'cause when the sun sets, it upsets what's left of my invested interest

[00nothing]

WHO: Alex Rider
WHERE: The fountain
WHEN: 12/12
OPEN TO: Everyone
WARNINGS: slight deep water phobia, reference violence maybe?
STATUS: Open

---

Alex opens his eyes to the all too familiar sensation of drowning in deep water and tries very hard not to panic. This shouldn't be happening. He should be home and safe in Chelsea, or at the very least drowsing wearily on the plane flight back to London, not... not this again. His chest feels tight, and it has nothing to do with needing to breathe.

This isn't fair, he thinks viciously, and his eyes burn. He never asked for any of this and he doesn't want to do this anymore.

Frigid water presses down all around him and Alex squeezes his eyes shut, his hands into fists until his nails cut into his palms. When he opens his eyes again his heart is beating loudly in his ears, but he's clear headed enough to look around and get a fix on the way out. And then he's swimming, long, powerful, slightly desperate strokes to the surface. He's gasping for breath as soon as he clears the water and flinging himself over the edge of the fountain before he even takes a moment to register his surroundings.

Of course, then he does, dragging himself up into a seated position, leaning back on his hands and giving the fountain in front of him a wide, wild eyed look. "What?" Who on Earth was going around leaving him in fountains, of all places? That was hardly an effective way to try and kill someone.

They hadn't even put a shark in there with him or something.

He shrugs the weight of a bag from his shoulders when he registers the pressure, and then pauses in analyzing the contents of the bag when he realizes that the shrug hadn't hurt like it should, no burnt skin pulling uncomfortably tight. With slowly dawning disbelief, Alex reaches up with one hand to press to his shoulders, and feels only the slightly upraised pale pink skin of a new scar.

"What." He says, once more with feeling.

Comments

[00nothing]

Alex's first instinct is to deny, of course. Deny that there's anything to talk about, deny that it's really anything all that serious, deny, deny, deny. But he's already said too much, already done too much, for any of that to fly, and they both know it.

He sets the cup down and reaches for the bread to buy himself a little time to think, tearing off a small piece and bringing it to his lips, chewing slowly. He's noticed her around, of course. With all of the time he's spent haunting around the inn over the past couple of days, it's hard not to catalog all of its regulars. Something about her though, has always had him skirting around the edges, some inborn instinct telling him not to engage.

The sensation is still tickling at the back of his nerves, even now, but everything's dulled and maybe that's why he hasn't found some reason to leave the room yet but despite everything she's making it easy right now. To stay. Something in her eyes, maybe, though Alex doesn't meet them for long.

He eats more bread, but shreds even more of the bread into little pieces that he leaves scattered in front of him on the table. Stares at them rather than her when he finally answers. "It's... complicated. And I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to trust adults right now with much of anything." Adding with a sigh, "no offense."

[vdova]

"None taken," she says easily, reaching for a piece of the bread herself, along with a little of the butter. She spreads it on the bread slowly, taking her own time, not necessarily to think, but mirroring his own wariness. He's acting, more or less, like a spooked animal, and she doesn't want to scare him away, now that she's got his attention.

"A lot of people don't trust me. It kind of comes with the territory." She smiles a little, mostly to herself, at that, but it's still pointed his way a little. Something terrible, she thinks, happened to this boy, and while she can't make it unhappen, she can absolutely try to help him through the aftermath. The nervous gesture of tearing the bread, the fact he won't look at her when he speaks.

"I'm not going to make you do anything you don't want to do." She pauses, tilts her head to the side in acquiescence. "Except eat and drink water so you don't have a hangover tomorrow. There's no aspirin in this village, so you'd be on your own with the headache."

[00nothing]

"I've had worse, I'm sure." Alex says with a diffident, one shoulder shrug, picking up a piece of dried fruit and nibbling at it warily. Not that he's ever experienced anything like a hangover before, but he wonders if it's not altogether unlike coming down from being dosed through his flight out to Africa, and while certainly the detoxing hadn't been enjoyable it was still hardly the worst thing he'd been through.

(He rubs at his chest thoughtlessly in memory of the winner of that very dubious honor before scowling and placing his hands rather pointedly in his lap again.)

'It comes with the territory' is a curious combination of words, but one that Alex in honestly too weary to analyze too deeply right now in any case. Because if he knows he might have to do something about it, and he's been trying to avoid anything like that since he pulled himself from that fountain days ago.

