Summary: Alec's past and present collide. When Alec Trevelyan was three years old, a green-eyed man saved him from an explosion the same night that his father died. Thirty-five years later found history repeating itself and bringing old questions to the surface. Bright Star 'verse. May stand alone.
Note: I completely changed canon Alec Trevelyan's history, but I used bits from GoldenEye to flesh out the story.
It's not really, really necessary to read the rest of the 'verse to understand this story, but you may want to.
Sasha
1981
Arkhangelsk, Russia, USSR
The agent moved noiselessly around the arms dealer's compound. The gun in his hand, fitted with a silencer, made only muffled popping sounds when he used it. The sound of the bodies falling was louder, but it couldn't be helped.
He ducked behind a stack of crates. Being a curious man by nature (this trait had gotten him into trouble as many times as it had gotten him out of it), he took a peek into one of them.
Timed explosives.
He snagged one to use later, just in case. Instinct told him that he'd thank his past self by the end of the hour.
He did, in fact, make use of the bomb exactly forty-three minutes later. He set it for six minutes, which would allow him to kill his target and leave, with a couple of minutes to spare.
A minute later found him standing over the bullet-riddled body of the arms dealer, Sergei Baklanov.
"Wounds to the stomach," he drawled lazily with a smirk that was almost cruel. His green eyes glinted like emeralds in the harsh fluorescent light.
The man at his feet groaned and spit out curses in Russian while angrily trying to reach for the agent's legs. There was still a lot of fight left in the dying man.
"Not a nice way to go. I'd say…" The agent tilted his head, assessing the injury coolly. "Ten minutes. Fortunately for you, I'm a merciful man," he said with a sardonic smirk. "The bomb I set next to those lovely propane tanks will take care of you and your whole compound in six minutes." He glanced at his watch. "Five now."
Baklanov's eyes widened in panic and he began babbling. "No! Please!" But he wasn't pleading for himself. "My son. My Sasha. I put him in closet. Please. He is young. Please! You say you are merciful man — save him!"
"In the closet? Where?"
"My office! In my office! Please!" the man cried. "Take him to west. He will be safe there. He will have good life there. Here, they would kill him. Please," the father pleaded, the blood on his lips a vibrant crimson. "He is young. Innocent. Please."
But the agent was already gone.
Two minutes and forty-five seconds later, he ran through the mazelike building as fast as he could. In his arms was a little boy with messy blond hair, dirt and tears smeared across his face.
One minute and thirty seconds later, the agent threw the boy into his car (an Aston Martin V8) and stomped on the gas pedal as far down as it would go.
5...4...3...2...1...
BOOM
The boy watched the explosion behind them with wide green-gray eyes as flaming debris showered down upon them.
. . . . .
2016
London, England, UK
Alec Trevelyan glanced at the sleeping figure in the passenger seat of the car and smiled ruefully, rolling his smokey green eyes slightly at his own actions.
What the hell was he doing?
He pulled into a parking spot in the MI6 building, and his companion stirred at the sudden stop.
Big brown eyes, nearly black in the dim light of the structure, blinked open sleepily.
"Hello," Alec said softly in her native language, unlatching the seat belt. "Did you sleep well?"
The little girl reached out to him and touched the sleeve of his jacket with a small hand.
He marveled at the trust she showed in him.
"Yes," she lisped, "Where are we?"
"London," he told her, "England."
"Where's that?" she asked curiously, craning her head to see out of the car's windows, though there wasn't much to see in the dim parking structure.
"Where I'm from," he answered her as simply as he could. It wasn't exactly the truth, but it would do.
. . . . .
Three hours later, he was sitting in Medical, watching her sleep. She was tiny under the covers of the adult-sized bed.
M had visibly reined in his anger when he'd seen the little girl in Alec's arms, and had sent her down to Medical with Moneypenny. After that, he had made his displeasure very plain to his agent.
For an hour.
A soft knock at the open door startled Alec out of his thoughts.
Q.
Q always managed to move quietly enough to slide under his radar, or perhaps he trusted him enough for his subconscious not to mind him.
