Disclaimer: I do not own, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, the characters associated with them, or any pop culture references I may choose to include.

Author's Notes: Thank you for your reviews. I'm glad that you all are supportive of this story. I especially appreciate all of the constructive reviews that I have been receiving, they really help motivate and encourage me.

Italics are thoughts.

Chapter Seven

"Let me make sure I've got all this." Frank spoke as he and Joe stepped into the empty elevator on their way up to get Camilla. "This Tom guy, knocked Nancy out, and handcuffed her to a bed. Then you showed up and knocked him out. You were getting Nancy out of the cuffs, when he showed up again, with a gun that you forgot to search him for. You then decided to fight him, even though he had the advantage, and somehow the fight got into the living room, leaving Nancy to find a way out of the remaining handcuff without the hair thing you were using because you dropped it in your rush to take out Tom. You and Tom switched to a fist fight when you knocked the gun out of his hands, and meanwhile Nancy gets so frustrated trying to get her hand free that she just pulled the bar that she's chained to out of the back of her bed, which is how she sprained her wrist. Tom regained the gun, and was about to kill you, when Nancy came out and shot him, with her own gun that she keeps hidden in her bathroom. Is that it?"

Joe sighed dreading the next question. "Yeah. That's pretty much the gist of it."

"Can I ask why this all happened?"

"You can ask. I just can't answer."

"And why not?"

"Well I don't know the entire story either." It wasn't exactly a lie. Joe did not know everything about the events that had been occurring. He did know a lot more than Frank, but he didn't know everything.

"Bull." Frank snapped a little as the elevator doors opened. "You know more than you'll tell me."

Joe hated the way that his brother could read him sometimes. "That's because it's not my place to tell you. If you want answers then you have to go somewhere else."

"And where do you suggest I go?"

"The other party involved in last night's incident would be a good option. She's working downstairs." Joe started to smile as they neared Camilla's room. Maybe he could twist everything into working out wonderfully; Frank and Nancy would be friends again once Frank got the whole story, he could get some peace with his daughter, and then after everyone had had their fill of those particular notions he and Bess could play matchmaker.

Frank nodded. "That's a good idea." He agreed. "I need to talk to her about why she didn't listen to me in the first place." He turned and started back to the elevators.

Oh crap. "Uh…Frank? That's not what I meant!"

Frank had been in the Emergency Room for ten minutes but hadn't spoken to Nancy. He couldn't find her, and he didn't know where to look. Joe, though reluctant to give information about why he had been so worried, had told him all about the nurse at the front desk and Frank knew that he really didn't want to deal with her. Instead he decided to wander aimlessly, eventually he would have to run into her; she couldn't hide from him forever.

His plan however, was foiled, when he ran into someone. "Sorry." He quickly apologized, intent on continuing.

"Can I help you?"

Glancing at the petite woman up and down he realized that she worked at the hospital, and decided that he might as well ask if she knew where Nancy was. "I'm looking for Dr. Drew. Could you tell me where she is?"

"Oh, she's working on a patient right now. Is there anything I can help you with? My name's Margie. I work with Dr. Drew a lot." She held out her hand with a smile on her face.

"Well, I just really need to talk to her." Frank shook her hand.

"Are you a friend of hers?"

"Yeah."

"Well she should be out soon. You can wait right over there." Margie pointed to a couple of chairs. "Could you try and convince her to take the day off? She had a long night and we're all pretty worried about her."

"I, uh…I guess."

"Great." Margie bubbled. "Oh. There she is." She pointed towards a door that was swinging open and Nancy appeared, exiting with a tired look on her face. Her hair, which was still dark, Frank noted grimly, was up, pinned in some sort of bun that he couldn't recognize, and she had one wrist wrapped in a brace.

"Thanks." He muttered before hurrying over to her. "Nancy, can we talk?" He started quickly, in the hopes that maybe she wouldn't shut him down if he could start before she noticed him.

No such luck. "No." She continued her brisk walk.

