Chapter Text
Lurking in the leafy shadows of the house’s extensive grounds, Lexa Woods - or Agent Lancelot, as she is known in the field - watches and waits. Her entire body thrums with the excitement of a new mission, counteracted only by the tiniest flutter of nerves in her gut.
After four years in the field of intelligence, working for the covert Kingsman organisation that is based in a seemingly ordinary tailor’s shop right in the heart of London, Lexa has all the skills and experience for tonight’s heist. The task seems a simple one; break into the house, copy some files onto the USB drive safely tucked into her pocket, and get out again undetected. But Lexa knows that she can’t be complacent. The security in the house will be tight and it will take all of her training and mission instinct to pull it off.
Lexa has been lurking in this particular bush for almost two hours now, using a pair of slimline binoculars intended for birdwatching to keep her experienced eyes on the house, as well as small tablet to monitor the house’s ample security systems. The heist itself will probably only take her minutes, but choosing the wrong moment to approach and break into the building could cost Lexa the mission.
Lexa checks her equipment for what must be the tenth time, like she half expects something to have miraculously disappeared from her person in the eight minutes of sitting completely still since the last time she checked it all. The magazine pops out and back into the handle of her lightweight semi-automatic handgun with a satisfying click as she checks the ammunition inside. On her belt there are four grenades - two stun grenades, a smoke grenade, and a powerful explosive that Lexa hopes she won’t have to resort to using - a small torch, a concealed pouch of sleep darts, and the grappling hook she’s going to need to execute her plan of entering the house through the skylight on the roof.
It’s all exactly where Lexa needs it. Some people would say that Lexa’s insistence on checking everything too many times is just pernickety, perhaps even a waste of time, but it helps to calm Lexa’s nerves. There’s very little else to keep her mind busy as she waits for the opportune moment to strike, and knowing that everything is ready for her assault on the house, knowing that it is all just how she likes it, keeps Lexa at ease and prepared for what is about to happen.
She is, after all, Kingsman’s best agent for a reason - that reason being that she is always focused and completely unflappable in the field.
The house has been still for nearly forty-five minutes, since a bathroom light went out on the upper floor. Lexa has been biding her time ever since, waiting for the right moment. And there have probably been hundreds of right moments in those forty-five minutes, but Lexa wants the perfect one.
But the longer she waits for that perfect moment to strike, the more her nerves start to build up, and the less likely that moment is to arise at all.
It takes nothing more than a few quick taps on the screen of her tablet, and a tense thirty seconds of waiting, but the words ALARM DISABLED flash up on the tablet in green letters and Lexa breathes a sigh of relief. But there’s no time to celebrate. Hacking into and disabling the security mainframe is only the first part of a difficult mission. Lexa still needs to make it in and out of the house alive and now is the time to make her move.
Lexa slots the tablet back into the compact backpack she wears over her all-black outfit, and then carefully double-checks her surroundings, paying particular attention to the tall windows that line the south side of the house for any sign of movement. With the alarm disabled and all of her equipment ready, Lexa is satisfied that now is as good of a time as any. She emerges from the thick covering of trees in the far corner of the garden next to the hole in the fence that she used to get into the grounds, and makes a dash for the house. Lexa keeps her head down, sprinting quickly but quietly, with her hand poised over the handle of her gun, ready to draw it from its holster in an instant should the need arise.
Lexa is grateful for her training because when she reaches the house, she isn’t out of breath at all, as if she has just taken a leisurely walk rather than a two hundred yard sprint at top speed across a dew-covered lawn. Not even her left knee, sometimes stricken with aches from an old injury she sustained during the brief time she spent in the British army, gives any indication of being put under strain.
Lexa presses herself against the wall of the house and glances at the device on her wrist, not for the time, but looking for dots on a radar that might show a radio frequency from inside the house. There’s nothing, but Lexa is experienced enough to know that this doesn’t mean there isn’t further security inside the house. She has the latest high-tech equipment, but so do her opponents.
Glancing up, Lexa examines the sheer white face of the house’s exterior wall and spots the guttering along the edge of the roof – perfect for grappling up the side and getting onto the roof.
