Abel Montero

A message on the screen and in the code, in some kinda magic alphabet Tavi doesn’t understand. A message, which either means that it is what’s activating the curse or whoever did this is taunting them somehow—and he’s got a bad feeling in his gut that it’s the latter, because there had to be easier ways to curse a computer than by writing out big runes in ASCII with a huge chunk of your code—you didn’t need that, to make a message appear on screen, and you didn’t need it to get the virus to actually do anything. The whole block wasn’t a functional part of the code. Instead, it feels a little bit like some kind of sick show-boating…

He pulls up the screenshots he’s taken; he didn’t get quite all of it, missed the first two or three letters of whatever this message is, but he grabs a piece of paper and writes down the rest of them, big blocky letters as close to accurate as he can manage to the ones on the screen, passes the piece of paper across to Abel, since apparently they’re good enough to translate this, whatever it says.

     “That’s… that’s great, right? If we can reverse this, you think it might be able to reverse the memory loss and everything else? Or at least stop it from getting worse?”

The computer in front of him isn’t acting up, yet—the progress bar on the install window is stuck at 98%, blinking and flashing, and he gets the feeling it’s a bar that will never fill, that whoever had hidden the virus in this program had anticipated that any wix—or anyone, really—would get bored of waiting for InstantChat to install if it went on forever and would quit the program, so that there didn’t need to be anything to the program but the virus, no actual program to complete the illusion of a free software trial. He quits it, too, powers the computer down. There’s a chance replacing the RAM might fix the computer, too, and make this hunk of junk salvageable in case something else like this comes up again and he needs a computer he can afford to ruin. 

     “So, what does it say?”

If they can get the correct rune sequence when it came to the curse, they feel like they have a genuine shot at reversing this thing. There’s a chance Tavi may not have gotten every single line of the curse embedded into the disk, but having a good portion of it should give them what they need to fill in any missing pieces. 

“I think so,” they reply as they look down at Tavi’s laptop screen, their brow furrowed as they try to work out just how to go about this. “If I can write out the counter curse, do you think you could put that onto a new disk, and reverse whatever was done to the computers too?” They don’t know a lot about technology outside of how to use a laptop. They had a feeling this curse was going to be tied with the computers, so if they reverse the curse, and reverse whatever effects the computer was under due to it, maybe they’d then be able to help the victims fully recover.

 When Tavi motions to the floor, Abel’s gaze shifts back to the chalk drawn letters. The runes Tavi found should give them enough to help the victims, they just hoped that whatever this message was would lead them to an actual culprit. 

“Here give me a sec,” they respond, “I think I have something in my desk that could help translate this.” Ducking out of the conference room, they head to their desk, and fortunately it takes only a couple seconds of rummaging around its various drawers until they find the small worn paperback book on the Theban alphabet and several other magical lettering systems. 

When they get back to the room, they pick up the chalk again, and start to decode the message, writing the translated message just below the one they’d quickly scribbled down from the screen. Once they’re done, they stand back, as the culprit’s message comes into clear view. 

“I just wanna to tell you how I’m feeling...” they begin to read, face contorting into that of clear confusion as they continue, “Gotta make you understand....Never gonna give you up, never gonna let- oh for fuck’s sake,” Abel grumbles as they kick at the chalk lettering. They may not have been an expert in no-maj culture, but even they could recognize the lyrics written out on the floor in front of them. Gripping tightly onto the small book in their hand, they feel like tossing it across the room out of annoyance, but instead toss it onto the nearest table. 

“He’s fucking with us,” they groan. Moments ago they’d been so hopeful for this case, between the code Tavi obtained and the message they saw, and while there was still plenty of hope they could help the victims involved, catching the culprit seemed to be a much more difficult task. 

With their nod as a cue, he goes ahead and loads the disk up, half his focus on the screen itself, the other half on his own laptop—he’ll be more useful watching the code than the screen, but he’s curious what Abel’s going to see, too, and based on the way the other computers had been fucked up by the virus he isn’t sure they’re gonna get a second chance of this without procuring another computer. Knowing that the virus is fucking with the RAM, he might be able to fix it, but he’s also not sure it will do the same thing if it’s reinfecting the same machine. 

But as soon as the disk is loading, as soon as he clicks the prompt to install the preview software, his attention has to be focused on his laptop, as he watches the virus immediately start to get to work, watching what it’s doing—the rapid speed at which it seems to be spreading through the computer’s programming and finding what it needs to find, erasing its own tail behind itself. And the thing he notices, most immediately, as it works, is that there’s something in there that doesn’t look like code, not exactly. It looks like… well, the only sense he can make of it is that it looks like ASCII art, a series of lines and slashes making a long line of shapes.

And the shapes look kind of like the chalk drawings Abel had made on the floor—not the same ones, but similar shapes, runes or whatever, magic sigils of some kind. He quickly screenshots them, though he knows in his surprise at seeing them he missed a few of them before they erased themselves. But he gets most of them, saved to his own laptop so that even when this computer is fucked beyond repair he’ll be able to show Abel what he saw.

     “Well, I think I might have an idea where the curse came from,” he says, as the last bits of the virus delete themself, leaving this computer with the same fucked up RAM as Issa and Alice’s had been when he looked. “Let me pull these up so you can see ‘em. You see anything on your end?”

Their gaze remains fixed on the screen once Tavi loads in the disk, waiting to see what, if any clues may flash onto the monitor. At first everything seems like normal, once the disk is loaded in, a window pops up, welcoming the user to the “InstantChat” program. No sooner than it appears though, the image on the screen becomes distorted, fracturing into disjointed pieces until the image cuts out completely. Just as they think that may be it, and any hope to finding out who committed this crime would be left to what Tavi finds, a series of strange markings flash onto the screen in quick succession. 

It only takes them a moment to realize the markings were letters to the Theban alphabet, and clearly whatever was flashing on the screen must have been a message. Picking up the chalk they’d since left on the floor, they quickly begin scribbling down what letters they can onto the linoleum. When the virus seems to have done it’s job, the monitor clicks itself off, and in front of Abels lays a message they still didn’t know the meaning to. 

“Um, yeah,” they chuckle breathlessly as they stare down at the assortment of letters written on the floor in front of them. “I think I have a message from our hacker, just have to translate it is all. How about you? Were you able to get anything about the curse specifically?” 

Abel feels like between the two of them, they just may have enough information to put this thing to rest- that is if the message sitting before them actually contains something more valuable than a simple “fuck you” written in Theban. They’re pretty sure they still had a little pocket translator in their desk that’d had the Theban alphabet in it, so it shouldn’t take them too much longer to figure out just what the hacker had left behind for them to find. 

