Author's Note: ...So, apparently I neglected to mention the girl's name again. That, was honestly, completely unintentional. In fact, I planned to reveal it, I guess it just never came up :S You know what though? I'm betting at least half of you are going to kill me when you hear it. I was warned against this, but I seriously just couldn't resist ^_^ LOL.

Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note, or anything remotely associated with it.

Date: Unknown

I woke up more than a little groggy and more than a lot in pain. My head was spinning and nausea didn't even begin to describe what I was feeling. I had no idea what time it was or how long I'd been out of it.

Instinctually the first think I did was to check myself over. I seemed to be in one piece... if still in my pyjamas. I discovered a tiny, radial bruise spreading outward from an even smaller puncture wound in my left thigh. It hadn't been from Mello; it had been from the tall one. The tallest one of the seven, the one who was also carrying the tranquilizer gun. These guys, whoever they were, really didn't mess around.

I made a move to stand up but a wave of nausea washed over me and I sank slowly back to the floor. I pinched the bridge of my nose and was relieved to find that I still had my glasses on. Although, it was bittersweet realising that the room was as fuzzy as it was, not because of my eyes, but because of my current physical condition.

I spent the next six minutes staring at The Offspring on my pyjama bottoms, lest I should try to move and start throwing up. The room stopped spinning shortly after that and I was able to assess my surroundings.

I was in a cell; a small cell, in a long line of cells. Three of the walls around me were iron bars and the third wall was made of red brick. The floor was a bare, cold, concrete, and I would have been shivering except that the coolness against my skin was combating the nausea, which felt quite nice under the circumstances.

But I was sick of cells. I'd been locked in cells more times by the bad guys than by the police. There was just that one misunderstanding with that portly officer over in D.C. He hadn't taken too kindly to my comment about the contents of his packed lunch. Apparently he didn't need to know the specific ingredients of bologna... I was just trying to help. Although, in hindsight, it probably hadn't helped that I'd told him, 'You are what you eat.' He'd been very unreasonable about the whole ordeal.

"Eh boss," I heard a man with an odd accent say. I hadn't realised that I wasn't alone. "She's awake now." I rolled over to the side where the sound had come from and found that I recognized the man I saw. He was quite tall, muscular, had piercings and tattoos and a long, greasy, black ponytail. He was the man from the warehouse. He was standing in a doorway at the end of the long, narrow room and calling to someone over his shoulder.

A beefy bald man with at least a dozen facial piercings came into the room through a steel door. I had seen him before too. He was the one that I had taken to be the leader at the warehouse meeting; and judging by what the greasy one had just called him, I assumed my assumption to be correct.

I struggled to right myself; nothing was worse than a show of weakness in enemy territory. I got myself posed in a fighting stance and willed my feet and legs to stop shaking. I was in seriously bad condition. Between all my actions the previous day, getting shot with a tranquilizer and spending God knows how long on a cold concrete floor... well I had had better days. Not to mention I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since before I could remember. I recalled Matt's jasmine tea, but that was all. I hadn't finished my tea in the coffee shop and I hadn't eaten since before I infiltrated the warehouse. I was in seriously bad condition.

"I'm surprised you have the strength to hold that arrogant expression on your face, let alone stand," said the bald one, reading my thoughts. "You know, we heard a lot of great things about you. You kind of disappoint. You went down quite easily the other day, and that sedative should have worn off hours ago."

I didn't say anything at first, I just stared him down as he drew nearer to my cage. "What am I doing in here? What is this? Where am I?"

"You threw a mighty big wrench into our plans the other day you know." As the man stopped in front of my cell I recoiled in disgust. I could smell him. Thoughts of garbage dumps and toxic waste came to mind, and I could barely contain the reflex to dry heave.

"Answer my questions," I demanded as my knees buckled slightly.

"Feisty one, aren't you?"

I glared even harder.

"Alright then, Ms. 'Jewel,' is it?" The guy motioned with his right hand for the greasy one to hand him something without taking his eyes off mine. A folder came out from behind the man's back and he handed it to his boss. The boss stared at me a moment longer before bowing his head into the folder. "Seems you and that darling little blonde you were with last night, caused a great loss for me." The sarcastic way he spoke about Mello made me want to break his nose. "Do you remember a whole lot from that night Jewel? I've heard the sedatives we gave you can cause some adverse side effects; that includes short term memory loss."

"I remember just fine," I spat. "Tell me what's going on."

The man snapped the folder closed one handed and glared in on me. "After you so conveniently disappeared onto the roof, your blonde friend and his gang opened fire on us. I lost three men, and all my money. And what did I get out of that encounter? Not what I had gone to pay for."

