It's about the Principle!

"As he sobbed, feeling terribly sorry for himself, it began to occur to him that maybe the only reason he was so troubled by the injustice of growing up in Quill was because he had experienced life differently since then. He'd experienced something that his parents and Aaron had never known. And that maybe, if he hadn't been Unwanted, he'd have been just like them."

If Alex hadn’t been Unwanted, I think he would have had to be a Wanted.  None of the Stowe siblings were good at sliding under the radar, at fading into the background, like seems to be a requirement to be a Neccessary.  Also, Alex is an all or nothing character.  He’d either get many infractions or none.  So, a strong, intelligent Wanted he becomes.

In order for that to happen, not that much would have had to change about Alex.  He doesn’t have to not be creative; he just has to not get caught.  A Wanted Alex still would have drawn in the dirt, he just would have done it in private.  So, all that we’d need from a Wanted Alex would be for him to just be a little bit more sneaky (a little bit more like Fifer).

So, if we have a Wanted Alex, where does that leave Aaron?  Anywhere, really.  We could have gotten an Aaron who hides his creativity, who becomes a Wanted alongside Alex.  We could have gotten an Aaron who didn’t hide it quite as well, who got one infraction and became a Necessary.  Or we could have gotten an Aaron who ended up as an Unwanted.

There’s interesting things to talk about with all three options, but for now, I’ll look at a world where Alex was Wanted and Aaron was unwanted.  For that to happen, Aaron needed at least two infractions.  Maybe someone walked in on him pretending the broom was a hedgehog.  Maybe the day in the rain played out a little bit differently.

Maybe Alex and Aaron grew up closer than they did in canon.  Maybe Alex drew in front of Aaron and Aaron was just a little less desperate for approval and didn’t report him.  Maybe, when the rain fell, and Alex offered Aaron that chicken bone, and Aaron was caught drawing, he took the infraction, instead of letting Alex take the fall.  Maybe his father recognized him.  Maybe his father decided to save Alex that day rather than save Aaron.  And maybe, called out as he was, Aaron followed the rules.  He’d been caught being creative.  It was the rule that he was to die.

And maybe Alex, watching him go, felt relieved that the rain was hiding his failure to be a Quillen.  Maybe he thought of owning up, of admitting that he’d drawn, too, but that the words caught in his throat.  Because he’d almost made it.  He’d almost succeeded.  In this world, he hadn’t yet failed in Quill’s eyes.  And he couldn’t bring himself to admit it.  So maybe this Alex has to be a little bit more selfish, too.

Would Alex hate himself, for not being willing to die alongside his brother?  Or would he shove that guilt down, and let it come back out as anger, like so many of our Alex’s repressed emotions do?

Anyways, the day of the Purge arrives, and Aaron is Unwanted while Alex is Wanted.  Alex meets his brother’s eyes as Aaron is dragged away in chains, and looks away after Aaron whispers goodbye to him.  Alex grieves his brother.  Because he loves Aaron.  That is something that I don’t think would change about Alex’s character.  Alex will always love Aaron.  Alex will always want a life with his brother at his side.  He will always fight for that possibility.

This Alex also still wants to succeed.  Quill has just had a lot more say in what he views that success as.  He’s become Wanted; he has succeeded on that front.  Next, his ambition is encouraged, and he is eyeing the Quillitary, perhaps, as he excels in university and gets the attention of General Blair and Major Burkesh for his exceptional battle strategies.  He wants a position in the Quillitary, not the palace, because he’s smart enough to see that the military is where the real power lies.  Justine can’t enforce her will without people willing to enforce it.  The Quillitary controls what’s done and not done in Quill.  And Alex wants to control that.

This Alex also has a very strong sense of right and wrong; it’s just more skewed to what Quill thinks is right and wrong.  And this Alex, once he decides that something is right, will also not go back on it very easily.  He is Wanted.  He was right to become Wanted.  He is creative.  He was right to be creative.  These are two facts that can coexist in his mind.  And if creativity is right, Justine must be wrong to send creative people to their deaths.  Justine is wrong.  And because this Alex is as much a doer as our Alex is, he wouldn’t be content to wait and let someone else do something about that.  But, because this Alex is sneakier than our Alex, he wouldn’t launch a frontal assault on the palace.  No, he would work his way up through the Quillitary, quickly, gaining their loyalty, because this Alex still inspires people to reach for more, is still a powerful leader.

