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kennahijjaTitle: In Silence Gone from Danger
Author: Hijja
Fandom: Alex Rider (spoilers right up to and including 'Crocodile Tears')
Characters: Alex, Yassen
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Trouble finds Alex even on the most mundane of assignments...
Note: Originally intended forflash_rider, but wordcount ran way over the limit. Thanks to the incomparable annephoenix for beta and advice. Title filched from Joan Baez's 'Who Do You Think I Am'.
For once, Alex Rider's assignment with MI6 had been as speedy and risk-free as Mrs Jones had promised when she'd called him from a secure line at Royal and General.
Exactly fifteen minutes after putting down the receiver, he'd found himself chauffeured to the bank building in a black, bullet-proof Mercedes S350 limousine, then escorted by John Crawley through an area of the foyer he'd never been in before. A short ride in a downstairs lift took them into an underground zone that awkwardly combined Victorian basement and high-tech security equipment.
Mrs Jones had asked him to identify one of the henchmen who'd attacked him on Harry Bulman's orders a few weeks ago. It was a task quickly fulfilled – Alex wasn't going to forget the permanent, angry sneer of the man he'd kicked in the stomach and sent into hospital. He'd nodded silently at Crawley and was escorted out of the small room with the one-sided glass wall and back towards the lift that would take them back up to the foyer.
That was when the sirens started to shriek, and a metallic loudspeaker began to blare "Code Three, I repeat, Code Three!" in an infinite loop. Alex jumped when Crawley grabbed his elbow and practically dragged him down the corridor, ignoring his protests.
A gun had appeared in Crawley's free hand. Alex wondered where it had come from.
Crawley stopped in front of a door labelled 'Security Control Room'. He opened it with his code card, and all but hurled Alex inside.
"Stay here until I come to fetch you," Crawley ordered before rushing out. "You'll be safe."
The sirens were muted inside the room, but still audible. The two guards who sat watching walls full of monitors were carrying handguns with the unconscious confidence that screamed 'military'. One of them, a good-looking black soldier, offered Alex a sparse smile and an empty swivel chair; the other, older and somewhat rumpled, just glared. Alex went for the chair, eyes curiously scanning the monitors he passed.
And froze. It was just a glimpse, like a ghost flitting from shadow to shadow on bare feet on the grainy screen. But Alex would never, ever forget those movements.
Before he could collect a clear thought, he was at the door, finger stabbing down on the opening button. He dashed out with the yells of the guards ringing in his ears. He didn't even know where he was going. The monitor had showed an area that looked like one he'd passed on the way to the interview room, but the basement area was labyrinthine. There was no way to be sure. He shied away from the treacherous bulbs of CTTV cameras whenever possible and just hoped his green shirt, brown jacket and trainers were distinct enough not to get him shot should he run into a search patrol.
When he peered around yet another corner, this one with a bulky cooling shaft running along the ceiling that looked a lot like the one he'd seen on the security monitor, he saw no trace of his target; his handiwork, however, was unmistakable.
The soldier lay on his side, face down and with his head bent at an unnatural angle. He was barefoot and unarmed, and Alex knew he hadn't set out that way. Alex went down on one knee to check the man's pulse, already knowing he'd find none. He'd seen death too often over the recent weeks, and sometimes wondered whether it still had the power to affect him at all. Now, with his skin crawling as he touched cooling flesh, he knew it still did.
Careful though he had been, Alex received no warning – footsteps, breaths, anything – before he was grabbed by the neck from behind in an unmerciful grip and slammed into the wall. Pain sparked in the entire left side of his head. It drove the air right out of his lungs when he hit the wall again, harder if anything.
"Come to gloat, Rider?" a terribly familiar voice hissed in his ear, so close that Alex could feel the warm breath on the skin of his neck.
He felt himself being dragged away from the body, around the corner into a smaller, darker corridor.
Before he could be thrown into the wall again, Alex wrenched his head around, ignoring the pain and forcing the grip to either give or break his neck. It gave - a little.
Knowing whom he'd see, but still not quite believing it, Alex stared up at Yassen Gregorovich. The assassin's hair was no longer close-cropped, but longer and tangled, his face sharp and tense in a way Alex had never seen before in the man who'd exuded casual calm even when waking up to a gun pointing at his head. His feet were no longer bare. He now wore the fallen guard's military-issue boots and carried the man's MP in the free hand that wasn't holding Alex.
