Disclaimer: I do not own Alex Rider.

A/N: Crackfic, 2 years after Scorpia. Part of what I will expand later on into a multichaptered fic. I've always wondered what it would be like if Alex decided to go rogue and take matters into his own hands...

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02. Minimum Wage

To taste reality in a fingernail, and depression in a bomb; glimpse danger in a heroic tale, and death at the hands of some sadistic sob.

Alex stared at his nail beds. He really should have stopped chewing before it started hurting, but that little bit of common sense had obviously not been apparent at the time. He reckoned that all those times of being knocked unconscious on missions was finally taking its toll or had caused some sort of brain damage that the doctors hadn't picked up on.

Doctors depressed him; if they were around, it was fairly likely that he had been wounded in some unfortunate way or another. Alex uncomfortably adjusted the gauze that was still wrapped around the nether regions of his torso, underneath the scratchy cotton of the regulation uniform. School depressed him. MI6 work depressed him.

As much as he would have been content to remain in an unenlightened state of childhood, kept ignorant by real adults of the real-life equivalent of monsters that hid under the bed…at a grand old 16 years old and a few years' worth of espionage, there was no mistaking the frantic way Jack hid the bills and spent so much time out of the house as of recent times. Alex had appreciated her thoughtfulness, but he'd figured that it wouldn't hurt to be aware of the household's fiscal situation before 'the shit hit the fan,' as Jack would be inclined to say with her American colloquial mannerisms.

He sighed, even as Tom subtly nudged him to pass the note down the aisle to the kid sitting in front of him.

"Psst. This one's going down to Damian."

He was going to need to get a job, if only for paying for smaller household purchases. Ian's finances were stellar by right of his risky occupation, but Alex wasn't quite so shortsighted to believe that whatever was left in the bank would tide him and Jack over for much longer than a few years. MI6 was not offering him a salary for saving the world several times over; They had grudgingly picked up his considerable insurance and medical tabs, but otherwise left much of the financial aspect of his affairs to himself and Jack.

Which was actually quite bloody stupid, because if anything Alex would have assumed that keeping a rein on financial freedom would be a be-all and end-all method of curbing any rebellion from anyone.

Alex dutifully scratched out the notes that the teacher was writing on the blackboard, and returned to speculating on what job openings there would be for a minor with no college career and little marketable skills of any sort that didn't involve espionage. Stocking shelves at the local supermarket wouldn't be such a bad alternative, but a fixed schedule was the last thing that he could adhere to.

"As you can see from the downwards slope from left to right, the demand curve for a commodity is negative," Mrs. Price was explaining, and since it had been a good week or two since he had last been in school, Alex Ride felt quite compelled to actually try to listen, despite being distracted by the stab wound that pulsed with fire.

In hindsight, it wasn't too intelligent of him to refuse the medication that the doctors had offered him for his latest injury; Being impaled by a harpoon by a seafaring smuggler tended to be rather painful, but he hadn't trusted MI6 not to slip something else in with the pills to ensure his future loyalty.

Macroeconomics didn't precisely provide any sort of redeeming value for him in his current field of work, but on second thought he reckoned that trading stocks or even internet marketing on the side would be a source of passive income that he couldn't possibly overlook. He made a mental note to investigate online sources of income.

"…Mr. Rider?"

Alex paused in mid-thought.

"Yes, ma'am?" What kind of super-spy was he, that he hadn't detected her nearly breathing down his neck?

"Daydreaming, are we?" She stated frigidly, and Alex observed the way her lurid red lipstick transferred itself onto her front teeth with every word.

Alex carefully crossed his arms over his notebook, hoping that his distracted doodles of soccer balls would go unnoticed before realizing that attempts at concealing anything looked unnatural and an experienced, tenured teacher like Mrs. Price would be fully acquainted with the signs of student guilt. Assuming a casual slouch, he leaned back in his chair to stare her in the eye.

"Would you like to give the class an example of the law of supply and demand?"

Mrs. Price wasn't fond of him, and somehow was always giving him opportunities to give errant answers that he usually took advantage of to keep his reputation as an overall delinquent adolescent. (Alex supposed that this was what his past captors had meant by him having a "smart mouth" on him.)

"The sex industry." He said aloud, aware that all eyes were on him. "As long as there is demand from wankers who can't get any, there will always be a supply of underaged teenagers being smuggled in by trafficking rings from third-world countries to work the brothels."

Tom snickered, and he wasn't the only one.

Alex supposed that it would be prudent to stick with his image even as Mrs. Price barked at him about crude language, but even then the topic of the illegal adult industry struck a little too close to the last mission that he had completed. Perhaps Alex should have said something about drug-dealing, to keep his cover?

"Mr. Rider…I believe that not a single word has made it through your thick head during this entire period." Mrs. Price sniped, before closing in on a daydreaming Tom. "Can you give a working definition of the supply and demand model for Mr. Rider's benefit?"

"The law of supply and demand predicts that the price level will move toward the point that equalizes quantities supplied and demanded." Tom quoted, straight from the textbook that fortunately lay open upon his desk.

Alex rolled his eyes. Alright, so perhaps he took it too literally.

Needless to say, he could firmly testify to the tenement that there was demand for everything and anything. MI6 work had borught him too close for comfort to the questionable margins of human depravity and creativity, and there was always demand for certain things of disreputable value.

Like killing people.

Yassen Gregorivich had made a living off it. Heck, there was lots of money to be made in the industry of offing people, if Scorpia was any representative of that.

One simply does not start up a crime syndicate, Alex mused as he continued to lazily fill in the margins of his notebook with fanciful constructs of imagination.

There was definitely more to such a large-scale production then mere aggregation of resources, monetary or otherwise.

