Todd Duffy-Zanetti

Kadri knows that she isn’t exactly the warmest and fuzziest person in the office. That she hasn’t made the same powerful kind of friendships that everybody else has. She’s been kind, and she’s been charming, and shes done the minimum of trying to make sure that at the very least nobody hated her. But she knows that she can seem overly focused, like if you disturb her from her work you might get a far less friendly variation of her smile. And that’s something she’s been battling against lately, something she’s been trying to fix. She knows just as well as anybody else that having friends and allies in this world can get you farther than just hard work –– so it’s time to branch out from just Dante, time to really make an impact. 

She doesn’t think that Todd will be all that diffuclt to warm up to. He seems nice, always has. Kind and warm and –– she doesn’t even want anything from him, not really. There’s no prize he can give her, no ulterier motive she can work toward. He’s just nice, and this lunch might be okay. Maybe it will make her look more approachable all around. Maybe it will just be… comforting, to talk to somebody else who knows, who felt that jolt of fear spread through them when a letter arrived to their home. 

She’s sitting, waiting at the coffee shop when Todd finally appears. And she can’t help but smile, a wide thing, with a little laugh escaping out of her chest. 

“Damn,” She says, as he takes the seat across from her. It was a little bit adorable, and definitely something soft. She could see him there, playing earnestly with his daughters, tea parties and little games. “I should joke more often. You clean up nice, Duffy-Zanetti.”

. 

He’d asked Kadri about lunch on a complete whim, having no plan to do so until the words just happened to appear fully typed out on his telekit’s screen. He’d have asked Yaxley too, make it an impromptu Squib Squab meeting and what not, but having heard Yaxley was in the middle of a case, he kept the invitation down to just one of his fellow squibs. Between the three of them, something tells him that Kadri might need this little meet-up the most anyway. He had Brittany, after all, and the girls to occupy his time. And then Yaxley was related in some way to half the squad. Kadri though, well he’s not all too sure just who she has. 

“Thank you,” he bows his head as he settles into his seat, “as someone who craves positive attention, after growing up as the constant source of subtly masked disappointment, I can assure you the compliment is greatly appreciated.”  

Chuckling at his own expense, he then digs out the infamous red envelope that was the very reason for their little meeting and tosses it across the table towards her. He probably should have just pitched the thing after Brittany brought it to him, but for some reason he had the urge to hold on to it just a bit longer, and let it serve as a reminder for why their work was more important now than ever. 

God, even after years of imagining the day she and Todd would get to work a case together as aurors, she’d somehow underestimated just how much fun it would be, how satisfying it would be to know that she could trust him, at every step, to know exactly what she was thinking, to back her up at every turn. And, as he jumps in to pick up where she left off, doubling down on their little trap of catching Goodfellow in any number of lies, his story all mixed up, it sounds like he’s having fun, too.

      “We have a picture of the person we believe to be responsible, here,” she says, pulling out a blank piece of paper for her case file. “Who we think may match that description.” The complete and utter non-description, but she’s just curious for one last piece of confirmation: whether or not Goodfellow has an injured leg, or if it’s just a coincidence.

     “You do?” he says, sounding surprised, and she nods.

      “One of the no-majs present gave a description of someone looking suspicious before they were obliviated but, of course, we wanted to confirm with someone whose testimony would be more trustworthy. Would you mind coming and taking a look at it, confirming whether or not this is the woman you saw?”

She’s almost afraid she’s laying it on too thick, but apparently it’s just thick enough, because he springs out of his seat—looking relieved, like he’s surprised by the ability to clear his own name so fully—and, sure enough, he’s limping slightly on one leg.

She looks at Todd, as Goodfellow crosses the room towards her. Gives him a nod. They’ve solved this one together, but Todd deserves to be the one to arrest this guy.

He’s not sure if he’ll be able to play it cool for much longer, especially as Brittany pulls out a blank piece of paper, and goes on like its some artist’s rendition or some shit. Bringing his hand up to cover the grin that threatened to reveal itself, he stares sternly at the blank image, shaking his head in contempt as if the very sight of this woman was enough to irritate him. 

When Goodfellow springs up, it’s no surprise at all at this point that he walks over to them with a slight limp to his leg, and Todd was willing to bet that somewhere in the mess of an apartment was a pair of blue jeans with a patch torn out in it that Brittany still held. 

Once Goodfellow makes it over to Brittany and sees the blank page in her hand, his shoulders immediately slump, clearly seeing the precarious position he was now in. 

“Aw, fuck me,” he groans, then looks between the two aurors as if he was some kid about to get pulled into detention, rather than get arrested for his part in a domestic terrorist attack. 

“I would go ahead and do the whole Agatha Christie/whodunit thing, and explain to you your own crime and how you did it, but we’re good here, right?” Todd asks, no longer trying to mask his smile now. “It’s just it’s kind of getting close to lunch and all, and I’d really rather take my wife here out for a much needed break, than sit in the stinky interrogation room for an hour and a half or whatever.” 

“Nah, nah you don’t have to do it,” Goodfellow replies with an eye roll, “but like... plea bargains... you guys do that shit right? Cause like... if you do, then I’m sayin’ I’m open is all.” 

Glancing over to Brittany he shrugs his shoulders. They’d have to get a hold of the district attorney, let them figure something out since that’s more their department, then do a whole interrogation room deal from there. But that would definitely take a couple hours while they waited for all of that to happen. 