For a moment, Alex just stared, barely aware that he was shaking. Then rage descended.
"I thought you were dead!" he snarled, hands curling into fists. "I was there! I saw you die!"
He pulled away even though the assassin's fingers left bruises on his throat.
"How can you not be dead!"
Yassen gave him a hard look. He pulled up the hem of his thin black top, revealing an ugly red scar just an inch from the heart.
"They took me from the wreckage of Air Force One alive," he said. "I gather you didn't ask to attend my funeral?"
Alex stared at him in shock. It had never occurred to him that there might be such a thing. He could no more imagine MI6 organising a funeral for their dead enemy than shipping the body back to Malagosto.
"They never told me anything. I thought it was my fault. I thought you were dead because of me."
"It was because of you," Yassen said coldly.
"You made the decision!"
The assassin looked at him, eyes hooded and dark. "Yes, I guess I did," he said.
"You sent me to Scorpia," Alex accused him in a burst of anger as memories came crashing down on him. "And they almost killed me!" For the first time, he realised how much Yassen, even dead, had shaped his life over the past years.
"Why would they?" A frown furrowed Yassen's forehead.
Alex hesitated. Yassen had known and loved Alex's father, in a way Alex himself had never had a chance to. For him, finding out about John Rider's true allegiances would be as traumatic as Ash's betrayal had been for Alex. Alex didn't quite know how much faith to place in Yassen's sense of obligation - after all, his love for John Rider hadn't stopped him from murdering Alex's uncle Ian, John's brother. Much better, for both of them, if he didn't learn the truth when he was hurt, hunted and under pressure.
"Mrs Rothman was attracted to my father," he hedged, hoping Yassen wouldn't pick up on the short pause. "He rejected her. She wanted revenge for that." It wasn't a lie, not really. He'd just left out all the important bits.
"Show me," Yassen ordered.
Alex hesitated, then reached up to undo the top buttons of his shirt. Unlike Yassen's, the scar above his heart had healed well enough – after all, the surgeons and physiotherapists at St Dominic's, one of London's most exclusive private hospitals, had been world-class. But it would never vanish.
At times, Alex still recalled with a cramp of unease the easy acceptance he'd found on Malagosto, training with Scorpia's assassins-to-be. It was a sense of belonging he'd never felt before, not at school, and certainly not among K Unit. Although one of them might well have been the sniper who'd shot him in London.
Yassen reached out, ran a finger over the rough tissue and nodded. "You know about your father, then?" he asked. "And yet, here you are, still serving MI6…" Alex saw his fingers clench around the ribbed handle of the gun.
"Scorpia is evil," he said flatly. "They were planning to kill thousands of London schoolchildren. Including me," he added, recalling the gold-plated nanoshells that were still coursing through his bloodstream.
"So you stopped them. And they punished you."
It wasn’t even a question. Yassen knew him very well indeed.
"What did they do to you?" Alex asked, almost afraid.
Yassen shot him a sharp look. "They torture innocents and prisoners of war overseas," he snapped. "What do you think they did to Scorpia's top assassin?"
Alex thought of Alan Blunt, cold, grey and utterly without conscience. He shivered inwardly.
"I didn't know," he said.
Yassen raised an eyebrow. "What would you have done if you had?"
Alex shrugged helplessly. "I don't know," he admitted again. "But I'm glad you're not dead." It was the truth, he realised. Only when he'd seen the Russian alive, he'd realised how heavy the burden of his death had weighed on him.
There was a sudden echo of heavy footsteps, seeming to come from every direction at once. A metal door on the right-hand side of the corridor was tightly barred and alarmed. Yassen tried it, but it wouldn't open. The assassin dragged Alex further into the corridor, shoving him back first against the wall with a hand clamped over his mouth.
"Did they send you to distract me?" he snarled against Alex's throat.
Alex glared. For a second he seriously considered biting the hand over his mouth, but then it vanished – only to close around his throat in an unsubtle warning.
"You grabbed me," Alex rasped. "I didn't even know you were here when they brought me in!"
