Work Text:
Kyra sits in a way that feels as dangerous as everything else she does, which is to say somehow quite threatening but at least accompanied by a quirk of a smile.
It’s not exactly comforting but it is at least a little better than Alex’s watchful, almost scowling sprawl nearby. Although, wait. Tom looks between the two of them again and decides yeah, actually, the scowl is currently much less dangerous than the smirk.
He’s probably gotten himself into another mess this time, hasn’t he? Well, can’t really expect anything different from this lot.
“This one is normal, right?” he says, “I’m not coming out of the train to guns or blazing bullets or - or -”
He stumbles off, because the way Kyra is smiling at him remains disquieting. Why did he agree to this again?
“We’re just taking a trip,” Kyra says brightly (or what he thinks is brightly for her), “I thought a nice vacation might cheer us all up. Jack said we could and she’ll come join us in a couple days.”
Well. If Jack said they could, it does seem a little more likely to be above board.
He has that thought for about three seconds before he takes it back.
Alex slouches further, but one of his hands reaches out to brush Kyra’s for a moment and his eyes are vigilant. It’s not quite The Look. Tom has learned by now to recognize that one. He sometimes wishes he’d figured it out a long time ago, back when maybe it would have let him know Alex needed to be stopped from doing something incredibly stupid and dangerous and brave. Maybe then Alex wouldn’t stop at the sound of a car backfiring to put his body between it and anyone he was with. Maybe then Alex wouldn’t watch exits like a falcon or carry his body differently when the weather grows cold because of the once-broken ribs that Tom can tell still ache.
Maybe half of Bath would be dead, though, or there would have been nuclear war, or the world would be controlled by a Hitler worshiping mad man and his weird clones.
Tom pulls his mind from those thoughts, like he does every time they come up. He sees Alex watching him, knows Alex knows he’s been thinking them.
“As long as these tickets aren’t taking us to Cornwall again,” Tom says, and Alex smiles a little and takes Kyra’s hand. She squeezes his back briefly.
“So where are we going?” Alex asks, and Kyra laughs.
“No, still a surprise.”
“You know I figured out already, right?” The tone is so lightly teasing and amused it could almost be Alex of a few years ago telling Tom to stop dragging out an announcement of his new project or some gossip he’d overheard.
“The first part, sure,” Kyra says, utterly confident. “Not part two. If you figured out part two, I will be disappointed in myself.”
The door to the train car hisses open and Alex’s eyes dart to it immediately. There’s no visible tension in his body that Tom can spot, but he’s learned to spot those flickers of awareness. The person who clambers in and takes a spot looks completely innocuous to Tom, just some bloke in his middle ages with a newspaper and a briefcase who sighs as he sits down and starts reading.
He doesn’t know what Alex sees in him, only that he’s watching the newcomer sharper than he would be if he’d immediately discarded him as a threat.
You know, Tom thinks, it might be a little worrying I know that much about how Alex looks at people when he’s thinking about whether they might try to kill us.
Nothing happens, which is really great. The train ride ends and they exit to find a prearranged cab ready to take them to the airport.
“You didn’t say out of the country!” Tom protests, and Kyra hands him his passport with a grin entirely too smug.
“Don’t worry, I have it handled.”
Tom would say he needs to step up his personal security, but his two best friends in the world are a crazy hacker and a madman who climbs buildings for fun, so what would it really help?
“Am I still only on figuring out part one?” Alex says, pulling his own passport out of his pocket, and Kyra does laugh.
“Of course you are.”
Alex rolls his eyes, but it’s with a smile.
(Tom has seen that smile before, a thousand times, bright and open and warm. He still dreams of the night he saw it wrong and twisted and cruel. That’s another thought he tries to keep from showing on his face.)
+
“Miss Starbright,” Mrs. Jones says, brisk and professional as ever, and Jack tries to keep her smile polite as she sits down. “How pleased we are to see you’ve made it past our first round of interviews. As you know, our bank is exceptionally thorough in how we vet our candidates.”
“Mrs. Jones. I didn’t realize you would be a part of this interview process.” She waits as Mrs. Jones sighs and flicks a button and the conference room walls go dark.
“No need for stepping around the subject here, Miss Starbright, but I assure you the position being offered is legitimate and is not directly tied to any previous activities you are aware of. This is, let us say, an act of good will.” She slides a folder across the table. “I am sure you are capable of the role and of reading through these documents thoroughly before signing any of them to ensure there’s nothing underhanded slipped in.”
