A/N: I watched Red a few too many times. This is little more than an experiment, I cannot be sure if I'll continue it.
Warren didn't know how long he'd been there in the grey cell. It looked like the room where he met his father during his visits to the Maxville Penitentiary only this time he was the 'villain' strapped to the desk with handcuffs. He could get out of them easily enough, they'd snap under his Super strength or if he didn't want to make noise he could just melt them off but the double sided mirror staring from across him stopped him from doing anything of the sort. He could feel someone watching him from the other side.
"Mr Peace." A balding man in a grey suit said as he walked into the room with a file in his hand. He looked tired and old but his eyes were sharp. "Do you know why you're being held here?"
"No sir."
In his long time as a rebellious teenager Warren had found the usage of honorific when speaking to authority went a long way. It put them at ease, appealed to their ego but that was not the case here. Instead the man just looked amused.
"You can call me Agent Dakin Mr Peace."
"Okay. So Agent Dakin, mind telling me why I'm cuffed to a table?"
"Do you know a Miss Elizabeth Briggs, Mr Peace?"
"What's wrong, did anything happen to her?" If Agent Dakin was taken aback by the sudden panic in Warren's voice he didn't comment on it.
"Tell me, what do you know about Miss Briggs?"
"You've cuffed me to the table to ask me about my fiancée?" Warren was confused. He was certain that his father had done something to get him into trouble but here they were asking him about Liz. What exactly was going on?
"Please answer the question Mr Peace."
Warren sat back confused and not quite sure what he could say about her. It wasn't that he didn't have anything to say about her but he just didn't really know how to start.
"Umm what do you want to know?"
"Are you aware of her work?"
"She's a textile consultant." Warren said hesitantly. He still didn't know why Agent Dakin was asking about Lizzie's work, what could the FBI (or whatever agency Agent Dakin belonged to) want to know about textiles?
"Anything else?"
"Well she flies out a lot, spends a lot of her time volunteering, sometimes in dangerous places and that worries me."
"Go on." Dakin said patiently and Warren understood why he was the interrogator, something about the man made you want to confide in him. Perhaps it was the unassuming air he held.
"I don't know what to say, we don't' talk about her work so much I don't really understand it. She talks about silk bolts and printed chiffons, it's not something I'm interested in."
"And if I were to tell you that Miss Briggs is not a textile consultant that she doesn't go out on volunteer trips?"
"I'd say that's ridiculous."
"Is it?"
He snorted. "I think I know my future wife."
"Do you Mr Peace? Don't you ever wonder why her trips are always so dangerous, why every time she leaves a country there's some sort of breaking news about a Mob boss being arrested or a political leader being assassinated?"
Bewildered silence was the only answer Dakin got. He opened the file he had in his hands and pushed it to Warren. His cuffed hands allowed just enough movement to flip through it quickly and on the first page was a profile of his Elizabeth. The next few pages detailed her abilities, abilities that he didn't even know she had. According to what he was reading she was an expert marksman, specialised in bombs, poisons and assassinations. There were pages upon pages of transcripts that had most of the words blacked out but by the time he read through it he understood enough of it to know that this person was a very dangerous woman.
"You've got the wrong person." He said resolutely shoving the file away even as his mind ticked on filling in the gaps and telling him that Dakin didn't actually have the wrong person. This was his Lizzie, but now when she came back from Colombia with a bruise on her hip he knew it wasn't from accidentally running into a door and getting a doorknob to her hip. When she had a cut on her arm it wasn't because of an accident while cutting fabric but probably from a fight. When she came back smelling of smoke it wasn't because the airport hotel put her in the smoking section of the restaurant but because she'd blown something up.
It made so much sense now. He'd spent all this time thinking he had a clumsy fiancée who needed saving all the time and instead here she was killing people, toppling drug lords and exposing human trafficking rings for a life.
Agent Dakin looked at him sympathetically.
