“You can’t just do that,” Adrienne pointed out with a huff.

Cedric smirked at her; that smirk that stirred up so many emotions inside of Adrienne: joyful annoyance, love, frustration, and an intense longing to kiss it right off his face. “Oh can’t I?” Cedric drawled, raising an eyebrow as, down on the floor, he darted to another wall.

Adrienne rolled her eyes as she jumped to another rafter in the roof. “Ugh! Well, I know you can, I just wish you couldn’t.” The best thing was to just be honest with Cedric, even when it meant feeding his already-too-large ego.

“Uh-huh,” he replied, carefully peering into another room. Adrienne looked nervously back at the main entrance. “Will we be able to get back out?”

He glanced up at her. “Of course. Don’t worry so much.”

“But we’re, like, practically in the tombs of the dead!”

Cedric made a sour face. “You could call it that.”

Adrienne pressed her lips together and flipped down from the rafters with ease, landing in a cat-like crouch beside Cedric.

“Hey!” He said sharply, wheeling, “You should have stayed up there! We –” But then they heard footsteps. Cedric’s eyes blazed suddenly. “They’re back,” he uttered, with a muttered curse.

Adrienne’s face looked white but determined. “Yeah, so what? We can do this thing. Back to back. Brother to brother.”

The doors opened and Sergeant Andrews came in. When he saw them, he barked, “Soldier! Kill them!”

“And that’s another thing. I know this isn’t the best time to tell you this, Adrienne,” – as they swung up to the rafters once more and began skipping out of reach of the gunfire – “but I’d really like it if sometime it wouldn’t be brother to brother.”

“Oh,” Adrienne panted back, “you mean brother to sister?”

“No,” – as he dodged another gunshot – “no, I don’t mean that – at all –” Cedric swung back down to the ground and dodged behind a wall.

Adrienne did a Parkour roll on an eight-inch-wide rafter in order to dodge another bullet. “What do you mean, then?”

“Well – ” Cedric, who had a black belt in karate, did a roundhouse kick and managed to fell a soldier, “I think I’d like to explain that, but maybe I should do it when we get landed back in jail or something. At least then we’d be more comfortable.”

“Okay. Fine with me. But I think when we –” she pulled her gun out and started firing – “get in jail, you’ll have to –” she reloaded – “talk fast, because I have a feeling that this trip to jail will be a little more…permanent.”

“You mean we’ll get shot or something?” Cedric stole a gun from the fallen soldier and began firing as well.

“Yeah, shot, or the chair, or something like that.” Adrienne cursed. “I’m out!”

Cedric glanced up, then bent and took another gun from the fallen soldier and tossed it up to her, shouting, “Think fast!”

Adrienne caught it and glared at him. “I’ve half a mind to shoot you!” She said. “Only you would yell ‘think fast’ at someone who –” she paused to do a triple Parkour roll and lost her train of thought.

“Yep.” Cedric responded, but absently, as he continued to fight like a madman.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Adrienne said suddenly, after a few minutes of no talking and all fighting, fighting like wildcats, fighting for their lives, “is it just me or does it seem to you like they keep…multiplying?”

Cedric briefly glanced around the room. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure they are.”

Adrienne whistled. “Have they actually called the CIA and the FBI out on us? Are we that important?”

Cedric grinned. “It would seem that they have. Wow, I feel flattered.”

“Um, Cedric?” Adrienne said, a little nervously, “Do you think now is a good time for surrender?”

The room had filled up with different secret service agencies from around the world, including the CIA, the FBI, the SIS, the CNI, the DCRI, and the AISI.

Therefore, even Cedric acknowledged that it would probably be deemed wise for surrender to be their chosen path of action.

There was a discussion between secret services, after Adrienne and Cedric had been secured, back-to-back in chains, as which country’s jail should get them; Adrienne thought she’d never seen Cedric look so terrified before. She didn’t understand why; that wasn’t the scary part.

“Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk before they torture us or whatever,” she whispered to him.

He tensed and his hand scrabbled desperately to grip hers. Tears welling up in her eyes, she gently eased her hand into his, and they waited.

Eventually, because America had sent two secret services out for them, and because most of their offenses had been against America, it was to America’s jail they went.

***

“You have to let me see her! Please! I’m not trying to do anything! I just have to talk to her! Please! It’s…it’s standard to let one prisoner talk to the other for a little while before they die! Please!” Cedric was going berserk. Literally.

He was screaming, strangely enough, not about being killed (he seemed to assume that he would, case closed), but instead about needing to see Adrienne.

Finally, Sergeant Andrews gave in, “Fine, but only for five minutes! That’s all you get, okay?”

“Okay, great, fine, I’ll be a good boy ever afterwards! Thank you!” Cedric was out of that cell in a flash, running to Adrienne’s.

As soon as they were alone in her cell, Cedric began talking. “Okay, this is probably the last and only time I’ll have to talk to you, so…I’d just…” he cleared his throat. “I’d…really like to…talk…about stuff.”

Adrienne grinned up at him. “Cedric, this is the first time I’ve ever seen you nervous since I’ve known you. Where’s the cocky laddie I know? What have you done with him?”

Cedric laughed, his easy laugh, but his eyes were serious; passionate. “Okay, this is gonna to be really hard to –” Suddenly, an almost evil glint came to his eyes. “No, wait, this isn’t gonna be hard at all!”

He strode across the cell with a firm step and took her in his arms. Adrienne looked warily up at him. “This will explain everything,” he said, then closed the distance between them with an unspeakably passionate kiss.

When they stopped for a split second for air, Adrienne gasped, “That…explained a lot.”

“Mm,” Cedric groaned, kissing her again.

That night, Adrienne heard a scraping sound in her cell. Getting down off her cot, she knelt on the floor. “John?” She whispered into a crack in the floor. Then she thumped on the floor to let whoever it was know where she was.

“Hey!” Yelled a guard. “Whaddya think you’re doing?”

“I’m not doing anything!” She yelled back. “Sorry, I just fell out of bed!” There. That would ensure that whoever it was would know where she was.

Soon, the crack in the floor grew bigger and then concrete slid away in one place, revealing a tunnel.

Adrienne crawled down into it without hesitating. But when she came to the bottom of the tunnel, she cried softly, “Cedric! What about Cedric?! Oh, dear God, we need to get Cedric!”

“We’ll get him out later,” John (for it was he) said softly, grabbing Adrienne’s hand, “but for right now, we just need to get out of here. Okay?”

“Later might be too late! We have to get him out tonight!”

“Okay, I’ll get someone working on it. Mark, go get him. Now.”

“Wait, Mark!” She grabbed his arm. “Let me come. Please.”

Mark glanced at John, who sighed and nodded; then he grabbed her hand and they began half-walking, half-crawling, through the tunnel as John put the cement floor back in place.

Mark and Adrienne finally found the place where Cedric’s room should be and Mark began working on the roof of the tunnel so as to create an opening for Cedric to climb down into.

As soon as it was completed, and the cement of the cell’s floor gave way, Cedric began to climb down.

“Hey, you,” he whispered to Adrienne, catching her in a hug and kissing her quickly, “Good of you to come and rescue me.”

“You know I’d do anything for you, you big jerk,” she whispered back, tears welling over in her eyes as they made their way out of the tunnel to get back to their organization’s headquarters.

“You do realize, of course,” Cedric remarked just as they came to the opening, “that we’ll be killed eventually.”

“Well, duh,” Adrienne said. “But I intend to spend the time I left in the best way there is: with you.”

~finis~