AN: Erm...hi? I know it's been an absolutely long time, and I'm sorry! I really love this story, though, and I want to finish it. I won't blame you if you need to go back and re-read. (In case anyone forgets, this is the sequel to Divergence, which you can find in my profile.) Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer: I do not own Alex Rider.

Helen heard the light padding of her husband's footsteps before he emerged in the kitchen, tightening his belt. She unpeeled her fingers from a cold cup of tea and picked up the gauze that she had set aside earlier.

Without a word, her practiced hands gently unwound John's blood-coloured bandages, fighting back a wince as the smell of infected shoulder tissue reached her. Helen usually avoided thinking about why her husband often came home injured, but the infection shed a whole new light on the subject. John was meticulous when it came to cleaning his wounds—for one to have developed this severely, he must have been kept without water. Tortured.

She retied the bandage perhaps a bit too tightly.

"I think," she said, leaning back in her chair and watching John's toned stomach disappear as he pulled on a shirt, "that it's time for you to retire."

John looked up. "All right," he said after a moment's pause. "I'll put in the request later today."

Helen felt her eyebrows lift. "That's it? No arguments?"

Pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pre-brewed blend, John shrugged lightly. Helen caught a wince as he strained sore shoulder muscles. "I told myself years ago that I would retire the moment you asked. You would never have done it before you thought it was time, and I wouldn't know when to stop."

She hummed her agreement, and for a moment John bustled around their modest kitchen in search of breakfast.

"Today's the anniversary, you know. I've been dreading it all month."

John, bent down to retrieve a frying pan, almost hit his head. "Fourteen years. He'd have his first girlfriend by now."

"He'd be on the football team," Helen said wistfully. She stood and poured out her tea. Leaning on the counter, she continued. "He would be the top of his class, I think."

"Oh, absolutely," John said. "With your brains, I don't see how he could go any other way!"

"Flatterer," she said, but it was without bite.

For a moment, everything in the Rider household was happy. The phone rang, breaking their silence, and Helen moved toward it so that her husband didn't have to abandon his eggs.

"John?" It was a woman's voice on the phone, one Helen thought she might recognize. "We need you to come in right away."

"This is Helen. Who should I tell him is speaking?" She felt as if she had swallowed a marble, and it was making its slow and painful trek down to her stomach. It was too soon! He had only just returned, and he wasn't even close to healed….

"Oh, forgive me. This is Tulip Jones."

She handed the phone to John and they switched places without a word. She poked the eggs with the spatula. He was only on the phone for a moment before he hung it up. Helen saw him run his fingers through his hair out of the corner of her eye.

"I've got to go in," he said. She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off: "They won't send me off again. It's probably just misfiled paperwork or something. I'll be home for lunch."

He kissed her cheek and grabbed a jacket off the hooks in their entryway. It wasn't until he'd pulled out of the driveway that Helen realized that he'd forgotten to eat his eggs.

John mentally prepared his retirement paperwork on the drive into the bank. A few times over the years, after the missions in Jakarta and San Pedro Sula, he had gone so far as to fill out the first pages of the forms. He'd locked them in the bottom drawer of his desk, and forgotten about them each time. Now, several years later, they were gathering dust. He looked forward to finally finishing them.

He inserted a key in the lift in the underground garage to take him past the bank lobby to MI6's reception floor. A facial scanner silently recognized him while a security officer on the 30th floor monitored the results of the full body scan that the machinery in the lift was completing while it rose upward. He was armed, of course, but the scanner was sophisticated enough to recognize John's weapons as those permitted to him. All this in the 25 seconds that it took him to reach the 20th floor.

The doors dinged open softly and Marta, their highly trained receptionist, nodded at John. He nodded in greeting before veering left down the labyrinthine corridors. Very little business was conducted on this floor, mostly low-level administrative work. Of course, the higher the security clearance, the higher the floor. So John made his way to the second bank of lifts, which were operated even more stringently than those that carried him from the garage.

In addition to the invisible facial scanner and weapons detector, John pressed his thumb against the pad that emerged robotically from the panel with the emergency phone. At the same time, he said clearly, "John Rider to floor 36." Supposedly, if he were under duress his voice would be different. John didn't see why it mattered, but it made everyone else – especially those who had never been into the field – more comfortable.

It was a livelier scene when he exited onto the 36th floor. Up here, agents mingled with support staff around the coffee machines and everyone breathed a little easier. Laughed a little easier.

His own office was on the opposite side of the floor from Tulip Jones, but he stopped there first, to drop off his things and to collect his thoughts. They wouldn't be sending him away again, not so soon. He had only been home two and a half days; one of them spent debriefing the team about what had gone south in Johannesburg. Usually agents got a week free for every week they were away, at least – and more if there was an injury to recover from, in any case.