"Sometimes I wonder..." Alex finds himself saying as he pulls the cup close to him again, and he's not even all that sure how he's going to finish the sentence until the words come out of his mouth. "--how much worse things need to get before I actually begin to regret telling Sarov no." Because he's not there yet, not with how wide scale and broad the devastation would have been from allowing Sarov's actions to go unchecked. He can't in right conscience condemn the rest of the world to that, even if he's beginning to think at least a few people might deserve it.

But at least Sarov had been honest about trying to control Alex.

[vdova]

She's about to tell him that having had worse doesn't mean he needs to experience it again (advice that she, ironically, never takes herself) when he continues, and she stops short in buttering her bread, knife hovering over it as she listens. The lack of movement doesn't last long, and Natasha sets down her knife to take a bite, chewing thoughtfully.

She picks up two things from that sentence, the first being that he's probably unaware of how loaded it is. Not careless, mind, he's aware of what he's saying, but she gets the feeling he thinks she won't. Which, for now, she'll allow him. Because while she can't discern the details, like why he told this person no, how bad things have gotten to get him to this point, she can tell that it's bad, and she's been there before. The second is that he's clearly had contact with Russia to the point of someone asking him to do things. He's not Russian himself, and Natasha knows the government of her former homeland all to well, so he was probably useful.

She considers revealing her heritage, and then rejects the idea for now. She has more important things to worry about, like regret and the effects of. The statement is rhetorical, but she answers anyway.

"If you told Sarov no for a good reason, then things will never get bad enough for you to regret it."

[00nothing]

Alex isn't watching her, but there's something so apparent in the sudden cessation of motion (even as short lived as hers was) that it's something he can see all too clearly still from the corner of his eye. And it has him freezing up too, hands wrapped tight around the cup until his fingers are white from the pressure.

He doesn't even know why, and that's almost the worst part, isn't it? That just the slightest suggestion that something he said put her on edge can do exactly the same to him. He wants to stop being paranoid about everything, but what was that saying...?

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

"He wasn't a nice man. But I do think he honestly cared about me." Alex says after a tense minute, shoulders hunched, eyes shadowed. It was more than could be said about a lot of people in his life. "He was just so... sad, I think. And he tried being angry instead." Something Alex could understand all too well, these days. And that? That's what scares Alex the most, honestly.

Natasha's sentiments are well-intentioned, he's sure, but it's hardly her fault that she's missing a few things. Like the fact that in some ways, he'd regretted the words the moment Sarov pulled the trigger. Or at least, regretted being the reason Sarov had. Alex has seen so many people die since the MI6 pulled him into this mess, had even been at least indirectly responsible for some of them (alright, maybe more than some), but Sarov's death was one of his biggest regrets, in the end.

There are some things you just can't come back from.

[vdova]

He's not a relative, this Sarov. He wouldn't be referring to him by surname if he was, but Natasha can't pinpoint what he was. Some kind of caretaker, a superior, but he's too young to be military, even with the way he moves, wary and paranoid. She'd really rather not consider that he might be to him what Madame was to her, but the possibility is there. He's got the haunted look of someone who's seen a lot of death; the question is whether or not it was at his hands or someone else's.

"Anger's easy," she says finally, leaning back in her chair. "It's harder to live with sadness, but anger, now that you can use." She says it almost distantly, like she's thinking of something or someone, but her attention is back on Alex soon enough.

"It doesn't mean you should use it. And you don't look angry to me." She pauses, expression becoming a little more discerning.

"That's what you're scared of, right? Becoming angry?"

[00nothing]

"I'm tired." Alex says in answer, almost as an explanation. Or maybe an excuse. He pushes away everything in front of him on the table until he has the space to curl his arms up on the table, slumping down to rest his chin on them and staring straight ahead at the wall. Eyes unfocused. "Which is almost scarier."

Because he shouldn't feel this way, not so young, he at least knows enough about the world to know that. And because it feels like that means he's giving up, when giving up is honestly one of the last things he can afford to do.

Not here, not back home. Especially not back home.

Alex lets his head tip to one side just enough to hide the shape of his mouth behind one arm (it's a shallow sort of protection, and he's never been any good at hiding what he's feeling in his eyes anyway, but this way at least he almost feels like he isn't even lying), slants a look at Natasha under the fall of his fringe. "I've been angry." He admits, words slightly muffled by his arm.

"I don't like how I get when I'm angry." How destructive he gets, how careless. It's so hard to care about anything at all, when he gets like that. And when he doesn't care, how does he figure out where to draw the line? How does he stop from destroying himself entirely, all on his own?

