Chapter Text
Alex looks forward to getting his soulmate mark like the other millions of little British schoolchildren in primary school, eyes shining enthusiastically as they listen to a soulmate specialist come in and give them what is initially a very formal, curated talk until tens of curious tiny hands shoot up every couple of minutes and the woman switches over to a casual Q and A session.
“It’s simply wonderful,” the woman says with that very same sparkle in her eyes, mirroring all the children in the room, a dreamy quality in her voice, and a little pep in her step. “Better than ice cream on a hot, blistering day, better than your mum or dad picking you up early from school, better than spotting an extra Christmas present under the tree, better than anything your wonderful little imaginative brains can think of! Picture another person, except they’re made for you, and you for them, someone special who will love you, no matter what. They’ll give you butterflies in your stomach and the courage to do anything that you couldn’t do before! Just wait until you see.”
After she leaves, all of Alex’s schoolmates take turns enthusiastically shaking hands and grabbing one another until Claire and Alyssa both gasp from the quiet reading corner, the little area sectioned off from the rest of the spacious classroom for reading with the small bookshelf, practically covered top to bottom in holographic stickers obscuring the grainy oak brown material of the wood and the flattened red, yellow, and blue bean bag chairs that Alex has never tried sitting on tucked away to the side. Needless to say, it was nearly impossible to pry them off of each other afterwards.
Alex goes home that day and tells all this to Ian, just before the man leaves for another long business trip. Ian sits him down and explains to him that the woman was highly exaggerating and that in reality, people easily miss their soulmates and may never meet them at all. There are, in fact, many cases of people having one-sided soulmate marks, apparently.
“There’s no electricity when you first make that skin to skin contact,” Ian explains to him. “You could accidentally touch someone in an airport and never see them again.”
Alex doesn’t ask Ian if his parents were soulmates. He doesn’t ask Ian if he’s found his soulmate, either. He holds on to the specialist’s glowing words and occasionally dreams of a warm hand intertwined with his and soft lips brushing against his forehead.
Alex looks forward to getting his soulmate mark like the other millions of British schoolchildren in secondary school until Ian is killed, and then Alex begins to dread dragging his potential soulmate into his whole mess with MI6.
Better to never meet them, he thinks, than to give MI6 more ammo to blackmail him with.
***
When Alex first sees Yassen Gregorovich, his immediate thoughts of him are that the other man is brutally efficient and cold. Then he notes the grace and weightlessness in the assassin’s movements, like a dancer, the way he almost floats over to the dockworker before unloading a bullet into him. The sight and the explosive crack etches itself into Alex’s mind as he sits, curled up and holding his breath, secretly tucked into the back compartment of a lorry, speeding away from the scene.
Later on the roof after Herod Sayle, when Alex is seconds away from getting shot, he stares and stares and stares at the icy ocean-blue of Yassen’s eyes, the way he almost looks amused after Alex tells him that he’s going to kill him, like he doesn’t think that Alex really poses any threat.
After a day of proper sleep, the full force of the conversation hits him. It doesn’t make any sense. Though Yassen was employed by Sayle, it seemed like he was working for a larger, more looming organization, one with the power to give even Yassen Gregorovich orders. Alex demolished Sayle’s plans and Yassen knew that he was doing it for MI6. Surely the assassin knew that MI6 would employ Alex again, possibly ruining any future endeavors of his organization? Logically, Alex would most definitely be a future annoyance, even if he wasn’t a threat. Yassen killed a man for dropping a box that didn’t even dent. Why wouldn’t he kill Alex for more?
There’s something odd, Alex thinks, about the way Yassen looked at him. Like a spark of recognition, of a wistful longing, almost. It was as if he looked right through Alex and at a ghost of the past.
It is right then and there that Alex realizes Yassen hadn’t truly seen him and was instead looking at something unbeknownst to Alex. Sure, the assassin might have been strangely invested in Alex leaving MI6 and returning to school like a normal teenager, but something tells him that if it were any other agent up on that roof, they would be dead before even laying eyes on the other man.
