Chapter 2
“Where’s mum?” Is the first thing that comes out of Adrian’s mouth when he walks into the kitchen, at six am preparing himself for school. Ethan looked at him sheepishly.
“She had to take the night shift, there is a shortage of nurses right now, and you know your mother, she’d never pass up the chance to help somebody in need.” Adrian understands but is also a bit annoyed that nobody woke him up to tell him that, even if it was at one in the morning, he didn’t care.
He loves to see his mother off when she leaves in the morning for work.
He’s about to leave for school, when his father throws him a familiar cool object. Adrian catches it with ease, it’s his gun, and he almost forgot to take it with him, what an idiot move. Usually he wasn’t so sleepy, but something made him restless last night.
He couldn’t figure out for the life of him why he had trouble sleeping, as July 31st had no real significance to him.
But his birthday, according to his mother and father, was August fifth, so that may of had something to do with it.
Adrian slips the gun back onto his ankle holster. He’d been going to this weird underground school for IMF children ever since he was six years old, and he was now nine.
Maybe he’d get his first mission assigned to him, with a senior agents supervision of course. It would be just a little lick of experience for him, in an extremely simple mission that shouldn’t be too important, and it wasn’t like the world was going to be laying on his shoulders during it.
The day was moving much slower than anything Adrian had experienced in his life. His class was going through a lecture on bomb defusing. The instructor then brought in gas bombs that would at most knock out the whole room into unconsciousness, and gave each and every one of them a gas mask, incase if anything went south. Adrian was third in line to try and defuse it.
When it was his turn, he managed to not only defuse it, but set a new record for the class. When he was going through the motions of cutting wires and turning screws, he didn’t even use any time to think, just his intuition in the back of his mind told him what to cut and what to rewire.
Apparently it worked, but he had been told not to be so reckless with important situations.
Adrian understood that the implications of blindly following his instinct wouldn’t be able to save him if he didn’t cut the correct wire in a future situation. The teacher was proud but reprimanding. Soon, permission slips were handed out to bring home to their parents. It wasn’t the traditional way of handing out a school permission slip, and instead of paper being given out, each student was given three small marbles.
Before the end of the day, there was an announcement of a new student being transferred from a facility in London. The instructor walked in with a lean 9-year-old girl. She was beautiful in Adrian’s eyes, and he for the first time in his life, was hoping that he wouldn’t be assigned a mission with his best friend, Colin, and instead wanted to try his chances with the new initiate.
“Granger, Hermione.” The girl said, in a clear voice. Each word was perfectly annunciated in a perfected American accent, and Adrian almost thought she could’ve been raised here in America. Then the initiate giggled, before speaking in her natural voice, which had an upperclass english lilt to it.
“So where were you born?” Asks Colin, curiously. Tommy, immediately from the other side of the room yells.
“England, you idiot!” Hermione rolls her eyes, and cuts in, correcting Tommy.
“Actually I was born in Paris, France.” Collin laughs and sticks his tongue out at Tommy’s flustered face.
“Yeah, I was the one born in London,” Adrian admits to the rest of them, Collin laughs even harder and Tommy's face goes red. This continues when Collin tells them that he was born in Bangkok, Thailand.
“Wh-what?! But you’re not asian!” Tommy tries to fight off Collin’s claim.
“Actually my mother is asian, I just happened to not be born with prominent Asian features.” Tommy’s had enough, and waits by the door with his bag over his shoulder for the end of school bell to go, which is due any minute now. Hermione looks around in confusion. She eyes their formal uniform, fitted with a white button down, ironed black slacks and navy tie with their navy jumper.
“I thought American’s didn’t wear school uniforms?” Adrian and Collin chuckle at her confusion.
“That’s only the public schools. Well this facility is actually government run, but we’re a special case. They grant us a tenfold budget because technically we’re an extension of the intelligence and defence forces.” Adrian shrugs, and this uniform wasn’t only just for show, it was kevlar lined and weighed down so that each and every initiate was stronger built up their personal strength just by wearing the clothing.
The initiate class was actually quite small, and the department only ran a few classes, each a few years younger than Adrian’s own initiate class.
Adrian’s class consisted of nine children, and each of them had at least one parent who worked for the IMF agency. In Collin’s case, both his parents were senior analysts, who met in the office one time in an overseas IMF office.
“So what’s brought you to this side of the pond?” Adrian asks her, trying to strike up a conversation.
