A one-shot of an alternate Scorpia mission for Alex. Rated T for graphic and bloody scenes. Please enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own Alex Rider, or any of the other characters, not even the books! Anthony Horowitz has earned that privilege, no matter how much I would like to steal Alex. Though I am hoping to get the books for myself. But that is for another day, and onto the story (still a oneshot!)!
~Moony~
She never saw it coming.
After Alex shot the bullet-proof glass in Mrs. Jones' apartment room, the spies supposedly guarding the building entered the room and seized him as quickly as possible.
Alex collapsed against them dejectedly, as if upset he had failed his assassination attempt. None of the men, or Mrs. Jones, gave his eyes a second look.
The first guard grabbed the gun from Alex's limp hands without resistance. It was empty and of no use to Alex anyways. The man leveled the gun to the back of the teen's head, threatening the gesture. What he didn't know was the gun was empty. Only Scorpia and Alex knew that.
Two guards grabbed his upper arms, not thinking about his wrists, which he had crossed over his stomach, fingers brushing against knife sheaths hidden under the sleeves of his long-sleeved Pizza Delivery shirt. He had quickly slipped the knives on before breaking into Mrs. Jones' room. They had been concealed in the false bottom of the pizza bag, and the guards had missed them in their evaluation.
Mrs. Jones, thinking Alex was secured, stepped out from behind the cracked glass and walked towards the group.
The guards hadn't used the tranquilizer yet, as Mrs. Jones wanted to talk to Alex before he was knocked out.
She was soon within a yard of the group. Alex wasn't being held as securely, though he was still hanging loosely between the novice spies.
One more step from Mrs. Jones, and she was within reach of Alex. He pulled his arms in closer to his body, as if cold or cowering from the woman, when he was in fact wrapping his fingers around the hilts of both knives.
"Alex, how could you go to Scorpia?" Mrs. Jones spoke.
To Alex, she sounded quite naive, and he responded in check, "They haven't lied to me."
Her face dropped into a sad grimace, and Alex softened his eyes, trying to look innocent and pleading as he gazed up at the woman, though the disgust of doing so rested in a corner of his mind.
She was wearing the bathrobe, and it was tight enough for Alex's sharp, assassin-trained eyes to assess she wasn't wearing a bullet-proof vest, unneeded considering she was to stay behind the glass while he was attempting her death.
Mrs. Jones sighed, and Alex sagged against the man holding onto his left side. The man shoved Alex away from him, though still keeping a firm hold on Alex's bicep.
With the momentum of the man's push, Alex whipped the knife hidden in his left sleeve out with his right hand and lunged, catching the three spies by surprise.
The extended blade jabbed into Mrs. Jones' sternum and broke. The collar bones in retaliation collapsed inwards and punctured her lungs and a small quadrant of her heart. She was nearly full-impaled on Alex's knife. He took a quick step forward, pushing the weapon further into the woman's chest and knocking her off balance.
Mrs. Jones slid off the blade and onto the carpet floor, blood spreading in a wave from her front and back, where the knife had gone through, narrowly missing the spinal cord. Alex didn't want her to have an easy death, which would only come with a severed spinal cord or brain damage. His ex-boss would suffer, until her blood emptied from her body from both stab and punctured organs.
The teenage assassin spun around after glancing at the woman lying on the floor. He caught the guards unaware, as they were staring in shock at their boss. Alex pulled from his right forearm the second knife and mercilessly slit the throats of the stunned spies that had held onto his arms, not minding the blood spattering onto his front.
The man who had been behind Alex tentatively raised Alex's own gun to the teen, who just grinned at him. The man's face blanched when he tried to shoot, only to find the weapon empty. Alex took a short step to the frozen spy and jabbed his blade through the jugular vein. He pulled left, tearing through the windpipe and the matching vein on the neck.