"Hey," the younger man said quietly, leaning against the door jamb with his arms crossed in front of his skinny chest. He looked ready to leave for the day; he had his anorak on and his laptop bag was slung over his shoulder.
"You're wondering what the hell I'm doing and came to give me another scolding," Alec predicted, rubbing his hand over his face and through his dirty-blond hair.
Q chuckled. "No. Not exactly. I know what happened."
Alec arched a brow at him. If Q had any insights into why he'd done it, let him share them.
Q smirked, but not unkindly. "Orphans, both of you. You saved her life and got attached."
Alec dropped his head into his hands and swore. His friend was right, of course. The circumstances in which he'd found the little girl were eerily similar to his own. He cursed again for emphasis.
Q snorted. "I would recommend against swearing in her hearing. Children pick curse words up rather easier than ordinary words, I'm told. For instance, my first dog was named Puck, but only because I couldn't pronounce the 'f' sound properly. My Uncle Stuart's fault, and my father has never let him forget it.."
Alec grinned at the mental image. "You were special, though, I'll bet."
"Yes," Q conceded, "But all the same. Don't do it. You'll regret it later. According to my dear father, being glared at by scandalized mothers and grandmothers in shops is every bit as terrifying as getting shot at."
Alec's face fell. "I'm not keeping her," he said.
"Okay," Q said evenly. "Even so, don't teach her bad habits. Be a responsible adult for once."
Alec glared at the smug smile on the younger man's face. "Funny, hearing that from a spotty kid."
Q rolled his eyes and pushed off of the doorway. "I'm heading home. You should, too." He glanced back at his friend, who hadn't moved. "She'll be alright for the night. You can come back to see her tomorrow, if you like. Or not, if you don't want to get more attached than you already are."
Alec looked up and saw only the kind expression on his friend's face. He nodded and stood, grabbing his jacket off of the back of his chair.
He paused by the side of the bed, looking down at the little girl he'd saved, but whose parents' deaths were on his hands.
He wondered if she would forgive him, when she got older. If she ever found out.
He wondered.
"Come on, Alec," Q coaxed gently. "Chinese, my place? We can finish that bottle we started last time."
Alec turned away from the little girl and towards his friend. "Sounds good," he said, and swung his arm around his companion's skinny shoulders.
"Lead the way, Quartermaster."
. . . . .
Later that evening, Alec sat on his friend's couch, staring morosely into his glass.
Q's long, spindly legs were a comforting weight in his lap, and their owner was reading a novel with his head propped up on the armrest.
"Want to talk about it?"
Alec sighed. "What is there to talk about? They'll find her a new family and that'll be the end of it."
Q was an expert at eloquent silences, and he used one of them now.
"Danny," Alec groaned, letting his head fall back against the back of the couch. "What the hell am I doing?"
"You're having a life crisis," Danny Drake drawled from behind his book. "I'd say 'midlife crisis,' but it's impossible to predict what midlife would be for you, since you really should be dead by now, statistically speaking." He turned a page.
Alec pushed the book down so he'd have his friend's full attention. "I know I'm having a life crisis, Danny. Are you going to help me with it or what?"
Danny sat up and put his book aside, slipping a bookmark between the well-loved pages. "Now that wasn't so hard to admit, was it?" he smirked.
Alec rolled his eyes at his friend and huffed.
"Okay," Danny said, his clever hands playing with the cuff of his colorful sock. He was sitting sideways facing Alec with one leg bent and the other dangling off of the side of the couch.
Despite the childish pose, his manner was, as always, calm and businesslike. "Alright. What made this little girl special? She's not the first child you've encountered, and certainly not the first orphan, either. Why her?"
Alec had been thinking about that. "She reminded me of myself," he answered promptly.
His friend raised an eyebrow at him. "The little girl reminded you of yourself?" he pressed, teasing him a little.
Alec glared ineffectually at him, knowing what he was trying to do. Alec hated thinking about his past, and this was bringing back memories that he'd rather keep buried.
