This is my submission for this year's fic exchange. It was very very fun to write. I hope whoever requested the prompt is satisfied! My reasoning was that everybody likes Smithers, right? Or at least everybody in our AR discord does. I hope you've read Scorpia Rising, or some of it might be a little confusing...

Anyway, I hope anybody reading this has a happy Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, or whatever else you may celebrate! And thank you to the SpyFest mods (wolfern and dalekchung) for organising the fic exchange and keeping the fandom alive! Sorry for being That Person you have to chase up about sign up deadlines.

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The first time they asked Derek Smithers to design a set of gadgets for a fourteen-year-old, he had thought they were joking. He had thought it was purely hypothetical. A test, to see what he come up with.

"Get it done as quickly as you can," said Jones, but that was what Jones always said. He hadn't thought she was serious.

It had been fun, he had to admit. The truth was that he hadn't had a good challenge like that in a long time, and Smithers always liked a challenge. Maybe a little too much. It was that part of him that had gotten him into MI6 in the first place. Well, it had landed him in a maximum security police interrogation room, first. Smithers had mixed in very different circles back then. It had been a competition, and when one of his competitors had hacked into the British government mainframe - well. Smithers never liked losing.

That was how he'd first met Alan Blunt. Blunt had sat on the other side of the table, his grey lips pursed, surveying Smithers with sharp, narrowed eyes. And luckily for Smithers, he had seen a spark of potential in a slightly manic, twenty-three-year-old Irish dropout who spent so much time on the dark web that he had already landed himself on multiple watch lists. He had taken Smithers on, put him to the test, and luckily for both of them, Smithers had turned out to be very, very good at making gadgets.

Smithers liked the creativity that brought him; the Rider situation. A fourteen-year-old. A millionaire. The distant Cornish coast...

It was something fresh. Something new. These days, his work was so repetitive. It was all about making earpieces smaller and smaller and smaller, and where was the fun in that? Yes, Smithers had thought it was a quaint little exercise set up by Mr Blunt. It was entertaining, but it couldn't possibly by anything but hypothetical.

And then Alex Rider had walked through the doors of the Royal and General Bank, and Smithers realised the truth.

Derek Smithers was a wearer of masks. In more ways than one. But by far the greatest mask that he wore was the one that almost nobody knew about. The fat suit had been a condition of his contract with MI6. Only Blunt had ever seen him without it. Smithers knew, as soon as he took this job, that one day, he would need a way out. He was a builder, and so he had built himself an escape route, that he knew would save his life one day, when the time came that he needed to run. Everybody in this business - agent or otherwise - had their own plan, in the back of their mind.

Smithers was not an overly sentimental man, but as soon as he set eyes on Alex Rider, his chest ached with sympathy. Alex Rider had no way out, and it was painfully obvious.

The boy looked ever so young. Smithers could tell in an instant that he was intelligent, but his eyes were still ever so round and wide.

And so Smithers put on his gaudiest smile and polished his most ridiculous, over-the-top accent, and gathered up the gadgets he had made with such enthusiasm for a boy he didn't think was real. He doubted young Alex would survive the mission. But still, Smithers was still determined to show him that at least one person in MI6 was on his side, before they threw him to the wolves.

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It really was incredible how MI6 treated their gadget-maker, sometimes. If he had six months before every mission - two months, even - he could design far better stuff than what he eventually had to give the agents. But all too often, he'd walk into the office on Monday morning and be told that they were sending Perkins into an active war zone in nothing but his pyjamas on Wednesday, and could Smithers whip up something to save him from certain death in the time between now and then? Sometimes he complained that Alan Blunt must think he pulled the gadgets out of a magician's hat, rather than spend hours and hours trying to think around the problem, before spending yet more painstaking hours trying to actually turn the ideas into a reality.

Smithers wasn't their only gadget-maker – thank the Lord – but he was their best one.

There were corners that he usually could afford to cut. There was a standard set of gadgets, a template, that he could use for almost every agent. A few weapons; a tracking device.

But when Alex came along, Smithers knew it would be different.

Alex had survived his first mission, against all odds. But every time Alex he walked into his workshop, Smithers saw less and less of the boy who had walked in the first time. That innocence had soon vanished, as his eyes became very hard, very quickly.

It had been obvious from the start that MI6 were not playing by the rules, but the implications of that really sunk in on his second mission. Smithers had been the one who received the shrill alarm, that told him Alex had activated the distress signal. He had informed Blunt and Jones within minutes. But Alex wasn't pulled from the mission. Instead, they waited.