It’s easier than he thought it would be to get a computer from the seized property floor. Granted, it’s a computer from probably 1992, but it’s a computer, with all the parts and pieces he needs it to have: monitor, keyboard, disk drive. He thinks maybe it would be easy to get it back up to the office if he could, like, levitate it or something, but instead it takes him a couple of trips to get each part up to the conference room on his own, dragging them inside as soon as Abel seems to be ready and finished with the magical chalk drawings on the floor. 

     “It’s a piece of shit, but seeing as we’re just gonna ruin it anyway, I think it’ll serve it’s purpose. I just need a few minutes to set it up, get everything ready since, you know, no electrical outlets…”

June had been a godsend when it came to setting up his own computer, and so he’d swung by her desk on his way to the conference room, thankful she was in the office and not out on a case—she’d quickly worked up a short-term charm on an old paperweight to basically turn it into a temporary power source that would last them long enough to see what was going on with these disks.

So he quickly gets to setting it up, bare minimum, basically just enough to boot the computer up and plug his own laptop in to get a closer look at what the virus is actually doing once they load the disk. It takes five, maybe ten minutes, and then he pulls a chair over to he can sit off to the side, close enough to use his laptop on the table next to it, but so that Abel can see whatever’s going to happen on the screen, too. 

     “Alright, you good on your end?” he says, once the computer is on and ready, pulling one of the disks out of its paper sleeve, setting it in the disk drive, ready to hit the button as soon as Abel gives him the go ahead.

They wish they could help Tavi more as they watch him have to try to figure out how in the world to get the computer to work in a setting like this. For all the strengths the wixen world held compared to that of the no-maj one, it was still far behind when it came to technology. Computers may still have been a generally new tool, but they certainly had to be far better and more reliable than the paper method the department was still running on. 

Once Tavi does get the computer up and running though, Abel has to admit they’re fairly impressed with both Tavi’s and June Norwood’s combined efforts in getting the thing up and running. There was no telling just what they would find now, but they were eager to see what would flash on the screen the moment Tavi slips the disk into the computer. 

“I’m ready,” they reply with a nod. Standing behind the series of wards they’d drawn onto the floor, they cross their arms as they stare ahead at the computer’s monitor, curious to see what would happen next. 

Cassandra isn’t sure if its better or worse that even the first sound of Christopher’s voice sounds much more quiet and subdued than one would expect, for a child behaving in the way that his mother described. His voice is a quiet thing as he gives his agreement for them to come inside, almost timid. She glances at Abel, finds them looking at her before they enter the room, obviously as vaguely nervous about this case in its entirety as she was herself. Her and Abel really had to stop getting stuck with the cases that had kids in danger, it did awful things to her, made her want to think of a future where she was able to help her better. 

Abel is as good with Christopher as its possible to be, it seems. The boy is subdued as he plays his video games, and he doesn’t stop playing it to talk to them. She can get that, it seems like an escape. And Abel talks to him so gently, casual little questions to settle them in to the conversation that needs to happen here, the awful questions that they have to ask about what his life is like here, what’s going on with his mother, what his side of the story is. This is such a strange case, Cassandra can’t quite piece it together in her mind, she can’t quite figure out what could be happening here. This wasn’t like the case in Kentucky, when it had been clear what happened even if they weren’t one hundred percent clear on the finer details. 

She watches as Abel sits on the floor a few feet away from the boy, watches as they interact with him. Cassandra takes a seat on the edge of the bed, instead of adding to the growing crowd on the floor in front of the TV. She’s just off to the side of them, far enough  to give him room to breathe with these two strangers in his room.

“It’s not that hard,” He says, voice still quiet as he answers Abel’s question. “but I guess so.” 

Cassandra flicks her eyes up to look at Abel over the kids shoulder, arching an eyebrow just slightly. Not the most talkative kid, but that’s as understandable as everything else. She’s considering the next question, what she can say to ease them in to this further, but on the screen the little orange character dies, little wings carrying him up to heaven, and though Christopher doesn’t look away his attention seems to be on them.

“You’re here about my mom.” He says, timid and soft. “Because she hates me now.” 

It breaks Cassandra’s heart a little bit, and she can’t believe that they’re here. This doesn’t seem like a violent kid. Lorna had said he would try to trick them, but Cassandra didn’t exactly get the idea that this was some kind of grand subterfuge. “I don’t think she hates you, Christopher. I think she’s confused. And we just want to help clear things up, fix things.” 

He restarts the game, back to the start of the level he had been at when they first came through the door. “The other aurors said she was probably just crazy. I heard them before they left.”

Cassandra swallows, and tries not to think that herself. If Lorna was having some kind of mental break, that wouldn’t be good for either of them, her or the kid. But Cassandra wasn’t certain either way. The kid seemed normal, but she had bruises on her arms that she clearly hadn’t done to herself. “Well, we aren’t the other aurors. We’re better than them. The best of the best. Isn’t that right, Abel?”

A flash of anger rises in Abel’s chest as Christopher speaks again, and mentions what the other aurors had thought of this whole thing. This should not have been a case that went unanswered for this long, they think bitterly. Even if the other aurors though that the fault in all of this lay on Lorna, they still should have done their due diligence and made sure Christopher wasn’t in an environment where his mother was unwell to the point she was referring to him as an “it”. The marks on Lorna’s arms seem to suggest there’s more going on here than simply something fashioned in her own mind, which only made more of this seem like a large injustice that this family was left to suffer so long. 

“That’s right,” they echo Cassandra’s words as they continue to look over at Christopher. 

“I think something is wrong with me though....” Christopher speaks up again, somehow even quieter than before. “I don’t remember things sometimes. Like one minute I’m here in my room, and then the next I’m in the kitchen, and my mom is crying. She says I hurt her, but I don’t remember.” 

It’s then does Christopher finally turn to face the aurors, and the small stream of tears running over his cheeks shatters any remaining pieces of Abel’s heart that hadn’t already broken before. They want to console the kid, as well as track down and give the other aurors that had this case a piece of their mind. 

“How often does that happen?” They ask instead, determined to do a better job here then the others that came before them. 

“I dunno, sometimes it happens twice a week, other times it doesn’t happen for a while,” the boy confesses, then turns back to face the tv. As he does though something catches Abel’s eye, a thin white scar that just barely exposes itself above the top of Christopher’s shirt collar. Reaching back behind them they grab a hold of Cassandra’s leg where it sat, hoping she too saw the scar.

Things have been a little chilling and uncomfortable ever since they saw Lorna for the first time, ever since she started talking to them and telling them her story. Cassandra knew that look in her eyes, and she could tell that it was genuine. Whatever fear and grief this woman felt was real, it was powerful, and it wouldn’t go away just because people told her it wasn’t true. There was something wrong here, they just needed to figure out what it was, and they needed to give this family all the help that they could offer. 

