smoking cigarettes on patios

Of all three cards laid out on the table, Judgement obviously scares her the most. If they could take down a fully capable auror, and in Quinn’s home no less, than there was no telling just what they could be capable of if they should find out the identities of the two aurors investigating the crime. She was going to have to be careful on this one, more careful than she’d probably ever had to be on a case before. 

“From the crime scene pictures alone, Quinn certainly put up a hell of a fight,” Langer sighs, as she pulls out a collection of photographs from the folder sitting in front of her. The photographs were the same ones that sat in April’s own folder, showing the chaotic scene in Quinn’s living room of broken furniture, along with that strange purple powder covering nearly everything. “The gun is the last thing Judgement uses is my guess. We’ve only ever found evidence of one round fired at other scenes tied to them. I would guess they duel their victim first, render them incapacitated, then fire the gun.” 

“Why use the gun at all?” April asks, curious to get a better idea of just who this hitman was.

“I’d guess as either some kind of calling card- or to make a statement. All of their victims are people who’ve angered the NBO in some way. Maybe Judgement views their victims as so beneath them, they won’t even use magic to end their lives. Perhaps they see using the gun as a form of insult against their victims.” 

It was probably as good as any guess she would have, and it did make sense considering just what kind of group of people they were dealing with. 

“You said you didn’t think we’d be able to find Judgement. The Magician though, you think they might be an easier find?” She asks. 

“Yes, I do. Like I said, Quinn’s job was to find the Magician. The fact he was killed tells me he must have succeeded. I suggest you talk to Brooks to see if you can find out anything more about just how much Quinn relayed back to them.” 

Brooks seemed like a pretty good starting place to her, but she was curious to see what Dante’s thoughts were on it all. Looking over to him, she’s just about to ask when suddenly her telekit goes off, a message from Eli flashing on the screen that reads “[incoming message] medical examiner eli cooke: Vitale, Monday- Come see me when you have the chance, I found something interesting during my examination of Quinn.” 

“Looks like Eli also has something for us,” she says before reading the message out loud for both Langer and Dante to hear. 

“Do you want to head to him next? Or see Brooks first?” She asks him, after giving him enough time to ask whatever other questions he may have for Langer. 

He’d been trained in a lot of things, before starting this job. Alongside his normal lessons at the Academy, he’d had nightly training—occlumency, obliviation, all kinds of skills that would be useful in making sure cases like this had gone his way, and he’d made use of all of them a dozen times over in the seven years he’s been an auror, a constant safety net of last resorts that he’s relied on more times than he likes to admit. But the lessons that had been the most useful to him were the long hours of practice keeping his cool in uncomfortable situations, learning to lie as best he could, learning to look like nothing had shaken him without looking like he had anything to hide.

It’s those skills he’s falling back on now, as Langer talks. Looking unshaken at the same time as he manages looking surprised and horrified enough at what should be new information but isn’t. To hear this stranger guess at motivations he knows all too well and come a little too close for comfort in the faceless picture she summons of the man he’s known for eight years, the man who taught him the very skills he’s relying on now. 

     “And if we can find The Magician you think she can lead us to this Judgement person?” he starts to ask Langer, but then Monday’s getting a message, reading through it, and he looks back at Langer, shakes his head a little, a silent nevermind. He’d just been filling space, anyway, a stalling tactic while he tried to figure out what to do. 

Crow would be lying if he said he hadn’t been daydreaming, a little bit, about Dante. Over the last few weeks, its something that’s loomed in his mind. The push and pull of every conversation that they’ve ever had. Dante is something so much more exciting than a somewhat awkward one night stand, and if he was anybody else Crow would have already forgotten about him. But it was good, and Crow had wanted more of it. Every time he looked across the room at Dante, he wondered what it would be like to do it again, not as drunk this time. He wondered if it would be as good, he wondered if Dante would treat him differently now that they had to see each other every day. He wondered if he could convince Dante to do it all again, more than once, just for the hell of it. 

It isn’t so hard to convince him, as it turns out. Not with the way that Crow goes about these things. He doesn’t usually have time for subterfuge, he wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s one of those people where you always know what the fucking wants, and sometimes that can hurt him. But right now, he’s glad for it, because Dante takes the hint. 

And kissing him feels like something almost magical. A spark of wanting, a spark of satisfaction. Finally getting what he’s wanted for these last few weeks. Finally. And it’s just as good as he remembers, better somehow. Because Dante is taking his time with it, kissing him slow and hot and with purpose, as if he’s trying to savour Crow somehow. Crow presses close, not quite as patient. A little harsher, a little more wanting. But he lets Dante take charge for the most part, enjoy it in whatever way he wants to. And he finds himself feeling full of something, something strangely light and happy. A laugh bubbles up, when the kiss breaks for a second. “Better at that when I’m not seeing double.” He comments, with a little grin, before kissing Dante again. A press to the corner of his mouth, a little sweeter just for a moment, before he returns to form and asks for more. 

