#it took me ages but FINALLY here it is: the overdramatic coffee machine case

[fitzwilliamburke]

     location: Eastern Squad offices, floor 66      time: 8:05am, the morning after Hattori’s retirement party           ( solo )

     “Burke.”     

It’s eight in the bloody morning. Eight in the bloody morning and he’s sporting a hangover the size of Missouri from the party at Leaping Lizards the night before and suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever, Snow is howling his name from the door of his office, practically storming over to the desk where Fitz is just trying to get his head on straight in peace.

     ‘Yes, Chief?’

     “I’m sure you’ve noticed that something is horribly wrong,” Snow says, his face sober, sombre, as he closes the distance between them and takes a seat across from Fitz. He feels a little like a psychoanalyst, all of a sudden, sitting across from the Chief like this, with him looking like someone’s gone and murdered half his family and-- oh, Merlin, has someone gone and murdered his family? Fitz certainly hopes not, he was hoping for an easy day, at least until the hangover tonic he’s taken starts to do the trick.

     ‘Is there?’

     “What, you haven’t tried to get a coffee?”

     ‘I’m a tea man, Chief.’

     “Of course you are. Damned Brits. Right, well, thing is: someone’s stolen our damned coffee machine, Burke. The LuxBrew 3000. Do you know how much my wife spent on that? Anyway, look, I need someone to get it back and you’re not out on any cases, so I’m giving this one to you. I’m sure it’s the Central Squad, revenge for whoever set those damned doxies loose last night, but they swear up and down they spent the whole morning clearing out their offices, so we can’t rule out the others. Midge says it was still there at 4 this morning, so there’s a chance someone is storing it in their office. You get it back to me by one, you hear?”

     ‘Ah, it’s just, I’ve got all this paperwork to get through,’ he replies, gesturing one hand vaguely towards the stack of unfinished paperwork he has absolutely no plans to get through today. A convenient excuse not to go on a wild goose chase round the entire MACUSA building looking for a bloody coffee machine.

     “There’s something in it for you,” Snow says, and Fitz can already tell from the look on his face that whatever it is, he thinks it’s good. Thinks it’s something Fitz won’t be able to resist. “I’ll give you Friday off. No questions asked.”

And, well, it turns out that after all this time, Snow knows Fitz pretty damned well. 

A coffee machine, he thinks. Not a problem. A Friday off for nothing. It’s not an offer he can turn down, especially if it means he’s got a perfectly good reason not to get any real work done for the remainder of the day. 

     ‘Alright, Chief,’ he says, sitting up, taking his feet off the desk to look the other man eye to eye. ‘You’ve got yourself a deal.’

     location: Central Squad offices, floor 67      time: 8:15am

     “You know just as well as anyone else that we’ve been cleaning doxy shit off every square inch of this place since seven thirty in the fuckin’ morning,”  Kennedy Stokes sighs, one hand on her hip in the space between the lift and the Central Squad’s main office area. He can see, looking past her, that she’s probably not lying -- there’s still the unpleasant lingering scent, and he can see spots they missed on the back wall of the equally unpleasant gray-teal color of  fairy excrement. The pranksters in his own office had really outdone themselves, but Stokes and her ilk seemed to be facing the day with a rather grim sense of defeat, uncharacteristic of any auror who had a trick up their sleeve -- especially a trick like a stolen coffee machine. 

     ‘Then I’m sure you won’t mind if I take a look around,’ he replied, glancing over her shoulder. He couldn’t very well check every desk drawer, or every cabinet in their breakroom, and if they were disguising their guilt this well he imagined it’d be hidden somewhere better than just tucked away somewhere, but he’s at least got to pretend he’s trying hard, here, in case Snow starts asking around to see if he really deserves that Friday off.

He’s made plans, already, spent the last ten minutes and the lift ride up here dreaming about what he might do with a day off, imagining the possibilities, settling somewhere between seeing a show and abso-bloody-lutely nothing. An entire weekend, even, he could get out of town, if he wanted, maybe go to a quiet beach somewhere and find someone cute to--

     “You’re not gonna find anything, Fitz. But alright, sure, be my guest, I guess.”

She moves to let him pass, returns to the stack of files she has been working her way through cleaning off, charming flakes and swathes of the sticky substance off of the pages that had been left open on various desks overnight -- an unexpectedly fatal mistake. Her attitude alone is a pretty clear indicator that if the Central squad is behind this, she certainly wasn’t a part of it: she’s too quick to let him in, too resigned to the fact, and he’s known Stokes for a number of years now -- she’s not that good of an actress.

A quick sweep of the office (it does smell like doxy shit, noxious and cloying, the scent lingering even where those present have managed to scourgify most of the actual residue away, and he’d rather not linger for any longer than he needs to) mostly confirms his suspicions -- it it’s Central, he’s not going to find the evidence he needs here. No LuxBrew turns up under an upturned trashcan or in a desk drawer or anything that might make his damned job any easier.

