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It was 10am on a Saturday and Abigail was not happy about being dragged out of the house and into the bank and she was making sure that Reginald knew it, but at the age of six she couldn’t be left at home and her older brother and sister were both away at music and science camp respectively and her father was out of town doing his “intelligence consulting” gig for some television network that had hired last year to do work on intelligence analysis for one of their international news programs.
“Daddy, this is booooring!”
“I know it is sweetie.” Reginald didn’t like running errands anymore than his six year old daughter did, but it was a necessary evil that came with his incredibly domestic life.
“Why couldn’t I stay home and watch cartoons?”
“Because, Abby, you are six years old. You can’t stay at home alone.”
“I wouldn’t be alone, Max would be with me.”
“Max is a dog, not a babysitter.”
“I’m not a baby!”
Reginald sighed and rubbed at corner of his faceplate to ease the headache that was forming. A mother having a similar struggle in the next line gave him a sympathetic look as she tried to corral her young son. He smiled at her as the line he and Abigail were standing in inched forward again. He turned to Abigail and picked her up, his back twinged a bit at her weight, reminding him that he was really too old to be doing that.
“You’ll always be MY baby.” He told her and she giggled. “Have I ever told you how small you were when we brought you home?”
“Yes daddy, you said I was this big.” Abby held her hands about two inches apart and Reginald laughed.
“A little bigger than that, but yes. You were tiny. Your father kept thinking he was going to drop you, didn’t know what to do.”
“But papa is the one that wanted to ‘dopt me?”
“Adopt” he corrected her, but she wasn’t paying attention. “Yes he was, but he had never held a baby before. Your brother and sister were much bigger than you when he came to live with us.”
Reginald thought back to the whole situation. Abigail had been the child of a fellow agent that Michael had been friends with for years. She’d come to him in her last month of pregnancy, asking him to help her place the child with someone because she couldn’t keep her. After she’d been born Michael had fallen in love with her and asked Reginald if he’d want another child.
It was then that Reginald got out of the game completely. He’d been a “super villain” for long enough and with another child in the house, he didn’t want to keep putting his family in danger. Only three months before an intelligence agency had tried to kidnap his family, thinking that his relationship with a former spy was a sign that he had gone soft. Michael had protected the children and assured him that the threat had been minimal, but Reginald had mothballed his more dangerous labs and redirected his efforts into more humanitarian projects while making it very clear that any attack on his family would be met with the same deadly force that would have been expected before. Most of his scientists and staff, even his “minions” as Michael still called them, stayed on to work with him.
So things hadn’t changed that much, he was just no longer an active threat and the intelligence community backed off.
His back twinged again and he set Abby back down on the floor. She hugged his leg.
“I’m glad you ‘dopted me daddy.” Reginald smiled and rested his hand on her curly head, feeling happy despite the heat and the obnoxiously slow line they were stuck in, and that’s when everything went horribly wrong.
“Everyone get down on your knees! We’re robbing this place!” A group of several men in ski masks and truly horrible uniforms stormed in through the front door waving guns, one them hit the only security guard over the head and he dropped to the floor close to where Reginald was standing. Behind them a woman in a skintight catsuit and ridiculously impractical high heels followed them. She had foregone the ski mask in favor of some sort of goggles that, combined with her outfit, made her look like a prostitute that took a wrong turn at a welder’s convention.
The standards for super villains sure had gone down hill since Reginald’s day, he thought. He got down on his knees, pushing Abby down with him and tucking her between himself and the desk that held the paper deposit slips.
“I need you to stay right here under this desk sweetheart” he told her. “Everything is going to be fine.”
He did his best to keep himself out of the line of sight of the villain and her henchmen. Six years was a long time, but he had a recognizable face and he’d rather not get involved in this mess. The bank was insured and, unlike his husband, Reginald was not prone to heroic nonsense.
Not that Michael would have been prone to heroic nonsense with Abigail there either. He had too much sense for that when their children were involved.
“Daddy, what are those people doing?” Abby was pressed up against his back as close as she could get.
“They want money sweetheart, they just came to the bank for money like everyone else. Just…more aggressively.”
“Will they leave soon?”
“I hope so, now stay under the table for now alright?”
“EVERYONE BE QUIET!” Welder prostitute shouted. “Get the safe open now.”