He’s not expecting Crow to laugh, not expecting Crow to pull away at all, but he’s not surprised that Crow can’t stop talking even through this. He’d been mouthy last time, talkative all the way through, something Dante had chalked up to the alcohol and since realized was just a part of Crow’s personality. But last time his mouth had mostly been occupied other places, so Crow’s talking hadn’t been as much of an interruption, hadn’t left Dante open-mouthed and waiting, waiting for Crow to shut up and kiss him again.

He’s not wrong, though. He is better at this sober. They both are. Not that anything about it had been less than great, the last time, but it’s nice this time to feel a little more in-tune to the way Crow’s body moves beneath him, under his hands and under his lips, the places Crow presses into him and the places he pulls away as Dante maneuvers him, turns him to press his back against the counter so he can get a little more purchase, a little more friction. He keeps a hand at Crow’s neck, where he know Crow likes it, thumb brushing against the base of his throat; he gets his thigh between Crow’s legs, pushing a little once he can without worrying about either of them falling over, the counter catching Crow’s back and keeping him there. 

And after a minute or two of that, minutes that feel, somehow, like hours, stretched out long between them and filled with the hot rush of Crow’s breath, the writhing of Crow’s body so clearly wanting more, time suspended in place by the pent up want coiled low in his stomach, it’s his turn to break the kiss.

She’s not sure if she’s getting her point across how she wants it, not through any fault of how she’s explaining it, she thinks, but more because she’s actually genuinely not sure if it’s something that someone like Dante Vitale actually cares about. The thought isn’t a negative one, or a judgmental one, just a fact, really, because she knows nothing about him, in the same way that she’s certain he knows nothing at all about her, or anyone else in the office, because he isn’t someone who seems to care about making friends, at least with coworkers. Which is why, she realizes belatedly, maybe this is a pointless attempt to help Crow. It makes her heart sink a little, realizing that this might just have to be one of those things that her cousin has to go through on his own, another potential disappointment, more pain stacked up. She just wishes she could do something to help, that he would let her or anyone else do something to help.

Given what she can glean from knowing other men like Dante, she thinks she can make a few safe assumptions about him, and hearing his reply, his little shrug, his insistence they haven’t been doing much talking, and that he doesn’t get what she wants him to do about it. He’s not the type who cares. This is a fun game for him, a distraction from his own worries, probably, not something to give much extra thought to, especially not the thought like she’s asking him to give. Another fun hookup, maybe a few more times than normal, but ultimately something he doesn’t care about lasting. It’s not healthy, and she’s pretty sure he could use someone like her, too, to try to kick him into shape like she tries with Crow, but she’s certainly not that person.

Maybe all she can do here is be as clear as possible, no matter how much he doesn’t want to care, or consider someone else’s feelings on something like this that isn’t serious to him, and then worry about Crow’s side of things, instead.

“I want you to make sure you don’t break his heart without thinking. He’s had enough pain; if you’re just here to fuck around, and nothing else, that’s fine, but you better make it bloody clear to him ASAP, or else you’re going to have me, April, Becca, Aster, and a dozen others to deal with when you get tired and drop him for the next hot, sad twenty year old you find,” she says, a little more forcefully than she means. Emmy pauses, shakes her head, letting out a sigh. 

“I just want you to be honest with him. He talks about you a lot, and I know what it means, he doesn’t do that with random hookups that don’t mean anything to him. I just want this to stay a good thing for him, I don’t want it to make things worse.”

.

He has a response on the tip of his tongue as she speaks—or, the beginnings of a few responses, half of an okay, I’ll clear things up, make sure he knows I don’t want to be his boyfriend or anything ready to go, half of something even more defensive than that, but she keeps talking, and he finds his chest tightening at the revelation that, apparently, Crow talks about him a lot.

It’s unexpected. Maybe it shouldn’t be; maybe he’s been naive, here, maybe he’s been fooling himself into thinking that fucking around with a coworker could be anything other than an absolute disaster. He’d been the one reassuring Crow day one that he wasn’t planning on clueing their coworkers in to the fact that they’d hooked up the night before, but Crow apparently hadn’t had the same decorum, on that, because from Emmy’s list it sounds like half the squad knows, now, which is already more than he wants any of the squad to know about him. 

He’d thought they’d been working under some shared understanding, here. But, yeah, alright, maybe Emmy does have a point that Crow is twenty and might not have the same reticent attitude towards keeping private things private that Dante does. That Dante assumed most of the people he slept with also did, though if they didn’t, they were rarely his coworkers and so there was no fallout to speak of. Clearly one hook up with Eris Hattori had given him a false sense of security when it came to his ability to safely fuck around with people from work; Crow, obviously, was not Eris. 