"Why not?" He simply followed her. He wasn't about to give up as easily as she wanted him to, even if it meant causing another scene, finding embarrassment in the emergency room once more and probably getting punched in the eye again.

"Because now is not the time for an 'I told you so.'"

OK. She so called you on that one Frank. When he learned that she knew of his ultimate plan it annoyed him. She wasn't supposed to be able to tell these things anymore. She wasn't a detective. She was a doctor. Doctors weren't supposed to be able to just know what somebody was going to do without hardly glancing at them. And she most certainly wasn't supposed to be able to. Not when they did not have the connection that allowed them to read each other so well. At least, Frank couldn't see the connection anymore. Nancy was too far changed. "Well too bad. I warned you about that guy Nance. I told you he was bad news. If you had just listened to me--."

"If I had just listened to you what would have happened?" Nancy whirled around quickly, with a look in her eyes that to Frank was even scarier than the one he had seen the day before. "You would have apologized and everything would be perfect between us because you would realize that maybe some of the old Nancy was still in me and the old Hardy charm might still work to convince me to give up everything I've worked for and return to my old life? And then I would join the agency and you'd change the name to Hardy, Hardy, and Drew? What would happen next? Would we be working a case and get stranded alone in some terrible situation, yet somehow it would turn romantic and we'd finally get together because of it? Is that what would have happened if I had just listened to you, Frank? Would everything returned to the way you want it to be if I had listened to you?

"I have a bit of a newsflash for you Hardy. It's been ten years. We aren't teenagers anymore, and you're stuck on fantasies that you created back when we were, because you somehow managed to make it through the gates into the adult world without changing very much. Well I didn't. I found a different job, that I like a lot. It's a lot of hard work, but I'm helping people, and I'm really sorry that you can't see that it's not so bad to do something else. I want to be friends with you Frank but you have to get over the fact that it's not going to be the same as it was when we were eighteen. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm working."

Frank was speechless as she turned again and left, walking towards the crowded waiting room. He couldn't believe everything that she had just said…especially how spot on she was about the whole thing. She was right. He hadn't changed at all. He was still the eighteen year old amateur detective, trapped in a twenty-eight year old private detective's body. He could barely stop thinking about it, and how unfair it was that she could see it when he couldn't.

OK. Maybe I owe her an apology. He sighed as he heard her voice, suddenly a lot softer and more caring, straining over the crowd.

"I'm very sorry to tell you this Mr. Harper, but your daughter's injuries were very severe. We exercised every option that we had but there was nothing that we could do. I'm very sorry for your loss."

Make that a big apology. Frank watched as she spoke for a few moments more with the man she was talking to before turning and speaking with a nurse at the front desk that she would be going home, and then something about it being what everybody wanted her to do anyway. She then entered a door that, if he remembered correctly was the locker room. Without a thought, Frank followed her in determined to extract his foot from his mouth. He found her leaning up against a row of lockers with her non-injured hand up against her face, but it quickly flew down when she heard him come in.

"Frank, you're not supposed to be in here. And furthermore with the way you're following me I have every right to have security come down and get you. I don't want to talk to you."

"I know." Frank stepped a bit further into the room. "But I really need to apologize to you." After he said this, he wondered briefly if the look of shock on Nancy's face would be permanently stuck there if she didn't feel a different emotion soon. "I should have given this whole medical thing a chance…I should have given you a chance. I was really a--."

"Bastard?"

"I was going to go for jerk. But that works too." Frank nodded, suddenly finding himself in agreement with every assessment that Nancy provided. "I'm sorry. I should have just accepted that you were doing something different."

Nancy gave him a brief moment of silence before responding. "It's alright. I was mad, and a little upset, but it wasn't entirely your fault."

"It wasn't?"

"A lot of things changed for you. Your younger brother had a child. It's not unnatural that you would want to hang on to something completely constant." Nancy informed. "In this case, me, and your relationship with me." She smiled, giving him his first genuine Nancy smile in quite a bit of time, at the look of confusion on his face. "I did a rotation in psychiatrics."