Jack opens the folder and glances through the first page before closing it.
“Look. I know you’ve been - well, better to Alex than most. And the last paperwork came with no strings attached, and yeah, I checked thoroughly there too. But why this? Why now?”
Mrs. Jones folds her hands in that precise manner that has irked Jack since the first time she met her. They meet each other’s eyes steadily.
“SCORPIA is not quite dead, Jack.” The words are as cold as steel and Jack is already reaching for her phone. “He’s on a plane right now, isn’t he? I don’t believe he’ll pick up. There’s no immediate threat, please sit back down.”
“No immediate threat? Is that what you said last time before he came home needing a doctor? Or the time before that? How many times are you going to lie to us both that he’s going to be all right?” Jack is still standing, one hand on her phone and the other on the folder of paperwork.
“We do lie, don’t we.” And Mrs. Jones sounds so tired that Jack thaws just enough to listen a little longer. “But I promise, I know of no immediate threat to Alex. Just that – there was an attempt, shortly after Bath. And we are uncertain whether there are others who may try as well.”
“An attempt? On his life?” And then Jack remembers Alex and Kyra staring up at a nearby rooftop, the way Alex’s shoulders settled and he instinctively moved when he heard a noise none of the rest of them had.
Mrs. Jones’ lips tighten somehow more.
“We weren’t the ones who stopped it. But we are going to be sure we don’t let another one happen. And that is part of your role here. This bank is completely legitimate and on the level, your job will be as well, you and Alex will be well provided for as a result. As well as - well, we’ve already discussed the various pensions.” She clears her throat, embarrassed almost.
Jack knows about all the pensions. She’s made it a mission. Ian’s estate, Alex’s parent’s estate, she’s made sure Alex has every possible thing he’s owed. Ian had trusted her. He’d believed in her even when she’d said she would be leaving.
“Miss Starbright, in return, I ask only that you and Alex keep us appraised of his whereabouts and allow us to advise on any security requirements we might consider necessary.”
“Security? Like he’s some sort of prince with a bodyguard or something?” She says it out loud but realizes even as she does she already knows the answer.
Mrs. Jones continues to meet her eyes, the frosty blue gaze that never seems to waver.
“I don’t ever want him coming home in a body bag, Miss Starbright. I think we can at least agree on that.”
There’s a long pause, and then Jack puts her phone down.
“Yeah. Yeah, we can agree on that.”
“Excellent. You’ll start here soon, but before you do - once Kyra sends you those tickets for you to join them, please let us know the destination. And - let Alex know of our concerns.”
“Ma’am,” Jack says, which isn’t a promise at all and she is very sure isn’t taken as one.
+
Alex likes Germany. He’s been here before - with his uncle, of course, back when they travelled all the time. What had they done here? Skiing, he thinks, but they had also walked the streets of old cities and visited museums and studied history.
“Germany,” Ian had said one time, “knows what it is like to be under a tyrant and come back a better people. But it took time, and it was not easy.”
The first morning after they arrive he wakes up early - he always has anyways but his time at Point Blanc had made the habit stick even harder. Tom is snoring. Kyra is sleeping in the haphazard way she does, one arm out of the blanket and a leg almost trying to climb the wall.
When he wakes it’s from a dream, a gun to his head or a dead switch in his heart or – or his father on a bridge and then a plane, his mother alone and then dead. He’s had all these dreams so many times now. He can at least pretend they don’t affect him most of the time. Maybe that’s why he’s always the first person awake, really. It’s easier to have a few minutes alone to breathe and regain composure. He can do it immediately if he needs to (that lesson was learned at Malagosto, written in black and blue and yellowing purple across his body). It’s easier, though, when it’s just him for a little while.
He leaves a note to reassure Kyra and Tom he’ll be back soon before he goes out into the cold, still thinking of the brief text Jack had sent last night. Be careful. Meeting at The Bank was fine but they’re worried about your trip. See you tomorrow. Jack doesn’t talk in code unless it’s needed, but when he puts it together with the body on the roof (“I just wanted you to be aware Niles was off the playing board,” Mrs. Jones had said, and for a moment he had tasted blood in his mouth like a snake bite) he thinks he has an idea of what she means.