But at the same time... he can’t help but wonder just what Crow says. About him. To, apparently, his cousin, and Becca Savage, and April Monday, and a half dozen other people far too close for comfort, people each one wrong step away from finding out things about him far worse than his preferences in bed. He finds himself wanting to know—not because he needs to keep his story straight, but just because he’s curious. What Crow thinks of him. What Crow says, to people other than him, about it all. 

He wants it to stay a good thing for Crow, too. He finds—fuck, he thinks, to himself, a sharp flare of something in his chest—that he’s been thinking about how it might stay anything. Like an idiot. Like someone with far less to lose.

There’s a note to Dante’s voice that tells Crow he doesn’t believe the act for a second. Crow couldn’t really pull off blithe for more than a moment. The more you got to know him the more clear it became that he cared about far too much, that he depended on every connection he had built in his life to keep him standing up right. His friends, his family, even things like this. The push and pull of it all. It makes him shoot Dante a smile, a cheeky little grin. He does like the thrill of this, the energy of standing here and letting Dante look at him.

He isn’t really sure what Dante thinks of him, fully. He can’t tell. But he thinks it might be good. He thinks that Dante must like him, at least a little bit, to have him here. He could have kicked Crow out the second he handed the glasses over, if he didn’t want Crow hanging around, if he didn’t want to delve deeper into what was going on between them. Maybe he wanted to be fuckbuddies or something. They could do that. Crow could cope with that, with the fun and with the excitement of getting to know Dante a little better. He knew, because it was the way Crow was, always getting attached, that it might burn him in the end. He might get hurt.

But somehow, he didn’t really think that he would. 

He just lets himself look, appreciative, when he takes the glass and takes a sip of it. He likes the way that he looks, the way that he licks his lips. He’s really too attractive to be safe, for someone like Crow, who wants things so badly. 

So he smiles again, slow and interested, arches an eyebrow. “Hey now, don’t go making promises you can’t keep.” He says, a little breath of a thing, sounding…definitely interested. He feels so close, looking up at Dante. He takes a sip of his own drink, halfhearted, because its the thing to do, lets it linger against his lips and swallows it slow, feeling the low burn. He lets it dangle then by his side, almost happy to just set it down, if Dante wanted to do something else, like kiss him. “Start talking about ruining things and you might never get me to leave.” 

.

The nice thing about Crow is that there’s nothing subtle about him. Nothing subtle about his clothes, or the way he looks, but better than that, nothing subtle about the way he tells you exactly what he wants, the way he telegraphs it, intention and desire so clear on his face, and in his voice. It’s a game, it always is, but it’s a game Crow makes it very easy to win. His gaze heavy, as he watches Dante lick his lips, the way he, almost imperceptibly leans in, like he’s thinking about it and his body is betraying him just slightly.

Crow wants to kiss him. No—scratch that. Crow wants Dante to kiss him. Crow wants Dante to do a lot more than that. He came for the sunglasses but, just like Dante had hoped, they were a convenient excuse, a prelude to something else. For a second, just a second, he finds himself caught in the thought that maybe he would slip the sunglasses back off and they’d be forgotten on the bedside table again, a perpetual and recursive excuse. 

     “Now whose talking about promises,” he says, and his voice comes out low, and rough, and he’s glad the counter is where it is, right there beside them, because he can set his glass down in the same movement as he leans forward to catch Crow’s lips with his own. 

She watches closely, watches for any indication of just what the whole thing is in his eyes. He protests, because of course he does, of course, he wants to be right in any given situation, and she just gives him a look that says she’s not going to take that bullshit when she knows full well that at least on the other side of things, this isn’t just a twice and done situation. He makes a big show of closing his file, moving it out of the way, and she can’t tell if it’s a genuine gesture, or if there’s something condescending to it, but that doesn’t matter really, because she’s not here about what he may or may not think about her, or her role as protector to the gaggle of younger relatives she has, or her lack of magic, or anything else. She’s here to make sure he’s serious, or if not that at least that he thinks about what he’s doing so she can keep Crow from going through any more pain than he already has.

Folding her hands on the table in front of her, Emmy considers the right approach here. When she saw him, she had thought the half-joking, slightly threatening but ultimately well meaning approach would be right. But now that she’s sitting here, looking at him closely, and she can see the stress written all over his face, even if he’s trying to mask it, she thinks maybe he would actually respond well to seriousness. Because she is serious, deathly so, so afraid that one wrong move could send someone she cares so deeply for into a place so bad nothing can pull him out, and she already feels helpless enough to help him.

“I could give you the normal talk, but I assume you’ve already gathered that I’ll fuck you up worse than you’d think someone without magic could manage if you hurt him. So I’m gonna be serious with you, Dante,” she explains. “I don’t know how much actually you know about him, but knowing him well, I’m gonna assume it’s not much, no matter what it seems like, or at least not much straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth.”

She pauses for a second, for once considering just how to word this. It’s not her place to give any details, not her place to go into specifics of Crow’s life, but she thinks she can still make Dante understand.