Yassen didn’t really see Alex.
He probably saw a piece of a memory and not Alex Rider, who still wants to be a professional footballer, Alex Rider, who likes granita and despises horseback riding despite his surname, Alex Rider, who didn’t even want to be on that bloody rooftop for MI6.
And the biggest question of why hangs over Alex’s head like a miserable cartoon cloud that simply refuses to go away. Why not let Herod Sayle kill Alex? Alex’s life is so minuscule and insignificant in the bigger picture of things. Why tell Alex to go back to school? Why talk with him at all instead of getting into that helicopter and flying away? Why had Alex opened his big stupid mouth and told the other man that he would kill him? Why spare Alex after that? Why look at Alex in the way he did? Why, why, why?
The next time Alex sees Yassen, he doesn’t get the chance to ask any of these questions. Instead, he’s forced to strip and is shoved into a ring with a bull, and Yassen doesn’t even have the courtesy to stick it out until the end.
It makes Alex want to tear his hair out, for reasons wholly unknown to him until long after he’s indirectly killed Damian Cray with a trolley and suddenly Yassen is involuntarily draped all over Alex, clutching to him, bleeding out profusely onto Alex’s hands, onto Alex’s clothes, and onto the collapsing floor of Air Force One, dark, dark thick red, almost black if Alex blinks for longer than he normally should, and somewhere whispering at the back of Alex’s head is Ian Rider, explaining the implications of seeing blood in darker shades and something about arterial bleeding, and then Alex spots the location of the gunshot wound and oh, he thinks, Yassen is done for.
Something inside him splits at the seams, twisting and turning against the inevitable, watching this seemingly invincible man struggling to breathe, struggling to—Yassen weakly clasps at Alex’s bare wrists, the first physical contact they’ve ever had, staining them that very same heavy tint of red, but the assassin’s voice comes out miraculously level and steady and clear, telling Alex that he knew his father and that MI6 had him killed, a sorrowful glaze to his rapidly fading blue eyes and his voice still frustratingly calm like he hasn’t just dropped a bomb on Alex and completely flipped his world around with a single sentence.
And then Yassen says, “In a way, I loved him. I love you too, Alex. You are very much like him. I’m glad you’re with me now,” and then there’s a spasm of pain in his face and something about Venice, Scorpia, and destiny that Alex doesn’t quite care about at that moment because his chest seizes with an ugly, muddled mix of several unnamed emotions.
Whatever pain, whatever ache Alex feels from his own injuries is no match for the numbing burn in his heart when Yassen closes his tired, pale blue eyes for the final time, and then the numbness flares like a supernova, quiet and explosive and soul-strangling as Alex succumbs to the sweetness of unconsciousness, I love you too, Alex, I love you, I love you, I love you echoing down a slippery spiral and into the noir void, the aftermath of a billion stars imploding into dust and birthing a brand new longing for the sun in Alex’s slow, beating heart.
***
When afterwards comes, Alex doesn’t know if he should be shocked or not.
When afterwards comes and he’s dead-exhausted and about to crawl into bed, slipping into a more comfortable pair of trousers, he sees it: stark black lettering against his pale skin, pale from the lack of sunlight, right there, neatly printed between his knee and outer thigh, black as the blood that seeped layers deep into his skin from when his fingers were pressed against a wet bullet wound.
Afterwards comes and Alex finds himself scrubbing the dark crimson stains from under his fingernails and in between his fingers and dripping down his forearm in the bathroom, over and over again, furiously scrubbing them clean and irritated and bright pink in a different way. He steps under his shower and sprays the discreet coppery metallic scent from his tongue, his gums, his lips until he can no longer smell anything but hot steam and soap. He rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms until he stops seeing ice-blue eyes melting into pain and fondness, no longer hidden under a cold demeanor, until he begins to see black spots.
Afterwards, he steps out still dripping wet and mouths to the fogged mirror, I love you too, Alex. He wipes away the condensation with his bare fingers, each rub producing a squeak and revealing more and more of himself in the reflection.
