A/N: Hello! Here is the 9th chapter of this adventure! I finished it earlier this week, and the next chapter too, so I can promise that things are not nearly as fragmented as they seem for poor Alex, who has several pieces of a very confusing puzzle. Nothing he finds is random, that much I can promise.

Just a quick recap on names:

Fox - Ben Daniels

Eagle - Ian McGreggor

Snake - Quinn Cariston

Wolf - Luke Giovanni

The reason I'm having Danielle refer to K Unit by their first names is because she doesn't know them in the sense Alex does - to her, they're normal people because she hasn't seen them do their job. To Alex, they're highly trained SAS operatives. Two different perspectives.

Thank you to everyone who reviewed! Aaskl;k I love hearing what you guys think. Replies will be at the end. :)

I think that's it - thank you for reviewing, please continue to do so, and enjoy!

Danielle's first thought when the car pulled up a winding gravel driveway was that there was no way the house was big enough to hold nine people -surely they didn't *all* have to stay there, right? She wasn't involved in any of this.

"Um," Clara scooted forward from the backseat. "This isn't all of it, right?"

"Sorry," Snake - no, Quinn, He'd said to call him that - said as he yanked the key out of the ignition and shoved open his door. "Beggars can't be choosers."

"You sound like my mother."

"Mission accomplished."

Clara rolled her eyes but undid her seatbelt and got out of the car, tucking her pillow in her arms. Danielle climbed out into the fresh air, remarkably crisper than in the city, and knocked on the passenger window. Tom jolted awake with a strangled gasp that she would've laughed at if she wasn't feeling so *tired*. A 'short car ride' had turned into five hours stuck in a car with Clara, Tom, and Quinn, who had no shortage of things to discuss when Danielle just wanted to sleep. Her world had been flipped over, shaken, and left to settle, and that turned out to be a very exhausting thing to emotionally process.

A second car, this one silver with a dent in the front, turned into the driveway. When it stopped, Alex shot out of the backseat, staggering, with his right arm cradled to his chest. He promptly dropped the posture when he saw Danielle looking.

"How was it?" her voice cracked from unuse in the early morning air.

"Never again," he replied gravely. "Never again."

Quinn took the front stairs two at a time and unlocked the front door. The house itself was grey bricks with a wood-tiled roof, just like the dozens of other homes that they had driven by. Danielle supposed that was the point. On one side, the garage ate up half the basement, but Quinn couldn't figure out how to open the door so he had left the car in the driveway. There was supposedly more space in the basement that would be 'unavailable', whatever that meant. The first floor had a kitchen, a living room, three bedrooms, and an office. Three bedrooms for nine people?

Danielle almost shuddered just thinking about it. She could volunteer to sleep in the office - yes, that was a good idea.

"Hey," Alex said, nudging his shoulder into her uninjured one. "Don't be nervous."

"I'm not," she replied.

He glanced pointedly at her fingers, which were curled around the jacket in her arms like claws.

"Oh, shut up."

"I didn't say anything," he said innocently, dodging the kick she aimed at his foot, and hurried up the stairs.

After taking one last glance around the driveway, she followed. The floor plans Quinn showed her were one thing; the actual structure would be much different.

"How did they even know we'd get stuck here?" Clara asked the open closet as she stood in front of it. Women's clothes lined the interior, most hastily hung up with the tags still dangling off.

"Called it in," Eagle said from the door. "It's against protocol to return to a blown location, so my buddy owed me a favor-"

"Thanks," Danielle cut him off. "Did Quinn tell you . . ?"

"That you're seventeen? Yeah. Eh, as long as you stay out of my stuff, we won't have a problem." his slate eyes twinkled with good humor.

"What stuff?" Clara asked.

"Guns, ammo, clips - the works. Well, the speakers aren't going to wire themselves, so I'd better get started on that."

Danielle frowned, sympathizing. "Ouch. Good luck."

"Thanks. I'm Ian, by the way."

"Well, I didn't lie about my name."

He grinned. "Good to know."

His footsteps faded down the carpeted stairs with several dull thuds.

"Guns?" Clara's face was skeptical.

Danielle shrugged. "He is a soldier."

"You have to look at these -" Clara began, but Danielle was already kicking her shoes off and flopping down on one of the mattresses laid out on the floor.

"Later. I'm taking a nap."

