

Alex hisses and shoots him a glare, even as he laughs softly. He gets caught looking at Yassen, at the dark curls of his hair at his temples and nape, at the white stretch of bandages—Alex's handiwork—below his collarbone, at the smooth lines of his face that make him look so much younger than usual, in this quiet room with no one out to kill them. It strikes him that he wants to see Yassen look like this forever. Maybe sans the wounds, though, for both of them.

Forever, Alex thinks. That's a long time. Alex doesn't think he could ever get sick of it. He wonders how many other ways Yassen could find to make him fall in love with him, if they were ever given just a few more hours in a safe, quiet room, without the world ending around them.

Yassen finished with cleaning the cut and begins to wrap it with what's left on the spool.

"The rocket ship," Alex says lowly, head resting on the top of his arm now. He's still getting lost looking at Yassen.

Yassen looks up at him, eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly in question. The hand cradling his forearm squeezes slightly.

"That's what I choose," Alex clarifies, almost whispering. "Let's go right now. Fly off to the stars, pick a new planet." He lets his eyes close. Breaths in the smell of antiseptic and knocks his knees against Yassen's under the table. "Leave this all behind."

Yassen doesn't say anything, for a while. Just finishes cleaning Alex's wound and wraps it up with the rest of the bandage on the spool. Alex is content to lie there and fall close to a semblance of sleep, Yassen's warm, gentle hands on him soothing and comforting.

Eventually Yassen leans over and presses his forehead to Alex's. Alex nudges up into it. "Maybe one day," Yassen says. Then he lays a kiss on the side of his nose and pulls away.

Alex wants to believe him more than anything in the world.

Mundane things, boring things. No blood except for the occasional paper-cut, no ringing gunshots except for a log snapping in a fireplace.

Those dreams start bleeding into the waking hours, which is a good thing, because he has more of those than anything else.

"Congratulations, Alex," Mrs. Jones says to him as he walks into HQ one morning, a new underground set-up that Alex is still getting used to. All the lighting is tinged green this time, instead of the usual blue, and it makes Alex feel slightly nauseous.

Alex asks her what he's done.

"You've officially been promoted from Junior Agent." Mrs. Jones smiles proudly at him. "Welcome to the Seniors."

She says it warmly, looking at him as if she's expecting some grand response. All Alex can feel is the sudden actual urge to vomit.

He excuses himself, too dizzy to care about her confused and pitying face. Finds his way to the toilets, which he takes way to long to remember the location of.

All those m—all those years. Apparently that was the junior work. Just a trial run for the real stuff, trivial now that he'd actually be joining the real world, the adult world.

Alex takes a few deep breaths over the sink. He thinks about his future.

He should really go apologize to Mrs. Jones.

Alex decides it's about time he was the one tracking Yassen down.

He uses the skills he learned through the years, senior agent skills, mind you, uses his own feelers, searches for names only he knows. Manages to pinpoint him to an old slate mining town in the north of Wales for a range of days.

Alex requests his untouched vacation days, ignoring the surprised look from by Mrs. Jones when he brings it to her, and spends a full day traveling in a discontinuous, weaving path up to the mountains.

The Underground, trains, buses—Alex can almost pretend he's just wandering for the sake of wandering, if not for the checks over his shoulder he has to make every few minutes.

He's left behind anything digital, of course, so he's forced to look out at the world around him the entire time, and Alex has to admit he's almost forgotten how pretty his homeland is. Skyscrapers turning to suburbs turning to little villages, then the grand expanse of rolling hills and trickling rivers, eventually into Snowdonia with its sapphire lakes and towering mountains.

The journey is quiet, and with the world flushing brilliant green outside the windows and the promise of Yassen on the other end of the line, his mind and body are starting to relax in a way he hasn't felt in many, many, many months.

The town is old, buildings and people barely stamped with memories of what was once a booming community, and Alex wonders what on Earth could possibly have enticed Yassen here.

It's at the edge of the main towncentre, a terraced stone cottage tucked by a river. Yassen doesn't seem to be in, but Alex is confident in the location and figures hunting through the village would most likely be fruitless and unnecessarily risky, seeing as he still doesn't know exactly why Yassen's here. So he scopes the place out instead, watches for neighbors (there's only two other doors, and as far as Alex can tell they're holiday rentals, both empty), and waits for the right moment to appear.

Yassen finally drives up the lane as the sun's setting, though it's a bit hard to tell that through the constant misty drizzle and grey skies. Alex can't help but smile as he watches him roll up to the carport on the side of the house. Even through the sun-reflecting glass his profile is the best thing Alex's seen in months.

His very skin itches to run to meet him the second he steps out of the car, but Alex holds himself back with a deep breath and a bite to the inside of his lip. Makes sure he's cased the neighboring streets twice-over, refusing to risk compromising Yassen because of something as ridiculous as missing him.

He goes through the garden in the back. It's perfectly hidden from any prying eyes from the street or down by the river, with large bushes and trees planted along the fence-line and thick vines of ivy winding through the iron gates between the yards. Alex walks as silently as he can up to the backdoor, trying not to get too much mud on his shoes.

He reaches the door and only hesitates a moment before rapping as quietly as he can with his knuckle.

The door opens about ten long seconds later.

"Alex," Yassen says before he's even finished pulling it open, voice quiet and confused and the best thing Alex's ever heard.

"Hi," Alex is saying, feeling sheepish all of a sudden, but Yassen's pulling him through the threshold by the strings on his hoodie before he can do much else in the ways of a greeting.

Alex almost trips on the rubber mat in the entryway as Yassen crushes Alex against him. Alex is so shocked he forgets to hug back for a good few frozen seconds. His brain luckily gets back on-line before Yassen can pull away, and Alex releases a shaking breath he didn't even know he had been holding as he snakes his arms around Yassen's waist and squeezes him back just as hard.

"Are you alright?" Yassen murmurs into his hair.

"Yeah, yeah." Alex's voice is muffled from where he's buried his face in Yassen's neck. He feels Yassen's body relax under his, tension snapping from his shoulders like a string's been cut, and the arms around him pull him even closer. Alex only has a moment to feel horrible for worrying him, though, before Yassen is pushing Alex away and holding him at arm's length.

"What on Earth are you doing here?"

The sheepishness comes rushing back. Alex shrugs, trying to look nonchalant, but probably failing miserably. "Wanted to see you."

Yassen sighs. "Alex. You know this is too dangerous."

Alex meets Yassen's eyes. Shrugs again. "Yeah."

Yassen's gaze traces over his face, and Alex can't read his expression—he hates it when he can't read his expression. Eventually Yassen just sighs again. "Would you like some tea?"

Alex has spent the better part of the day in the cold Welsh rain and tea sounds like the best thing in the world right now. He smiles, relieved. "Absolutely."

—

Alex can't remember ever spending this much time with Yassen, much less time just doing nothing. Their time at the Scorpia safe house came closest, too-brief days and nights living in each others' pockets, but every second then had been tainted by Alex's looming murder of Mrs. Jones.

Alex isn't sure what's on Yassen's plate now, but whatever it is, he doesn't seem that worried about it. He makes Alex tea, and Alex watches him raptly, captivated by how foreign the domestic scene is. It makes him think about a lot of foolish things.

—

Alex sips at his tea, perfectly steeped and sugared, and Yassen sits quietly across from him at the kitchen table with no tea for himself but a book in hand with a title on the spine that Alex can't translate.