“We could still get lunch,” he offers to her as he pulls out his handcuffs to put on Goodfellow, “maybe get some gyros at that place in Picquery Plaza. Celebrate arresting a blood purist and all.” 

“Yo, I’m no-” 

time: day after nbo squib letters

status: closed to @kadrisozen​

He’d been holding his breath for something to happen, ever since Squib Relations announced the bombing was a way to cover up the theft of all squib records, he knew it was only a matter of time before the group showed just what exactly they intended to do with such information. Sending a harshly worded letter likely isn’t the last he’ll hear from them, he knows that all too well, which only proves to deepen the worry that’d been steadily growing in his gut over the last few weeks. 

He puts on a brave face though, because he has to, because if he does anything outside of acting like he had everything under control right now, he’s sure he’s going to fall apart at the thought of his bloodstatus being the cause of any harm that may fall on the girls and Brittany. 

And it’s in that fight, the fight to live his life rather than live in fear of it, that he puts on the ridiculous outfit he’s wearing in that moment, fully taking Kadri’s “dress to impress” remark to heart as he walks into the coffee shop that afternoon, bow-tie and all. 

“Never joke about dressing up to me, Sözen,” he greets as he moves to take a seat across from her, “because as a father of two girls who enjoy the occasional tea party- I will take it seriously.” 

It’s impossible not to notice the neck tattoo, first thing, as she and Todd step into the apartment and she gets her first glimpse at Goodfellow. It’s not proof, but it’s enough to alert her to keep her guard up, enough to put into place the possibility that Goodfellow might not just be a witness, but might be the Fool that they’re looking for. 

She takes in the scene, as they make their way over to where Goodfellow’s sitting with his feet propped up—and that’s interesting, too, she thinks, thinking about the scrap of denim currently tucked away in her case file, which Medina had handed her from the erumpent horn, and the likelihood that the person they were looking for had an injured leg. He’s wearing sweatpants, she notices, which he was unlikely to have been wearing earlier, if he’d been flying to Mesquite all the way from here, a many hours-long flight, even if you took a break in the middle to go hiking, like he’d claimed to the Nevada aurors. 

Altogether it paints a certain picture of guilt, but they can’t be sure, not yet. And she still has to take into consideration the fact that he might not be the guy they’re looking for, but might have seen the guy they’re looking for after all. 

     “Pretty good thing,” she agrees, giving him a pleasant smile. “We were told you were planning on stopping in the park for a hike on your way to—” she makes a show of pulling the case file out, like she’s checking it for the information she clearly already has on hand. “To Mesquite. Awfully long way to fly.”

      “Well, you know, apparation makes me queasy,” he answers easily, smoothly—and maybe it’s just her imagination, but it sounds too smooth, almost rehearsed. “I played quodpot at school, I’m a big flier.” 

      “I see. Well, like I said, we’re really grateful that you managed to see something, call it in. How close were you, to the erumpents, when they were set loose? We’re hoping that someone will have seen the face of the person who did it, might be able to give us a description of her so we have a little more to work with.”

It’s a little bit of a trap, if not a terribly clever one. Langer’s notes hadn’t specified a gender, for the person she’d been calling The Fool, but if he latches onto it, gives them a description that doesn’t match what Langer seems fairly certain they should be looking for, then it’ll almost certainly be the case that he’s trying to throw them off his own scent. 

He has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep himself from laughing at the ridiculousness of Goodfellow, especially as Brittany makes the show of looking through her case file, as if she didn’t know already. The trap she’s laid for Goodfellow is a smart one though, and all he can do is wait with bated breath to see if Goodfellow would fall into it or not.

“A description of her?” He asks as he looks over towards Brittany, his brow creases in confusion at first, but then suddenly his mouth opens like he’d suddenly just remembered something. “Oh yeah, of course... her, how could I forget her.” 

Of course the problem is Goodfellow seems to have forgotten this reported “her” as he seems to be scrambling to think up a description before speaking again. 

“Well, she looked pretty plain, you know? Average height, average build... average hair color.... Nothing really stood out about her.” 

“And just what color would you describe as average?” Todd pipes up, his shoulders aching from trying so hard not to shake with laughter. If this guy wasn’t their Fool then he was ready to eat his own shoe, but the problem was they were going to have to catch him in enough lies to finally get him to crack. 

“Well, brown of course” Goodfellow replies with a shrug. “It was definitely brown”

“Interesting,” Todd nods, and pulls out a notepad from his coat pocket to scribble down ‘it can’t be this easy’, just for Brittany’s to see, but to make Goodfellow think he was writing down every detail he gave them. “And, forgive me,” he adds, feigning embarrassment as if he’d forgotten to write down the information from earlier, “but did you say this was before or after you visited your brother in Mesa?” 

It seems like a small mercy, given the context, that the erumpents hadn’t been killed—a small mercy that they were being housed somewhere safe, now, instead of whatever terrible circumstances this Fool had bought them from. A strange silver lining to a stranger case: between this and the attack on the Squib Relations Office, no one had been hurt, no one had been killed, and the erumpents were better off for it. She can’t help but wonder how much of that is coincidence and how much is intentional. It seems like the only way to find out will be to catch the Fool and get to the bottom of all of this, and to hope that Emmy and Hattori do the same with whoever attacked the office. 

But all of the no-maj witnesses had been obliviated already, which meant that even if one of them had seen the smuggler’s face, there’d be no recovering that information, which left them with only one witness who they could actually hope had happened to see their smuggler. One witness and a scrap of denim on an erumpent horn, plus the knowledge their smuggler might be injured and has some kind of neck tattoo, wasn’t very much to go on, even for her. Unless the obliviator had gotten a description or something else off one of the thirteen no-maj witnesses, it felt like they were wading through the dark, here, Langer’s information useful but not terribly helpful at this stage of things.