Yassen's eyes and expression didn't soften, but his grip did, a little.
That was when the two soldiers rounded the corner in front of them, so suddenly that Alex jumped.
They saw Yassen, tall, fair-haired, one hand wrapped around Alex's throat. Their guns came up at once. Yassen let go of Alex and pointed the MP at the soldiers. But fast as he was, they had the advantage of surprise.
Alex moved without thinking, just as driven by instinct as he'd been when he'd run out of the control room. He threw himself forward, into the line of fire, delivering a karate chop at Yassen's gun arm that set off his aim and sent a hail of bullets screeching off the metal wall.
The soldiers fired.
One bullet went wide, striking the wall beside Yassen's head. The other, aimed perfectly, would have hit Yassen directly in the chest. If Alex hadn't been there.
Instead, it buried itself in Alex's left shoulder. The impact threw him back into Yassen, who grabbed him around the middle even as his free hand raised the MP to fire.
The soldiers dove back around the corner to escape the bullets. From somewhere further behind, a voice yelled, "Hold fire!" It sounded almost like Crawley.
Alex groaned as he slipped down to the floor, cushioned by Yassen's grip. When Scorpia's sniper had shot him after he'd destroyed operation Invisible Sword, he had felt no pain. Just the impact of the bullet, a tilting of the world, and a fading out of reality into the embrace of death.
Not this time. A burst of pain exploded in his shoulder. The fingers of his left hand twitched reflexively, and sent a jolt through his nerves as if someone had poured acid into the wound.
More footsteps sounded from the other end of the corridor. Yassen swore under his breath in Russian. He raised the MP, aiming at the welded lock of the door he'd just tried in vain. The bullets tore into it, painfully loud in the narrow space of the corridor. A row of holes perforated the lock. Yassen threw himself against the door with all his strength. This time, it snapped open. An alarm started to blare.
Yassen fired another round of bullets down both directions of the corridor to discourage his pursuers, then dragged Alex into the room beyond. The movement sent a stab of searing agony through Alex's shoulder. His eyes watered, turning the form of the assassin into a blur. Yassen threw the door shut behind them, and the alarm broke off. There was a crossbar on the inside, and Yassen bolted it before leaning over Alex to examine his wound.
"You'll live," he announced even as Alex jerked under his touch, although he looked worried when Alex doubled over in a coughing fit. He tasted blood in his mouth. A pained hiss escaped him when Yassen took the hand of his unhurt right arm and pressed it palm-down over the wound.
"Press down," the assassin ordered. "Not too hard, but firm enough to staunch the flow." Alex did, and nearly passed out from the pain. He let out a soft cry.
Outside, voices sounded, and a fist was hammering against the door.
"They will take you to hospital as soon as they make it in," Yassen promised. "That," he nodded at Alex's shoulder, "was extraordinarily foolish."
Alex bared bloody teeth. "We're even now," he ground out. His eyes darted around the room. It looked like a communal area for the guards. Doors led to showers and lavatories, with another exit at the opposite wall. "Go!" he snapped.
He felt blood seeping through between his fingers, and weakness started to tug at him in lapping waves.
Yassen nodded, then unexpectedly leant down and placed the knuckles of his right hand against Alex's cheek.
"Not 'even' by a long shot, little Alex," he promised.
Alex wasn't altogether sure that sounded like a good thing, yet felt oddly comforted by the touch.
He kept his hand pressed to the wound, trying to shut out the pain as Yassen slipped out of the second door. There were no shots.
Alex closed his eyes and drifted, barely able to lift his eyelids when the locked door sprang open with a bang, and a group of soldiers stormed in, weapons brandished. Some took up pursuit of Yassen through the back door, but within moments Alex felt himself lifted onto a stretcher. Crawley's grey face appeared above him even as his hand was peeled away from the wound and an intravenous drip fed into the vein at his elbow. The man's mouth moved, but Alex couldn't hear him. He could hear nothing apart from a mounting rush of noise in his ears.
His lips cracked in a smile as he was rolled out. Even as he slipped into a drugged haze, he knew that Yassen had been right. He would heal.
And Yassen would escape.
And part of Alex was looking forward, with sleepy curiosity, to find out what 'not even' might mean.