Alex breathes in the smell of jasmine and tries to burn everything about the moment into his mind so he can have it forever, something to visit in his future dreams.

"Are you ok?" Alex asks into the peaceful silence, once his cup only has a shallow, chilled pool left in the bottom.

Yassen's eyes flick up to him, stay on him, unblinking for a long moment. "I am," he says eventually, and Alex knows by the unusual gentleness in his tone that he understands what Alex was trying to ask about.

Alex doesn't like to remember that horrible last time they met. The memories of it have invaded his dreams, and he hasn't slept a full night in what feels like a lifetime. Miserable and nightmarish, blood coating half of Yassen's face like a mask and soot smothering the burns melting the flesh along his chest and—

No. Alex doesn't let himself remember it. It's the main reason he selfishly broke their rules and came here today.

"I'm so sorry," Alex whispers into his tea, even as he nods.

"Alex, I told you—"

"Just let me say I'm sorry, ok?"

The ensuing silence is less easy than before.

There's no more light seeping from behind the closed curtains by the time Yassen moves to clean up. "You can't do this again," he says, eyes staying glued to the suds in the sink.

Alex blinks away tears.

—

"This is a nice place," Alex quietly says later, curled up on the sofa with his legs over Yassen's lap and gaze lost in the flames licking the fireplace.

Yassen hums at him and flicks over another page in his book, the same one from earlier.

"It's not really private," he keeps going, mind meandering through minutia, "but the view's nice and you've got a giant back garden."

Yassen tilts his head in agreement. "Perfect for a dog."

Alex whirls his head around to look at him. Yassen just runs a thumb under his calf and keeps reading.

Alex settles back and listens to the fireplace crackle.

—

Yassen is a gentleman and gets them to the bedroom, instead of making do with the wall like Alex was vying for.

"You should grown it out again," Yassen murmurs into his ear as he tugs at the short strands of his hair with as tight a grip as he can.

"Ok," Alex groans, and slots their thighs together.

He shuts his eyes when he tugs Yassen's shirt off, unsteady all of a sudden on the soft mattress with his heart beating too fast. He can feel the heat of Yassen's skin as he moves into his space again, flinches at the feeling of their bare skin touching. Yassen's hands move up and cup his face, his thumbs just barely brushing over the curve of his cheekbones. They come to rest at the tops of them, press gently next to the edges of his eyelids. Yassen whispers his name and Alex opens his eyes.

"Am fine," Yassen whispers, and reaches down to find Alex's hand, bringing it to his chest. Alex's hand shakes as he runs the pads of his fingertips along the ripples and ridges of the new scar tissue. He tries not to let tears well up again, though he's pretty sure he's already ruined the mood.

Yassen lets out a puff of breath as Alex throws himself through the rest of the space between them and tucks his face into Yassen's neck, pulling them as close together as possible. Yassen cradles his head and wraps his arm around his waist and lets him, and Alex doesn't know how to love someone this much, was never taught how.

Yassen takes him apart slowly, heavy and urging and endless, and even with the burn wounds and shorn hair and the knowledge that everything he has here is temporary and fleeting, Alex decides to define himself by these moments anyway.

—

"Do you even eat?" Alex calls out from the kitchen, frowning at the counter. After a bit he hears Yassen pad around the corner in socked feet, and turns in time to see Yassen pinch his brow in confusion.

"Yes, Alex, I eat."

"It's just," Alex spreads his hands out wide over the counter. "There's not a single crumb anywhere. There's not even a plate out of place."

Yassen's brow raises, lips curving up incredulously. "Is that a bad thing?"

"No, no, it's just… weird. I hate tidying up, there's always crumbs everywhere in my flat and it drives me mad."

Yassen huffs out an amused breath. "You might want to rethink the beach, then. Sand will in everything."

Alex looks at Yassen and can't help but to smile. "Not rethinking the beach."

Yassen shrugs a shoulder. "There are a few things in the freezer," he throws over his shoulder as he turns around to head back the way he came.

Alex grins and checks the freezer.

—

Alex finally gets to ask him about what happened in Bath. And in London, and Morocco, and with Vasquez, with his father.

"Alex," Yassen sighs loudly, too composed to actually groan. Well, at least in this setting, Alex thinks with a smirk. "Maybe no more questions for tonight, hm?"

"There might not be another chance to ask."

"There will be."

"When?"

Yassen doesn't answer. Alex almost wants to let him get away with it.

"How, Yas?"

Yassen looks up at the ceiling for a moment, halfway to rolling his eyes. Alex glares at him. "Many people still want you dead, Alex."

"And not you too?" Alex huffs angrily. "What's the plan, to just never live? Die like this?" He wants to know. Needs to know, needs Yassen to have something in his life, even if it's just dreams like Alex has, something other than blood and cold and loneliness. Everything Alex is he sees reflected in Yassen's eyes, and he knows Yassen is stronger than him, but it shatters something in Alex to think of Yassen going through all those years, time measured only by kills, target by target, hopeless and loveless.

"It's not as easy as how, Alex."

"It can be. Passports, funds, whatever we need —"

"There are too many risks," Yassen replies sharply, lowly, sounding angry too now, but Alex knows innately it's not at him. "There are too many factors, too many ways for it to go wrong."

Alex bites his lip.

Thinks, really thinks.

He exhales. "Not if it's worth it," he whispers. Yassen doesn't move from next to him. "Not if it's worth it."

—

He's really got to stop being shocked that they actually get along, Alex thinks as they flip through a magazine that had been left underneath the telly, HOME & FURNITURE emblazoned in hot pink font on the cover. Or, more accurately, as Alex flips through the magazine and Yassen half-begrudgingly looks along, unwilling to untangle himself from where's he's wrapped around Alex on the sofa.

Alex leans farther back into Yassen's chest and hold the glossy centerfold up. "Look at that."

Yassen leans forward and tucks his chin over Alex's shoulder. "That is horrid," he says, and Alex can hear the genuine bewilderment in his voice.

"Who buys this stuff?" Alex wonders outloud.

"That one's… not too bad," Yassen raises an arm from around Alex's waist to point at a little blue and white decorative bowl at the corner of the page.

He finds himself agreeing, and brushes Yassen's fingers away as he points to the runner underneath it. "Would go with that if it wasn't the most revolting color orange in the world." Yassen hums.

If you had told Alex years ago that one day he'd be sitting happily flipping through an interior design mag to pass the time, Yassen or no Yassen, he might have tried harder to not fall into the Department's grasp.

—

He tries not to count the hours. Pretends it's just another boring day in that future of theirs that Alex tells himself is just waiting around a corner, waiting for them to turn their heads and meet it.

—

They say goodbye in the afternoon, when the sun's at its weak peak behind the thick and ever-grey clouds and the ground is still soaked through with last night's rain.

"I will see you soon," Yassen says, eyes searching Alex's face, maybe pleading, maybe comforting.

Alex kisses him rougher than they have before, teeth and tongue and nails digging into his forearms.

Alex doesn't see him for half a year.

Jones brings up him having a partner just once.

There's a trial mission, something low-stakes (at least by the Department's standards). If it goes well it could be a fix for the loneliness, maybe. Or an invite into the rest of the cohorts that he could just never seemed to crack.

Alex doesn't know if intentionally sabotages it or not, but either way, Jones never brings it up again.

"You could let me out," Alex wheedles. He tugs at the binds on his wrists. "This could be it. We could run."

