Part one of Façade, the fifth and last in my Safehouse arc. For anyone who is reading/has already read Scorpia Rising, my arc is ignoring that book. While I loved the book, it messes with my storyline. ~ SamayouTamashi

The funeral was a small one in the courtyard of MI6, hidden from the rest of London by a grove of apple trees. No one had leaked anything to the media, keeping it private from the public, not that it would have mattered. There weren't many who knew James Bertrand outside the workplace; fewer were the ones who knew the real identity behind the deputy director.

While the spy still had to be at work by nine, Ben Daniels had gotten up early to attend. He wasn't the only one. Many of his colleagues, from both MI6 and other country's intelligence organizations (most, if not all, in disguise), had managed to find their way to the funeral as well. K-Unit, from SAS, had even gotten a week off when the news arrived at base, orders from the unusually emotional Alan Blunt.

Ben sat by himself before Eagle arrived, ignoring the four rows of plastic seats to lean against the tree nearest the mahogany coffin. MI6 had allowed the casket to be open, after the bullet holes had been sealed up, but Ben hadn't looked upon Alex's face again. He'd already memorized it as they took it away on the stretcher, remembering that faint smile as if it had never died.

Eagle was the first of his unit to arrive, with Falcon not long behind him. Their plane had been a direct flight with no layovers, unlike the rest of K-Unit. At first glance, he didn't see the one person he already knew would still be there. Taking a harder look, however, he saw Ben sitting off to the side, staring off into space.

Dressed in the little black he could muster on such short notice, which was basically a black tie and belt, he joined the spy in the loose black suit. Ben didn't even realize he was there until a hand rested lightly on his shoulder.

"We got the news just before we were about to get shipped out. I tried to call but you must have turned your phone off."

"I didn't want to talk to anyone," he sighed. "I just…needed some time to think."

Falcon sat in the front row, nodding his head in Ben's direction.

"MI6 didn't tell us what happened. Was it-?"

"I don't know," Ben grimaced. "There's an investigation looking into it, but I don't think it matters. What's done is done."

"A sniper again?"

"Yeah. I see it over and over in my head and I always feel like there was something wrong with the picture." He rubbed at his eyes before another tear could threaten to fall. "There had to have been something I could have done."

"No, there wasn't," Eagle reprimanded him in a tone very un-Eagle-ish. "Like you said, what's done is done. The point of us being here is to remember him, not regret our mistakes."

"I guess having a psychologist as a brother comes in handy sometimes."

"All the time. It never fails to help. Now what he would say is 'instead of sitting there, go talk with all these people and share condolences. They miss him just as much, even if you were closest to him.'"

"And let you sit here by yourself crying? That would be mean."

"I am not crying," he denied even as the first drops ran down his cheeks. "Oh now you've done it. When Wolf gets here, he's going to call me a crybaby."

"Somehow, I doubt that."

The two sat for a half-hour, watching somewhat familiar faces come and go, stopping to drop off flowers from all across the world. Even the Prime Minister stopped for a brief time, speaking with the newly arrived Blunt and Jones, now MI5*. Arriving just shortly after was the rest of K-Unit, who immediately located Eagle and Ben.

Snake had spent the entire flight and ride over berating himself for not trying harder to get make Alex leave MI6. Any job in the world, even joining the EODs** would have given him a longer lifespan. Ben, of course, whacked him over the head when he even tried to bring it up. After all, the spy told them, he had gotten addicted to the job. Once a spy, always a spy.

Wolf remained stoically silent, but his unit managed to auspiciously avert their gaze or turn their attention to another mourner every time he wiped at his eyes.

When Blunt was about to leave, near the time he had to return to work, Ben noted another car pull up to drop off its two occupants. As the car stopped, he noticed the license plate subtly change, the first and third numbers blurring to go from a five and nine to a three and two. The first man out was easily identifiable by his large weight: Smithers, the gadgetmaker of MI6. Alex had always been his favorite test subject, willing to give some of his more interesting ideas a test out in the field.

