"Given that you nearly failed to complete the last mission we gave you-"
"Mr. Blunt, it's been years since-"
"-we've decided," Blunt continued, thoroughly ignoring Alex,"to give you a partner."
That word made Alex grow hot with embarrassment. "I don't need a babysitter to help me do my job."
"Good," the man said crisply. "Because I said MI6 has decided to give you a partner." To his right, he shouted,"Isla!"
Oh, good God. A girl? Named Isla? Such an English name. Alex knew an Isla Worth at Brookland Comprehensive. She'd been nice enough to him, but what she lacked in intelligence she made up for in—well, did she make up for it in anything? Come to think of it, she'd actually been sort of rude to loads of people, and Brookland Isla always seemed to blink profusely whenever she would speak to him—
"Goodness, where is that blasted American?!"
American?! Hang on, what—
Blunt stood up and started for the door, but it opened before he could get to it. In rushed a short young woman, whom Alex assumed to be Isla. She was dark haired, tan, and with almond shaped eyes the same color as Alex's. She wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants. Judging by the speed at which Isla had entered the room, Alex expected her to look abashed. Quite the opposite, actually: Isla looked nonplussed, if not irritated.
"Sorry," she said, sounding not at all apologetic. Her accent was definitely American; sorry was saw-ree. Her voice, though, was deeper and a bit husky. It surprised Alex. Isla flipped her long hair over shoulder, sending a cloud of sugary smelling perfume to disperse around the room. She didn't even need to speak for Alex to know she was smug and rude. "You shouted, Blunt?"
"Yelled's more like it," the older man snapped. "Alex, this is Isla Cruz. Isla, this is Alex Rider."
Isla looked up at Alex with her dark eyes, and he was immediately struck by how expressive they were. Jack would've called them 'bedroom eyes'.
"Hi," she said with a slight smirk, sticking out a hand. Alex took it, and before he could condescendingly comment on how small and soft it was (it was a child's hand, really—this woman had probably never worked a day in her life), Isla shook it with an iron grip. "Nice to meet you."
"I'd say the same, but I just know your name and nationality," Alex replied coolly. Her handshake had surprised him, but he wasn't about to let her know that. She needed to know her place. In fact, MI6 needed to know that he wouldn't take amateurs with him for anything. As he released her hand, he added, "Irrelevant information, considering I already know that all you really are is deadweight for my next mission."
"Alexander Rider!" Alan Blunt scolded. "You will respect Ms. Cruz and-"
"It's alright, Blunt," Isla said calmly. She smiled slightly, which only irritated Alex even more. "I'm a big girl."
Alex snorted. "Right. Can you even reach the top shelf in a kitchen cupboard?"
"Alright, that's enough, Alex," interrupted a woman's voice, accompanied with the clip-clopping of heels. Ms. Jones appeared next to Mr. Blunt, holding two Manila folders so thick they were bound by binder clips. She walked briskly towards the pair.
"This is his. Read it tonight. You're scheduled for weight training and boxing in the morning," the woman explained, handing one of the folders, stamped ALEXANDER JONES RIDER, to Isla. The file's subject suddenly made a grab for it, certain he didn't want her of all people knowing everything about him.
Her reflexes quick, Isla yanked it out of his grasp. She raised an arched eyebrow. "Naughty things in here, Alley Cat?"
"No," he grumbled. Then he realized— "Alley Cat? What the fu-"
Ms. Jones, without missing a beat, nearly shoved Isla's manila folder into Alex's chest to shut him up. "And this is hers. Read it tonight. You're scheduled for weight training and boxing as well."
As he took the folder, Alex waved it in front of Isla's face and sneered. "What about you, Cruz? Naughty things in yours?"
The young woman smirked again. "Depends on what you decide to look at, doesn't it?"
With that look in her eyes, she left through the same door she came through.
After awhile, Ms. Jones noticed Alex's look of disdain bordering disgust and mistook it for discomfort. "Isla Cruz is rather...flirtatious. That personality trait has been highly efficient in gathering information, but sometimes it complicates things..."