     “Okay,” she says, taking it all in, giving Langer a nod. She tries to think, for a moment, if she has any other questions, but right now it seems like the best thing to do is to keep moving and hope someone saw something. “We’ll keep all of this in mind, thank you.” And then, turning to Todd, she adds, “We should start with the witness we have, Goodfellow, and then if he doesn’t have anything for us, we can meet up with the Obliviator.” 

He nods to Brittany’s suggestion, not seeing any other option they had left at that point. Langer’s information certainly gave them at least something to think on, but it was clear why at this point she still hadn’t caught the Fool yet. Nodding his head in thanks to Langer, he leads Brittany out of the office, and outside the apparation wards where she can apparate the two of them to their next location. 

Goodfellow’s apartment wasn’t actually all that far away from the Pacific Headquarters building, in fact once they arrive outside of it, he can just barely make out the top of the building from a few streets away. “He flew on a broom from Merlinus City all the way to Mesquite?” He asks out loud, not fully intending for Brittany to be able to answer it. The notion seemed strange though, that flight seemed like an awfully long one, when using floo or apparation would have been far easier. 

Once they reach Goodfellow’s apartment, he knocks on the door, waiting for the wix to answer but is instead met with a- 

“Who the fuck is it?” Shouted from somewhere deeper inside the apartment. 

Glancing over at Brittany he shrugs his shoulders, before introducing the two of them, “Aurors from the Pacific Squad,” he shouts so that the wix could hear him from inside, “we’re here to ask you some questions about the erumpents.” 

“Ah, shit yeah, you guys can come in! Door’s unlocked!” The wix shouts back. 

Following the wix’s instruction, he opens the apartment’s front door to quickly see that the place was a complete sty. Take-out containers and various beer bottles littered almost every surface imaginable, and when he closes the door behind them he’s quickly greeted with a red lace bra hanging off the door knob. 

Goodfellow, he quickly finds, is sitting on his couch, both his legs propped up on it like they’d just interrupted a lazy afternoon of his. His TV is on mute, but when Todd looks to the screen he quickly recognizes it as one of those trashy talk shows that involves paternity tests and scandalous confessions. The words “My wife slept with a goblin- now I’m raising his baby” seemed to be the title of that particular segment, as its written across the bottom of the screen. 

“So the erumpents, right?” Goodfellow speaks up from his couch as he looks up to them, “some fuckin’ crazy shit. Pretty good thing I was flying over when I did and called, or else you all would have been fucked.” 

Aster finds it easy to smile, for the moment. Excited to be there, excited to get started on this case and see if they can’t solve a decades old mystery. The man who greets them –– Sergeant Chaves, seems friendly and warm enough, and Aster gives him a firm handshake when he offers it to her, just the way that Cassandra always taught her. They follow Chaves to his desk, tucked away in the corner, and he pulls out the case file, clearly already prepared for them to come and take a look at it. 

He opens it up for them, and Aster leans in to take a look. The story of the little boy is one she’s sure she’s read before, in newspapers, or seen in documenentaries. Cold case shit, the things that people would make podcasts about. She’s no stranger to that specific brand of online content, in this day and age. There was that one podcast with the two witches –– that one was good, and it was always nice to hear crime discussed by women, their unique perspectives and advice, the interesting disucssions they had. She scans through it quickly, again feeling a little ache for this little boy who disappeared without a trace thirteen years ago. There’s a picture attatched of his face, and he looks like a sweet kid. She hopes that it is him, in there, if only so they can have found him and will be able to put him out of his misery and get him home as soon as possible. 

She glances up at the two of them, looking to Todd first for guidence, or to see his reaction to the file in general. As she does it, she finds herself asking, just to see, just to know. “The painting. It hasn’t changed again yet? No new messages from the kid?” 

Chaves shakes his head. “Not yet, no.” He says, almost disappointed by it. “I’ve been checkin’, almost every hour since we first noticed it. But there hasn’t been anything new since the last time.” He points at one of the little rooms, across the way again from his desk, past the others. “Hung it up in there, so we can all keep an eye on it as best we can. Don’t want to miss a thing, just in case he has anything more he can tell us about the painting.” 

Aster nods in agreement, thinking about it. It would be best to keep a close eye on it, who knew when the smallest aspect could change and reveal something new about the case. “Smart thinking.” She says, and gets a small smile from Chaves. It’s like he can tell she’s pretty new at this, and it feels like an encouraging thing, a sign of warmth.

“I bet you’ll both be wanting to take a closer look at it yourselves.” And with a tap to the old case file, he shifts to talk to Todd. “You take as much time as you need with that, now that we’ve cracked the old thing open again. And you can head in whenever you like too. Got a few more cases to look in to myself, today, but I’ll be around the department if you need me. Just shout.” 

For some reason it really doesn’t hit him that they’re dealing with a case about a very real little boy, until he sees his picture in the case file, and suddenly he feels like he’s about to throw up. Thirteen years, this poor kid has been missing for thirteen years, without so much as a trace of him. If Charlie or Sophie suddenly disappeared, and was gone for that long, he’s certain he’d go crazy, and probably hope against all hope that something like them getting stuck in a painting was the cause, rather than the much more sinister option. 