They're in Burundi. It wouldn't be hard, from here. Yassen's eyebrow raises a twitch but otherwise doesn't react, just keeps pacing unhurriedly across the floor.

Yassen ignores him. "I really must ask how you managed to end up here, of all places."

Alex narrows his eyes. He jerks his wrists and the chair scrapes against the floor with a horrible metal screech. "I didn't follow you this time, if that's what you're wondering."

Yassen ignores that, too. "I can give you five minutes."

"That's it?" Alex asks, starting to work his good foot out of his boot.

"Be grateful I convinced them to only let me in here," Yassen retorts, and comes to a stop a few feet in front of Alex. He still makes no move to help him. "Nice… trick," he says, tilting his head down toward what Alex's has tucked away in his sock, genuine smile ghosting across his lips. Alex huffs at him, but secretly feels a flush of pride.

"Go on," Alex grumbles, throwing his head back in the direction of the door and focusing very carefully on not dropping anything with his toes. "Can't have you losing a chunk of our retirement fund on me."

Yassen leaves him without another word, but brushes his fingers lightly over his shoulder as he passes.

He even gives Alex an extra minute.

He asks, every time they run into each other after Wales, sometimes more forcefully than others, but never joking about it anymore. It's worth it, he has to.

He knows Yassen cares.

At least, he knows he has to believe Yassen does, for his own state of mind. Alex thinks he might finally and truly go off the deep end, if he ever learns that Yassen cares for him less than he does him.

One of his flatmates moves out and Alex doesn't even notice, doesn't realize until he comes home at 2 AM and sees a guy he most definitely has never met sitting in their living room.

Alex has the SRK he keeps in his waistband in his hand in an instant, thinking that maybe Yassen has been right all this time, that they were never meant for living peacefully, alongside a million other doom-saying thoughts that send adrenaline pumping and his heart battering against his ribs.

Then the guy lets out a shout and Alex is flushed head-first back into reality, finally notices the fast-food bag crumpled on the guy's lap and the Xbox controller in his hands, and feels bile rise in his throat as he realizes what exactly he's just done, what he had been prepared to do, what his very first instinct was.

Alex can't breath. He sheaths the knife and practically runs down the hallway, ignoring the Oi, what the fuck, mate? yelled after him and the slamming open of someone else's door from the other end of the flat, spends the next hours ignoring the knocks on his own bedroom door and staring at the blade of the knife he'd thrown across the floor catching the streetlights bleeding in from his window, as if there might be an answer in it, somewhere.

He misses Tom's birthday.

He wasn't even off on an assignment, had spent the day sitting at his desk finishing up paperwork.

He hasn't not spent Tom's birthday with him once, not since the year they'd met. Even if it was just hours talking over FaceTime, like the past few years. Never once. Until now.

He wakes up three mornings after the date with it at the forefront of his mind, pushed there front-and-center by something subconscious, and it sinks his heart and twists his stomach and it is such a little thing, such a fragile and sweet thing, to want to see his best friend's smile when he sings happy birthday to him off-key, and losing that—knowing that he was the one that took it from himself, at the end of the day, no one else—

Fuck.

It hurts him in a way that no bullet wounds or barbed wire or knife cuts could have.

Tears brim in his eyes and they burn as he tips his head back and blinks them away.

Something has to change, soon. He feels it in his gut, knows it. If it doesn't, Alex is not sure how much longer he has in him.

It isn't even the worst one, in the end, that finally tips the scales.

Worst, at least as in there is no ticking timer on a global poisonous gas, or nukes actively in the air.

But it does start with a gunshot.

When he hears the gun go off he flinches, his blood running colder than ice. He's not hit, the gun wasn't aimed at him, but Alex feels as though he might as well have been anyway.

Well, back up. He guesses it didn't really starts quite at the gunshot. No, it really began—and ended—with the tunnels under the Mediterranean coastline.

Tracing kilometres underground and through the cliffs along the waterline, they were an amalgamation of World War bunkers, smuggler roads, nuclear shelters, and escape ports that dropped right off into the choppy shores below. Most of the actively used sections, at least according to British intelligence, ran underneath a couple of the casinos in Monaco. Mainly smaller pathways dug more for foot-traffic, just perfect for illicit-gambling operations to make into their evil lairs. And while these lairs might have been redecorated by the richest criminals in the world, they still had a rather nasty reputation for deadly features such as trapdoors and torture chambers.

Alex would kindly describe the tunnels as a gold plated, deceptive, living hell. Which is of course why the Department found the one mission that required entry into them and shoved it at Alex as if it were a vacation.

"You'll get to spend an evening in one of the most nicely accommodated establishments in the world," Crowley had said to him from across the conference table. Mrs. Jones had just nodded from next to him as if he was handing out the sagest of advice. "We'll even provide the suit."

Alex had felt tired down to his bones, and nodded back anyway.

The tiredness followed him through the rest of the briefing, taunting his meager few hours of rest that night, settling like an itch under his skin the entire plane ride there.

Everything he needed was on his person. Or so MI6 had said. Just one concealed case of tech to plant, no weapons, no radio, no evac nearby. He'd smuggled his own small insurance, of course, but it still miffed him a bit that all Jones and rest thought he needed was a wallet, despite the copious evidence proving otherwise.

But that was the life he chose, so he left his taxi driver from the airport with a fat, Department-provided tip and walked empty-handed into the employee entrance of the casino.

It was a cake walk, really. He was simply to pose for the night as the personal chip minder to the internationally infamous launderer Jonas Stors. The briefing packet Alex read on the flight over described the man as paranoid, quick-to-flight, and a specific type of arrogant that only came from a lifetime surrounded by disgustingly rich breeding. All of Alex's favorites, of course.

All this to say that Stors insisted on—rather, demanded—personal attachés on every casino floor he visited to mind his winnings and keep them close. Young attachés, so the rumors went, and the blonder and cheekier the better. Naturally, Blunt and the rest thought of Alex front and center.

Attach the Department's RFID interfering technology to the interior of the chip case, ensure the chip data was relayed and altered, and disassemble before anyone was the wiser. And if he had the time pop into the transaction headquarters in the interior of the tunnels and see if he could access the mainframes before he took his leave, Mrs. Jones had mentioned before he left, in a tone that really didn't involve any asking.

Really, exceedingly simple. Almost a milk run. Of course, that's why it ended bloody.

Even on paper Jonas Stors was the kind of man that made Alex bristle along his spine, taste penny-copper in the back of his throat and press his nails into crescent moons on his palms.

Alex greeted him at the front doors of the lobby with a wide and eager smile, casino-official waistcoat and slacks perfectly tailored and buttoned just this side of too-snug around him. After passing his oversized coat to a doorman Stors turned to Alex, returning his professional nod with a heavy, sweaty hand high up on Alex's shoulder.

"You're the mouse dragged out for the king tonight, eh, little boy?" Stors said to him with an oil-slick smirk, and Alex fought valiantly to simply nod again instead of stabbing the man in the jugular with the knife hidden up in his sleeve. (At the tail end of the briefing that had been given to him, typed lone as if an afterthought, it had read: Target has irregular and infrequent, yet impactful acts of unpredictability. Whatever the fuck that meant, but Alex reasoned that it was best to keep any overtly hostile actions at bay, at least at the start.)