A 'nap' turned out to be five hours long, and by the time Danielle woke up, it was nearly noon. She groaned softly, stretching, and rolled off the mattress. For a few terrifying seconds, she couldn't remember where she was.

Then it all came rushing back with the force of a train - the safe house, Ben's leg, Alex.

*at least August can't find me here*, she thought grimly. *But there's not a piano.*

She couldn't believe that Alex was a spy, or 'something like that', as he'd put it. The very idea was insane, the stuff of comics and movies.

Except, it sort of made sense.

Actually, it made a lot of sense when she realized that it was the only explanation she was going to get so she might as well believe it until proven otherwise.

There had to be some law against using a teenager - the government, at least, was supposed to be better than the low lifes of the world, like August.

Her head felt like it was packed with cotton and she coughed, almost doubling over, to clear her lungs.

Danielle grabbed the doorknob, then hesitated. Part of her was tempted to hide in the bedroom for as long as possible - it was the farthest back in the house and opened onto an adjoining bathroom. The walls were painted ivory, the carpeting beige. It wasn't an appealing space, but she would rather stay there than talk to the other people in the house.

She cracked open the door as softly as possible, but needn't have worried - with the amount of clattering going on in the kitchen, no one could have heard her emerge.

"This is in case of an emergency, it's not a utopia," Luke growled. There was a muffled clang, and Eagle - Ian - muttered something exceedingly unflattering,

"Is there anything in here that doesn't come from a can?" That was Alex.

Danielle hovered in her doorway, safely out of sight.

"You live off of a microwave and cereal," Clara replied testily, her voice faint from the living room. "Deal with it."

The door directly across the hall swung open and nearly scared Danielle to death. Gwen stepped out, her dark hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail. Her eyes were smudged with dark circles and she wore sweatpants and a paint-stained t-shirt that probably belonged to Ben, if the SAS crest on the front pocket was anything to go by.

"Oh!" Gwen blinked rapidly, then stuck out her hand. "Hi. I'm Gwen. You're - Danielle?"

"Yes," Danielle said, hesitantly taking her hand. "You're Ben's wife. How is he?"

She shook her head tiredly. "They're bringing him up this evening. I had to go on ahead." A bit of resentment crept into her tone, but she sighed and gave a wan, exhausted smile. "Bureaucracies."

Danielle couldn't say that she understood the legal parts, but she knew how it felt to be stuck waiting for someone. "Right."

The carpeted stairs creaked as someone ascended them, and Clara appeared with a bowl and plate balanced in her hands. She thrust them into Danielle's hands and turned back towards the stairs.

"The kid's awake!"

"Clara -" Danielle sneezed violently and broke into a hacking cough. Clara reached out but thought better of it when she shrank away. "I'm not a kid, for God's sake."

Clara made a precarious grab, as she was balanced on the stairs, for the dishes, but Gwen lifted them from Danielle's hands before anything bad could happen that resulted in Clara falling down the stairs or Danielle getting burn damage from steaming soup.

"We already have one injured person," Gwen admonished. "Don't make any others."

Danielle bit her lip, half tempted to say that she wouldn't be there for long, and nodded. She had to get out - even if she was safer here, it wasn't her home. She wouldn't run away again.

"Are you okay?"

"Just a cold."

Clara turned and jogged down the staircase, her gleaming hair swishing with each movement. She hunched her shoulders, jamming her hands into the pockets of her sweater, and that was how Danielle knew that she was upset. Clara always acted unflappable, bold - but that was her protection. Whenever she was agitated, she couldn't stay in one place, constantly prowling from one room to another in a coil of nervous energy.

Danielle debated going after her but decided that she would be terrible at trying to help people feel better.

"Hey," Gwen said, holding out the soup. "Are you hungry?"

"No," Danielle replied. Her stomach growled, betraying her, and she reluctantly took the bowl. "Thanks."

"No problem." Her eyes were sincere, even through fatigue. "You should probably hang out up here, everyone's pretty tense downstairs." she reached up, tugging at her ponytail, smoothing stray hairs back into place. "Someone has to keep them in line."

Danielle managed a short laugh. "Better you than me."

Three months of this, forced conversations and half-hearted attempts at isolation.

Safety wasn't worth that.

