He should have been happy. He wasn't.
While MI6 was busy hunting down and eradicating the last of SCORPIA's cockroaches, Alex was back in school and taking his GSCEs, getting good marks in every subject, excelling at football and shaping up to be captain of the team next year. He even had a sort-of girlfriend, Erin Andrews, who played on the girls' football team and whom Alex sometimes studied with. She was a nice girl, average-pretty and fun to be around. Entirely too happy and outgoing, though. Alex was talking to her less and less these days.
He should have been happy. He had every right to be. He'd saved the world, saved millions of lives, and Ian's well-stocked bank accounts afforded Alex and Jack a very nice life at their home on Cheyne Walk. They didn't want for anything.
Well, Jack didn't. Alex, on the other hand, wanted. He wanted to be able to sleep at night. He wanted to be able to go about his day and not think of MI6. He wanted to stop waiting for That Story to appear on the evening news, to stop worrying about bombs being planted in airplanes, drug cartels roaming the globe, women and children in third-world countries being sold into prostitution, nuclear weapons passing from madman to madman . . . He had a laundry list of worldly concerns, and no way of knowing if SIS were getting the job done right.
Sometimes he rode out to Liverpool Street to stare at the Royal & General, squatting there like a brick toad, behaved and proper and by all appearances just an innocent building, knowing that within those walls were high-tech computers and technicians and engineers and agents, a whole different world. A world of adventure and danger and justice in its sweetest form. And despite two years of sheer, perfect hell at the hands of MI6, despite being robbed of his innocence and naivety, Alex wanted back in the game. He belonged with them. This is what he was meant to be, what he was meant to do. All this school and football and girlfriends—it didn't feel like him. It all felt fake, like he was living someone else's life. He wanted to live his own life, doing what he does best.
So Alex decided that when he turned sixteen, four months from now, he was going to walk into the Royal & General and beg Alan Blunt to let him rejoin MI6.