Kane and Abel

[Kennedy Kane]

It wasn't the prettiest of buildings; but it was was certainly distinctive. You couldn't live or work in DC for long without learning that the hulking concrete monstrosity at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue was the headquarters of the FBI.

It's distinctive nature was both a blessing and a curse: granted, it was a hideous eyesore; but on the plus side, everyone tended to be extra careful around people wearing suits in it's immediate vacinity.

Once inside however, it was easy to forget that you were in a building of such significance. The corridors just looked like corridors; and save for the odd FBI seal here, and the occasional grandiose job title there, you could almost believe that you were walking down the hallways of any old corporate building, anywhere in America.

Almost.

A security door blocked his path; not the formidable or bulletproof kind, but the kind that required an ID card to pass through. He absently swiped, the proximity sensor tripping the lock and letting the door swing open as he pulled. The ID card zoomed back to his belt like a tape measure, winched back in by the clip device he'd stumbled upon in a cracker two Christmasses ago. Damn, that thing was cool.

Two hulking guys with earpieces walked past in the opposite direction; he offered them a tight smile. They didn't offer any kind of gesture in return, or even aknowledge his presence in any way. The miniature expression collapsed.

No wonder everyone thinks the FBI are a bunch of assholes. Quite a lot of us actually are.

That thought gripped him as he wove on autopilot through the corridors, finally arriving at the office he called his own. He would have liked to think of it as a home away from home; but with the hours he and his partner had been putting in lately, it felt more like just plain home. And while he'd escaped for coffee and a shower, she clearly hadn't; her clothes were the same as they had been the day before, and a discarded half-empty carton of Chinese take-out was abandoned an arms-reach away.

Special Agent Penelope Abel, he mused. The poster girl for workaholics everywhere.

She hadn't even noticed the door open. It took a faint clearing of his throat to catch her attention. "Did you even make it home last night?" he asked, despite already knowing the answer, "Or is your entire wardrobe just that samey?"

[Penelope Abel]

“Something…” She raked her hands through her hair and wrung her hair over her shoulder in her hands, twisting it around and around. “…something that happened last night. Probably nothing.”

The blonde agent, hair still wound about one hand, craned her head around and back just a little to bring her partner into view.

“Coffee?” Her eyes trailed down from his face, down his torso to his hands. Her brow knit in something akin to confusion and she lurched her head back to face what she had on the table in front of her, unwinding her long hair from her hand. Her voice brought with it a tired disappointment. “Coffee, Kane. I need coffee.”

A couple folders askew, photos, photos, photos which she began to straighten out and shuffle back into the appropriate folders. She pulled the re-neatened folders up on their ends and gripped them firmly, tapping them on the surface they had once laid out of habit before tucking the two folders in the crook of her arm and looking on Kane.

“And to answer your rhetorical question, sleep just doesn’t... occur, sometimes.” She offered him a tight smile, shrugging. “So, what’s up?”

[Kennedy Kane]

If you ever stopped working long enough, you could get coffee from the break room.

Kane felt the urge to grunt out his thoughts aloud, but he knew better. Not only were such observations a futile lost cause; he was too smart to risk antagonising his partner after she'd been up all night without enough coffee.

"What's bugging you?" he asked instead.

Her mind was clearly somewhere else; and unless he could coax her into putting that particular train of thought to rest, there was no sense in trying to change the topic. Once Agent Abel started thinking, her mind turned into an unstoppable juggernaut. Sure, she could multitask, and she'd work other cases just fine; but three hours from now she'd blurt out some seemingly random piece of information in the car and expect Kane to know exactly what she was talking about. He'd learned the hard way: whenever Abel was like that, he needed to find out what she was thinking about, no matter how much he didn't want to know.

[Penelope Abel]

“Oh, um….” She shifted her shoulders, tensing and loosening them. "...I had this migraine last night."

That wasn't something to be considered unusual. Agent Abel had them often, to no unordinary effect. They were a fact of life that she medicated, dealt with as one would a minor annoyance, and went on with her work.

"I was heading down to Wong's to pick up take-out I'd ordered. I went in, waited since it wasn't quite ready yet, paid when it was and left with my order. I was going to just head home after that, but as I turned the corner to head back and fetch my vehicle, this man passed me and turned the corner behind me, possibly going to Wong's himself. Nothing out of the ordinary there, except..."

She carefully shifted the folders from one arm to the other.

"...except that as soon as I saw him, I had preceding aura. Normally it's just a blur but this time, shimmering aura, immediately when I saw this man and once he was out of sight, the aura was replaced immediately with the wonderful pain phase where it feels like my head is going to split in two, four, six... anyway, after approximately five minutes, it passed. No postdrome, nothing."

Her face scrunched slightly.

"I know what migraines are like for me, they're always the same and it never comes that quickly and it certainly like to stick around. Well, I would have had myself checked out, but it was too late, so I went looking around in the files for anything about it, or the man I saw, but..." She shrugged. "...nothing. And now I really need that coffee."

[Kennedy Kane]

Kenny squirmed a little inside, though thankfully he managed to keep his outsides from fidgetting. It wasn't that he had a problem with mutants. Hell, he worked on cases involving mutants every day: they'd picked him for this detail purely because he had no problem with them. They didn't freak him out in the slightest, unlike a lot of people. He even found them a little fascinating; though bearing in mind that the mutants they usually met were crooks and killers, he tried to stop himself from becoming too fascinated.

But when it came to his partner talking about her mutant abilities, it made him distinctly uncomfortable. It wasn't that she was a mutant: it was more that he wasn't. It was like hearing a woman talk about period pains and lady problems. It wasn't the prospect of bleeding from intimate areas that creeped him out: it was more the uncomfortable realisation that, no matter how hard he tried, there was absolutely no way he could possibly relate.

He offered her a small, barely noticable twitch of a smile, fidgeting with his glasses to distract from any tells his body might be throwing off.

He changed the topic: an even better distraction tactic. "We'll have to grab coffee on the way," he apologised. "A report that Boston PD just filed set off a bunch of our search flags. The coroner talks about drained pigment and translucent skin -"

His shoulders rose in a grim shrug. "Could be the handiwork of our Shifter."

[Penelope Abel]

Her eyebrows lofted, almost in unison. The Shifter. Not something they had heard anything of or seen any residual corpses from in... months. The trail had went cold. The thought of the fact that bodies would be found until the suspect was caught and 'neutralized' was a fact that Agent Abel was unfortunately used to, though it never worried her any less.

"Oh." Penny brushed hair back from her cheek and tucked it behind the nearest ear. Her eyebrows settled. "Well, why don't I go replace these files and freshen up a little before we go fetch that coffee, go see the coroner to start, then follow up at the scene?"

Sleep could wait - most things could wait. Work couldn't. Penelope showed a small smile to her partner, then walked past him to head off to do exactly as she intended. She stopped in the doorway, looking back at Agent Kane.

"Oh and... it's your turn to drive."