Alex likes the cold, too. It means he’s bundled into enough layers it’s hard for anyone to recognize him without close enough scrutiny that he’ll notice it. It’s an acceptable trade for the ache in his ribs that he has begun to realize will never leave him whenever the weather changes. (Niles on a different roof, dismissive and angry and brutal all at once, the way Alex’s feet had tried for traction as he was dragged by his throat, clawing for air as every breath stabbed against the splintered ribs that also threatened his lungs.)
There is an itch in his spine and the back of his neck as if he is being watched, and he worries that too will never go away.
It had been real, before. He hadn’t just been paranoid. It had been real, and his instincts had kept him alive. When will he learn how to tell the real and the instinct and the paranoia apart?
There is snow falling, gentle and silent, and it feels like every noise in the entire city is muffled by it in these hours before sunrise.
“Coffee?”
He knows how useless it is to bring his fists up but they’re up anyway as he spins onto his back heel, stares down yet another ghost.
“Alex, if I wanted you dead, you would have been dead a long time ago.”
Yassen holds out a cup, steaming with heat, and after a long moment Alex reaches out and takes it from him. He holds it and lets the warmth reach his hands through his gloves.
After what he guesses Yassen will think is too long, he asks.
“Why?”
Yassen shrugs a little.
“I already told you the story, Alex. You have too good a memory to need me to tell it again.”
Alex glances around them, checks the vantage points, and then takes a long sip of coffee before he faces Yassen squarely.
“No. Why on the rooftop? You fulfilled your debt to my father long before that. How did you even know Niles would try to kill me?”
“See, now you’re asking better questions. Still not quite there.”
Yassen is always such a contradiction of patience and impatience, stifled and open, pleasant and cruel. Alex has wondered before of how much of that he learned from John - from Alex’s father. It reminds him of Ian. He wonders, sometimes, if his childhood would have been much different with any of the three of them.
“Fine. Why are you here, following me?”
“And now you are asking the right questions.” Yassen smiles, that slight one that now reminds Alex of the smile in the few pictures he has of his father. “Because I’m not the only one following you. And you are being far too uncautious. Go home, Alex. At least there the Department knows how to watch you.”
“Am I going to be watched the rest of my life?”
Yassen studies him for a long moment and then finishes his coffee. There’s something in his eyes that’s almost sympathy. Alex has seen it before. Sometimes he thinks he prefers the studied indifference.
“What do you think?”
And then he’s gone into the early morning, vanishing like the ghost of the past he’s always been. Alex sits down on a nearby bench and drinks his coffee slowly, watching the sunrise and the places a sniper could get a line of sight on him. He’s about to throw the cup away when he glances down and sees the phone number, meant to escape the notice of anyone who didn’t pay enough attention.
He brings back breakfast and uses that as his excuse when he finds Tom and Kyra both awake and bundling up to come search for him.Their hushed and worried whispers stop as soon as they see him, the relief too obvious. I left a note, he almost says, and realizes that will never be enough to stop them worrying.
“Jack will be here soon, right?” he says, and they both have relaxed some but the tight worry in their eyes is still there and has been for so long. Sometimes – sometimes he wonders if it wouldn’t be easier for them –
He breaks that thought off.
(Yassen on a rooftop, twice.)
“Well, we’ll meet her at the airport. We’re staying somewhere nicer for this part, right?”
“VIP suite, of course,” Kyra says. “We were just at the hostel for the one night to make sure everything was secure.”
“Secure?” Alex knows the way he turns on her in that moment is a little too abrupt, a little too worried, but he can’t quite help it. She tilts her head, confusion on her face.
“Well, I did set this up last minute, I didn’t want us to sign into the VIP suite until I was positive everything was completely in place. I mean, I’d be fine and you’d be fine but.” Kyra gestures at Tom, who rolls his eyes and sighs.
“Hey, which of us escaped from like, a lot of guards on a bike? I’m just saying, I feel like I’ve earned a little more consideration for my abilities at this point.”
Alex hugs him and feels the slight surprise in Tom’s body at the suddenness of it, feels the ache in his ribs that means the snow is here to stay.
“Come here, Kyra,” he says, and ignores the way stretching his arms around two people makes his back ache and always will. “I’m sorry. I just - sorry. We’ll have a good time. I bet the room service is killer.”
He regrets that choice of wording immediately, but neither of them seem to notice that at least.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. Jack letting them know she’s landed, he hopes.
