fredbassett

Title : Complicated, Part 4 of 8
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Alex Rider
Rating : 15
Characters : Alex/Yassen
Word Count: 24,400
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Against his better judgement, Alex agrees to do a job for MI6. A nice, simple job that doesn’t include power-crazed billionaires. Just righting a wrong that affects tens of thousands of teenagers. What could possibly go wrong? Then things get complicated. They always do where Alex is concerned.

Three days later, Yassen was still coughing, still weak, and still the very disgruntled owner of a very a wonky temperature control. If he’d been a car, he’d have failed his MOT on multiple counts.

The Hobbit had been followed by The Lord of the Rings. By the Monday afternoon of Alex’s quarantine with an extremely ill assassin, the Fellowship had left Rivendell behind and were making their way steadily through Eregion.

Yassen’s breathing difficulties were also as bad as ever, although he was trying to claim that the frequency of the really bad attacks had diminished, Alex wasn’t convinced. He’d fed Yassen chicken soup, tomato soup and had even managed to get some pasta in mushroom sauce down him. Yassen had dutifully done his best to eat and drink whatever Alex put in front of him. Providing he did that, Alex allowed him hot toddies at night to make a change from the mint tea with honey and lemon. When Alex ran out of the necessary ingredients, he unashamedly tapped Smithers up for more, reasoning that if MI6 had got him into this mess, the least they could do was bail him out when he failed to get an online delivery of what he needed, including decent whisky. Very decent whisky.

Alex had to change the bedding every day as a result of the temperature fluctuations that could leave Yassen sweating uncontrollably one minute and then shivering the next. He quickly reached a newfound admiration for all the work Jack had done to keep the Rider household running smoothly and decided that if his washing machine or drier packed up through overuse, he’d send the bill for the repair or replacement to Mrs Jones.

When necessary, he helped Yassen to the toilet and into the shower, mopped the sweat from his forehead and even massaged the cramp from his calf one night, feeling the muscles jumping and contracting under his fingers as he tried to ignore the strangely intimate nature of the relationship that had grown up between them, while in other ways, they remained as distant from each other as ever.

In return for everything Alex was doing for him, Yassen told the story of how the man he’d known as Hunter had set him up to fail his graduation assignment with Scorpia by giving him a too-short, too-blunt knife and telling him to butcher a man to death. From what Yassen said – and Alex had no reason to disbelieve him – John Rider had done his best to turn him away from Scorpia, but the knowledge that his mentor was living a lie had eventually served to push Yassen into their arms. He’d not betrayed Hunter to them, nor had he been sure whether Scorpia or MI6 had been responsible for the death of the man he’d loved, but without John Rider, Yassen had only seen one direction his life could take, and he’d thrown himself into that life and not looked back. Or so he claimed…

Alex learned more about his father from Yassen than he’d ever learned from Ian. and the fundamental difference was that he trusted Yassen to tell him the truth, even if that truth was sometimes unpalatable.

In return, Yassen accepted Alex’s occasional barbed comments and flashes of temper without protest. He never sought to excuse his actions but nor did he glory in them. Alex had quickly learnt that there was no prospect of engaging the contract killer in any discussion about the morality of his work, but he did get the strong impression that for the past two years, Yassen had taken very few jobs, and that none of the ones he’d accepted had involved lethal force.

The days passed surprisingly quickly. Alex slept very little, constantly alert to the sound of Yassen’s breathing. The packet of earplugs sat on his bedside table, unopened. Every five hours he insisted on Yassen taking painkillers and anti-inflammatories, making sure he washed them down with fizzy water or mint tea, depending on whether he needed warming up or cooling down.

They settled into a routine and, in a way that he didn’t care to examine too closely, Alex found that he enjoyed the other man’s company. By the time Yassen could talk for more than a few sentences heavily punctuated by coughing fits, he’d seemed content to answer Alex’s questions, and even asked some of his own in return.

“Why did you listen to me when I told you to find Scorpia but not when I told you to leave this life behind?”

Alex squirmed internally under the cool stare that Yassen turned onto him, feeling uncomfortably like a butterfly pinned onto a board by a zealous collector. “I was 14. Not a good age for taking advice from strange adults who’d been trying to kill me.”

“You mean you wouldn’t have come with me to see puppies?”

“You never told me there’d be puppies. That might have made all the difference.”

“So why Scorpia?”

“I was a 14-year-old adrenaline junkie. I hoped they might have some answers. The trouble was I didn’t know what the questions were.”

“And yet you eventually walked away from that life, took your exams and went to university.”

“I lost my youthful looks.”

