We're the good guys, Michael.

title: Remember Babylon? (9)
rating: PG-13 to hard R/NC-17 in later chapters
summary: "She had to grow up sometime". When Charles Widmore attempts an island coup, the only safe place for Alex Linus is far, far away. With Richard Alpert overseeing her safety, everything should have been fine, but nothing Ben wants ever works out precisely as he had planned, and even for Richard, things do not stay entirely the same. Alex/Richard romance, along with a few other pairings, island history and Richard back-story. AU, utterly.
pairings: Richard/Alex mainly, mentions of several others, particularly rare pairings
author's note: Inspired by any number of Godless things, among them possessiveness and Nabokov, fickle weather, Oscar Wilde, Radiohead, world history and the Marquis de Sade.
author's note for this chapter: This is a shorter than usual chapter, for which I apologize. The next one is longer, I swear. Also, the address isn't arbitrary. ;)
warnings: semi-graphic sexuality soon next time, some violence and character deaths throughout.
previous: part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | part six | part seven | part eight




ix.

After one year and two months, Alex finally hears her father’s voice, shaky on the long distance telephone wire. For all the delights of Vladivostok, their communications station, the Listening Post, is the least comfortable place Alex has ever inhabited. Chill wind blows against the metal top of the structure, and underground, even through the concrete, Alex is convinced she can feel the frost. They sleep in bunks, metal slabs screwed onto the wall. Despite foam pads and mounds of blankets, she can still feel the icy touch of the metal, the unrelenting hardness. It is much more difficult than sleeping on the ground, back on the island. Frostbite. A cold that settles in her chest for a week, making it difficult to breathe. Mikhail gets the flu, refuses to sleep, stomps and sweats and jabbers endlessly in brooding Russian with two Ukrainians who come to their door on Ben’s orders. The air circulates sluggishly, stale, all artificial heat flavoured with cough syrup and warm vodka.

Ben is hesitant at first. He remembers the whirlwind, remembers the Alex who spat at him, cursed his name, ran away. He remembers being hated, told she would rather he had died, that she would rather die than tolerate him. Alex on the phone is smooth and cultured, sweet, if withdrawn, almost kind. Ben’s self-preservation and stoicism evaporate when she tells him she is having fun travelling, that she misses him, that she loves him and hopes he is all right. She does not ask when they are coming back and he does not tell her. He gives her a name, an address of a bank, the number of an account, and then asks her to hand the phone to Richard.

They go back in London, and though Richard is fine, Alex is still oddly fatigued from the jetlag. She has her own room in the hotel but lingers long in Richard’s, stopping by in the morning with two glasses of orange juice from the free breakfast downstairs, sometimes lying on his perfectly made bed reading the newspaper. Often, she falls asleep on his clean sheets in the long, purple and golden hours of the afternoon, when all the world is twilight. Sometimes, when he can, Richard joins her, pulling her close, kissing her cheeks or her neck or her lips, letting his hands rove over her body, trying to forget, but often, there is too much to do. The have the Lamp Post back. They have reclaimed the Siren and the Gate. Things are happening in Australia. An elderly man telephones one day, offers the help of a small band of contingency forces. Alex has never seen him before, but Richard recognizes him instantly. The former vice president of the Hanso corporation. He had escaped the island four days before the Purge, headed home for Christmas. The man does not recollect Richard, or, if he does, says nothing. He leaves them envelopes full of cash, a gun in a metal case, tells Richard to say hello to Jacob for him, leaving Richard, Tom and Alex perplexed.

“Better Linus than Charles Widmore,” the man shudders, wrapping his long trench coat around his bent body, his brown eyes hinting of things left unsaid as he shakes Richard‘s hand. It is entirely possible he does not realize who pulled the lever in the Tempest, leaving the forty-some dead strewn across the bunker grounds.

Juliet Burke shows up two weeks later.

“Juliet!”

The fertility doctor looks harsher than what Alex remembers: pared down, more focussed. All unnecessary sentimentality has been stripped away, and the look in her eyes is opaque, blank, reminiscent of Ben when he tries to hide his feelings. She gives Alex a perfunctory hug, too overwhelmed with post-traumatic stress to utter a word about the island, despite the questions. After asking a few, Alex gives up. The four of them go to a restaurant, discussing business over dinner, and no one misses the fact that while Tom orders a glass of quality imported beer and Alex tries out the novelty of a Singapore Sling, Juliet drinks no less than six screwdrivers. Her hands tremble as she cuts her steak, choking on the first bite. She speaks in a tremulous monotone, offering one or two word answers to the questions Tom and Richard ask. No one wants to speculate about what she has been through. When she goes to the bathroom, Alex follows her, and once the door swings shut, Juliet puts her arms around the girl and cries.