As Aster thankfully continues to talk to Chaves, all he can do is stare at the small little picture, until Chaves shuts the case file and hands it to him, effectively breaking his trance. 

“Uh yes, yes, we would like to see it,” he nods, as he attempts to regain his composure. He’s not too afraid if Aster notices the sickly expression that likely had washed over his features, figuring she had to know this kind of case wouldn’t exactly be the easiest for him to swallow. 

Once Chaves gives them the go ahead, he picks up the case file, then leads the two of them to the small room the painting had been hanging up in. When they get there he finds its a small conference room, with the painting of the farm scene hanging up on the wall. On the table directly in front of it are a collection of blown up photographs. When he takes a closer look, he realizes it was what the painting had looked like previously, first when there was no message, then during the first one that appeared. 

Looking back up to the painting he can see the second message “I am Alberto Blas” still written out in the paint, alongside the boy. Opening up the case file he sets the boy’s photo down on the table next to the others. 

“Fuck, I really hope this is that kid, as weird as that would be,” he sighs as he looks between the collection of photos and the painting itself. “Stuck in a painting with a cow is definitely better than any other scenario for a thirteen year old missing person case.” 

She moves to put the palette back, picks her wand up off the dresser and makes her way back over to him, waving it in a gentle sweeping motion to charm any lingering bits of eyeshadow off of his suit before moving to stand close enough that she can see what she needs to do to clean up the makeup around his eyes.

     “I know,” she agrees, glancing back at the dresser. It isn’t the first time Charlie’s floated something she wanted down from a high surface with magic—she’d had to magic-proof the cabinets in the kitchen after one too many cookies went missing, and the toy time-out spot that had served them well enough since the girls were old enough to occasionally bicker over who got to play with what had been moved countless times in the past few months to make sure it was still fair to Sophie, who couldn’t unlock doors all on her own. It’s all been harmless, so far, but Charile’s so young, still, even younger than Brittany was when she started showing signs of magic, young enough that it was hard to predict what she might try to do with it. 

She takes a second, does just a little bit of touch-up on the make up, evening it out, wiping away some that had strayed away from his eyelids, providing a little contrast and a little shadow, so it all looks a little more intentional. And then she leans in and gives him another kiss, deeper this time, her non-wand hand on his chest, straightening down the lapel of his jacket and lingering there.

     “But we can worry about that tomorrow. Tonight we have a party to go to.”

He watches her with a content smile as she moves around this little space of their’s, away from the warm chaos that was the rest of the home. He almost has to pinch himself when he’s stuck in these quiet little moments, that somehow this is his life, a life he’s built beside his best friend, and somehow he hasn’t made a royal mess of it all. If this is his grand accomplishment in his life- not becoming an auror, or anything else, but this life with Brittany and the girls, then he couldn’t imagine a better outcome. 

When she returns back to him, he smiles as her lips brush his, resting his hand at the small of her back as she deepens the kiss. He almost didn’t want to go to the party that night, but rather find some private little getaway for them, a little B&B, maybe a fancy dinner, something where they didn’t have to mingle with a room full of people. But maybe that could be something he could plan for later, coordinate it with Brittany’s parents and make it a surprise for her. All this NBO stuff had certainly scared the crap out of him, but he’s sure she’s shouldering more of the burden, like she always had. 

“Sounds like a deal,” he says after she pulls away. It’s just as he does when he can hear the front door open paired with a strong couple knocks and the sound of Brittany’s father calling out to them. The girls must quickly rush down to him, because he can hear the thunderous noise of four small feet running down the stairs along with the excited squeals of Charlie and Sophie. 

He’s got more makeup on than she does, at this point, and he’s right about giving Crow a run for his money in that regard, but she’s not lying when she says he looks good. A little messy around the edges, but she can touch that up with a little bit of magic once Charlie isn’t looking and won’t get upset about all of her hard work being for nothing. So instead, she takes the palette out of Charlie’s hands, along with the brush, and closes them up so she can take them back to her own bedroom on her way downstairs. 

      “You know, I thought your trophy husband days were over when you got onto my Squad, but apparently I was wrong,” she jokes, reaching forward to brush a stray bit of silver powder off of the tip of his nose before leaning in and giving him a quick kiss. “Vesper will be mortified when you show up looking nicer than them.”

She gives his white suit a quick once over, too making sure it hasn’t fallen victim to the shower of eyeshadow as Charlie had put it on, and finds it to be pretty clean, which is honestly a small miracle given how much is on his face. 

     “Okay, I have to go put this away, and the two of you,” she adds, pointing the brush at Sophie and Charlie, “need to get into pajamas so that grandpa won’t have to go digging through your dressers when he gets here to put you to bed. Two minutes, and I’d better see those butts in jammies, alright?”

They’ve got ten minutes or so before her dad gets there to watch the girls for the evening, and she knows they’ll be up for hours still watching cartoons or whatever he’s decided to spoil them with, but the last time he watched them they convinced him to let them go to bed in party dresses because they wouldn’t tell him which drawer their pajamas were in, so it was better safe than sorry this time. The two of them hop up, scrambling over to pick their favorite pairs out of their drawers, and she hands her shoes to Todd before heading for the door.

     “I can touch it up for you, if you want it to look a little less like a six year old did it for you,” she offers. 

“Pft, being a trophy husband is just part of the perks of being married to you,” he chuckles before leaning in to return her kiss. With how good she looks he has to stop himself from going in for more, remembering the girls were only a foot away. It’s only been a couple weeks since their last date night of sorts, back at Harbird’s, but he’s grateful for another chance to get away from the house for a little bit. At home the two of them were “mommy” and “daddy” roles they rarely got a break from given they had a three year old and a six year old to contend with. At work they at least got to slip back into themselves, but that was work. 

