Hello! I thought I'd make a continuation of this. Someone mentioned that the title didn't really make sense, and I guess this is why it did in my mind, but I hadn't made that clear to you guys. That's why I wrote this. It's also a rough draft; I didn't reread it or anything, I just went for it and this is what regurgitated out, but let me know what you think!

-Ara

The boy rounded on him, eyes narrowed. "Do you know what they did? What they did to me? To Jack? This isn't about revenge, this is about closure. If I kill him, no one comes after me. No one will know who took out SCORPIA. If I don't kill him I run for the rest of my life!"

Alex had been in America for a while. He didn't bother to change his accent, he was out of that life. It all seemed like some hideous, fictional, nightmare now. It was all too ridiculous to believe, even for the boy who had lived it. Now, though, now he was a man. Just a few short years and he'd grown up so much. Once upon a time he had struggled with growing up too quickly, but that was a different type of aging. He was free, and normal. He was what he'd always wanted to be.

He had a job, a girlfriend, a flat (or an apartment as the Americans called it). He was happy.

Every once in a while he would have the sudden urge to do something dangerous, and once in a while he would indulge it. But each time he did, he only got himself in trouble. He squashed them now, went to the gym to work out like crazy, get the energy out, and afterwards he would go out with his girlfriend and his fake ID and just relax. Because even though he was happy, he was restless.

After a year in America, legal papers willingly provided by MI6, he had caught the attention of local police. Not because of his naughty behavior, because he'd never been caught, but because they wanted to recruit him. Now he was a low level officer, patrolling bar row for intoxicated drivers and hostile drunks. It wasn't very fulfilling, but he figured he could climb the ladder eventually. He was just happy to have a career going at 19, even though he was 'legally' 22.

He owed it all to Gregorovich. Who knows what would have happened if he'd shot that last SCORPIA leader. Yes, he would be safer, but he wouldn't be Alex Rider anymore. He'd still be an operative for MI6, that's what he would be! If he had taken that last step he wouldn't have even wanted to leave. How could he? You can't do something like that and go back to normal, no matter how long you tried. Yassen had taken that burden from him, and he doubted it even fazed the assassin. So much good from someone doing something that's practically his job anyway. Sick as that was, in the circumstances.

He sighed as he walked his beat, the extra breath clouding in front of his face. Thinly clad women bounced on heels in the winter air, either totally ignorant of the weather or shrinking against the cold. Street performers played the washboard or their bucket drums. It was a fairly quiet weekday night, with a squabble here and there, but most people behaving.

Until a crash came from overhead. Instinctively, he dropped his center and reached for his club. Consciously, he looked up, and managed to lunge out of the way of the falling glass. It hit the pavement and shattered into harmless little pieces, but the pane could have cut him to ribbons if he'd stayed beneath it.

He could hear yelling from the now-open window above him.

He sprinted for the entrance to the building, pausing to find the stairwell to the levels above where dirty apartments were stacked atop eachother. It was easy to find the right apartment. It had been a corner window on the third floor, and he could hear the screaming from the hallway.

He didn't pause to knock, he felt that would be foolish because of the thumping and pounding he could hear from the inside. "This is the police, open the door!" He hollered. No one answered, but the crashing continued. So he put his foot through it.

It didn't swing open like he'd hoped, instead the cheap clapboard caved in around his leg, so he ended up breaking through like the Kool-Aid man, a bat swinging in his hand. But when he came clear he saw a woman, fear in her eyes, pointing a gun in the general direction of a man who was cowering against the wall.

The first thought that flew through Alex's head was that her aim was atrocious and that the positioning of her hands around the handle would only add to the recoil, and he hated himself for that. But he brought up his own weapon and pointed it at the woman, his hands steady and firm. He had killed in name of defense before, he knew that he could handle the after-effects.

"Miss, put the gun down!"

"I won't!" She cried, tears flowing down her cheeks. They glistened off the bruise developing on her cheek, making the mark burn an angry red.

"I can see that you're frightened, miss, but you must put it down!" He said calmly, suddenly and acutely aware of his foreign accent. She didn't seem to notice, though, distracted by her situation. He didn't blame her.