She is gone the next day, packing heat, a crumpled piece of paper bearing two names tucked into her pocket.

A few days later, Alex receives a package in the post. The slim box contains three things: a letter from her father, four pages long; a loaded Desert Eagle with spare .44 Magnum cartridges and a dog-eared Polaroid photograph. In the white area, where a loved one might write a name, date or special caption, is an address - 121 Westminster Bridge Road - and a surname, Brookwood. She picks up the pages of the letter, each written in Ben’s peculiar handwriting - he always did have a penchant for writing in all capital letters - looks sparingly at them, returns them to their envelope and wordlessly sets the package inside the air vent. After screwing back the slats, she flops down on Richard’s bed.

“Alex?” Richard questions a moment later. He knows the answer to the question before he speaks it. “What did Ben want?”

She utters a sound, like a sigh or a gasp, and lays her forearm over her eyes, shading her vision. “What do you think?” After a moment, she looks at him. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything different from him. We’ve been apart so long, I almost forgot what kind of person he is.” She mimics Ben’s voice harshly, heavily sarcastic. “Sorry I haven’t spoken to you in, oh, fourteen months, but hey, Alex, be a pal and go kill some people for me, what do you say?”

Richard feels his heart stop beating. “He gave you a name?” He has lived too long to be shocked, but nonetheless, he is. Of all the people Ben might recruit, Alex is the last. She has been wholly untouched by his skilful manipulation, though of course, he coerces her directly in ways he would or could not do to others. Ben has always looked at Alex as something fragile and precious, his own, to be protected at all costs from the dirty things he needs to handle. Now, she is in the centre, part of the hurricane force Ben bears down on Widmore.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“One of Widmore’s, of course, some guy named Brookwood, probably not top of the food chain, or he wouldn‘t ask me,” Alex says, rolling onto her side to face Richard. Her voice sounds hard, jaded, older. She shrugs. “So that was what he sent me the money for. Compensation. He always did pay his people well.” She offers a tight, mirthless smile. “I should have expected that sooner or later. I’m not a little kid anymore. He expects me to do my part.”

“You don’t have to,” Richard explains. His pulse returns, thunderous. He thinks of Alex, his Alex, steely eyed, gun in hand. She has held a gun before, of course: pointed and threatened and aimed. But that has always only ever been in desperation, her against the world, passionate and afraid. She did it to rescue Karl. She did it to get away from Ben. She was never destined to be a killer.

She turns to him knowingly. “You mean to say, if I want you to, you’ll do it for me.” It is not a question. She knows where he goes when he leaves the hotel, despite the lies about meeting contacts and checking for information. Richard is good, very good. He does not return with blood on his hands, tellingly dishevelled. His appearance is as neat and calm when he comes back from a murder as it is when he walks out, but nonetheless, she knows. She can sometimes smell it on him, the hint of a struggle, the heat scent that stains his hands after a hollow round leaves a chamber, the trace of adrenaline and fear. “You’ve killed people for him before.”

He does not lie. “Yes.”

“I can handle it,” she assures him, just a twitch of little girl pride at being grown up enough to get asked. Her eyes go cloudy, purple stained glass. “I’m so tired!” she admits, to change the subject.

Richard sits down on the edge of the bed, his expression sympathetic. It is strange. He is a corrupting force. He should welcome this. It will be in service to the island, he knows, if Alex does what she is told, but he cannot wrap his mind around it.

“Hush then,” he tells Alex, “and go to sleep.” Richard sinks down as she turns away from him, curling up into a sort of foetal position, and slides against her, pulling her close to him. He can feel her trembling slightly, probably crying, but she does not make a sound. He wraps one arm around her hip, pressing his hand over hers, and draws her back to rest her head on his other arm. The heat from her body is radiant; he can feel it everywhere his body touches hers, but she shivers anyway, claiming she’s cold. He pulls her closer, holding her tight, nuzzling against the back of her neck, breathing against her soft hair, and within seconds, she is asleep.