A/N: Updated 18/05/15. Made minor grammatical and spelling fixes.

All That's Said. All That's Not.

There is something about a child's cry that Alex Rider could never ignore. If a child was crying, he could never find it in his will to not do something. It went against every instinct in his body and had gotten him into trouble on several occasions. Getting into trouble was not something that unusual to Alex Rider either. He had been working for secret intelligence services all over the world since he was fourteen and ruining the plans of criminal organisations tended to lead him into trouble.

However on this occasion Alex Rider knew that answering to this child's cry was something that was going to get him into more trouble than usual. He was in the very heart of the latest terrorist group he had infiltrated, he had the flash drive containing all their plans, and he still had five minutes to get out of the place unnoticed. But…

The shrill wail carried down the whitewashed halls. The child was terrified. Not only that, the whole building was rigged to blow. MI6 hadn't warned him that there could be children harmed. Then again in the five years since he was forcibly recruited he had learnt that they didn't say anything if was detrimental to their plans.

The decision was made so quickly that it couldn't really have been considered a decision at all. Alex wasn't a monster, he wasn't heartless, and ergo he would waste the precious minutes needed to get out attempting to find, remove, and save the child.

Turning in the direction of where the explosives were laid, he raced through the halls towards the cries, eventually stopping outside an office. He pushed down on the handle. The door wouldn't open. The steady bleeping from his watch told him that he was running out of time. So he wasted no more in kicking the door open.

The cries stopped as the young girl (probably four or five years in age) looked up at him in surprise. Big fat tears lingered on her face, snot trailed down from her nose, and her blonde hair was matted, like it hadn't been brushed in days. Her wide brown eyes looked at him fearfully. It was for that, coupled by the fact that the girl was most definitely not Asian like the entire body of terrorists, that Alex deduced that the girl most likely had been kidnapped. For what purpose he had no idea but he definitely could not leave her.

"Hello sweetheart," he said in a gentle voice, "I'm Alex and I'm going to get you home."

"To mummy and daddy?" she asked hopefully. Alex felt sudden relief at the fact that she could understand him. He didn't think about what an English girl was doing in Italy.

"Yes," he said, before sweeping her up and onto his back. "Hold on tight. We need to leave really fast."

"The bad men?" she asked.

Alex nodded, already running through the halls. The girl wasn't too heavy but she slowed him down. He was never going to get out the way he came in on time. The watch began to bleep faster. Only a minute left. The answer came to him with the sight of a flight of stairs. There was a cable attached to the roof that stretched across the lake next to the building bringing power to it. Smithers had given him a belt completely insulated from electricity.

He raced up the stairs. Faster bleeps from the watch, Thirty seconds left. The girl's nails were digging into his shoulders. He barged through a pair of emergency doors and suddenly they were on the roof and the cold night air was on their skin. He whipped the belt off, safe in the fact that the trousers were made to fit in the case he needed to use his belt for a situation like this.

"Trust me," he said to the girl.

He already had the belt looped over the power cable and leaping off the building by the time the girl nodded. The watch stopped bleeping the building exploded behind them. Mortar went flying and the power cable snapped. The girl screamed as they plunged deep into the cold lake. Alex had long since let go of the belt in an attempt to get away from the still live cable.

The girl gripped him tightly, her arms around his neck choking him slightly, as he pushed and pulled against the water away from the sparking cable and to the surface. The girl choked and spluttered and tears trailed down her face.

"Are you okay?" Alex asked.

She snivelled, still clinging to him. "Y-yes."

"What's your name?"

"Sophie."

"Sophie, huh," Alex said kicking water to keep them afloat, "That's a very pretty name. Okay Sophie, I need you to loosen your grip so I can get us to shore."

Ten minutes later he lifted the shivering girl onto the tree lined shore of the lake. In those ten minutes Alex had learnt, in an attempt to calm the obviously very scared girl, that Sophie had a baby brother called Luke, was four-and-three-quarters years in age, had a puppy called Rolo, and lived in Cambridge.

"You've been a very brave girl, Sophie," he said as he activated on of the buttons on his jacket that sent a homing signal to MI6.

"As brave as daddy?" she asked, cocking her head to the side.

"Is your daddy brave then?"

"Mummy said he is the bravest man in the whole entire world!"

"Did she now?"

"Uh huh. Daddy is big too. This biiiiiiiig," she said, stretching out her arms to emphasize her point. "He's even bigger than a tree. Enormous." Sophie seemed proud of her large word. She shivered and Alex removed his jacket and wrapped it around her. It was already mostly dry being made of whatever it was that Smithers used.

"Rolo is big too," Sophie continued. "Mum has to brush him a lot because he's hairy. I don't like hairy things. Rolo's okay because he's a dog. But spiders are hairy and they're really creepy. And boy's are hairy and icky and stupid. Tony Marks didn't even know that two and two is four. I've known that for ages. Even when I was a baby."

Alex smiled as the girl talked herself asleep, ever aware of his surroundings. MI6 arrived ten minutes later. Half an hour after that they were on a flight back to England and several men and woman were comparing Sophie's picture those in missing child reports.

Sophie shifted in her seat as she had been doing so for the last five minutes. The flight was rather long for a young girl desperate to go home. To everyone else they looked like cousins, maybe even brother and sister with similar blonde hair and brown eyes, something MI6 had played on to get the girl safely back home if there were unsavoury characters on the lookout for the girl.

"Alex, do you think mummy and daddy will let me have some chocolate when I get back?"

