Chapter 3

Stomach full, bandages checked, pain medication swallowed, and with a new saline bag connected to his IV port, Sam was feeling much better than he had upon awakening.

The others had updated him on the situation (mainly, what fortifications they had been preparing, and what was left to be done). They were now building a plan for both defensive and offensive attacks.

Danny had gone back to his oversized book, but Sam caught him watching the proceedings with undisguised curiosity.

Much of the strategizing had to be going over his head, no matter how intelligent he was, but it was plain that the keen little mind was absorbing all of the information for later perusal.

Suddenly, though, the boy exclaimed as if he'd just realized something, drawing their attention to him.

"Oh!" He scrambled down off of the bed and shot out the door. "I have to go."

Stuart chuckled, and laughed even harder when he saw Sam's confusion.

Drake smirked and explained. "We're working on potty-training. It's been going rather well, considering. His development is all over the place. None of the timelines in the parenting books apply to him. Intellectually, he's off the charts, but physically, he's a bit behind in a lot of ways. He's still much too small for his age, and I daresay he always will be."

Stuart sobered quickly. "He get bullied by the kids in the village?" he asked, a dangerous edge to his voice.

Damien gave him a probing look. "Did he tell you, then? I'm glad. Yes, the older children teased him at Easter, but he held his own and gave better than he got, so I didn't interfere."

"You wanted to." Stuart crossed his arms. "Didn't you?"

Damien's expression turned vicious. "God, I wanted to teach those little beasts a lesson they wouldn't soon forget," he snarled, and Sam finally saw a shadow of the world-class assassin raise its head.

"What stopped you?"

Damien huffed angrily. "Ponsonby. She gave me such a look. That woman's a bloody dragon, I tell you," he snorted, shaking his head.

Stuart chuckled, and Sam smiled in agreement. "That she is. Probably for the best. Wouldn't want to get arrested for making little kids piss their pants."

"I wouldn't have minded."

"Nor would I. But would Danny want a jailbird for a dad?"

Damien glared at his friend. "Whose side are you on?"

They were still laughing when Danny returned.

"Mission accomplished, agent?" Damien said with mock solemnity.

"Yes, sir!" Danny said, equally serious.

"Did you...flush?"

"Yes."

"Did you...wash your hands?"

"Yes."

"Very good!" the father exclaimed, and lavished praise on his hygienic child.

Sam shook his head in bemusement at how absolutely bizarre this situation was. He truly would not be surprised if this entire thing turned out to be a hallucination brought on by bleeding out from that leg wound.

. . . . .

Sam was allowed by his burly nursemaids to get up the following morning. Not only that, he was even permitted to take a quick shower to wash off the grime, sweat, and blood.

Feeling much refreshed, he limped down the stairs wearing a well-worn t-shirt and sweatpants - he and Damien were more or less the same size, which could not be said for Stuart, for whom it seemed Damien had taken to having a clean set of clothes ready for whenever he 'dropped in' unannounced and usually bleeding from somewhere.

There were traces of others' visits, too. Clothes of various sizes had been stocked in the wardrobe of the charming little guest room. Some of them were even women's clothing; Sam guessed that they were for Miss Ponsonby's use (unless Damien had peculiar tastes).

The air in the cozy little house was perfumed with the smells of a classic English breakfast: sausages, beans, mushrooms, eggs, and bacon...And was that the scent of freshly-baked bread? Good god. Stuart hadn't been kidding when he'd said that Drake had gone domestic.

Stomach gurgling, he made his careful way down the rest of the stairs and was greeted at the bottom by none other than Danny Drake, who smiled widely up at him.

"Good morning, Mr. Sam!" he chirruped cheerfully. Today he was wearing a tiny red knit jumper over miniature denim jeans.

"Good morning, Danny," Sam replied with as much cheer. "You don't have to call me 'Mr.,' you know. Just Sam will do."

A mischievous look took over the small cherubic face. "Uncle Sam?" he asked, evidently remembering Sam's disinclination to be called the same name as the American mascot.

"Please don't," Sam chuckled.