Alex and Wolf went to the basement as soon as the microwave - which Tom kept glancing at as if it was going to implode - finished heating a variety of canned soup that gave Alex the eerie impression that they were waiting out the apocalypse.

The basement was half a gym - "Ben needs PT," Wolf explained gruffly. "And the rest of us have to keep up." - and half a command center outfitted with monitors, keyboards, and enough flash drive to supply an entire army, which was perhaps the point.

A stack of thick files sat on one of the desks. Alex recognized the bent corner on the top folder: it was one of the stacks Ben had been looking at.

"Look at those," Wolf ordered.

Alex was too tired to argue, so he flipped the top one open and dumped the contents onto the floor, sitting down to spread them out.

After a few lines of the first page, he recognized the story outlined in the introduction: a madman surgically altering clones of himself to look like the children of influential figures.

Dr. Grief.

Alex didn't want to read anything about Point Blanc, Grief's school, or anything else that he had been involved with. He felt the panic start to rise up in his chest like a wave, and took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. Don't show weakness. You're better than that.

He remembered his own clone standing in front of him.

Julius. A lithe body crumpling and folding like paper as it fell to the ground.*

"Give me another one," he muttered, pushing the papers away and reaching for another folder.

Wolf knocked his arm away. "Just read the damn thing. You can read, right?"

"Not that."

"Why are you even here? Bloody useless."

"Frankly, this is the last place I want to be." Alex got to his feet and snatched a file off the stack before Wolf could stop him.

"I wasn't exactly looking forward to dragging you along either."

"Not my choice."

Wolf rolled his eyes. "By all means, leave."

"I tried that once," Alex said conversationally, glancing in his peripheral sightline at the soldier. Wolf didn't seem to be paying him that much attention. "Didn't work out. Now I'm banned from leaving England."

"Cry me a river, brat."

"I'm nineteen."

"Yet you're still annoying as hell. Aren't you musicians supposed to be all poised and uptight?"

"I wasn't supposed to be anything." Except a convenient body in an unmarked grave. Alex still wondered if MI6 had planned to let him die in a tragic 'accident' on one of his missions before he turned eighteen and could legally pursue charges.

Bored of reading the files - but mostly heartsick, if he was honest, it felt like he was breaking apart inside and he hated admitting that because, dammit, he was an adult - Alex wandered up the stairs and hurried out to the back deck. It covered the back of the entire house, and two flights of stairs led down to the sprawling yard. There was also a lake at the center of the neighborhood, with a dock sticking out from their yard. To some it was merely an aesthetic feature, but Alex knew better: a body of water was one less side to guard against. It was strategic as much as anything else.

Alex also knew that he should read the files because it was his duty, he had a mission, he was the only one, blah, blah, blah. Those arguments were much more compelling when he was a child than they were now, which was probably why Jones had resorted to blatant blackmail by cutting off Danielle's resources.

He leaned against the railing with the file open on top of it and began rifling through the pages until he found a profile of a man in his mid forties with a scruff of black hair and abnormally pale skin. His eyes were all ice, no color.

Dr. Johann Icarus.

Plastic surgeon.

Contemporary - Grief.

Aged: 47

Height: 190 cm

Weight: 77 kg

Alex sucked in a breath of the crisp air. Grief.

That explained the Point Blanc file.

He stared down at the grass far below his feet and wondered if drowning himself in the lake would be better than suffering through this case, which suddenly became a lot more complicated than setting up AudVis transmitters and waiting around for evidence. He had seen enough of Dr. Grief's impeccable work to understand the dangers of reconstructive surgery, especially when it happened closer to home - and Parliament, who seemed to have a lot to answer for between the case with August and this new guy.

Of course, it could be the nature of politics to corrupt, and everyone involved was sucked into an inescapable vortex of avarice and graft.

Spreading the papers across the railing, Alex began to delve further into the life and exploits of Johann Icarus to find out just how he was related to the Prime Minister's reception at the Palace Theater.

All Alex had gleaned after another hour was that Icarus happened to be the family cosmetic surgeon for the Prime Minister and his wife, and was also called upon by several members of the House of Lords. Alex found himself wishing that he paid more attention to politics; knowledge of that could come in handy at this point. He made a mental note to acquire a newspaper as soon as possible. And internet. And a violin, because he was about to go stark raving mad if he couldn't play something, even the bloody recorder.