Alex’s face is screwed up into an involuntary bewilderment, confused furrowed brows, tense creases on his forehead, and mouth slightly parted, ready to burst with questions that no one can answer. He looks wide-eyed and haunted, with dark circles just under his eyes.
After all those afterwards, just before he sleeps, Alex Rider finds the name of his soulmate permanently marked onto him.
Yasha Gregorovich
And suddenly, he can no longer sleep.
***
Alex deliberates very carefully over the soulmate mark. Firstly, MI6 can never know, ever. Alex buys bandages, lots and lots of bandages and keeps the name tightly under wraps, quite literally.
Secondly, he thinks up a storm. Questions such as Who have I touched? and Who’s touched me? cross his mind, but in the end, Alex doesn’t actually need them.
Last name, Gregorovich, first name Yasha. There are no metaphysical connections between soulmate marks. Just as you won’t feel when it blossoms into fruition, you won’t feel when it withers and dies. The mark stays forever, even beyond death's clutches.
Alex’s conclusion is a very simple one. A very painful one.
Thirdly, he can’t stop thinking about the other man and the color draining out of Yassen’s eyes and skin and drifting into the pallid palettes of an ashen grey, a color very close to death. Alex is near enough to see the assassin’s eyelashes splayed delicately against his cheeks, fluttering when Yassen blinks, spending longer and longer with his eyes closed through each pass, obscuring the dimming blue of his eyes.
Yassen, Alex thinks when he wakes up.
Yassen, Alex thinks before he sleeps.
He thinks that this isn’t normal, even for people with dead soulmates.
Then again, Alex has never been quite normal, either.
Are you mine? Alex never gets to ask, constantly touching at the beautiful raven ink-black name etched onto his right thigh, right above his knee.
For the two weeks MI6 allows for him to attend school after the fiasco with Damian Cray, Alex keeps a hand resting on his right leg all throughout his classes, the mark a constant reminder under his palm and through a layer of fabric, through his uniformed trousers. He stares at it in wonder for hours before he goes to bed. Are you Yasha? Are you mine?
And then one day he’s had enough. He wakes up on the wrong side of bed, the wrong side of a lost childhood, and suddenly the previously muted barbs of his schoolmates increase tenfold in volume, stinging hooks digging deep into his skin. Alex can barely refrain himself from snapping at the low whispers and thrown glances when rumors begin to circulate about how he probably found his soulmate, dead in a ditch or also a druggie or something much worse, none of them trying to be subtle at all.
But yet. They’re just normal teenagers and Alex is the odd one out. It’s not like they’re too far off from the truth, anyway.
Mrs. Jones speaks to Alex by the Thames and Sabina leaves. Alex is exhausted.
“Venice, Scorpia, destiny,” Yassen had said, his final wishes for Alex, his last words.
Alex goes to find all three, and his world is completely flipped once more, tilting unsteadily on its axis, barely held down by the gravity of the sun.
***
Just as Alex was unsure whether to be shocked or resigned when he initially saw his soulmate mark, he doesn’t know how he should react when he learns that Yassen Gregorovich is not dead and is, in fact, very much alive. This is months later, after Alex follows the words of a supposedly dying man and ends up in a place where nearly everyone wants him dead, and they almost get what they want, too, if not for the luck of the devil that enjoys following Alex around everywhere he goes and only appears in the direst of situations after he’s already been put through the wringer. The devil’s luck indeed.
It’s so mundane, the way Alex finds out.
He isn’t on a mission for MI6 or getting shot at and seeing a fleeting glimpse of the assassin out of the corner of his eye, nor does he wake up with the business end of Yassen’s gun fixed on his head. In fact, he’s quite sure that MI6 kept this from him on purpose.
The truth of the matter is that Alex is on his way home from school one day, walking, surprisingly unafraid of another attempt on his life. He isn’t even particularly alert or anything, but he pauses at a corner on a red light and turns his head at just the right angle and there Yassen is, dressed in plain black clothes that make him seem less conspicuous than he actually is, holding a white cup of steaming coffee in one hand and the other one free to reach for a possibly hidden gun at any time, exiting the small cafe he bought it from, probably.
