Author's note: it's a little dark, but it's sort of been floating around in my minds for a while. Fair warning, it's a crossover, but I'm going to leave the series for you to guess. Also, this is not exactly a JJ HR story . . . not that I'm not a (huge) fan of the pairing, but I'm doing something a little different with Jonny's character here, sort of pushing him a little.
Disclaimer: I don't own Jonny Quest or any of the other characters portrayed herein.
Last Time: She was gone, vanished into a low structure. He glanced around for landmarks to be sure of his position - he'd memorized the crude layout Dean had given him. She'd run straight for the guard house.
Well, if he wanted to live forever, he'd have chosen a different line of work.
Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all, it was clear where he'd gone wrong. Fortunately, he wasn't given much time to reflect on the error of his ways.
Besides, he was pretty sure he deserved it.
The first rule in the book was that the hostage is more dangerous than the kidnapper (it wasn't really a book, it was more of a pamphlet – I-1 wasn't about to send its top-secret training manuals to a commercial publishing firm, after all, and so the agents were left to the tender mercies of their instructors' copying and collating skills. It was demonstrably a skill less cultivated than their espionage skills.)
Jonny had never been big on manuals, whether in pamphlet or book format – growing up with Race Bannon, I-1 agent and bodyguard extraordinaire, had given him the kind of field experience that most seasoned agents could never dream of. Like Race, Jonny had excelled at his training – he'd even knocked Race's name off of a few obstacle-course time records.
Of course, none of that mattered right now. What mattered was the business end of the AK-47 aimed at his head, and the tall blonde on the other end of the rifle. Her hands were shaking, but he didn't have any doubts that she could hit him from the ten feet or so separating them – maybe not on the first shot, but at 10 rounds per second, the odds were in favor of her hitting something vital before he could take her down. (1)
"Er … Drew, I presume?" Brilliant, Jonny – he'd forgotten her last name. It had to be her – how many tall women with red-blonde hair and vivid blue eyes could there be running around this particular camp? (2)
She should have worn something warmer. It hadn't occurred to her, almost twenty-four hours ago when she'd woken and dressed for the day's heat, that she'd be spending the night shivering on a cold dirt floor. Her khaki pants and button-up shirt were lightweight and modest, but did little to fend off the bitter chill still lingering in the desert air. The heady rush of her initial escape had warmed her briefly, but now – standing (leaning against the wall, truth be told), holding a man at gunpoint – the cold, and the long night spent on the floor were beginning to catch up to her.
Her hands were shaking. From the cold, of course.
She was pretty sure that he wouldn't notice that little detail, although he didn't look particularly alarmed at his predicament. If she had to put a name to the expression on his face, it would be impatience.
Which, in and of itself, was fairly odd – but not nearly as odd as the high-end tuxedo the man was wearing. The tall, well-built man with the all-American good looks and the alluringly disheveled mop of blond hair shining like a beacon.
Clearly, these seasoned killers, these fanatics who embraced the eventuality of their own deaths, had sent this seemingly innocuous man to lull her into a false sense of security. Because she was obviously too formidable an opponent to subdue via outright confrontation. Again. Yes, that was the only possible explanation for the man standing before her. Well, that or she'd finally snapped, and he was merely a figment of her admittedly strange imagination.
And then he spoke, seizing her full and undivided attention. What was left of it, anyway.
He was American. Not that his nationality precluded his membership on the roster of international terrorists, necessarily. Her brain tripped over that spectacularly irrelevant fact and fell heavily on one word.
Her name.
Her real name.
Not the name on her passport or her (faked) journalist credentials. There was only one man in Iraq that knew her as an agent of I-1. Two, if you counted the figment her imagination.
She was in shock. He could see the raised welts at her wrists, and dark crimson blood matting her hair, the glazed-over look in her eyes.
The human body is an amazing thing, really. Adrenaline can power a person through cold and terror and injury, as he knew all too well, but even adrenaline has its limits – and it was clear to him that she'd been pushed to her limits.
"Drew."
She started spasmodically at the sound of her name, her wide eyes focusing on his. "I believe you have me at something of a disadvantage," she said slowly, as though trying to puzzle through her current situation.
His lips quirked in a faint half-smile at the notion that he had the woman holding the machine gun pointed at him at any sort of a disadvantage.
"Jon." He smiled in earnest, turning the full force of his (reportedly) irresistible charm on the hapless Drew. "Quest," he added, delivering the second blow of the carefully calculated one-two punch.
She looked for a moment as though she was going to speak, but thought better of it. Her mouth snapped shut, and she stepped back, hitting the wall behind her with a muted thud. To her credit, she kept her eyes and the gun fixed on him the entire time.
She almost dropped the gun when he motioned with his hands, giving a pre-arranged signal known to all field agents.
"Who are you?"
"Dean sent me. I don't have a lot of time to explain – sooner or later they're bound to return here. Do you trust me?"
"No," she said automatically, but he noticed that despite the suspicion evident on her face, she was no longer pointing the gun directly at him.
He shrugged, smiling at her again before casually edging closer.
"Stop that."
"If you were going to shoot me, you'd have done it already. I can get you out of here, but I need you to trust me."
She frowned, considering her situation carefully. The sun hung well above the horizon, its harsh light penetrating the ancient blinds and illuminating the small room. She wasn't naïve enough to think that she could make good her escape in broad daylight, nor was she foolish enough to think that she could rattle around the compound unnoticed until sundown. She couldn't stay where she was - he was right, sooner or later they'd be back.