Not a great start to his day, he thinks, and makes a note to check back in when the office is finally clean, maybe with a Bubblehead Charm to make his search a little easier. 

     location: Pacific Squad offices, floor 69      time: 8:35am

Every single auror in the Pacific Squad office is hungover.

That isn’t an exaggeration, he notes. He’s never seen so many sour looking faces, but it’s clear they all celebrated a little too hard last night, and while the rowdier of the crew might have had the wherewithal to snatch the machine before the worst of the hangover hits, his tempting offer of one of his special hangover tonics to whoever can turn the machine over turns up no results among the miserable faces before him.

There is no LuxBrew in sight.

He’s going to need to take a different approach.

     location: Department Lobby, floor 50      time: 8:45am

The gentleman behind the front desk had been easy enough to persuade to let him see the security logs. An easy smile and, when that didn’t work, the invocation of Snow’s wrath, and he’d been granted access to the book in which every out-of-hours entry into the MACUSA building was logged, which he was now combing through, looking for any familiar name between the hours of four and seven-thirty, when the night-time sign in books gets put away for the day. 

Unfortunately, a third of the people who work in the building get to work early, and so there’s not an insubstantial list of names to go through towards the latter hours listed. 

He’s got coffee on the brain, by now; he won’t drink it, ordinarily, but he’s been thinking of it so much he can almost smell the phantom scent of it as he pours over the log, running through the names one by one, cross referencing them with the list he’s made in his notebook of every auror on every squad in the building who might be under suspicion. Seriously, he can smell it, almost like it’s right under his nose--

A clink of ceramic on marble. He glances to the side, sees the chipped white coffee mug with the MACUSA logo printed on its side, filled to the brim with black coffee.

     “Morning, Burke,” says a voice, and he glances up from the security log to see a face he hasn’t seen in some time: Ishmael Hanson, an old classmate from the Academy, still as smug looking as they’d always been. Files tucked under their arm, the other elbow up on the marble countertop where Fitz is standing and working, they look amused to see Fitz standing here squinting at the visitor log. “Looking for someone?”

     ‘Working a case,’ he answers, tense, distracted. He’d much rather get this over with than chat to Hanson for any amount of time.

     “Wow, this early? That doesn’t seem like your usual work ethic. Need a hand? A coffee maybe?”

     ‘More of a tea man, Hanson,’ he says with a sigh as he turns his eyes back to the never-ending list of names. There’s one -- Aurora Powell, Pacific Squad, came in just past six, that could be a lead...

     “Well, suit yourself.”

And then he realizes, a second after Hanson is gone: he knows that smell. The stench of it on Snow’s breath every damn morning, the odor whirling through the Eastern Squad offices every morning from eight until just past noon, the way it’s seeped into the very walls of the breakroom. It’s not just coffee. It’s LuxBrew coffee.

     location: Mountain Squad offices, floor 68      time: 9:05am

They’ve barricaded themselves in, the bastards. 

They must have re-sealed the wards after the second Hanson was back inside, because for all his spells, all his ward-breaking charms, all his literal physical banging at the damned door, the thing won’t budge, and what’s worse, one of the wards sent of a flurry of sparks at his feet, scuffed his shoe up right at the toe when he’d tried kicking the door in.

Lincoln’s know for his specialty in locking charms and blocking wards, and the squad seems to have put him to good use. Locked door means they’ve got something to hide. Locked door means Hanson knows Fitz is onto him -- or that Hanson was intentionally baiting him with the coffee downstairs just to watch him squirm. 

This isn’t bloody worth it.

He’ll have to find another way in, a way to break through the wards or get into the offices another way. He’s positive the damned thing is in there, he can feel it.

He can smell it. 

     location: Evidence and Seized Property Storage, floor 52      time: 9:35am

    ‘Milly, love, it’s just a bloody piece of paper,’ he insists, leaning on the high desk at which the old house elf sits across from him. One spell -- he’d found the case number and everything, thanks to Fay, but she’d been caught up in other work, and he’d been forced to schlep his way down to floor 52 on his own, to del with the temperamental and notoriously stingy house elves who watched over the labyrinth of old evidence himself, much to his chagrin. One spell, which could allegedly unlock any door, undo any ward, and take down any magic barrier, and it was all he needed to get into the Mountain Squad’s barred offices and take a look for himself for any evidence to confirm his strong suspicion that they were the culprits here.

     “You need form 1-A-456 to remove any evidence unrelated to a current case from Evidence Storage, auror Burke,” she replied, her voice graveled with age but still with the telltale squeak that every house elf he’d ever encountered had. 

     ‘This is related to my case. It’s got a spell on it I need to use.’

     “I don’t make the rules, I just follow ‘em.”

Her voice is decisive, her gaze even, daring him to contradict her and the careful order of bureaucracy, and he withers under it. It’s clear there’s no way he can cheat his way Milly -- she takes her job far too seriously, he knows, to let him get away with it. He could fight this battle for the next two hours, eat up half the time he’s got left to find the damned machine, or he could concede to the order of things, have her help him find one piece of paper amidst the towering labyrinth of evidence storage.