He should probably look through the other files - they were there for a reason. He just didn't want to see Wolf, as bratty as that was, he didn't want to be around the man who had tormented him for two solid weeks. What was stopping him from starting again, now that they were stuck with seven other people in a house already feeling too small?

Alex pushed his hair out of his eyes, gathering the papers back into the folder and snapping it shut.

The neighborhood was beautiful, the kind of place Jack would've loved.

He sighed.

Behind him, the screen doors slid open and an odd thunking hit the deck. Alex pivoted, slipping the file folder behind his back.

Ben stood there - well, propped himself, really, on two crutches. His right leg was covered in bandages and a brace that anchored at his calf and his thigh, allowing very little movement.

Alex almost dropped the folder. He thought Ben was coming tomorrow.

"Do you need - like, help?" he really wasn't sure what to do.

Ben grinned. He looked sickly pale from loss of blood. "I'm good. Not the first time I've been in crutches. Gwen kicked me outside."

"How long have you been here?"

"Oh."

"Yeah. So," he nodded to the file. "What's that one for?"

"Johann Icarus." Alex held it up. "Plastic surgeon to the Prime Minister."

Ben's frown deepened. "Have you read all of them?"

". . .no."

"Do you see why Jones wanted you to help out with this?"

"Wait." Alex took a few paces forward, feeling unsteady. "You knew?"

"Not until yesterday."

Was it really just twenty-four hours ago? Alex stood there struggling to fight back memories of snowy hills, the grating of metal against metal, boys locked in a cell as doppelgangers took their lives and faces. How close he came to being one of them - but Julius, his engineered twin, was dead.

Alex's hand clenched around the file, wrinkling it. Shooting Julius, it was like killing himself. And how many times I wanted to do that.

"Yeah," he said on a breath, exhaling and letting his shoulders slump forward. "I do." That doesn't make it right. "Do think he's making clones too?"

Ben's shoulders lifted in a shrug. "It would be an excellent way to make the government implode. Change it, corrupt it, from the inside out. Most people wouldn't notice the change."

"And the ones who did. . ."

"They would disappear."

Alex almost shuddered even though they were talking purely hypothetical situations. He should be used to the debased nature of human instinct that manifested from greed, hatred, lust for power - he should know, better than anyone, the havoc wreaked by fallen human natures.

He didn't realize any evil could surprise him anymore. No one else could possibly be as diabolical as Grief or sadistic as Sayle, but apparently Dr. Grief, at least, had a successor.

Perhaps the nature of evil was to ferment beneath the surface of civilization and, in time, venture forth.

Alex felt a headache coming on and held back a harsh groan. He was starting to get an idea of what he was fighting, but it didn't make sense: two sides of the same coin - no, more than that, two sides of an infinitely complex web. If Icarus was going to replace the Prime Minister with the clone, what was the point of a public assassination? It was counter productive, against all logic - but maybe, just maybe. . .

Squinting at the grainy planks on the deck, Alex slightly moved his head, enough to watch the sunlight reflecting off the lake's glassy surface, reminding him that he needed to get into the mezzanine of the Palace Theater as soon as he could.

"It's two different groups," he said out loud. "Icarus - if he's involved, and the assassin's employers."

There was no reply.

When he looked up, Ben was gone.

An icy shiver curled up Alex's spine. It wasn't that Ben was gone - no, he could see him through the glass doors - but he hadn't heard him leave, too deep in thought to monitor his senses. That was a mistake, not a costly one when he had nothing to lose, but now he had a team, whether he wanted one or not.

Through the doors, he saw Ben leaning against the counter, crutches propped up behind him, his face screwed up in protest as Gwen knelt and adjusted the tightness of his leg brace. Clara perched on the island in the middle of the kitchen, legs crossed, a thin notebook balanced on her lap. She ducked as Danielle, who clutched a black binder to her chest with one arm, made a grab for the notebook. Flinging her hands up in frustration, Danielle left the kitchen and vanished from sight.

It was almost normal, if normal meant three soldiers, two spies, two musicians, a law student, and a social worker to be forced together under the same shrinking roof for three months.

"Hey," a voice yelled. "Who're you?"

Alex felt an icy pit drop into his stomach as he turned around and saw a short, wiry man with grey hair whitening at the temples standing on the deck next door with his arms crossed over his chest.