Standing up with Brittany, he shoots the girls a teasingly stern expression as Brittany instructs them to get in their pajamas before her dad gets there, clearly trying to avoid another party dress sleepover fiasco. When Brittany turns he points two fingers at his eyes, before directing them at the girls, wordlessly telling them he was keeping an eye on them, causing both to quicken their pace in a fit of giggles. 

Turning around to follow Brittany, he takes her shoes before leaning in to give her a quick kiss on her exposed shoulder. 

“I’ll leave that up to you,” he laughs, “you’re the one that will have to be looking at me all night. Everyone else though...” he trails off before leaning down to plant another kiss on her shoulder, “will be looking at you.” 

When they reach their bedroom he leans against the door frame, swinging her heels on his index and middle finger as she goes to return her make-up palette. When she does his eyes narrow at the height of the dresser it was on, and how it was unlikely Charlie grabbed it down on her own. 

Getting dressed for a party is always a little bit of a hassle with a six year old and a three year old around, and though she’d sat them down on the couch in front of one of their favorite cartoons before going upstairs to shower, she can hear from her and Todd’s bathroom as she’s getting dressed that it hasn’t lasted nearly long enough.

Todd heads out to deal with it, while she finishes up, the last touches on her makeup, a simple selection of jewelry, picks up her heels but doesn’t put them on yet, knowing there will be a little more child-wrangling to do before her dad gets there to take over so they can leave on time. And once she’s done, dressed and ready, she heads out to see what trouble they’ve gotten into in the meantime. 

     “Silver! To match mommy!” Charlie is exclaiming with glee as Brittany makes her way down the hallway and into the doorway of the girls’ bedroom.

And the scene inside is a sight to see, Todd sitting in one of the tiny plastic chairs, Charlie with a look of deep. concentration on her face, tongue stuck out slightly and brow furrowed as she focuses on applying the silver eyeshadow to Todd’s face, Sophie standing by, suggesting other colors from the palette that Charlie must have grabbed off of the top of the dresser while Brittany was in the closet looking for shoes. 

      “Okay, gentle, baby, we don’t want to poke daddy’s eyes out, right?” she says, with a laugh, glancing up at the resigned look on Todd’s face. Charlie has… actually, done a pretty respectable job for a six year old, the glittery silver eye shadow a little on the heavy side but at least mostly restrained to his eyelids and not all over the rest of his face. She crouches down just behind her, puts one hand over each of her little ones, holding the palette steady and gently guiding the brush to clean up the edges a little bit. She meets Todd’s eyes, smiles wide as Charlie squirms between her arms and Sophie wraps her arms around her waist from behind, nearly toppling all three of them over into Todd and the little chair. 

      “There! Perfect!” Charlie declares, after a moment. She drops the brush and turns to get Brittany’s confirmation, and Brittany only barely manages to catch it before it falls and splatters silver eyeshadow all over the carpet. “Doesn’t he look nice, mommy?”

She laughs again, bright and warm at the scene, and honestly, he does look nice, though she’ll help him touch it up a little bit before they head inside to Vesper’s big fancy party, just so it doesn’t look like a six year old did his makeup for him.

     “I think he looks beautiful,” she confirms, leaning down to kiss the top of Charlie’s head, cradling the back of it in one hand. “What do you think, Sophie? I think it really suits him.” 

He’s not sure how long it is until Brittany comes into the girls’ room, but it feels like a small millennia. Once she does he mouths a brief ‘help me’ as the girls’ faces are turned. To her credit, Charlie seemed to take the job of applying the makeup quite seriously, but his butt was beginning to get numb from sitting in the too small seat, and he was worried Charlie would soon use up all of Brittany’s silver eye shadow if they gave her the time to. 

After Brittany joins in, he’s fully resigned himself to whatever fate and face he ends up with that evening. Although he’s sure Brittany would make sure he at least didn’t look too ridiculous, seeing as how he’d be on her arm all night. 

“Pretty daddy! Pretty daddy!” Sophie exclaims once Brittany and Charlie have completed their task, and okay maybe he isn’t feeling as worried as he was if the look from Brittany’s face alone was anything to go by. 

“Alright, does someone have a mirror around here, I think I’m going to die of the anticipation,” he chuckles as he looks between the three. Sophie goes to her toy box immediately and pulls up a barbie sized mirror, Charlie though, bless her, managed to find a plastic hand mirror that only had a little bit of crayon drawn onto its surface. 

Once he looks at himself in the mirror he has to bite his lip from laughing because dear god- he looked like he was on his way home at 3am, stilettos in hand, as he tried to hail the nearest cab. 

“Oh, I’m going to give Crow a run for his money,” he chuckles finally, and just to make sure Charlie felt good about her work, he leans over and plants a kiss on the top of her head. “I look very pretty, thank you sweetie.” 

She takes the card from Langer, looking at it for a moment before passing it over to Todd so that he can get a look at it, too. The Fool. Honestly, she’s more interested in the board behind Langer than in the single notecard—it looks like a chart of some kind, a dozen notecards just like this one with different names, all the names of various tarot cards, lined up in rows, clearly some kind of order to them, though it’s hard to tell exactly what without a little more context to the whole thing.