     ‘Alright, alright. Have you got the bloody form?’

     location: Mountain Squad offices, floor 68      time: 11:50am

He had nearly given up. He really had. Somewhere between form 1-C-568, which he’d needed approved by three other aurors in order to even access form 1-A-456, and the fifth trip upstairs to get Snow’s signature on a newly-conjured page, he’d nearly said fuck it and decided that one day off wasn’t worth it for all of this.

But he had it now, the piece of paper tucked delicately into an evidence bag, the bag gripped in his hand. The handwriting is poor, hard to read, but he remembers the events surrounding the Scranton robbery well enough that he can make it out, still. Advanced lockpicking charm. If anything will get past Lincoln’s bolted door, it’s this. 

He stands back, a bit, not wanting his shoes to become the victim again if this goes arse-end-up, and readies his wand, glancing at the paper one more time to make sure he knows the spell. 

     ‘Sera Apertus.’

There’s a pop, then a hiss, then a few more sounds he can’t quite identify, the sounds of wards breaking and locks sliding out of place, whisper-quiet, and damn, he’s impressed that the charm worked just the way he’d hoped it would. The door stands in front of him, still closed but unlocked, now, unprotected. 

He reaches his hand out cautiously, wand still at the ready just in case the charm missed anything, any unexpected curses or jinxes lingering around the general area of the doorway, but nothing happens when his hand touches the brass of the door knob, nothing happens when he turns it except that the door clicks and swings open, letting him in -- finally -- to the Mountain squad office, and to the surprised faces of the handful of aurors inside as they turn around to see who has made it through their wards. 

Wand still at the ready, he faces them down, the culprits, the coffee thieves, the loathsome pranksters who caused him hours worth of strife, and who were now going to win him his well-earned Friday off. 

     ‘Where is it, then?’

     location: Interrogation Room 14, floor 64      time: 12:10am

He has just under an hour. Just under an hour to break Ishmael Hanson, get the coffee machine, and get back to the 66th floor. 

He sits across from them at the interrogation table, a mug of tea in front of him. It’s not very good tea, but with everyone in the Eastern Squad looking for non-coffee caffeine this morning to stunt their lingering hangovers, it’s the best he could find. He makes a mental note to remember to bring in a box from home, hide it somewhere in one of his desk drawers for occasions like this. 

Well: he has, by his calculations, thirty five minutes to break Ishmael Hanson, ten to get the LuxBrew from wherever it’s stowed, and then five to get back to Snow before the deadline’s passed and he’s missed his shot at an entirely luxurious Friday far, far away from this chaos. He’s going to need it, when all this is done. 

     ‘Where’s the coffee machine?’ he says, and across the table from him, Hanson grins.

     “What coffee machine?”

     ‘The one you stole from the Eastern Squad break room, Hanson. The one you were drinking coffee from this morning in the lobby. The one your squad mates confessed to stealing, last night, after the retirement party, before they confunded poor Midge and bribed her into telling Snow the machine was there when she cleaned. Where is it?’

     “Ah, that coffee machine.”

His grip tightens around the mug of tea in his hand. 

     “You’re the big detective here, why don’t you tell me what you think happened, where you think it is?”

     ‘I think you’re an utter prick with a death wish, goading me because you know I’m a better auror than you. I think the LuxBrew is up your bloody arse, or at least, it will be if you don’t tell me what you’ve done with it.’

Hanson presses their lips together, a silent my lips are sealed gesture, and Fitz very nearly throws the mug at them. It wouldn’t even be a waste of tea, he thinks, blithely, since it’s such bloody awful tea. 

He stops himself, though, and it brings his anger to up against a wall, his frustration escapes and leaves him exhausted thinking about the furious running up and down from floor to floor, the back and forth, the hours of unnecessary paperwork, the scuff on his shoes.

He has thirty four minutes to break Ishmael Hanson.

He can’t do it.

So he does what he’s always done, as the tension seeps out of him and leaves him hollow. He finds another way.

     ‘You’ve got to tell me, Ishmael. You’ve seen what Snow’s like when he hasn’t had his coffee. Imagine that, but in perpetuity, for the rest of my life. I won’t survive it. None of us will.’

Ishmael, finally, looks like they’re considering it for a moment.

     “What’ll you give me for it?”

     location: Eastern Squad break room, floor 66      time: 12:58pm

     “What do you want?” comes Snow’s gruff voice from behind the closed door to his office, and Fitz can’t help but think he sounds like he’s likely more hungover than the rest of them, even still, even now. 

     ‘Brought you something,’ he says through the door, and he can hear Snow behind the door rushing to get up at the sound of his voice, making his way out from behind the desk to where he can open the door and stick his head out.

     “Burke. You found it? Please tell me you found it.”

He holds out the mug of fresh, pungent, LuxBrew coffee in one hand, offering it out to the chief, letting a smug grin of self-satisfaction cross his face. Sure, it took him half the bloody day to get through it; sure, he was going to need to take his shoes in to get the leather repaired; sure, he didn’t even give a damn about coffee; but Snow had been right: he was the right man for the job.

And it only cost him a month of Hanson’s paperwork to prove it.