“You’re older than him, you’ve been an auror for longer, I’m sure you’ve had a case or two that’s been hard,” Emmy offers, knowing everyone’s had at least one of those cases. “I don’t mean hard to solve, or annoying, or whatever, but I mean the sort of thing that stays with you. Like, something you can’t shake off, something you saw, or had to do that’s stuck with you, that’s fucked you up a little for one reason or another. I know I have…and you’ve maybe heard that the reason he’s here now is because he had a case like that on his last squad. A really, really horrifying one. Did you know that?”

.

She’s right, at least, about her first point: he doesn’t know much about Crow. Bare details. He can probably count the solid personal facts on two hands: his favorite drink, that his godparent bought him those tacky sunglasses, that his other dad’s a no-maj born, that he likes backyard cookouts, that he’s... not an only child? Though Dante couldn’t venture a guess as to how many siblings he actually had. That he’d been on Central Squad, and then not on Central Squad. That he has a tattoo of a bird on his chest, and a tree on his ribcage, a line of what look like runes on his scalp only visible if you look closely which must, he think, have some purpose beyond the simply aesthetic.  A few other more intimate details that feel strange to think about with his cousin sitting here lecturing him.

It feels strange, to reduce Crow in his mind to a list like that. Of course he knows there’s more to him than that—it’s more than he knows about any of his other one night stands, unless you were counting Siouxsie Hazard, though everything he knew about her he’d learned from Ransom’s non-stop attempts to set them up with one another. It’s more than he knows about most of his coworkers, too, other than Kadri. More than he knows about Emmy. 

The second point she raises, though—well, no, he has no idea of what Crow went through on his old Squad, though it sounds, from what she’s saying, like that’s probably the why of why he’d left and come here instead. Two easy dots to connect, though he’s not entirely sure why she’s telling him, what it has to do with him. 

     “I didn’t know that,” he says, with a shrug, shaking his head a little. “We haven’t exactly done a lot of talking.” 

Yeah, he’s had cases like that. Ones that filled him with dread, ones he couldn’t shake afterwards, that kept him up at night. Emmy had been with him on one of them, though he knows she doesn’t remember it that way anymore, and that part hadn’t stuck with him at the time but now that he’s talking to her he can’t seem to stop thinking about it. When it happened, he did—well, it sounds like what Crow’s already doing. He went out, got drunk, slept with someone new and fun, passed the time with distractions until it faded away. As far as he’s concerned, that’s really all you can do about something like that. 

     “Is that—” he says, the corners of his mouth turning down in an exaggerated frown, poking gently at a spot near the corner of Crow's left eye, "—a wrinkle?"

They're lying in bed, still, the two of them, even though it's going on noon. That had been one of the small laundry list of birthday wishes Crow had outlined the day before: morning birthday sex, in bed until noon, brunch with mimosas, etc. etc. A small list of perfectly reasonable demands from the tyrannical birthday king which Dante was only too happy to oblige. 

      "No," Crow says, halfway between defensive and a pout. He sounds like he's been betrayed, sounds utterly mortified, in that perfectly dramatic way of his, and Dante wants to lean in and kiss the pout right off his face, press him back into the sheets and put his mouth to better use than pouting. He doesn't think Crow would object. "No. Shut up."

All in all, she doesn’t actually have any overly strong opinions on Dante Vitale, which is a rarity. From the little she’s gotten from him, he seems just fine, and she’s pretty sure that’s intentional. He’s always seemed like the typical pureblood asshole, just slightly less outright asshole-ish than someone like Hattori, leaning more on the vague charm. They’ve had a case together and it went well in her mind, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to her if privately he was the sort who had been less than happy to work with a squib. Any gossip she’s been able to uncover about him is downright boring in how stereotypical it is for a rich boy. Parties too much, drinks too much, sleeps with randos to fill the void, goes to brunch with Ransom Hazard, keeps everyone at an arms length, gives just enough to seem polite, but not enough to make any real connections. Not her cup of tea, but then, growing up with Ignatius Yaxley as her dad really did a number on any interest she may have had in pureblood boys who haven’t grown out of needing parents’ approval over breaking the cycle.

As long as he’s not a blood purist, he’s fine. But you never know what someone with more money than they know what to do with it, and a pureblood legacy to back it up, does when they get home at night, especially right now, so she’s cautious, and curious.

What this all says to her is that he’s the sort of person who could very easily not realize how attached someone gets, and hurt them without meaning to. And her cousin’s been through enough recently and not recently to have the guy he clearly has a crush on and wants to date, not just fuck around with, break his fragile heart. She’s always felt like an older sibling of sorts to her cousins, so it feels like her job to try to help keep that from happening as best she can, since she knows damn well Crow isn’t ever looking out for himself.