+
There is always some small corner of Kyra’s heart that burns with jealousy when she sees Alex and Jack, the way Jack hugs him and he hugs her back, the unreserved love given so freely.
She has no memory of a time either of her parents hugged her like that, or any of the various servants she was handed off to and learned early on how to hide from. Sometimes, for a brief moment, she sees the same jealousy in Tom’s eyes.
Alex and Jack are so easy with each other. Maybe if Nuo or Andriy had been less cold, less busy, maybe then Kyra could have been loved like that. Maybe later, when she was older and not so demanding or angry, when she had learned better how to bury things. Now she will never know if that could have been true. She keeps that thought in a quiet cold part of her most of the time, tries not to think of it, but the way Jack and Alex talk to each other and roll their eyes and Jack eyes him for injury just in case always makes it try to worm its way out into sunlight.
“He’s lucky,” Tom says beside her, his arms across his chest almost as defensive as hers. “That we’re fine waiting, again,” he adds, and it’s a cover, the same way the overly exaggerated greeting with his brother is, the way he casually ignores Jack asking if his parents are going to expect him home. She bumps her elbow into his.
“We are too,” she says, and for one brief moment Tom looks at her without that guard in it that she realizes now she’s always understood. Not a spy. Just another early orphan.
They come to join her and Tom, and Jack is smiling but there’s a tightness in it Kyra recognizes.
“Told you I’d get us somewhere really fun,” Kyra says. “I hear Oktoberfest is great.”
“I’ve wanted to check it out for a long time,” Jack says, “but you’re being careful, right?”
And there’s something in the way she says it that isn’t quite Jack, or at least not Jack on a good day. It is very much Jack on an Alex gone missing day. Kyra glances at Alex and he’s not looking back, his eyes scanning their surroundings with a watchfulness higher than his everyday normal.
“Of course I was careful,” Kyra says, and Tom looks at her and grimaces a little. He knows something’s wrong too. It’s been wrong since they woke up this morning with Alex gone, since he came home with breakfast. Too distant at the same time he was too close. He’s felt brittle for too long now, but this was - more. Closer to all the times he’s made a choice that means other lives matter more than his.
She probably should have actually put a tracker on him instead of just thinking about it, but he’d never trust her again if he found out. (And of course, somehow he would find out.)
“Awesome,” Jack says, “then let’s get to this hotel. It sounds entirely too fancy, but in a fun way. And you’re paying for this… how?”
Kyra shrugs.
“Unimportant,” she says, “but it’s totally legitimate.” She pauses, remembering again she’s talking to a lawyer. “Sort of. It’s not important.”
Jack sighs and starts walking. “As long as you do not get me in any trouble. I just got a new job.”
“Really, where?” Tom says. “Wait, that bank you were interviewing for where you’ll have to keep everything super confidential and never tell us anything fun at all?”
“Tom, I’m an attorney, I can’t tell you anything actually important anywhere I work. But yes, that bank.”
Alex is staying a careful five paces behind them all, so measured it’s absolutely on purpose, and his hands are in his pockets and he has The Look. (“I should have known,” Tom says in her memories, pacing, “I should recognize that look by now,” while they had stayed uselessly home until Alex came back bloodied again.)
What had Jack said to him when he went to meet her ahead of them? Kyra bristles but shoves it down. He’ll tell her later, right? Once they’re all out of public sight. He’ll let her know what the problem is that is absolutely ruining her very fun surprise trip.
He doesn’t.
She should have seen that coming, really. She’s spent her whole life circling truths nobody wants to tell her - the parents who mostly saw her as a forced connection between them and then an all too intelligent nuisance, the servants who saw her as a job, her orphaning, how and why and who. She always likes to think of Alex as someone who tells her the truth, but the reality is that he lies too. He doesn’t do it to hurt her, and that’s why she’s always forgiven it. He does it to protect her.
But she doesn’t want protecting. The truth is a savage cruel thing that bites, but she’ll take it over the stupid suffocating blanket of lies any time.
Maybe not any time. Most times.
“Spyboy,” she says as Alex glances out through a corner of the curtains he’s insisted they keep closed. His face sinks as he turns to look at her.
“It’s not - it’s not a job,” he says. “I promise. There’s no job.”
“Okay, but there’s something. And you’re -” she pauses, bites off the word scared. “Worried,” she compromises on, and Jack peers her head out of her door.
