Alan woke up in the early hours of the following Monday with Leah next to him, one of her long legs curled around him possessively. Leah’s room was as sparse and well organized as the rest of the house, but Alan couldn’t help but smile at the trail of discarded clothing trailing into the bedroom through the open door.

He tried to extricate himself from the bed so he could pick up his clothes, but Leah shifted in her sleep, tightening her grip on him and murmuring something that sounded suspiciously like ‘mine’. He glanced over at her fondly, before sliding her leg off him and sitting up. They had never made it to the shower last night. Or rather, they had - but they hadn’t exactly ‘showered’. Frankly, Alan was amazed they had even made it to the bed.

Given all that, Alan strongly felt the need to clean himself. He smelled of sex and sweat and - curiously - Leah. It of course made sense to smell like someone you had basically been rubbing against for hours. But the scent was almost overpowering in nature.

If Alan had been paying attention, he might have noticed the nondescript bottle of chemical on Leah’s nightstand, or the way one of her lidded eyes was open slightly. He might have taken note of the manic, possessive, insane gleam in that eye as it tracked his progress across her room.

But Alan did not note any of those things. Because despite his peculiarities, he was still an adult male in his mid-twenties. A species not well known for post - or even pre - sex clarity and critical thinking. So rather than seeing the oncoming storm, he merely picked up his clothes and snuck out of the sparsely decorated bedroom to shower.

Leah, for her part, rolled over, carefully rearranging the covers so that she could sleep comfortably.

Alan couldn’t help but let the strangely barren house bother him. He was aware that Leah had her peculiarities - he’d noticed on more than one occasion that having an odd number of dice on the table, or having too many different colours of dice, or any of a myriad of other things, sent her into a bizarre state of tension. So it naturally stood to reason that she would keep her home as devoid of distractions as possible. But while he could ignore a certain degree of meticulousness, the house he now found himself in felt… unlived in. As though Leah, it’s sole inhabitant barely, spent time in it, had put none of the personal touches in that made a house a home.

It bothered the shit out of him, but given that he was pretty sure they were dating now he tried to accept it for what it was.

Not that acceptance was going to stop him from looking over his shoulder for Norman Bates every few steps.

Arriving in the bathroom he found it exactly as sparse as he was expecting. Perfectly clean tiles, a plain black shower curtain around a moderately sized bathtub and a single spotless toilet. He quickly entered the room and shut the door behind him, finding two green towels hanging from a hook on the door.

He squinted at them briefly, finding both the number of towels and the fact that they were his favourite shade of green strangely coincidental. Then he shook himself, mentally scoffing at his own paranoia.

Sure he had a spy suit, a bunch of gadgets and a nondescript criminal organization trying to kill or capture him for reasons he didn’t know, but this was Leah. Gentle, tender, … slightly neurotic… Leah.

The shower to his great joy, actually had something in it when he shoved the curtain out of the way. A number of small racks stuck to the wall by suction cups held an extensive array of hair care products, and one even had a small radio positioned just high enough to be out of any rushing water. He quickly set the water to his traditional ‘too hot for human usage’ and set about the arduous task of scrubbing himself down.

Not much later he found himself clean once more, and halfway to Leah’s bedroom when it occurred to him that he his clothes weren’t actually in the bedroom - they were on the floor in the kitchen where they had been discarded yesterday.

He weighed his options. Theoretically, he could probably crawl back into bed with Leah without much issue. But he was feeling antsy. Cooped up. Alan was a man who’s life to now could be largely defined with the phrase ‘self-control’. He was a highly regimented person, and the absence of his normal routines and plans was jarring, to say the least. While he was hesitating in the hall, the doorway to Leah’s room opened on its own, and the woman herself stepped through the doorway in an almost see through green negligee. She swayed up to him and all but hurled herself onto him, the skin of her pale wrists sliding smoothly over his shoulders and around his neck as she dragged him into a passionate morning kiss.

“Morning,” she said blearily, still leaning heavily on him.

“Morning yourself. Hey uh, why don’t you go shower and I’ll clean the kitchen?” Alan offered diplomatically. It wasn’t so much that there was a huge mess or anything. They hadn’t exactly eaten or cooked anything. But he felt it only polite that he try and accommodate her unique tendencies. He knew she could walk into the room with its chairs askew and clothing strewn about without batting an eye, but had known her long enough to realize that despite that, it would bother her. He tried to convey that diligence, that care to her in his expression and body language. Allowing his hands to rest comfortably on her waist and gently maintaining the weight her sleepy form was placed on him.