Abel ask the right question, and Cassandra feels another chill go down her spine when she sees the bruises on Lorna’s arms. They don’t look like she could have done them to herself. It was clear that something or someone had hit her, had attacked her in ways it was hard to imagine a child doing. But something had happened, and they had to entertain the possibility that this child really would be violent. She glances at Abel, and sees them looking at her. They’re having the same thought, their ideas meshed well together as they always did. They were usually on the same page, usually, and it was true today it seemed that they were keeping pace with each other well. Cassandra swallows, and looks at Lorna.

“Does anything seem to trigger these outbursts in particular, anything you can pinpoint that would set him off?” She asks, wondering if there may be some reason for the way this kid is apparently behaving.

Lorna shakes her head, a slow and shakey motion, not quite meeting their eyes any more since Abel first asked her the question. “It just happens.” She says, “When we’re alone, when I talk to it.” 

Cassandra sighs very quietly and nods her head, and when Abel mentions going to talk to the kid now, Cassandra supposes that there’s nothing else to do, Nowhere to go but up. “We’ll be very careful.” She promises Lorna. “We’re well trained for things like this.” 

She stands and she leads them up to the stairs, watching carefully as Lorna lowers her head into her hands as they leave, seeming to shake a little. They climb the stairs slowly, taking their time. “Whatever is going on here, I think it’s bad.” She says, more to herself than really to Abel. She doesn’t want this to be as bad as it might be, she wants there to be a solution where this mom and the kid end up safe and happy. 

It’s instantly clear which door upstairs belongs to Christopher’s room. It’s a bright blue, and it has his name in colourful letters stuck to the outside. Cassandra glances at Abel before she knocks on the door with a soft hand. “Christopher?” She calls out, voice soft and open. “My name is Cassandra, and I’m an auror that was sent here to help you and your mom. Is it okay if me and my partner come inside to talk to you for a minute?” 

After leaving Lorna behind in the living room, they stick close to Cassandra’s side as they make the slow ascend up the staircase and onto the home’s second floor. Her mumbled words mirror their own, as the pit in their stomach deepens only the further they get into this case. Whatever was happening here, whether it was honestly a changeling or something else all together, it was going to be bad. Cases like this didn’t have pretty outcomes, not after what they just saw on Lorna’s arms only moments before. 

Stepping to the side, they wait quietly as Cassandra knocks on the door, and soon after she introduces herself they can hear a quiet voice call out from the other side of it. 

“Yes,” Christopher replies, not even close to the tone or demeanor of that of a violent ridden child, but much more timid. 

Looking over to Cassandra, they reach their hand out to the doorknob and take a deep breath to ready themself for what would likely be another difficult interview before finally opening the door. When they do, they see Christopher sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back turned to them, as his attention remains on a small television in the room. He’s playing a video game, Abel quickly realizes, something involving an orange animal of some kind, that spins around and breaks wooden crates. Christopher doesn’t pause the game, or even turn around to look at the two aurors as they enter his room, but instead continues to keep his eyes focused on the little screen just in front of him on his dresser. 

“That looks like a fun game,” they offer, figuring it’d be better to work their way into talking about the reason why they were there instead of jumping right into things. 

“Yeah.... I guess so,” Christopher replies, his voice so quiet Abel can barely hear it over the noise of the game. 

Casting Cassandra a cautious glance, they step forward before taking a seat themself on the floor, a couple feet away from the child so that he wouldn’t suddenly feel suffocated by the auror’s presence. The floor doesn’t offer much room, and requires Abel to awkwardly fold one leg underneath them, while the other’s knee rests against their chest, but they manage it without seeming to disturb Christopher. 

Cassandra isn’t comforted much when they get inside the house, nothing sets her at ease in regards to this mother’s opinion of her child. There are toys everywhere, so Christopher has clearly been around, clearly been playing. But she’s still convinced it isn’t really him, that it’s not her real son. And who knows what kind of damage that could do if it kept going for much longer. Who knew what this kid must be thinking now, when his mother was probably treating him differently than before. Her heart ached, and she wished that cases didn’t have to involve children, that no one ever had to face problems like this within their families. Life should be easier for the people who need it the most. 

She hopes that the boy is okay, when they talk to him. And she’s curious to see how he’ll behave, if he could possibly be as stange and wrong as Lorna says he is, if something could be wrong with him. She hopes that whatever it is, they can fix this. Because up until now, it’s seemed like this was a happy family. Mother and son, together. 

She settels down on the couch when Lorna prompts them to, perched on it carefully, not too comfortable. Part of her prefers to stand at times like this, but it’s good to be on the same level as the person you’re talking to. She doesn’t want this to feel like an interrogation, to make Lorna feel like they’re attacking here here. 

“What didn’t he do?” Lorna says, and she sounds so overwhelmed that it aches. “He’s wrong. He’s just wrong. He’s not my son.” She shakes her head, and it looks like she’s already ready to cry about it all. She leans forward just a little bit, and she doesn’t quite look at them, more hunched in on herself than anything else. “I took him hiking, to get him out in nature more? You know, kids spend way too much time in their rooms, they should be outside, and he loves to go for walks. But i lost track of him. Just for a little while. Just for twenty minutes. But when he came back… he wasn’t the same. He’s been acting differently ever since then.” 

“Different in what ways, exactly?” Cassandra asks, gently. 

Lorna shakes her head again. “Every way. He was a happy boy, my son. He was always so bright and so warm. We had all these fun little games, and he gave me trouble but he was never…” She trails off. “He doesn’t sleep right, he doesn’t eat right, even his favourites. And he doesn’t sound like himself anymore. He’s angry and he’s violent and…” She whispers, softly. “He doesn’t want anyone else involved, but he won’t show that to you. He’ll try and trick you too, the way he tried to trick me.” 

The feeling of unease that’d settled into Abel’s bones only increases as they listen to the mother talk. They don’t like how easily it seemed she adopted this “changeling” theory, that whatever is going on with her son isn’t some of issue of his own, but rather something else has taken his place. It could be true that something has happened to her son to bring about this behavior in her, but they still didn’t feel willing to adopt the idea it’s because her son isn’t her son anymore. 

“You said he was violent,” they begin, and immediately she starts tugging at her sleeves again, as she looks up to them, “could you tell us a little more about what kind of violent behavior he’s been displaying? Such as to what degree, and if it seems focused on any one individual?” 

“He only does it to me,” she replies quietly, no longer meeting their gaze, “I talked to his teachers at school. They said he’s more quiet and withdrawn than usual, but not violent. He’s tricking them, just like he’ll trick you too if you let him.”  Before Abel can ask her again about the degree of violence, she begins pulling up her sleeves to reveal a series of both dark and yellowed bruises that litter her arms. 

