A.N. Hi! It's SpyFest Week Two, and the (absolutely gorgeous) prompt was "There's one secret everyone takes to the grave." Here's my offering.

Just a friendly reminder, you can vote for Week One stories right now in the Revival forum. And if there are any casual lurkers out there who don't know what's going on but are interested, feel free to ask. Also, I really don't own Alex Rider.

If espionage was a world of cloak and dagger, Alex had always relied more on the dagger than the cloak. He brought justice down in hellfire and watched the flames leap high. But it was impossible to stand so close without getting scorched himself.

When his reputation grew to legendary proportions, it no longer mattered that the government's secret weapon was barely a secret anymore, because now he was a myth, just as unbelievable as the notion that Great Britain would use a child to do her dirty work had been in the first place.

"They call you an avenging angel," Ben laughed as he caught Alex up on MI6 gossip.

Alex didn't feel like an angel. He bled too much.

"Can't be," he said, forcing a grin. "Angels have to listen to the boss, and if you'd heard the lecture Jones gave me yesterday, you'd know all about my problems with authority."

Ben gave him a searching look, and Alex felt guilty for deflecting, but he schooled his expression to give nothing away until Ben segued into complaining about one of his trainees, because "Talk about problems with authority…"

The agents who received second hand accounts of his missions only heard about the end result; they didn't hear about the events leading up to it, where Alex's enemies would leave deep wounds of their own. The fire would cauterise them before too much truth could be spilled in desperate confessions to anyone who might know how to fix him, but sometimes he thought that maybe that hurt more.

When too many secrets were bottled up inside and his thoughts were starting to fester, Alex went to Yassen.

"Will you be my secret keeper?" he asked.

Yassen had once told Alex to go back to school and to his life before he became a killer. Later, when he was staring down the barrel of Alex's gun, he had told him what it would feel like to pull the trigger. And when he was dying, he had accepted the inevitable and sent Alex to learn how to do it.

But he had always protected the child, had never wanted Alex to go so far down the one-way street.

Well, Alex had. The boy stood in front of him and decided which secret to tell first.

"I didn't have to kill Julius, but I did it anyway."

Perhaps emboldened by Yassen's silence, he added one more.

"I don't regret it."

He drew in a shaky breath and gave a tiny nod, like that was enough for now, and walked away.

He resisted the temptation to go back for as long as possible, still struggling to reconcile the part of him that hated Yassen with the part that had grown to… what? Like him? Trust him? The whole situation was ridiculous.

And so, for the next few missions, he let the tiny opening he'd made in a moment of desperation scab over and pulled everything he couldn't say as far within himself as he could, and clamped down harder when it fought back even more.

When his nightmares increased to the point that he couldn't hide it from Jack anymore, he let himself give her an unabridged account of his latest, especially brutal mission in a moment of weakness. She cried with him and hugged him when he finished, but her eyes betrayed her horror.

The next time he came home battered and bruised, they went out for burgers and a movie, and he held back his flinches at every rattle of gunfire onscreen and pretended that his visible injuries were the only ones that mattered.

(Jack wasn't fooled, but sometimes she liked to pretend, too.)

He'd learnt his lesson; telling those close to him his secrets wasn't "letting them in", like he'd been told it would by the shrink MI6 had made him see once (when he came back to England after he found Jack, because he'd shot a boy in Cairo who bore his face and they needed to know just how damaged he was before they used him again). It only made them back away, seeing a part of him they'd closed their eyes to before.

Jack didn't have a word for it. Alex did: monster.

He told snippets of his missions to Ben and Smithers and Tom, made it sound like a Bond movie, excitement and explosions and caricatures of villains. Mrs Jones got the full rundown. He only gave her the facts that were relevant to the Service, but she was perceptive enough to read between the lines. It didn't matter, though. She had been choosing to walk with monsters throughout her entire career, and she had become one the day she drawn Alex in again after his return to London.