Quite unexpectedly, he found himself pressed against the wall of the narrow hallway, as Leah pivoted into him, pinning him to the wall with her own body and hungrily trailing kisses up his neck. When she finally came up for air he found their faces mere inches away from each other, her steely grey eyes boring into him with a predatory need that simultaneously thrilled and terrified him.

He had no doubt he could push her off of him if he really wanted to. But truthfully he didn’t really want to. More than anything, this was where he wanted to be.

And then the moment passed, as Leah - all drowsiness having drained from her - stepped back and smiled at him.

“I’ll meet you afterwards for breakfast.” she said demurely, a tone entirely at odds with the fierceness of just moments before. Then she skipped away towards the bathroom. Or was it flounced? He supposed either descriptor could be used to describe the happy spring in her step.

Thankfully, Leah no longer being in bed detracted somewhat from the idea of going back to bed himself, and so still naked, he returned to the kitchen for his spy suit.

When he was finished dressing, he found some disinfectant wipes, and carefully ran them over every surface he could remember laying Leah on the previous night. Then he tossed the refuse and straightened the chairs. Not seeing anything else in need of his attention, he traipsed into the living room and turned the television on, changing it to the news. There was no way an explosion going off in a high rise was going to escape anyone's attention, and he could only pray no one had recorded him using his suit to glide away from the destruction. It would make for some awkward questions if he ever encountered the real police.

That was a thought. Did the real police know about Dan’s spy gig? After all, he lived here and was a spy, and spies worked for the government right? It only made sense to him.

“Hm. Does that mean Dan had a license to kill?” He wondered aloud.

“Agent Thespian did not, in fact, have the fabled ‘license to kill’ that your generation seems to fond of.” An annoyed voice sounded in his ear.

“Oh. It's you.” Alan said flatly after a moment of panicked looking around for who had spoken. It had taken him a few moments to remember Playwright could be listening. Then he remembered what he’d gotten up to while the suit had been on the floor and cringed.

“Hey did you happen to hear anything yesterday night after I got away?” he asked hoarsely.

“I assure the Understudy, that I neither noticed nor cared about your ill-timed attempts at fornication.” Playwright jabbed at him.

“But you just acknowledged that you -” Alan complained before being cut off by the other man's continued speech.

“Two men were found stripped of their belongings and dead in the doorway of your home last night. Residents say there was an altercation with the police, and now your… associate… has gone missing. It would be reasonable to assume that they are holding her hostage.” The older man rattled off at him like he was reading from a cue card. There was a brief pause that was filled only by the sound of someone taking a slurping sip of a beverage, and then he continued.

“I have identified at least two locations in which you may look for her, and possibly whoever is leading this attack against you. How would you like to proceed?”

Alan sat stock still, feeling all the blood drain from his face as the news destroyed any good humour he had been carrying that morning.

“I don’t… what should I do?” he asked desperately. He knew what an action hero would do. Get a bunch of guns and shoot his way both in and out of both locations. Unfortunately, Alan was not an action hero and was, in fact, quite a poor shot with a firearm if his brief exposure to the things in Dan’s apartment had been anything to go by.

“Ask me about the two locations you dolt. Honestly, why you were chosen as Understudy is beyond me.” The older man grumbled petulantly.

Alan felt the heat of both anger and embarrassment rush to his face as he lost control of himself. He could feel it when some of the caustic rage he kept so tightly bottled burbled to the surface of his mind and took over all of his other faculties.

“Listen, I might not be a great spy - but I’ve been doing this for less than twenty-four hours. So give me shit about this again, or make light of the fact that my friend is in danger right now because of you people, and I swear to god I will get good at this job just so I can hunt you down and feed you your own dick.” He snarled, low and controlled. He had never really considered himself easily capable of murder. It wasn’t in him to so casually disregard life.

But he had been having a very bad time recently.

“...noted. Would you like the information on where your ‘friend’ might be or shall I just let you stew?” Playwright asked, a slightly subdued tone in his voice.

“Tell me. Please.” Alan bit out.