“You don’t know?” she asks, raising an eyebrow with a little hum. She comes into the room, and sits down at the table he’s clearly working at, leaning back in the chair to regard him. He looks tired, something tight just around the eyes giving him away, the sort of look of someone trying to keep it together, but truly one broken coffee maker away from losing it. Mood. 

“You’re sleeping with my little baby cousin, Vitale. My mom’s a Falconer-Quinn, and Crow and his siblings are like younger siblings to me,” she explains, because okay, he might not actually know that, since this whole office is a mess of relatives and pseudo relatives that’s impossible to keep straight, and she’s still only half sure how Lex is even related to anyone else, and she doesn’t want to offend anyone by asking. “So I think we need to have a little talk if you’re gonna keep doing that.”

.

He’s, admittedly, relieved, when he realizes what Emmy’s here to talk about, what this conversation is going to be. Crow. He’d known they were related somehow, had gathered that much from general observation, but he hadn’t known the full details—cousins, Crow’s father, the pureblood one, related to Yaxley’s mother, apparently, which is odd because he hadn’t thought Yaxley was actually, technically, a pureblood, but if she’s half Yaxley and half Falconer-Quinn, she must be. Maybe the squib thing had thrown him off.

But better this be a conversation about his sexual indiscretions or Crow Falconer-Quinn’s purity or whatever ridiculous thing it was about to be, than it be a conversation about the suspicious he’d once erased from Emmy Yaxley’s mind in a desperate attempt to keep his cover here. Better, maybe, that she does have reservations about him sleeping with her baby cousin—and, okay, he’s not that young, and Emmy’s essentially the same age Dante is, so baby feels like a strong word—to distract her from rediscovering her prior reservations about him. 

       “I’m not sleeping with him, I slept with him,” he says, as if there’s actually a meaningful difference there that will matter to Emmy. And as if, if there was a meaningful difference, he was not fully intending to continue sleeping with Crow for as long as Crow wanted to. Still, this seems unavoidable, somehow. He’s dealt with protective types before, heard the if you hurt him I’ll hurt you lecture his fair share of times. People rarely followed through on it. 

      “Twice. But, okay, I take your point.”

He sets his coffee cup down, waves his wand to stop the coffee pot as it starts to float over in an attempt to refill the cup. Closes the case file he was looking at, pushes it to the side. Physically clearing the figurative table as a sign of good faith, a show that he’s listening to whatever threats she’s going to level his way. 

Crow can’t help but watch Dante as he moves. He’s a simple man, he has simple wants and simple desires. And Dante is insufferable, kind of, just for the fact that he ticks every single one of Crow’s boxes. It was utterly unfair that the first hot guy he found in California had to go and be perfect, had to be exactly what he always wants. Crow isn’t delusional, he doesn’t think that Dante is here for some grand romance –– he doesn’t seem like the type. And Crow isn’t supposed to be looking for that either, right now. He wants to get laid, have sex with someone spectacular, someone confident and so hot it almost melts his brain. Dante can do that for him, a win-win scenario. 

There’s a confidence to the way that Dante moves, and Crow gets caught up in it. A smile is already spreading across his face when Dante walks back toward him, intent in his eyes. Crow almost wants to throw the bottle of whiskey down somewhere soft and get Dante to kiss him again already. But hey, patience is a virtue, or something like that, and Crow can wait his turn. He hums out a soft sound when Dante slips the glasses onto his head, arching an eyebrow, looking at him with his own intentions. It has to be clear by now that Crow isn’t going anywhere unless Dante wants him gone. 

“Hm,” He says, shifting away just a little, but keeping the eye contact, the want lingering for a long moment. He goes to get the glasses, to pour them some. “See, if it was just for you, you might get this crazy idea about me being…I don’t know, selfless or something.” 

Which was strange, because he generally was. Crow was nothing if not generous with nearly everything that he had. A doormat, sometimes. Stupidly so. Everyone knew it, that he was a clingy and needy and soft thing at heart. Too tender for his own damn good, too easy. He slips a glass in to Dante’s hand, full of amber liquid, letting their fingers brush, letting himself get close. “Couldn’t have you thinking that. You’d ruin my blithe and disinterested reputation.” 

Crow pulls away, and he watches, as he makes his way to the bar cart, seems to take his time picking out glasses, pouring two drinks, talking all the while. He watches the way Crow moves, already familiar-feeling, a posed confidence, a well-practiced ease to the way he moves, like he does this all the time.

     “Blithe and disinterested, is it?” he says, and maybe that first night Crow could have persuaded him that there was anything blithe or disinterested about him, but all this playing at being strangers is so much harder when he’s seen so much more of Crow—more than he usually sees, of the people he sleeps with. The way Crow acts with his friends, the way Crow acts with some of who it has rapidly become apparent he considers his family in one way or another. Monday, Yaxley, that whole strange little cluster of people. He’s seen Crow soften, mask off, talking about backyard cookouts. 