The bomb. So if we didn't have it, and they didn't have it, who did? Did Mello get away with the money and the bomb? Then which suitcase did I grab?

"What does that have to do with me?"

"You my dear, are now what we are going to pay to get our prize. We will trade you for our bomb and our money. It's only fair. Your friends don't do very good business."

"You're wasting your time. You won't get anything for me."

"No? Are you not worth anything to them?"

"I'm not involved with this, you need to release me."

"And a sense of humour on you to boot," he laughed grotesquely. "Yes, I think they will pay to get you back." He sneered fiendishly at me and then turned to leave the way he had entered. "Come Juan. You uh, did leave the lovely little ransom note at her apartment didn't you?" he asked just loud enough for me to hear.

The steel door slammed shut behind them.

I did a round around my cell and pulled and wrenched each iron bar in turn. They were all secured firmly into the cement floor and to the brick wall which I took to be the outer wall of the building. I could see no windows, only four separate cells including my own, and the steel door.

I walked to the front of my cell and peered out between the bars to get a better view of things. It seemed to me though, from whichever angle I looked, that escape was hopeless. I hated cells.

I sat in frustration against the back wall and realised for the second time that I was still in my pyjamas as the cold seeped through to my skin. What an annoyance. Not just the cold, but this whole situation. This was shaping up to be a pretty ridiculous week.

I sat for a bit waiting for an idea to come to me. I ended up deciding to pull a MacGyver. The recessed lighting up and down the narrow hallway outside the cells was covered in a mesh of wire to protect the bulbs. If I could pull it down I might be able to fashion a type of lock pick out of the metal.

As I walked up back up to the front of the cage though, I realised something I hadn't noticed before; and then I realised that I was an idiot. I examined the iron bars of my cell more closely. Earlier when I had taken a closer look at them I had only been preoccupied with the possibility of their looseness I hadn't even realised how far apart they were.

In an average police prison cell, the iron bars are eleven and a half centimetres apart, roughly a third of a foot. These bars were clearly over fifteen centimetres apart, about half a foot. These cells hadn't been built to code. They'd been done half assed to save money no doubt; either that or the person who made them was just clueless. Granted, this makeshift prison was probably meant to hold men twice my size; men who would have trouble escaping from a foot and a half space. I thought about the greasy ponytail guy and his boss. They'd probably need two feet of space before they could get their steroid ridden bodies through the gap.

I leaned against the bars. If I could get my head through, I'd have no problem. My hips and shoulders I could twist and turn and bend into whatever angle I needed to. I leaned through the bars and listened acutely for any noise. The last thing I needed was to be caught halfway in and halfway out of my cell. When I heard nothing, I used my arms to pull myself through the bars. Every aching muscle in my body protested. I needed a serious soak in a hot tub, I was seriously lucky I could move at all.

I slipped through into the narrow hall and almost collapsed onto the floor. My legs were all but refusing to hold me.

"C'mon, just a little longer," I willed my aching limbs.

I half shuffled, half stumbled to the steel door at the end of the long hallway, listened against it, and reached for the doorknob.

There was no doorknob.

Instead, there was a round metal plate to mark the place where it should have been. I guess that was one way to prevent people who could slip through the bars from escaping. "Damnit. This, is so not up to safety standards!" I hissed quietly. "What if there was a fire!" I was about to go off on a long winded rant when I heard voices and footsteps on the other side of the steel barrier. I tried to judge how many but the voices and footfalls were all muffled by the door. If there were only one or two, I could probably... maybe... not likely be able to (but try to,) take them. If there were more though... I decided to play it safe. I crawled painfully back into my iron cage just before the steel door swung open.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

"YOU DUMBASSES!" I growled in frustration at my captors. "That's not how it works!" They were complete amateurs these guys. "You can't get anything from them if they're in here with me!"

The boss, the greasy ponytail guy and four other of their henchmen marched into the miniature cell block. The four others were guiding two far too familiar men in with them. I pinched the bridge of my nose and shook my head. Three of the men coming in were holding on to an indignant Mello, and the fourth was holding Matt.

While Mello was putting up a half-hearted struggle for show or just out of frustration, Matt wasn't fighting the one that was holding him. I wondered if he was biding his time, or if he was just being lazy.

"This has to be like, thee dumbest week of my life."

Mello was thrown into the empty cell on my right, and Matt the one after him. Three of the four cells were now occupied; the one closest to the door was the only one that still stood empty.

I waited a moment to gather myself while the six men left the room and then I asked, "So uh, what's up?" No answer. "What are you doing guys?" I asked as casually as if it had been a lazy Saturday afternoon.

I heard a heavy sigh from two cells down, "We came to break you out actually."

"You don't say? So uh, how's that going for you?"