“The first is an old theatre called The Dancing Light, traffic cameras noted several of the fake police vehicles from your encounter at the apartment to have gone there afterwards and never re-emerged, suggesting that the vehicles are still there if not the people. The cinema itself is still open but gets little to no traffic due to being solely a purveyor of black and white movies of middling quality.

“The second is a tad more interesting. The men who approached your flat led their own police pursuers on a merry chase across town before finally losing them, and retreating to a nightclub called ‘Sparks’. Terrible name if you ask me.” The little voice in his ear finished.

“...and?” He asked, exasperated.

“And what? What do you think spies are for? If I could just tell you what’s there and how many people you would have to fight we wouldn’t need you in the first place now would we?” Playwright snapped.

“Shit.” was his only real response to that information. He supposed that was right though wasn’t it. That sort of was what spies were for. He was so distraught at the realization that he was going to have to break into one or both of these locations that he hardly noticed the headline on the television indicating his favourite comic book store had been robbed in the night.

“Al?” Came a voice that most certainly wasn’t the result of the technology in his suit. He turned to find Leah walking into the room, now dressed in a pair of jeans and a beige sweater long enough to qualify as a very short dress should it ever have the occasion to be used that way.

“Oh hey. I wiped everything down.” He said, trying to keep how lost he suddenly felt out of his voice.

“Is everything okay?” she said tentatively coming to take a seat next to him. She fidgeted with her hands as though unsure of what to do with them. He recognized the gesture. She wanted to comfort him but was unsure if being touched would bother him or help him at that moment. It was a worthwhile consideration, different people could go different ways with it.

“I… no. Not really. I think… I think I’m going to have to go do some spy stuff today.” He admitted to her. At this point, there really wasn’t much of a point in trying to hide much from her. She had slept with him after he had told her about all the crazy spy stuff after all.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She warned, scooting closer to him on the couch and finally deciding to lay a hand possessively on his knee.

“We still don’t know where those men came from, or what they’re after. You should just lay low for a while. I don’t think it was you they were after. I think it was Dan.” Leah continued, absently rubbing her thumb against the fabric of his pants. Worry was evident on her face, and his heart ached for her. They’d barely even started their relationship, and there was a very real chance he was going to run off and die in the very near term.

“I know and that’s what I wanted to do but, I think they have Jane,” he said, his gut churning with guilt and fear the longer he thought about it. Leah’s grip on him tightened slightly as he spoke but quickly relaxed.

“So… so we’ll go to the police. The real police. My father knows some people, I can make sure everything’s on the level.” she exclaimed staring firmly at him, daring him to contravene her wishes.

“I think that would be unwise. As far as I can tell the local police are largely on the take. A number of them have received fairly large deposits to there private accounts over the last two days.” Playwright spoke up, apparently still listening in on him.

“Playwright says the cops are being bribed to mind their own business,” Alan explained when his silence drew a questioning stare from Leah.

“Still!” Leah yelled at him.

“Look I’m just… going to go look at one of these places. I won’t go inside, I won’t try to talk to anybody, I’ll just pass it on the bus a couple times both ways to get a good look at it.” Alan offered, trying to assuage his girlfriend's fears. He infused every bit of honesty he could into his movements and voice. He didn’t just tell her things were going to be okay, he willed that truth into being through his actions.

Even if he knew, privately, it was a lie.

He took her hand in his and rubbed his thumb over the tender flap of skin that existed between the index finger and the thumb of her hand. He leaned slightly into her personal space. He locked eyes with her, not daring to blink even once. They locked eyes for a just a bit longer, before Leah nodded once, quickly and decisively.

“Tell me you’ll come back.” She demanded, her tender grip on his hand turned into an iron claw that demanded attention.

“Promise me you’ll come back. Make me believe it.” She hissed at him.

So he leaned the rest of the way forward and kissed her tenderly.

“I promise.” He said when he pulled back. Then he stood and headed for the door to get his shoes on. With a final backwards glance at his girlfriend, he pushed the door open and left.

Leah allowed exactly one hundred and eighty seconds - three minutes from the minute the door closed - to pass before she too rose to begin her preparations.

She headed to the basement of her home, counting every step, cataloguing every creak the floorboards made. Such was her stress that she had to consciously stop herself from trying to counting the motes of dust the morning sun showed her as it peered through the bay window of the home.

“And yet, I just don’t believe you,” she mumbled - disappearing into the basements depths. The basement that had been locked and inaccessible to Alan for the duration of his stay in her home.