Lexa detaches the grappling hook from her belt and points it towards the roof, aiming with the precision that comes from a three-day training course last month dedicated only to using grappling hooks. Before the course, Lexa had no idea that there were three days of teaching material on grappling hooks and to be completely honest, even after taking the course she still struggles to work out how they dragged it out for so long, but when the hook lands on the roof with precise ease and then catches on the gutter exactly where she aimed it, Lexa is grateful for the extensive practise.
The rest of Lexa’s training kicks in like second nature. She clips the other end of the grappling hook back onto her belt and tests the strength of the wire, pulling it taught to check that the hook isn’t going to slip. Once satisfied, Lexa presses the button and the wire starts to reel in, lifting Lexa into the air. She steadies herself with her feet against the wall, effectively running up the side of the house with the help of the wire as it coils up.
Oddly, Lexa feels safer on the roof than she did on the ground. From up here, Lexa has a view out over the large gardens and beyond, where the occasional set of car headlights flash past along the road on the other side of the tall security fence. The only way to Lexa’s position is the same route that she took – up the side of the house – and Lexa would have a few seconds to prepare for such an eventuality.
With the grappling hook back on her belt, Lexa withdraws another piece of equipment from her backpack and dashes across the roof to the skylight. This device is easy enough to use, and Lexa attaches the suction pads to the window, then programs the laser to cut a circular path through the glass. Once finished, Lexa removes the sheet of glass, leaving a round hole just big enough for a slim body to climb through, which is exactly what Lexa does. She lowers herself through the newly cut hole, biceps straining as she descends carefully, before dropping onto the carpeted floor with a soft thud.
Inside the house, Lexa knows that her immediate danger is much greater, but her goal is even closer than before and she doesn’t doubt for a second that she has the skills to succeed. She checks the radar on her wrist once more for signs of activity – still nothing – and draws her gun, loading the first cartridge into the barrel with a mechanical click. Her gun poised, though she hopes that she won’t have to use it, Lexa creeps down the hallway. The map of the house that Lexa studied in depth before this mission swims to the front of her mind, so clear that Lexa feels as though she has lived here for half her life, even though she has never set foot in this building before.
She finds the office that she’s looking for with ease, and does another quick sweep of the area before she enters, pushing the door closed behind her as she enters and crosses over to the desk that dominates the room. The office is every bit as grand as the rest of the house, a large room with a rug that covers most of the wooden floor and oil paintings lining the wall behind the mahogany desk.
As her eyes quickly adjust to the gloom of the office, Lexa walks around behind the desk and drops into the chair. One hand stays on her gun as the other reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small USB drive, which she plugs into the computer on the desk.
Hacking has never been Lexa’s forte. She’s always preferred the physical side of things, excelling at tasks that require strength or stealth. She’s physically fit, and though she is clever too, the smarts that she possesses come in the form of being able to think quickly on her feet, using a combination of rational thought and logic to overcome obstacles even in the face of extreme danger to both herself and others. Computers, or at least anything more complex than a basic spreadsheet, go straight over Lexa’s head.
Thankfully, this is a pretty easy hack. The USB does most of the work and Lexa just has to sit there and observe the software loaded onto it as it gains access to the computer. Once inside, Lexa runs a search of the computer’s hard drive for the files that she needs. They’re encrypted, but that’s a problem for somebody else later down the line, and all Lexa has to do is copy them across to the USB.
It’s an anxious few minutes as the green bar on the screen slowly fills up.
Lexa sighs with relief when it finally finishes copying the files over onto the USB. She quickly goes about covering her tracks, removing all trace of recent activity on the computer, before ejecting the USB and switching off the machine. The room fills with darkness as the monitor, the only previous source of light, falls black, and as Lexa slips the USB back into her pocket, she raises her gun once more and heads for the door.
Before she leaves the office, Lexa peeks her head out of the door and scans both ways down the corridor. When she is happy that her way ahead is clear, she leaves the office and closes the door behind her, and dashes down the hallway. The carpeted floor muffles Lexa’s footsteps, but her gun is poised and ready for action, while her ears listen out for any sign of movement in the house.
