A/N: This is a poem fic, and the poem I used is "Stanzas Written in Dejection" by Percy Shelley, and it's not nearly as angsty as it sounds, I promise. The author wrote it near Naples, Italy, so I decided to set this fic in Italy as well, but it is set on the opposite coast.

Just a few disclaimers:

1. There is no such place as Sulieti, Italy. The name was made from mashing together Sulmano and Chieti, which are two real towns in Abruzzo, Italy

2. I obviously don't own Alex Rider, but I do own any other named characters ( Sadly, I don't own a villa on the coastline of the Adriatic Sea either).

So, since the point of this oneshot is the poem it's based on, here's the poem! I studied it in literature a few years ago and I liked it (I had angst when I was 14 okay don't judge), so I hope you enjoy it too :)

Happy reading!

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

The waves are dancing fast and bright,

Blue isles and snowy mountains wear

The purple noon's transparent might,

The breath of the moist earth is light,

Around its unexpanded buds;

Like many a voice of one delight,

The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,

The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

I see the Deep's untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown;

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:

I sit upon the sands alone,—

The lightning of the noontide ocean

Is flashing round me, and a tone

Arises from its measured motion,

How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

Nor peace within nor calm around,

Nor that content surpassing wealth

The sage in meditation found,

And walked with inward glory crowned—

Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.

Others I see whom these surround—

Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;

To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,

And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

Some might lament that I were cold,

As I, when this sweet day is gone,

Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,

Insults with this untimely moan;

They might lament—for I am one

Whom men love not,—and yet regret,

Unlike this day, which, when the sun

Shall on its stainless glory set,

Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

Abruzzo, Italy

The sun was not yet shining over the eastern Italian coast when the sleepy village of Sulieti was woken by a bang and a cloud of smoke from the supposedly deserted villa just south of the last few village houses. Twelve years had passed since the villa was last occupied; the reclusive man who had formerly inhabited the stucco-walled warren of crumbling walls and pitted roofing left with a posse of men who spoke Italian with an undeniable Croatian accent and was never seen again.

The house closest to the derelict villa belonged to Giovanni and Maria Tombrello, descendants of one of the village's founding families. No one knew exactly how old they were, the general consensus being that Giovanni was seventy-five and that he was six years older than his wife, but they had lived in the village since before the villa was built and could recall when the property was only a spike of rocky earth that jutted out over the coast. Due to the soil's gravelly composition, the area was not suitable for growing the grapes and tomatoes that Abruzzo was famous for, and local legendarium held that plot of land to be cursed barren. The mysterious comings and goings of anyone who happened to stay in the villa only added to such superstitions and prompted much discussion amongst the villagers.

Giovanni Tombrello had not been woken by the loud noise; rather, he was shaken awake by Maria, who urged him to go investigate the origin of the disturbance. There had been problems with vandals in the vineyards and disappearing sheep from local flocks over the past few months. Was this related? His arthritic joints ached from a long week of standing and baking various breads for an impending wedding festival so he mumbled back a garbled reply that he would go later and rolled over with absolutely no intention of getting near the villa that day.

Alex Rider stood outside the villa, the patio warm against his bare feet, with a cup of bitter coffee in one hand and the other grabbing his chest. He wore a plain cotton t-shirt and khaki drawstring pants, both of which were provided with the villa. Convenient items, if not what he would have chosen, and they fulfilled their purpose. The healing scar slashed across his tanned right cheekbone was turned towards the sun as he stood on the bluff's edge and squinted out over the sea. His sandy hair, once neatly trimmed in imitation of the political elite who had gathered for a summit on the state of the African continent, flopped about his face in an unruly mess.

He was twenty-three years old and had been exiled to Italy.

The sun had risen approximately six hours ago; it was noon, and he had just finished dispatching an Albanian mercenary who had the foolishness to approach the coastline in a rumbling speedboat. Once the mercenary had been rendered unconscious in an incident involving a sizeable chunk of the roof caving in and a sizeable cloud of dust, Alex had heaved him into the boat and dropped a chunk of the villa's roof on the accelerator. The boat would get back to the Albanian coast eventually.

Killing the man probably would have been wiser but Alex hadn't seen any point in doing so, as a dead body would have caused more hassle than he wanted to be bothered with.

A warm breeze tossed the glittering Adriatic sea into gentle waves that rolled towards the beach below and frothed as they broke over the coast. The air was thick and humid but not overly warm, a pleasant change from the rainy spell that London was having.