"I killed her parents and saved her from a burning building," Alec grumbled after a while. "The man who killed my father saved me when I was a kid and brought me to England. There was an explosion involved. I'm relatively sure he set it."
Danny nodded. He'd seen all that in Alec's records. Much of it had been redacted, but it seemed straightforward, though scant on details.
Alec Trevelyan had been born Aleksandr Sergeevich Baklanov in 1978 in Soviet Russia. His father, Sergei Ivanovich Baklanov, had been a Cossack arms dealer who had made the mistake of attracting the attention of the British government. He had been killed by a British agent (identity redacted) in 1981. The agent had found Baklanov's son (then three years old, nicknamed Sasha) in the building, which soon exploded, and brought him back to England with him.
"Okay," Danny said, "definite parallel there. Why are you dwelling on it now, though?"
Alec thought about it for a moment. "It made me wonder why that agent brought me here. Why not drop me off with the local authorities?"
"Like you ought to have done?" Danny remarked dryly.
Alec made a face at him.
"Maybe…" Danny pursed his lips. "Maybe he was an orphan, too, or maybe he had a soft spot for kids."
"Agents can't afford to have soft spots," Alec reminded him.
"That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen," Danny retorted. "You're all human, despite your every effort to pretend you're not."
Alec sat back and sipped at his vodka. "I tried to look into it once," he admitted. "The file was full of blacked out lines. I couldn't find out who he was. If he's still around."
He could feel Danny's green eyes watching him.
"Why do you want to know?" Danny asked quietly.
Alec shrugged. "Closure? I honestly don't know. Maybe to thank him for saving my life. I'm sure I didn't thank him then. I didn't understand what was happening. I don't even remember him properly."
"What do you remember?"
Alec squinted at his thumbnail, though he didn't really see it. He was trying to focus on his foggy memories of that time.
"He had dark hair, and I think his eyes were sort of a light color. Gray, maybe. Green," he decided, "And he was tall. I suppose anyone would seem tall to a kid, though. Cleft chin. I remember that. He let me poke at it."
Danny leaned forward. "Want me to have a look around?" he offered quietly.
Alec's answer was hesitant. "Yes, if you don't mind."
"Mind?" Danny scoffed, "I love being nosy."
. . . . .
It didn't take long for Q to get into the redacted files.
He made a quiet sound of surprise. "Small world."
"What?" Alec came over from where he'd been pacing.
Danny turned his laptop towards Alec. "Here's your knight in tarnished armor. Agent 007." His eyes rested heavily on Alec's face.
007. Alec quickly reviewed his mental catalog of double-oh agent tenures. 007 in 1981 would have been Damien Drake. Danny's father. One look at the screen confirmed it.
He glanced at his friend, whose expression remained blank.
"You're joking."
"I never joke about my work," Danny deadpanned. He gave Alec a nudge with his shoulder. "You okay?"
"Always," Alec answered immediately. He paused. "Your father…"
"Killed your father. Yes." Danny watched him carefully.
Alec sensed the conflicting emotions under that calm gaze.
"I'm not looking for revenge," he reassured his friend. "I've seen enough about my father to know that he was an utter bastard."
He didn't remember much about the man himself, nor his mother, who, he'd read in reports later, had ended up on the wrong end of his father's gun not long before the latter's own demise.
Danny nodded, and some of the tension left his wiry frame.
"Do you want to talk to him?" he offered quietly. "We could go together, if you want. I can call out of work tomorrow. If we leave early enough, he'll make us breakfast."
Alec stared at the stark black numbers on the screen.
007.
He nodded. "Tomorrow."
. . . . .
Damien Drake met them at the door of his small cottage on the outskirts of an out-of-the-way village with an easy smile that didn't quite manage to hide how dangerous he could be if anyone cared to look closely enough.
"Coffee?" he asked, leading the way in.
Q had texted his dad that they were coming so he wouldn't assume the worst and greet them with a gun in his hand.
"Yes, thank you," Alec said, "black."
Drake handed him a mug of the dark, steaming liquid and proceeded to plate up their breakfast.
