Sorry for the short chapter and the long wait! I have AS levels to take, French and Spanish Orals to do, and incidentally, my father decided to put his back out. All in all, it's been fun, recently.
Oh, and a couple of people have been asking me whether Alex is going to have a German lesson. I don't know about Brooklands, but at my school, it wasn't possible to take both German AND Spanish...
...OK, lame excuse. Put it this way, Alex will have a German lesson the moment I learn to speak German. i.e. it's gonna be a few years yet, folks.
Oh, and someone mentioned that Alex was too young to be doing coursework. They did so very politely, and thank you very much for pointing it out, I'm really grateful! And, I here and now admit my total ignorance of state schools; but a lot of my friends go to state schools, and they all did coursework at fourteen... maybe just, different schools, different methods?
Thank you once again to all my lovely reviewers!
DISCLAIMER: Nope, still not mine. Walker books are WAY overprotective of their authors' copyrights...
Sunday started off as a nice quiet day, with Alex wrestling with his homework before doing the gardening, and Jack cleaning upstairs.
It didn't stay quiet for very long.
At about eleven, there was a ring on the doorbell, and Jack called down to Alex,
"Could you answer that? I'm still in my dressing gown…"
Alex did as she asked, going to the door, pulling it open, expecting to see Tom, or possibly Jack's new boyfriend, Dan, or Dave or whoever, and instead coming face to face with…
…three glowering SAS, and a faintly apologetic looking Wolf.
Wolf shrugged at Alex. "They made me do it." He told him, sounding faintly petulant.
Alex raised an eyebrow at him. "How old are you? 'They made me do it', indeed." He looked at them for a long second, before standing aside to let them in. "I s'pose you'd better come in…"
"Alex!" The call came from upstairs, where Jack was working. "Who is it?"
"Wolf!" he yelled back at her. "He brought some… friends!"
The announcement was met with silence, so he ushered them through to the kitchen. Once they were sat down, looking rather ill at ease – except Wolf, who looked surprisingly calm about the whole thing – Alex said, politely,
"Coffee?"
"It's obvious who's going to be doing the cooking in their partnership." Fox said, under his breath. "Thanks, coffee'd be great." He told Alex, out loud, trying to avoid Wolf's sudden glare.
Awkward silence descended once more upon the kitchen, as Alex boiled the kettle, and got out the cafetiere. Finally, Snake spoke up.
"Look, Cub – we just wanted to talk to you. About this partnership between you and Wolf…"
Alex turned to him, crossing his arms defensively, and saying, rather disbelievingly, "That sounds worryingly like you want to make sure that I have honourable intentions."
Fox shrugged. "It's not your intentions we're worried about."
"You're worried that Wolf doesn't have honourable intentions?" Alex asked, guilelessly, turning away to make the coffee. "I'm sure that even if he was gay, he wouldn't go for someone as young as me."
When he turned back with the full cafetiere, he noticed that all of them looked a little taken aback at that. He suppressed a grin.
"That wasn't quite what we meant…" Snake said, carefully.
"But it was a little what you meant?" Alex asked, determined not to make this easy for them, for no other reason than revenge. It was fun to give them back a little of the awkwardness that they'd given him.
"I swear to god you weren't this chatty when we were at the training camp." Eagle muttered.
"It's not like you gave me the chance to be." Alex shot back, quickly. "What was it you called me again? Double-o-nothing?"
Wolf flushed. "To be fair, Cub, that was more my fault than theirs…"
"Yeah, but you've apologised." Alex pointed out. "This lot haven't."
"Christ, if you'd just wanted an apology, you could have asked, kid!" Eagle told him, exasperated.
"If I'd just wanted an apology, I would have asked." Alex said, quietly. "But, I wanted an apology that you actually meant."
"That's something I've always wondered." Snake interrupted, his voice thoughtful. "What were you training with us for, anyway?"
"I had to – investigate something. For MI6." Alex evaded, rather unsubtly, but they let it go at that. He looked at them for a long moment. "So." He said, slowly. "What are you doing here?"
"We're just – trying to sort a few things out." Eagle told him. "Because, one minute Wolf is our team leader, and the next thing we know, he's leaving the SAS and going to join MI6 as the partner of some kid."
"Oh, thanks." Alex said, with a heavy trace of sarcasm. "But that doesn't tell me why you're here now."