Reginald internally groaned at that. The safe was on a time lock and it definitely wasn’t set to open at 10:12 on a Saturday morning. Monday morning maybe, Friday afternoon maybe, but Saturday?
Which was exactly what the bank manager told the villain. She waved an overly complicated looking gun in his face and made various stereotypical threats.
“Good grief” Reginald muttered. As a former villain this was just embarrassing to the whole profession.
“I’m sorry, if I could open it I would!” The villainess growled and fired off a shot to the right of the bank manager, the walls next to him instantly was coated in a thick layer of ice.
“A freeze ray? Really? What is this, a 3rd grade science fair project?" Reginald rolled his eyes, but kept his head down.
“Then open all the tills and empty them out.” The bank employees where quick to comply and the henchmen went around to the various teller windows and collected the relatively small amount of funds (relative to what was in the vault anyway) from each of them.
Outside the sound of police sirens came into hearing range and Reginald just groaned. If this woman was even vaguely competent she would have been in and out by now, but now it might turn into a real hostage situation and that, that was just not acceptable. The henchmen gathered around their boss, looking for guidance on what to do next and Reginald made his move.
He used to tease Michael about some of the more ridiculous gadgets he’d carried on missions, but some of them had their uses. Reginald slowly moved to pull a pen out of his shirt pocket and twisted the cap around twice.
“Sweetheart, I need you to close your eyes for me and stay under the table alright?”
“Okay daddy.”
The pen was armed and he started the count down as soon as he snapped off the pocket clip on the side. At 5 seconds he threw the pen toward the group of henchmen and their boss, took a good look at the room around them to find the best route to get to them, then closed his eyes just as a loud BANG filled the room and the flash grenade deployed. There were several screams of pain from the civilians as well as the henchmen. The second it was safe, Reginald opened his eyes and ran for the group, grabbing the baton off the belt of the nearby security officer who was still stunned.
The henchmen were blundering around blindly and it took only a few moments to knock them out with the baton and without her men the woman was ridiculously unprotected. Her grip on her gun was loose and Reginald yanked it away from her.
“Honestly, this is just pathetic. Who actually uses freeze rays anymore? This isn’t some 90s superhero movie.” He knocked her on the head before deactivating the gun’s power cells and then dropped it to the floor, the woman was slumped over on the ground with her henchmen. The police pulled up outside and Reginald dropped the baton, returning to sit next to his daughter on the floor.
The security guard was finally waking up and he groaned before sitting up to look around. He took in the scene, realized that the threat had been taken care of and he got up to open the doors for the police.
The police came in, confused, and found the bank robbers conveniently knocked out. Cops were cuffing henchmen and collecting weapons and calling for stretchers when a higher ranking officer stepped inside.
“What happened here?”he asked and a flurry of confused stories from bleary eyed people came at him from every direction until he finally got people to speak one at a time. Reginald stayed back, keeping his mouth shut until it became apparent that the man had no intention of letting everyone go home until he found out what had happened here. Reginald picked up Abigail and walked over the crowd of bank patrons.
“It was me.”
“What?” The policeman looked at him speculatively, taking in the odd facial adornment and the little girl that was clinging to him.
“It was me. I was in the military a long time ago, so I put my skills to use.”
“Why? We were already on the way.”
“Yes, but then it would have been a hostage negotiation and it would have dragged on and people might have gotten hurt, their leader wasn’t exactly emotionally stable from what I could tell, and honestly I have a lot of errands to run today and I was hoping to have dinner fixed before my husband gets back from work and it was just easier.”
The policeman looked perplexed at his statement, like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.
“Can we go now? I need to get groceries and honestly we are way behind schedule to get home now.”
“I…uh…we’re going to need a statement about all of this…this.” The man waved a hand at the general room.
“Can I just come in tomorrow and give it? My husband will be home and Abby won’t have to be bored to death in a police station.”
The policeman looked flummoxed again, but after a moment he nodded slowly.
“Uh, yeah, I think that would be fine. Let me just get your contact information and you can come to the station tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you.”
A few minutes later he was walking out to the car with Abigail. He strapped her into her carseat and got in. He had just started the engine when something occurred to him.
“Damn…I’m going to have to go to the bank again on Monday.”
Abigail giggled in the back and Reginald rolled his eyes, backing out of his parking space and driving home.
Michael was going to love this story.