They do look like defensive wounds, Abel thinks hollowly as they notice the bruises are located on the outside of her arm, as if she sustained them after using her arms to block an attack. Looking over towards Cassandra, they try to gauge if she too sees them as defensive wounds rather than something Lorna would have done herself. No matter what she thought though, they were going to have to talk to Christopher next, if anything just to get a better idea of what all is going on here, before they make their next call on what to do next. 

After giving Cassandra the chance to ask any other questions she may have, they turn back to Lorna. “We’ll go up and talk to Christopher now,” they tell her, because they don’t feel it’d be appropriate to phrase it as a question at this point. 

It seemed easy enough to duck back here later, depending on what they found back at headquarters on the disk, and talk to the manager about what had happened when he’d tested out one of the disks—if he had tested out the disks and this wasn’t a case of some kind of negligence, malicious or benign. And honestly, now that they’ve got the disks, he’s itching to take a look at them, a morbid curiosity to see how however had made this had pulled it off. Moving a curse through a computer virus was shitty, yeah, but he’d never stopped to think about what could actually be accomplished by mixing tech and magic in a way like this..

Either way, he needs to focus on this, and seeing what’s on these disks is the only way at this point to get an idea of how it’s happening, where it might’ve come from, and how to stop it, most importantly. Stop it and hopefully reverse it. 

     “Thanks for your help, man,” he says, shaking Remy’s hand briefly. “If we end up needing anything else, we’ll swing by later on when your manager’s here.” 

And then he nods to Abel and picks the box up—better to confiscate them all while they’re at it rather than risking the chance one of these gets mixed up in the freebie bin again—and heads out of the store, until they’re far enough away to talk. 

     “If you want, I can track down a bum computer in evidence or wherever while you get whatever space you wanna do this in set up? I don’t know what kind of…” he gestures vaguely, some hand gesture badly approximating what looks like a kind of magic spell.  “Uh, precautions you want to take, but I doubt I’ll be much help with ‘em.” 

.

Following Tavi back out of the store, their mind is still trying to grasp at just how someone could have done this. They’re grateful MACUSA had the forethought to hire someone like Tavi, but even between the two of them, they still weren’t sure if it’d be enough to crack whatever the hell seemed to be in the disks that were now in the other auror’s hands. 

“I can get us set up in one of the conference rooms,” they offer. Originally they’d been set on using one of the occlumency rooms, but figured maybe for safety reasons, testing this out somewhere where help was only a shout away would be best. “When we get back to the office, I’ll head that way while you can get us a computer.”

Which is precisely what they do. After taking the L back to the connecting point between Chicago and Port Steward, the two eventually go their separate ways once they reach the office. As Tavi heads in the direction of the seized property floor, Abel tries to get the second conference room set up for whatever they’d be in store for. After moving one of the tables against the wall, they draw a line to separate it from the other half of the room with a chalk line on the floor. Having no clue just what kind of curse they were still working with, they draw out several series of runes just in case, and manage to produce enough magic to embed into them. 

When the conference room’s door opens up behind them, the chalk written onto the tile floor is glowing dimly, ready to ward off whatever kind of curse could possibly try to penetrate through them. 

“How’d it go on your end, then?” They ask as they turn, assuming it’s Tavi that entered. 

Abel smiles at her, just a small little thing, and it makes her relax just a little bit. It’s not like she thinks that they would hate her just for something they saw in a book no one has touched in decades, but it’s still a grusome reminder of how Cassandra was raised, of the kind of things her family believed. She came from a line of people who would have relished in what happened to Abel, who would have attacked them if they had the chance to, even if it might have been less brutal than that curse. They were the kind of people who believed that people like Abel shouldn’t exist at all.

It still aches to think about doubting Becker like this. She doesn’t want to do it. She wants to believe in him as entirely as she ahd before, she wants to be determined in her faith that Becker Savage was a good person, the kind of soul who woul dnever do anything like this. He was never supposed to be like her father, he was never supposed to be like her brother, obsessed with life. How to get more of it. How to bring it back from the dead. She didn’t want to look through all those files and find something that didn’t add up. But she couldn’t let Abel do this on their own, she had to trust them as well, enough to work through it beside them, even if she hoped that she could prove them wrong. That was how her and Abel did things best, in the past. Trying to prove each other wrong, working so damn hard to get to the answers. 

“We’ll start soon,” She says, taking their hand in hers. “We’ll go through every file. We’ll figure out the answers.” And she lets herself smile, because she’s sure that she’s going to be the one who is right here. She always wins, after all. “Never met a puzzle we couldn’t solve.” 

She considers it for a moment, what she might be able to do here, what she could possibly wnat to do in this house. All of these walls full of dark memories. Her mother haunting a different wing of the house. She lets out a soft sigh when she considers it, holding the book close to her chest. 

“You could show them the gardens.” The portrait says, and Cassandra rolls her eyes and shakes her head, glancing back up at the girl in it, who died too young and too tragically. 

“No, I think we’re done here for today.” She says, and reaches down to take Abel’s hand again, to start to lead them out of the room. “Give mother my regards. Tell her to write, if she needs anything.” 

She closes the door behind them again, and lets out a sigh of relief. Sharing another look with Abel. “Unless you want to see the gardens. I think we could probably use your apartment and a whole lot of take out food right now.”

Her touch is a grounding thing, and they grasp hold of her hand as soon as it slips into their own. There was no telling just how all of this was going to end up, but they were slowly beginning to feel more and more confident that no matter what happened, that this bond between them wasn’t fragile enough to be broken by it. 

Following her back out of the library, they’re just about to lead her in the direction of the front door when suddenly she pauses. The offer is a sweet one, and maybe if this home and its surrounding garden held happier memories for her, they’d take her up on the offer. Instead its her latter offer that sounds the most promising. 

“I think so too,” they smile, before stepping forward and pulling her into a hug simply for the fact they could use one in that moment. Holding her tightly for a moment, they let out a small steady breath before planting a kiss on top of her head. 

Cassandra returns Abel’s smile, getting lost in it for a second, the softness of it that still surprises her every day. She’ll make them smile like that more later, when they can go home at the end of this day and get wrapped up in each other again. It might be nice to get a little lost, to just let themselves have a nice night when there’s nothing else that they can do in this day. 

She follows Abel’s line of sight when they get distracted by something, glancing up at the woman in the window of the other house. The house next door, the woman who never seemed to leave it. She could be a valuble witness, that much was true. Who knows what she had seen, what she had heared with everything else going on around her. “Must be,” She agrees, with a nod of her head and a small sigh. “We’ll call by after we talk to the mom and the kid. She might know something that they won’t admit. It’ll be good to cross reference somehow, if she’ll talk to us.” She really hopes that the woman will listen, that she’ll know that Cass and Abel are here to help and they’ll be able to break through to what’s going on around here. 