After his initial revulsion ebbed to something manageable, Alex spared a second to be peeved at being called little boy. Not that it was ever going to be appropriate, but he'd grown out of that years ago, and those years were bloody and hard earned. And he was working at a casino, for God's sake, so Alex really didn’t know where the man got off. Only one person still got away with anything close to a nickname like that, and he was nothing near similar to the disgusting man strutting past Alex now. Whatever. Jack's time-faded voice in the back of his head told him you’ll be happy for that baby face of yours in a decade or two.

So Alex carried on, the unfortunate object of Stors' slinking affection as he travelled between tables, but luckily barely a ghost amongst Stors' entourage while the man was actually playing. All-in-all, Alex had definitely had worse assignments, so he let himself relax a bit and take the time to evaluate everything around him.

He cataloged Stors' movements, his speech patterns, companions. He soon came to realize that almost as important as the man himself were the two goons that had come in with him, neither having left his side even once. They were both dressed to the nines, like most of the guests here, and doing a laughably bad job at trying to pass as just rich friends along for a night of extravagant debauchery. An untrained eye might have been fooled just by their expensive clothing, but Alex was experienced enough to notice the slightly excessive bulk under their suits and how they followed Stors at just too close a personal range to be friendly. The men didn’t do much besides glower at anyone that got too close to their boss unless the man initiated the contact himself, Alex included, which made for a rather boring entourage if you asked Alex. One of the goons (whose face was unfortunately, it seemed, permanently swilled with an angry, ruddy red color) had a hilariously poor poker face toward each of his boss’ hands, which would have been almost infuriating if it weren't for the fact that he was giving away the luck of one of the worst men on Earth. The other one had a terribly out of date mustache (Alex proudly dubbed him Gable, and wondered if the guy had the actor's headshot on a mirror somewhere) and seemed to not entirely understand how poker even worked. Alex spent most of the night laughing internally at the voice in his head—definitely not Jack's this time—that muttered witty, devastating insults about the two thugs. 

After about half an hour on the floor, Alex came to the conclusion that while Stors' posse were meaty and imposing in stature, they were greatly lacking in any areas related to surveillance. Alex had slipped the Department tech out of his interior coat pocket while Stors was settling at a new craps table, pressing it deftly into the lining of his case in the manner of seconds—and while Alex always prided himself on his sleight-of-hand, he frankly thought it was ridiculous that none of his movements caught even a single lazy glance from anyone at the table. 

Device planted, Alex tried to reason with himself that his mission was technically already completed and that all that was left was to extract himself with no one else the wiser. If he strictly followed the directives and Crowley's assignment, or if he was an agent with a little bit more to lose and without that restless beast constantly choking the air from his throat, he probably would have had the balls to call it a job well done and slip out at the next opportunity.

But it wouldn’t be The Department without what Tom had once dubbed as side-quests, little additions to the main objective casually mentioned in a side-bar before he departed. Little additions that were exponentially more dangerous than anything mentioned before, and probably the only thing they really wanted out of the mission in the first place. And Mrs. Jones' if you have the time was most definitely side-quest material. Years of experience told him that much, if not the pocket square hiding all the necessary computer bugs that she'd slipped him on his way out.

So, waiting around for the chance to get to the tunnel entrance it was. Until then, just avoid making too much eye contact with Stors and have fun taking in the silk tapestries and gilded ceilings.

Half the night passed, painfully uneventful.

It was hard to say whether the next half got better or worse. 

When Alex saw Yassen striding across the floor toward their table during a rather uneventful round of craps, something bright and warm flashed in him, heartbeat sparking and boredom evaporating from every vein and bone. Alex kept his face professionally blank, but he couldn’t help tracking the man with his eyes as his thoughts swirled with an unfortunate mix of confusion, panic, excitement, and… well, alright, definitely a bit of lust when Yassen pushed through the crowds enough for Alex to make out the ridiculously tailored, velvety black two-piece he was wearing. Good God.

Through the shock and adrenaline that came with seeing the man so unexpectedly, a thrill that Alex hadn’t felt in a very long time came rushing back through him. It had been… well, too long, since the last.

Yassen finally caught his eye, and Alex's mind felt clear as a cloudless day, for the first time in months. No communication happened, no meaningful glance was exchanged, nothing but a professional once-over on both ends. It was more than enough. 

"You're late," Stors said, interrupting Alex’s staticky thoughts and bringing him hurtling back into the moment. Craps, international gambling fraud, the stiff itch of his starched collar. The fun stuff. Alex realized a beat too late that Stors was actually addressing Yassen, who’d come to a stop at the corner of their table. 

Hearing Yassen's voice again warmed Alex way more than it should have. "Then I suggest you bring that up with your business partner, Mr. Stors. He has quite the penchant for... distractions."

Stors grumbled, brow pinched and a sneer forming on his lips. Yassen remained still and unbothered, eyes blandly tracking up the table, looking for all the world like he just happened by and decided to watch out of bored curiosity.

After a few long moments Stors appeared to get over himself, grunting and waving a hand magnanimously as if he'd just granted Yassen a unrequitable kindness. Yassen barely deigned to respond, glancing at Stors with his patented half-lidden stare and basically sauntering over, in no rush at all, when Stors beckoned him.

The exchanged a few words, too quiet for Alex to hear. Good thing he'd had been practicing reading lips lately, Alex thought, something that had been spurred on by a rather unfortunate experience he'd had a bit ago while stuck behind the glass of a leopard seal enclosure at the Sydney Zoo. Alex shivered at the memory. Best not to dwell.

He shuffled a bit around the table, under the guise of peaking over at the craps table in full swing a few feet away, so he could get both Stors and Yassen's lips in view.

—another ten minutes at Blackjack. He's feeling very confident about it this time around.

Alex pushed down a chuckle at the flowery curses he read from Stors' mouth next.

You tell him five, and you tell him… won't be footing the bill or anything else, if we don't get the… tonight.

Alex figured he was missing a name, or a company, and then something undoubtable important at the end. A codename, maybe? Or a word so ridiculously scientific that Alex would never have any hope of deciphering without sound. He's surprised to find how little he cared about finding out what all. 

They continued their conversation with not much more pertinent information to note, Yassen cool and unbothered as always and Stors increasingly agitated at the mystery man that connected them.

(Yassen's lips wrapped around words prettily, Alex thought. He allowed himself the barest moment of a distracted second to appreciate them.)

And then they were done, and Yassen was stepping back with an acquiescing tilt of his head that Alex knew was actually extremely annoyed, and with a single sharp flick of Stors' chin the croupier was stowing the dice and stick away and the dealer was swiftly gathering up the chips, Ruddy the Goon soon ambling over to dump all the winnings off in Alex's waiting case with a nasty, smug glare down at him as he did.

Then Stors made his way to Alex, a saccharine smile smacked across his face, pinched-lipped and crinkle-eyed. It was a jarringly quick jump from the boiling irritation of half a second before, and Alex was mildly shocked that he didn't even try to hide the switch in expressions from him.

"Sorry, pretty thing, but we're going to have to part for a bit." Stors placed a hand low on Alex's waist, and Alex wasn't entirely successful at hiding his flinch at such a bold move. "Bring my winnings to the cage, yes? Be waiting for me." The roiling nausea at being felt up like this was almost drowned out by the look on Yassen's face over Stors' shoulder, a cold indignant blaze on his face.

And then Stors was gone, goons and Yassen with him, and as the rest of Stors' posse disbanded into the throngs of other rich and famous, Alex found himself in a very convenient position to complete his mission. 