It should make him want to do this less. It should make this feel more complicated, that he knows a side of Crow that Crow wouldn’t have shown him if they’d just met up in some club again and decided to do this. It should make him want to do this less, that they have to see each other every day, that Crow is... fuck, what is he? If Dante feels increasingly like a spy in enemy territory, with everything ramping up around him, then Crow is the enemy. He’s spent all these years doing everything he can to not get close to any of his colleagues in any meaningful way, so they won’t know him, so they won’t know enough to see him for who he really is. But. Crow—

This doesn’t have to mean he’s getting close to him, he tells himself, as Crow slips the glass into his hand, as he raises it to his lips and takes a sip of the whiskey, licks his lips as he drops his hand back down. This isn’t anything they haven’t done before. Crow’s seen his apartment before. Crow’s seen more than that. This doesn’t have to be any different than the last time. It doesn’t.

They follow Tabitha through the shop, down to the darkest corner. Tombstone’s Tomes seems like one of those places that lives for the aesthetic –– the dark and the gloomy, with very little actual flair beyond the minor touches. It’s surprising, given the way that Timmy acts, but she can see what he might have been going for when he built this place. 

With a wave of Dante’s wand, the shimmering substance of the wards reveals itself to them. Kadri may not have any practical experience when it comes to magic like this, but even she could appreciate how well crafted they were, the artistry that went in to them. She eyes them with appreciation, with a hint of jealousy. Tabitha must have been smart, indeed. Must have been a natural, must have studied this, must have held some kind of passion in her heart. Kadri likes her all the more because of it. 

“If the wards were disturbed, it would alert you instantly, yes?” She asks, with a delicate arch of her brow, a curious tone in her voice. She thinks she’d like to hear about it, from someone who clearly boarded on being an expert in the topic. “An alert on your telekit?”

“Yeah, you got it.” She says, pointing out a certain section of the wards, a warm tone in her voice. “Right here, anything happens and me and Tim would get clued in about it,” Tabitha agrees. “But we didn’t get anything the day that the books went missing. Not even a blip. No one could have gotten through these things in the first place, and definitely not without the two of us hearing about it.” 

He shoots Kadri a look—she’s flirting, and he feels like he should be able to tell that she’s doing it just to play to Tabitha’s clear interest, to get better answers out of her, but he’s seen Kadri flirt and he’s seen Kadri flirt, and this seems more like the latter than the former. And, okay, he can’t exactly judge her for that, given his own recent... indiscretions. But one of the two of them needs to focus, there.

     “And does anyone other than you know how to disable the wards temporarily? If your brother’s right, and the books were taken by Midnight—would he have had any knowledge of your designs? Or...” he starts, glancing at Timmy for a second, wondering about the kind of person who would have dated Timmy, “Do you think he would have had the knowledge to break through them without triggering your alerts?”

       “Oh god, no,” Tabitha says instantly, and then laughs a little, as if the very idea of Ebony Midnight breaking through her wards is the most laughable thing in the world. He wonders, for a second, just what this Midnight guy is like—the flashy, showy front of his store, the fact that he dated Timmy, Tabitha’s reaction to him... it paints an interesting picture of him, and Dante’s starting to get the idea that even if he had nothing to do with the missing books, they’re going to have to talk to him sooner than later anyway. “Ebony? No way. He’s outsourced all of his own security work to an outside firm, he has no idea how any of this works.”

She can feel her palms sweating the closer they get to Langer’s door, a feeling that doesn’t subside once she’s in front of the wix again. The look Langer gives her is a soft one, one that makes her think she clearly remembered her back when she was a kid and fascinated endlessly by this life her father lived. She feels weirdly torn between giving her a hug, and slapping her across the face, as she thinks to what happened in Scotland to Marleigh, and the lifelong scars and troubles they had to face ever since their run in with Greyback all those years ago. 

She’s grateful that Dante speaks up, giving her the chance to fully get used to this strange mixture of emotions that for once were all entirely her own. Taking a seat across from Langer, she lets her eyes drift over to the board on the wall, reminding herself of the more important task at hand. 

“Yes and no,” Langer sighs as she gets up, but instead of taking one card down from the wall, she takes three. “I’ve got some information for you, but it won’t be enough to give you a great lead, but at least some idea of the people you may be encountering.” 

After tearing down the cards, she places each one on the desk in front of April and Dante. Leaning forward April can make out what each says- 

The Magician (Tier One)

- Newer member, evidence of their presence in the group only extends to April of 2020.  - Skilled in wand craft, as the NBO began using new untraceable wands shortly after they likely were taken in.  - Was being investigated by Zander Quinn at time of his death

The Hanged Man - Zander Quinn (Tier One) 

- Belonged to California Division’s own NBO Task Force for last five years.  - Went undercover three months ago, in an attempt to find out how NBO was getting access to untraceable wands.  - Murdered most likely by Judgement  - Auror partner was Sgt. Heather Brooks

Judgement  (Tier Two) 

- Member of NBO for some time.  - Works as group’s hitman.  - Calling card is using a no-maj handgun over magic during their hits.

