Welcome to the Scrapheap

1.

He was useless to them now. He couldn't answer their mindless questions even if he wanted to. Screaming without a break for weeks will do that to your voice.

He wasn't afraid anymore. They couldn't do anything worse than they already had. There wasn't even a point to the torture. No evil plan for him to thwart, no larger goal. Just him and their job to cease his life as agonisingly as they could.

Just his death to look forwards to.

He could hear them now as he shifted on the concrete floor. Coming down to deal the final blows.

Finally, he could give up on trying to get through the pain.

The click of the metal door triggered a visceral response, his whole battered body twitching away from it despite having absolutely no energy or motivation to move. He couldn't choke down the panic that rose up; despite his mind being past the point of caring, his body still tried to do its job.

He closed the one eye that still opened, not wanting to see the instrument of his murder.

And then something crashed down on his left leg with blinding force.

Pain crackled along his leg and through his body like lightning through water. The sound of bones crunching was sickening. His ears rung loudly with agony as he let himself scream, a long, animal cry that tapered into a choked sob.

They struck again and again in the same spot, sending shudders of terror and hopelessness through him. Alex whimpered as they stopped, eyeing him up. For a moment he thought it was over, before his arm too exploded into hellfire.

His back, his shoulder, everywhere, the blows were relentless. He didn't quite know why he was still awake. His leg was already going numb, which wasn't really a great sign. Not that it mattered anymore.

They stopped.

They left.

Alex let himself go.

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Wolf gripped his gun tightly, back against the wall as he prepared to move around the corner. It had taken twenty minutes to get past the guards. Mrs Jones had been right, they were good, but fifteen men dead on the ground vs his grazed shoulder told him all he needed to know.

Cub should not be in a place like this. The whole situation was wrong. Fox had told them what he knew, Cub's file told them even more, but he couldn't grasp the reality of the situation. That kid couldn't be the razor sharp, cheeky sod they met out on the Beacons. At Point Blanc he'd been so blasted calm and collected, it was unreal. Practically five minutes after ironing board-ing down a mountain, he was sipping hot chocolate and teasing Wolf. Not even recruits teased Wolf.

What had that innocent kid gone through since he last saw him? The mission reports were detached and clinical but the things they described... he didn't even know if he could have gone through it unscathed. Now he was here, and Wolf was afraid to find him. Because he didn't want to find out what would happen if they found him dead.

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Eagle went to break open yet another basement door. Three dead bodies out of five rooms didn't bode well.

None of them Cub.

Each one another heart attack until he looked closer.

He kicked it open and stepped forwards with one clean movement, gun ready in case another enemy emerged.

At first he thought it was empty.

Then he saw the puddle of blood and the limp figure in the shadowed corner.

The size could only be a teenager.

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AN:

Well hi! This is my first ever fanfiction that I've carried through. Thanks for being here.

This chapter contains, quite obviously, a lot of violence. Hopefully it's not too graphic? It's not gratuitously so, I'm not really into gore, but whump gotta whump, y know?

Mild swearing for characterisation I guess

Disclaimer: I am, in fact, not Anthony Horowitz in disguise as a WattPad idiot who's username is owlin_around. I don't own Alex Rider. (He's on my birthday list though.)

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