Inescapable History, Inescapable Fates

chapter 2

Alex POV

Alex regretted it in the morning.

 What the hell had he been thinking? He ran to the bus stop, wanting to see Luna, then ran back to Sandhurst, then ran back to the bus stop, then remembered he had class and ran back to Sandhurst. Holy shit, he regretted it. He had never considered he was gay. More importantly, he had nearly slept with the mark. The person he needed to kill. He couldn't tell Luna! The mission! Had Luna always known? Looking back on his knowing smiles and jokes, Alex wanted to deck him. THIS was not what they were here for. Alex spent first period looking at photos from the Guatemalan genocide and photos of the explosion and it wasn't working so he looked up a secret URL, a document posted to no server, and looked through photos of torture for his mother's body. It was an American black site, but England knew. Alex spent second period throwing up in the bathroom and hating himself for looking. He spent third period channeling all that rage into Henry James Fox. And he spent lunch period staring at Henry's goldan locks and wishing he was shirtless. Fuck. Fuck Fuck Fuck.

Henry POV

He knew Alex would regret it. That's why he stopped it before they did things they couldn't take back. It still stung when Alex pulled his disappearing act in the morning. He hadn't even left a note. But Alex was staring at him lunch period, and looking away when their eyes met.

Henry had spent so much time trying to figure out if Alex was gay over the last few months. Henry knew Alex had a pride pin in his sparse bag of personal belongings, but it had an RL engraved in the back. Just a keepsake from Raphael Luna. He followed LGBTQ+ news, but Alex followed all politics. He read Henry's flamboyently gay poetry collection, but there were straight men that studied those books. Now that Henry knew Alex liked men, knew he liked Henry, all that research meant he knew Alex didn't have the amount of internalized homophobia Henry did. Henry knew the people around Alex supported LGBT rights. Maybe Alex just needed time to process. Maybe he was hung up on the "being a spy who thinks English people are evil" issue. Pez very badly wanted Henry to confront him, or at least send him a text, but Alex clearly needed space. And Henry needed to figure out why Alex was at Sandhurst beyond vague connections with the Guatemalan genocide and an explosion.

So once again he ended up in Pez's room staring at a pinboard and google archives. Pez knew basic coding and could navigate their way to documents and pages that didn't exist anymore for normal people, but all their information came from articles about events that happened decades before. And none explained why Alex was here now. His mom was a soldier from Britain who must have worked with Henry's dad before deserting. His dad's parents were part of the Mano Blanca, the right wing government that committed the Guatemalan genocide, but he had fled to Mexico as a teen, after the civil war. They had married and divorced in Mexico; Pez had found official records. Henry assumed they had met as witnesses, both trying to do the right thing with information they had gotten in the wrong ways. They couldn't find records on Alex's stepfather, or Alex for that matter. He simply did not exist in the records until 2015, a month after Henry's dad died. Pez found records of him creating a college board account, of all things. Henry felt like laughing maniacally or punching a wall. Alex became a trackable human because he wanted to take AP WORLD HISTORY AND PHYSICS??!!

Henry sighed and studied pictures of the explosion. Why did Alex's mom have his dad's gun, why did Alex only feel it was safe to reappear after Arthur Fox died?

"Why an explosion?" Henry asked Pez. Pez shrugged. "They could have poisoned them, or shot them, and avoided widespread news coverage. So why an explosion?"

"To burn all the evidence, probably, there was literally nothing for investigators to go off of."

"What if my dad's gun wasn't the only thing Alex's mom took from him." Pez's eyes widened. "It was never about the witnesses Pez,"