Smithers knew, from that moment onwards, that he was the only one in MI6 who truly had Alex's interests at heart. Alex was a dangerous toy to have landed in MI6's lap. They had no obligations, when it came to him; there no guardians, no relatives. They could do whatever they liked, and it sent a shudder down Smithers' spine.

They were ruthless people. Necessary. But still ruthless.

When it came to Alex's gadgets, there was no cutting corners. Smithers made prototypes for each and every one, testing them rigorously and eliminating any flaws before he sent Alex into the field with them. Alex was an agent like his uncle had been: he had a tendency for taking risks, for cutting things close. If Smithers' hand slipped - if he forgot a single component of any device - Alex would be dead in the water. He prepared the gadgets months in advance, and them sit on the shelves of his workshop, knowing that Alex would be called back in eventually, despite MI6's recurring promises to leave him alone this time, because they would never be able to resist. And when it happened, when Smithers was given two days' notice that Alex was being sent into the field, he pulled his first all-nighter since university, making sure everything was ready in time.

He didn't let on about this, of course. When Alex walked into his workshop, Smithers would flash a cheery smile; "Here's something I've had lying around", as if he'd forgotten he was coming. He might as well protect Alex's pride, he reasoned, since he had committed to protecting the rest of him.

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"Why don't you just stop making them?" asked his colleague, one day.

Her name was Zoe, and she was a new addition to the Q department. She was bright, very bright. Half British and half American. Smithers wasn't as old as he pretended to be, but he found himself wondering whether young Zoe was closer to his age or Alex's.

"If you hate it so much," she prompted. "Making the gadgets for Agent Rider. Why don't you just stop?"

Agent Rider. This was Alex's sixth mission. Or was it his eighth? It had gotten very complicated after the Damien Cray incident... Smithers had lost count.

Still, Alex had been here longer than Zoe. It didn't feel all that unnatural to hear her call him Agent.

"Why, I don't hate making them!" Smithers replied, feigning surprise. "I don't hate it at all. Whyever would you say that?"

But she only gave him a shrewd look, before turning back to her work. It was amazing, how perceptive the young ones could be.

To all his other colleagues, Smithers thought he put on a pretty good front. He pretended that he loved designing Alex's gadgets. It was true, in part, that he did. He had so many opportunities with a teenage agent, that he didn't have with an adult one. Some of them had been his best work. The snowsuit. The chewing gum. The bike! He was particularly pleased with that one. It had taken a whole month to perfect that bike, and it had all been out of his own paycheck, because he wasn't supposed to be helping Alex, that time, and of course, the boy had completely ruined it in a single high-speed chase. But Smithers had loved it, nonetheless. He loved being able to cram as many devices as possible into one object. And he loved the pun value, of course. He often wished he could be there to see the look on someone's face when the fan turned out to be a club. He knew it would be priceless.

But he still couldn't be proud, of what he was doing. He couldn't be proud, when Alex returned from each and every mission, just about alive. He could only be relieved.

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Derek Smithers had a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach, when he stepped on the plane that would take him to Cairo. The fat suit, for some reason, felt heavier than usual.

This was another "one last time" for Alex, but they had all been "one last time".

And yet Smithers had a feeling that this might be "one last time" for somebody.

He had been thinking of quitting, of moving on, for a while now. Alex had changed things. Of course, Smithers knew what they sent agents out there to do. Sometimes he did his best, he designed something superb, something brilliant, even by his standards, but it just wasn't enough. The agent returned in a body bag. Or they didn't return at all. Every time he handed them a fresh new gadget, there was a chance that he would never see them again.

Smithers knew what happened out there, in theory.

But it was very different to look out of his window, and seeing a pool of Alex Rider's blood spreading over the pavestones of Liverpool Street.

He would never forget it. And this latest business... arranging a shooting in one of their own schools...

There had been a bad taste in Smithers' mouth for some time now.

He had his resignation letter sitting in the drafts of his emails. As long as Alex was here, then Smithers would be too. He would see Alex through. But after that, he was done. He didn't know where he would go. Back to Ireland, perhaps. Or maybe to somewhere with a little more sunshine. But at any rate, he had built himself an escape route, and he knew it was almost time to use it.

Yes: Smithers could see the writing on the wall of MI6, and he had no intention of seeing the blood that followed it.

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Fin.