Six has possibly just received the most boring job offer ever to date. Six is the sixth most deadliest man in the world, sent on some of the most dangerous missions, and someone actually dared to send him a job offer to be a bodyguard to some random 10-year-old kid.
Six sighed and leafed through the files on the boy spread out on the table before him. A boring mission or not, a crazy amount of money was being offered to Six to guard the boy, and yet Six could not see what the fuss was about.
An ordinary plain kid smiled out at him from the small photograph clipped one of the files, with a goofy smile stretched on his face.
According to the files in front of Six, the boy was the son of two scientists working on a top-secret hush-hush project. The boy had gotten himself injured in a freak accident while goofing off, and the boy now apparently held some expensive life-saving medical equipment in his body. The boy's parents feared would make their son a target to people that would love to get their hands on whatever was put in the kid's body.
Six fingered through the various papers, stopping every now and then to read more about his charge.
The boy's brother, Caesar, was a certified genius, but it was noted in Caesar's files that Caesar tended to act a little bit...off. He had a bad sense of time, and his file had a long list of injuries attested to him not checking in with others and a history of passing out due to lack of eating and drinking. Caesar's even longer list of expensive and impressive inventions made Six's eyebrows slowly rise up as he read through them all. This guy was what, twenty-five? Not much younger than Six himself...
Honestly, Caesar looked like he needed a bodyguard more than his brother did.
Six rolled his eyes. Caesar's parents were going to waste their money on hiring Six to protect his brother, but if the boy's parents were willing to pay him the amount they were offering, then he'd happily accept. Less work for him.
As Six flipped through the files again, he came to rest on a handwritten note written by the boy's mother slipped in one of them. It was probably some sappy plea to Six to protect her precious baby boy that would not be worth the read to Six, but he read it anyway.
Six,
My son highly recommends you as a bodyguard. He seems convinced you will be able to protect Rex from anything. I know you are likely to have other, more exciting job offers than this, but please understand that I can't afford to let anyone get to my boy so I hope you will accept. I can't tell you much since you aren't under an oath of silence yet, but the medical equipment in my son can be used for the greater good or to put the world in ruins. If you accept, you will be working alongside your partner, White Knight, and Doctor Rebecca Holiday.
Very Respectfully,
Violeta Salazar
Well, that letter gave Six more questions than answers. Why did Rex's brother, Caesar, recommend him for this job? Six thought back and couldn't recall any time he would have met and made a good impression on the young scientist. Perhaps the kid had connections in the military and heard about him from there?
Pushing aside Mrs. Salazar's 'the world will be doomed if you don't protect my boy' part of the letter (such a cliche thing to say to try to convince someone to take a job like this), the part where she mentioned White Knight had also been hired to be a bodyguard intrigued him. It would be nice to work with White Knight in a less...dangerous setting.
Six took the job.
Six couldn't wait for the helicopter to land, so when the helicopter came close enough to the ground, Six jumped. The fall was only about three stories high, so there was no need for a parachute.
Six landed on the grass next to the helicopter landing pad and rolled off his right shoulder as he carried his momentum from his fall to his feet and into the roll. He popped up and brushed off the grass off his uniform.
Above him, the helicopter came to a hover, and when Six craned his head upwards he could see the co-pilot peeking his head out of the helicopter, his face slack with shock.
"Woah, that was a dramatic entrance!" shouted a voice over the sounds of the helicopter. A man, who Six assumed was some kind of security guard, ran over to where Six was.
"You're Six right?" the security guard asked, waving Six over to him.
"Are you okay from the fall?" the man asked with a little bit of awe and a little bit of concern in his voice. "That was like, fifty feet you just jumped from!"
"Closer to forty actually," Six replied.
The security guard led him to a heavily locked door and started unlocking the various locks with the keys on the large key ring attached to his belt.
"Forty, fifty feet, that was still one of the craziest stunts I've ever seen a guy do! I hope you're ready to do more stunts like that because you've got your work cut out for you," the guard said as he punched in a number into a keypad and handed Six off to another guard waiting for Six inside.
"What did he mean by having my work cut out for me?" Six asked the new guard as the door closed.
"You'll see soon enough," the guard said mysteriously. He turned around and started walking down the hall. Six lingered at the doorway before he decided to follow suit. The guard didn't say anything else as Six followed him down the hallways.
The way to Six's destination was a blur of turns and looping back around halls and through empty rooms. Six knew he should have been paying attention as he was walking, but his heart wasn't into it right now.
The guard stops at a set of doors that look like they might lead into a small cafeteria or breakroom and swings the doors open.
"Is that Six behind you?" a young voice Six assumes to be Rex asks just behind the door.
As Six pushes the door open more he notices everyone at one table, eating. White Knight blocks most of Rex from Six's view, and a woman, likely Dr. Holiday, sits at the head of the table, eating a sandwich while working on some kind of science paper thing.
Six notes from what he can see of Rex behind White Knight's large frame. The boy is small for his age and that his clothes were awfully big for the boy. The cloth clings oddly to the boy in some places, wide in spots that shouldn't be wide.
Rex leans back from behind White Knight to get a better look at Six and Six stiffens at the sight of what appears to be metal growths covering the sides of his face and escaping into his shirt. As Rex gasps and runs over to Six, the growths expanded in tune to Rex's laughter, and little snakes of growth reach out of the metal on his skin.
"I was right!" Rex cried out happily. "Six! You're finally here!"
Rex runs over and slams his entire body weight into Six's legs and squeezes his legs tight. Six can feel the snake-like growths pushing into his pant legs, feeling for an opening. Six swats them away from his left pocket.
"Alright... that's enough of that." Six pries Rex off his legs, as gently as he could which wasn't all that gentle.
"Awwww," Rex whined. "But I only got to grab two of your mints."
Rex grinned mischievously as his misshapen hand held up two mints that Six realized came from his little tin of mints he kept in his right pant pocket. Was snake growth's interest in his left pocket just a distraction for Rex's hands to slip in and steal his mints? Could Rex control the metal growing out of him?
And how did Rex know he even kept mints in his right pocket?
Author's note:
This is a two-shot (I hope) of something I thought about on the bus ride to school. This is an AU where Rex travels back in time and saves his parents and prevents the great Nanite Event by absorbing the active nanites before they explode. Unfortunately, this overloads Rex. The technology to offload Rex doesn't exist yet and will take a while to properly invent and create (because Rex has no idea how the tech works so he can't cure himself by making a machine to offload his extra nanites).
Rex now holds millions, possibly a billion dollars worth of research and nanites in his body that could easily be extracted from his blood, so he needs to move around constantly and have a bodyguard. Rex figures that if he's now stuck in the time before Providence, he might as well convince his parents to hire White Knight, Six, and Holiday and try to get back the relationships he had with the counterparts in his timeline.
Of course, no one but Rex knows he's time travelled!