"We wanted to have another look at you." Snake said, without a trace of artifice. "We figured that there must be some reason for Wolf to decide that he wanted to be your partner."
"Again, I feel so flattered." Alex said, sharply. "Look, do you want to stop with the veiled insults? Because then we can all accept that you think I'm a liability, that Wolf's mad to even consider partnering me, and that I'm going to get him killed."
"You don't tiptoe around, do you, kid?" Fox said, amusement clear in his tone. Alex turned stony eyes on him.
"It all depends on the situation. With you, you wouldn't get it if I talked in hints and suggestions." They winced. "With Scorpia, on the other hand, they'll pick up on the slightest inflections, so I got pretty good at 'tiptoeing', as you put it."
"Right, so you think we're thick, do you?" Eagle said, looking at him, hard.
Alex met his stare calmly. "I'm giving you as much credit as you're giving me." He said, quietly. "I'm through with giving people the benefit of the doubt. I did that before, and they tried to kill me three times – and that's not counting the two times they tried to kill me before they recruited me."
There was a long silence, until Jack came down. On seeing the other men, she paused in the doorway, looking them over carefully. "Who're you?" she said, part suspicious, part neutral, nodding at Wolf.
"This is my team." Wolf told her, quietly. "Well… ex-team, I guess." He amended, fairly. Fox scowled at that. "That's Snake, that's Eagle, and the glaring one is Fox."
Jack treated Fox to an especially sweet smile. "Hallo." She nodded at him, and Wolf smirked as the scowl slid off Fox's face, to be replaced by a faintly ashamed expression.
Alex smiled at her, rather awkward still at having these men in his house. "Would you like a coffee?" he offered. She nodded, and he stood to get her a mug, while she drew up a seat at the table.
"So, I hope that you're not here to make life difficult for Alex." She said, her voice carrying only the faintest hint of a threat. "Because, trust me when I tell you that he's got enough people doing that without amateurs like you coming along to give it a go."
They all looked as ashamed as Fox did by the time she'd finished speaking.
Wolf was the first to stand, after a long, extremely uncomfortable pause. "Well, I think that everything's been said that we needed to say. Cub, I'll see you on Monday, OK? For our training. Miss Starbright, nice to see you."
He all but pushed the other three men out of the door, forcing them out. Alex sighed once they'd gone, and looked at Jack, tiredly.
"It might be really good having Wolf as a partner." He told her, quietly. "But, he comes with some really bad downsides."
Monday was just as much fun as Alex had been expecting. Although the furore around him had died down a little, he was still getting for too much attention for his liking, and although Wolf was still there, he was only with Alex so much now. Alex couldn't say that he missed the man hanging around at the back of his lessons, but he did wish he had the man's gift for intimidation.
Finally, though, the school day ended – Alex had fielded at least seventy questions, and was feeling rather frazzled as he escaped out the gates – and he headed, with Wolf an ever present, if rather silent, companion, over to the Royal and General Bank.
There, they were met by an earnest, eager looking man who took them down to the basement, where they found various high-tech looking classrooms, and even, in one instance, a live firing range.
"On Mondays, you'll be learning languages with me, Mr. Rider, Mr. San Luca." The man told them, voice soft and friendly. "Chinese, specifically. You have me again on Fridays. As for the other days, I've got a timetable to give you." Alex resisted the urge to roll his eyes – trust MI6 to come up with a timetable for his 'spy' lessons – but Wolf nodded, seriously.
The two-hour lesson was uneventful, as they learned a few basic phrases, had their accents rigorously worked on by the man – Terence Ashley – and learnt to recognise some of the more basic symbols. He wanted them to be able to recognise them all for a short test that Friday, and set them to learning it all as 'homework'. Alex sighed. Just what he needed, more homework.
He and Wolf parted with a brief 'see you tomorrow', and Alex headed back to Chelsea on his own, semi-willingly repeating the Chinese phrases to himself. It didn't seem all that hard, but then, as the man had said, this was the extremely basic stuff.
Over the past week or so, his life had changed so drastically, that Alex was having a hard time catching up with it. He just wished he could work out whether this change was for better – or for much, much worse.
And, this was supposed to be the last chapter. It's not, quite. It'll probably end in about two chapters time, when they get given their first assignment together.
And then, ladies and gentlemen, TEH SEQUEL!!!
Lol.
ami xxx
