The thief made her cautious way through the darkened hallway leading to the private display room of a wealthy collector, attracted there by the word in the Parisian underworld of the latest addition to his collection. It was said to be a jade statuette, notable for having been recovered from a recently discovered oriental temple by a certain teen-aged adventurer.
The corridor was guarded by a series of laser beams, but the thief navigated the loose web with almost casual ease. As she agilely dodged the beams her mind wandered to another time, a time when she would have let an arm or a leg brush a beam, hoping the alarm would summon that very teen hero to yet another encounter. She shook the thought away, annoyed with herself. Those days were long over.
A metal door with a fingerprint scanner let her know she had reached the display room. She had not been able to obtain the reclusive millionaire's thumb print, but she had researched the scanner and had brought the necessary tools to bypass it. Cutting through the door would have been faster, but would also lead to kind of attention she was trying to avoid these days. It wasn't necessary: the eccentric collector's reluctance to allow human personnel or even cameras in his sanctuary meant she was unlikely to be detected at this stage. Getting inside the building had been the hardest part.
The metal door slid into the wall, revealing another, mahogany door behind it. This door wasn't locked, and opened into a room perhaps a thirty feet deep and a hundred feet wide. The room held a number of pedestals, some of which were lit by dim spotlights, leaving the rest of the room in deep shadows. There was enough illumination to reveal the pedestals supported glass cases with misshapen, hybrid animal figures in them. One spotlight revealed the object the thief sought, a green statuette of some chimera from Asian mythology, enclosed in a glass case on the other side of the room. She was three steps away from it when a voice from the shadows froze her in her tracks.
"I knew you'd come."
The voice was familiar, but the tone wasn't. The thief whirled around to face a figure stepping out from the shadows, her heart beating too fast. The figure was unmistakably feminine, more so than she had remembered. Skin-tight leggings flattered her legs and hips in a way the cargo pants never had, and she filled her crop top better than before. Her smooth curves were broken only by combat boots and a bulky belt. She was still too deep in the shadows to make out the color of her hair, but the thief's memory supplied it readily enough. She watched the hero take another two steps, hypnotized by the swing of her hips. Her chest felt strangely hollow and she was short of breath. She was annoyed by her reaction, and it was easy enough to let that annoyance color her voice.
"Dammit, Princess! I left you alone. Couldn't you have returned the favor?"
"Why did you leave?"
The thief hadn't expected the question and it took her a moment to decide how to reply. She chose an ambiguous answer.
"I just got frustrated with never getting anywhere. It became obvious it was never going to work; so..."
The hero had moved closer as she spoke, and she could see the green of her eyes as they looked into hers only two paces away. She was surprised by the hurt in them.
"So you left me. Alone."
The thief swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. She couldn't have spoken even if she'd known what to say. The hero advanced another step, still looking into her eyes. The thief's heart was hammering and alternating waves of heat and cold raced along her body.
"It took me so long—months—to understand why I never seemed to be happy anymore. So many months to realize that there was something missing from my life."
The hero looked away for a second. The thief didn't dare breathe for fear of disrupting the moment. Her chest ached as her heart seemed to be swelling with hope rekindled.
"And more time to admit to myself what it was that was missing."
The hero took one final step and leaned in to whisper in the thief's ear. She was very aware of their chests pressed together, of the hero's thigh against hers, of the breath on her earlobe.
"Please... don't walk away again."
The thief briefly leaned back to look the hero in the eye.
"I won't, Pumpkin," she said, her voice soft. "Never again."
She wrapped her arms around the younger woman as their lips met in a kiss.