“I may not leave this bed even for Oktoberfest,” she says, and Alex smiles briefly. Kyra is pretty sure from the noise Tom is jumping on the bed in his room.
“So?” Kyra says as soon as Jack has closed her door again. “Please don’t lie to me, Alex. I thought we were past that. We said no more secrets.”
Alex looks away from her and pulls the curtain at the side just enough to peer through again.
“SCORPIA might still want my head for what I did.” It sounds so flat, the way he says it. It sounds so wrong. He’s known this longer than she thought. He’s boxed it away to try to be here with them and it still hasn’t worked.
“And you know this because?”
“Because they tried. The day we saw Yassen on the roof. And because Mrs. Jones warned Jack.”
“Yassen tried to kill you?”
Alex turns then, and his smile is so humorless it hurts to see.
“No. He saved my life. But I - assume he’s in trouble with them now too,” and Kyra notes away the hesitation there and that it isn’t an assumption but a known truth, “and he can’t just follow me around forever.”
“Forever? Alex, they can’t hate you for that long. And they’re gone, they’re revealed, you told me - you promised me -”
“I thought so! I didn’t - I didn’t know they were still around except for Niles and that one try till now, but.”
There’s silence from Tom and Jack’s rooms. Their voices have raised too much.
“Do you want me to go?” Kyra can hear how fragile her voice sounds but can’t stop it no matter how much she hates the weakness. “Are you trying to get me to leave?”
Alex turns away and shoves the heels of his hands into his eyes, shakes his head.
“What were you doing this morning?”
She can’t see his face, but she can see the way his shoulders tighten, knows there is an answer she won’t like hearing and he doesn’t want to give.
“Right. Okay.” She turns away, looks anywhere else. “You and Tom are sharing that room, I’ll be in Jack’s, we leave for the events in a couple hours, if you want to go.”
“Kyra,” Alex says, turning around, but she’s already through the door and into the ensuite bathroom, ignoring Jack’s call of her name.
She lets herself feel sorry for three and a half minutes and then emerges with a clean face, any tears wiped away. Jack is sitting at the table and there are two cups in front of it.
“That,” Jack says matter of factly, as if nothing in the past ten minutes had happened, pointing at the mug next to the chair across from her, “is some incredibly high quality vodka mixed with a few things I found in the mini fridge. Now, my bartending career was very short lived but I was pretty good, I think. How about you sit down and have some?”
“I thought you would have gone to talk to Alex.” But she sits down anyways, and then against her better judgment takes a sip. It’s nowhere as revolting as the other times she’s tried alcohol. All right, points to Jack. Yet another talent up her sleeve.
“Alex is a big boy, and I already gave him any advice I had at the airport.” Jack takes a drink from her own mug and nods, apparently satisfied with her own concoction.
Kyra swirls her cup, not sure she should say anything, and then -
“I feel like he’s pushing me away. He knows I hate when he hides the truth. He knows it, I don’t want to be kept safe, I just want to know. How can I ever trust he won’t just -”
Kyra stops and takes another drink, longer this time. She doesn’t know how she wanted to finish the sentence. Leave me, maybe. By mission, or death, or duty, or any combination of the three. (She remembers far too often the way he had stared into the distance after he came home from Bath as she tried to clean his face, the stiff way he’d held himself, how he’d tried to keep the pain off his face. The phone call he’d stumbled his way through, trying to say goodbye without saying it. How he wouldn’t take his shirt off around any of them for weeks until the bruising mottled and faded.)
“I’m not his mother,” Jack says after a long moment, looking down. Jack is always so forthright and in your face that that by itself is a surprise. “He never really had one.”
“He’s had more of one than I ever did,” Kyra says, and wonders how strong the vodka in this drink is or if she’s simply finally trying to tell the truths she wishes others would tell her.
“I’ve tried my best, but I’m not his mom. And I’m not yours either. But Kyra?” Jack looks back up at that, waits until Kyra meets her eyes. “He is dangerous to us. That’s just the truth. He knows it. We all know it, if we think about it. And he hates it. He - he -” and she glances away at that, like she’s searching the ceiling for how to say it.
“He wears it like a coat,” Kyra says, and Jack looks back down to her then and nods, sadly. “He doesn’t want to lose anyone else.”
“You know some of that yourself, don’t you?” Jack says, and Kyra drains her mug, avoiding Jack’s eyes.
“I’m going to take a nap.”
