For the alternative prompt: "I'll never forgive you"


Alex shuffled through the hundreds of papers spread out on the dinner table; as if reading them again would change what they confirmed. It didn't. Here he had it, black on white, what he had feared but naively hoped wasn't true.

He had verified the information, triple checked it, and gotten confirmation from four independent sources; they were all legit. AAIB reports, expense transcripts – the real ones, not the official records send to the government – unredacted mission files, hundred of hours of surveillance tapes, recordings of orders that were never written down and hadn't meant to be recorded either. He had read, watched, and listened to all of it more than once as he slowly connected the clues.

It had taken him more than a year to get here. He had collected and owed so many favours he would be paying back the next decade, but Alex didn't care. The papers might be bad news, but they were the truth, and Alex did not want any more likeable lies.

He found the main evidence: the short request that had put the final nail in their coffin. Barely half a page of text that had caused the premature death of a married couple and their pilot when their plane exploded shortly after takeoff.

The paper was signed by Alan Blunt.

No, MI6 had not killed Alex parents, had not bothered to dirty their hands like that. Instead, they had dangled an irresistible bait in the form of a newly retired undercover agent who had successfully infiltrated an up-and-coming crime organisation.

And it had worked. They had caught two mid-level SCORPIA moles: a junior field agent and a trusted analyst who had had that position for more than fifteen years, and four low ranking paper-pushers trying to make some extra cash on the side.

MI6 had even been investigating ASH at the time – though not in relation to John's mission – because the man's clear displeasure with his reassignment to desk work had made him a likely target of bribery, and his position let him access a lot of sensitive information. They hadn't considered he might be willing to pull the trigger on his only friend and the parents of his godson, though, and when Ash transferred to ASIS, MI6 had stopped the investigation and deemed it the Australians' problem.

And the only thing the operation had cost them was two civilian lives – tragic but unavoidable – and the life of a former agent who had fit in just a little too well with the assassins he spied on to be completely trusted again. Even though John had never set foot on any official MI6 site to keep his cover, he still knew a lot of sensitive information and would have been a security risk for at least another year or two. All in all, the operation had been considered a win-win.

Except Alex had been able to sniff out the secret nearly two decades later, and unlike his father and uncle, he was no patriot. He held no loyalty to the British intelligence services.

Blunt had dodged a lot of bullets during his long career.

He would not be able to dodge this one.


Themes: Implied/referenced canonical character deaths, Blunt being Blunt