Connections of the people sort were advantageous, as were networking skills…that wasn't to imply that the masterminds behind Scorpia were social butterflies by any means, though. If anything, Major Winston Yu was a pushy conversationalist who got on people's nerves.

And an assortment of competent colleagues didn't quite translate very well into liquid wealth, even if everyone did grudgingly agree to pool their assets; Joint ventures came with their complications, and Alex could personally attest to the amount of backstabbing that he had witnessed while on one mission or another in the crime underground. And it really did make for a simmering mess of bureaucracy, with certain delegated tasks carried out by various self-serving personages. It certainly created a self-containing atmosphere of ego clashes, which would be highly unproductive.

And overconfidence had nothing to do with it, although Julia Rothman had been somewhat nearsighted regarding her underestimation of him.

After all, there still needed to be a body of disposable, multipurpose human resources to play bodyguards and hitmen and overall grunts whom had the responsibility of the day-to-day upkeep of a crime syndicate's dirty work. Alex briefly wondered about the legalities of putting a binding contract out until he realized that they probably weren't worth anything if Yassen managed to skirt disposing of him one too many a time.

But they all knew how that ended up.

Which brought him to thinking about recruitment of talent, and Alex had to agree that crime syndicates and occupational training facilities like Malagosto were hotspots for sowing young unemployed assassin-wannabes. (Jack had candidly mentioned once how Ash couldn't hold a desk job for a week.) The hard-core image of organized crime in general did much for the image, if the influence of certain bits of popular media were any indicator. Tom still watched "The Sopranos" reruns on a regular basis, after all.

Alex smiled and jotted down the next heading that Mrs. Price wrote on the board; What were the chances that he could become a bigger force in the 'license to kill' job market than MI6 or Scorpia?

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"It's called supply and demand, like what Mrs. Price was talking about in class. Just more…literally." Alex had tried to explain over a Reuben sandwich at lunchtime. "If there wasn't a demand for someone to be killed or something horrible like that, Scorpia would be out of business and wouldn't supply their clients with assassination services."

"…So you're going to start a gang?" Said best mate voiced in disbelief, as Alex motioned for him frantically to keep his trap shut and the half-chewed baloney off the cafeteria table.

"No! Well, no. But it is a profitable niche." The spy told him, exasperated. "Well, at the very least, if it were done right. But I'm not going to start up a gang."

Somehow along the ways to explaining his plans for world domination he had managed to confuse Tom, who had actually been present for every Economics class that they had that year, with Alex attending just a little over five of them.

"I dunno. It sounds a bit off to me…didn't you say that you didn't want to do anything like that anymore?"

"…I don't." But giving how his own motivations stacked up, Alex was not entirely convinced that he would ever be able to completely forsake saving the world; Having two relatives whom had been in the business was fairly good indication that some part of it was probably due to breeding, and through no fault of his own.

"Then why?"

Was it really so much to ask for a little compensation and a little less MI6 control-freak tendencies for saving the world?

"Well, we are in a global economic crisis right now…."Alex winced, hoping that it didn't make him sound the way he thought he did, like a common gold-digger.

And self-gratification in know that he was there to protect innocent people as he should have been protected, but he wasn't going to say that to Tom.

"Get a sugar daddy, why don't you, Rider." Tom rolled his eyes. "We all need to buy new cleats for the next football season, too."

Alex ignored that. "There's demand for eradicating organized crime and stopping trigger-happy arseholes from bringing civilization to a halt. It's only the national intelligence agencies and the black ops like CIA and M16 that are really dealing with the supply part of it all."

"…So you're somehow going to start something that's like a gang?"

"Not a gang. It's anti-gang." Alex tried again. "It'll crush criminal activity before it happens. Before MI6 wastes times dithering with paperwork; they are awfully ineffective, you know."

Like not sending backup to one of their best agents, therefore putting a valuable asset at risk―Alex was sure, 2 years after the entire Point Blanc affair, that he had smashed the thresholds of their expectations for him tenfold, which would have meant quite a loss in their efficiency if he had died back then.

"Like killing everyone in Scorpia before they blow the world to smithereens?"

Alex frowned. "Something along the lines to that, but not exactly. No assassination, just mostly interfering with their plans. Something like what MI6 tries to do, just without the manipulations and underhanded techniques."

"Fine, then a for-profit vigilante group with multiple Batmen that target criminal groups like Scorpia?" Tom asked incredulously. "And I don't believe you'll get anything done with such a…humane approach. From what you've told me, they probably won't stop until you off them."

The Batman reference was nice, but he'd like to think that he had better style. And Alex hadn't really thought of the word vigilante, but it was definitely fitting.

"Not just Scorpia. Crime lords and smuggling rings and Yakuza once I find them. Which isn't quite difficult, considering how I have very easy access through MI6 to much of the big-name criminal population in the world." Alex nodded, pleased that the point had finally made it across the Monday-torpor that affected half the school population and subsequently Tom as well.

"…Nice try. Good luck explaining that to M16 when they see that you went rogue. You can always be like Boba Fett, you know." Tom said doubtfully. "And how will you work out pricing?"

"Being a bounty hunter means working alone. For all I'm doing as a spy, I have no political power and very few resources at my disposal, and MI6 wouldn't like me freelancing for, say, the Australians. So seceding altogether seems like the best thing to do in my situation."

As much as he abhorred admitting it, Alex was certain that he would never be able to accomplish it on his own.

After Tom's lukewarm response, Alex decided that it would not be in his best interest to mention it to Jack. She did have something against him taking up arms for the better good, although he had a feeling that it was more of M16's blackmail and the danger of his missions that had her reaching for her steak knife.

Besides, he was failing Economics 101.

But contrary to popular belief, Alex Rider was more than an overly articulate, druggie brat who knew karate and various forms of self-defense.

And he was going to save the world on his own terms, this time.

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Please R&R.