But it looks like Langer seems to be charting out the… what, the structure of the NBO’s leadership, even if they don’t have the names of any of the individual people? It’s remarkable, that they could have that much detailed information and yet know so little about any individual person within the terrorist group’s larger machinery. 

     “You think this ‘fool’ was responsible for, what, buying the erumpents, extracting the fluid, and then letting them loose to get rid of them?” she asks, just trying to confirm the connection, confirm that what she and Todd had been assuming from the information they had was what Langer was assuming as well. 

She glances back at Tood, after a moment, checking in for a second. She knew he’d been hoping to investigate the attack on the squib relations office—who hadn’t been?—and now it seems like he really is, albeit from a different angle. They’ll still be able to take down some important member of the NBO by the end of the day if all of this goes well, which is huge, something that basically hasn’t happened in the two decades since the first NBO attacks in the late 90s, long before either of them were aurors. 

     “And you have some information, that might help us catch them?”

He takes the card offered to him, and gives himself a second to look at the information on it before glancing back over to the large board. There isn’t much detail there, but what is there includes a small list of possible other cases MACUSA has handled over the years that Langer had surmised had been The Fool’s work, and then a short description of the smuggler which read:

Not the most competent smuggler I’ve seen, but gets the job done. 

Perhaps related to someone else higher up the chain? Thus why NBO has stuck with them.

Eyewitness in previous case reports the wix has a tattoo on left side of neck, but couldn’t determine what it was of due to the brief nature of the encounter. They could give no further identifying features as the wix was clearly using some kind of concealment charm. 

It’s not a lot of information, but it certainly helped them to some degree. Setting the card down on Langer’s desk, he steals another glance at the board, and from what he can tell there’s at least eleven other NBO members she was on the trail of. 

“I do,” Langer responds to Brittany’s question, “the NBO wouldn’t have had the time, resources, or desire really to raise and breed erumpents themselves. My guess is that they employed this smuggler of their’s to purchase the erumpents, and extract the fluid to give to their explosives expert. To their credit, they didn’t resell the erumpents or dispose of them in a deadlier matter, it almost seems they hoped the erumpents would be found, releasing them in a national park like that.” 

Todd’s brows furrow at Langer’s comment as he thinks back to the erumpents, who were now settling into a peaceful life in the middle of the Wyoming prairie. He supposed he’d never thought of it before, why someone who’d committed such an awful act would them seem to give mercy to the poor creatures. 

“So it sounds like our perp has at least some kind of a conscious then,” he speaks up. That was as much credit as he was willing to give the terrorist though. They got lucky with that attack as far as he could tell, if it’d happened during a weekday Hattori and Yaxley would be dealing with a body count rather than a bunch of property damage. 

time: before the party

status: closed to @bduffyzanetti​

With about thirty minutes to go before Vesper’s party, Todd has fallen into his usual routine when it came to him and Brittany going to any event that involved the two of them having to dress up. The routine being he would generally get ready early, then try to distract the girls for however long Brittany needed to get ready in peace. During this particular evening he’s chosen to distract the girls by way of hide and seek, which looking back, probably wasn’t the best idea, as it involved him having no view of the girls for most of the game, but it was the game they chose, and he therefore was outnumbered two to one. 

It’s just as he’s found Sophie, who had chosen to hide behind a sheer curtain, her bare little feet clearly sticking out from under the drape, when Charlie suddenly begins shouting gleefully for him as she bounds down the hallway. Charlie shouting gleefully could really mean several things, some good, some not so much, and so he braces himself for whatever hijinks the six year old had gotten into as he scoops up Sophie from her spot against the window, and heads in the direction of the still carrying on six year old outside. 

“Daddy, daddy, look!” She shouts as soon as he pops his head out of the girls’ room. Looking down at her he immediately recognizes one of Brittany’s make-up pallettes in her hands as she looks up at him with a grin that can only spell trouble for him and him alone. 

“Daddy, look! Now you can be pretty like mommy!” She beams as she heads back into her bedroom, a skip to her step as she does so. 

“Sweetie, I really doubt mommy let you have that so we should really give it back to her to let her finish getting ready,” he sighs, setting Sophie down, and readying himself for whatever battle this may turn into. 

Sophie quickly moves to take her sister’s side, standing next to Charlie as she grins widely at the array of metallic colors on the pallette. 

“No....” Charlie draws out, seemingly having been stumped until her eyes brighten again as she adds, “but mommy is done, I swear. And you said it was good to share, and so now we share it with mommy!” Thrusting the pallette in his direction, both girls are now beaming up at him, looking at him expectantly. 

“No, we really should give that back Charlie, it’s not sharing if-” he begins but is quickly cut off as the girls begin to chant and plead with him. Looking between the two of them, he knows he could just as easily snatch the pallette and return it to Brittany, but he also knows the chances of that resulting in a full-blown meltdown between the two girls as they fed off one another was extremely high. 

“Fuc- fudge, fudging fudge, alright,” he raises his hands in defeat, causing both girls to jump up in glee. “But I’m the one that dips the brush in mommy’s make-up okay?” he adds, not trusting Charlie’s fine motor skills to not completely ruin Brittany’s make-up pallettte. “You can choose the colors and put it on me, but I’m the only one that gets to put the make up on the brush, deal?” 

She high fives him back as she moves to put her telekit away, giving him a wide smile and a fond eye roll. Detective duo of Duffy and Zanetti, she thinks, fondly. They’d helped solve a case once when they were young, with two real aurors whose kids were now on their Squad, and they’d made a great team then, practically unstoppable. Now, grown up, married, and hunting down a terrorist organization, they clearly made just as good a team. It’s comforting, knowing that they can do this, that they get to have this, together, after so many years of thinking Todd would never get to be an auror. 