None of that mattered right now – what mattered was how she was going to deal with him. Jon. Jonny freaking Quest, if he was telling the truth.
If he was lying . . . if he was lying, then she was damned if she shot him and damned if she didn't. If she shot him, it would bring the entire compound down on her, and if she didn't, it was only a matter of time before he got the drop on her. She'd placed top of her class in fundamentals of hand-to-hand combat, but in the real world, he was still bigger and stronger than her, he was most likely faster than her, and he almost certainly had more experience than her.
If he wasn't lying . . . if he was telling the truth, then shooting him would not only crush any hope of escape, it would still bring down the entire compound around her. Plus, she'd hate to have to file that report to her handler.
Either way she was in quite the predicament. If he was telling the truth, and he was really the legendary Jonny Quest, then she might stand some chance of getting out of the compound alive. Something told her he was. She'd never met him, but she'd heard all the stories.
He'd managed to close more distance while she'd been thinking. He was only a few feet away – dangerously close.
She tried to back up, forgetting that her back was already against the wall and somehow managing to trip over her own feet. She went down in a tangle of limbs, failing wildly.
Jonny moved without thinking, lunging for the gun as the girl fell. He just didn't have time for sweet reason to win her over to his side. He miscalculated slightly, and was rewarded with a sharp crack across the jaw; he swore, knocking the rifle from her grasp. She put up a hell of a fight, even without the gun; he could see the panic in her eyes as he tackled her, deftly dodging a well-placed kick to the groin and pinning her arms and legs with his.
He'd seen her head hit the wall when he tackled her; fortunately, it only stunned her for a second. Unfortunately, he didn't have time to think when he saw her stop struggling; he knew what was coming. She opened her mouth and he sealed it with his own, pressing into her and stopping her scream before it started.
If she was panicked before, she went berserk when his lips met hers, twisting and flailing under him. Jonny tightened his iron grip on her wrists, bringing his full weight to bear against her. He shifted against her, pulling her arms above her head and catching them in one hand.
Luck was on his side – for once that night – and he managed to keep ahold of her long enough to clamp his free hand over her mouth, replacing his mouth on hers.
She was crying, a single tear falling slowly down her cheek. Her eyes shot wide open when his hand replaced his mouth – she'd squeezed them shut when he kissed her.
"I'm sorry," he said simply, dropping his head to whisper hoarsely in her ear. "I'm not going to hurt you, but I couldn't let you scream."
He saw her eyes tighten, felt her stiffen under him, and he was suddenly glad he'd kept his hand over her mouth.
"I need you to trust me," he said, wincing at the fury in her wide blue eyes. "I'm going to take my hand off your mouth, and I need you to stay calm. We both know what will happen if you scream. I'm here to get you out of here, Dean sent me to retrieve you."
"Get off of me," she hissed when he removed his hand. She was shaking under him, whether from fear or rage, he couldn't say. He did as he was told, releasing her wrists and rolling off her.
She curled into a ball, gasping for breath and massaging her wrists weakly. She didn't look up when he knelt beside her, flinching slightly when he took her hands once more and rubbed them gently to help restore circulation.
He didn't blame her for flinching.
She let him touch her, deliberately avoiding his gaze while her brain went into overdrive, frantically trying to piece together some sort of reasonable explanation for her predicament.
The most likely explanation for the increasingly ludicrous situation she found herself mired in was an intricate, lucid hallucination. A bad one, not a good, daiquiri-toting-cabana-boy hallucination with a pool and a bar and lots of sunshine and no one trying to kill her.
It didn't seem terribly likely to her, but then, she'd never hallucinated before – good or bad.
Her mind was reeling, her nerves shot to pieces. Admittedly, her deductive powers were not at their best, but in the end, there was only one possible explanation – he was telling the truth. He had the gun from her, and he'd had her at his mercy, so to speak. He acted on impulse when she'd caved, giving in finally to a very primal urge to scream – he'd seen it, and moved instinctively to prevent her from crying out.
Which, if she'd been thinking properly, she'd have realized was a damned stupid thing to do. Still, the fact remained that he'd subdued her then let her go, and that he, too, seemed to fear discovery.
"So, what's the plan," she said softly, still not trusting herself to look at him.
Her question was greeted with a prolonged silence.
"Can you walk?"
"Yes, I can walk – what's the plan?"
"Keep quiet, stay behind me and keep up," he said tersely, helping her carefully to her feet and stooping to retrieve the discarded rifle.
"That's not a plan – you don't have a plan, do you?"
"Were you listening when I told you to 'keep quiet'?"
She stifled an indignant retort, her eyes widening as a commotion caught her attention, and his. It seems the guards had returned to the guardhouse.
And things had been going so well.
Author's Note: Thanks for staying with me! Sorry to end it on another cliffhanger (well, not really, I LOVE doing that). I get a weird sort of writer's block when I have too much down in a chapter – it takes a posting to get the creative juices flowing (as it were)
(1) Wikipedia lists the AK-47's rate of fire at 600 rounds per minute (and we all know Wikipedia is never wrong). That works out to be 10 rounds per second. Other sites figure it at 90-100 rounds per second, with a burst of 400 rounds per second. Either way, it's more rounds per second than I'd want to dodge. But then, I'm not Jonny Quest.
(2) "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"