"So now I'm insane?" Frank reacted a little defensively at the suggestion she had just offered.

Nancy frowned again. It's going to take some getting used to, Drew. Don't jump down his throat. He did apologize. "I didn't say that Frank. I said it was perfectly normal." She paused. "But there is another factor that probably led to us not, playing nice, as Bess put it. I haven't been completely honest with you." She took a deep breath knowing there was no turning back now. It's not like he wasn't going to find out eventually. "I haven't exactly quit detective work."

"And I'm guessing this has to do with why Tom tried to kill you."

"Yeah."

There was a silence that Frank did not want to sit in. Especially when he was finally about to get some answers. "So what exactly is it that you do? You can't just go undercover in the medical field."

"I'm getting there." Nancy assured. "I'm just trying to figure out how to word it." There was another short pause. "OK. You remember the Network right?" She sat down on a bench in between the rows of lockers and encouraged Frank to do the same.

"How could I forget?" He took a seat. "I only had most of my near death experiences on those cases."

"When I came back from my freshman year of school I was recruited by an agency like the Network called, interestingly enough, the Agency."

"I've never heard of it."

"Yeah, and how many people have heard of the Network?"

"Point taken."

"I took on training with them, as well as school, and when I decided to go into medicine, they gave me my first…and so far only case. The Agency specializes in major crime families and they plant agents to monitor and eventually take them down. Tom was the son of the head of one of these families, and we had determined that one day he was going to take over. Tom was also planning on working in medicine in the meantime. It was my job to be friends with him, eventually become more than friends, so by the time he did take over I would be one of his most trusted confidantes, and it would be easy to get the evidence needed to take them down."

"And that's why you said he was no one special yesterday." Realization dawned on Frank, and he felt like even more of a jerk for saying what he had.

"Yeah." Nancy nodded awkwardly. "It was all part of my assignment."

"How was it supposed to work? You used your real name. All you did was dye your hair. Any serious criminal would easily see past that."

"The Agency, while very secretive, doesn't like its agents to have to live a separate life for however long their case takes. Instead you tread a long route of creating a different lifestyle for yourself. I hadn't solved a case since the car accident anyways, so I was pretty far off the criminal radar to begin with. It wasn't that important to hide my past because I hadn't done anything in so long and I wasn't jumping right into Tom's life. I was easing my way into it. I met him during our last year as med students, and we slowly became good friends after that. It wasn't until yesterday that I made the move needed to become more than friends. There was no reason for him to even suspect that I was anything but a doctor.

"Unfortunately, he somehow learned about my past and decided to check up on me." Nancy chose to leave out the part about how that information had come from Frank. She figured that he probably now had a lot more on his mind and she didn't need to worry him about that. "He knew what I was up to before that kiss you saw."

"Hence the fight at your apartment that you dragged my brother into."

"I didn't drag him into anything. He decided that he wanted to be the knight in shining armor for this one. I should be thanking him."

"And I should be thanking you."

"Why?"

"Because you saved his life when you…"

"Shot Tom? You can say it Frank. I know what I did." She exhaled deeply. "And anytime. Saving people is my job." There was another long, awkward silence. There was still quite a bit to work through between them. "So…I just took the rest of the day off, and Joe's with Camilla. What do you say we try the whole eating together thing one more time and I give you a tour of the city?"

They left the building and entered the parking garage together a few minutes later, with Nancy in the lead once more, leading Frank to her car. Frank was following, watching as the dark hair thatshe had let down swished from side to side with eachstep; it still wasn't growingon him."So not to drudge up any bad memories or anything but how's the eye?"

As Frank answered she took out her keys and pressed the button that would unlock the doors; they were crossing the road to the side where her Jeep awaited. "It's OK. You have one hell of a --." He was cut off by a loud explosion and Nancy's body colliding into his, sending them both to the ground. "Hook…" He finished his sentence in a hushed tone tilting his head up to see a flaming wreckage that he could only assume had just been Nancy's car.

Thoughts?