"Frightened?" She spat venomously, shaking the gun. "I'm not scared, I'm tired!" Then the tears started again, and she took one hand off the gun to wipe at one eye, and then the other without obscuring her sight so that Alex had no chance to grab the gun.

"I want to leave, but he won't let me leave! You should be arresting him!" She emphasized the statement with a thrust of the gun, and the man jerked. Blessedly he stayed quiet. Alex didn't think the woman was bluffing.

"Tell me everything I should charge him with and I'll take him away in cuffs, I swear. You don't want to shoot a man in front of a cop!" He said, trying to build a rapport with the woman.

"He's a lying, stealing, drunk, who beats his wife, and skips out on his taxes!" She screamed. "He keeps threatening me! He says that if I leave, he'll track me down! He won't let me go!" The sentences quickly broke down into sobs. "I have to kill him! If I don't, I'll run for the rest of my life!"

The words hit Alex like a ton of bricks. They were the same words he'd uttered a few years ago, the same situation he'd left, just different details. "You don't want to do that." He said gravely, a hitch in his tone.

She caught it and looked at him, an unreadable expression on her face. "Trust me, you don't want to do that." He repeated, allowing some of the emotion to leak through. "You want to be normal again?"

"I… yes." She answered in a small voice.

"You'll never be normal if you kill him. You'll never forget what you did, and you'll never get what you want." He stopped staring down his pistol's sights and stared her directly in the eye, trying to persuade her. Not for this bastard's life, but for her own. "It changes you." He said simply, trying to explain with his eyes, because he didn't know how to put it into words.

All those manageable 'after-effects' of killing someone, or even being responsible for their 'accident,' were just that. Manageable. There was no cure for the kind of disease that takes over your head after something like that. No way to reconcile with yourself that 'there was no other way.' It was just death, and each time, it got less surprising, and less offensive, until he could stand above a boy who looked just like him and justify shooting him.

He knew Julius would go for that gun if he turned away. Alex could have knocked him out, but he had wanted it all to be over. For the past to quit catching up to him. It was that mentality that allowed him to go to that hotel in Chicago with a rifle, to plan everything out. And Yassen had shown up in the nick of time, to save him from that one decision that would finally ruin his life.

Well, now he could finally pass that favor forward.

"No matter what he's done to you, you'll regret it for the rest of your life, because you'll know you could have done something, anything else to have kept it from getting this far. Don't let him make you regret anything." He said vehemently.

Her thinned lips turned down as she struggled against another sob, and he saw her resolve rise. She held out the gun with shaky hands, pointed down, and then walked proudly forward. Alex glanced behind him to see two more officers in the doorway, smiling ruefully at him. Alex suddenly knew he'd get shit for that speech for weeks at the station, but it almost felt like a badge of honor.

He directed the woman towards the other men and advanced on the portly man who was still burying himself in the drywall. "Come on, time to go, sir." He said, pulling out his handcuffs.

"What?! You're arresting me? She pointed a gun at me!" He cried, outraged.

"And I suppose it was her who broke out the window, crashed around in here, and gave her that bruise on her face? I see your knuckles are in bad shape, maybe you cut them while shaving your legs?" He snarked, marching the man downstairs.

Later that morning (since he worked the late shift), he pondered the situation over a glass of honey whiskey on his balcony. He wrapped his coat tighter against the cold, but for now it was refreshing.

The difference between him and Yassen came down to the choice that they made. Alex didn't have any system to turn to for justice; it was just him, his freedom, and a gun. He understood what he'd been thinking, and would still probably do it if he thought he had to, but he'd hate himself for it.

God, he was such a hypocrite. Spouting off all that bull about not letting them make you regret anything. How could he forget all those things that they had made him do? All those psychos, and MI6, and the CIA, and the ASIS, it went on and on. But he couldn't see her ruin herself like that, not like he'd seen in himself.

But then, she didn't really have anywhere to turn to either. He'd seen the fear on her face when she saw him. It wasn't just her husband she was afraid of, it was the police. He wondered why, but figured it could be anything. And it occurred to him that he probably hadn't actually solved anything. They'd both be out sooner rather than later, and he'd be free to track her down, just like he'd threatened.

He took a large gulp of the whiskey.

The difference was that Yassen took care of the problem, but Alex took care of the people.

REVIEW!

Awful ending, I know, lol.