Something else no one had bothered to tell him - apparently, they had neighbors.

Drowning himself in the lake was suddenly very tempting as the aging man glared at him with nothing but suspicion emanating from his gaze.

"Hi," Alex said lamely after a few moments.

The man gave him an unimpressed snort, then turned and went inside. Heavy curtains swished shut across the glass-paned doors.

"O-okay. . ." Alex frowned. What was that?

Danielle twisted her hair into a rope and squeezed, trying to get it as dry as she could. The bathroom floor was slippery, and the cuffs on her sweatpants were damp. They dragged around her ankles as she walked to the double sink and stared into the foggy mirror, tugging her sleeve over her wrist to rub away some of the condensation. Her eyes reflected back, red, and, to her disappointment, her face was flushed with fever. It wasn't anything serious, so she hadn't told anyone she was feeling poorly.

At the back of the bathroom was a door -she guessed it was for a closet- and she debated looking for another towel to mop up some of the water from the tile.

Someone pounded on the door. Danielle startled, almost falling over, and hastily gathered her things from the floor.

"Yes?"

"Come on," Clara's muffled voice was accompanied by another thud. "I need to shower too, kid."

"Don't call me that." Danielle wrenched open the door. Clara brushed by with her arms full of clothes, and Danielle didn't ask why. Her throat hurt whenever she spoke.

Tea - that would be nice. She paused for a moment, listening, and when she decided that no one else was in the kitchen, She stole down the carpeted stairs.

A faint light flickered from the living room but everything else was dark. Light shone from under the door to the basement stairs, and murmured voices echoed from the room below. She had no intention of venturing down there, not when everyone else was already asleep - Tom, Ben, Alex, Clara, Gwen. The only people downstairs were the soldiers, and, if she was being quite honest, they were still terrifying. Danielle pressed herself up against the wall, trying to slip past into the kitchen, but she caught sight of someone laying sprawled out on the couch.

"Alex?" her throat winced at the whisper.

His eyes flicked over to hers, clouded with stress and exhaustion, and he jabbed a button on the remote to pause the muted TV. "Is someone looking for me?"

"No. I thought everyone was asleep." She saw a pile of folders sitting next to him, balanced precipitously on the edge of the couch. "What are those for?"

"Hm? Oh. Research." He stifled a yawn, shrugging, and flopped back against the armrest. Danielle waited to see if he would say something else, But that was all he revealed.

She headed into the dark kitchen to make a cup of tea. Sadly, the cupboards were almost completely barren of everything except for a few packs of instant coffee. It was like a hotel.

She stumbled back into the living room.

Alex was gone.

The only indication that anyone had ever been there was the soft snick of the front door sliding shut. A languid shadow rippled across the front stairs, but any footsteps were eerily silent. All the files were gone, the TV still playing, and Alex Rider was nowhere to be seen.

Danielle pretended not to see the darkened silhouette at the end of the winding driveway, nor the soft glint of blonde hair in moonlight as she pulled the curtains shut and turned away.

There was some depth to his being that no one could reach.

Alex decided that besides from the obvious function of disguise, night served another purpose: it soothed.

Most people feared monsters that lurked behind shadows, but he befriended his demons a long time ago. Some people called it an 'inner calm'; in his musical career, it was often mistaken for passion.

Alex himself couldn't name that calm, that hidden place where he could go when his mind needed to work. Everyone had a place like that, he thought - Wolf lived in his, Danielle retreated into hers. Some people stuffed that emptiness with booze and sex and drugs, but it was never enough. He didn't know what to do to ease that aching emptiness in his chest, the pain that wasn't a torment but a calm, rippling sea.

Agony would be easier to live with.

He crouched low as he crept up the hill opposite the safe house's driveway. A few seconds ago a pinprick of light had flared from somewhere over the crest. It was orange, like the products of a flare gun. He knew nothing like that was normal for this neighborhood, full to the gills with vacationers and the idly wealthy.

Blades of soft grass whispered against his shoes as he bent nearly parallel to the ground and flattened his palms to the dirt. The crest of the hill was covered in sparse patches of grass and a few rocks, more similar to the moors than to the cityscape he was familiar with, reminiscent of the highlands.

Four hunched figures crowded around the marina to another lake - or maybe it was a winding branch of the one in his yard - and Alex knew that they weren't mariners. Boatsmen didn't wear dark outfits with blinking earpieces visible from the hills.