The ever-present and soul-deep tiredness that had been haunting him for so long had returned the moment Yassen left his line of sight, and Alex decided to blame that on why a sudden sick, uneasy feeling began swirling in his stomach. He wasn't usually one to ignore a gut feeling, but recently most missions made him feel some level of dread, and he really hadn't been sleeping well recently, and there was that knife wound by his shoulder that he forgot to get treated by Medical when he came back from Somalia last week, which meant there was the chance he was fighting a slight infection…

Plus, Yassen was here. There was no world in which that meant Alex was anything but safe.

So Alex dragged in a deep breath as he made his way to the cage, shaking himself back into action. He clandestinely removed the tech from the chip case as he made his way over, blocking out his plan as he went. Slip away, find the control room, and see if he couldn't plant a little bug. Easy work.

Into the tunnels under Monaco he went. 

Finding the hidden access was a breeze, MI6's maps having thankfully been accurate. There was almost as much to look at down here, heavy scarlet carpet and cream-colored wallpaper that had enough gold leaf and opulent sconces to make Alex almost wonder if he'd actually just stumbled into some sort of high-roller level instead of the epicenter of crime that it was suppose to be.

He found the computer core after only a dozen or so minutes of looking, which was rather impressive considering how sprawling this place was. Impressive or lucky. Story of his life. 

The long, winding hallways had been mostly just that—hallway—but the occasional door did pop up, all unlocked, and each one sent a different kind of shiver up Alex's spine as he peaked in. The first one he'd come  across opened into a room that was barren except for a single operating table stood in the middle, straps dangling down and tilted up in the air at a forty-five degree angle. Alex moved along quickly, trying not to think too hard about what had happened in there, or what might happen in the near future if he wasn't careful enough. The second door had led to a room so long that Alex couldn't see the other end of it, stacked with shelves and crates and looking more like a low-ceilinged warehouse that anything. Alex looked at how big some of the items were and figured there must be another, wider exit at the other end, and wondered if it even exited in the same city as the one they were in. They kept going like that, strange and disjointed rooms that were unsettling yet with no hints as to what they could possibly all be doing together, and without anything that even resembled like computer banks.  

Eventually he came across something new. The electric keypad was the first tip-off that this room was different, and Alex sent a small, perfunctory thanks out to Smithers as he pulled out his cell and got to work opening it up.

A matter of seconds, and Alex figured that if he operated out of a century old underground network that less than a dozen people on Earth had knowledge of, he'd probable cheap out a bit on the door locks too.

Plant the bug, collect some data. Done and done. Easy peasy. Cake walk.

Of course that's when it all went to shite.

Really, who would have guess that Stors upped it to a dozen and one and hired a nerdy programmer?

Alex didn't even see him until many minutes later, after the man shakily rose from his hiding place behind a looming server rack in the far corner with the silent alarm remote clutched in a vice-grip in his hand.

Normally with a grunt that looked as timid and underpaid as this one did, Alex would try talking his way out of the situation. He was, unfortunately, barred from this course off action by the squeeze of a meaty, heavy forearm around his larynx and the immobilizing clawing of oversized fingers digging into his side.

Alex had to hand it to the body guard, whichever this one was; he really would not have though stealth was in his repertoire. Like, at all.

"You duplicitous bitch," Ruddy/Gable hissed into Alex's ear, and Alex was half focused on his concerning lack of access to oxygen and half on duplicitous—because really, was he dead sure this was one of the goon twins? He grossly underestimated them if so. They might just deserve an apology for all the lambasting he did in his head—it had gotten rather brutal toward the end of the baccarat stretch.

He could work on the I'm Sorry hamper later, he told himself. Maybe in the form of the knife in his sleeve. Or, first, a couple thumbs to the eyeballs.

Those both went rather well, if you asked Alex, who actually had time to try and shake the blood off of his hands as who he now can identify ad Ruddy cried out and cupped his palms over his eyes. Alex looked for a weakness, beside the ones he had just dug into his face and slashed at his arm, and decided that bulk was going to be the key. Krav Maga might be the basic fall back he needed, just enough to get Ruddy to the ground without any more surprises coming his way. 

Alex moved in to strike right as Ruddy decided to barrel forward with a wild yell, and the fight was on. 

He took a few hits, a few heavy hits, and Ruddy even had one more surprise in him with a sweep to the leg that was impressively agile. But Alex had too much experience with men built and trained exactly like Ruddy, and it really wasn't long before Alex had him knocked down with a brutal slam on the ground to the back of his head. 

It was all going too swimmingly to be true, naturally, and Alex really should have guessed that if one of them was hiding stealthy superpowers, the other might be too.

Honestly, hits from behind were just bad sportsmanship.

The looks on everybody's faces as Alex was dragged into a low-ceilinged rotunda would honestly have been funny if it weren't for said dragging being completely literal.

Actually, he thought he might have sprained an ankle and definitely had a bruised rib, so he was secretly glad for the excuse to go limp and let the thugs do the heavy lifting for him for the moment.

That was the only upside, though, and though Stors and the group of black-clad men next to him definitely set off some mild warning bells in Alex's head, it was Yassen's stony face that really had Alex's oh-shit meter blowing past the red.

He was going to be in so much trouble.

Stors took a step toward him. "So, little mouse, it seems you are actually a rat." Only years of experience kept Alex's mouth shut. He gritted his teeth. "And you've interrupted a very important day between me and my friend." Stors waved a lazy hand back at the others, and after a second Alex noticed that of the new faces, one seemed significantly more upset than the rest.

"Talk about rolling out the red carpet!" Said man yelled, a bit too loudly for the small space. "Money, booze, women, and a show." He said show like it was something disgusting, a juvenile pout twisting his mouth.

Stors glared at him. "We couldn't have put it on without you," he said with vitriol. There was so much history behind that you that Alex almost felt like he was interrupting a lover's tiff.

"I'm the customer, Jonas, you should have prepared properly for your guests. Now I'm wondering about the rest of my amenities…"

"You'll get your package, Simmons, if only you'd shut the hell up," Stors growled. Alex was mildly shocked by the strength of words between "friends," but Simmons just shrugged, and Alex finally noticed just how red the man's cheeks were. Not as bad as his goon friend's, but Alex figured the "booze" intake was well above the suggested amounts for those about to partake in some serious international racketeering deal.

Conversation did not go well. Par for the course. Stors' bodyguards bleeding from the eyes and trailing torn shirtsleeves on either side of him probably didn't help matters much either.

As usual, the decision was made to kill him. Shame, because Alex was rather looking forward to what sort of opulence might have adorned whatever room he would be thrown into as a prison. He's sure it would have been the most comfortable one he'd ever ended up in.

"Gregorovich," Stors said, his anger turning into something much more concerning with one of his smarmy, psychotic grins, "time for you to give me a show."

Oh, hell. Well. That wasn't good. Alex finally lets his gaze flicker to Yassen, trying to read what the man wanted him to do. Yassen was stoic as always, though, meeting Alex's eyes with something unreadable.

"I'm sure it would be better do to this behind closed doors, wouldn't you think?" Yassen replied after a beat, eyes never leaving Alex's. "Save the carpet."

Stors huffed out a laugh. "Oh, the blood'll blend right in. And we can always rearrange the furniture."

Yassen hesitated. On him, it just looks like murderous contemplation. Alex would be very impressed by it, if he had any idea whatsoever how they were going to get out of this one. "I am not your toy, Jonas. I am paid for one thing, and this is not it."