As anxious as she is about the possibility of being caught so close to the end, it is the moments like this that Lexa lives for. Her heart pounds in her chest with the rhythmic beat of a hundred war drums, pumping adrenaline through every vein in her body. It’s a high, the same kind of rush that Lexa would get during sports games when she was playing for her school team, or when she approaches a pretty girl who has been looking at her from across the room. Lexa has always been a thrill-seeker, thriving under extreme pressure, and it is perhaps that which makes her such a good agent - how the entire world could be on the brink of collapse but the exhilarating rush of being in such a pressurised situation would be all that is needed for Lexa to perform to her best and save the day.
Which is exactly what she needs to do now.
Lexa creeps down the staircase, gun still raised. Moonlight shines through the tall downstairs windows, creating shadows through the slats of the railings lining the stairs, and the silvery-white glow only makes the atmosphere in the house seem eerier.
But Lexa is ready. She’s made it this far and she isn’t going to let her nerves get the better of her after everything she’s gone through up until now. She reaches the bottom of the stairs and her goal is in sight. The front door is just at the end of this hallway, and when she’s made it through that it’s just another quick sprint across the garden to the gap in the fence and then both she and the USB drive containing a copy of the computer’s files are free.
Lexa is so busy thinking ahead to the completion of the mission, that when her ears pick up on a soft thud in one of the downstairs rooms behind her, she startles.
With her gun raised and ready for action, Lexa turns to face the direction of the noise. She peers through the darkness, looking for a sign of movement or a shift in the shape of the shadows, though she sees neither. It may have put a slight delay on her escape, but Lexa has a major advantage now - she knows where her opponent is .
Though Lexa smiles to herself in triumph, she realises that she faces a small dilemma. It would be so easy to creep towards the source of the noise and take down her opponent before she makes her escape from the house, guaranteeing her safety. But on the other hand, that was never supposed to be part of the plan. She’s evaded her enemy this far, and the USB containing the information that she came here for is safely in her pocket. And though leaving through the front door might draw her opponent’s attention to her presence, Lexa is confident that she has the speed to escape across the garden and out of the grounds of the house before they would be able to catch her.
In the end, it is Lexa’s hesitation that is her downfall, and she doesn’t hear the person behind her, in the complete opposite direction to the noise that distracted her, until it is too late.
“Put the gun on the floor and your hands in the air.”
Shivers trickle down Lexa’s spine like droplets of icy cold water. There’s a smug air to the woman’s voice, like she already believes that she’s beaten Lexa. But Lexa doesn’t allow herself to accept defeat yet, instead choosing to steady her racing heart with a few deep breaths, reminding herself that she’s Kingsman’s best agent as she already starts mentally devising her daring escape.
“I’m shooting you in three, two, one-“
Lexa hears the click of the safety being turned off and realises that the woman is serious. She takes her finger off the trigger of her own weapon and raises it in the air to show her compliance, before bending down to place it on the ground. Once the gun is on the floor, Lexa lifts her hands above her head again and slowly turns to face her opponent.
Lexa is quietly confident. Her gun may be on the floor out of easy reach, but she’s a highly trained agent and that’s not her only weapon. She runs through each of the others that she has on her body – the different types of grenades, the sleep darts, even the small knife strapped to her calf – and cycles through each one in her mind, plotting how she could use each to escape from this house virtually unscathed.
“You’re stupider than I thought you would be,” says Lexa’s opponent, and before Lexa even has time to process the flash of orange from the barrel of the gun in the other woman’s hand or the crack of a gunshot filling the room, there’s a sharp pain in Lexa’s abdomen where the bullet hits her.
In all the scenarios in her head, not one of them considered the fact that the woman would be cold enough to shoot Lexa while her hands were still raised above her head in surrender. The force of the shot knocks the wind out of Lexa and the pain is enough for her to bend over slightly at the hips, but the feeling that overwhelms Lexa is not one of pain, but of defeat.
She has lost. The mission is over.