The second wasn't as easy to remember. Despite being just halfway to forty, the grey streaks not yet visible in his hair, the slender Caucasian was confined to a wheelchair. Ben faintly recalled his last name being Rochester, but that was it. Three times he had seen him at MI6, the first time when he got the motorcycle from Smithers and twice speaking in a low voice with Alex in his office. When he'd asked Alex who had just left, a little over a week ago, the teenager had shrugged. "An ally, but not necessarily a friend." He had frowned just the slightest bit, prompting Ben to ask for more details. "Mr. Rochester is an incredible spy and has had a long career, but he seems to suffer from a grievous malady for anyone in the intelligence business to have."

"And that is?"

Alex smirked. "Bad luck. No matter how much he does, his missions have the strangest occurrences; though he always does manage to pull through admirably well despite how bad things get. Once, he was on a fairly simple job when the building he was in collapsed from an unexpected earthquake. His team was killed and he was paralyzed from the hips down."

"So why don't you consider him a friend?"

"Something about him, the way he seems to see right through your eyes to your soul, just makes me uncomfortable."

The topic had never been broached again.

Even after death, mysteries seemed to follow the young spy.

Rochester rolled from the back of the car, which was evidently bigger than it appeared to fit both him in a wheelchair and Smithers, to approach the casket. Even retired from the spy game, it appeared that he hadn't lost his touch. He slowed for a moment before meeting Ben's eyes. The spy shivered as he agreed with his partner's judgement wholeheartedly. It honestly appeared that those dark gray eyes could see into the depths of your soul.

But it was only in the briefest second, for the former-spy resumed his normal pace and averted his gaze.

Falcon, who had joined them, looked over at Rochester. "Wasn't he the one that died in the earthquake a couple years back?"

Ben looked curiously over at Wolf, who seemed to be thinking. "You mean the four guys whose bodies we pulled out? I don't think we ever found the intelligence agent supposedly with them."

"That's an impressive trick he pulled, then. I could have sworn there were no survivors when that building crashed."

"Maybe he switched identities for a time," Snake suggested, "and somehow got pulled back into the game. I sure wouldn't suspect a cripple for doing too many stunts, but…" he trailed off, not adding the 'but I wouldn't suspect a teenager, either' to the end. The blanks were simple enough to fill in.

"Or, MI6 might have offered him the newly vacated position. He visited enough times to make it seem like he was deciding to come back in." Ben didn't add that he had talked specifically to Alex the few times he had been there.

They were quiet as they watched the man rest a hand on the coffin, speaking a few words that none of them could have understood, save for the lip-reading the spy was fluent in before rolling his chair over to speak with Blunt. "That's a little weird."

Eagle perked up. "What? What'd he say?"

"He said, 'They'll miss you,' instead of 'I'll miss you.' That just seems off to me."

Wolf looked thoughtful. "If Alex were here, he'd probably come up with some insane scheme to break into his files and somehow drag the rest of us into this. Despite overwhelming odds, we'd all survive and laugh about it when we didn't hurt so much."

"Probably," Ben sighed. There were many things he would miss, but the adventure would be the biggest one. Alex brought a lot of color to their lives and not much could fill in his absence. He happened to see the time on Snake's watch. "I need to run over to the office for a couple minutes. Blunt said we'd get the day off, full pay included, but there were some things he needed to speak to everyone about at around nine." He grabbed his duffel bag from the ground beside him, full of post-mission papers he needed to get turned in, and dashed to the back door of the Royal and General. Somewhat unconsciously, he took the stairwell hidden in the back behind a seemingly solid metal wall instead of the elevator, not wanting to retrace his steps from two days ago.

Once on the correct floor, he swiped his ID card to get in the door to the offices, typing the unique ten-digit password, which would correspond with only his card and fingerprints, into the keypad that slid out from the wall. Smithers had upped the security tremendously since the information that leaked Alex's address got leaked out. Not that it had helped, he thought grimly.