The man drowned as his blood poured down his exposed throat into lungs and stomach. Alex, betrayed one-to-many times, watched as the man fell to the ground, scrabbling with crimson fingers at his neck, head unable to support itself and tipping back.
The assassin's face was blank, but in his mind, Alex was quietly enjoying the sight. MI6 had denied him the opportunity of a gun, and Scorpia gave into that need of his protection, though Alex had trouble shooting at images of people.
Alex's preference was with close-ranged weapons, not guns. He could play the innocent child trick for pity, as he had done many times in the past working for MI6. Had the glass not been in place, he would have narrowly missed Mrs. Jones' head, the bullet causing mere wind in its passing.
Reminded of the woman, he turned to her form, which lay still on the ground, blood seeping from her ruined chest. Her eyes were opened, though clouded in pain, and she seemed to be mouthing words to anyone.
The young assassin crouched by her side and said to her, "You should have stayed in your bubble, Tulip," spitting out her first name with disgust.
Her eyes stayed on Alex's face while he rose, but she couldn't watch any longer as he moved beyond her, the pain too intense to move, let alone cry out. She couldn't cry anyways because of the blood filling her lungs and pushing the air through her chest.
Tulip Jones' last sight was of a blood-covered teenager standing and walking away, after causing the death of three new spies, and leaving a head-of-office to suffer as she bled out. Not long after Alex Rider leaving her view, Mrs. Jones' eyelids slid shut as her brain shut down from lack of oxygen.
Alex glanced once more at the woman beyond the glass, and the three men dead on the ground before her. He turned back to the window and slid the glass panels carefully up, allowing the cool breeze wash over his blood-splattered face.
His fingers slid his knives, blades free of blood, back into their sheaths, and quickly worked on unhooking his belt buckle. He pulled it free from the damp pants, and set it to the side. Alex proceeded to slip the top layers of clothing off, in the shadows of the window.
He resulted in tight black jeans and a black Under Armor© with long sleeves. The knives rested onto of the sleeves. The old shirt he wiped across his face and hair, then across the tops of his water-repellant shoes. The blood of four people slipped away from the young assassin, and he dropped the dirty shirt to the ground.
Picking up the belt, he placed the hooked end against the bolted-on window lock and gave a firm tug, resulting in the sound of splitting threads. Alex wrapped the other end of the belt around his hand and sat on the window sill. Without looking back, he slid over the edge and into the night.
The titanium strands in the belt supported his weight as the weaker ones broke the webbing, resulting in gravity pulling Alex to the ground. His shoulder nearly popped out of its socked from his weight, but Alex was prepared, having been trained secretly from another assassin at Malagosto, Scorpia's island.
In minutes, Alex reached the pavement before the building. He dropped the end of the belt, of which there was extra incase nine floor's worth of length wasn't enough. He stepped from the shadows into the light. People swarmed the streets, and Alex went with the flow, on alert for a phone booth with which to call Nile.
Civilian spies from MI6 swarmed the streets, blending into the population of tourists and natives. Most of the spies were heading to the apartment where Mrs. Jones, second to Alan Blunt of their organization, was reported out-of-action at the check-in time. The many people were sent to search the building, and look for the woman, none expecting to find her dead. After all, Scorpia had sent a teenager to do their work, and most of the spies had no idea the teen's importance, nor his need for revenge.
Many passed the innocent-looking boy wandering the streets, assuming him to be part of one of many gangs, or an innocent boy on his way home from a friend's home. None studied him close enough to see the outlines of knives on his forearms, and his hands with the bloodied fingernails were tucked into pockets.
Alex noticed MI6's people, and he kept his face angled to the ground, while sneakily watching for phone booths. He found one, on the corner of a smaller street, and stepped into it, closing the glass door behind him. He pulled lock-picking tools from a knife sheath and worked on opening the change box. In under a minute he had it open, the skill courtesy of his Uncle Ian.