Lexa knows that she probably wouldn’t die from a bullet to the abdomen but it still hurts like hell, and when she touches her hand to the area in disbelief and then lifts it up for inspection, her fingers come away sticky.
Grimacing through the pain, Lexa glances up at her attacker, who wears the smug smile of victory, and asks, “Seriously? I put my gun down. There was no need to shoot me.”
The lights suddenly come on, dazzling Lexa’s eyes so that she has to shield them from the brightness. Once her eyes have adjusted, Lexa can see that the stickiness on her fingers is just bright orange paint, and her stomach is covered in a splatter of the same where the simulation bullet hit her and exploded.
The culprit, fellow Kingsman agent Anya, known professionally as Agent Galahad, holsters her gun and replies with a smirk of victory, “Just playing the part of the villain - it’s so much fun being the bad guy for a change. And you know I’ll never pass up an opportunity to kick your arse.”
“You just got lucky,” scowls Lexa, wiping the paint from her fingers onto the leg of her trousers as she bends down and reaches out with the other hand to collect her discarded gun from the floor.
“You can’t blame bad luck when something goes wrong in the field,” Anya tells her.
Lexa feels her left knee twinge in pain, the old injury from years ago flaring up as it does so every now and then, and she wonders if maybe she did something to it while running across the dewy lawn, or when she dropped down through the hole in the skylight. Either way, the pain in her knee is minor compared to the sting that she feels at being beaten by Anya.
Lexa’s jaw clenches and her eyebrows furrow together, but she doesn’t get the chance to say anything else because there’s a slight crackle as a speaker concealed somewhere in the house comes to life, projecting the lilting Scottish accent of Merlin, Kingsman’s only non-field operative and the person in charge of all training exercises the agents are put through to keep their skills as refined as possible.
“Not bad, Lancelot,” says Merlin, “but you can’t let yourself get complacent until after you’ve made your escape. Excellent work, Galahad. We’ll do a full debrief at headquarters in the morning. Goodnight, ladies.”
The speaker falls silent and Lexa is left with the bitter taste of defeat in her mouth.
“No need to look so glum,” Anya says, wrapping an arm around Lexa’s shoulders. “You’ll be fine against any real bad guys because they aren’t as clever as me.”
“And probably not as modest either,” says Lexa dryly, shrugging off Anya’s arm. “Do you want a ride home?”
“Given up on your career as a secret agent to become a chauffeur?” grins Anya. “Come on, Lex. You weren’t that bad.”
If it were anybody else making a comment like that, Lexa would probably forgo the good manners and ethos of respect maintained by the Kingsman organisation and its agents by socking the other person around the face with her fist. But because it’s Anya, who would not only have Lexa on the floor in a dangerous headlock before Lexa could even think about raising her arm but is Lexa’s oldest friend and has been making comments like that for over ten years, Lexa lets it drop.
Anya may have beaten her this time, but there’ll be a hundred more chances to get her revenge in the future.
Lexa leads the way towards the front door, trying her best to ignore the ache in her knee with each step that she takes.
“You need to work on your fake limp,” comments Anya.
“It’s not fake,” says Lexa turning as she walks so that she can roll her eyes at Anya. “You know damn well I’ve got a bad knee.”
“And it’s funny how you never seem to have a bad knee when it’s you beating me,” shrugs Anya, the very corner of her mouth turning up ever so slightly.
Lexa opens the front door and stands in the doorway with a hand on her hip, blocking Anya’s way out, then asks, “Do you want me to leave you to get the tube home?”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me,” challenges Lexa.
Anya falls oddly silent and Lexa smiles to herself in triumph. She turns around again and steps out into the brisk night, shivering as a gust of chilly wind hits her, mentally plotting the quickest route to the car she parked a few streets away.
They make it only a few paces before Anya’s voice pipes up again, still laced with smugness.
“Were you actually going to make your escape through the front door?”
“Shut up."
“To spring break!” says Raven, raising her beer bottle over the table.
Clarke lifts her own drink, closely followed by Octavia and Lincoln, and the four tap their glasses together with a few soft clinks.