"It's not nice is it? To find out that your loved ones are keeping secrets from you, that must hurt."
Warren snorted and looked away trying to rub his nose in his usual sign of anger but his hand caught in mid-air, trapped by the cuff and he stopped himself mid-movement before it broke. It wouldn't do to give away his secret identity to a three lettered agency. Then they'd find out who his Dad was and that would mean even more time spent in these cuffs, being watched 24/7 by a government operative.
"Why now?" He asked himself before repeating it to Dakin. "According to this file she's CIA, she's one of you. So, why am I here and why are you asking me question about her?"
Dakin sighed and took off his glasses polishing them, a hint of a sulk beginning to form on his face.
"Agent Briggs has gone rogue. At 400 hours this morning an armed fifteen man team was sent to her place of residence to bring her into custody. They were recovered from the river nearby with no memory of the past twenty four hours."
"You can't be serious?"
"Oh but I-" Agent Dakin was cut off by a knock on the double sided glass. With a glare to it he slid the file a bit more forward for Warren's convenience and turned to leave the room.
Lizzie was CIA. How the hell did that even happen? And not only was she CIA, she was apparently a rogue agent who had taken out fifteen armed men all on her own.
Fifteen armed men. So they weren't trying to bring her into custody, they were trying to kill her. He still couldn't quite wrap hi head around it, only three days ago she'd spotted a spider and climbed onto his back to get away from it, how could this Agent Elizabeth Briggs be the same as scaredy cat Lizzie? It made no sense.
The door opened as Agent Dakin went to leave but instead of leaving, he was hit by a fist and then sent stumbling back when Liz came in, her hand held firmly on his neck, holding it down rather viciously until he lost unconsciousness.
"Oh hello darling, come on let's blow this joint." She said and Warren looked at her in shock and spluttered. She however had stopped hopping about and noticed that h was cuffed to the table. "Oh sorry, I forgot."
There were many moments in Warren's life when he felt like time had slowed down. Waiting for the announcement of his father's punishment was one of them, facing Royal Pain for the second time was another, and then there was the time when they'd been battling an army of aliens from outer space.
None of them came close to how terrifying it was for him to see Lizzie take a gun out from behind her back and then shooting his handcuffs off.
He flinched at the loud bang as the cuffs separated from each other and the table respectively but before he could begin to comprehend what had just happened she was waving her hand wildly.
"Come on, no time to wait around, we need to get out of here!"
Without waiting for a reply she pulled him up and tugged him by his hand down hallways throwing grenades that leaked a strange gas behind her, humming all the while and handing him a little mask when the gas grew too unbearable.
They entered a room with two men in it, both with glasses sitting low on their noses, busy with their work on their computers.
"Hi." She chirped and they both looked up warily only to grow wide-eyed at the sight of a gun in both her hands pointed at the two. "Get out." She said and they followed her instructions.
She led him out onto the fire escape but as he began climbing down she stopped him.
"What are you doing?!" She shrieked and pulled him over. While he stood there looking confused she slung a leg over the side and climbed onto the fire escape of the building opposite.
"They both lead down to the same alley!" He said and she snorted.
"We're not going down, we're going up."
"Up?"
"Yes to the roof."
Form that roof they jumped onto the next building. And then the next and the one after that.
Warren was a superhero. He was used to battles, he was used to using his invincibility to help overturn trams, he was used to punching giant robots in their face and defeating them easily, he wasn't unfit or anything.
But now as he raced alongside his apparently secret agent fiancée and she leaped in front of him, rolling onto the roof without even sweating, without her breath going haywire, he began to feel like an uncoordinated mess.
Finally instead of running over to another roof, she went down yet another fire escape and there he saw parked in an alley, her little mini-cooper.
Without a word he followed her in and strapped himself into the car but once they were finally settled and he was done catching his breath while she fiddled with the air conditioner, he turned to her, a maniacal gleam in his eyes.
"What the hell is going on?!"