A/N: This is my response for SpyFest 2016, Week Four - 'Ode of Remembrance.' Dedicated to dorfchaosgenie (I don't know if you remember, but I told you that I might borrow your idea of Alex and Julius as mirror images). Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Alex and Julius are too undeniably sexy to belong to me.

Alex has never been afraid of the dark. He was never afraid of the monsters that hid beneath his bed or in his closet, of the silent shadows that drifted through his windows to steal his life away. His greatest fear, since the age of fourteen, has been himself.

Perhaps that is not entirely true. Alex doesn't pretend to be so noble as to fear his own inner darkness – he's no hero, no mystical champion of good. No, his greatest fear is his likeness – he is afraid of his own face. And this fear has a name.

"Hello, Alex."

"Julius, you bastard."

Julius Grief haunts Alex's dreams, searing himself behind the other boy's eyelids. Each night, Alex dreams of his twin's deranged smile, of the madness that lurks behind the blond hair and brown eyes that every Rider man inexplicably possesses, and each night the young spy wakes tangled in his sheets and with the ghost of cackling, childlike laughter ringing in his ears.

Yes, Alex is afraid of Julius Grief. It begins when they are fighting to the death atop Alex's school, explosions and chemicals erupting around them. Alex is nearly paralyzed by the sheer depravity on the other boy's face – on his face. And then Julius falls through the roof and the science wing explodes and Alex can feel the relief burning inside him – relief tempered by a vehemence to never, ever allow that expression to cross his face again.

Then Alex joins Scorpia and becomes everything he loathes – he is a killer, cold and deadly and deranged (like Julius, only he doesn't realize that until they're face to face once more and then Julius is dead and Alex is holding a smoking gun). He's filled with vengeance and anger and pain and it drives him a little bit mad – mad enough that he can't see that Julia Rothman has used him just as much as Alan Blunt, that he doesn't realize that he's been primed like a nuclear missile with one target until he's pointing his gun at Tulip Jones (he'll never say it aloud, but he's really, really glad he missed).

He stops Scorpia, in the end, but he pays the price for it (sometimes, he wishes that the bullet had been just two centimeters lower. He doesn't tell Jack about this wish and then she's dead and it doesn't matter anyway because it's not like he has anything to live for anymore). And inside he knows that just as he has narrowly escaped death, he's narrowly escaped a fate that (in his eyes) is so much worse – things would have been very different, had neither he nor Scorpia missed.

Months later, Scorpia – and Julius – resurface in the form of international terrorism, under new leadership and with a mutual hatred of one Alex Rider, and he's so tired of this – so tired of playing whack-a-mole with Scorpia. His life is fading away, too, because Jack seems so far these days and Blunt is more of a bastard than ever and Jones is a bystander and Julius is a cockroach that refuses to die.

After Cairo, Alex can't decide if he's won or not. Scorpia is gone, Julius is dead, and Jack is so far that he'll never reach her (not ever, because she was an angel and he's destined for hell). He's destroyed, emotionally and physically, and it seems that Blunt and Jones know it because they promise to leave him alone and the Prime Minister shakes his hand and calls him a hero and tells him about the lives he's saved (Alex stares blankly ahead and thinks of the lives he's taken).

He goes to the house (he can't call it home anymore because home is where his heart is and his heart died along with his best friend/mother/sister in a burst of flame) and lies back on his bed, eyes wide and directed at the ceiling. He closes his eyes, praying desperately for sleep, but he knows that the blissful darkness will be unattainable (he'll never sleep without seeing Julius' – his – Julius' face). He sees the other boy on the ground before him, macabre mirth ingrained in his eyes as he smirks up at Alex and dares him to kill his twin, taunts him with the belief that Alex is weak for hesitating to take the kill shot. Funny thing is, it's only now as he's lying there that he realizes that in shooting Julius, he's given up any semblance of strength.

The heads of MI6 recommend that he see a psychologist, that it would be 'beneficial to his state of mind' to get his head shrunk (Alex reads between the lines and is slightly pleased that they're scared of who he's become). So he sees the shrink and he's most definitely not surprised when it doesn't work from the beginning because every word that the man tries to get him to associate begins with 'Jack' or 'Julius.'

The therapist snaps one day, shouting for Alex to look at himself in the mirror because can't he see that he's not getting better and that he's turning into a damn psychopath with all of these violent tendencies and morbid thoughts? And Alex is almost physically struck by his appearance (because that face both belongs and doesn't belong to him and those eyes are so familiar and yet so foreign) and black dances across his vision and then the next thing he knows he's panting with glass shards embedded in his fist and the therapist is running, screaming, from the room.

He goes home and smashes every mirror in his whole house, not caring that the glass lies in pieces all over the wood floors and that he's going to add scratches to fists and feet to his extensive list of injuries. He avoids the kitchen like wildfire because he'll punch the metal door of his refrigerator if he goes inside and so he wastes away, a miserable and mad shadow of who he once was.

I am obscenely and inexplicably proud of the fact that the story is exactly 1000 words.

Review?