~ finis ~
Author: Hijja
Fandom: Alex Rider (spoilers right up to and including 'Crocodile Tears')
Characters: Alex, Yassen
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Trouble finds Alex even on the most mundane of assignments...
Note: Originally intended for
flash_rider, but wordcount ran way over the limit. Thanks to the incomparable annephoenix for beta and advice. Title filched from Joan Baez's 'Who Do You Think I Am'.For once, Alex Rider's assignment with MI6 had been as speedy and risk-free as Mrs Jones had promised when she'd called him from a secure line at Royal and General.
Exactly fifteen minutes after putting down the receiver, he'd found himself chauffeured to the bank building in a black, bullet-proof Mercedes S350 limousine, then escorted by John Crawley through an area of the foyer he'd never been in before. A short ride in a downstairs lift took them into an underground zone that awkwardly combined Victorian basement and high-tech security equipment.
Mrs Jones had asked him to identify one of the henchmen who'd attacked him on Harry Bulman's orders a few weeks ago. It was a task quickly fulfilled – Alex wasn't going to forget the permanent, angry sneer of the man he'd kicked in the stomach and sent into hospital. He'd nodded silently at Crawley and was escorted out of the small room with the one-sided glass wall and back towards the lift that would take them back up to the foyer.
That was when the sirens started to shriek, and a metallic loudspeaker began to blare "Code Three, I repeat, Code Three!" in an infinite loop. Alex jumped when Crawley grabbed his elbow and practically dragged him down the corridor, ignoring his protests.
A gun had appeared in Crawley's free hand. Alex wondered where it had come from.
Crawley stopped in front of a door labelled 'Security Control Room'. He opened it with his code card, and all but hurled Alex inside.
"Stay here until I come to fetch you," Crawley ordered before rushing out. "You'll be safe."
The sirens were muted inside the room, but still audible. The two guards who sat watching walls full of monitors were carrying handguns with the unconscious confidence that screamed 'military'. One of them, a good-looking black soldier, offered Alex a sparse smile and an empty swivel chair; the other, older and somewhat rumpled, just glared. Alex went for the chair, eyes curiously scanning the monitors he passed.
And froze. It was just a glimpse, like a ghost flitting from shadow to shadow on bare feet on the grainy screen. But Alex would never, ever forget those movements.
Before he could collect a clear thought, he was at the door, finger stabbing down on the opening button. He dashed out with the yells of the guards ringing in his ears. He didn't even know where he was going. The monitor had showed an area that looked like one he'd passed on the way to the interview room, but the basement area was labyrinthine. There was no way to be sure. He shied away from the treacherous bulbs of CTTV cameras whenever possible and just hoped his green shirt, brown jacket and trainers were distinct enough not to get him shot should he run into a search patrol.
When he peered around yet another corner, this one with a bulky cooling shaft running along the ceiling that looked a lot like the one he'd seen on the security monitor, he saw no trace of his target; his handiwork, however, was unmistakable.
The soldier lay on his side, face down and with his head bent at an unnatural angle. He was barefoot and unarmed, and Alex knew he hadn't set out that way. Alex went down on one knee to check the man's pulse, already knowing he'd find none. He'd seen death too often over the recent weeks, and sometimes wondered whether it still had the power to affect him at all. Now, with his skin crawling as he touched cooling flesh, he knew it still did.
Careful though he had been, Alex received no warning – footsteps, breaths, anything – before he was grabbed by the neck from behind in an unmerciful grip and slammed into the wall. Pain sparked in the entire left side of his head. It drove the air right out of his lungs when he hit the wall again, harder if anything.
"Come to gloat, Rider?" a terribly familiar voice hissed in his ear, so close that Alex could feel the warm breath on the skin of his neck.
He felt himself being dragged away from the body, around the corner into a smaller, darker corridor.
Before he could be thrown into the wall again, Alex wrenched his head around, ignoring the pain and forcing the grip to either give or break his neck. It gave - a little.
Knowing whom he'd see, but still not quite believing it, Alex stared up at Yassen Gregorovich. The assassin's hair was no longer close-cropped, but longer and tangled, his face sharp and tense in a way Alex had never seen before in the man who'd exuded casual calm even when waking up to a gun pointing at his head. His feet were no longer bare. He now wore the fallen guard's military-issue boots and carried the man's MP in the free hand that wasn't holding Alex.