Inside, everyone had gathered in the main 'lobby' of MI6's HQ. The room was mostly filled with the employees constantly in and out of the office, with accounts registered to the bank. Their salaries appeared to be similar on the outside, but the other half of their salary was hidden in the registers until it was used. The room had been divided into comfortably sized cubicles with the most recent software and comfortable seating, though their coffee was lacking.

Ben tapped the shoulder of one of MI6's programmers, Jenny McAlister. The top in her field, she had been recruited right out of college in her early twenties and rose in the ranks faster than most. While she did some communications work, most of her time was spent keeping track of the computers within MI6, including those in other countries, and maintaining active defenses to prevent viruses and leaks from appearing without notice. "Is everyone here?" he asked her as she shut off her monitor and turned around.

"So far as I can tell. Must be pretty important stuff he needs everyone to hear. From what I've heard, he's even making sure that any agents on ops get time off to tune in. Alex's death hit him harder than I-well harder than anyone expected."

"Heard anything about who's filling the new position?"

"Not a peep, but that's to be expected. Normally there's at least some idea, but then I guess no one really expected Alex to…um…pass on." Ben wasn't the only one his death had affected. At work, he'd been a constant presence, demonstrating his new disguises and even accidentally once hitting one of the accountants with a sleeping dart. The spy chuckled under his breath as he remembered his partner puzzling over the mechanical pencil Smithers had dropped cryptically off at his desk as he attempted, and failed, to make it write. He'd gone over to a cubicle asking for ideas, when one of the accountants suggested blowing through the inside to get the lead loose, and when he did, a piece came out to prick the man's hand. With a confused look, he'd immediately fallen backwards in his chair, snoring. Alex had blinked before asking for witnesses to claim that it hadn't been his idea.

Jenny seemed to understand what he was thinking. "Remember when Smithers got him the hair tonic for the mission in Greece, and Cassie was teaching him how to dance?"

"And we kept laughing too hard for him to pay attention? Oh that was priceless indeed."

One of the other programmers, Dylan, leaned in to join them. "And when Rob lost his glasses, Alex was looking all over to try and help him, and they had wound up in the refrigerator somehow. He spent the entire day searching for them and Crowley was stuck doing most of his paperwork."

"He always did manage to get out of doing his papers," Cassie laughed, rolling her chair over to hear more clearly. "Like that one time when he insisted his papers were vanishing from his desk—"

"—when he was actually hiding them in the ventilation shafts," Ben finished. "And once we found them, no one else was small enough to get them back out."

Another round of stories passed through until the clock dinged twice to signal oh nine hundred hours***. The MI6 employees fell silent as Blunt plodded into the room, Rochester in his wheelchair moving steadily behind him. Without the dramatic pause or introduction that most speakers give to their audience, Blunt spoke just as his name suggested: blunt and straight to the point.

"The administration in MI6 is going to undergo a rapid change in just a few days, and I am going to inform you all now so that you aren't surprised by the end of the week. First, I am retiring from the intelligence work altogether." If the room could have gotten any more silent, it would have. There were a couple nods from the particularly observant workers, because there had been a great deal of signs, but many were affirming what they just heard with those beside them with hand signals.

"Second, to take effect before I resign, I assign the position of deputy director to Mr. Gene Rochester," he gestured to the man in the wheelchair, "who will be accepting my abdication later today once the correct papers are in order."

In spite of his cold outward manner towards most people-including his own-not even Blunt could keep up his façade all the time. It was then that Ben, and a couple of the other spies used to detecting minute changes in movement and behavior, saw the smallest chink in his armor: pride. Not the bad kind that makes you think too much of yourself, but the sort you get from seeing your children succeed and students under your discipline graduate with huge smiles as they receive awards for their labors; the kind that warms your heart on the coldest days.