April’s gaze stops momentarily on Quinn’s card as she spots the name Heather Brooks. She clearly must have overlooked Quinn’s partner’s name before, because she knew Heather Brooks. Back from her days in the Oregon Division. Brooks was another one of her almost-somethings, but they were a damn good auror, one that April is certain will be able to help the two of them out somehow in all of this. 

“I very much doubt you’ll be able to track down Judgement,” Langer speaks up, with a sigh, “they’re an allusive one, but if you can manage to find the Magician they may give you intel on Judgement that could be useful to us in the future.” 

Judgement. It’s a fitting title, weirdly enough, for the man he knows lies behind it, matches up with Langer’s bare description of him. He doesn’t know who this Magician is, didn’t know Zander Quinn, but he knows Judgement. Maybe it should be a relief that all Langer seems to know is the single most public-facing fact about him: the gun is a dramatic flare that’s hard to ignore. Maybe it should be a relief that Langer doesn’t seem to think they’ll be able to track him down. Maybe it should be a relief that he’s the one standing here, will be the one questioning this Magician, who ever they are. 

Still, none of it feels like a relief. 

it feels too close for comfort. And he finds himself wishing, for a second, that this didn’t have to be him. That someone else could do it, that it could be in someone else’s hands. He finds himself desperately missing the boring in-betweens, the normal cases. Him and Kadri, investigating stolen books, all the shit he’d complained to Eris about when Eris had the last NBO case.

Wouldn’t it be easier?

The roll of Dante’s eyes is probably to be expected –– he’s like that, so put together where Crow feels hapless and messy and far too loud for his own good. It only makes Crow grin a little wider, somehow. He’s always been like that, always smiled in the face of uncertainty, especially when it came to boys. He’s been with ones who think pretty little of him, and he’d known it, and he’d smiled anyway. He smiled when people broke up with him, and broke his heart. But he didn’t think Dante thought nothing of him. He thought, maybe, Dante might like him a little bit. At least parts of him. At least the physical parts of him. 

But he didn’t think it was just that either. Because they’d actually…talked, at Branwen’s party. About his family, of all things. And it hadn’t been awful. It had made something small and soft squirm in his stomach, something he would roll his own eyes about if he had the time. 

So, it meant that he probably wanted to suck Dante’s dick or something. 

Typical Crow. See a hot guy and lose your wits. 

“Ha, ha. Whatever, you’re getting off easy, that’s all I’m saying, Officer Vitale.” He says, shifts a little bit. He’s half waiting for Dante to… invite him inside, or do something. And he bounces a little on his feet, as he shifts, pulls a hand up, bottle in hand. “I brought you this, anyway. Thought it might be a fair trade –– totally equal value, to the glasses. Which is a burn on the whiskey, actually, because I’m pretty sure my god-person Marleigh bought those at some beach-side sunglasses stand for like, ten dollars.”  

His smile widens a little bit, peeking in behind Dante’s shoulder, letting himself stand close against the doorframe. “So, i’ll pour you a drink while you go fetch them for me?” 

He arches an eyebrow, as Crow holds up the whiskey, but there’s no judgement in the expression, just a touch of amusement, a touch of curiosity. Crow always seemed to be able to take him, just slightly, be surprise, at every turn. He’s not sure what he’d expected from tonight, from Crow coming here, but it hadn’t been precisely this. 

He steps aside, to let Crow in, an open gesture—Crow didn’t exactly get a tour of the apartment the last time he was here, but it’s hard to get lost, open floor plan and all. A kitchen with marble counters, a living space with two couches and a chair, a screen currently separating the bedroom area from the rest of it, the California King bed, the door to the bathroom and his closet. A floor-to-ceiling window running the length of it, the top floor of this building high enough to get a view of the beach. Crow’s seen just about all of it, already, if only briefly, if they’d both been a little tangled up in one another. 

     “Fair trade, huh?” he says, finally turning his back to Crow, moving into the apartment, over to the coffee table between the couches, where he’d left the sunglasses when Crow had first messaged him. He takes his time, picking them up, looking at them for a moment, and then he turns back, now that Crow has come inside, closes the distance between them again.

He walks close, unfolds the arms of the sunglasses as he approaches Crow so that he can move in close, can slip them behind Crow’s ears, slide them into place where they were the first time he’d taken them off of Crow and tossed them into this table, on top of his head, pushing a few loose strands of his hair back.

She hums in thought as she considers Dante’s words. There were certainly a couple different explanations for why the NBO would want to get rid of Quinn once they discovered his true identity. If they were going to figure out just who killed him though they were going to need to know much more than that, they were going to have to try to find the identity of the person the NBO used for hits such as this one. 

“We should go down and see Langer first,” she reasons, as she looks back up to him, “she might be able to tell us just what exactly Quinn was looking into in the NBO, what leads he might have had- how close was he to actually taking in one of its members. That should help us determine a motive and a list of possible suspects at the least.” 