Alex never coloured his stories with his own emotions. His psyche was being twisted into knots, and he would hide the tangled mess forever if he could. But he was getting caught up inside his head, and he needed help getting out.

And so he went back, more jaded and haunted than before. His eyes were bloodshot and although the vodka was too pure to leave a telltale odor on his breath, the way he stumbled as he approached and the half empty bottle in his hand told a different story - inevitable experiments with alternative coping methods, although he didn't think he wanted try this one again. The only good it had done was lowering his inhibitions long enough to get him here.

Yassen didn't judge him. He was just there to listen, nothing more.

"I've killed a lot of people," Alex said this time. This time he sat down on the ground, letting the dew seep into his jeans. "I don't even know how many anymore. How can I not know, Yassen?"

He took another swig from the bottle and hugged his knees in tighter.

"I can't forget them, though. Not even the ones I tried to deny at first - the random guards, the collateral damage. I barely sleep anymore because they haunt me at night and I can't escape the questions the questions I tried to ignore when I was younger. Who they were. If they had families. How am I supposed to live with myself? How did you manage it?"

Yassen didn't have an answer for him. Alex scoffed and pushed himself to his feet.

"I'm going mad," he muttered, leaving the rest of the vodka there for Yassen and not looking back as he made his way home.

Visiting Yassen became an addiction. They met after almost every mission so Alex could spill the secrets he couldn't tell anyone else.

"Bet you never expected to become my therapist," Alex said wryly, after an especially long session. He didn't let it bother him, though. Yassen had never complained about it.

He found himself saying more and more each time, straying from secrets to follow a train of thought.

"Maybe they were right," he said. "Maybe I am an angel. I've saved a lot of people; I forget that sometimes."

He plucked a blade of grass and twiddled it between his fingers.

"Then again, the Devil was once an angel too."

If Alex liked using the dagger, Yassen preferred the cloak. Fate had made him a ghost when he escaped Estrov and Scorpia had exploited it. It was lonely work, but it was easier to reconcile the kid who got into trouble with Leo and watched the helicopters passing over the village with the merciless contract killer that he'd become when the only record of that time was in his hazy memories and a flash drive that no one else would ever read.

Rothman had known the story, and maybe she'd shared it with a few colleagues, but once he'd proved his worth they only cared about Cossack, about Yassen rather than Yasha Gregorovich.

Yassen tried to do the same, to forget that he had ever been anything before he was an assassin, that he used to have dreams which didn't involve murder. But then he met Alex on a rooftop, and seeing another boy whose world was falling apart around his ears at age fourteen made him feel a twinge of regret for the life he could have lived.

It was too late for him, but maybe there was still time for Alex to go back to a normal life, if he was given the chance. Yassen let him go, and when their paths crossed again he did his best to scare the kid away.

(But danger ran through Rider blood, and Yassen knew the point of no return had been passed a long time ago.)

A long mission meant that Alex had to hold onto his secrets for much longer than he had grown accustomed to now he had the luxury of confiding in someone. He struggled at first, with the feeling of having them trapped inside his chest, but he found it didn't matter so much anymore. He had shared many that were worse a long time ago.

When he finally got a chance to visit, he didn't talk about the mission. Instead, he weighed heavy words in his mouth, the one secret he had never thought he'd tell, even to himself.

It didn't fall as easily as the others, but he forced it out anyway.

"I don't regret it," he said, "becoming a spy. I'm not angry at being blackmailed into it. Even though I was just a child and you were right, I wasn't ready to kill. I'm glad it happened."

And that was it. The secret that had haunted him more than the deaths he'd caused, the one that kept him up even after he thought he'd shared enough with Yassen to escape the nightmares for a little while.

"Maybe that does make me a devil, I don't know," he said. "I hope you're not angry with me. But this world… this is where I belong."

He didn't get a reply, but a misty drizzle started to fall, and maybe that was enough.

He left feeling lighter than he had in years, and when he came back, he brought flowers to the grave instead of secrets.