"Have a seat, Alec."
Alec glanced at Danny, who was fussing over his tea, then looked back at Drake. The older man was examining him with an assessing gaze and didn't bother to hide it.
Alec sat.
Danny sat down across from him, chattering about some machine or other that he was developing.
Drake made the appropriate sounds to signify that he was listening, but Alec could tell that the bulk of his attention was on Alec himself.
"And you're not actually listening to me," Danny finished with a sigh.
Drake arched his brow at him over the rim of his mug.
Danny sighed. "Okay. The reason we're here. We wanted to ask you about something."
Drake nodded for him to continue.
"1981. Arkhangelsk."
That took the retired agent by surprise, though a slight twitch was all that gave him away. "What about it? It was a standard mission."
Danny leaned in, a serious expression on his face. "Except for one detail. The little boy you saved."
Drake stilled. Alec could see the moment it clicked.
"You're Sasha."
Alec swallowed hard and nodded. "I haven't been called that in a very long time."
Drake took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, his green gaze fixed on Alec's all the while. "You know…?"
"You killed him."
The expressive mouth flattened into a hard line, and the icy eyes glittered with the promise of danger. "I won't apologize or ask for forgiveness."
Alec nodded sharply, acknowledging the fact that the man before him was still dangerous despite having been retired for the last twenty-six years. "I wouldn't expect you to. He deserved it, and you were doing your job."
Drake breathed again, and leaned back in his chair. "He loved you," he said at last. "Your father loved you. At the end. That's why I brought you back with me. He asked me after I'd shot him to get you out of where he'd hidden you and bring you to the west. So you'd have a real future. The way the Soviet Union was in those days...You likely would have ended up dead if I'd left you in their hands. He told me where to find you. He begged for your life."
Alec knew how that went. He'd had men and women plead with him for the lives of their loved ones. Sometimes he obliged; other times, he didn't. He did what he had to do.
From the look on Drake's face, Alec could tell that he knew that Alec knew, too, that if it had been necessary for the mission or self-preservation to leave Alec to die in the explosion, he would have.
"They placed you with a family. You seemed happy enough when I looked in on you."
Alec hadn't been aware that Drake had bothered to check up on him.
"My adoptive father died," he explained dully, rubbing at the handle of his mug with his fingers. There was a flaw in the ceramic that created a raised bump on the smooth surface. He dug his thumb against it with a frown. "My mother remarried and changed my name to her new husband's. They both died in a car crash soon after that. I ended up in the system." He shrugged. C'est la vie.
Drake's face turned sympathetic. "I am sorry. I should have kept an eye on you."
Alec jerked his shoulders in another shrug. "You had no obligation to."
"If I had," Drake sighed, the sound heavy with responsibility, "then you might not have ended up where you are now."
"Exactly. I'm fine as I am," Alec said, raising his chin in a challenge. Broken and dangerous he might be, but he was fine.
"Of course you are."
The words were said quietly, but with approval. Alec suddenly felt something like warmth flare in his chest because the older man was looking at him in the same way he looked at his own son sometimes — with pride, but also regretful at the thought of the pain and darkness that they all knew came with the job.
"Why now?" Drake asked, cutting into a sausage on his plate.
Danny, who had hitherto remained silent, answered, half-exasperated. "Alec brought home a little girl on his last mission. Just like you brought him here."
Alec met Drake's eyes. "I killed her parents. Terrorists. It got me wondering."
Drake nodded. "And now that you know?"
Alec shook his head slightly. "Thank you." He shrugged with a short laugh that turned into a sigh. "For saving me. For bringing me to England." Uncomfortable, he took a bite of his eggs to prevent himself from saying anything else.
Drake considered him. "You saved my son," he said, referring to the time Alec had pulled Danny out of the airplane wreck. "I think we're even on that score."
"Ahem," Q interrupted, sensing that they needed some levity in the conversation to keep it from getting too dark and uncomfortable. "I've paid him back myself, Dad. Multiple times. Also, it has just occurred to me that Alec's pyromaniac tendencies may have resulted from being exposed to that explosion when he was three. Set by you, of course, 007." He said his father's old designation accusingly and the lines around his mouth pinched with (half-mock) displeasure.