“Dad’s MI6, mum’s IMF. Once mum heard about this experimental program for child agents, she decided it would be good for me to learn how to properly protect myself.” Hermione shrugged again. “I’ve already been to a few private lessons over at MI6, but none of them are really course based.”
Adrian nods along.
“So who’s your mum?” He asks, maybe he’d know her. Hermione waves him down.
“Oh, you wouldn’t know her. Jean Granger, International Affairs.” She’s right, Harry doesn’t recognise the name, but if she was in international affairs, he probably wouldn’t. There was a high chance she was working overseas anyway.
“Your dad?” Adrian can begin to tell she’s getting annoyed, as she doesn’t know anything about him yet.
“Junior Head of finance.”
“What about-“ Hermione interrupts him.
“Your turn.” She looks at him expectantly, with a hard, unimpressed stare. Adrian has the decency to look sheepish, chuckling nervously.
“My mum’s a nurse… my dad is Ethan Hunt.” He doesn’t even need to explain who Ethan Hunt is, because apparently every single IMF agent knows about Ethan, and by extension Hermione knew. Her jaw drops and eyes widen.
“The retired field agent-“
“Yup.”
“The same one who-“
“One in the same.”
“How was school today, kiddo?” Julia asks him. They’re walking home together from the front of the school which Adrian went to school. Adrian’s happily skipping along.
“There was a new student. Transferred from a school in England. Her name’s Hermione, and she’s amazing.” Adrian thinks back on Hermione’s little defence demonstration, remembering how she skilfully fatally wounded the training dummies.
“In love?” Julia jokes, Adrian doesn’t respond, except for sighing deeply. Julia’s still in her nursing uniform, due to having just gotten off her shift to pick up Adrian. Adrian begins to giggle, somewhat finding Julia’s accusation of him being in love absolutely hilarious. Julia begins to chuckle along as well. They sober up, and this time Julia speaks again, in a serious tone.
“Adrian,” She waits until his undivided attention is on her. “Your father and I have spoken… and we’re deciding to get married.” Julia eye’s Adrian for his reaction. It’s unsurprisingly positive. His mouth breaks into a grin He’s been waiting for his parents to finally tie the knot, even though they’ve been considering getting married for years.
“The engagement party is on Saturday night. My parents, your Uncle Rick and Aunt Melissa will be there.” Adrian’s eyes brighten a little, although he’s currently the only child in entire family, he knows that Aunt Melissa is expecting, but the child wouldn’t be anywhere near his own age. It was enough to placate him for the moment.
“Aunt Melissa?” Visits between Julia’s side of the family were rare, as most of Julia’s family didn’t live anywhere nearby to where their little family of three had resided.
“Yeah.” Aunt Melissa was extremely nice towards Adrian, which had quickly placed her in extremely good graces in Adrian’s books. It wasn’t though that meant much, as anybody in his books were extremely temporarily placed, except for his parents. Any decisions he made based on people’s character could change in an instant, although if he trusted people more and had known them for a longer period of time, it would be likely that he’d need more evidence against their case to change how he judged them.
“That’s great, mum. Can’t wait, honestly.” The smile on his face is evident by the tone of his voice.
“Are you sure you want to? It’ll be pretty late at night…” Adrian tilts his head and reconsiders, and nods again firmly. Of course he wants to go, he can’t wait for his parents to get married. The wedding is going to a pretty memorable event for him. He’d get to put all those formality skills into use he’d learned at school.
They turn around the corner and happen to already be home. Ethan seems to already have gotten off of work early today, as shown by the fact that he’s sitting on a barstool at the kitchen counter staring immensely at his laptop. To anybody else, it would look like he’s immersed in live statistics of traffic conditions along the east coast of the state, but to Adrian, he can tell that Ethan’s in the middle of decoding some cleverly hidden message.
Julia takes one look at his screen, rolls her eyes and gives Ethan a playful kiss on his forehead. He looks up from his ‘work’ and smiles, taking in the scene of his little family together. He’s extremely proud of the life he’s managed to build up for himself outside of work. It’s everything he could’ve wanted.
“How was the day?” He asks his fiancé and son. Adrian perks up at being involved in a conversation.
“Today was amazing! There was a new student, she’s transferred from England. Hermione Granger.” Adrian gushes on about the new girl, carefully filtering out any mentions relating to the fact that she comes from an MI6 department in the UK, and avoiding any talk on actual schoolwork, instead casually insinuating that Hermione was just gifted.
“Gifted? Well, I hope so, she does go to your special school of yours after all.”