Alex reached in and slid enough change to pay for one call. He dropped the coins through the slot after closing the hatch and relocking the box. When the dial tone came up, he pressed the buttons in the combination Nile gave him. (Yeah, I know Nile wasn't there, but it helps later. Pretend Nile was the one that flew Alex out to London again.)
Nile's rough voice answered in moments. "That you, Federico?" he said, using Alex's fake name from the pass-port, though the boy had stripped off the disguise.
He replied, "Yeah, I finished delivering the pizza. Where do I go for the next drop-off?"
"The truck is outside the shop, where we are waiting with your other orders to deliver. Please hurry before they cool," Nile told the assassin, playing the part of worried-for-my-money pizza guy perfectly.
"Alright, I'll be there in a bit," Alex told him, before hanging up the phone, slipping his picks into their slots, and exiting the phone stall.
After a kilometer of street blocks, Alex came across the delivery truck outside a pizza parlor. He opened the back door after placing his hand on a bumper sticker reading the number of the pizza parlor, which in turn scanned his fingerprints and unlocked the door in recognition. The bumper sticker, if called, would redirect the call to another place, which delivered pizza and would keep Scorpia's organization out of the government's curious eyes.
On a bench inside the truck sat Nile. Across from him was an open space, and the driver's seat was filled with a driver provided by Scorpia. The truck smelt like warm pizza, and Alex saw an opened box on the seat he was to be in.
The door to the truck closed behind him and locked with an audible thwack! Alex shifted the pizza and quickly sat as the driver started up the vehicle and drove from the spot.
Nile gazed at him with even eyes as Alex took a slice of cheese pizza from the box and began eating.
"How'd it go?" the man asked curiously.
Alex swallowed before saying, "I had to improvise. Bullet-proofed glass was placed between me and the target, and three guards grabbed me."
Nile nodded and responded, "You get Jones in any case?"
"Do shattering the sternum, resulting in collapse of collarbones and puncturing of heart and lungs count? Along with the bleed out from front and back, too," Alex questioned.
Nile gave a smile and told the boy, "Based on that, I see you found a use for daggers after all? How'd you get the guards?"
"Slit one's throat, leaving him to bleed out, and stabbed the others through the throat, severing their spinal cords."
The other assassin grinned at the younger, "How do you feel now?"
Alex was quiet before answering, "I don't feel anything bad, just that buzz you described of a job well done."
The people were silent, save the small noises made as Alex ate and those of the road under the truck.
They arrived at a small house a bit later, and the two assassins got out of the back, both carrying pizza boxes as if to deliver. The driver sped off, where he would soon dispose of the cumbersome truck and from there find his own way back to Scorpia.
Alex rang the doorbell to the house. Nile's finger pads had no prints, as they had been burned off by acid long ago, so Alex had his prints read by the pad. The door was opened by the woman who played the mother in the disguise of Alex's mission once his data was transferred to the house's computer.
The two men made their way inside. The woman told Alex he would find a change of clothes in the bathroom, so he showered and cleaned his knives thoroughly while the older assassins sorted out the passports and disguises to get them back to Venice, and from there Malagosto.
On his return, the antidote for the microchips would be given to him and him alone, and the lady whose plan it was to inject Alex in the first place would 'accidentally' fall from her fourth-floor bedroom window. The children of London between ages of twelve and fourteen would perish, leaving the world traumatized for years.
Alex would continue work on his training, including martial arts, knife techniques, languages, endurance, and his fear of shooting live targets. He would learn to shoot the images, and would rank the top shooter in his class, surpassing the young adults training before him.
The organization of Scorpia would work on Sabotage, Corruption, Intelligence, and Assassination with the young, teenaged spy.
Soon Alex Rider, previously of MI6, would become the most feared assassin working for Scorpia, second only to the late Yassen Gregorovitch. His codename, Stalker, would bring the deaths of many, along with the haunting gaze of a sixteen-year-old as he killed another, feeling nothing but giddiness.
How was it? Good or bad? Please review, and flames are welcome.
~Moony~