A/N: So I haven't abandoned it after all! This has taken a completely different direction than previously. I think in the old story they were half way to America. Well it is almost 1 AM and I have just finished writing this, so you better like it! Actually, you don't. Just tell me what you think, ok? Next chapter will have Amethyst, David and our favourite assassin in it, I promise. For now... enjoy.
DISCLAIMER: I don;t own Alex Rider. I am not making money from this. I am just playing with the voices in my head...
***
He was awoken by the agonising pain in his legs. He arched his back in distress and was ashamed to hear whimpers emanating from his mouth. The pain rolled over him again, and whimpers gave out to a long, fitful scream. It hurt so much. How had he managed to get back to the trench?
"Shh, shh," said someone by his shoulder. "Hold still, I'm trying to get you're IV in!"
Alex forced himself to relax, though one of his legs continued to tremble uncontrollably.
The needle slipped into his forearm and Alex followed the tube with his eyes until he found the stand, with three different sacks of fluid hanging off it.
"What are they for?" he croaked, painfully.
"One will keep you hydrated, one is a painkiller, and one is an antibiotic. You might feel a bit drowsy, it's a side effect."
Alex gritted his teeth as a new wave of agony swept up from his legs. "How long... til the pain killers..."
"Until the painkillers kick in?" asked the nurse and Alex nodded. There was something familiar about her. She had wine red hair, which he was sure must be dyed and deep brown eyes. Where did he know her from?
"Not for about five minutes," she said. "Sorry."
Alex tensed against the pain again and nodded. He could survive for five minutes.
The nurse was already gone, required somewhere else to treat some other patient. It was the middle of a war – the hospital was overflowing.
Alex saw a man being carried in a winced in empathy as he saw the stump that had once been his leg. He was losing a lot of blood. Alex was sure he wouldn't survive the night.
***
The man who had lost a leg had been placed in the cot next to his. He kept moaning no matter how much morphine they gave him. He went silent about midnight.
Alex lay in bed staring at the ceiling in the dark. He wondered if he should get someone, but what was he supposed to do? He couldn't walk. He doubted there was a nurse within calling distance – there had been an emergency down the hall about half an hour ago and all the attendants had disappeared.
There was nothing he could do to change anything and he could feel that the man lying next to him, barely two feet away, was already dead. He sighed and turned his head on the flat hospital pillow.
He felt so helpless. He hated hospitals.
***
The next morning, the nurse was back, checking his lines.
"How long until I'm out of here?" he asked.
"Normally, we'd keep you in until you were fully healed, but at the moment we simply don't have the space. We'll give you a skin graft this afternoon. You will leave in about a week and then will have two weeks leave."
She twisted her hand as she disconnected his IV to replace his drip. There was a silvery scar over her thumb, running right around the base. He stared at it.
"How did you do that?" he asked.
She glanced at it, apparently absently, but Alex could read the tense lines of her shoulders.
"Oh... I got my thumb caught in a pair of scissors when I was young," she said absently.
But Alex knew the truth. It really was a small world. But still he had never thought to run into Sabina Pleasure again, least of all working in a wartime hospital.
Would she recognise him? Probably not. She thought he was dead. It was only in films and, ironically, his life that people came back to life. The chances of her thinking of him and recognising the resemblance, which after almost four years wasn't that close anyway, was remote.
What should he do? Nothing, he guessed. Either she would recognise him and pass it off as a similarity or it would never cross her mind. He wouldn't blow his cover for her. Only four people knew he was alive: Yassen, Amethyst and David, who he lived with now and Tom, his former best friend who he had told the truth to right before he left, and hadn't spoken to since. It had been too risky.
Well, no. Actually, that wasn't true. Wolf knew too.
Briefly, he spent a moment wondering how Wolf was doing. Was he fighting in this war? He might already have died for all Alex knew. Being in the SAS was hardly a risk-free occupation. If he ever saw him again he would have to find a way to help him. He was stacking up quite a debt to his one-time unit leader. First Wolf had taken bullets for him at Point Blanc and then he had helped him fake his death and escape, disobeying his orders to do so.
Alex sighed. Sabina had already gone, leaving him alone to his musings. Now that the pain killers had kicked in he wasn't in pain at all. His main problem was boredom.
He sighed again and turned over. Sometime since he woke, the man in the bed next to him had been removed. He would probably wind up cremated without ceremony and placed in a mass produced urn. Alex hoped they had known his name. He knew that with modern weapons being implemented, the list of unknown soldiers was now longer than in any previous war. So many people grieving for relatives who were MIA with no gravestone to visit, no ashes to scatter.
***
Alex shouldered his military issue duffel as he climbed off the train. It was a week later and he was back in Germany. Surprisingly air travel between Europe was still relatively safe due to the efforts of the European Air Force – a combination of the air forces of the European countries involved in the war to allow them to work more effectively. Alex could only assume that it was working as there had been no plane-instigated bombings in Europe at all, with the notable exceptions that had led to the formation of the EAF.
The flicked his eyes his eyes around the car park briefly and they alighted on the bus he needed. It always surprised him how normal life could seem here, despite the events he had witnessed a thousand miles away.
Of course, there had been changes. Electricity was rationed – only on between eight in the evening and midnight and again from six until nine to residential areas. Factories and other businesses had special dispensation and had their own generators to 'keep the blood of the economy flowing' as one German minister had described it.
Buses, cars and everything none-military had been adapted to run on hydrogen fuel.
Alex loathed war, but he could hardly deny that it had pushed forward so many new inventions that the world had desperately needed.
He hated how greatest innovation and greatest creativity was always accompanied by greatest destruction, but it had been proved true again and again and again.
He climbed on board the bus and flashed his military ID to the driver. Soldiers didn't have to pay for the duration of the war. Alex had a feeling it was the Government's way of making up for the pathetic salary the soldiers, by necessity, received.
Half an hour and a five kilometre walk later, Alex was standing in front of a nondescript house, albeit slightly larger than the average house. It was situated at the end of a long winding lane and looked over fields in three directions and, in one, a lake. Alex had spent the entire of his first summer down there and had made friends with the teens who hung around there.
Most of them were dead now. Casualties of war.
Alex was distracted from his thoughts by a small figure bowling into him.
"Uncle Alex! Uncle Alex!"
Alex grinned. It was David.
***
A/N: So do you like this story still? Is it worth me continuing with it? If you think so please Review and tell me!