+
“All right, mate, you’re going to have to stop being like this and start talking at least a little,” Tom says. He’s had an absolutely extravagant bath, trying to give Alex some space as he paces or sits or peeks out curtained windows, but it has officially become Too Much.
Alex is watching the rooftop across from them.
“I’m enjoying the view,” he says, in the most unconvincing manner Tom thinks he’s ever heard. Like, wow, he’d fire him as an actor on the spot.
“Is that how you infiltrated SCORPIA? Because they’d have to be absolute idiots to buy your acting skills if this is how they are.”
Alex doesn’t turn to face him, but he lets the curtain drop and then his hands drop to his sides, dangling, and Tom remembers (a knife, a smile so unfamiliar, a glare so purposeful in the wrong way) and feels the shiver down his spine.
“Alex? Can you… come on, you gotta talk about it.”
“Not really,” Alex says, and the way he says it is hollow and wrong. “Nothing to talk about. Let’s have fun and then we’ll go home. It’ll be fun.”
“Okay, I don’t know I can really accept that particularly. Seems pretty not great and last - well, several times you seemed kind of weird it was a big mess, so.”
“It’s me, Tom. I’m still me.” Alex turns, but his smile is so faint. “I’m just tired. I just want to enjoy this. Can we do that? Please?”
“Am I allowed to take video of everything?”
Alex’s smile does brighten at that, at least.
“Yeah, mate, absolutely. Get as much video as you want.”
It isn’t The Look. But it’s a little too close to it. Maybe Alex has just gotten better at hiding it.
When they leave their room and he meets Kyra and Jack’s eyes across the (entirely too extravagant and large) dining “area”, he sees the fear he doesn’t really know how to name reflected in theirs.
+
Mrs. Jones lands in Munich and takes the car provided. The snow has stopped, though the evidence of an unseasonable snowfall remains.
“They’re visiting the tents. Still no indication of active threat,” her driver says, and she pulls the hood of her coat over her head as she gets out of the car.
She spots him in a corner and knows he meant for her to see him. “Stand down, just keep an eye out,” she tells the driver, and crosses the distance.
Yassen holds out a cup of mulled ale.
“Not poisoned,” he says, and she scoffs.
“Do you think I would have joined you if I thought it might be?”
He makes that sideways gesture with his face and mouth that reminds her too heavily of John.
“Well, given history. Seemed right to be clear.”
“I know what you’re here for.”
Yassen’s eyes tighten, but he takes a long swallow of his own cup.
“We are both here for the same thing,” Mrs. Jones continues, and then takes one long sip of her cup. “John’s son. Yes?”
“Some debts are never repaid,” Yassen says, and his eyes are tracking a small group not far away, one of them staying carefully apart from the rest and scanning everything. Alex’s eyes land on them for just a split second and even from here Mrs. Jones sees something in his shoulders change.
“I quite agree,” Mrs. Jones says. “Niles, on the roof. Your work?” Yassen’s lips curl up a little, not amusement but not dissatisfaction either.
“As I said. Some debts are never repaid.”
“You know, technically I should arrest you.”
“I assume you thought of that well before you came to join me.”
“I assume you thought of it as well.”
They stand together in quiet watchfulness for a few minutes. Kyra is laughing at something Tom has said, but it rings false to what’s on her face. They’re trying, all of them. Alex is trying.
How much they’ve all stolen from him and his family.
“Will they ever stop hunting him, do you think?”
“When they’re all dead.” Yassen turns to face her then, finally, and she sees for a moment the young man John had saved. “You know that. He knows that. The others - they know, too, but they don’t want to believe it yet.”
“John sent reports, of course.” Mrs. Jones meets Yassen’s eyes squarely in return, bracing herself against the cold of the air and his gaze. “He was - very fond of you.”
“Yes. He was.” Yassen shrugs, so close to disinterested and dismissive it’s almost believable. It isn’t quite.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Jones says, “for keeping him as safe as you could. Both of them. Against everything.”
Yassen is watching the small group still, so stock still you could think him a statue.
“Keep him safe,” he says, and she watches him leave through an alley and vanish. Another ghost on the long list she has been filing throughout her career.
(“Did you love him?” Ian had asked after the plane, when he found her sitting alone on the bench on the bridge, back straight and stiff as she stared into the distance. “Yes,” she’d said, “not like that, but yes.” Ian had hugged her for as long as she let him, which wasn’t very long at all.