It’s an extra hot day, today, the sun beating down on him from overhead, a blazing ball of heat in the sky, painfully insistent on Alex’s back and his hair and his neck, biting at him with each small movement. His school uniform is clinging to his skin and he wants to hurry home and shed it immediately.
Alex laughs, for lack of a better reaction, in either relief or hysteria—he can't quite tell which—and then makes his way across the street and follows the assassin as he ducks into a park. He almost expects for Yassen to instantly turn around and shoot Alex for getting him nearly killed, but Alex is trailing him from a decent distance and he’s learned a thing or two about stealth.
However, no matter how good Alex is at trailing someone, Yassen is better. Better at stealth, better at recognizing danger, better at intuition, better at just being aware, like how Alex swears that Yassen was going to check for someone listening in on him way back during the whole tizzy with Herod Sayle out on the jetty until a dropped container interrupted him. He should have noticed Alex by now.
Something that feels suspiciously like worry blooms in Alex’s stomach, before any real fear for his own life or fear that this might actually be a trap that Yassen set so Alex can get closer and easier to kill. The worry unfurls when Alex gets close enough to reach out and touch the assassin, and suddenly, his hand is doing just that, reaching up to Yassen’s shoulder, except without Alex’s permission—
—Yassen grabs his wrist and twists, sending Alex sprawling to the ground at an inopportune angle, and as he scrambles to get back up on his feet, Yassen, without spilling a single drop of his coffee, prepares to break Alex’s arm in the middle of a public space, poised with an elbow ready to drive down at the joint, hard, until Alex shouts for him to stop, stop, Yassen, please, stop! and the assassin freezes, one hand still tightly gripping Alex’s wrist. Alex honestly should have expected this.
A concerned woman walking her husky comes up to them, eyeing the way Yassen is holding onto Alex hard enough to probably leave bruises later, but Alex stands in between them, doing his best to obscure Yassen’s face from her, and puts on his brightest shaky smile, though it isn’t difficult to fake, considering what just happened.
“I’m sorry if we made a scene,” Alex apologizes, like he and Yassen didn't just meet for the first time in months a few seconds ago. Not a problem, the woman says, continuing to stare at the way Yassen’s fingers are seriously curled around Alex’s wrist in a death-grip.
“He’s got… he’s got PTSD,” Alex says hurriedly, hoping that he sounds genuine. He’s not even sure if he’s lying or not. “Sometimes he forgets where he is, but he just needs a few minutes to breathe, really.”
The suspicion on the woman’s face morphs into pity, but as long as she’s no longer considering calling any authorities, the danger has passed.
“Have a good day.” As she walks away. Alex waves his free hand at her and her cute dog that he didn’t get to fully appreciate, and he really hopes she doesn’t remember the encounter, for both their sakes.
And then he finally turns his attention to the assassin, who’s staring at Alex like he’s grown three heads or something equally as strange.
Alex winces. He has no clue how the other man feels about him, especially since he was almost killed because of Alex. Whatever little attachment he had to Alex could be completely severed now, possibly even festering into resentment, and though Alex would really like to say that Yassen isn’t the type for sadistic revenge, he doesn’t actually know anything about the other man.
“Yassen,” Alex says, his voice cracking with emotion. Oh, well. There goes pretending like he’s unaffected. “You can let go of my wrist now.”
Yassen drops Alex’s hand like he's been burned and then averts Alex’s gaze for another minute, looking around the park, anywhere but Alex, saying nothing.
Why is Yassen acting so weird?
Alex’s hand automatically goes to rub the mark above his knee like he does whenever he feels nervous this past couple of months, a bad habit he’s been trying to kick, and then it clicks for him. Yasha Gregorovich. Alex touched Yassen’s bare skin, too, which means that he should have Alex’s name somewhere on him.
Alex suddenly grows nervous. “I think we need to talk.”