Stors snorted out a huff like a bull, eyes bulging as he whips around to look at Yassen. Simmons let out a scandalized oh ho ho! that made him sound like a teenager that'd just heard the sickest burn in the world.

"Is that so?" Stors seethed.

Yassen tilted his head, eyebrows raised lightly and lips pursing thoughtfully. "Yes."

Stors twitched, and then began to speak and move with a sudden pep in his step and gleam in his eye that Alex did not like, as if he'd just had a new idea that most definitely spelled trouble for all involved. "You know what?" Stors turned to face a couple of the men standing between Simmons and Yassen, and Alex realized that the unfamiliar suits weren't all there together and rather were split between Simmons and Stors instead, which definitely changed the dynamics of the entire situation. With split loyalties in numbers… well, the track record for that was bloodier than Alex liked. He watched warily as Stors spread his arms out. "Damn third parties really do just become more trouble than treat, don't they?"

Alex's heart was racing. Unpredictable his ass, he thought, thinking about his ridiculously bare-boned dossier. Everything about this man was sending warning signals a mile high in his mind, and Alex couldn't trace a single one of them to the source. One thing he knew for sure: man was far beyond unpredictable.

Stors sighed with his whole body, shoulders rolling and hips cocking obnoxiously. He shook his head in commiseration at his men, all who remained laughably stoic. Unpredictable, Alex thought, just before Stors grabbed a pistol out of a concealed holster, raised his arm to his 3 o'clock and fired.

Alex's heart hit the floor in the ringing split-second of silence. Ice ran through his veins. 

Then everything happens all at once.

Simmons comes to what Alex will later agree was probably the correct decision and pulls out his own pistol, his men following suit and turning the room into a blazing wall of gunfire. Stors is laughing as he evades and whips around to return it. Gable and Ruddy tense on either side of him and there are shouts and curses of confusion being yelled right by his ear.

Alex doesn't pay an inch of it any mind. He doesn't—he can't. Because Yassen swung backward with Stors' shot and Alex doesn't know if it was because he was hit or if by some miracle he managed to dodge but Stors was in close range and Yassen is infallible in Alex's mind but not when it's that close, and Alex's throat closes and his skin runs cold and he needs to get over there now. 

The grips on Alex's arms shift and loosen, and everything is happening all at once, and Alex drops.

On his right Gable stumbles forward at the motion, having already been unsteady on his feet with indecision on whether to stay on Alex or rush to protect his boss. Ruddy still hangs on to Alex's arm, heavier and harder to jerk around than his partner, but his grip is unstable enough for Alex to break with a well-placed fist from the arm he manages to wrench away and a tug that makes his shoulder scream. Alex carries his momentum forward in a half roll, giving him enough space from the two guards to formulate his attack.

Luckily Alex is good at thinking in the split seconds. That's the only reason why he's made it this far.

Gable is still catching his feet under him, eyes flicking manically between him and whatever murderous distraction Simmons is making behind them. Alex goes for his head, a swift and forceful bash from Alex's knee and then from his foot and he's crumpling, out cold on the floor.

Then it's Ruddy's turn, round two, and as Alex shifts his gaze to him the image of Yassen's bloody body dropping to the velvet carpet strobes in his mind. 

He makes quick work, only half aware of the hits he lands and the ones he dodges. The man goes down once more, and maybe Alex would ruminate on the blood staining his knuckles and the breath torn ragged from his throat at another time, but now is not that. He runs toward the others, who are locked in gunfire exchanges from behind the furniture. 

Maybe a God does exist, because Alex manages to avoid any bullets, stray or otherwise, as he makes his way toward where he last saw…

There. Supine. Half-hidden behind a toppled chaise.

But alive, if the giant heave of breath Yassen takes at the touch of Alex's fingers to the side of his face is any sign. "Thank God," Alex punches out an exhale, trying not to let his fingers shake as he quickly draws them down the side of Yassen's throat and over his chest, feeling for any bullet wounds. Yassen blinks heavily and tries to sit up, and Alex puts another hand in the base of his neck to help him.

There's gunfire still ricocheting around them. Alex can hear shouts and crashes. He tries to duck lower behind the chaise. "Are you okay? Did you get hit?"

Yassen doesn't respond. His pointer and middle finger come up to his temple, and he draws them away with a frown at the blood on them. Alex realizes that he must have slammed it on the fall down, which comforts Alex at least a little, explains the blacking out.

Alex's hand hits Yassen's abdomen. It's warm. Wet. It stains the remaining pale stretches of his fingers.

"We have to move," Alex hisses, trying to keep his voice from breaking, and Yassen meets his eyes and nods toward a narrow hallway caddy-corner from the one he'd been brought down. Alex helps Yassen up as much as the man is willing to let him and then follows him around the shoot-out, staying low and going fast. They make it to cover without any more injuries, and Alex really wonders if he should have been praying more these past few years.

Yassen's feet stutter on the carpet, and it's barely enough to notice, doesn't even impede his pace, but to Alex it near stops the world turning. It's his turn to lead, he decides, pulling in front and dragging Yassen down another too-bright hallway with a hand around his wrist, too panicked to appreciate the novelty of Yassen actually letting himself be dragged anywhere. He prays for an exit sign, a dim-lit branching corridor—hell, even just an unlocked door would be a fucking welcome sight. But the tunnels give him nothing, nothing but too-small vents and scarlet carpet that, in the only string of luck they're having, is hiding the trail of blood they're leaving. 

Something silver gleams in Alex's vision up to the left, and he squeezes Yassen's forearm tightly when he realizes it actually is a door, at least of a fashion. He pushes forward even faster, Yassen stilling managing to match his speed without any delay, despite whatever injury he's obviously hiding. Alex takes a second to marvel at the resilience of the man as he brings them to a halt in front of the door before rooting around in his memory for the proper way to open a quick action hatch such as this one. It takes him a few precious seconds to get his thoughts together and try get the wheel turning. It's stuck, obviously having not been used in ages and not having been oiled in even longer. His muscles begin to burn and threaten to give out and Alex has only managed to move it a few centimetres.

Alex, through his adrenaline and panic, can't feel much else other than the searing pain of his knuckles splitting further as he clenches his fists. He takes a shaking breath, thinks of Yassen and all that forever he wants to have with him, and tries again with all his might.

With an ear-splitting creak, it starts to turn.

As he's finally pulling it open, a warm, salty draft hits him in the face and Alex's heart sinks so low it almost bowls him over. He curses something fierce under his breath and turns to drag Yassen away from the drop-off, and finds no one there.

His heart has just a moment to jump painfully back up into his chest before he hears his name being called from further down the hall.

"Alex, here."

Alex sprints, already digging in his pocket for his lock pick. He passes by half-a-dozen other strange excuses for doors, more hatches and vents and, insanely, what Alex is pretty sure is a magician's star trap, oddly sideways and barred over. He finally reaches Yassen and gently pushes the man's hand away from the (thankfully normal) door as he kneels, getting to work on the lock and trying not lose focus listening for the clanging of military boots running down the hall behind him. Normally he'd let Yassen take over when it came to things like this, but since one of the man's hands is busy keeping his internal organs pressed inside his body, Alex figures he can step up just this once.

The second he hears the final click he's bursting into the room, Yassen a hair's width behind him.

Mistake number one, that.