"Last, I want to say that it has been an honor to serve with all of you, but this profession gets wearisome. Alex's death has sealed my decision. Agents' deaths are hard to take, and Alex was supposed to replace me when I retired. To my dismay," he tilted his head in what might have been a salute to the newly deceased, "he cannot. However, Gene is more than capable of my position. He has been a close friend for a few years now and will be better at my job than I ever was."

Ben frowned as Blunt used the word 'friend'. He wasn't the man to hand out that word carelessly, but he said he had only known the former spy for a couple years. And hadn't the guy worked at MI6 previously? That was more than a 'few' years ago.

Blunt appeared to have said what he wanted as he retreated back to his office, Rochester on his heels.

At a tap on his shoulder, he turned to Jenny. "Hey, didn't that dude, Rochester, die two years ago?"

"Yeah. I thought that too, but I guess not. Must have been faked so he could retire," the spy guessed.

"Then they really managed to get rid of everything," she said. "I could have sworn that the files about his death were with the rest of the spy obits, but when the boss," she referred to Blunt, despite his impending retirement, "brought him back in, he must have erased that one. By that, I mean really erased. There isn't even a ghost left on the main computer."

"And his other files? Have they been, um, changed in any way?"

The programmers main strength was her incredible capacity to learn, but second was her nearly perfect memory. Even if the computers said everything was the same, Jenny tell you if an 'a' had turned to an 'an'.

Her fingers flew across the keyboard with such speed that he feared the keys might burn out. "Despite how long he was in the field, there are relatively few documents with his name mentioned, either as under his main codenames, Thirteen and Black Cat, his other identities, or his actual name. A few notes in the margins refer to extra documents, but I can't find them here or in any of the computers. Not even Blunt's." She swiveled around, switching her monitor off as she did. "Do you think he's hiding something personal that became important once he was hired as MI6's director?"

"Possibly. Maybe he needs to keep anything that could be used against him, like the names of his kids and such, off of our main data source."

"But why?"

"If an agent decided to go rogue or, even worse, switched sides, they wouldn't be able to find out where he lived or other potential blackmail."

"Good point. It just feels like…well like he's hiding something else."

Ben shrugged. "I know the feeling, but if Blunt trusts him, then he has to be out of this world. Last I heard, he still doesn't even trust his wife."

The room was slowly dissipating as everyone grabbed any leftover work and went home to enjoy one of the dozen or so days they would get off. You got every other weekend off, but the typical workweek was twelve days on, two days off. Jenny stared in the direction of the director's office for a few seconds more before snatching the un-coded files from her desk and jamming them into the false bottom of her briefcase, securing both the real and false locks as she picked it up from her desk. "I guess I'll see you tomorrow." Her gaze softened. "And don't look so down. None of us could have done anything about it, much as we'll miss him. You aren't the only one blaming yourself by the looks of it." She discreetly tilted her head towards Blunt's office as she stood up, leaving him alone with the remaining stragglers.

With a melancholy sigh, he pushed his chair back to its original spot, grabbed a few papers from his office to fill out when he got the chance, and grabbed a spot on the elevator before the doors could shut. It was going to be a different job here without Alex, he thought sadly.

A/N: So I highly doubt that MI6 would bury their own in the grounds behind headquarters, but I think this sounds better.

On another note, I know I said it would only take a couple days to get this up, but evidently I have no time (or internet) during the week. An advance warning to my wonderful followers: chapter two should be done tomorrow(ish) but it likely won't get posted until next weekend for a couple reasons. The first is because I sprained a wrist and it really hurts to type. (Even now, I am wincing in pain) Second, my internet connection is going down during the week but seems to be stronger on the weekend. Why? No clue. Either way, it'll be posted soon. Thanks for reading these annoyingly long notes and please review!

* Tulip Jones quit her job to work at MI5 during the last chapter of Favor.

** Explosives Ordinance Disposal; despite increased safety precautions, they still suffer a decent mortality rate. These are the units that disable bombs on the field.

*** This is nine in the morning for those who don't have parents in the military or live in the US. (At least, I think it is... I always get confused when people say nine am, or nine pm because it makes no sense at all.)