     “We should go see the—” she starts, and then her telekit buzzes again, and she frowns slightly, because she can’t imagine Hattori sending her another message after the last one, unless he’d discovered it wasn’t erumpent fluid and he wanted to rub it in her face. But instead, the message she finds when she flips her case open and checks the screen is a name she’s only just heard for the first time today. Agent Langer, from the NBO task force. 

She types a quick reply back, and then turns back to Todd. “Scratch that. Agent Langer from the task force wants to see us. It sounds like they might have some information for us, so we should probably head back to the office first.” 

They’re back to the apparation point, by now, so she loops her arm through his in a familiar gesture, and once they’re back to the office it’s barely a minute before she’s knocking on Langer’s door.

      “Agent Langer,” she says, with a nod, when the older wix finally opens the door. “Sergeant Duffy-Zanetti. Your message said you might have some information for us?”

He’s expecting Brittany to take them to the obliviator next, figuring that was the next best place to go if they were going to learn more about how all of this happened. Instead though, her telekit goes off again, and half of him is hoping its a message from Hattori, confirming they were indeed right. Instead he finds it’s even better when that bureau agent of the task force is the one who reaches out to them next. 

“Damn that was fast,” he lets out a small chuckle, “I guess this task force isn’t as incompetent as everyone is making them out to be- or at least going off of that message anyhow.” There’s a certain excitement in the air surrounding them, a buzzing that makes everything now they do seem suddenly so much more important. 

Merlin, if he could really help take down a member of the NBO it’d make his whole damn week-hell his year. He was a bit bummed it was Yaxley that got the NBO case, but he’s happy for her, and hopefully if things go there way here today, he still might get the chance to throw a blood purist in jail. 

Shooting Brittany an excited grin, he holds out his arm for her to loop around it. Apparating with Brittany was by far one of the most pleasant of his ridealong experiences, probably because Brittany had become so well trained in the art of a smooth apparation with another by now, it was second nature. 

Once they get to Langer’s office, he falls back into the roll of assisting, walking in behind Brittany and letting her do a bit of the talking. Langer though, seems fairly interested in the both of them, as the gray-haired wix looks between the two aurors a small smile on her face growing as she does. 

“And you must be Cadet Duffy-Zanetti, I presume?” She asks as she looks over to him. It’s weird because Todd would swear the look she shoots the two of them is something akin to pride, even though he’s certain he never met the wix before in his life.  

“Uh, yeah, yeah I am,” he smiles in return as he holds his hand out for her to shake. 

With the introductions out of the way, she motions for the two of them to sit as she walks over to a whiteboard covered in notecards. He can barely read it from where he’s seated, but if he had to fashion a guess, he’d assume it’s intel on the NBO, seeing as how that was the whole reason they were there to begin with. 

“Your potions specialist is currently running tests on a piece of tile Sergeant Hattori pulled from the scene to test it for erumpent fluid,” she says as she pulls off one notecard from the top row. “Your chief sent down a copy of your case file just a little bit ago, and I can say I’m confident that the two of you are investigating a case involving the NBO’s smuggler.” 

Aster had done her homework on the people she was working with, in a vague sense. Figuring out who they all were, what their stories were. She’d made note of the family pictures on certain people’s desks, who liked who and who hated who. Todd, from observation for the most part, seemed like an alright guy. Kind of sweet, a little less put together than his other half. Aster had definitely heard him, Emmy, and that Sözen girl call each other the Squib Squad, which –– was cute, nice for them all to band together. 

Aster is curious about what things are going to be like, when they get out there. She has all her stuff ready, so she follows Todd along with an easy gait. She’s interested to see how he works. Aster has never been one of those people who underestimated squibs –– how could she, when she knew how amazing Emmy was? When she had been raised by someone as spectacular as Abel, who was, the way that Cassandra told it, one of the best aurors on Central Squad before they had been found out. She hoped that she could impress Todd, somehow, and be just the support he needed to get this one in the bag. The way Emmy talked, there were a lot of people around the office that probably underestimated them. 

“They should be,” She agrees, and shifts out of her seat to gather her things. She even graces Todd with a small smile, because even she doesn’t like the odds of them making it over the Pacific by apparition. She’s pretty dependable, but she’d hate for something bad to happen, if something went wrong. She’d extra hate for Todd to hurl next to her, when she was wearing her new coat. “Can’t blame you for that one,” She says, with a nod of her head. “Floo is definitely the safer option.” 

They reach the floo point, and its a quick trip to the department in Guam. She dusts herself off when she walks through, and steps aside so that Todd won’t stumble over her when he comes past himself. She perks up, when she sees him, excied to get started for real, and lingers until he starts to lead his way. 

He’s grateful that Montero seems to take the floo thing in stride, and doesn’t try to put up some kind of fight or apparate on her own without him- which he’s pretty sure Hattori would do if he were in Montero’s shoes. 

When they finally do get to Guam the journey there is a pleasant one, and all it involves is dusting off some of the floo dust off his trousers before he steps into the small Guam division. And small it certainly was- at least in comparison with something like the California division. With only the island to call their jurisdiction, the building looked no bigger than a standard no-maj sheriff’s office. There seemed only to be about ten desks sitting in the division’s bullpen, which he could see clearly from where they just stepped through the fireplace. 

Being such a small building, it’s only within seconds of them first stepping through does someone go to greet them. 

