By the lord, it's been a long time since I updated this. Here! Have an update!
This may be somewhat, um... less funny that the other chapters. (shrugs) I have a plan, my friends, a proper plan, and the steam shall be picked up next chapter.
Ahem. Yes.
Right! Dedicated, as always, to Von and my brother. Von gets a mention because of all the stuff she puts up with from me, and also, I'm doing this experiment for Philosphy classes, I want to find out wether I can compliment her into getting annoyed with me. :D And my brother? Well, it'd annoy the hell out of him, and that's always been a good enough reason for me to do just about anything. :P
DISCLAIMER: Yes! Yes, tis all mine, mine, I tell you, mine, mine mine!!! That, and my enormous legal fees incurred by my battle with Mr. Horowitz for those bookrights, it's all miiiine!!
(coughs) Yes. Right.
John dragged a hand down his face. "We've got time."
Yassen favoured him with his most insouciant smile. "You might have, yogodka," Yassen enjoyed infuriating his one-time mentor with the wholly inappropriate nickname, which, John had soon found out, meant 'little berry' in Russian, and was most commonly used between lovers, "But I have a briefing in half an hour."
"Half an hour will be plenty of time." John said, inexorable. "What. Did. You. Do?"
"Mr. Smithers helped." Alex piped up again, from his position behind Yassen, sheltering, as he was, behind the slender man, safely hidden from the parental wrath. He had been placed there by Yassen himself, in a rare moment of self-sacrifice, and, from the expression on the Russian's face, he was beginning to regret it.
"So you've said." John replied, without taking his eyes off Yassen. "So, in what way did Mr. Smithers help?"
"Well, he had these rats." Alex said, peeking out from behind Yassen, and meeting his father's eyes with an irrepressible dimpled grin. "He said – he was s'posed to practice things on them, like, sums and things." The little boy frowned for a second, apparently a little confused as to how one could practice sums 'and things' on rats, but he shook off his momentary confusion, and continued, brightly. "'nyway, Mr. Smithers said that he didn't like testing things on them, so he just kept them. For pets. And he let me play with one of them, because I told him how I didn't have a pet… and then Mr. Yassen came along, and Mr. Smithers was busy, so he said I should go with Mr. Yassen. But I forgot to put Snowy back with his friends."
John resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose in favour of gritting his teeth. "Who's 'Snowy'?" he asked. He couldn't have packed more distaste into that one word if he'd tried.
"The rat." Alex said, promptly. "Because he was white. It was 'snowy' or 'reddy'. Because he had red eyes. Mr. Smithers said that was cos he was ablino."
"Albino, you mean, Alex." Yassen corrected, in a stage whisper.
"Yeah. That." He grinned up at his father.
"So you bought 'snowy' up here, and he got away, am I right?" John asked, very, very quietly.
Alex shuffled a little. "Sort of." He admitted, finally. "I didn't know that people were going to scream, though!" he added, quickly. "Mr. Yassen said that people liked rats."
John glared at his partner, who simply shrugged. "Children need to learn that they can't always trust adults to tell the truth." He said, calmly.
"Not at seven years old, they don't!" John hissed. He could feel the headache to end all headaches coming on, and made a little prophecy, then and there, that painkillers were going to be involved in his near future. "And Alex doesn't need to worry about suspicion and intrigue in his every day life because Alex is not going to be a spy!!"
Yassen frowned, a tiny crease on his forehead, which was about the nearest he got to anything resembling a 'tell', in terms of his emotions. "Why not?" he grinned, suddenly. "I bet he'd be darling at it."
"Why's Mr. Yassen calling you 'darling', Daddy?" Alex piped up.
"Why doesn't this place have day-care?" John moaned.
John didn't stay around to help clear up the situation his son had caused, though he did make sure that Alex apologised personally – and rather charmingly – to all of the secretaries, and the various other personnel, whom he had shocked. They all forgave him on the spot, gushing about how 'sweet and innocent' he looked with 'those big brown eyes and adorable little smile'. John found himself wishing, rather sourly, that Alex had had to work harder for forgiveness.
He took Alex back to his office, and sat him on the sofa with a book of fairytales he found in the backpack Helen had so-hurriedly prepared for their son that morning, and a Gameboy that went with it.
The next hour passed in blissful silence, while Alex read happily, and killed a few hours killing a few levels on the electronic toy he had literally moaned and hinted his mother into buying for him. John made a mental note to send a personal letter of thanks to 'Nintendo' for creating the otherwise-irritating gadget.
It was for that reason that, when Lucy, his secretary, handed him a memo for a meeting Halton 'recommended' that he attend – with a wary glance at Alex, against whom she had taken something of a suspicion, ever since the incident with her password – John only hesitated momentarily before nodding.
"OK." He said, slowly, "I'm on my way. Lucy, um… Oktav, will be staying in my office; make sure he doesn't get out, alright?"
"But you've got confidential things in your office, sir…!" she protested, worriedly.
"I've locked them away in the drawers." John said, with a small, rather tight, smile.
"I'm sure he can pick locks easily enough…" she tried, but John just frowned, lightly.
"For heavens sake, Lucy, he's a seven-year-old, not a crime lord." The look Lucy gave him suggested that, in this case, she was highly doubtful that the two epithets needed to be separated. "He's not going to go through my drawers. And even if he did, what would he do with the information he'd get?"
Lucy was obviously running through the answers to that, but caught John's eye, and nodded, quickly. "Yes, sir." She agreed, quietly. "So – Oktav – mustn't leave the office; I'll make sure that he stays safely in there."