His curiosity was piqued. He flattened himself against the ground and pulled his body forward with his arms, dragging himself down to a small boulder to use as a vantage point.

A gentle breeze curled through the heavy night.

It drew whispers towards him that taunted of secrets best kept by water.

Despite all his efforts, Alex couldn't hear any intelligible words.

Carefully, watching the figures on the dock, Alex sat back on his heels and pillowed his arms under his chin, resting on his knees. They couldn't see him, nor would they want to - each figure faced away, their backs towards him.

One of them moved. The moonlight, remarkably clearer than in London, glinted off something shiny.

A gun? A knife?

Suddenly, Alex heard a soft scraping noise. Squinting, he peered forward, but couldn't see where it was coming from.

The metal object was pressed against the side of one of the docked boats that gently bobbed on the water. The person holding it turned and whispered something to one of the others, who fished in his pocket and pulled out a tiny round piece of - plastic?

Alex tried to shift back onto his stomach, but his hand brushed against a solid object. Curious, he grabbed the plastic handle with his sleeve pulled over his hand as not to leave fingerprints.

It was a gun.

His palm curled around the grip - it was oddly bulky, no safety. . . He felt the muzzle with his other hand. It was stubby and short, in no way conducive to accuracy.

So, the light he saw had been a flare, and this was the gun that shot it.

But who was playing with flare guns in the middle of the night?

Raised voices drew his attention back to the docks. The four people there were getting ready to leave. One reached over and took the metal thing, shoving it into some kind of casing, then pulled a visor down over their head.

Alex blinked. That was why their clothes looked bulky.

He barely believed what he saw as, one by one, the figures sitting on the docks slipped into the lake water and disappeared.

He frowned. There's no way this lake is deep enough for scuba diving.

Or they weren't concerned for the depth - maybe they wanted endurance, the oxygen tanks.

For what?

Alex took a quiet breath and silently counted to thirty. When no one resurfaced, he stood and kept a low profile as he approached the docks. He risked a glance over his shoulder - there wasn't anyone - and gripped the flare gun tighter. Crouching next to the boat, hard to distinguish in the murky night, he felt the fiberglass side for any indication that it had been tampered with. His fingers bumped against a rough patch, like the material was whittled away. Alex leaned closer, almost all of his weight resting against the side, and tried to determine what the thing beneath his hands was. It was small and plastic - the thing he'd seen earlier?- and surrounded by some kind of sticky glue. He wiped his hand on his jeans and pried the gooey plastic out, holding it up towards the sky. A curved lense made a dull reflection of the sky. Pulsing blinks of red light came from a small bulb on the upper ridge. The whole device was half the size of a golfball.

Alex didn't think it was a coincidence that there were mysterious divers placing cameras in hollowed out boats on the same day he and the others moved in. All he hoped was that whoever was searching didn't know where they were, hence the cameras.

Coincidences didn't exist, not in his world. There were only carefully orchestrated events, pieces of a massive puzzle that never quite made sense.

He fleetingly wished - as he did so many other times - that he was normal, that his worries amounted to passing university classes and going to football matches, even though that was an impossibility. MI6 had stolen so much from him; once upon a time, that thought made fiery anger roil to life inside him, but now all he felt was. . .nothing. Like something inside him was hollowed out. Like the space that let him protect himself was all he had left.

Maybe it was.

When the fist clubbed him upside the head, he shouldn't have been surprised.

One moment he was staring at a hidden camera, the next he was flat out on his back, eyes on the hundreds of stars that graced the heavens.

Something clouded his vision, darkening the skies.

An eclipse, was his first dull thought as his brain jostled around inside his skull.

A strong hand grabbed him by the collar. He almost groaned in pain, spikes shooting through his head.

"Who are you?" an irish voice demanded.

Alex blinked once, twice, and forced himself to focus even if it felt like someone had taken a hacksaw to the back of his head.

"Wha. . .?" he didn't have to put much effort into sounding like a ditz. His tongue felt thick and heavy.

"You, kid, screwing around with the boat!"

"It's my dad's," Alex said vaguely. He scrabbled his hands against the wooden planks, searching, searching. . .

His assailant scoffed. "Yeah?"

Another punch hit Alex in the eye. He winced, groaning harshly.