Yassen’s gaze finally drifts to Alex, his face as impassive as ever, which Alex interprets as a sign to continue speaking.
“How are you even still alive?” Alex asks, his tone incredulous, unable to contain himself any longer.
The assassin’s brows furrow. “MI6 didn’t tell you?”
“They don’t exactly like me after… after,” Alex says, and both of them know that he isn’t going to explain himself any further. “Why didn’t you notice me following you?”
“It’s the pain medication. I’m still… recovering,” Yassen admits. “I haven’t been as attentive to my connections as I should be. To the rest of the world, I am still dead.” That could mean a million things. That could mean that Yassen has no idea that Alex single-handedly destroyed Scorpia. That could mean that Yassen has no idea that Alex spoke with Ash and learned about the reality of the whole messed up situation with MI6 and Scorpia and John Rider.
If Yassen’s only been amicable this entire time to Alex because of that thin thread of connection, then he certainly isn’t going to be the one to poison the assassin’s impression of John Rider.
Alex bites his lower lip to prevent himself from blurting his next question out loud without restraint.
“What else?” Yassen asks, like he knows there’s something that Alex isn’t quite saying. Alex isn’t as well-versed in the art of keeping a blank expression.
“The thing—you know,” Alex says, sparing himself from embarrassment by being as vague as possible.
“I don’t,” Yassen supplies helpfully in return.
“The sou—The—” Alex stammers, genuinely unable to get the word unstuck from his throat. He tries a few more times, failing each one after the other, and what little patience Yassen has for him seems to be slipping away quickly because of the heat.
Alex glances around to ensure that they’re mostly alone, and then leans forward, tilting his head slightly upwards, and kisses Yassen right on the mouth.
He knows that it’s a mistake as soon as he does it. Yassen’s lips are frozen beneath his, completely unresponsive. Alex immediately backs away and stares at the assassin in an abject horror.
“Alex…” Yassen says, an uncharacteristic expression of shock gracing his features.
Alex doesn’t allow for Yassen to say anything else. He turns tail and flees the scene like a coward, his heartbeat a rapid staccato against his rib cage, the loud pounding of his shoes on the even concrete matching the frenzied throbbing of his heart threatening to jump out of his chest. He probably runs about fifteen blocks or so before his pace begins to drag and he noticeably slows down.
He takes a risky glance behind him. No Yassen in sight. Only the occasional odd look from passersby.
Yassen wasn’t being weird or purposefully averting Alex’s gaze earlier. He was simply checking for any hidden MI6 agents in the park in case Alex was playing bait to lure him in. Alex projected his own feelings onto the assassin incorrectly and only saw what he wanted to see. God, how stupid of him.
Panting hard, Alex almost finds himself collapsing in the middle of the sidewalk. The combination of his perspiration and the heat burning through his clothing from the sun, the bastard still mockingly winking down at Alex from high in the sky, is almost suffocating. It almost feel like standing behind a bus engine, each breath full of dry fumes. Alex suddenly wants to shoot it down, wants to tear at it, wants to choke the life out of it with his bare hands.
Instead, all he can do is glare at it, squinting slightly so he doesn’t hurt his eyes.
Alex hates the sun.
How incredibly stupid of him, Alex thinks, to assume that he has a requited soulmate. How arrogant to assume that he’s one of the lucky ones out of everyone on this Earth. How foolish of him to take such a direct approach instead of something more subtle. What he hates most is that, again, he can hear Ian Rider at the back of his head, the man’s gentle, soft-spoken tones explaining this very situation to Alex. What he hates the most is that Ian Rider is dead and haunting him as a faded voice instead of helping him go through this, dead because he was killed by Alex’s unrequited soulmate.
Yassen Gregorovich is one of the best—if not the best—contract killer assassins out there. He is undeniably attractive, undeniably talented, and undeniably ruthless.
Alex is a pitiful teenager playing spy in a grown up’s world. If Scorpia has taught him anything, it’s that he can’t find it in himself to kill the way they do, to remove himself from the situation emotionally and pull the trigger heartlessly.