Cassandra gives Abel another small smile, another warm thing before they move for ward. He defers to her pretty calmly, and she can’t help but think that it all feels different now, a lessened sense of cometition between them either because of their new relationship or the potentially serious nature of this case. She knocks on the door, and they wait for a few long moments before a woman comes to greet them. 

“Hello?” She says, cautious, looking out from the barely opened door. 

“Lorna Kelly?” Cassandra asks, an inquisitive gaze making its way through. The woman nods, and Cassandra gives her a small and patient smile, pulling out her badge to show it to her, hoping to set her at ease. “Seargent Astor-Reyes, with MACUSA’s Central Squad.” She gestures towards Abel with a brief movement. “And this is my partner today, Corporal Montero. We’re here to talk to you about your son, if you have the time? We’re hoping that we can help you figure this all out.” 

“Christopher? I’ve got it figured out. I know exactly what’s going on, and if you don’t believe me i’m not sure I want to let you in.” She says, defensive, clearly distraught by everything that’s been going on. “But if you’re here to bring me my own son back, that’s a different story, so I guess that’s up to you.” 

“We want to help you in any way that we can, Lorna. We’re just here to listen and fix this.” Cassandra says, hopefully working around committing one way or another about what exactly they believe. “You don’t have to let us in, but it would be a lot better if we could sit down and talk to you and Christopher.” 

They remain quiet as Cassandra introduces the two of them, it’s only seconds into meeting the young mother, but already they can see how much of an uphill battle this was going to be. If Lorna was already this dead-set on her child being a changeling, they wondered just what possibly Christopher could have done to make her believe so inherently that he wasn’t her own. 

When Cassandra answers her question, Lorna’s eyes narrow as she looks between the two of them, clearly trying to see if she should trust them or not. Fortunately Cassandra’s words do seem to be enough for the woman, as she eventually nods her head, before opening the door further to allow the two aurors inside. 

Once they do get inside, Christopher isn’t any where to be seen, but evidence lays all around the house of his presence. Toys are strewn about the living room, and there are a couple pairs of child sized shoes sitting just against the wall next to the door. 

“Is Christopher here?” They ask, turning back to the woman. 

“He’s upstairs in his room, I can get him if you need to see him yourself,” she offers, but as she glances up to the top of the stairs just ahead, Abel can see she’s anxious, like she’d much rather not go and fetch the child. 

“No, that’s alright,” they reply, “we can go and talk to him ourselves later, if that’s okay with you.” 

“Yes, yes, that’s fine. Then you’ll be able to see for yourself that that thing- whatever it is, isn’t my son.” 

Following Lorna into her living room, she motions for the two aurors to sit on the couch, as she takes a seat in a nearby arm-chair. “So where do you want to start?” She asks, and again she seems anxious, Abel thinks to themself, as they watch her fold her arms over her chest, her fingers digging into her sweater’s sleeves so that they don’t roll up above her wrists. 

“How about the day you believe this all happened,” they offer, “such as, when you think he was switched, and what did he do to make you think he had been.” 

They follow Remy to the back, to where the disks are, and Abel takes the box down, and Tavi crouches down next to it to get a better look at the contents inside: about three dozen disks in paper sleeves, with a bright green and blue InstantChat logo and some instructions on the back. 

The disks sleeves are flimsy, not even cardstock but regular printer paper, literally stapled together at the sides, looking like they’ve been printed on a standard inkjet printer. If he’d accepted something like this when he worked at Best Buy, started passing them out to customers before vetting that the disks didn’t contain a virus first, he would’ve been fired. Which meant that Computer City’s standards for shit like this were way lower, or that the disks had been vetted.

But even if no-majs weren’t catching the curse themselves, surely the code contained on the desk would infect any computer. That had to be the way it worked, right? The virus infected any computer and, on the off chance the person booting it up had magic blood, whatever it showed them or did initiated the actual curse that was causing them to get sick. Curses might have been able to target certain kinds of blood but computers couldn’t. 

     “You guys vet these disks before you start passing them out to customers?” he asks, picking one of them up and looking over the packaging. It really doesn’t even seem to be attempting to be convincing. “You know, test them out? Make sure they aren’t malware or anything like that?”

     “Yeah,” Remy says, a duh kind of tone in his voice. “Of course we do. Usually when we get the boxes we test one out before tossing the rest into the bins.”

      “Did you test these?”

      “Not personally. I wasn’t here when they came in. I think my manager tested them, he’d stuck a note on the box that they were good to go in the bins when I got a chance.” 

Having little insight to add into this particular avenue of questioning, Abel listens silently as they look between the box full of disks, then up at the kid. All of this seems rather shady, just passing out disks at random, without really knowing where they came from. Then again, that might just be the nature of the beast with a store as large as this one, with so many different people and employees coming in and out, things like this could easily slip in without too much alarm. 

“Is your manager here now?” They ask, if Remy was being honest and the manager had indeed vetted the first disk, he might know a little bit more about where they came from.

“No, he’s on his lunch break right now, but he’ll be back at two if you guys want to talk to him or whatever,” Remy offers with a shrug. 

Looking down at their watch, they notice that gives them at least an hour to see what they could get from the disk before heading back this way. That was if they even needed to head back this way, which they hoped they wouldn’t have to, and whatever they may need could easily be pulled off the data on the disk. 

“Well,” they let out a sigh before looking over to Tavi, “you want to head back to headquarters, take these back with us and go from there?” They didn’t have anything else to ask Remy themself, but wasn’t sure if Tavi was done yet. 

It feels a little bit like she’s showing Abel the darkest parts of her soul, here. When it comes down to it, this was the place that had created Cassandra, this was the place that had formed her into the girl she was before she decided to force herself down a different path. They’d trained her into the picture-perfect daughter within this house, the perfect pureblood girl who did perfect pureblood things, and sat with her father in grim rooms like this. She was a girl with power, and she was a girl who wanted this, and one day she had been a girl who read some of these books with a grim kind of interest. She isn’t proud of that, the way she hadn’t known the way the stuff inside the pages could hurt you, the way she hadn’t known so much about the ways the wolrd really worked. 

She has to stop and wonder for a second what Abel will think of her after. She doesn’t want to be the kind of girl who lived here, she doesn’t want them to associate her more heavily with this kind of thing. Shelves and shelves of books on the darkest of magic. These dark halls, these intense things that no one should have grown up knowing. Cassandra doesn’t want to be this person anymore, but she needs to know these things. She needs to know every single thing about what Becker may or may not have done, she needs to know what might have happened so long ago, the things he may have been keeping hidden for as long as they’ve known each other. She needs to know it so that she can tuck it away safely, so that she can prove it wrong someday, so that she can lay out all the facts for Abel and make it clear that it has to be something else, that there has to be a different explanation. 

