Description: Kingsman find out about Alex Rider in the aftermath of the V-day massacre.
Disclaimer: Not mine…
Title: Leaving Well Enough Alone
By Marns AKA Bumpkin
Rated PG
Gen
(Wordcount: 1,390)
"Eggsy!" Merlin hollered from his Crystal Cave (aka his tri-monitor/control desk in the room looking over the hangar/garage) for the Kingsman's newest knight. "Get in here, I need you to see this!"
"What? Why do you need me to see anything? Can't you just record and re-watch whatever it is?" Eggsy called up from the garage where Merlin had him doing some inventory of some newly returned cars.
"Now why didn't I think of that…" Merlin said mockingly in a dryer than dust voice before he snorted and told Eggsy, "teach your gran to suck eggs, boyo, I just need to be sure that I'm not interpreting things wrong because I'm seeing something that I dinnae think was possible. At least, not as I understood how things worked." Merlin clicked over to another screen as Eggsy walked into the room and pulled up the final confrontation between Harry and Valentine. Eggsy grimaced, he hadn't been prepared to see or hear that footage again. He never was to be honest, but he dutifully paid attention.
…"-do to me? I had no control. I killed all those people. I wanted to." Harry sounding so wrecked always made something in Eggsy's chest clench painfully.
"Clever isn't it?" Valentine's sheer smugness, even in the recording, always made Eggsy want to kill him all over again – even before he killed Harry. "In simple terms, it's a neurological wave that triggers the centers of aggression while at the same time it switches off inhibitions." Merlin stopped the recording there and sat back to stare off into space. He seemed to be putting something together in his mind while Eggsy hovered behind him and waited.
"That wasn't what you wanted me to see was it?" Eggsy asked after a few minutes had passed.
"Nae, t'was something else." Merlin answered Eggsy absently as he was still mentally trying to wrangle whatever it was that had him so preoccupied internally. He began to hit some buttons and pulled up another feed, the grainy quality to it letting Eggsy know that it was one of the London CCTV feeds. Then Merlin began to explain as he queued what seemed to be a specific instance up, "I was going through the CCTV feeds in concordance with the lowest fatality reports – I wanted to find what might have interfered with the wave – and I found this…" He pushed a single button and sat back again as the footage began to play.
It was a school yard and Eggsy felt ill as he thought of how many kids were going to die until he remembered that Merlin had said he was going through the lowest fatality reports – which meant probably that next to no kids had died in the making of this little live action movie. So why had Merlin yelled for him to come and watch this? What was that he didn't trust his eyes about? Then Eggsy saw it, what had Merlin wanting a second set of eyes. Eggsy saw the wave starting, the kids going from bratty to brutal; then he saw the one lone kid that seemed to have a whole lot more talent in brutality than any of the others. He was taking other kids out and down in quick succession. Boom, bam, crunch, munch. The kid's movements were so smooth and practiced that Eggsy knew he'd been trained. "The fuck? Who the hell is that kid? He's like a one man demo crew."
"Alex Rider." Merlin answered shortly and then asked, "Well, lad, have you seen it? Seen why I wanted you see this? It wasn't because the kid can fight, it's something else."
Eggsy looked back to the screen and pushed the button to rewind it a bit – then he watched again as Rider took down the majority of the persons on the school yard, adults and teens, in the duration of the two waves. He watched as Rider very effectively put down with a disturbing precision every single person he came into contact with - but then it clicked. Eggsy understood what Merlin had been getting at – Rider for all his professional violence had somehow channeled his aggression into disabling rather than killing. Not a single death and as far as Eggsy could tell, it was all thanks to Rider.
"How the fuck did he manage that?" Eggsy wondered aloud and Merlin hummed in satisfaction.
"So, ye saw the same thing I did. Good, I dinnae want to think that my mind was giving up on me after all that's happened lately."
"No, your mind appears to be fine if now just a little blown like mine." Eggsy snarked at the tech wizard, but then he got serious again. "After training so many for Kingsmen, you must have an idea of how the kid was able to do that?"
Merlin scowled as he pulled up more and more information on Alex Rider. "Aye, I have an idea of how the kid was able to do it. It took me a bit to dig up any info about who the kid was aside from his name, and it's a colossal cock-up. Turns out the poor kid was conscripted to Mi6 shortly after his Uncle – Ian Rider and operative by choice - died while on a mission for that bastard, Blunt. Alex was barely fourteen at the time but he managed to get the job that killed his uncle done. Since then he's been loaned out to numerous other agencies and sent on various missions that he's made a hell of a name for himself in some circles."
"Made a fuck ton of enemies too, no doubt." Eggsy broke in.
"Yes, that he has." Merlin said tiredly. "But you wanted to know how young Mr. Rider was able to do what he did?"
"Yes!"
"My guess is that Alex has to keep himself under such strict control at all times as to not give away what he has been trained to do that the switching off the inhibition part of the wave allowed him to let loose enough to actually use his violent and precise training in a public setting, which he never would have done otherwise."
Eggsy just stood silent for a bit as he processed what Merlin had said. "Fuck, the poor kid is pretty fucking messed up ain't he, Merlin?"
"Aye, I think that's a fair assessment."
"He still being forced to work for Mi6?" Eggsy asked.
Merlin checked. "Nae, seems that our activating the chip had Alan Blunt forcibly retired, and Mrs. Jones – his former second – allowed Alex to retire and retroactively paid him a salary for all the missions he'd been sent on."
Eggsy just shook his head and said, "Shit, retired by the ripe old age of sixteen and probably sufferin' some wicked PSTD." Then something seemed to occur to Eggsy and he asked slowly, "So other than making sure you weren't losing your mind, why did you want me to see this kid in action?"
"Well, we are still trying to refill seats of the table, Percivale. Don't you think he would make a good candidate?"
"Yeah," Eggsy said in an unhappy voice, "but not now. I think what we really need to do is leave this kid alone for at least a couple years – he needs time to heal. If he doesn't do it himself, we can maybe pressure that Mrs. Jones lady into getting him therapy because he really needs it. The kid has been through hell for the last two years. Fuck, the last few weeks have got to have him feeling like he's all over the place." Eggsy then paused to think a bit before continuing, "But yeah, in a few years when he's older and got his head back together, I think he would make one hell of a Kingsman. Seriously, we need to let him finish school and get his head on right, but yeah let's keep him in mind – who knows, after surviving both Mi6 and V-day when he's still this young, by the time he's an adult he might become a better Kingsman than Harry was."
Merlin looked up with an affronted expression on his face, turned the screen off decisively and remarked, "Very well, and furthermore, I don't bloody think so."
Eggsy just laughed and went back to the original chore Merlin had set him to, mucking about happily with the cars and their little extras.
-end-