(Who needs the bad guys to hurt you when you have yourself?)

"Ever since Yassen died..." Alex stops himself abruptly, squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, terrified of revealing too much when he clearly has so little control over what he's saying. This is why he should have never touched that bottle of alcohol, this is why he can't afford to be so careless.

How could he have forgotten?

[vdova]

“I could teach you,” she says after a long moment of watching him — analyzing, certainly, but mostly empathizing. She's not the angry one, or at the very least doesn't let anger consume her like it literally does Banner or figuratively does Steve. Natasha's always used her emotions as tools and weapons, anger among them. It's how she was raised, not to feel but to use emotion, both hers and her target's. That's not the case anymore, of course, but the point remains that Natasha knows well how to compartmentalize, how to hone her rage or sadness into laser like precision when the time comes for it, and it's because she's been where he is. And someone reached a hand out to her and said ‘trust me’ when he'd been sent to do the opposite. It took courage she didn't know she had to take it.

“How to use your anger responsibly. Or,” she continues, tilting her head to the side briefly. “To not feel it at all, if that's what you want. But I don't think that's wise. You can't grieve if you don't feel.”

She pauses, reaches across the table slowly, grasping his forearm gently, her tone softer, understanding.

“I'm sorry. For everything that happened to you. You're too young for that.”

[00nothing]

Alex laughs sharply at her offer before burying his face entirely in the curve of his arms, not at all sure what sort of expression he might be making right now and entirely unwilling to let Natasha see it either way. He doesn't speak or move for a very long time, and the only indication he gives that he's not going to simply stay like that for the rest of the night is the way his shoulders eventually drop slack, losing tension all the way down his back.

When he finally does look up again his expression is wry and sharp, and gives the impression of shattered glass around the edges. "Somebody already tried that once, thanks, I wasn't suited to it." Even before Jones had told him the truth he hadn't been able to shoot her in the end.

Which he supposes he should take as a good sign, but all it really tells him is that he's no good at cold rage. And that it doesn't matter what side people are on, in the end they all want to control him.

Alex tenses up instinctively when Natasha reaches out to touch his arm, staring down at her hand with a sharp, discerning eye. "Someone once told me that you're never too young to die." He tells her softly, something resigned in his voice, in every line of his body. What he doesn't say is this: sometimes death honestly seems like the easier option.

He's always been far too stubborn though.

[vdova]

She'd be offended by that, but he doesn't know who she is. Understandable, all things considered. He's dropped two names that she would know, being who she is, considering what he's revealed without really revealing anything. He's trying not to talk, but the alcohol has loosened his tongue. There's a reason she was taught not to drink to excess. At his laugh, she smirks, and at his comments, it just gets a little bigger, more knowing.

She pulls back, her movement still slow and gentle, despite the sharpness of expression, and she leans back in her chair, looking at him like an equal.

"You're from a world that isn't mine, so you don't know who I am," she says. She's not angry, not trying to be arrogant. It's just fact. "I recognize the origin of one of those names you said, but not the name itself, ergo, you're not from my world." She leans forward, looking him right in the eye as she speaks.

"You're right. You're never too young to die. It happens to all of us, eventually, and it doesn't discern age or creed or race. But that doesn't mean it's the easy way out. And you're still here," she says as she leans back, raising an eyebrow. "I think deep down you agree with that, even if it seems hard.

"I know what you've been through. I've been there myself. I can help you take what you've already learned and mold it into something you can use. Something that you are suitable for." Her smirk falls into a smile.

"It's not so bad being useful, you know."

[00nothing]

Alex tips his head slowly, consideringly at Natasha at her words, and takes a moment to think about the sort of people he's met here so far. Compares the likelihood of them having a place in the world he knows, as opposed to the possibility of there being other worlds, all being brought to somehow converge in this one small space.

There are so many strange, dark, forgotten pieces of the world, and he's only seen a handful of them, in the end. It's a ridiculous idea, really, no matter how sure of herself Natasha sounds.

"What?" Alex says with another laugh, and this one doesn't cut as much but his disbelief is clear in the sound regardless. "Origin? You mean Russia? Am I supposed to believe that you know everyone in Russia? And that that's supposed to convince me that there are multiple worlds?"

Alex very carefully doesn't let Natasha catch his eyes as she continues. Which is easy enough because his vision is starting to narrow as her words register. He's clearly made a huge mistake, he should have never touched that bottle of alcohol. Whatever Natasha thinks she knows, it's too much, he can't...

He can't... breathe, oh god.