For a moment, Alex just stared, barely aware that he was shaking. Then rage descended.
"I thought you were dead!" he snarled, hands curling into fists. "I was there! I saw you die!"
He pulled away even though the assassin's fingers left bruises on his throat.
"How can you not be dead!"
Yassen gave him a hard look. He pulled up the hem of his thin black top, revealing an ugly red scar just an inch from the heart.
"They took me from the wreckage of Air Force One alive," he said. "I gather you didn't ask to attend my funeral?"
Alex stared at him in shock. It had never occurred to him that there might be such a thing. He could no more imagine MI6 organising a funeral for their dead enemy than shipping the body back to Malagosto.
"They never told me anything. I thought it was my fault. I thought you were dead because of me."
"It was because of you," Yassen said coldly.
"You made the decision!"
The assassin looked at him, eyes hooded and dark. "Yes, I guess I did," he said.
"You sent me to Scorpia," Alex accused him in a burst of anger as memories came crashing down on him. "And they almost killed me!" For the first time, he realised how much Yassen, even dead, had shaped his life over the past years.
"Why would they?" A frown furrowed Yassen's forehead.
Alex hesitated. Yassen had known and loved Alex's father, in a way Alex himself had never had a chance to. For him, finding out about John Rider's true allegiances would be as traumatic as Ash's betrayal had been for Alex. Alex didn't quite know how much faith to place in Yassen's sense of obligation - after all, his love for John Rider hadn't stopped him from murdering Alex's uncle Ian, John's brother. Much better, for both of them, if he didn't learn the truth when he was hurt, hunted and under pressure.
"Mrs Rothman was attracted to my father," he hedged, hoping Yassen wouldn't pick up on the short pause. "He rejected her. She wanted revenge for that." It wasn't a lie, not really. He'd just left out all the important bits.
"Show me," Yassen ordered.
Alex hesitated, then reached up to undo the top buttons of his shirt. Unlike Yassen's, the scar above his heart had healed well enough – after all, the surgeons and physiotherapists at St Dominic's, one of London's most exclusive private hospitals, had been world-class. But it would never vanish.
At times, Alex still recalled with a cramp of unease the easy acceptance he'd found on Malagosto, training with Scorpia's assassins-to-be. It was a sense of belonging he'd never felt before, not at school, and certainly not among K Unit. Although one of them might well have been the sniper who'd shot him in London.
Yassen reached out, ran a finger over the rough tissue and nodded. "You know about your father, then?" he asked. "And yet, here you are, still serving MI6…" Alex saw his fingers clench around the ribbed handle of the gun.
"Scorpia is evil," he said flatly. "They were planning to kill thousands of London schoolchildren. Including me," he added, recalling the gold-plated nanoshells that were still coursing through his bloodstream.
"So you stopped them. And they punished you."
It wasn’t even a question. Yassen knew him very well indeed.
"What did they do to you?" Alex asked, almost afraid.
Yassen shot him a sharp look. "They torture innocents and prisoners of war overseas," he snapped. "What do you think they did to Scorpia's top assassin?"
Alex thought of Alan Blunt, cold, grey and utterly without conscience. He shivered inwardly.
"I didn't know," he said.
Yassen raised an eyebrow. "What would you have done if you had?"
Alex shrugged helplessly. "I don't know," he admitted again. "But I'm glad you're not dead." It was the truth, he realised. Only when he'd seen the Russian alive, he'd realised how heavy the burden of his death had weighed on him.
There was a sudden echo of heavy footsteps, seeming to come from every direction at once. A metal door on the right-hand side of the corridor was tightly barred and alarmed. Yassen tried it, but it wouldn't open. The assassin dragged Alex further into the corridor, shoving him back first against the wall with a hand clamped over his mouth.
"Did they send you to distract me?" he snarled against Alex's throat.
Alex glared. For a second he seriously considered biting the hand over his mouth, but then it vanished – only to close around his throat in an unsubtle warning.
"You grabbed me," Alex rasped. "I didn't even know you were here when they brought me in!"