Out over the sea, three birds spiraled over a patch of rippling water where fish leapt gleaming from the sea. Alex watched them for a few moments, studying the relationship between predator and prey, as the new wound in his chest throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

After the incident in Ethiopia, which had happened two weeks prior to his arrival at the villa the previous night, Alex had been effectively exiled from London until further notice. His superiors claimed that he needed some time off to recover and get his strength back but Alex understood that what they were really doing was shuffling him off out of the way until he could be called on again.

As nice as the Italian countryside was, it was eerily silent. Alex was accustomed to the unceasing rambling of large metropolitan cities; traffic noise, people with too much alcohol and too little self control yelling on the sidewalk outside his flat building, commuters talking to each other or someone on the phone on their way to work.

Here, outside Sulieti, the air was as silent as the sanctuary of a church, as if the ground itself was too sacred to degrade with something as plebian as noise. At first, Alex had found the silence relaxing, but he quickly grew more and more restless as each hour passed with little development.

The thought occurred to Alex as he watched the ongoing battle between the fish and the seabirds that the coastline itself was a kind of city: the noise of the waves, the breeze, the birds cawing in the distance over the splashes of particularly large fish that fell back into the watery depths of the Adriatic sea.

"Well, it's definitely not London," he muttered aloud. The openness of the land around him made his voice seem unusually insignificant, a feeling that unsettled him, so he decided to make his way down to the sand.

There was a narrow, winding path down the face of the cliff. Uneven rock lent itself to several handholds for Alex to use to steady himself when his newest scar started pulsing with bolts of white-hot agony. He grit his teeth as he finally stumbled down to the shore, his feet slipping and sinking into the shifting sand, barren of any shells.

He hurt. God, how he hurt.

Purple-tongued seaweed waved its gnarled hands beneath the surface of the waves as they laved over the sand. The smell of salt and sea was more pungent there, and rose and fell with the water.

The thrum of the sea and the cries of the birds ricocheted off the cliff face above Alex's head in a web of hollow echoes that made his eardrums ache. He couldn't hear himself think .

Alex lost track of how long he spent standing by the sea, surrounded by noise loud enough to blot all thoughts from his mind. Part of him was sorely tempted to lay down on the clammy sand, close his eyes, and wait there until each of the nagging, damning thoughts that tangled together inside his head crumbled into dust and disappeared.

MI6 had sent him away.

Maybe he wouldn't have to return. He could remain here, in Italy, and no one would be the wiser. The villagers wouldn't bother him, and even if they tried, he was good at fending people off. There was too much mystery about him, too many things he couldn't explain: why he was there, how he got the marks on his skin, why he spoke fluent Italian with no foreign accent even though Italy clearly was not his country of origin. Eventually, most people tired of wondering about him and relegated him to the unknown man, the unsolvable equation. They left him alone.

He would have to take his happiness where he could find it, and a few weeks of solitude on the eastern Italian coast were likely to be the last time he would have such freedom for several years. There was always another impending disaster and he was always the only agent who could mitigate it. Alex despised that burden, loathed it with every fibre of his being, and his superiors knew it. They also knew that he was compelled to act by a strong sense of personal duty to the greater good, which was the only reason he hadn't quit yet. As long as they kept him on that leash of high-stakes duty and peril, Alex would remain lashed at the foot of MI6's division of special operations. Most of his colleagues had surmised as much, as far as he could tell from the increasing amounts of pitying glances that he'd started receiving in the halls of his office, and some of them had come out and asked why he didn't leave. As they pointed out, there was always someone else who could take his place. Alex usually avoided that question, mainly because he didn't know how to answer it.

There was only one other person who could hope to understand and she was a world away, embroiled in a mess of investment fraud and biochemical warfare in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York. Her name was Annaliese Hayward. She had been partnered with Alex several times in the past and like him had been blackmailed into her current position, being the illegitimate child of the Prime Minister. Her fierce loyalty to her father would have granted her a position in any national organization but MI6 wanted more than mere loyalty from their employees.

Personal loyalty is a powerful force, Alex thought, But leverage is much more useful.

He and Mrs. Jones were the only two people who knew of Annaliese's true parentage, just as she was the only one who knew what happened to him in Egypt nearly eight years ago. She'd told him one night in the Marseilles when they were crammed in the engine hold of a notorious drug runner's boat waiting for him to return.