Damien raised his brow at him. "May I remind you, son: Toaster. Bombs. Note the plural." And then, narrowing his eyes for the kill, he said with that cruel twist of the mouth that was often the last sight seen by many a foe, "Also, I changed your nappies, young man. You ought to show a little more respect for the person who wiped your bum."
Q immediately turned the color of a tomato. "Oh my god, Dad," he exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air and tangling them in his hair in exasperation, "can you not bring that up every time I get the upper hand in an argument?"
Alec sniggered.
Drake smiled serenely. "It's my favorite weapon."
Danny rolled his eyes. "I thought that was your Walther," he snarked, recovering.
Drake made a show of considering both options: gun or embarrassing his son.
"I really, really hate you, Dad," Danny grumbled.
"Hey!" Alec said, snickering, and kicked his friend's ankle under the table. "Show some respect for the man. He wiped your bum!"
"Okay, that's it, Alec," Danny snarled. "Say goodbye to the other other other bank account you thought you could hide from me."
Oh shit shit shit.
"Aww, come on, Q," Alec wheedled, turning his charm up to eleven and making sure to use the beloved alias. "It was a joke. Be a sport, mate."
Danny narrowed his eyes at Alec. "Fine. Your money is safe. For now. Mate. But your cover for your next mission is going to have hideous taste in everything. Think: American redneck."
Alec winced, but didn't complain; that punishment was pretty mild compared to what Danny Drake could do. "As long as it doesn't involve your awful jumpers," he shrugged and picked up his mug.
Danny's lips curled in a dangerous smile.
Oh shit.
"You don't like my jumpers?" he asked innocently. "Did you hear that, Dad? He doesn't like your knitting."
Alec froze and nearly spit his coffee out. His eyes fixed on the ex-spy, who was smiling mildly in a rather frightening manner.
The ex-007 leaned forward and spoke softly. "Would you like to see my pattern collection?"
Alec paused, uncharacteristically uncertain about how to respond. He wasn't sure if Drake meant that literally or if it was a metaphor for something else. Was it a joke, or…? He couldn't tell. It irked his professional pride that he couldn't tell.
Danny snorted disparagingly, knowing exactly what Alec was thinking. "They're literal printed knitting patterns in three-ring binders. He's got shelves of them. I keep trying to get him to go digital, but—"
"It's a pain to keep having to tap the screen to make it light up again," Drake broke in as though this was a long-argued point, which, knowing Q, it probably was.
"All my efforts have accomplished is to encourage him to sign up with online knitting and crocheting communities instead. And then he goes and prints the patterns out anyway," Danny huffed in complete exasperation.
Alec could only blink slowly in response to that. "You must be really, really bored," he finally said to the retired assassin. He had never, in all the years he'd known him, considered where Danny's neverending collection of eclectic knitwear had come from, but never in his wildest dreams had a retired double-oh with a penchant for knitting come into his mind.
"There's only so much golf, tennis, hunting, and fishing one can do," Drake shrugged. "I've never been one for convention, anyway. It fills my time and I send most of what I make to charities and homeless shelters so they don't clutter up the place. I still have the little hat and booties the hospital gave Danny when he was born; I thought I'd give something back."
There was a long silence.
"You're pulling my leg."
Another long pause.
The Drakes, father and son, exchanged looks and dissolved into laughter.
"His face!" Danny giggled, slapping his hand on the table. "Oh my god!"
"You don't really knit," Alec said, relieved.
Drake's green eyes, so much like his son's, danced with amusement. "Oh, but I do. I don't spend all my time at it, though. Some days I crochet or do a bit of counted cross-stitch to liven things up. There's nothing like stabbing something a thousand times to relieve tension."
Alec suddenly became aware that the tablecloth draped over the breakfast table was hand-embroidered with an intricate celtic design that had little dragons worked into the braid.