Alex smiled. That was the thing about young kids. It doesn't matter what has happened to them because they soon bounce back and become more concerned with things that they deemed more important like sweets and toys.

"I'm sure they'll be happy to buy you chocolate. But," he turned his voice into a playful whisper, "how about I buy you some chocolate when we get to the airport?"

Sophie smiled brightly and nodded her head. She paused. "Do you like Barbies? I have a Barbie. It's a fairy one. None of my friends have a fairy Barbie. She used to have long hair but I gave her a haircut. Mummy didn't like me giving Barbie a haircut. She told me off. That doesn't matter though because my Barbie has the best haircut ever. Do you think I can cut your hair, Alex?" "

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I've just had my hair cut."

Sophie looked at his hair critically, trying to work out whether he was telling the truth. Eventually she decided he was. "Can I cut it for you when it grows?"

"No."

Tears welled up in her eyes. "Don't you like me?"

Alex shook his head. "Of course I like you. It's just my hairdresser is really scary." Sophie's eyes widened. Alex was the bravest person she had ever met, apart from maybe her daddy. If his hairdresser made Alex scared then she must be really scary. Alex nodded. "Yes. I can imagine if I let anyone else cut my hair then she'd come after me."

"Don't worry. I promise I won't cut your hair."

"Good girl. Now it's really late so you should go to bed little miss."

"Okay," Sophie said. Normally she wouldn't go to sleep just because somebody told her to but this was Alex. He was the most amazing person in the whole wide world. If he told her to sleep then he had to know what he was doing. She rested her head on his lap, mumbled a quiet 'don't leave me', and fell asleep for the remainder of the flight.

"Are we nearly there yet?" Sophie asked for the thirty-eighth time since they got in the car. A quick clean-up in a hotel before they got on the plane had made all the difference from her first appearance. Gone was the tearstained face and the dirty, knotted hair. In its place was soft blonde hair tied up with a red ribbon, a new, blue dress, and a pair of leather buckled shoes because Sophie had to be the one to do them up and didn't like Velcro and laces were too difficult.

"Very soon now," Alex promised.

"And mummy and daddy are there?"

"I told you I got the phone call. They got there five minutes ago. And look, it's just around the corner."

Sophie immediately started craning her neck around the window, trying to see whatever building they were going to. "Which one is it, Alex?"

When they got to the airport a couple of people from MI6 had come to collect Sophie to take her back to headquarters but she had, understandably, refused to leave Alex's side and clung to him like a limpet. Since Alex had to return sometime in the next twenty-four hours to file a report (the flash drive already being worked on by operatives in Italy) he had agreed to take her in. His only regret was he wouldn't get a rest before dealing with Blunt. Lord knows that was going to go well.

"This one," he said, as the car pulled out in front of what looked a real-estate office. He opened the door and stepped out, before lifting the girl out. When he went to put her down she wrapped her legs around him and buried her face in his side. Alex smiled softly but his brown eyes filled with concern. It was actions like these that showed how much her kidnapping affected Sophie.

He lifted her properly onto his back, the girl smiling brightly and loosening her grip a bit upon realising that he wasn't going to drop her. The two men at the door, Alan Jasper and Timothy White, didn't bat an eyelid at Alex's passenger. It wasn't the first time they had seen him return from a mission with a kid in tow, sometimes that was the actual point of the mission and not Alex's inability to ignore a child's cry. Jasper and White both knew by that point that small children adored the young agent.

Once they got in the building they entered the elevator at the back, having passed a couple of dozen security measures in the short time they'd been in the building. Conformation that Alex was allowed to be carrying a gun had been sent back and forth to several people and a message had been sent up to the meeting room on the sixth floor that Sophie Barker was on her way up.

In that same meeting room Alan Blunt sat blank faced at the head of the table and Mrs Jones stood to his side. At the other end of the table a pretty faced woman, blonde haired and blue eyed sat, bouncing a brown haired child on her knee. She held him slightly closer and firmer than normal, as if afraid if she loosened her grip he would be snatched away. Her face was drawn and she had several more wrinkles and grey hairs than the week before. Her name was Melissa Barker, Sophie's mother. The baby on her lap was Luke.

Pacing back and forth by the door was a tall, muscular dark haired man. He walked with a slight limp and had a yellowing black eye from where he had tried to fight off the men that took his daughter eight days before. On his face was the shame of a man that couldn't do his job in protecting his children and the determination of one that was never going to let that happen again. He glanced at the door every few seconds and concern that his daughter would be snatched away again in these last crucial seconds filled him. He knew that it was his fault that Sophie had ever been involved like this. His father had been a very rich man and, even though they hadn't spoken in years due to disagreements about his career choices, upon the man's passing he had inherited a large amount of money. It was that money that the terrorists had set their eyes on. They had taken his daughter for ransom and he would have happily paid every last drop of the money.

James Barker just wanted his daughter home.

The door opened and everyone looked up at once. James and Melissa didn't see the face of their daughter's rescuer as Sophie had already flown into the room, barrelling into her father's legs with a cry of 'Mummy! Daddy!'. Then she was in James' arms being spun around and held close, before her mother and baby brother were pulled into the hug. Tears were flowing down all but Luke's face. The poor boy just looked confused at the whole fuss but gurgled happily as he reached for his sister.

Alex Rider stood leaning against the doorway. He watched the relief and happiness on the faces of the family. He smiled. 'This,' he reminded himself, 'is why I didn't quit.'

Eventually James Barker looked up at the man who saved his daughter. There was a flicker of surprise on his face before he mouthed a silent 'thank you'.

Alex looked at Wolf and knew that was all that needed to be said.