Redesign Me, State of the Art (Jalex)

A Kiss Or a Gun Fight

Jack's POV

My mind was reeling as I ran. I thought my body would be aching by now, but when you feel like you're floating, steps don't hit the ground as hard as they normally would; and weight doesn't weigh as much as it should.

I was still genuinely surprised that a 16 year old kid with two smoke bombs was able to create a diversion decent enough to escape from a trio of trained government agents. I mean, certain super powers may have given Alex and I a slight unfair advantage, but I'd like to think that it was still pretty impressive.

When we finally reached a nearby gas station, I set Alex down. He wobbled a little bit, holding onto my arm and steadying himself. Once he let go, the cloud that had enveloped my body quickly evaporated and I finally felt the full impact of the several miles I had ran. My legs basically collapsed underneath me and I found the nearest bench to rest on. Alex sat down next to me and we were silent for a while; a pattern I found happened quite often when Alex and I were sat together.

"So... what now?" he asked with a little chuckle. It finally hit me then, that I didn't really have any plan beyond rescuing Alex.

"We run maybe?" I suggested.

"Where to?"

"I have no idea," I admitted, fidgeting with the edge of my shirt. I was trying to figure the whole thing out in my head, and decided that I needed to have as much information as possible to be able to adequately assess where we'd be going from here. "So who were those guys in there? What did they want?"

He tensed up at the question and looked wildly uncomfortable. Why that would be was a complete mystery to me until he explained everything that had happened in between the time he opened the front door to when I stormed through the back one.

"You're shitting me. He's your dad?" I confirmed once he had finished.

"Unfortunately, yeah. I never in a million years thought this would be my life," he admitted shaking his head.

"I did," I laughed trying to lighten the mood of the situation.

"What?"

"I uh, always kinda had this weird fear that some sort of FBI agency would come one day and take me to a lab and poke and prod me like a zoo animal," I said, feeling foolish the second the sentence came out of my mouth.

"Rightfully so I guess," Alex reasoned.

"Well, if we're going to be innocent fugitives looking over our shoulders for the rest of our natural born lives, we should come up with some sort of code word or something," I proposed.

"A code word?"

"Yeah, or a phrase only we would know, in case we ever have to alert each other of danger."

"You really wanna go all spy movie on this don't you?"

"Why not? We might as well try to make the best out of it."

"Yeah, I guess so. What should it be?"

"Something simple. Something we could incorporate into a sentence easily. But not too easily to where we get confused if we're using it or not." We both paused and thought for a moment before Alex snapped his fingers at an idea.

"What about 'canals'?"

"Canals?"

"Yeah, when do you ever use the word canals?"

"Never, that's the point. How would we incorporate that into a sentence?"

"I don't know, maybe like 'the canals are freezing'? Just trust me, I can feel this word in my bones man."