They’d never talked much after that, but she’d quietly logged every time he left early or requested desk duty for a stretch or looked at a picture of a young boy growing all too rapidly older he kept in his desk.)
Across the street Alex meets her eyes.
She raises her cup to him. He nods for a moment and then turns to check the rooftops and for a moment she sees his father and his uncle. But when he turns and meets her eyes again there is an anger there that did not come from John or even Ian. It comes from her failures. She’s seen it in him before.
“Keep subject in sight at all times, but maintain distance.”
Kyra turns to grab Alex’s hand and bring him closer to the group and sees where his gaze is. Her face twists for a moment in recognition, in that quiet bitterness Mrs. Jones has seen before, and then she turns away and pulls Alex with her. He goes, at least. Perhaps knowing he’s protected will grant him some peace.
Not that their track record is really one to provide him any comfort.
+
“I’m going down to the lobby,” Alex says, and he looks so tired. He slides on his jacket with that slight stiffness on one side Jack has learned how to clock. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Alex,” she says, and he looks at her and his eyes are too young to look this empty. “You don’t have to do whatever it is you’re doing. You don’t have to do anything.”
“When are we going to stop believing that?” he says, and slips out the door.
Kyra is at the window, the stubborn stance of her shoulders and squared folded arms just enough to keep almost anyone away.
“Kyra,” Tom says, and he holds out something small he got at one of the stalls. “I just thought - maybe you’d like it -”
She nods, and her lip quivers for a moment in a manner Jack and Tom have both come to recognize, and this time instead of running away she leans her head against Tom’s shoulder.
“I think he talked to Yassen this morning,” she says, muffled, and Jack comes over and wraps her arms around them both. She didn’t ever think she’d be running a lost kids home, but here they all are.
“I think it’s time we let Alex make some choices, kids.” And she breathes, and every part of her screams against not trying to do something, anything, but if he wants to leave he’d find a way to do it no matter what she did.
+
He sees Mrs. Jones and Yassen both easily. Neither of them are particularly trying to hide themselves - or at least not from him.
Alex crosses to Mrs. Jones first, makes himself the picture of an entitled rich kid who thinks he should be able to take up half of the small sitting area she’s in. He has practice, after all. She helped teach him.
“How immediate?”
“It wasn’t immediate when you were where we could keep eyes on you easily,” she says, folding over a sheet of the newspaper, and then a little louder, “Take your feet off the table!”
“Is it now?” he says, a perfect show of scowling and slowly, deliberately removing his feet from the coffee table.
“No, but we can’t rule it out.”
She’s never been easy to read, and now that she’s actively undercover it makes it harder.
He leans forward, glowering at her. It’s both a front for the character he’s playing and the truth.
“Am I bait?”
She flicks him the barest of looks, a rich woman disdainful of the kid who just put his boots on the table next to her.
“No.”
“Fine,” he says, “let’s pretend I believe you,” and gets up, wanders seemingly aimlessly across the lobby and flops into a couch that he’s absolutely sure none of the staff is happy about him sprawling in or his boots dangling off the edge of the couch’s arm.
“Good beer?” Yassen says, the picture of a businessman busily employed with his laptop and phone at once. Alex had tried to get a look at the screens as he walked over, even though he knew it wouldn’t be of much use.
Old habits die hard.
Do they ever die?
“Hope tomorrow’s is better,” he says.
“Your parents should have told you to be less of a brat,” Yassen says, and for one brief second Alex thinks he hears affection.
Maybe he just wants to think that. Maybe it reminds him of the moments Ian would say something with a mixture of exasperation and a smile even as he snatched Alex away from doing something a little too reckless, held his hand so tightly before they crossed a road when he was younger, sat with him on the bench across from school the first day and told him he could always come home if he needed to and gave him the house key.
“You think tomorrow’s is worth going to?” he says, kicks a foot up casually and feels a twinge of guilt when a nearby attendant twitches at how close it comes to what is probably a very expensive lamp. They don’t know he calculated it. They only see the facade.
Yassen is on top of him a moment later, dragging him up into a sitting position, done just right so anyone would think it was just a guest of the hotel angry about the near damage.
“Go home, Alex,” Yassen hisses into his ear, “Go home and live.”
And then he’s shoved him away and is shaking himself off, waving off the staff casually.
“The boy has had a little much to drink, I think. You’ll go back to your room, right? All good. Just that time of year.”