“I’m so excited to go to the Bahamas,” says Octavia, leaning into her boyfriend’s side as Lincoln wraps his free arm around Octavia’s shoulder. “Two weeks of drinking cocktails on the beach and swimming in the ocean.”
“Normally I would be insanely jealous,” replies Raven, “but I’ll be spending part of the break at Clarke’s. You know, at the freaking White House .”
Clarke’s cheeks flush in embarrassment at the mention of her new home. If it can even be called her home yet. Clarke still considers the house in the suburbs of New Hampshire that she grew up in to be her home, while the White House is just a well-known building in DC that Clarke holds no personal attachment to. It’s just the President’s House.
The President, who so happens to be Clarke’s mother.
It still hasn’t really sunk in yet. It’s been nearly two months since the inauguration, and another two before that since the election that won Abby her presidency, but even before that there were years of campaigns and primaries and so much time for Clarke to prepare herself for the possibility that her mom could become the President.
And yet it’s still such a weird thought. Clarke feels like a normal college student and it’s only when she sees paparazzi photographs of her own face on the front of gossip magazines detailing her latest “party-girl” antics, or sees every news outlet plastered with reports on what her mom has been up to in her first couple of months of presidency, that it hits her that this is her life now.
“I can’t wait to ask your mom to give me an internship at NASA,” Raven sighs dreamily, smiling to herself.
“That’s not how it works,” Clarke raises a curious eyebrow at Raven, who pouts in response. “My mom will hardly be around anyway. She’s very busy. You know, being the President .”
“Lame.”
Raven rolls her eyes and takes a sip from her beer, but she’s only quiet for a few seconds before a look flashes through her eyes. And it’s a look that Clarke recognises all too well, one that usually precedes some kind of crazy scheme that ends up either getting them into trouble or leading them to do something they end up regretting. Or both.
“Do you think I’ll be able to take a trip in Air Force One?” she asks Clarke. Raven’s eyes widen even further, before she asks, “Oh my god, do you think I’ll be allowed to fly it?”
Across the table, Octavia snorts and shakes her head, a sentiment that Clarke echoes with words.
“Absolutely not,” she tells Raven.
Raven slumps back in her seat in disappointment, though how she can possibly have been expecting a different answer is beyond Clarke - for a highly intelligent aerospace engineer, Raven can be incredibly dense sometimes.
“Can I at least get a photo in the cockpit?” Raven asks Clarke, a pleading tone to her voice. “Imagine the boost my tinder profile will get with that as one of my pictures.”
Clarke rolls her eyes.
“Why have I even invited you to visit again?” she asks Raven teasingly.
“Clarke, it’s probably not too late to book a last minute flight to the Bahamas and spend spring break with us,” Octavia suggests.
Even though Clarke knows that Octavia is joking, she does actually consider it. It would be nice to spend spring break as the normal college student she was before her mom ran for President, to be able to spend two weeks soaking up the sun on sandy beaches, lounging around a beautiful swimming pool during the day and enjoying late evenings of colourful cocktails and dancing. To not have to worry about paparazzi following her or strangers doing a double-take when they pass her on the streets or the two Secret Service agents that follow her around campus wherever she goes to ensure her safety.
Clarke is so incredibly proud of her mom and everything that she has achieved in her political career so far, both before the election and now that her first term as America’s first female President is underway, but sometimes she wishes that it could be happening to somebody else’s mom. Enjoying spring break like every other college student seems like such a foreign idea, when Clarke instead has two weeks of living in a house that probably won’t ever feel like a home, two weeks of public appearances culminating in some kind of fancy political dinner that feels like an episode out of somebody else’s life.
Sometimes she wishes that she could just be normal again.
“I can’t,” Clarke tells Octavia, full of regret. She pushes her own feelings to the back of her mind for later, and then jokes, “I’ve got to get Raven that picture in Air Force One. I wouldn’t want her to miss out on any potential tinder dates.”
Raven snakes her arm around Clarke’s back and leans into her side, taking a sip from her drink before she says, “You’re the best, Clarke.”
And though Clarke doesn’t yet know what the next two weeks are going to hold for her, there is nothing that can possibly prepare her for what will be the craziest spring break of her life.