fredbassett (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fredbassett) wrote2022-02-13 12:08 pm
fredbassett) wrote2022-02-13 12:08 pm
Entry tags:
Fic, To Thine Own Self Be True, Alex/Yassen, 15
Title : To Thine Own Self Be True
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Alex Rider
Rating : 15
Characters : Alex/Yassen
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : There was no such thing as a quiet life when Alex was around
A/N Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
goldarrow’s ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
primeval_denial Gift Box for the prompt “What exactly happened yesterday?”
Of all the properties he owned, Yassen particularly liked the small, unobtrusive cottage deep in the French countryside.
He used it when he wanted – or needed – to go off the grid for a while. He would stock up with enough food for however long he intended to be there and then relax by taming the garden and ensuring he had an ample supply of cut wood for his winter needs, always laying down wood on the assumption that he would leave it to season for two years before use. The simple tasks gave him physical exercise combined with some much-needed mental space away from the demands of deranged billionaires and their like, and kept him off the radar of the various intelligence agencies who veered between doing their (usually incompetent) best to kill him and tendering for his services. He used the latter to drive a hard financial bargain, generally backed up with a contract clause that stipulated a period of unofficial amnesty.
His sojourns in the countryside also kept him away from Alex Rider, a young man who had developed an irritating habit of complicating Yassen’s life in wholly unacceptable ways. After all, to shoot one employer may be regarded as a misfortune; to shoot two looks like carelessness, and Yassen tried very hard to avoid carelessness in his professional life.
All of which made it even more annoying when he opened the cottage door at dawn, intending to go for a run in the woods, and discovered MI6’s golden boy lying in a pool of his own blood just inside the gate.
For a moment, Yassen considered going back inside, waiting half an hour and then re-starting his day, in the hope that the universe might have decided to take pity on him and deposit Alex Rider on someone else’s doorstep, instead.
But history had amply demonstrated that the universe was unlikely to take pity on him, so Yassen was left with two choices: either finish what someone else had started with a quick snap of that slender neck and then bury the body underneath the new woodpile he was intending to start that afternoon or spoil the peace and quiet of his favourite safe house and attempt to put the wretched young man back together again.
Yassen was tempted, he really was, but the Causse de Gramat was rocky, with only a thin covering of poor soil on the pale limestone. The labour involved in digging a hole deep enough to keep predators at bay would be considerable, and the cloudless blue sky promised a day of unrelenting heat, so too much manual labour was an unattractive prospect. Regrettably, he couldn’t even just drop the body – alive or dead – into one of the many deep pits that pockmarked the limestone upland. The area was popular with speleologists who liked nothing more than burrowing like helmeted moles into every obscure nook and cranny, so the chances of a dead body remaining undiscovered for long enough were slight. Especially when the universe appeared to be harbouring a wholly unreasonable grudge against him.
The slumped, bloody body emitted a disproportionately loud groan for someone who appeared to have been beaten close to unconsciousness.
Yassen rolled his eyes. “Cut the theatrics, Alex. A thespian career is unlikely to await you.”
A bloodshot eye fixed him with a basilisk glare. The other eye was puffy, bruised and closed. “Was bloody good at drama when I was at school.” Alex sounded distinctly affronted, as well as almost certainly concussed.
“Really?” Yassen allowed polite scepticism to bleed into his tone, emulating the way his uninvited visitor was bleeding into the gravel of his path.
“Stop being an arsehole.” Alex coughed weakly and spat out some blood.
Yassen grimaced. Maybe the exercise of digging a deep hole in rocky ground would be good for him. It would make a change from running.
“You have just spat a gobbet of blood onto the gravel of my path. And you accuse me of being an arsehole?”
Alex coughed again, promptly gave up the unequal struggle of looking up at Yassen and pillowed his head on his arm, snuggling down into the once neat gravel.
Yassen allowed himself the indulgence of a sub-audible sigh. “I’m going to pick you up, Alex. Kindly refrain from attempting violence.”
Despite having easily equalled his father’s height, the boy – no, young man now – was surprisingly light, his lithe body lying limply in Yassen’s arms like a ragdoll cat as he was carried into the cottage and laid out on the floor of utility room where Yassen could, if needed, hose away the blood.
“What happened, Alex, and how did you find me?”
“The better part of valour is discretion…” Alex muttered.
“Henry IV, Part 1,” Yassen replied, a nasty feeling starting to develop that he was going to regret impugning Alex’s acting abilities.