Danny giggled and scampered over to grab his hand. "It's breakfast time, Sam," he said, and tugged him gently (and slowly, minding Sam's injured leg) towards the cozy dining room.

The sensation of the tiny hand in his was strange and alien, and somehow warmed him from the inside. He hadn't realized how damned lonely his life was until this innocent, trusting little beam of sunlight had wormed his way into his heart.

"There you are, Sam," Stuart said, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

Damien nodded from where he was fixing Sam a plate. "Danny and I had a time of it trying to keep him from gobbling up your portion."

"Ha, funny," Stuart said, deadpan, as he lifted Danny into his booster seat. "But really, though, Sam," he said as an aside, "Damien's a damned good cook. Never knew that about him until I visited him here."

"Visited," Damien snorted, sitting down again. "Bled all over my front door, you mean. I'd just painted it, too. And then you bled all over my freshly-mopped floors, made a mess of my new sheets and my new towels…"

"Alright, alright," Stuart said. "What do you want, a reimbursement? Give me a bill then."

Damien rolled his eyes. "That's not the point. By the way," he said to Sam, who was fully conscious that he too had bled all over the man's house and linens, "I made Stuart mop up the other night, so don't worry about that. And as for the sheets and towels, what kind of assassin worth his salt doesn't know how to wash blood out of things?"

Stuart smiled. "You always did that a sight better than anyone else I ever knew."

"It's only chemistry," Danny piped up around a mouthful of toast. "Proteases catalyze proteolysis by cleaving peptide bonds."

"What's that, kiddo?" Stuart asked, squinting. Sam found himself staring again. Science, too?

"Enzymes catalyze the breakdown of proteins into amino acids," Danny explained impatiently, as though it boggled his mind that the adults couldn't understand such a simple concept. "Blood is made up of proteins."

"That's still too much science for the layman, luv. And don't talk with your mouth full," Damien said calmly, reaching over to wipe the egg off of Danny's face. "Basically, putting the chemicals on the blood stain breaks down the protein into smaller bits that you can wash out better than using only regular detergent. Is that right?"

Danny nodded distractedly, his concentration focused now on spearing a bite of cut-up sausage onto his child-safe fork.

"You know, Damien, you're getting awfully good at translating technobabble," Stuart laughed and shook his head. He never ceased to be amazed by his nephew.

"I ought to be," Damien chuckled over the rim of his mug of tea. "My disaster spawn has been speaking fluent maths and science since he could talk."

Danny looked up, indignant at being called 'disaster spawn' by his father.

Damien laughed and leaned over to kiss Danny's cheek, ruffling his hair. "You are, and don't deny it," he said fondly, "You made a bomb out of the toaster the other week while I was doing laundry. I wouldn't even have noticed it if you hadn't come to ask me hypothetically what you should do if you'd combined a whole string of chemicals from around the house and put it in the toaster with cutlery for extra sparkle."

Danny looked sheepish.

Stuart groaned and threw back his head, laughing. "God," he wheezed. "What did you do?"

Damien snorted. "What do you think I did? I called Q. He told me after I neutralized it that I deserve this for all the hell I've caused him."

"And it would have worked?" Sam asked incredulously. "It was more than baking soda and vinegar?" That would have caused a bit of a fizzle and maybe a mess, but nothing too major.

"Apparently, it would have demolished the kitchen," Damien deadpanned. He looked fondly down at his son. "Chaos child."

This started Stuart on another round of laughter, to which Sam and Damien joined in, while Danny sat there looking aggrieved, but at the same time, also rather pleased with himself.

. . . . .

The Drake residence was a small Tudor cottage with decorative brown half-timbering contrasting with the creamy off-white of the outside walls. It had a tiled roof with birds nesting in the eaves and soft white curtains in each window.

The pretty little wooden gate at the front led up to a well-tended kitchen garden with herbs and vegetables. The charming stone pathway was lined with rose bushes and other flowering plants, carefully arranged so that there was bound to be something blooming at almost any given time of the year. The month being April, the marigolds and daffodils were in blossom, giving the garden a cheery look.