The boat rocked against its moorings as the water grew choppy with an impending storm. Alex shifted around in the boat's hold, trying to pull his legs farther up to his chest so he wouldn't kick Annaliese where she was curled on her side, head buried in her arms as seasickness ravaged her gut. Her pale brown hair tumbled down around her shoulders, tangled from the hours spent awaiting their quarry. There was barely any light in the dank, foul-smelling space, but the LED display from his diver's watch gave just enough of a glow for Alex to see her shift and roll onto her back with a quiet groan. Her face looked clammy and pale, but perhaps that was the blue tint from the light.

"You're kidding," Alex said as he stared at her.

Annaliese shook her head with her face screwed up in discomfort. "He wasn't always Prime Minister. Besides, he barely knows I exist. As long as I'm out of the way."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." she managed a small smile. "It can't be helped. By all rights, I shouldn't have been born."

Annaliese had always wanted to go to Italy; instead, she was assigned to America and Alex was the one exiled to the coast of the Adriatic sea. They had joked in the past about travelling there on vacation with the mutual understanding that such a trip would be impossible to swing given their careers. It was as if an invisible wall separated them from the rest of the human population.

It's always going to be this way, Alex thought glumly to himself. It's always going to be lonely.

By the time the pain in his shoulder grew to the point where it overpowered the crashing waves, Alex's calves were starting to cramp from standing in one place for an extended period of time. He began the laborious ascent back to the villa while the sound of the sea faded at his back and another salted breeze swept in off the water.

Back on the bluff, he felt the back of his neck twinge in warning and he became aware that he was being watched. As he turned his head inland he caught a glimpse of an elderly man with a walking stick clenched in his right hand who stood several hundred metres away on the crest of one of the shallow hills. The man made no efforts to disguise himself. He must belong to the village.

Alex lifted his hand in a distant greeting before he went back inside the villa. His feet, though damp, left no marks on the patio.

During the following weeks, an unconventional exchange instituted itself between the stranger in the villa and the inhabitants of Sulieti. Stone dishes of roasted mutton, pork, grilled tomatoes, and other such food appeared on the villa's front doorstep along with flasks of wine, olive oil and bread, and goats milk cheese. The food was brought by several different villagers and each of them returned to Sulieti with the same report: there was no sign of life at the villa, as if whoever Giovanni Tombrello had seen could disappear and reappear at will.

In return, the dishes were always returned empty and clean in the mouth of the dusty main road, stacked up against the stones of the church. No one ever saw the man who cleaned and delivered them. The vandalism in the vineyards was halted - the vandals, young boys with nothing better to do, turned themselves in at the local authorities and were promptly put to work in the very same vineyards for decent wages - and the flocks of sheep were mysteriously replenished. No more lambs went missing and the ewes remained with the herd.

Although there was a great deal of gossip and speculation as to the means by which these things were accomplished, the general consensus among the villagers was that the man in the villa was responsible. Some said that he was a criminal living in exile to hide from his government, but others held the mysterious man to be the heir of whoever had last lived in the villa twelve years ago. The most popular explanation was also the most unlikely, and was entertained solely for the purpose of being entertaining: the man was an angel, the guardian of Sulieti.

The day the mysterious man left, Giovanni Tombrello saw him go. Leaving the villa with a small sack slung over his shoulder, the sandy-haired man picked his way down the side of the cliff with the ease of a mountain goat, climbed into a motorboat, and disappeared towards the southern tip of the Italian peninsula.

Armed with his gnarled walking stick and the gut instinct that the man would not be returning, Giovanni limped to the villa and cautiously used his stick to prod open the unlatched front door. The interior had been swept and cleaned. Fresh white plaster shone over what were once lesions and holes in the villa walls. New shingles patched up the leaks in the roof and the furniture had been dusted and arranged in each room. The kitchen table had been covered with a fresh coat of stain, matching the wooden doorframes around the house.

Who was this man?

There was a note on the kitchen counter beside the chrome-plated sink, scrawled hastily in perfect Italian with a pencil that had rolled farther down the counter.

Thanks for the food. Use the place until I come back.

Giovanni understood that the man did not expect to return for a good amount of time, probably several years if he even returned at all. The man was the kind of man whose life was measured by different standards than most others.

A quick scan of the villa revealed that there were no other identifying items; no clothing, no food, no knick knacks left lying about. Every surface had been thoroughly wiped down but the trash was somehow empty. No dust could be found in any corner or on any wall.

The villa was eerily still as if it had never been disturbed. There were no scratches on the floor from pushing the furniture around, no footprints in the bathtub or out on the patio. There were no marks on the kitchen counter from cooking.

The mysterious man was that kind of man, decided Giovanni Tombrello. The kind of man who left no marks.