Yassen carefully settled Alex’s head on an old cushion he used on an outside chair and started to equally carefully remove his filthy, bloody sweater. After an exasperating couple of minutes wrestling with a limp but uncooperative octopus, he used one of his knives to cut the garment off.
“Don’t have a spare,” Alex objected.
“I have plenty of clothes.”
“’m taller than you.” The unfocussed brown eye that wasn’t too bruised to open sharpened for a moment. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
“I shall give you the clothes, and as it’s summer, a pair of shorts and an overly large teeshirt will serve you well enough. And I am not intending to marry you, so we can forget the husbandry part.”
Alex blinked. “Was that a joke? You don’t do jokes. You’re too murdery for jokes.”
“Alex, shut up. You’re concussed and very irritating. I need to assess your injuries and decide whether to patch you up or give free rein to my murdery tendencies.”
A weak cough greeted his words and Yassen took advantage of the momentary silence to unbutton Alex’s bloodstained shirt – in deference to the wretched young man’s sensibilities – and raise him up enough to slip it off his shoulders and toss the equally wretched garment into the deep white sink. With large amounts of bleach, it might just survive.
Alex’s torso was a mass of bruises. He’d caught the wrong end of fists, boots and something wooden, if the splinters were anything to go by. There was also a knife gash down the side of his ribs that would need suturing. The wound had bled copiously but was not deep.
“I am a man more sinned against than sinning,” Alex informed him, sadly,
“Debateable.”
Yassen proceeded to carefully wash the blood from Alex’s tanned, well-muscled chest, noting that the boy who had first turned his previously well-planned life upside down was now very definitely a man and, despite the cuts and bruises marring his skin, one whi was the image of his father. Yassen indulged in another sigh. The bloody Rider clan would be his downfall. He should just have obeyed Cray’s petulant order ten years ago rather than clinging to one inconvenient moral.
Inspecting the contents of his first aid kit, Yassen said, “If I numb your side before suturing your wound, will you stop quoting Shakespeare?”
“Probably not,” Alex admitted, after appearing to give the matter due thought. “Once spent a month in a Bolivian cellar with only the Complete Works for company. Came in handy for bog paper, too.”
Yassen winced but rewarded honesty with an anaesthetic injection before cleaning the wound and drawing the edges together with small, neat stitches.
Any potentially salvageable clothes joined the shirt in the sink until Yassen was able to complete his assessment of the long, toned limbs and the rest of Alex’s torso and back. He was pleased to note that the young spy’s virtue – what was left of it, anyway – seemed to have remained intact on this occasion.
“Stop perving my arse…”
“Nothing will come of nothing,” Yassen said, aiming for indifference flavoured with a dash of inscrutability.
“King Lear, Two out of ten. Must try harder.”
“I could just leave you here on the floor when I’m finished. Or there’s still the option of just going all murdery on you.”
“You’re going to make me regret that remark, aren’t you?”
“That was my intention, yes.”
Once he was satisfied Alex wasn’t going to ruin a perfectly good pair of bedsheets, Yassen picked up the somewhat worse for wear spy and deposited him on the cottage’s only bed – otherwise known as Yassen’s bed.
Alex snugged down with an appreciative little grunt and closed his good eye.
“You need to stay awake for at least the next two hours,” Yassen informed him, wondering whether he could survive that many Shakespeare quotes before terminating their non-aggression pact with extreme prejudice.
He did, but it was a close-run thing. For a while he managed to divert Alex into a stumbling rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquies, which was an improvement on the awkward moment when Alex retorted ‘oh my prophetic soul, my uncle’ to Yassen’s demand to know why he didn’t simply hand in his notice and go to university instead of being at MI6’s beck and call for little more than minimum wage.
Yassen’s counter: “We know what we are, but not what we may be.” earned him a mutter of “Et tu, Brute?”
Yes, the soliloquies had definitely been safer ground. Yassen just needed to make sure they stayed well away from the sonnets.
They called a temporary halt to literary hostilities while Yassen fed his reluctant patient some vegetable soup made with duck stock. Alex happily pronounced it to the food of love, which did nothing whatsoever to assuage Yassen’s murdery impulses.
“What exactly happened yesterday, little Alex?” he asked, after tidying away the dishes. “Or are you intending to cling to the illusion of discretion? I do still have contacts in the DGSE and I can hardly imagine that you’ve managed to stay off their radar after whatever trail of destruction you’ve managed to leave behind.”