Standing up, she slips her case file into her purse before waiting for him to follow her to Langer’s office within the Bureau of Covert Vigilance. She has to admit, she’s been hoping she’d land one of these NBO cases soon, if anything just to see Langer and get a read on her. The last time she’d seen the other wix was the summer before her year at Ilvermorny, during one of the Central Squad’s summer family picnics. She seemed nice, from what she could remember, definitely not the type of person to betray her squad like Marleigh says she did, but she also wasn’t going to question Marleigh either. 

“I heard she has this board,” she speaks up as she moves to head in the direction of the elevator, “Todd was telling me about it in the breakroom the other day. She’s got these notecards divided up into tiers based on their level of importance, and each card represents a member she’s been investigating. Most of them don’t have names- but tarot titles, I guess you could call it. Who knows, maybe she’ll have one on our guy?” 

It would certainly make things much easier, and give them at least some kind of heading, but she didn’t want to be too hopeful about it all. 

     “Right,” he says, with a nod, getting up again so the two of them can catch the elevator and head to Langer’s office, talking as they go. “The board—Eris was telling me about it, too. It sounds like it’s pretty good, if it helped him and Todd both catch their suspects. So maybe she’ll have a better idea of where we should start.” 

The board. It had been a thorn in his side since the first time anyone had mentioned it—not only pretty directly responsible for the first two major breaks in the NBO cases since he’d started on the force sixish years ago, but also a constant, nagging kind of thing, that he hadn’t gotten a look at it yet, hadn’t gotten a chance to see what was on it. He’s got no way of knowing what Langer thinks she knows, but more and more it’s starting to feel like it’s a lot more than she ought to, a lot more than is any good for him. 

At least, from what everyone has said—and he’d heard about it, by this point, from almost anyone who seemed to have seen it, having bugged Brittany about it at the coffee machine the other day to see if she knew any more than what Eris had given him—Langer didn’t seem to have names. Names were what would fuck him: if Enzo Vitale showed up on some NBO most wanted list, people were going to start looking at him sideways every time he introduced himself. 

So he can’t help the way his heart picks up speed as they approach Langer’s office, as the door swings open when they knock, as the wix who must be Langer calls to them to come in from the desk on the other side of the room—the desk behind which the infamous board is hanging, notecards and all, though he can’t make out what any of them say from this far away.

     “Monday and Vitale?” Langer says, looking up from some papers on her desk, and someone must be watching out for him, because her attention seems almost entirely focused on April as she says it, her voice lingering on the Monday rather than on his own name. 

Harbird drops the case file on her desk in their usual fashion, not saying much outside a quickly worded “good luck with that one” before disappearing back into their office again, the low hum of their speakers picking back up again once they do.

It only takes one look at the case file to see just what Harbird meant, it was an NBO case, her first one yet, and involving the murder of another auror no less. Before she digs too much into it, she heads for the breakroom, figuring coffee was needed for what she was about to dig into.

It’s just as she’s headed back towards her desk, her head already in a fog when Dante calls out to her, seemingly because he’s her second on the case she’s certain will be one of their most challenging yet given the subject matter.

Picking up her own case file she motions for him to take Emmy’s seat across from here where it currently sat empty.

“I’d have thought they’d have lied low after everything that happened with the attack on Squib Relations,” she speaks up as she opens her own case file, glancing through it to pick up some of its keys features as she does.

“I wonder if it’s at all related?”

Back when he’d first started all of this, he’d asked his father to do something like give him a heads up when a case might be coming his way, or let him know anything about what the larger plan was so that when things happen, he could effectively mislead, knowing what to obscure and what false leads to latch onto as he worked the case. His father had argued that if he knew everything, and anyone got suspicious, all it would take was a better legilimens than he was an occlumens to ruin everything that the NBO was building, and had staunchly refused to keep him in the loop on anything ever since. 

He gets it, he does, but it makes things like this complicated—he doesn’t know if this is related to the attack on the squib relations office, doesn’t know if there’s a reason the death of this undercover auror is following so closely on the heels of that, or if it’s the opposite, if it’s the precursor to something bigger. He didn’t even know the NBO knew about an undercover auror at all which, really, seems like something they should have told him. 

But all he can do it work the case, really, work the case a step faster than April to the best of his ability and get rid of anything that seems too incriminating, anything that might tie to the identity of the killer. Luckily, he knows who did it, so that part is easy, at least. And if something goes wrong, he can obliviate her, a last-resort move he’s had to use once before, on something not too dissimilar to this. 

     “It has to be, doesn’t it?” he says, dropping into Yaxley’s seat, trying not to think about the fact that she’s the exact person he had to obliviate the last time he slipped up on a case like this. “Or, you’re right, they’d obviously lie low for a while, especially since we caught two of their people.”