Alex’s life has been spinning out of control for the last year. He no longer belongs in a classroom, no matter how much he wants to. He has next to no friends. MI6 has him tightly held in between their manipulative fingers and on a short leash.
The gravity of his life has changed. Why not also toss an unrequited soulmate into the mix?
Alex hopes that the universe is having a good laugh out of this.
A sick lurch of homesickness tugs at his stomach, accompanied by a mild sting behind his eyes. Alex suddenly misses Ian very, very much, even though with each passing day, his memories of the other man grow hazier. In years time, Ian Rider will fade from his head.
That is, if Alex is still alive by then.
Alex really doesn’t know how he’s made it this far.
He wants to return to a home he doesn’t even have anymore.
What Alex also doesn’t know is that if he had turned around, if he had stayed for just a moment longer, he would have seen Yassen involuntarily raising his fingers to his lips, reliving the shadow of a kiss, coffee entirely forgotten.
The sun makes a fool out of them both that day.
***
“Why didn’t you tell me that Yassen was alive?” Alex asks, when they’re alone in an office in Royal and General Bank. He does his best to sound inquisitive and not accusatory, but from the looks of it, Mrs. Jones doesn’t really care.
“We didn’t find it a detail of importance,” she explains, peppermint oddly absent. “It doesn’t change anything.”
It changes everything, Alex wants to say, wants to scream, but he doesn’t. He nods, instead.
She briefs him on his next assignment, something quick and simple in Uruguay. An expensive party for expensive people, Alex pretending to be someone’s son, keeping his own first name and age, the same cover story recycled so many times that someone is bound to poke holes all over it eventually.
MI6 is beyond the point of asking for his permission. Alex doesn’t even expect it anymore.
She gives him several documents with vital information to memorize on the spot. Alex flips through them, scanning each page carefully. All he needs to do is plant several bugs in someone named Nicolas Castro’s hotel room. A weapons dealer. Nothing else. Alex pays special attention to any blueprints and building layouts he sees.
“Do I get to bring anything?” Alex asks.
“We’re sorry,” she says, not sounding very apologetic at all. “Smithers has been rather busy as of late.”
She’s lying to him. Either Alex is still being punished or some people in MI6 are feeling extra wary about him. No toys for the uncontrollable teenage spy. And as always, no gun either.
Fantastic.
“Oh, and Alex? One more thing. It was highly suspected that Gregorovich and your father were soulmates,” Mrs. Jones adds, offhandedly, like an afterthought that doesn’t really matter that much. “If you ever see him again, you can use that to your advantage.”
Alex says nothing. He doesn’t trust his voice.
They give him a date and dismiss him.
Alex goes home in a daze, but as soon as he locks the door to the Chelsea house left to him after Ian’s death and takes several unstable steps towards his bedroom, her words come back full force, harder than any brick wall or train, more painful than any bullet in the chest from a sniper rifle, his stomach rolling violently.
“Gregorovich and your father were soulmates,” she had said, and Alex barely makes to the toilet in time, dropping hard to his knees before he vomits out everything he’s eaten in the past two days, loud, harsh hacking and coughing over smooth, cold porcelain, accompanied by a horrible throbbing inside his skull like someone’s just pistol-whipped him and given him two concussions and maybe decided to kick his head around like a football.
He heaves and heaves until there’s nothing left but an empty pit in his gut, sour bile burning at the back of his throat, and he keeps heaving after that until most of his soul is in the toilet as well, waves of nausea bowling him over as he struggles to stay on his knees and over the toilet bowl instead of pitifully curling into a tight ball on the tiled floor.
His head feels heavy, like cement. Equally as weighed down, his heart feels like lead.
No wonder, Alex thinks to his mirror, sick to his stomach. I look like the spitting image of John Rider.
He strengthens his resolve to stop touching his soulmate mark after that.
He keeps it wrapped in bandages almost constantly.
He no longer looks at it.
That way, Alex can almost pretend as if it isn’t there.