The little house was the very picture of a peaceful and quiet English country home for the retired gentleman.

But it only appeared that way.

The walls were reinforced with a special fireproof Q-Branch-designed material and the windows were bulletproof. There were machine guns installed in the eaves under the roof and there was a wall in Damien's office that slid open to reveal a cache of weapons.

In the picturesque garden, there was electrical wire twined in among the roses that could be triggered to shoot electric shocks for short distances on command. The stone birdbath would open up to spray acid at any unwanted trespasser once activated, and the charming stone pathway was booby-trapped with radio-activated land mines.

The alarm system, too, was elaborate for a civilian residence.

Since there was only one road leading to the house, and any other way in by land tended to be rather muddy or rocky, it had been a simple matter to attach a small sensor to a tree overlooking the road some distance out that would send an alert to the telephone every time a car passed by it. The camera installed a short way from the sensor would pick up visuals, which could be seen on the television screen in the sitting room if one flipped to a certain channel.

Should any intruders come by air, another system had been set up to ring the telephone every time anything the size of a human or larger passed into the airspace around the house.

Of course, Q being Q, he had made normal phone calls trigger a different ring from the alarm system rings.

The basement was set up as both a bunker and a base of operations (not a pun, or rather, again, since this was Q, perhaps it was). This was where Danny would stay during the battle, once it started.

All they had to do was wait for the attack.

Unfortunately, this happened to be the most nerve-wracking part of it, and double-ohs were not known to like waiting.

They filled the time by putting the finishing touches on the fortifications. The defenses were more than fine as they were, but since they had time, they thought that they might as well add to them. It never hurt to be over-prepared.

Even Danny 'helped;' that is, he flitted around bringing the men whatever tools they asked for.

But first, Damien had caught the little boy and slathered him with sunblock before he could run outside.

Danny had whined and squirmed under his father's ministrations, trying to escape.

Sam had arched a brow at that; now that was overdoing it, wasn't it? It was April in England, not the middle of summer on a tropical beach.

Damien had caught his look. "You think I'm making a big fuss, but I let him get sunburned once. He swelled up and turned all red. He had a fever, too, and cried all night from the pain. It was a terrible ordeal for us both, and I am never making that mistake again."

Sam had made a face that meant 'fair enough.' The boy was terribly pale-skinned, so it was no wonder that he burned.

When Damien had finally released his son after thoroughly smearing every bit of exposed skin with the white cream, the boy had looked extremely displeased with his slimy, greasy, smelly state and tried to wipe it off on his clothes.

"Danny…" Damien had said warningly and received a pout in response.

They were sitting under a tree eating sandwiches for lunch when the phone rang: at least one car had passed the first sensor.

Damien got up to check if it was a neighbor or strangers, fairly snapping with suppressed energy.

Danny watched his father go, chewing his sandwich pensively. He had never seen his father quite like this before. "Uncle Stuart?"

"Mm?"

"Daddy liked his job when he was working with you, didn't he? Before I was born? He was good at it?"

"Yeah," the older man said slowly, packing up the picnic just in case, "and I know what you're getting at, Danny. He likes this life with you more. Much more."

"This job." He sighed and ran a hand through his short hair, trying to think how to explain it to someone so young and innocent, yet so oddly mature. "It's something you do when there's no one waiting for you back home that you have to take care of. When there's no one who really cares if you make it back. It's a job you do when you're fine being on your own and you don't really care about anyone else. Now he's got you, he's not willing to risk not coming home because he loves you."

Danny frowned. "I care if you make it back. So does Daddy."

Stuart heaved another sigh. "You're not meant to, though. Not too much."

Danny suddenly jumped to his feet and put his hands on his hips. "I care, and you can't stop me," he exclaimed, his expression darkening like sudden thunderclouds on a sunny day. "You have to come home, Uncle Stuart. You have to." He turned to Sam and looked earnestly at him. "You, too. You have to keep coming home, too. Promise?"

They were saved from answering the impassioned pleas by Damien's approach.

"Hostiles."

. . . . .