Maybe Jones sensed his retirement announcement coming, John thought with a smile. But it wouldn't be true retirement, not really. Just moving into a less strenuous position in the office, where he could have regular hours and less of a chance of being shot at. He would be nearly the last from his class to retire – at least of those of them who were still alive.

On a whim, he collected the dusty retirement papers from the bottom drawer of his desk and decided to bring them to his meeting with Jones.

Both Blunt and Jones were in the deputy head's office, which was an unwelcome surprise to John. Despite his senior status, he had dealt very little with Alan Blunt, and he preferred to keep it that way. All the same, he nodded politely as he sat in the chair opposite the desk.

Jones stretched a tight smile across her face, but Blunt hardly reacted at all. In fact, he wasn't even looking up from a small folder of papers on the desk. (This was Jones' office, John thought with irritation. Why was she standing and he behind the desk?)

When neither of them spoke, John began: "Why am I here?" he asked, blunt but not impolite. Brevity was appreciated at Royal and General.

"Three days ago, the senior vice president of research and development at Polizer Pharmacies was assassinated within his own compound," Blunt said without preamble. "We were not overly concerned with this – he's a rich man with plenty of enemies – until we discovered that one of the security cameras had remained functional and captured his killer."

Blunt finally looked up at him. John stared back, impassive. Tulip cleared her throat.

"Not only do we have a visual of the killer, but a set of fingerprints. It appears that he retrieved the shell but then dropped it – otherwise, this was a completely clean mission. There's hardly a blip in the rest of the security tapes. Whoever he worked for was very thorough and careful."

John raised his eyebrows carefully, as if to say, "And? What's this got to do with me?"

"Lots of people are thorough and careful," he said instead, slowly. "You already said you weren't very concerned with this assassination. What does it change to see his face and have his fingerprints?"

Rather than answer, Blunt slid a page across the desk – a grainy photograph. John squinted at it for a moment before his eyebrows rose in shock.

"That's just a kid!" His face was young, that was certain, and he was all arms in legs in the way of a boy who hadn't finished growing into himself. Something about his face struck John as familiar, but before he could think on that, Jones was speaking again.

"That's certainly part of our unease regarding this case. But the next is even stranger." She picked up the remaining sheet in the dossier and handed it to John. The fingerprint results.

They had only managed a partial fingerprint, but it was enough to cross check with their database. John saw the conclusion – no match – and was unsurprised.

"Keep reading," Jones said, and John's eyes flicked further down the page. "One of ours loosened the parameters, looking for perhaps an old relation who drew this…child into a dark world."

John saw what she was talking about. And then he saw his own name.

For a second, it felt like he had been sucker punched in the gut. And then he remembered how to breathe.

He laughed. "Jones, my only brother works for you, and he's quite a bit older than that," he said, gesturing toward the photo. "And he's a bit old to be my nephew, I think, even one that Ian never knew about."

"I know." Jones said, almost sad. There was a moment of pause, and then she continued. "Our forensics estimate that he is likely fourteen or fifteen years of age."

The sudden realization hit him with the strength of a freight train.

"Alex" he said in an exhale, hardly audible. "Oh God, you think that's my son."

Tulip nodded. Her eyes were sad and understanding. John remembered suddenly that her own boys were lost as well.

Blunt spoke again. John had nearly forgotten that he was there. "We are still piecing together how he might be alive. Our best estimation thus far is that he was nowhere near the house when it exploded – Scorpia just wanted you to think that he was. From there, it would have been simple to take him and raise him as one of their own."

John was thankful he was seated, because he was dizzy. "My son," he said, and the things he had wistfully thought about that morning with Helen were suddenly replaying in front of his eyes – only now with a dark twist.

Alex with his first girlfriend, sliding a knife into her back as they shared a kiss.

Alex running, but instead of dodging offenders on the football team, he was dodging bullets as rubble fell around him.

Alex in the top of his class indeed, but rather than impressing his teachers with his knowledge of geometry or Shakespeare, a man with a ruddy beard smiled and praised Alex's form as he shot bullet after bullet into a pig carcass.

He stood suddenly. "I have to get home and talk to Helen," he said, gripping the back of the leather seat so tightly he thought he would leave permanent marks. "We're going to get him back."

Jones nodded, and John didn't like the pity in her eyes. Blunt had a sharp, victorious edge in his eyes. "We'll arrange it so you leave in three days." He stood. "Before you go, however, I have a question."

It took all of John's strength not to rush out, but he waited.

"Who do you suspect has been raising him?"

Hardly a second passed before John knew. "Julia Rothman," he spat, and spun out of the office, clutching the photo and fingerprint test in his sweaty hands.

His retirement form, half completed, lay forgotten on the floor.