“I only blew up one building!”
“How very restrained of you. And then?”
“Exit, pursued by a bear,” Alex murmured sleepily, finally succumbing to the effects of adrenaline fatigue and physical exhaustion.
“Naturally.”
A moment later, the long eyelashes on Alex’s good eye fluttered open and he asked, “Why do you always help me, Yassen? You must have paid off any debt to my dad by now.”
“Go to sleep, little Alex,” he said firmly, refusing to be lured onto dangerous ground.
And for once, Alex Rider did as he was told.
****
Four hours later, after finding Alex’s stolen motorbike, breaking it down into very small parts and scattering them in municipal bins in small communes spread out over a very wide area, Yassen returned to the cottage for a much-needed shower to find his visitor still sound asleep.
Dressed only in a pair of faded denim shorts, he heated up some soup for himself and ate it accompanied by fresh bread picked up on his travels, followed by an apple from a tree by the back door of the cottage, then laid down on the bed next to Alex, to read a book of Japanese poetry.
The still sleeping young man snuggled up to him, draping an arm over Yassen’s stomach and pressing a twitching nose into his side. “You smell nice,” he muttered, in a muffled voice.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” Yassen hazarded, brushing Alex’s sweat-damp hair off his forehead and running a professional eye over his bandaged ribs.
“You’re doing the jokey thing again. It’s cute. Better than the murdery thing. Should do it more often.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“You didn’t tell me why you keep doing this.”
“No, I didn’t.” Yassen settled his arm around Alex’s shoulders and went back to his book. A few minutes later, he pressed a feather light kiss to Alex’s hair and whispered, “I am one who loved not wisely but too well.”
Alex’s arm tightened around his waist.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Alex Rider
Rating : 15
Characters : Alex/Yassen
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : There was no such thing as a quiet life when Alex was around
A/N Written for
goldarrow’s primeval_denial Gift Box for the prompt “What exactly happened yesterday?”Of all the properties he owned, Yassen particularly liked the small, unobtrusive cottage deep in the French countryside.
He used it when he wanted – or needed – to go off the grid for a while. He would stock up with enough food for however long he intended to be there and then relax by taming the garden and ensuring he had an ample supply of cut wood for his winter needs, always laying down wood on the assumption that he would leave it to season for two years before use. The simple tasks gave him physical exercise combined with some much-needed mental space away from the demands of deranged billionaires and their like, and kept him off the radar of the various intelligence agencies who veered between doing their (usually incompetent) best to kill him and tendering for his services. He used the latter to drive a hard financial bargain, generally backed up with a contract clause that stipulated a period of unofficial amnesty.
His sojourns in the countryside also kept him away from Alex Rider, a young man who had developed an irritating habit of complicating Yassen’s life in wholly unacceptable ways. After all, to shoot one employer may be regarded as a misfortune; to shoot two looks like carelessness, and Yassen tried very hard to avoid carelessness in his professional life.
All of which made it even more annoying when he opened the cottage door at dawn, intending to go for a run in the woods, and discovered MI6’s golden boy lying in a pool of his own blood just inside the gate.
For a moment, Yassen considered going back inside, waiting half an hour and then re-starting his day, in the hope that the universe might have decided to take pity on him and deposit Alex Rider on someone else’s doorstep, instead.
But history had amply demonstrated that the universe was unlikely to take pity on him, so Yassen was left with two choices: either finish what someone else had started with a quick snap of that slender neck and then bury the body underneath the new woodpile he was intending to start that afternoon or spoil the peace and quiet of his favourite safe house and attempt to put the wretched young man back together again.
Yassen was tempted, he really was, but the Causse de Gramat was rocky, with only a thin covering of poor soil on the pale limestone. The labour involved in digging a hole deep enough to keep predators at bay would be considerable, and the cloudless blue sky promised a day of unrelenting heat, so too much manual labour was an unattractive prospect. Regrettably, he couldn’t even just drop the body – alive or dead – into one of the many deep pits that pockmarked the limestone upland. The area was popular with speleologists who liked nothing more than burrowing like helmeted moles into every obscure nook and cranny, so the chances of a dead body remaining undiscovered for long enough were slight. Especially when the universe appeared to be harbouring a wholly unreasonable grudge against him.
The slumped, bloody body emitted a disproportionately loud groan for someone who appeared to have been beaten close to unconsciousness.
