AN: I know, I know, I know... I am such a horrible, terrible, evil authoress... I keep starting these stories and not finishing them. But I will finish all of them. Eventually... Anyways, this plot bunny has been bouncing around in my head so much I couldn't resist. This won't be a long story... Maybe four chapters? Anyways, here goes...
Disclaimer: I don't own Alex Rider, otherwise I would have forced Anthony Horowitz to write at least 200 books by now.
"Mom!" A dark haired young man shouted as he walked into the living room, running a hand through his hair.
A red haired woman slowly came down the stairs, yawning as she did so. Once on the same level as the young man, she glared at him. "Is there any reason you've interrupted me from my sleep?" She asked irritably.
The dark haired man looked sheepish. "I couldn't find my briefcase, and it's my first day at work!" He walked around the living room, pulling at pillows and throwing things out of place, hoping to find his briefcase.
"Where's Ryan?" The red haired woman asked.
"He's in the car." He answered, throwing a couch cushion behind him, which hit the red haired woman in the face. Right on cue, a car horn honked outside impatiently.
Instead of yelling at him like she usually would have, she just sighed. "Sam, what does your briefcase look like?" She asked.
Sam didn't look up from his obnoxious tearing up of the living room. "It looks just like Ryan's, only black, and the clasps are silver."
"Like that?" The woman asked, pointing to a briefcase perched neatly on the kitchen counter.
Sam blanched. "Uh. Yeah. Thanks, Mom!" He thanked her before grabbing his briefcase, kissing her on the cheek, and running out the door to jump into the car with Ryan, who drove off within seconds.
Jack shook her head good-naturedly. She just had to have twins, didn't she? She loved Ryan and Sam with all her heart, but sometimes, she really wished that they were at least a year apart. Their uncanny likeness to one another never failed to annoy her when they finished each other's sentences.
The redhead fixed the living room, putting all the cushions and pillows back in place before walking back upstairs. She walked through the hallway, peeking into Sam's and Ryan's rooms, just to make sure that everything was neat there. The boys were nineteen, and yet they still were as messy as thirteen year olds.
Sam and Ryan had been conceived back when she was still a teenager, in the United States. She was 19, young and impressionable. She had never been a fan of abortion, and so she gave birth, and gave them to their father, Robert Smith, a young college student with a rich family, and a passion for kids. She had loved him once, but that was long gone by the time she gave birth to the twins.
She had gotten the news that Robert had died a year after he went MIA. The boys were a welcome change to her brooding life, and as they were ten and adorable when they came. They were loud, they were messy, they laughed at every burp they gave. They were terribly rude, horribly impolite, they pulled dozens of pranks, and threw a temper tantrum every five seconds.
They were the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Jack lay onto her bed and cuddled closer to her pillow. It didn't matter how much she loved them, they were still dreadfully annoying. Especially those days when they woke her up long before she was willing to be woken up. One of her hands reached under her pillow, by habit, and grasped the picture that was lying there.
She didn't need to look at it to know what was pictured there.
It was the last photograph she had of Alex.
It was the last photograph of Alex.
She fell asleep with it clutched tightly in her hand.
Jack hummed along to the radio as she bent over the washing machine. She took out a shirt and swung her hips side to side as she folded it automatically, her long red ponytail swinging in the motions.
She picked up the phone while trying to turn off the radio with one hand, and only succeeding in turning the volume a bit lower.
"Hello?" Jack said into the receiver, balancing the phone between her head and her shoulder.
"Hello, this is the Royal and General bank, is this Ms. Starbright?"
"Yes, it is. But you're wasting your time calling here, you already took Alex away a month ago," she snapped into the phone, dropping the shirt she was folding and grabbing the phone for a better grip.
"That is the reason that we are calling, Ms. Starbright. At 0500 this morning, Alex Rider was officially declared MIA. We are very sorry for your loss."
Jack froze before the information ran through her head. "WHAT?" she yelled into the phone. "WHERE IS HE?"
"If we knew that, he wouldn't be missing. Thank you, Ms. Starbright. Once again, we are very sorry for your loss." The person on the phone said in a fake sugary voice before hanging up, leaving Jack with a large pile of laundry, a softly playing radio, an empty house and an even emptier life.
Jack woke with a startled gasp, sitting up in her bed before she really realized where she was. The day that she learned Alex was MIA went down in her books at the absolute worst day of her life. It was worse than the day Ian had died, or the day she fell out of a window and broke ten bones in her body… It was worse than all of those days combined.
She had raised Alex just as much as she had raised Sam and Ryan. He was as much her son as the twins were, perhaps even more since she had met him at an earlier age. She had stuck with him through thick and thin, comforting him when his teachers sent home letters that said that if he didn't show up to school every day for the next three months, he would be expelled…. Especially when those letters came on the eve of his next mission. She had cheered with him when the results of his GCSEs came, and showed that he had passed with flying colors.
When he had suddenly been torn away from her by MI6, Jack had assumed it was a temporary thing, no, she had convinced herself it was a temporary thing. She had told that to herself up until the day of the phone call. What was supposed to be a temporary thing ended her son's life.
What hurt the most out of everything, though, was the fact that there was no body. There was no body, and so there was no closure. In the back of Jack's mind, there was always that faint whispering what if that crushed her over and over again.
There was always hope. And that hope was torture to Jack, because every day that went by without word of Alex was another day of sadness. Every day she had hope, and only hope.
Ryan and Sam had helped her in colossal ways. But even they could not help her get rid of the hope. It was still inside her, deep, festering like an infected wound. That was all it really was, an infected wound.
She knew that there was no chance of him still being alive. But hope would not leave her.
Jack never spoke of Alex. There were a few pictures in her room of him with her and Ian. But it hurt far too much to look at those pictures, so she ignored them for the most part. The twins had learned not to ask about the handsome, blonde haired boy, and so they never knew about a large and very tragic part of their mother's life. Jack preferred it that way.
Jack somehow stumbled her way downstairs to the living room, where she fell onto the couch in an undignified heap.
She groped around for the tv remote, and somehow managed to turn it onto a random movie. She watched it halfheartedly, with nothing better to do.
All the while, she tried to push away a strange feeling of déjà vu… Something in the redhead was screaming out at her that something wasn't right. To silence the annoying voice, she merely turned up the volume.
Sam and Ryan stood in front of their new place of work. It was a tall, antique-looking building with a Union Jack fluttering up above. It wasn't a huge building, but neither was it small.
The twins looked at each other for assurance, took a deep breath and walked through the door.
They were greeted inside the marble-floored lobby by a woman with black hair.
"Welcome to the Royal and General Bank."
AN: I am such a horrible, horrible person... Oh, well. I will finish this quickly. So, what do you think should happen?
1: Should Alex be alive/dead?
2: Should Jack find out immediately, or after a period of time?
3: Should they go on any missions?
4: Should I somehow get K-Unit involved in a random way?
Begging for suggestions,
Marie