AN: Thanks ever so much to With the What Now for her beta of this so far. Any remaining errors are mine alone. Yes this is short, but the chapters will get longer as things pick up… slowly.
Description: What if Yassen chose a different route on hearing of Hunter's death? And what could that different route mean for Ian and Alex?
Disclaimer: Not mine…
Title: Pay it Forward
By Marns AKA Bumpkin
Rated PG
Gen
(Wordcount: 405)
Yassen Gregorovich wasn't a simple man. Nor was he a complicated man, really. He was merely – complex. He lived by a code of honor that was all his own. Easy enough to understand and predict if you knew him. Except, therein lay the problem. He was the only one able to understand himself as there wasn't anyone left who knew him.
There used to be another that knew him, that understood him - John Rider, codenamed 'Hunter'. The man who had trained him in everything he knew. Mentored him really, if you wanted to get a better picture of how the two had interacted.
Yassen owed John Rider everything that he was; the man had found him as a scrawny young thing in the Moscow slums and seen potential somewhere deep within him. A potential that prompted John, even with him being an MI6 agent under deep cover, to pluck Yassen out of the depths and take him home in order to train him.
John had even conned the upper echelons of Scorpia, the organization he was working to take down from the inside, to lend him some of their best to help him train Yassen. Yassen had soaked up the knowledge offered like a sponge and gone back for more, but he never forgot who had made it all possible… Who had made sure that Yassen would not only survive, but thrive, no matter what life would throw at him in the future.
John Rider.
Yassen owed him… everything. Not out of obligation, but out of love and the loyalty borne from that kind of devotion.
Then came the day that he got word that John and Helen Rider had been killed, their plane victim of a bombing. Incensed, he began to make immediate plans for retribution – he knew exactly who was behind their deaths – but then he had heard that their infant son hadn't been with them and survived.
It changed everything.
He no longer had time for revenge because he now had another purpose to devote his life to. He was going to help raise John's son, mentor him like John had mentored him. He was going to tell the child all about John while he trained him, bring the man to life and allow the son to know the father through his stories – he could give the boy that much at least, even if he could never truly take John's place.