"Oi! The hell d'ya get off doing that? I was out for a walk - do you always vandalize the house's property?"

The grip on his collar loosened. "The house?"

"Parliament," Alex said, inserting as much sarcasm as possible into his voice while still trying to sound dazed and very much in pain. His fingers closed around something solid and - wham! He struck the person holding him in the temple with the flare gun, scrambling backwards as they slumped to the side, pitching face-first into the lake.

Unsteadily, he got to his feet - his head throbbed- and stared at the body in the lake.

It wasn't moving, but clusters of bubbles made their way to the surface.

Only unconscious. Not dead.

However, that person would drown if he didn't at least make some effort. As much as he wanted to leave before anyone else had a chance to see him, Alex dropped to his knees, stretched out as far as he could without falling in himself, and hauled the attacker back onto the dock.

The body flopped over, breaths shallow, eyes shut. Already an ugly bruise was forming on the side of her head. Her, not he. A woman with inky black hair and pale skin, almost translucent. She wasn't wearing the wetsuits of the boat vandals; just a tracksuit.

A golden band flashed on her left hand.

Alex's throat closed up. If she had died - did she have children? A family waiting for her to come home, not knowing what she really did? No normal person could punch like that, he felt like someone had taken a brick to his face.

He turned on his heel and left, almost stumbling in his haste to leave, leave, leave. That was all he wanted to do: get away.

It was only when he opened the door to Danielle sitting on the couch curled up into a tangled ball of arms and legs that he realized, for the first time since he was fourteen, he had people to lose too.

Danielle was, for lack of a better word, his friend. So was Tom. Anything that happened to England affected them, and Gwen and K Unit.

Alex forced down the painful tingling in his face as he shut the door behind him as quietly as possible.

"What happened?" she asked softly. Her wide eyes landed on his face.

He said nothing.

Silently, she stood and trudged into the kitchen. He heard the freezer open. She returned a few seconds later with a bag of frozen green beans and stuffed it into his hands.

It took him a moment to realize what it was for, and she gently tapped the side of his face. The tender skin winced from her touch.

He pressed the frozen bag to his face and sat down on the couch.

Silence hung heavy in the room like a weight.

"I saw a flare," he said at length, grimacing as his jaw ached. "Four people were messing with a boat over there."

She didn't look very surprised. "Vandals?"

"I don't think so." He dug around in his pocket for the gooey casing on the camera, and held it out to the light from the TV. Now he could see that the adhesive was some kind of putty or plaster, made to mimic fiberglass in texture and appearance. The red light continued to blink. He quickly closed his fingers around the camera in case it was transmitting any images.

"Who put that there?"

"I don't know."

Danielle coughed, her fist pressed to her mouth. "Keep the ice on your face."

Sighing, Alex readjusted the bag to press up against his bruise in a way that was more effective. He didn't want to think about why Danielle knew so much about treating bruises and cuts, small injuries most people didn't notice.

"Thanks."

She nodded.

Some show about animal rescuers played on the TV. Alex watched for a few moments, but it didn't really hold his interest. He preferred sports.

"Alex?" Danielle asked.

He shot her a glance. She looked younger than ever in the pale light, her face not nearly as guarded as normal. "What's up?"

"I want to go home."

"Yeah," he said. "Me too. But I can't."

"Can I?"

"You'll have to talk to Wo- Luke." Alex frowned at the carpet.

Danielle pursed her lips. "You don't like him."

"I don't trust him."

"Why do you have to stay?" she picked at a loose thread on the armrest, drawing it out of the upholstery.

Alex sighed again, staring at the walls of a house that wasn't his. "Duty."

REVIEW REPLIES:

Op-Fan: Ahh thank you! Yes, everyone is there now, but some won't be staying for very long because reasons that have yet to be revealed. As for that plot, Alex certainly has his hands full. He might actually *need* K Unit for this one.

QwertyWerido: I'm glad you like it! Uh oh, that's odd. . . did you get the alert for this one? Maybe it's a site glitch.

Torchwood Cardiff: I can't wait to write more! I think I'm having too much fun with fanfiction :D

Pineapple Biscuit: Thank you so much!

Nrynmrth: we've already had this conversation but THRONE OF GLASS YES

Guest: Thanks! I haven't definitely decided either way - my concern is that romance might break her character at this point.