Yassen's eyes and expression didn't soften, but his grip did, a little.
That was when the two soldiers rounded the corner in front of them, so suddenly that Alex jumped.
They saw Yassen, tall, fair-haired, one hand wrapped around Alex's throat. Their guns came up at once. Yassen let go of Alex and pointed the MP at the soldiers. But fast as he was, they had the advantage of surprise.
Alex moved without thinking, just as driven by instinct as he'd been when he'd run out of the control room. He threw himself forward, into the line of fire, delivering a karate chop at Yassen's gun arm that set off his aim and sent a hail of bullets screeching off the metal wall.
The soldiers fired.
One bullet went wide, striking the wall beside Yassen's head. The other, aimed perfectly, would have hit Yassen directly in the chest. If Alex hadn't been there.
Instead, it buried itself in Alex's left shoulder. The impact threw him back into Yassen, who grabbed him around the middle even as his free hand raised the MP to fire.
The soldiers dove back around the corner to escape the bullets. From somewhere further behind, a voice yelled, "Hold fire!" It sounded almost like Crawley.
Alex groaned as he slipped down to the floor, cushioned by Yassen's grip. When Scorpia's sniper had shot him after he'd destroyed operation Invisible Sword, he had felt no pain. Just the impact of the bullet, a tilting of the world, and a fading out of reality into the embrace of death.
Not this time. A burst of pain exploded in his shoulder. The fingers of his left hand twitched reflexively, and sent a jolt through his nerves as if someone had poured acid into the wound.
More footsteps sounded from the other end of the corridor. Yassen swore under his breath in Russian. He raised the MP, aiming at the welded lock of the door he'd just tried in vain. The bullets tore into it, painfully loud in the narrow space of the corridor. A row of holes perforated the lock. Yassen threw himself against the door with all his strength. This time, it snapped open. An alarm started to blare.
Yassen fired another round of bullets down both directions of the corridor to discourage his pursuers, then dragged Alex into the room beyond. The movement sent a stab of searing agony through Alex's shoulder. His eyes watered, turning the form of the assassin into a blur. Yassen threw the door shut behind them, and the alarm broke off. There was a crossbar on the inside, and Yassen bolted it before leaning over Alex to examine his wound.
"You'll live," he announced even as Alex jerked under his touch, although he looked worried when Alex doubled over in a coughing fit. He tasted blood in his mouth. A pained hiss escaped him when Yassen took the hand of his unhurt right arm and pressed it palm-down over the wound.
"Press down," the assassin ordered. "Not too hard, but firm enough to staunch the flow." Alex did, and nearly passed out from the pain. He let out a soft cry.
Outside, voices sounded, and a fist was hammering against the door.
"They will take you to hospital as soon as they make it in," Yassen promised. "That," he nodded at Alex's shoulder, "was extraordinarily foolish."
Alex bared bloody teeth. "We're even now," he ground out. His eyes darted around the room. It looked like a communal area for the guards. Doors led to showers and lavatories, with another exit at the opposite wall. "Go!" he snapped.
He felt blood seeping through between his fingers, and weakness started to tug at him in lapping waves.
Yassen nodded, then unexpectedly leant down and placed the knuckles of his right hand against Alex's cheek.
"Not 'even' by a long shot, little Alex," he promised.
Alex wasn't altogether sure that sounded like a good thing, yet felt oddly comforted by the touch.
He kept his hand pressed to the wound, trying to shut out the pain as Yassen slipped out of the second door. There were no shots.
Alex closed his eyes and drifted, barely able to lift his eyelids when the locked door sprang open with a bang, and a group of soldiers stormed in, weapons brandished. Some took up pursuit of Yassen through the back door, but within moments Alex felt himself lifted onto a stretcher. Crawley's grey face appeared above him even as his hand was peeled away from the wound and an intravenous drip fed into the vein at his elbow. The man's mouth moved, but Alex couldn't hear him. He could hear nothing apart from a mounting rush of noise in his ears.
His lips cracked in a smile as he was rolled out. Even as he slipped into a drugged haze, he knew that Yassen had been right. He would heal.
And Yassen would escape.
And part of Alex was looking forward, with sleepy curiosity, to find out what 'not even' might mean.
