A/N: I'm sorry for this. I'm so sorry. (Much disclaimed, totally un-beta'd) Huge shout-out to Michelle My Belle because she made me do it. 3
Stealing
Red bumped into Lizzie, moving her away from the main cluster of the tour group. She felt him press something small and cold into her hand and looked down to find a glass ashtray. She looked at Red, bewildered.
"Red! Where did you get this?" she hissed at him as he turned away from her. He had insisted on this tour of Buckingham Palace during their brief sojourn in London. Lizzie had never been in the city and he was leaving no tourist attraction unvisited. They had toured the Tower of London and seen the Crown Jewels, gone for a spin on the London Eye and seen the changing of the Guard. Lizzie loved seeing all the sights she had only ever seen in movies or television, but she was exhausted, and now Red was shoving things at her, looking slightly furtive and she had a bad feeling about this. But she put the ashtray in her handbag anyway and tried to catch up to the tour group.
They were almost done when she noticed Red was missing. She scanned the crowd, thinking perhaps he had paused to look more closely at something, but he was nowhere. A tiny thread of worry wove itself into her mind, what if Red had been recognized and apprehended? That seemed unlikely, but she couldn't shake the feeling. She continued with the tour group, keeping her eyes peeled for the man who had been her constant companion for the last six months. She couldn't lose him. She just couldn't.
Red found Lizzie waiting for him outside the Palace gates. He had run into an old associate in the hallway and had stopped to say hello, forgetting that Nigel was terribly chatty. Before he knew it, the tour was long gone and he knew Lizzie would be frantic with worry over his absence. He loved the way her face lit up with a relieved smile when she saw him. She hugged him like he had been gone for a month, then she pulled away and punched him in the arm, hard.
"What were you thinking, wandering off like that? Do you have any idea how worried I was?"
Red rubbed his arm; his Lizzie had a nasty right jab when she wanted to make a point. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and steered her towards the main road. He knew a great pub where he could get a beer and work on smoothing Lizzie's ruffled feathers.
The pub was suitably dark and worn around the edges. They found a corner table after grabbing their drinks at the bar. Lizzie was not yet accustomed to flying under the radar. The best way to hide was in plain sight. Red had made a high art of it long ago but she was learning. She still had moments when she just knew Interpol would be crashing through the door of whatever safe house they were in, and those were long nights for her. Life on the run was not for the faint of heart.
"Why did you give me an ashtray? Where did you get it?" Red chuckled as he sipped his pint of lager. The twinkle in his eyes told Lizzie he had been up to some mischief.
"A friend of mine and I once made a bet, when we were both in Afghanistan, after I unwisely boasted about being able to acquire anything anyone needed, that I couldn't steal an ashtray from Buckingham Palace. We made a friendly wager, and I forgot about it until recently. He was a nice fellow, an Army doctor. I'll have to track him down; he owes me fifty pounds now."
He studied Lizzie's face in the shadows of the pub. She had been giggling at his story but now she seemed uneasy.
"What's wrong, Lizzie?"
"The ashtray you gave me…"
"Yes…"
"I don't have it." Red was taken aback. That wasn't like Lizzie.
"What happened to it?"
"A tall man wearing a sheet came up to me and basically told me I had stolen goods in my bag and if I gave it to him he wouldn't tell anyone. So I gave it to him."
"Lizzie!"
"Red! You were missing in action, he seemed to know what had happened and I couldn't risk being questioned by the police or security or whatever. I gave him the ashtray. He said he wanted it for a friend anyway."
"And you believed that story? He was winding you up, Lizzie. A man wrapped in a sheet doesn't likely have friends." Red sighed in exasperation.
"Well, he seemed to have someone with him. I watched him as he walked away; he got into a cab with a shorter blond man. Maybe it was his physician. I thought I heard one of the guards call him Doctor."