"Thank you." he said, sincerely, before giving Alex strict instructions to behave himself, and heading up to the meeting.
The meeting overran by a good half hour, and John's thoughts had kept inadvertently wandering to his son, three floors below, and in god-only-knew-how-much trouble. It wasn't that John didn't love Alex – on the contrary, he loved him a great deal – but he was under no illusions about how much of a troublemaker his boy was, and, in his estimation, father-son bonding should be left firmly outside the workplace.
At least, that was his estimation after today.
But on the whole, he was rather confident about the rest of the day; it was lunchtime, he could feed Alex – he was sure the canteen would have something his boy would like, and if not, he could always take Alex out for a meal somewhere, for some proper father-son interaction, or whatever this scheme was for… and really, how much time did that school think that busy, working fathers were going to have for their children while they were at work?
Resolutely, he forced those thoughts away, and went back to planning, in the last few 'tying-up' minutes of the meeting – a review of the new nerve poisons, and a couple of examples where they were used in the field; the subject was a source of some contention, and the aim was the make sure that it was resolved, so they could be either used or discarded – how he was going to finish the day with Alex. They could get something to eat, he could have a decent talk with the kid, something he freely admitted he didn't have a lot of time for… then, after that, Alex could settle down on the sofa and either sleep, or just keep quiet for a bit, he, John, could do some work, and then maybe show Alex around the 'safer' area of the building.
It was all perfectly safe and planned.
Because John liked to keep that certain distance between his home life, where everything, to a large extent, was now safe and planned and organised, and his work, where everything was liable to fall apart at any moment, and because Alex was a firm part of his 'home' life, it didn't seriously occur to John that all his planning might not work out along the lines he'd set out.
When the meeting ended, he left discussing the problem with Yassen, a habit the pair of them had got into over the years, a casual dissection of whichever ordeal they had most recently gone through, be it assignment, or long meeting. So Yassen was with him when he got back to his office; Lucy was working at her desk, calm and collected as usual – nothing seemed out of place. He handed her his notes from the meeting, asking her to type them up for him, and headed into his office proper.
There were papers everywhere, and no Alex to be seen.
John and Yassen exchanged glances, before turning on their heels and striding out of the office, practically in unison. Outside the door, in the corridor, with nothing more than a glance, and a quick sharp 'upper' from John, answered by a nod from Yassen, to serve as communication, they split up, each preparing to do a sweep of the building – this time, with John taking the upper floors, and Yassen the lower.
It didn't take long to find Alex, thankfully – but then, it rarely did. He was, as was getting to be the custom, surrounded by adoring and faintly maternal women, along with, somewhat bizarrely, one man, who was cooing over the 'little angel' just as enthusiastically as all of the others there.
Yassen heaved a sigh of relief – he wouldn't have wanted to explain to his partner that his seven year old was missing, they'd all seen the effects of that too clearly with Tulip Jones – and cut effortlessly through the crowd to Alex, who was looking frankly terrified at all the attention he'd been receiving.
"Oktav." He said, holding out a hand, and speaking in Polish, hoping that Alex hadn't already blown his cover. "I have to take you back to Mr. Rider's office now."
Alex grasped his hand readily, apparently eager to be away from all the people who had swooped down on him. "I'm sorry I left." He muttered, looking at the ground, slipping easily into the language switch. "I know I shouldn't have, but it was boring in the office…and the lady wouldn't play with me, she said I was a bad boy…" he looked up at Yassen, who could have sworn he felt his heart melting into a big gooey pile of sickly sweet marshmallow gunk, as he met those enormous brown eyes. Him! A hardened assassin, spy and information gatherer! Melting under the gaze of a seven year old! But he was really undone by the next line. "Am I really a bad boy, Mr. Yassen?"
The little lower lip wobbled dangerously, and those enormous brown eyes filled with tears. Yassen bit his own lip for a second, willing himself not to be so unforgivably sappy, to march the boy back to John and leave him there. That was what he'd do… he take him back to John, and then get far, far away from those eyes, and the catch in that little voice, and never end up saying such stupid, sappy things…
"…of course you're not a bad boy." A voice he distantly recognised as his own said, and he just managed to cut himself off before he added something along the lines of 'you're a very good boy, and I wuv oo', or something equally nauseating. "Come along."
Alex trotted happily along beside Yassen, chattering aimlessly – thankfully in Polish – about his impromptu trips around the building. "…and I found a secret passageway that goes all the way down to the bottom, Mr. Yassen!" he chirped, and Yassen very nearly froze in horror. "Did you want to see?"
Yassen opened his mouth to answer when John appeared round the corner. "Oh, thank God!" he said, a look of relief on his face Yassen wasn't soon going to forget, and Alex grinned.
"Daddy!" he cried, and headed over to John, who picked him up and hugged him, apparently too relieved to be angry about the earlier events of the day.
Then he recovered himself, realised that he was hugging a small boy in the middle of Britain's elite Secret Service Headquarters, and put Alex down, clearing his throat, and saying, a little awkwardly. "Why was my office in such a mess, Alex?"
Alex looked up at him, and Yassen, still stood there watching, wondered how John could possibly be immune to those eyes. "Well, Daddy…" he scuffed his foot on the floor, and refused to meet John's eyes. "You'll be angry…"
"Oh. God." John sighed, casting his eyes upwards. "Why me?" he looked back at Alex, fatalistic expression firmly in place. "What did you do this time?"
(grin) Enjoy?
-ami xxxx