Yassen rolled his eyes. “Cut the theatrics, Alex. A thespian career is unlikely to await you.”
A bloodshot eye fixed him with a basilisk glare. The other eye was puffy, bruised and closed. “Was bloody good at drama when I was at school.” Alex sounded distinctly affronted, as well as almost certainly concussed.
“Really?” Yassen allowed polite scepticism to bleed into his tone, emulating the way his uninvited visitor was bleeding into the gravel of his path.
“Stop being an arsehole.” Alex coughed weakly and spat out some blood.
Yassen grimaced. Maybe the exercise of digging a deep hole in rocky ground would be good for him. It would make a change from running.
“You have just spat a gobbet of blood onto the gravel of my path. And you accuse me of being an arsehole?”
Alex coughed again, promptly gave up the unequal struggle of looking up at Yassen and pillowed his head on his arm, snuggling down into the once neat gravel.
Yassen allowed himself the indulgence of a sub-audible sigh. “I’m going to pick you up, Alex. Kindly refrain from attempting violence.”
Despite having easily equalled his father’s height, the boy – no, young man now – was surprisingly light, his lithe body lying limply in Yassen’s arms like a ragdoll cat as he was carried into the cottage and laid out on the floor of utility room where Yassen could, if needed, hose away the blood.
“What happened, Alex, and how did you find me?”
“The better part of valour is discretion…” Alex muttered.
“Henry IV, Part 1,” Yassen replied, a nasty feeling starting to develop that he was going to regret impugning Alex’s acting abilities.
Yassen carefully settled Alex’s head on an old cushion he used on an outside chair and started to equally carefully remove his filthy, bloody sweater. After an exasperating couple of minutes wrestling with a limp but uncooperative octopus, he used one of his knives to cut the garment off.
“Don’t have a spare,” Alex objected.
“I have plenty of clothes.”
“’m taller than you.” The unfocussed brown eye that wasn’t too bruised to open sharpened for a moment. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
“I shall give you the clothes, and as it’s summer, a pair of shorts and an overly large teeshirt will serve you well enough. And I am not intending to marry you, so we can forget the husbandry part.”
Alex blinked. “Was that a joke? You don’t do jokes. You’re too murdery for jokes.”
“Alex, shut up. You’re concussed and very irritating. I need to assess your injuries and decide whether to patch you up or give free rein to my murdery tendencies.”
A weak cough greeted his words and Yassen took advantage of the momentary silence to unbutton Alex’s bloodstained shirt – in deference to the wretched young man’s sensibilities – and raise him up enough to slip it off his shoulders and toss the equally wretched garment into the deep white sink. With large amounts of bleach, it might just survive.
Alex’s torso was a mass of bruises. He’d caught the wrong end of fists, boots and something wooden, if the splinters were anything to go by. There was also a knife gash down the side of his ribs that would need suturing. The wound had bled copiously but was not deep.
“I am a man more sinned against than sinning,” Alex informed him, sadly,
“Debateable.”
Yassen proceeded to carefully wash the blood from Alex’s tanned, well-muscled chest, noting that the boy who had first turned his previously well-planned life upside down was now very definitely a man and, despite the cuts and bruises marring his skin, one whi was the image of his father. Yassen indulged in another sigh. The bloody Rider clan would be his downfall. He should just have obeyed Cray’s petulant order ten years ago rather than clinging to one inconvenient moral.
Inspecting the contents of his first aid kit, Yassen said, “If I numb your side before suturing your wound, will you stop quoting Shakespeare?”
“Probably not,” Alex admitted, after appearing to give the matter due thought. “Once spent a month in a Bolivian cellar with only the Complete Works for company. Came in handy for bog paper, too.”
Yassen winced but rewarded honesty with an anaesthetic injection before cleaning the wound and drawing the edges together with small, neat stitches.
Any potentially salvageable clothes joined the shirt in the sink until Yassen was able to complete his assessment of the long, toned limbs and the rest of Alex’s torso and back. He was pleased to note that the young spy’s virtue – what was left of it, anyway – seemed to have remained intact on this occasion.
“Stop perving my arse…”
“Nothing will come of nothing,” Yassen said, aiming for indifference flavoured with a dash of inscrutability.
“King Lear, Two out of ten. Must try harder.”
“I could just leave you here on the floor when I’m finished. Or there’s still the option of just going all murdery on you.”