"Like what?" Alex asked. "Did she end up shagging someone she was supposed to take care of?"
"Don't be crass," Ms. Jones snapped. Cowed, the twenty-year-old responded with an imperceptible nod.
"Thank you." She paused, looking for the right words. "But you are correct. Things became complicated when she led someone on during a mission. The man made a mess of it when he found out her age-"
"How old is she, then?"
Mr. Blunt seized this moment to regain control of the situation, feeling utterly left out in the clash of egos. "That's all in your reading tonight, isn't it?"
That night, Alex settled down at the desk in his room. It was rather quiet in the London flat. Whenever Alex went out it was always empty. Except for Harry. Harry was a great big German Shepherd that Alex had spotted out on the streets of Liverpool as a puppy. Now, three years and seventy pounds later, he was one hundred twenty pounds of muscle, fur, and energy.
"Hiya, Harry. How are you, boy?" Alex asked when said dog came in, scratching him all over. Harry responded with wet kisses, which stopped when he saw the thick folder Alex held. To the dog, it smelled like sugar and vanilla. The real stuff, too. Not the fake chemical stench that burned his nose and clung to the girls Alex used to bring home and would leave in the morning smelling of Alex. Harry began to lick it in the hope it would taste the way it smelled.
"No, no, don't do that, boy, that's my reading," Alex laughed deeply. Harry whined, then suddenly took the folder into his mouth and shook it loose from his owner's grip. When the file finally tore, Harry ran away with several sheets of paper triumphantly.
The tearing open had loosed free many pictures. With a groan, Alex stooped to pick them up.
"Fucking dog," he grumbled, gathering up the images into a pile. He was about to haphazardly shove them back into the wet paper folder when he realized that some were actually pretty cool. Alex sat onto the hardwood floor to look through them.
Some were of various pistols. There were a few captured images of hard drug hauls, like cocaine and heroin. Others were what looked like tranquilizers and possibly poisons. However, most of the photos were of Isla. A lot were candid; she was walking alone and looking at the ground in one. In another she was scowling at something out of the picture and pointing a gun at it. At the same time, she was running and looking behind her shoulder with narrowed eyes. But the one photograph Alex found the most striking was her mugshot. The lettering on the board she held may have been Russian, as he'd recognized the unique characters, but couldn't actually understand the message it conveyed. Isla was smirking at the camera in her mugshot, as if she had already figured out how to escape. Though he would not tell her in the morning, Alex thought Isla looked very appealing in the mugshot, even though they were supposed to be anything but.
He returned to his desk, laying out all the pictures and thick paper stack to read her portfolio. Alex read her mission list. There were seven so far. Her first two had been in 2012, and come in increments of two every year after that. This year, Isla'd had one. He assumed her second would be with him as his deadweight. The details of her previous missions, though, were several dozen pages long. Alex saw that she worked for a division of the CIA, but he didn't know if they were just sticklers for detail or Isla's missions just took very long to describe. He briefly wondered if his own mission descriptions, the ones MI6 had given him, were as long as hers.
Some of the pictures matched those same missions. The pistols and drugs were from a drug bust. The tranquilizers and possible poisons came from toppling a well-known and corrupt American corporation. Even the mugshot had a place with Mission 1107: Operation Red. She'd been captured during her most recent assignment and been put into Siberian prison. A quick skim of the report, the shortest at twelve pages, told Alex it had been rather easy for her to escape. Deciding he'd save the reports for later, Alex began to rummage for the juicy stuff: date of birth, date of beginning espionage, parentage, general history, etcetera. With a sickening lurch of his stomach, it dawned on him that her basic information had probably been in the papers Harry had taken away.
A few blocks over, Isla Cruz wore a large men's dress shirt (she couldn't remember the original owner; either a friend, a 'friend', or she'd bought it from a charity shop and forgotten when), a bra, and panties as she balanced Alex's file in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other. Settling down in her flat's couch by the window, Isla took small sips as she flipped through her new partner's information.
