Right, so it's been a liiiiiiitle while, and its short again, so I made it really gruesome... enjoy!
- Ara
"I watched him die." Alex said carefully. "He's dead."
The smile stayed on his face, mocking.
He's dead, Alex reassured himself.
He's messing with my head now? Alex paused in wonder. Stecha had been down-right helpful with his answers, and suddenly he's started playing mind games! Yassen was dead, he was sure of it.
Stecha took a long look at Alex, scanning his face.
In the silence, the soldier with the gun to Wolf's head shifted uncomfortably. He'd been standing for too long, it must have been more than an hour since this started. It seemed to be contagious, because everyone started shuffling, trying to get blood back into their legs, the weight of their body cutting off their circulation. It was a weakness, although not one he could exploit. No one was near enough. Maybe Wolf…
"You really don't know, do you?" Stecha asked finally, done searching his features for foul play.
"Know what?"
"Yassen is alive. MI6 cleaned up your mess and found him in the wreckage of that plane. He wasn't quite dead yet, and they managed to save his life. They kept him in their cells, interrogated him, but he apparently didn't let anything go." He shrugged. "It's a good thing too, cause they probably would have eliminated him if he did.
"Anyways, we knew, so when we broke in for your file, we let him out. We were hoping for a freebie job or something as thanks, but I guess the old man's gone into retirement. He's disappeared." Stecha sighed. "Not that there's a SCORPIA left to fight for."
"He's… alive?" Alex's eyes widened.
"You give a shit about that assassin?" Wolf spat.
"You don't know anything about it." Alex snapped back.
"Goddamnit, Cub! What the fuck is wrong with you?" Wolf shouted. "Bioterrorism, assassins, SCORPIA? What have you gotten yourself into?!"
"Oh… this and that." Alex replied sheepishly.
Stecha took that moment to clear his throat and press a button on the remote.
The image was of Alex, flying down a mountain on an ironing board, chased by snowmobiles equipped with machine guns. The boy veered into the woods, gunshots echoing through the little valley and an explosion following him through the trees. A second fireball guttered out on open turf after a show of Alex's boarding skills with a heel spin to the driver's face. From behind, you could see the boy slouch in relief, then tense. He veered off, swinging his board around erratically as if to evade attack by a ranged weapon.
The boy rode out of frame, but a document replaced the video on the screen. The words 'jumped a snow bank, landed on top of a train, and fell off the other side,' gradually grew larger. Alex could almost hear some sort of dramatic music, as if this were some educational movie he'd watched in school.
"That looks familiar." Wolf muttered.
Alex's head drew back in surprise. "You seriously made a documentary about me?"
"How else are we supposed to tell people?" Stecha shrugged. "Wolf! You tell me the story this time! You were the leading officer on the rescue mission, so you should know what happened."
Wolf shrugged slightly, this wasn't new to him. "The kid boarded down the mountain, fell off a train into a fence, and ended up in the hospital. He convinced the Deputy Director of MI6 to let him tag along with the squad I was temporarily commanding. We were supposed to detain the owner of the property, but Cub wanted to save his friends, or something. It was a private school, I guess they had some kids locked up in the basement." Wolf stopped and looked at Stecha. "The kid got into trouble, I tried to help him out but got shot. I took care of it."
"Helpful, aren't you?" Stecha smiled, leaving the 'took care of it' to be interpreted by the rest of the room. They knew what it meant.
"No sense in getting shot again if the kid would tell it to you in a second." Wolf glared at Alex.
"Who took care of the owner of the property?" Stecha asked.
"The kid." Wolf said darkly. Alex didn't respond, Dr. Grief was one of the least of his sins.
Stecha paused for effect, but not long. "Do you know why he was so desperate to get down that mountain?"
Wolf shrugged. "Got scared?" He suggested, but even he didn't seem to believe it, not after a month with the kid.
"You could say that." Stecha snorted, lifting the remote again.
An older man in a lab coat leaned over a table, a thrashing human being strapped to the metal slab. You couldn't tell whether the person was male or female, they were covered in blue cloth except for the torso, a homogenous slab of bruised flesh slowly being peeled back to reveal the muscle beneath.
Alex exhaled shakily, the situation on the TV sinking in.
A Y incision exposed his ribs, which rose and fell so quickly with the screams that must have come from underneath the cloth that the man in the lab coat had a hard time pinning back the skin. Then the man picked up a pair of bolt cutters, but the image went black before he could start snipping off the ribcage.
The room muttered.
"That's why. Dr. Grief threatened young Alex Rider with being dissected alive."
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