Their only saving grace is that the person occupying the room is obviously caught unawares by them—Alex's duly notes the soundproofing of the interior spaces—and is still in the process of wheeling around in their chair by the time Alex blinks away the brightness from the hallway. The look of pure shock on her face would have almost been hilarious if Alex didn't witness it through an adrenaline haze and a fair amount of his own blood still dripping down from a cut in his hairline.

The woman starts to open her mouth and Alex rushes forward, arm extended, when something flashes by out of the corner of his vision.

Alex's mind doesn't process what he's seeing until she falls to the ground, body hitting the floor with a heavy thunk and blood staining the entire front of her from where it gushes out from the socket of her eye.

Alex blinks. "She was unarmed."

Yassen doesn't say anything from behind him. Alex can't drag his eyes away from her. The familiar knife handle is dug to the hilt in her skull. "They've got…civilians, down here. She…"

Yassen grunts. Alex jolts as he brushes past him. Yassen stops at the dead body, looking pained for a quarter of a second before he ever-gracefully kneels down and yanks his knife from what's left of her eye.

"Maybe not just civilians," Yassen says, and tilts his head. Alex blinks at Yassen's hands around the hilt.

He blinks again, then turns to look behind him. There's a rack by the door, at least ten by six feet, covered with every sort of firing weapon one could think of. In another time and place, he'd have been rather impressed and eager to rifle through it all. Now, the sick feeling just twists tauter low in his gut.

Alex doesn't turn back around. "Did you see those when we came in?"

Yassen is silent.

Alex gives himself half a second to think he never, ever wants to see another knife again, then shakes himself back to the present and scans the room, taking in the eerie blue emergency lighting and large puddles dotting the cracked cement of the floor. There are no other doors besides the one they came through, and right now that could either be a very good or a very, very bad thing. Alex figures they'll find out soon enough. Another rickety chair leaning against the adjacent wall catches his eye, and he rushes to yank it over to the center of the room and push Yassen down into it. The man goes without a fight and that has Alex's throat tightening and mind racing, makes the trek back to lock the door feel painfully infinite. He takes the precious seconds to check the weapons rack—he isn't even surprised, with the history of their luck, to see absolutely every single piece sans ammo, almost like they were just there for display, but he can't say he wasn't gut-wrenchingly disappointed.

"A lovely concrete box," he hears Yassen mutter, and Alex can't help but agree. This room could very easily become worse than sticking in the hallway.

Alex finally gets back to Yassen and kneels in front of him, hissing through his teeth at the expansive pain that flares out from his right knee at the movement. He was going to be paying for slamming Gable in the face with it for a good few days. As he begins pulling Yassen's suit jacket off, he distractedly hopes it had at least looked cool when he did it.

Before the jacket even hits the puddled floor Alex is tugging Yassen's shirt up, pulling the blood-damp fabric away from his skin carefully.

"Oh thank goodness," Alex breathes out as he sees torn flesh and dripping blood but no overtly gaping wound. "It's just a graze." It really wasn't just a graze—by anyone else's standards there would be immediate hospital time and a fair bit of passing out, at the very best. But they weren't anyone else, unfortunately, or fortunately.

"Arm," Yassen mutters with closed eyes, and it takes Alex a second of staring up at him before his hands jolt back up and he's running feather-light fingers over Yassen's left sleeve.

Alex grunts as he finds the second wound, still a through-and-through but much deeper, oozing a lot more blood. He reaches down to the jacket left sprawling on the ground, into the inner right pocket where Alex knows Yassen keeps his switch knife. He flips the blade open with practiced fingers, ignoring the still-warm blood coating it, and begins cutting off the sleeve of the soiled shirt, right above the hole. When he's done he stuffs the bloody fabric into his back pocket and leans down to cut a strip from the cuff of his dress pants, the fabric sturdy enough to be tied as tight as he needs without snapping.

"Think you found the one actually normal room in this whole hallway," Alex murmurs to Yassen as he ties the makeshift tourniquet.

"All your luck, little Alex," Yassen replies, and Alex aches at how soft Yassen's voice is. He wants to cry. Doesn't, because then he wouldn't be able to see where he needed to start dabbing the blood away so he could better assess the wounds.

"My luck," Alex repeats, mostly to himself. He makes note of the depth of the one on Yassen's side, shallow enough to be mostly muscle damage. It'll be a bitch to recover from, but it's not an immediate threat. "It's my fault."

"No, it wasn't."

Alex moves back to the arm, repeating his field medicine training in his head like a mantra. Pressing his fingers gently around the area doesn't illicit much reaction from Yassen, and Alex's pretty confident no bones are broken. It's the blood loss that worries him. "If I hadn't stupidly been caught, he never would have looked twice at his alliances. He wouldn't have had a reason to—"

Yassen tuts at him. Alex still doesn't know how he manages to tut and still sound so serious. "A man like Stors always has a reason, Alex, and if he doesn't, he is always easily able to find one."

Alex's chest hurts, something deep and tugging beneath his ribs, and he tells himself that this isn't worse than the last time he'd held Yassen's blood in his body with his hands, isn't worse by a long shot, and that Yassen had always, always made it out.

"If not tonight, then it would have been tomorrow. And... you would not have been there to help me tomorrow."

Alex looks up at Yassen then, searches his eyes. The blue-green light of the caged bulbs shines dull around the edges of his face, fills the air all around them, and Alex could almost believe they're somewhere far underwater, safe and away from the rest of the bloody world.

Alex has too much to say. The thing about him and Yassen, though, is that he never really has to actually voice any of it. 

Instead Alex can bring his hand up and cup Yassen's face, desperate and reverent. His fingers are coated with both Yassen's and his own blood and they stain his cheekbone, drip red into the divots of his scar. Yassen presses back into his touch and Alex feels almost overcome with simple joy at being allowed this, relief that Yassen was still alive like a levee breaking over him.

"It's good to see you," Yassen says into the gentle space between them, and Alex can feel the words moving under his fingers and knows the true weight of them, how much they’re meant.

"I'm never not missing you," Alex admits with a shaky sigh, throat still constricted, unable to look away from Yassen's eyes. His irises are black in the shadows. He runs his fingers along Yassen's hairline, wipes away the blood there. Lightly thumbs at the thin skin underneath his eye.

Alex can't do anything but push up and kiss him like it's the last chance he'll ever have to. As far as he knows, it is. It's messy and inelegant and tastes like iron, and Alex wishes he could stop time and live in the feeling for the rest of his life. Yassen kisses back, and Alex doesn't think he's fooling himself when he thinks it feels just as needy and hungry as his is.

It's novel, to be here and to feel Yassen's warm breathing under his hands. He's not entirely sure it's not a dream.

Like most dreams, it is all too fleeting.

Yassen pulls away an inch, and the warmth in his eyes isn't wiped, but pushed back in favor of steely determination. "We have to move now. They will be—"

Alex presses forward and covers Yassen's lips with his own once more, rough and insistent, just how he knows Yassen caves to easiest.

Yassen gives as much as Alex takes, but Alex knows he was right. They need to move. He drags himself away, burying his face against Yassen's throat and breaths him in instead, moves with him as they both catch their breath, tries to preserve this memory of them in his heart and mind somewhere it won't ever fade.

He feels Yassen shift to curve his body over his. The hands that had made their way to Alex's ribs drag up toward his shoulders and pull him tight to him, and Alex bows his head and settles down against him easily and hopes they'll bruise—hopes he'll have Yassen's fingerprints littering him for days, would keep those bruises forever if he could.