Because if its true, it might break her heart. 

Her and the portrait share a few more words back and forth as Cassandra watches Abel reach up for the book in question, the one they had been pointed toward by someone who had haunted these walls for a hell of a lot longer than Cassandra herself had. 

“Thank you, Cassandra.” She says, with a nod of her head and a roll of her eyes, moving closer to stand near Abel and watch as they flip through the book, the one with all the potential in the world for them. The titles seem promsing, it seems like exactly the kind of book that would be useful, that would hold all the answers when it came to something as dark as a horcrux. But she freezes up a little bit when she sees the page that Abel flips to in the end, the section on blood curses. Blood curses likely in the style of what happened to them. Her blood feels chilled with it, her hands feel numb. Her family never actually went out and cast curses like that. They were more self serving, they didn’t act like that and cause fear and panic when they could help it, not most of them anyway. But it was the kind of thing her father would have supported, the kind of knowledge her father would have sold. That was the behaviour they would have seen as good and honest in the world.

They would have hoped that someone like Abel had no magic at all.

She holds her breath, and she takes the book when Abel hands it to her. They’re not looking at her, not really. She feels like she’s done something wrong, like she should be saying something to offer comfort to them now. But she doesn’t know what they want to hear, and its something that they can talk about later. She’ll bring it up when the time feels more right, when they’re somewhere softer than here, in this room full of pain. 

She flips to the page he mentioned, shifts away to lean on the desk herself, holding the book open as she scans over the page, flips to the next. And there it is. Exactly what she had been looking for. She feels sick, as her eyes scan over the page. The tiny details, the way it explains what you have to do. To split your soul, how to do it, what to do afterwards to make sure the whole ritual of it is as neat and sucessful as possible. For longevity and youth, to maintain a steady presence in your bloodline. She stares at it for a long few minutes, and tries not to picture Becker doing all of that. But its not impossible to see, and that’s the hardest part of all. 

“We can take this with us.” She says, quiet. “Look over it more, while we…” She clears her throat. “Look into his past cases, like you said.” 

.

They’re grateful that for now, she chooses not to mention the page they’d been reading only moments before. They know it’s not a subject they’ll be able to avoid- or should avoid for that matter, but would prefer to have a little bit more time to process seeing what their curse in one of Cassandra’s father’s own books. It won’t get them any closer to breaking their curse, the one they had was embedded in their blood, and they knew that no amount of tampering with it could ever truly make it go away, but they do like the idea of hanging on to the book for now, if only to better understand what the curse was intended to do to them. 

Remaining by her side, they look down at the book again, now in her hands as she finds the page they’d suggested she turn to. The passage in the books doesn’t tell them much more than what they already knew about horcruxes, but it is somewhat comforting to have an actual text in hand, especially if all of this goes in the direction they were hoping it wouldn’t- that Becker Savage did indeed create a horcrux and they were going to have to figure out what to do about it. 

“That’s a good idea,” they nod their head, and when their gaze meets her’s they shoot her a small smile of reassurance. They don’t want her to think their brief lapse in composure had anything to do with her. She may have been a product of this environment, true, but they didn’t think she believed the teachings of the book in her hands any more than they did. 

“We know Becker would have had to have done this some time after Camden was turned in 1954. I guess we can start by looking into cases he would have worked on in the Eastern Squad following that and go from there.” And by go from there they meant look to see if anyone in those case files or Becker’s life at the time had somehow gone missing or died due to mysterious circumstances, but they didn’t feel compelled to voice such thoughts, not now when both of them were currently fighting off old ghosts. 

Sometimes she can’t believe the way the world has changed, the way things have shifted in the grand scheme of things. Cassandra was someone who always woke up alone, even when she didn’t want to. But ever since Abel came into her life in this special way, she’s gotten pretty damn used to them being the first thing that she sees in the morning. It brightens the day up, the fact that the two of them are together, the fact that they can take their time getting ready and head straight out for their case, everything streamlined by the fact that they were already together.

Cassandra is worried about this case. Not because of anythinbg that had happened before, just because it sounds like something that could get intense fast. Another damn kid, another kid in trouble. She lets out a soft hum when Abel makes a comment about it, somehow mirroring her own thoughts within a moment of when she’s had them. They stand there together, looking at the house in front of them, worrying about what this is going to mean for them. 

“Not really, not outside of stories.” She glances over at them. “Isn’t this stuff more common in Europe? I always figured it was just an excuse people used in the olden days, when their kids were like…” She pauses. When their kids were mentally ill, or damaged. “When something was wrong and they didn’t know how to fix it. When pureblood families figured out that one of their kids wasn’t as magical as they would have liked.” 

She shrugs a shoulder. She doesn’t know what to think. “But I don’t know. This could be anything.” She rests a hand on their arm for a second, a momentary offer of comfort. “Best thing we can do is head inside and get a better picture of what’s going on.” 

Their gaze shifts from the house ahead of them to Cassandra’s when she pauses mid-sentence. She didn’t need to finish her thought, having thought it themself the moment they read the case file. Calling your child a changeling did seem like a convenient way to either disown them or worse- especially when looked at in the historical context the majority of stories came from. They themself weren’t exactly on board with thinking this child was some sort of demonic shapeshifter, living this boy’s life, but then that also meant he was likely living in a very dangerous and traumatic environment. No matter what way they looked at this case, the story seemed to only get darker. 

She was right though, there was no use trying to dissect all of what this could mean now, not when there was so many unanswered questions sitting in front of them. The best way they could help this child would be to figure out just what kind of home life he was living and go from there. “Sounds like a plan,” they reply as they look down at her, giving her a soft smile. When their gaze returns to the house though, it’s quickly stolen by something else- or rather someone else in the window of the home next door. 

From the home’s second story window they catch sight of someone peering down at them through a gap in the blinds, before they’re quickly snapped closed again. “That must be Deirdre Rose,” they say as they begin to head up the steps to the Kelly home. “we’ll have to see if we can talk to her later, get an idea of what she might have seen from her vantage point up there.” By the sounds of it from the case file, she’d be a difficult witness to actually talk to, but they’re certain she must have seen something of importance up there, especially if her entire day was spent looking through her little window to the world. 