“I’m guessing you’re the big-time squad aurors MACUSA sent over?” The man greets with a smile before he extends his hand out for Todd then Aster to shake. “Sergeant Chaves. I was the one who first saw the painting’s message change. Damn crazy thing that was. We’re hoping you’ll be able to help us figure what’s going on here. We’ve been searching up and down for this boy for the last thirteen years, it’ll be a relief to know we finally got him- if it’s him of course.” 

“Does that seem to be the common belief around here?” Todd asks, figuring it was a good idea to get an idea of how the local aurors saw this thing. “That it is Alberto Blas in the painting?” 

Todd picks it up at the exact time she does: the connection between someone using explosive fluid and the explosion that had happened that weekend. Of course the New Blood Order would be eager to get rid of whatever their source for the explosions had been—and, god, if they were right… This could be big. Finding out who let the erumpents loose in the park would give them a confirmed connection to the New Blood Order, a massive break in what had felt like a static operation for years now. 

She’s already pulling out her telekit to message Hattori by the time Todd starts laughing, and she does her best to keep herself composed while she types out the message, keeping her best air of professionalism to it, as much as she’d love to sound smug. Hattori thought he was Merlin’s gift to the auror department, like he was really any more exceptional than any of them was, like he was really a better detective than she was. Yeah, right. And she’s even more thrilled that it was Todd who got to take at least half of the credit for a breakthrough she was sure was going to be key to Hattori’s own investigation.

      “Explosive fluid,” she confirms, as Hattori texts back just a moment later. She can practically hear his scathing tone, and she can’t help but grin a little herself, at that. “They’re checking with Fareed now to make sure it’s erumpents, but that’s as good as a yes for me.” 

And, because she feels like they both need a win this morning, after the grim sight of the injured animals, she passes her telekit to Todd so he can read the message for himself, can see just how annoyed Hattori clearly was at his own big break coming from them, of all people. 

      “And he’s definitely pissed.”

The unexpected turn of events couldn’t have been any better, especially after the grim sight both of them just had to witness. If there’s anyone else’s case he would have loved to impede on it was have been Hattori’s, who seemed to make it his life mission to constantly compete with Brittany in anything the two of them did. 

Taking Britt’s telekit, he starts laughing again and tries his own stab at a Hattori impression as he reads it out loud. Once he’s gotten a good enough kick out of it, he passes the telekit back to her. She was right, even though the connection wouldn’t be official until Fareed gave it the thumb’s up, he felt like they’d do better to continue their own investigation with the assumption. Hattori can continue whatever the hell he’s doing on his side, while they can figure out the erumpent angle further. 

“Alright, boss, so what’s next?” He asks, as he grins down at her, “I’d offer a celebratory turn in the nearest broom closet, but as we’re on a time crunch, and with no broom closets in sight,” he sights as he throws his hands up to the vast prairie surrounding them, “we’ll have to shelve that for later.” 

“But hey,” he raises his hand up for a high five, “score one for the detective duo of Duffy and Zanetti.” 

It’s been pretty easy to settle in to the swing of things here at Pacific Squad, since she first started. Things have become rote, almost muscle memory, and Aster is all the more certain than she ever was before that this is exactly what she should be doing with her life. Still, she’s been dying to get in to more intense things, into juicer cases with more responsibility. Aster wants to start proving herself, pulling herself up the ladder. She wants to be an Inspector by the time she’s thirty, but it isn’t nice to think about where she got that particular drive anymore, given the unfortunate family connection to Becca Savage. 

Aster is at her desk, coffee in hand, when Harbird brings along the case file for her, one which seems to fulfil her wishes. She doesn’t try to stop them or cacth them in any kind of conversation, now clearly not being the time for such a thing. She finds the case enthralling the second that she opens it, as she reads through the words and gets caught up in the mystery and the problem. A little boy trapped in a painting isn’t something that you get handed every day. She would have thought it would have gone to someone higher ranking than her and a Cadet, but then again, she supposed the stakes for them were fairly low. There weren’t very many chances for a wand fight, she imagined, when dealing with an old lady and a little boy in the medium of oil on cavas.

Todd comes back to his desk, and Aster doesn’t try to catch his attention until he speaks to her. They haven’t paid each other much attention, as much as they’ve been sitting next to each other all this time. Aster isn’t here to make a bunch of new best friends, or to get too caught up in anybody elses lives. 

“I never found cows to be particulalry nefarious creatures.” She says, slightly bland, but she does allow a spark in to it after a moment. “But you wouldn’t be the first person I’ve met with these hangups.” 

She tilts her head to the side, slightly thoughtful. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. How do you get trapped in a painting? It must be cursed or charmed, something like that. We might be able to figure it out if we head over and take a look.”

He feels like there’s some kind of story behind her response to his cow joke, but figures with a kid possibly stuck in a painting for thirteen years, they should probably hold off talking about anything that’ll get them too off track. 

“Gotta be, that or someone has watched The Witches way too many times,” he says with a shrug. She was right though, the only way they could really get an idea of what was going on here was to see the painting themselves, maybe even talk to this colorful sounding old lady who first purchased it. The only thing he didn’t like by the sound of it was apparating clear to Guam, which made his head split just at the thought of having to ride-along for that long of a distance. 

“All the division’s are connected to the floo network, right?” He asks, although he’s fairly certain the answer is yes. “You want to use that to get to Guam? No offense to your apparating skills or anything, but I’m definitely going to hurl if I have to do a ride-along across the Pacific Ocean.”