Most of it she already knew. The basics of Alex Rider were rather well known in the younger spy circles: nephew of the late Ian Rider (a legend of his own), subtly trained all his life, first mission at fourteen, etcetera. Isla glanced at his other history. Five languages: English (obviously), French, Spanish, basic German, conversational Italian and Japanese. About the same as her, but she spoke Mandarin fluently instead of the Italian and Japanese and no German. She'd also wondered if her file included her endeavors in learning Arabic. School marks were alright. Licensed to drive. No living blood relations (the Pleasures in America didn't count). Physical appearance was obvious; tall, muscular build, fair hair, dark eyes, hard chin and cutting jawline like a model. For a brief moment, Isla wanted to be him.
Then she remembered that Alexander Rider was rotten.
The rather heavy report didn't mention anything at all about his bad attitude or superiority complex. It didn't talk about the way he looked down his nose when he talked to someone like her, or the slight sneer always at the ready on his lips. She'd acted stoic at MI6, but she felt Alex already knew the most embarrassing things about her. That she was self-conscious and insecure and that she was just a kid. A weak, helpless amateur.
Her brief exchange with Alex replayed in her head.
She'd attempted to smile, but her mother had always her smiles looked like smirks. "Nice to meet you."
Alex took her hand, all the while sizing her up."I'd say the same, but I just know your name and nationality. Irrelevant information, considering I already know that all you really are is deadweight for my next mission."
Alex had already figured out she was useless and was not afraid to get rid of her because of it. Isla shook her head to clear her thoughts.
"Enough," she told herself. "He's just a boy." When Isla started looking through the folder, she found that it was full mostly due to pictures. All rather good ones, as none of them showed Alex's face set in the haughty expression he had met her with. Younger Alex running in a black jumpsuit, Alex running in a formal black suit, Alex scaling a rock wall, Alex playing several different sports. There were more recent ones of Alex with all kinds of girls.
A sarcastic voice in the back of Isla's head said, "Well, at least he's not racist when it comes to getting laid!"
Nonetheless, Alex looked good in all of the pictures. Isla could only imagine the horror that Alex would feel when he looked at hers. She knew she looked like trash in most of them. Her candids were usually atrocious. But the most embarrassing was that Russian mugshot; Carl Stacey, one of her reporting superiors, had thought it would've been funny to keep. The very idea of it just made Isla cringe now.
After she finished looking at Alex's photographs, she saw his mission reports. They were rather short and to the point; a good thing, because there were ten. Thought they were all written by MI6, Isla could tell most of the 'missions' were rogue, meaning that Alex had decided to play spy without being asked. Her eyes growing wider and wider as she read, Isla learned about SCORPIA. She learned about the Pleasures, and Alex's almost-girlfriend-now-sister Sabina (she nearly snorted at this point; how some people could achieve such messiness was beyond her), but mostly she learned about Jack Starbright. Heartbreaking, really. As a fourteen year old she had still been afraid of the dark; there is no way she could have been mature enough to handle the death of a loved one. After that, there was an updated log of two years that documented Alex's life in America; another discussed the other two years of his move back to the United Kingdom. Extremely accurate, the gritty details of his later life were typical of attractive boys; lots of drink, lots of money (even though Alex hadn't attended university, he worked from home as a translator for some book company under the name Aaron Reacher), and lots of sex. As in, a lot of sex. The log described the tens of dozens of girls that passed through both Alex Rider's American apartment and London flat, coming in giddy and coming out blissful.
So MI6 never lost track of him, Isla thought. They'd always kept tabs.
In a brief moment, she wondered if her own mission descriptions, the ones the CIA had written her, were as well documented as his.
Or as sad.
A/N: So...what did you think? Is my characterization accurate? Is there something I should change? Grammar and/or spelling errors? Let me know in a review! 5 reviews of any kind, be they critical or full of praise, are welcome and help incentivize my writing! :)