Cassandra remembers this room so well. She lives there in her memory sometimes, she can go back there in a moment when she needs to. Her father had let her work there sometimes, sitting at the other side of his desk or in an arm chair. Many of the books had been forbidden, but Cassandra was someone with boundless potential, and he picked out the more tasteful things for her. She scanned over the shelves now, wondering where exactly she had seen the word before –– Horcrux. She had seen it written on a page in one of these tomes. Forbidden knowledge. She hums out a soft sound as she looks, and considers Abel’s question.

“Just my mother.” She says, an agreement. It seems strange to tell Abel more about her family, but they’ve heard the grittiest of the details already. They’ve heard the horror story, the way Cassandra got hurt, the negative consequences of her familys obsessions and beliefs. Her mother didn’t play a large part in the physical damage that Cassandra still suffered from, but she had been lacking in so many other ways. Cold. Distant. Staunch in her beliefs and steadfast in her rules. “I don’t think she really leaves her rooms, too often.” She says, a little softer, yet a little wry as well. “She can’t handle the shame of it all. And there’s no one else to really talk to, since my grandfather died.” 

About two years ago now. And she would feel worse for her mother if she hadn’t tried. Cassadnra spent her whole life trying to get through to that woman, but it never worked. So she was done with it now, so she just didn’t care. She had offered everything, and her mother pushed her away. So Cassandra stayed gone. 

She pulls down a book –– something on ancient rituals in the dark arts, a promising start of nothing else, and hands it off to Abel for them to flip through while she looks for more. She knows there are older, dustier tomes that might hold more for them. “Don’t worry,” She says, absently. “None of them are cursed, as far as I know.” It’s half a joke, a stupid thing, but it feels okay to say it. 

And like clockwork, she hears a voice from behind, coming from the portrait. The same cool and calm and utterly familiar one who had always given her the advice she needed to hear. Cassandra glances up at her as she speaks, the family resemblance is a powerful thing, the two of them looking as alike as Cassandra and her mother did. “Planning a dark ritual of some kind, my dear? How utterly unlike you. Your brother would be jumping up and down with glee, if he were not already in his grave.” 

She rolls her eyes, just the slighest bit, but decides to use this resource while she has it. “We’re looking for something. Do you know where my father might have kept a book on the topic of Horcruxes?” 

The woman in the portrait gives them a discerning look, arched eyebrow and sharp eyes. “Hm,” She starts, almost thoughtful. “I would try the top shelf, dear. The blue leather, the gold print, rather dusty indeed. Perhaps this very large suitor you’ve brought home with you can fetch it.”

They almost think to ask her if she wanted to try to talk to her mother, especially when they hear she’s been completely alone since Cassandra’s grandmother died. They couldn’t imagine being in this large of a home, all alone with no one to talk to but the occasional portrait and house-elf. When they look over to read Cassandra’s reaction to the topic though, they decide against it, seeing it was far from their place to mention such a thing. 

Taking the book she offered them, they shoot her a small smirk at her comment before flipping it open. Scanning its various pages they find all sorts of curses and charms embedded in the dark arts, one page in particular catches their eye, just by how gruesome the illustration was. On it depicted a dark and corrupted form of a diffindo being used for torturing purposes on some poor individual covered in lacerations. But other than a few more grisly charms they found nothing on horcruxes and quickly return the book to its spot on the shelf afterwards. 

Taking a look around Cassandra’s father’s massive collection, they get the feeling this hunt will take much longer than even they had expected, that is until a peculiar voice rings out, nearly making them jump out of their skin when it does so. Turning in its direction, they are quickly met with the mirror image of Cassandra on the portrait above the mantle, although her dress clues them into the fact this clearly was the “Other Cassandra” and not some odd portrait of the witch standing next to them. 

As the two Cassandras begin conversing with one another, they look between the two in mild amusement. Cassandra had been right, they clearly didn’t need to worry about this particular portrait, especially when her eye seems to travel down the length of their form at her mention of them being Cassandra’s “suitor”. Flashing their Cassandra an amused smirk, they turn towards the shelf in question. Cassandra’s father was either taller than them, or likely used a ladder of some kind to reach the top shelf, because as they go to grab it, even they have to do a bit of a reach in order to finally slide it off the shelf. Once they do, a good bit of dust falls from the shelf, leaving them coughing into their arm as they shake off any additional cobwebs that clung to the book. 

“I did tell you it was rather dusty,” the Other Cassandra speaks from her perch above the mantle. 

Once they’ve cleared the dust from their lungs they look down at the books cover to see its title, “The Arcane Legacy: Rituals to Purify a Bloodline”. Leaning against Cassandra’s father’s desk, they open the book so that she could see it. Inside, they find precisely what they’d imagined based on the book’s title, which was a wealth of dark magic to ensure a pureblood’s family’s legacy. Flipping back to the index, they scan through the page’s contents, until their eyes fall on a section labeled “Rituals to Extend a Life: Purifying a Bloodline through Longevity”, which if they were to guess would be precisely where they’d find something on horcruxes- but then something else catches their eye on the next page..... “Rituals to Cleanse Tainted Blood from the Lineage”. 

They know they should forget the second section they see, and instead focus on finding a passage on horcruxes that may fall in the first. That doesn’t stop their fingers though from quickly flipping several pages back until they find the section on blood cleansing. It only takes flipping to the fourth page of the section when their eyes land on a curse that sends a chill up their spine. “Removing Magic from a Half-Breed: A Blood Malediction and Curse to Cleanse a Tainted Lineage” In all their years of researching blood curses, the passage that follows the chilling title comes the closest to what they themself had. As their eyes slowly scan over the passage, taking in everything that they could, they can spot the similarities between the curse they knew to be pumping through their veins and the one detailed on the page in front of them. The only thing that is off is that their curse clearly went wrong somewhere, where the one on the page details a curse strong enough to wipe magic from not only the blood of the victim, but to make any child of their’s destined to carry the same curse. Their eyes stay frozen on the last sentence, because while they knew that having a bloodcurse meant they should never risk having children of their own, it was a whole different matter seeing it typed out so plainly. 

“Here you should take this,” they say after some time, avoiding her gaze as they hand her the book. They’re certain she saw the page they’d been staring at, but don’t comment on it for now. “I think horcruxes should be around page 233.” 

the astor-reyes estate, new york state, @aurormontero​

This isn’t a place where Cassandra really knows how to exist anymore. Her old family home, with it’s grand gates and grand walls. She leads Abel there by the hand, with the knwoledge that her ancestors would roll in the grave at the thoight of a half-blood stepping foot onto their ancestral grounds. They would never have wanted Cassandra to love someone like Abel. It’s far too soon to say it, but she thinks that she does. She thinks that she loves Abel Montero. She thinks that she loves them, even with everything else that might be going on in both of their lives. Cassandra is fairly sure that she’s loved Abel for a lot longer than she knew. 