He doesn't know what Yassen would say to that. But he does know about the sweet sound Yassen had let slip just moments before when Alex bit down into his lip hard enough to draw blood, and Alex thinks that maybe Yassen wouldn't mind all too much that Alex wanted to be marked by him like that. Maybe one day. Far in some intangible future Alex wonders if they'll ever get to have.

Alex breathes out, feels the slight dampness of his breath gather against the fabric of Yassen's trousers. "Give me a break, alright?" Alex tries to joke, betrayed by the hand he has grasping tight around Yassen's ankle. "I've been here before." Alex feels a hand in his hair then, longer than the last time they'd met, fingers curling warm against his scalp.

They breathe together, just once. Then Yassen is back in action. "I don't have many plans for a concrete box," Yassen says, and Alex fails to hold back a childish groan. He turns his head in Yassen's lap, frowning up at the man as he stretches his bad arm out tentatively.

Alex is suddenly very exhausted, now that he's had a bare second to be comfortable again, and all of the bruises and cuts finally start to register with his nerve endings. That, combined with all the utter ridiculousness and stress of the last few hours, has his burnout finally bubbling to the surface with a long groan. "I hate this stupid place. What's even the point of this empty room? And who builds trick corridors straight to the ocean anyway, what can you even gain at this many stories up? It's just a glorified, gilded diving board at this point."

The hand stills in Alex's hair. Yassen hums above him. Not one of his thoughtless and agreeable hums, Alex thinks with a quickly sinking heart, nor one of his playful ones and definitely not his sexy hum; no, this hum is the one that means there's a plan forming and it's without a doubt one that Alex will not like. Alex groans into Yassen's leg, silently cursing himself in the face of the fact that it was most definitely his own fault that Yassen got whatever this idea was in the first place. Him and his big, yapping mouth.

Yassen moves them quickly after that, explaining his rather straight-forward plan as he adjusts the makeshift-tourniquet and Alex heaves himself up off the ground with a shake to his bad knee.

"The sea salt will be good for the arm," is all Yassen has to say to him when Alex looks like he might protest, and Alex wants to kill him as much as kiss him.

Then they're back at the door. Alex adjusts his grip on Yassen's knife and prepares himself to leave their peaceful grotto for the gilded, ruby red nightmare waiting for them on the other side.

Yassen hesitates pulling out his own gun, turns to Alex instead.

"We must separate after this," Yassen says. Rebuttal is swift and bitter on Alex's tongue, and he bites down on it before it comes angrily out. He knows, he knows Yassen is right. Knows the eyes he has on himself right now, knows Yassen's closest safe-house isn't his own, knows a thousand other things that say this moment isn't the one. It kills him though, each of the thousand reasons cutting just a little bit more, just that much deeper into him.

It kills him mostly because he knows that that is all wrong at the same time that it is always going to be the truth.

Because he knows that this is the moment, just like he knew that moment on the boat all that time ago, like he knew that very first meeting all the way back at Point Blanc.

Yassen can read the pain in his face. He brings his hand up to Alex's chin and holds him gently, keeps his head steady and tilted up at his own.

"We have to take the jump," Alex whispers, sure and desperate.

"Alex," Yassen says to him, just his name, voice betraying the same pain and yet still full of so much kindness, patience, clarity. Alex loves him with his entire being. "It will be soon."

Alex tilts his head down and presses his lips to the tips of Yassen's fingers. "It's now," he says. He looks at Yassen. Knows, with upmost certainty. He has to convince Yassen of this. "It's now. It won't ever get better. We'll just get bloodier."

Yassen exhales.

"Look at me," Alex says, even though Yassen is always looking at him. He gently pulls Yassen's fingers up the sides of his face, presses his hand against his cheek. He's not above dragging Yassen's fingers through the blood dripping down from his hairline to prove his point. "Yassen," Alex pleads.

Yassen cups his face tightly, his palm burning against his skin. He looks into Alex's eyes and Alex can see that future so clearly and brightly it almost hurts.

Yassen starts to shakes his head, slowly at first, getting faster as his brow furrows. Alex can almost feel tears brimming.

And then Yassen moves his hand to dig his fingers in his hair, brings Alex closer, presses their heads together, and does the impossible. "Ok," he says. "Ok."

Alex chokes on his laughter that quickly turns into a cut off cry, and decides to bury the sounds in Yassen's mouth instead. Yassen falls back into Alex easily, returning urgent bloody kisses like they're tattoos against his mouth until Alex is numb to it, and then Alex knows one more thing: that them bleeding out in a gilded hell-hole with no idea if they're going to survive the next minute is the happiest moment of Alex's life.

They leave their underwater room, running back to the silver hatch Alex had opened before and diving down into the freezing water with a prayer and a tight squeeze of hands.

By a miracle they both surface unscathed, or at least without any new notable injuries, and swim toward the shore in silence. Every time Alex glances over at Yassen's shadowed form cutting through the waves he can't help but grin, and he keeps getting mouthfuls of seawater for his trouble. It's so stupid that he just keeps laughing at himself, which just means more seawater, and by the time they reach the rocky beach Alex is trying his hardest to hold in a fit.

"You are ridiculous," Yassen hisses at him, even while coming over to wrap his good arm around Alex's shoulders for no productive reason Alex can figure out. It's the most frivolous thing he's ever seen Yassen do, and it just sets him off again, smiling so widely it hurts.

They're both dripping wet and stumbling unsteady on the rocks, walking through an empty, unrefurbished section of the docks in their blood-stained evening best, and Alex really can't imagine what they must look like right now.

His brain spins, probably the concussion, and Alex is suddenly unsure if he can trust his memories. Yassen actually saying ok sounds like another one of his dreams, or one of his nightmares, something about to be torn away in the most cruel and violent way possible. He's suddenly almost afraid to speak, worried that if he does anything to interrupt their feet on the ground walking side-by-side that Yassen will disappear, be torn away from him as always.

Alex catches his breath, and tries not to give any mind to the burning at his skull or his ribs or his ankle or his bloody foot. His skin is covered in goose-bumps despite the warm Monacan breeze. 

"We need to get you to a doctor," Alex says eventually, Yassen's blood on his hands and up his arms catching the moonlight blackly and reminding him of the more urgent things. He presses closer into Yassen's hold and raises a hand to point out the stairs that lead to the access road that runs along the coast. Yassen nods slightly, and Alex knows he's not getting him to a doctor. Yassen readjusts his grip on Alex, eyes roving through their surroundings alert for danger like always, but Alex can tell his mind's somewhere else. He worries about the blood loss again, wonders if their hit against the ocean surface broke up any clotting they'd achieved. "You ok?"

Yassen just presses a kiss against his soaking wet hair. He doesn't release his hold around Alex as they start climbing up the stairs, and it's a bit awkward, but Alex never thinks for a second about untangling them.

They keep walking, darkness protecting them and each others' arms holding them up, and Alex begins to settle back into his bones. He breaths in the salt air and thinks about other things, curls his hand into the shirt clinging to Yassen's back and presses his hip against his with every sway of their step. 

"What first," Yassen asks, eventually, once they make it to the shadow of the narrow road and freedom is that much closer in reach. "The cabin or the cottage?"

Alex doesn't bother holding in his laughter this time. He just holds his future tight, finally within his grasp, and keeps on walking.