Dragons. 'Drake' meant 'dragon' in Middle English.
"I can't tell if you're joking," he admitted with a sense of dawning dread.
Danny had melted into a gasping puddle of hysterical cackling beside him.
"More coffee, Alec?" Drake asked, ignoring his son.
"Your face!"
. . . . .
They were back on the road again by noon, with a packed lunch courtesy of Drake in a cooler in the back (and a pair of hand-knitted socks each that had been gifted to them by a twinkle-eyed ex-assassin).
Alec had strict orders to make sure that Danny was well-fed before he went back to work. Danny had rolled his eyes and muttered about nagging fathers.
"Well?" Danny, already tapping away on his laptop to catch up on work, said as they drove past fields of wheat.
"Well, what?" Alec asked, knowing full well what his friend had meant.
"Alec." Reproachful green eyes skewered him to his seat.
Alec sighed. "Life crisis over and done with."
"Alright now, then?" Danny asked casually, returning his gaze to his computer screen.
Alec slid a pair of sunglasses on. "I'm always alright."
. . . . .
Alec stood in the doorway of the room where the little girl was scribbling on sheets of computer paper with a blue pen. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth in concentration.
He felt the corner of his mouth twitch up. Yeah, okay, she was cute.
He cleared his throat. "Yasmin," he called out her name softly.
The dark head snapped up and delight lit up her big brown eyes at the sight of him.
"Al-ec!"
She bounded over to him and latched onto his leg.
"Hey, sweetheart," he murmured, patting her silky curls, and knelt down so that he was closer to her height. She let go of his leg and clung to his neck instead.
"When can I see Ami and Pappa again?" she queried. "Are they coming here?"
Alec sighed. She was too young to understand that her parents were dead, and that everything she had known in her short life was gone. The entire compound and all its members had been destroyed by the terrorists in a final effort to prevent their members from being captured. The little girl had survived by a miraculous accident.
"No," he said at last, pulling enough away to look her in the eyes. "Your Ami and Pappa can't come here. And you can't go back."
Yasmin pouted, her bottom lip sticking out. "I can't?"
"No, I'm sorry." And he was. He was sorry that she was now an orphan, but only for that. Her parents had done some very bad things that had hurt a lot of people, but little Yasmin was wholly innocent and didn't deserve the upheaval in her life.
"Never?"
"Maybe someday," he conceded. "For now, you're going to be staying with a nice family here. They'll take good care of you."
"Can Ami and Pappa come see me there?" she asked next.
Alec shook his head. "They had to go away somewhere, for a very long time. They won't be able to visit you."
"Oh." She bit her lip in consternation. "Can you come?" she then asked hopefully.
"Yes," he answered softly.
Yes, he'd check in on her and make sure that she was happy. Danny had already set up a program so that Alec would be notified every time a change was made in Yasmin's file. She wouldn't get lost in the system like Alec did, nor would she end up with a family that didn't love her properly (like he did).
"I'll visit you when I can. It won't be all the time, but I'll come once in a while."
The little girl leaned against him and sighed into the shoulder of his jacket. "That's alright, then," she decided. "Promise?"
"I promise."
. . . . .
Notes:
"But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold." ~ Ian Fleming quote about Bond that I used as inspiration for Drake-as-an-agent.
"I never joke about my work." ~ Something Desmond Llewelyn's Q and John Cleese's Q both said in response to "You're joking." Ben Whishaw's Q, however, decided to answer the comment with that quip about the lab coat in Skyfall.
'Ami' and 'Pappa' are 'Mum' and 'Dad' in Arabic, according to the internet.
Yeah, okay, this Damien doing crafts thing is crossing over into crack territory, but I can't stop. I've written so many fics featuring this. Also, WHY IS HE ALWAYS COOKING?! Ahem.
Also, Alec sort of adopted a kid? I didn't see that one coming, either. No idea where I'm going with this.
And last, "I'm always alright" is a mini secret allusion to one of my first fandoms, Dark Angel. Alec (played by Jensen Ackles or Dean from Supernatural) was "always alright."