Yassen reached up and brushed an untidy lock of hair back from Alex’s forehead. The light touch sent an unaccustomed shiver down his spine. “That’s no bad thing.”

“Tomato soup or chicken?” Yassen wasn’t the only one who could change the subject when it suited him.

Yassen looked amused. “Is mushroom an option?”

“Might be.” Alex jumped up from where he’d been sitting on the edge of the bed. The sensation of Yassen’s fingertips grazing his skin had left him jittery, unsure whether to lean into the touch or pull back from it. He’d settled for deflection and Yassen clearly knew that.

When he returned with two bowls of mushroom soup, they ate in companionable silence then Alex retreated to the haven of the armchair and went back to the fellowship’s journey through the mines of Moria.

By the time Gandalf was confronting the balrog, it was obvious that Yassen had drifted from a light, partially aware doze into a deeper sleep. Alex put the book on the floor and settled down to catch up with the news. The various online newspapers were still dancing around with glee about the PM’s U-turn on the A level results, while also taking plenty of time to gloat over the downfall of his closest advisor. Alex hadn’t managed to extract any information from Yassen as to whether he’d planted the evidence or whether Alex had inadvertently done that via Smithers’ flash drive. If it was a stitch up, it was a bloody good one. The damage was irreversible and as a result, what passed for sanity among the current crop of wankpuffins in government had finally prevailed. And if it wasn’t a stitch up, the bastard had deserved outing. Alex couldn’t muster any sympathy for the man. He’d screwed over far too many people’s lives to deserve that. Alex didn’t have any qualms over making that sort of non-lethal moral judgment.

Taking care not to disturb Yassen’s all too fragile hold on sleep, Alex stood up and made his way down to the kitchen. He took the request for mushroom soup as a sign that the man’s appetite was starting to come back and after a week of existing on nothing more than soup and the occasional baked potato, Alex was ready for a change, as well. Smithers had included some extra supplies in with the last delivery of lemons, honey, whisky and painkillers and Alex decided it was time he did something with them.

He’d cooked for himself and his flatmates often enough to know what to do with a chicken, especially when it came in a roasting bag and its own foil tray, so he bunged it in the oven and set the timer.

He needed a good work out, and if he couldn’t leave the house, he could still make use of the garden. At least now he could leave Yassen alone for a couple of hours without an irrational fear that the bloody man would cough so much that he’d puncture his lung or cough himself sick again and then choke on his own vomit. For someone who had always seemed so composed and in control, being ill had clearly tilted Yassen’s world uncomfortably on its axis, but when Alex had pointed that out, Yassen had just shrugged and muttered something about not getting sick very often.

Throwing on a pair of shorts and teeshirt instead of his light cotton top and jogging pants, Alex went outside to start warming up. Working out in the late afternoon summer sun forced the jitters out of his body, cleared his mind and left him with sweat shining on his skin, his heart hammering in his chest and his hair plastered damply to his head. When the timer went off on the oven, Alex threw a packet of Aunt Bessie’s frozen roast spuds onto a tray and stuck them into the top oven while he turned the bottom one on to keep the chicken warm. He’d have plenty of time to shower and change before chucking some frozen peas into the microwave and rounding his daring culinary act off with some instant gravy. Jamie Oliver could eat his fucking heart out. That classed for cordon bleu in the student flats Alex had inhabited.

As he got to the stop of the stairs, he could hear the shower running in the spare bedroom. Yassen must have been feeling brighter to make it in there by himself. Alex turned to go into his own room when a muffled thud made him break into a run.

He wasn’t surprised to find his houseguest slumped on his arse against the wall of the shower, water streaming down on him as he coughed weakly.

Alex rolled his eyes, feeling like an irritated parent whose kid had taken the stabilisers off a bike and then pitched headfirst into the kerb. “You’re a bloody idiot, what are you?”

Yassen looked up, a flash of rueful humour in his blue eyes. “Remind me again who dislocated my knee?”

“Remind me again who took an assignment when he was down with coronavirus?” Alex pulled off his teeshirt and shoved his shorts off his hips, stepping out of them and into the shower to pull Yassen to his feet.

“You could have left them on. They’re as sweat soaked as you are.”

“Ugh, wet clothes, no thank you. And it’s not like I’ve got anything you’ve not seen before. I;e been undressed by enough homicidal maniacs and their minions not to care any more. Now lean against the wall and pass me the gel. I need a wash and so do you.”

