This fandom and honestly, also canon has insane obsession with ignoring people dying. So I decided to take it to the extreme. Have fun! This should have two or three chapters.
This contains spoilers for Never Say Die! So you have been warned!
Considering the last few years, the experience that Alex gained, there seemed to be one universal truth that he learned that doesn't always hold true.
Dead people stay dead.
There is no cure, no remedy for a fatal state. Yet for young Alex, there always seemed to be some way to make someone very much alive, when very much believed dead.
His own faux clone was just the first. For starters, Alex was never really sure about his fate. The science wing of Brooklands going down in flames already made almost sure he didn't survive. But his luck again showed up, snatched him and made sure he was the one who walked away alive. What made him even think in the first place that he was the only one?
The being's face will haunt him forever and not only in mirrors. He can't even think of him as a boy, as human. Someone who shouldn't walk this planet, just as mad as his South African father, yet wearing the same face as his, the only difference several ugly marks across Julius' face.
It wasn't enough to stop Alex from shooting him point blank, marking the first time the spy used a gun to deliver fatal wound. He knows some might see some kind of perverse symbolism in it, like killing a part of himself, the one that was the spy, the weapon, the pragmatic hero, the child soldier. Maybe he killed his restrictions that day, the morals, that already suffered enough in the past year.
Very much later he learns what MI6's psychologists really thought, the information from his file, of course, gained in not exactly legal means.
x
Julius Grief was first. Jack was second.
Maybe that was a sign of goodwill from destiny, maybe it just wanted to mock Alex. If your friend, your sister can be brought back, what makes you think that wrong people might not find some magical way to rise from the dead too? First his dark half that shouldn't exist, then his other half that kept him centred in the form of his guardian. Like some higher power was showing Alex that there is no escape from who he is, that no matter what happens, there will always be a way to throw him back into this life. No possibility for retirement.
Alex learned to not trust digital technology because of this. Repeatedly shown visual evidence of someone dying when in reality surviving in the background does that to you. There is nothing better than seeing something with his own eyes, not through a medium that could be so easily manipulated. Especially when you are someone like Alex, with the skillset to make himself disappear from digital trace too.
Jack eventually leaves back to her family in the USA and leaves Alex behind. But there are no hard feelings involved because Alex decided that is for the best - like this Jack won't be eating herself alone in worry, instead having her family as someone to take the minds off matters. And if maybe Alex returns from his missions on the American continent a few days later than he should, spending the days in the Starbright household, Mrs. Jones tends to not to comment as far as there is no time danger involved.
x
Jack was second. Klaus was third. Even though he was shown the file after Cairo, when he was closest at his breaking point, he remembers the details he read well. There might have been even some satisfaction when he saw the names of the Scorpia people that got sniffed out, hunted, arrested, disposed of. Big names, small names and most importantly, all those that he met at Malagosto. The teachers, the graduated students. No one he really had any bad feelings for, except for their allegiance. He even sort of liked some of them, in his own desperate way.
The German was amongst them. Listed as being killed while in the process of interrupting his job, information taken from Scorpia files compromising his position.
Alex left to America with the comforting thought that all loose ends were tied close. Of course, he was proven wrong by the Italian twins, but that wasn't really anyone who had the pleasure of meeting him in person and they were proven to be a very recent addition to Scorpia. Figures they managed to escape the hunt.
It took one unfortunate mission for Alex to learn how well these people are accustomed to escaping death. You do not dance on the edge of society without knowing safety nets. Out of all the millions of people that live in Berlin he had to meet the one German he is already familiar with.
Alex was undercover as Ralph, a sixteen-year-old living on the streets of Berlin, his perfect German rolling off his tongue with Berlinerisch accent. There was a man using the city street kids as cheap workforce, as messengers and carriers of packages of various kinds.
All it took for MI6 to get interested in him were stolen state of the art weapons.
All it took for Alex to know he is screwed up was one look at the man he was delivering a package to. Ralph didn't know what was inside, Alex knew there was a sniper rifle of Russian origin, military grade, one of those that required a real professional to handle. Alex knew this man certainly had a training for it, after all, he received the same one.
He was met with a studious gaze during the exchange, with a glint of recognition maybe, but otherwise, the man didn't seem to want to comment verbally on the obvious façade. Until the weapon and money changed hands the man decided to drop all pretence of not seeing through Alex's disguise with two sentences.
"Good to know now I will need to find a different supplier later. No hard feelings, Rider." A wink. Alex nodded back, carefully still observing.
A silent agreement passed between them. I won't say a thing if you won't. Honour among thieves, in a way, this time among former Malagosto students. Alex is reminded of the words that the principal told him all the time ago. Malagosto holds good memories for most of our students. Seems like the only thing assassins can be sentimental about is the school of murder.
The whole scene was probably a premonition of the mission going astray again, Alex muses two days after when he is held at gunpoint by Strauss, after he got caught sneaking in his office, holding in his hand the flash drive containing the network of suppliers. This is it, isn't it, the last breath I will ever take, is Alex's thought, when he closes his eyes. A thud and sound of breaking glass echoes through the room.
It's all wrong. It's not the sound of a gunshot.
Alex opens his eyes and the weight drops from his shoulders when he notices a body lying on the ground, gunshot wound straight in the middle of Strauss's head. One look out of the room window confirms all suspicions - the office was located on a place, that was surrounded by too many vantage points, it only reaffirms Alex in knowing this gangster was no professional. A quick look over the neighbouring buildings proves no evidence of the location of the sniper. He was probably long ago gone.
Alex's doesn't need to see him however, he very much has a feeling he knows the culprit. He bets if he examined the body on the ground, the bullet embedded in the head would be of a Russian origin. He is afraid what it means for him - was it a sign of goodwill that came out fo nowhere? Or was Klaus intending to have Alex in his debt?
The possibility of it being a coincidence never crossed his mind.