So she stands there on the precipice, just before they step over the wards. She stands there, hand in hand with Abel, and reflects in her own mind about the way she feels. The wards will accept her without a moments thought, but she keys them in to the fact that Abel is family too, now. Despite what the ancestors may think. Cassandra is the head of her family, and she says that Abel belongs. 

She takes a deep breath, and she guides them through, up the long drive and into the house –– it’s mor a mansion than anything else. It’s more like Yaxley Manor than any eqivilant that she’s seen. Its grand, and opulent, and full of dark corners that she was never quite able to brighten up, even when the house was hers to do whatever she wanted with.

She glances at Abel, when they stand in the grand entrance hall. Her mother is haunting the east wing, but she’s never stepped out of those halls. Not since the day her brother died. The house is theirs, for all intents and purposes. “Ignore the portraits.” She says, a breathless warning. “Except for… The other Cassandra. My namesake, I suppose. She means well, even if she seems kind of like a bitch,” A breath, almost a laugh. “She’s my great-aunt. Her portrait is in the drawing room, but she does like to move around.” 

She shakes her head, remebering all the advice that the othe Cassandra had given her. Her wand was in Cassandra’s hand now, after all. They matched each other, Cassandra was her spiritual sucessor mroe than anything else. 

She leads Abel through the house, up the stairs into her father’s library, slightly dusty. “I think he has –– had, books on everything in here. I just need to remember where I saw––” Where she saw the horcurxes, where she read the word before. It was lost in the crowd of everything else, if she was being honest about it. It was just one terror among many. She gazes at the shelves full of books, all containing dark and terrible knowledge, and tries to find just the right one.

The Astor-Reyes home is exactly how they had envisioned it, they think to themself as they look up at its imposing structure, very similar in architecture and size to that of the Yaxley Manor. Holding on to her hand firmly, they let her lead them up the long drive and towards the home, which only grew more daunting the closer they neared it. It doesn’t pass them for one second that they are precisely the opposite kind of person Cassandra should be taking home, so much so they can almost hear the dried bones of her ancestors turning in their graves as she leads them inside. 

They know they shouldn’t be expecting someone to greet them when they make it inside, but they hold their breath anyway, and when the foyer is just as empty as it should be, they find themself oddly a little disappointed. Whenever they returned home, it’d always been a thing of celebration, their parents both overjoyed to see them, and making sure the visit would be one they’d look back on fondly. Cassandra’s return home was probably what she hoped for, even though they wished she at least had someone in that big house that missed her. 

Her mention of the portraits doesn’t surprise them, before they got to New York that day, they’d been mentally preparing themself for everything they may find in that house. It was a house built and owned by generations of wixes who’d prefer to see their kind wiped clean from the wixen bloodline, so they don’t expect a friendly welcome in any shape or form. “I won’t,” they assure her, before she leads them to where her father’s library is. On their way, they can’t help but look curiously around the home Cassandra had grew up in. It seemed like such a stark contrast from the bright and brilliant witch they knew. Every corner seemed dark and shadowed, and more than once they’re certain they spot a pair of eyes looking back at them from behind a nearly shut door.

When they finally do reach her father’s library their curiosity only grows as they see the vast collection of books that lined the walls of the room. “Is it just your mother that lives here now?” They ask, as they begin to look over a nearby collection of books. There’s a painting that hangs over a nearby fireplace, they briefly look at too, and find themself hoping that the ‘Other Cassandra’ may show up in it. For as much as they talked, they still felt like they knew so little of this part of Cassandra’s life, even if it was one she’d much rather keep hidden. 

      “Sounds good, yeah,” he agrees, nodding as he saves his findings from Alice and Esa’s computer and then packs his laptop and cables back up in his shoulder bag and gets up, shutting the computer down. “Thank you, again, Alice. We’ll let you know what we figure out, alright?”

Thankfully, the Computer City is only a few blocks from Alice and Esa’s apartment, which makes sense, and it only takes him and Abel ten or fifteen minutes to make the walk over. He knows the drill, too, from Langer’s basic explanation of how aurors interacted with no-maj witnesses who, unlike him or Alice, didn’t know anything about the wixen world. She’d explained concealments, too, but reassured them it would probably be a while before he needed to be involved in a case where Rory would use magic to change what his face looked like. This—a made up name, pretending to be an FBI agent—seems easier. He’s watched enough crime shows to know how to fake this.

The Computer City is definitely more his terrain than Abel, he assumes, and so once they’re inside he heads over to the customer service desk, where a teenage employee is… very obviously watching some kind of flash video on a laptop, a pair of earbuds in his ears, not paying any attention to the counter.

      “Excuse me,” he says, waving the kid down as he approaches his desk. He can empathize, here: he’d worked for a few months in a Best Buy on the other side of Chicago the summer after his freshman year of college, and it was dull as shit most of the time, especially this time of day on a weekday, before most people got off work and went shopping. And he’d been working computer repairs, not customer service, which must have been even worse. 

      “Oh, shit, sorry, yeah,” the kid says, shutting the laptop quickly and fumbling to pull his earbuds out, looking a little guilty about having been caught. “Uhh, welcome to Computer City, is there something I can help you with today?” 

.

They follow Tavi into the store, letting him lead them through it since he very clearly had more experience than they had with a place like this. When they reach the service counter, they have to hold in a small chuckle at the kid’s clear embarrassment by being caught doing whatever the hell it was he was doing. 

“It’s cool,” they reassure him before they pull out the FBI badge they usually kept on their person for cases like this. “We’re with the FBI, concerning that whole case with the disks,” they offer as they flash the badge in the kid’s direction. “We’ve heard a couple other agents had already stopped by, we’re just here to collect the disks and ask you a few more questions if you don’t mind.” 

“Oh shit, FBI, yeah of course, totally, whatever you need,” the kid nods nervously, although Abel thinks it has more to do with the thought of the two of them being with the FBI than anything the kid is hiding. “Here if you want to like follow me to the back I can show you where the disks are.” Standing up, the kid is halfway through leaving the counter, when he realizes something. Hurrying back to the register he picks up what looks like a walkie-talkie, and instructs someone named Tom that he needed someone to cover the service desk. 

Once the other no-maj arrives, looking a little irritated by the whole thing, Remy quickly takes them into the back of the store and into what appeared to be a storage closet. “So we put all of the InstantChat disks into this box back here after the last guys asked us to. We even did a quick check of the store, made sure none of them were hiding on any shelves you know, but didn’t find any.” 

Stepping further into the closet, Abel takes out a pair of curse-proof gloves, just in case, before they pull the box off the shelf and sit it onto the floor between the three of them. “Would you happen to have any idea just how many were passed out beforehand?” They ask as they look up to the kid.