And while this is going on, maybe this Alex discovers that he has magic.  Not Artimean magic; he doesn’t know that that exists.  But his own, innate magic; like Fifer and Thisbe and Nadia all have.  Maybe he’s thirsty, and he makes it rain.  Or maybe he’s hungry (because the favored farm doesn’t exist in this world), and a dead, dried plant springs to life beneath his palm.  And there are possibilities here.  But the first one he thinks of is Aaron.

He misses his brother.  This Alex is lonely.  This Alex watched his brother and his friend (Meghan) get sent to their deaths and now only has manipulative Quillitary leaders and jealous Quillitary recruits for company.  And maybe the little Senior Governors' son who likes to tag along with him, who has gained a sudden, odd interest in him.  But they're not Aaron.  They’re not his brother, who he shared his deepest memories with.  They’re not Meghan, who he played in the street with.  Meghan and Aaron were sent to their deaths for being creative.  Something that Alex doesn’t believe is right.

And Alex, with this magic to perhaps make things grow, might wonder if he could fix this mistake.  Might start to think that there would be a way to bring his brother and his friend back.  He knows that they didn’t deserve to die.  Maybe this Alex would want to bring the other Unwanteds back as well.  Or maybe he would only want to save the people he cares about, this more selfish Alex, this Alex more like our Alex in Quests, who refuses to go help young dragons in need because it would threaten his people.  This Alex, whose only people as far as he is concerned are Meghan and Aaron.

So he starts digging.  Metaphorically, at first, although he suspects that it will soon be literally.  Unless the Death Farmer leaves all the Unwanted bodies to rot aboveground.  This Alex plans, alone, not much farther than finding his brother and his friend’s bodies and bringing them back.  He doesn’t test it, to see if it’ll work.  Our Alex wasn’t much of a tester, much of a scientist, and this Alex doesn’t have Lani or Sky to make him more analytical.  Maybe he climbs to the top of the wall in an effort to get into the Death Farm and discovers that Quill is an island.  And maybe he’s even more furious at Justine for having lied to him.  Maybe he discovers a secret tunnel into the palace.

But, when he finds a way into the Death Farm, he most certainly discovers Artime.  This Alex, just like our Alex, would be frightened by it at first.  It’s new and unexpected, not what he thought he’d find.  He thought he’d find rotting corpses, not living, singing, people (singing, like Meghan used to).  Would he see these happy people, with no one around to explain it, and think that it was fake?  That there was no possible way it was real.  That it was some sort of sick, twisted hallucination, making these people live in a false reality, trapping them there.  And he would still be determined to save Aaron, just like our Alex was determined to save his Aaron.

What goes down next would depend on what Aaron did.  What his life as an Unwanted had been.  And I haven’t thought too much about that, yet.  But this world wouldn’t end up being too different from the canon one, even with our main characters swapping places.  There still would have been some conflict between Quill and Artime after Artime was discovered and Justine still would have died.

But maybe Alex would have used the distraction of that conflict to be the one to kill Justine.  In another world, Aaron killed Mr. Today.  In this one, Alex kills Justine.  Maybe he uses something personal to do it.  Maybe he drowns her in the ocean, like she sentenced his brother to be drowned in a lake of boiling oil.  Maybe he shoots her with the Senior Governor's gun that little Henry Haluki snuck to him.

In this world, I still see Alex and Aaron rising to power of opposing nations; just with Alex in Quill and Aaron in Artime.  Mr. Today would still die.  Maybe Alex’s rival in the Quillitary, Samheed Burkesh (who never would have been Unwanted in a world where Aaron wasn’t reporting people), would be the one to kill Marcus.  I haven’t thought about what would happen after that.  It would likely be quite different from our series.  But some things about Alex would still stay the same.

This Alex is just as ambitious, determined, and creative as ours is.  He’s an inspiring leader, a fantastic battle strategist, and a powerful mage.  He’s perhaps more like Justine than ours is, more likely to say that his right is the only right and believe it fully.  More likely to try to control what other people do.  He’s a little more selfish and a little more sneaky, but he’s not cruel.  He’s angry, but he’s not necessarily a bad person.  He’s not a villain; more of an anti-hero.