“Fine,” Alex says, and he plays the role of a drunk entitled brat all the way into the room at the top of the hotel and then he opens the door and they’re all there, immediately turning to look at him and for the first time tonight he does actually feel fully sick.
“It’s all fine,” he says, “it’s all fine, it’s fine, it’s -” but it isn’t, is it.
“Alex!” Jack says, and he tries to wave them off as he moves to the couch.
“Nobody hurt me,” he says, unable to meet their eyes.
“Fuck that,” Tom says as Jack comes over to start trying to examine him and Kyra is trying to pull up hotel footage.
“No, I mean it. Nobody - nobody’s hurt me today. But they’re going to. We all know that, right?”
The room goes quiet.
“We all know it. We know I’m a walking target. We know I will be forever. Can we stop ignoring that?”
“Alex….”
“I could leave.” He says it so immediately he knows it’s what he’s been thinking for longer than he’s admitted to himself. He can see in their faces they’ve known he was thinking of it.
What a fucking mess.
“Don’t you dare,” Jack says, and she sits down next to him, gently pries his hands away from where they’ve curled against the couch like vices. “Let us figure it out together, Alex. Together, okay?”
“Mate, you’re the star of my next student film, so if you try to bail on me I am going to be deeply upset,” Tom says, and it’s a way of trying to make things more lighthearted but there’s a set to his face that he didn’t know how to wear before Alex dragged him into this.
Kyra doesn’t say anything, quiet on the other side of the room, and then she tosses something at them. Alex catches it without even thinking.
“Tom got it,” she says with the shrug she makes when she wants to pretend she doesn’t care, and he turns the heavy metal over and looks at the pin.
“What -?” he says, and Tom scoffs and throws himself onto the couch, his arms sprawled over the back of it, the way he always does but not quite hiding the tension.
“It’s a whole thing,” Tom says, “you’re supposed to get pins or something apparently. So I got that one.”
It’s a small metallic pin, stamped with Scheiße in aggressively bold all caps.
Alex starts laughing, and it feels so good to laugh. It doesn’t shed anything, not yet, but it feels good.
“Oh, I got one for all of us,” Tom says, and reaches into his pocket. “You still get one, Kyra. They felt right, you know?”
“Yeah,” Alex says, turning the weight of the pin over in his hand, and he leans back against the couch and closes his eyes. “Yeah, it feels pretty right.”
“Sleepover!” Jack announces. “All the blankets, all the pillows, come on. We’ll all sleep out here. What are we watching?”
Tom has many suggestions. He has far too many suggestions, and Kyra is surprisingly agreeable to them.
This isn’t the answer but it’s enough for now.
Kyra slides under his arm, tucking herself against him, and she’s not looking at him but this is also enough.
“We’ll need tickets tomorrow,” he says, and she waves him off.
“Please. Already done.”
+
Alex sits in his room, looking into the mirror. Downstairs he can distantly hear Jack and Tom. He can’t hear Kyra, but he can sense her in the absences where she’s rolling her eyes or shrugging to pretend she doesn’t care and they either know what she means by it or are making it up.
He’s taking inventory, in a way. Most of the damage is bone deep but there are scars, light and easily missed by others. Not quite as distinctive as Yassen’s. Not yet.
Niles might not have even been aiming for him on that roof. Not if he really wanted to hurt Alex.
“Memorize the numbers,” Ian says in his memories. “You have two minutes.” Then it became one minute. Became 30 seconds. It was a game, back then. Alex had thought it was a game, when he was young, like he’d thought the skiing and the parkour and the rock climbing was fun. It was never actually a game. None of it had ever been a game.
He wishes he’d gotten to ask his uncle why. Wished he’d had time to ask a million questions. Had Ian known SCORPIA would come back? Was he always afraid, was he training Alex to follow their footsteps even after it killed his brother? Why? Why go to that meeting, why leave Alex when he’d already been left behind so often?
It’s too late to ask. Ian is in a casket under six feet of earth and his parents are ash scattered through the wind.
He takes out the burner phone he had quietly acquired and puts in two numbers.
Coffee at the bridge. His birthday.
Mrs. Jones and Yassen will understand what it means.
He walks down the stairs, feels the slight pause they all have upon seeing him, the relief when he smiles.
“Please tell me Tom’s not cooking tonight,” he says, and takes Kyra’s hand. “I don’t think I’m brave enough to do that again.”