Both of them shot me exasperated looks.

"We picked the blonde one up at the airport actually," the boss said, slipping silently into the room again. "The redhead we found at your apartment. We had to take them separately. You don't ever want these two to get together. They don't seem to know where the bomb or the money went, so we're just going to keep them here until it turns up," he smiled evilly. "No food or water until someone speaks up. There's probably quicker ways to get the information out of you, but I'm in no hurry," he chuckled maniacally and left the way he had come.

"Well, at least we know what we're up against," I said after him. Then I turned back to the adjacent cells and asked Mello and Matt, who had taken a seat against their respective sections of wall, "So, where's the bomb and the money guys?"

"Didn't you just hear him? We don't know," Mello answered without making eye contact.

"No seriously."

"Why are you asking us? You're the one who grabbed the suitcase. And that other guy grabbed theirs. We don't have it. We came home as empty handed as they did. I don't know why they're after us. They should be going after you."

"Gee, thanks, except that we don't have them either."

Now I had both of their attention. They looked over at me through the bars, "What?"

"Yeah, we don't have them. Near and Gevanni got all up in my face about how I blew it because we came away without the bomb or the money."

"So what happened to them?" Mello asked.

"I don't know!"

We all sat in silence for a second before I realised something. "You were at the airport?" I asked Mello. "You really were going to go to England?"

"I really did go to England, I'd just gotten back."

It took a moment, but then a worrisome thought crept into my mind. "Winchester?"

"Yeah?"

"Do anything... exciting?"

"Not really."

"Did uh... did you-" I didn't know how I was supposed to ask my next question.

As it turns out I didn't have to.

"Did I meet a pretty little blonde who claimed to be your daughter? Why yes, I did."

I crinkled my face in awkwardness. I had one more question that was absolutely imperative. "Did she uh... did she happen to-"

"Did she happen to mention who the father is? Why yes, she did."

I wrinkled my face again.

"She's so cute," Matt finally broke in and I shot him a quizzical glance. "You went to England too?"

"Naw, I saw her at the airport."

"MATT!"

"What?"

"MELLO!"

"Damn."

"What's my daughter doing here!"

"She heard you were kidnapped. She insisted on coming down. She said something about having to be here in a couple weeks anyway. You know, because of your WEDDING!"

Mello shot me a cold look, but there was something else behind his eyes; something like, betrayal.

"What was I supposed to do Mello? You were DEAD!" I said, hoping to defend myself, to defend my heart against Mello's penetrating glare.

"Except that I wasn't!"

"Except that you kinda were. You left me Mello. That's the bottom line."

"You know why I left you Jewel?" Mello looked earnestly through the bars at me and in the next cell over I saw Matt turn away, to give us as much privacy as he could. "I stayed away from you specifically to make sure situations like this never happened. To make sure you didn't get dragged into shit like this." Mello gestured around the cellblock and paused for a moment. I tried to take in all he had just said. "This is the life I made for myself; you have the potential to do so much better than that. You don't need to live in dingy headquarters, you don't have to be on the run from the law or worry that someone is going to knife you every time you walk home from work. I wasn't going to do that to you Jewel. I just wasn't."

"But... Mello-"

"And in case you haven't noticed Jewel, we can't be around each other for more than ten minutes without starting a fight."

"But... Mello-" I tried again.

"All we ever do when we're together is argue, shift through cases and try to dodge as many bullets as we can."

"And wouldn't life be so boring if we didn't?" I smiled at him. "You just don't get it Mello. All of that, as much as I would hate all of that, the 'dingy headquarters' the running from the law, all the bullets and knives... as much as I would hate it, I would love it! The adrenaline! The excitement!"

"The risk."

"Being with you would be so incredibly worth it. You've got to take the good with the bad right?" I asked softly.

"No Jewel. YOU don't get it. You don't have to take the bad! You can have a good life, you can have a respectable job and respectable friends and-"

"You're not listening Mello!" I pleaded and i felt a small tingling sensation at the corner of my eyes. "That's not what I want! To me, that WOULD be the bad! A nine-to-five? Tea parties? Going to a movie with 'the girls' on a Saturday night, or hitting up the clubs to look for a cheap thrill? That's not me! 'ME' is always going to be defined by a part of you Mello."

Author's Note: AWWE ^_^ *love*

...So, believe me, I get how unrealistic it was that Mello and Matt got captured by those guys. I'm sorry. It hurt even me to read that, I just had to have them all locked up at the same time :) It was a desire so intense that not even wild horses (where on Earth did that expression come from) could keep me away.

BTW, Don't forget to get your guesses in for my age :P There's still time! Winner gets cyber cookies and a choice of prizes! ;D