“You’re going to make me regret that remark, aren’t you?”
“That was my intention, yes.”
Once he was satisfied Alex wasn’t going to ruin a perfectly good pair of bedsheets, Yassen picked up the somewhat worse for wear spy and deposited him on the cottage’s only bed – otherwise known as Yassen’s bed.
Alex snugged down with an appreciative little grunt and closed his good eye.
“You need to stay awake for at least the next two hours,” Yassen informed him, wondering whether he could survive that many Shakespeare quotes before terminating their non-aggression pact with extreme prejudice.
He did, but it was a close-run thing. For a while he managed to divert Alex into a stumbling rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquies, which was an improvement on the awkward moment when Alex retorted ‘oh my prophetic soul, my uncle’ to Yassen’s demand to know why he didn’t simply hand in his notice and go to university instead of being at MI6’s beck and call for little more than minimum wage.
Yassen’s counter: “We know what we are, but not what we may be.” earned him a mutter of “Et tu, Brute?”
Yes, the soliloquies had definitely been safer ground. Yassen just needed to make sure they stayed well away from the sonnets.
They called a temporary halt to literary hostilities while Yassen fed his reluctant patient some vegetable soup made with duck stock. Alex happily pronounced it to the food of love, which did nothing whatsoever to assuage Yassen’s murdery impulses.
“What exactly happened yesterday, little Alex?” he asked, after tidying away the dishes. “Or are you intending to cling to the illusion of discretion? I do still have contacts in the DGSE and I can hardly imagine that you’ve managed to stay off their radar after whatever trail of destruction you’ve managed to leave behind.”
“I only blew up one building!”
“How very restrained of you. And then?”
“Exit, pursued by a bear,” Alex murmured sleepily, finally succumbing to the effects of adrenaline fatigue and physical exhaustion.
“Naturally.”
A moment later, the long eyelashes on Alex’s good eye fluttered open and he asked, “Why do you always help me, Yassen? You must have paid off any debt to my dad by now.”
“Go to sleep, little Alex,” he said firmly, refusing to be lured onto dangerous ground.
And for once, Alex Rider did as he was told.
****
Four hours later, after finding Alex’s stolen motorbike, breaking it down into very small parts and scattering them in municipal bins in small communes spread out over a very wide area, Yassen returned to the cottage for a much-needed shower to find his visitor still sound asleep.
Dressed only in a pair of faded denim shorts, he heated up some soup for himself and ate it accompanied by fresh bread picked up on his travels, followed by an apple from a tree by the back door of the cottage, then laid down on the bed next to Alex, to read a book of Japanese poetry.
The still sleeping young man snuggled up to him, draping an arm over Yassen’s stomach and pressing a twitching nose into his side. “You smell nice,” he muttered, in a muffled voice.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” Yassen hazarded, brushing Alex’s sweat-damp hair off his forehead and running a professional eye over his bandaged ribs.
“You’re doing the jokey thing again. It’s cute. Better than the murdery thing. Should do it more often.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“You didn’t tell me why you keep doing this.”
“No, I didn’t.” Yassen settled his arm around Alex’s shoulders and went back to his book. A few minutes later, he pressed a feather light kiss to Alex’s hair and whispered, “I am one who loved not wisely but too well.”
Alex’s arm tightened around his waist.
no subject
After all, to shoot one employer may be regarded as a misfortune; to shoot two looks like carelessness,
*snorfles*
LOL for Yassen trying to decide whether to help Alex or just pretend he isn't there!
The grave-digging nope and "speleologists who liked nothing more than burrowing like helmeted moles into every obscure nook and cranny" made me giggle madly.
Aw, poor Yassen, the universe having a grudge!
"I’m going to pick you up, Alex. Kindly refrain from attempting violence.”
Smart Yassen!
LOL For "murdery tendencies"
“I am a man more sinned against than sinning,” Alex informed him, sadly,
“Debateable.”
*Rolls around laughing*
“You’re going to make me regret that remark, aren’t you?”
“That was my intention, yes.”
Oh, gawd, my sides!
Yassen just needed to make sure they stayed well away from the sonnets.
Oh, yes, Yassen, stay well away from Sonnet 116!
no subject
no subject
Though not killing Alex because it was hard to dig the grave was amusing :)
Gorgeous fic!!
no subject
Digging a big hole over there in the heat would be silly.
Ad if he tells himself that often enough, he might even believe it.
no subject