Instead, Yassen obliged by squirting a dollop of shampoo onto Alex’s hair and rubbing it in. He followed that by splashing eucalyptus scented shower gel over Alex’s chest and back, watching with his almost ever-present air of amusement as Alex quickly soaped his armpits and proceeded to get rid of the sweat from his skin and his hair.

“Are you cooking?”

“No, I’m naked in the shower with a Russian assassin who’s just about to scrub my back for me.” That sentence was closely followed by the words oh fuck sounding loudly inside his head as Yassen took hold of the small loofah and proceeded to do exactly that. To take his mind off the delicious scratch against his frighteningly over-sensitive skin, Alex looked over his shoulder and commented. “Your sense of smell must coming back.”

Yassen wrinkled his nose and stared pointedly at Alex’s armpits. “Yes, I do believe it is.”

To Alex’s horror, he felt a blush start to rise up his cheeks and wondered if there was anything in the bathroom he could use to trigger a controlled explosion as a distraction. Hell, he’d even take an uncontrolled explosion, after all, why change the habit of a lifetime? He shouldn’t be blushing just because Yassen was teasing him about the smell of his sweat.

“I’d be in my own bloody shower if you hadn’t tried to do too much, so stop taking the piss and finish scrubbing my back, if that isn’t too much effort, then I’ll go back to slaving over a hot stove just so you can eat something more than soup and pasta.”

Yassen dragged the loofah down his back in one long scrape that set Alex’s nerves on fire. Despite his blasé words to Yassen, it had taken Alex several years to be comfortable being naked around other people, but his two years with the caving club had instilled in him a caver’s casual attitude to nudity and had helped him get over his embarrassment over his scars.

“Roast chicken?”

“Roast chicken, roast potatoes, peas and gravy,” Alex announced proudly, to distract himself from a sudden urge to ask Yassen to scratch the itch on his right shoulder blade.

“Sounds wonderful. And smells it, too.”

The loofah made its way unerringly to the itchy spot.

Alex gasped. “I swear you can read minds.”

“I could see your muscle twitching.” Yassen scrubbed harder and Alex very nearly purred in contentment. There were few things more satisfying than having someone else scratch an itch in exactly the right spot. Well, apart from sex, and it was a while since he’d had any of that …

Alex’s cock twitched and he had to fight had to stop himself jumping like a scalded cat. “Thanks. I’d better make sure the spuds aren’t burning.” He stepped away from Yassen and quickly pulled open the sliding door, grabbing a towel to cover any more embarrassment. “Come on, lean on me and let’s get you dried and back to bed before you end up on the floor again.”

“That would be unfortunate,” Yassen acknowledged. “Once was bad enough.”

When Alex finished the cooking, he served up a decent sized portion for himself and plated a smaller amount for Yassen that he took upstairs on a beanbag tray that Jack had bought when he’d been in bed with an absolutely stinker of a cold.

Yassen ate slowly and methodically, taking the time to compliment Alex on the food. In contrast, Alex polished off his plateful with indecent haste and promptly went back for seconds, earning him another amused look. By the time Alex took their plates downstairs, Yassen had started to shiver again, so the next trip back up to the bedroom involved a large hot toddy, the next round of tablets and a hot water bottle. Yassen accepted them all with grateful thanks.

“You’ve been injured a lot, but you’re not used to being ill.”

“You said that two days ago.”

“I know. And when I said it before, you got evasive and changed the subject. Why?”

“I was a healthy child and I’m now a healthy adult. Apart from this damned virus.”

“Which you’re taking as a personal insult.”

Yassen’s lips quirked into a half smile. “Do you blame me?”

“No, but I will if I catch it.”

“Which you are currently showing no signs of doing, so maybe I should be querying that?”

“Nice try but no dice. Why don’t you get sick?”

“Clean living.”

“You drink.”

“In moderation.”

“Do you know how much whisky goes into those hot toddies you’re so keen on?”

A hacking cough was the only answer he got for several minutes. When he was able to resume sipping from the mug, Yassen met Alex’s eyes and said quietly, “When I was little more than a child, I was injected with something to guard me against a biologically engineered anthrax virus. Since then, I haven’t even had the common cold.”

Alex opened his mouth to ask another question but was forestalled by another bout of coughing.

When Yassen finally leaned back against the pillows, exhausted, Alex didn’t press the point, instead he picked up the book and started reading again, pushing away thoughts of why the hell someone would have needed to give a kid something like that, or why a drug that kept colds at bay had proved ineffective against a new virus.

Like everything to do with Yassen Gregorovich, one piece of information led inexorably to a dozen other questions.

Alex was prepared to bide his time. He was better at the whole patience thing than he had been at 14.

And he hadn’t blown anything up for years.