Who: Jo Savage and Octavius Pepper Where: Auror Office When: Thursday morning, February 28, 1979 What: Discussing the Nettles case, fooling around and, er, discussing fooling around. Rating: PG-13 for a bit of bondage talk Status: AIM/Completerated
Though he would have said, if asked, that he loathed paperwork with the fire of a thousand burning suns, Pepper actually quite liked the chance to take a break from the more active parts of the job. Normally paperwork meant bickering with Aubrey, as well, another activity he claimed not to enjoy, but today he was working on the Nettles case which meant combining reports from the ten minutes he was there with what the Aurors had done afterwards - specifically, Jo. Of all the Aurors she was almost undoubtably his favourite, perhaps due to the tension that usually floated around between Aurors and hit wizards. The rivalry between them was not always friendly.
He had stolen Dawlish's chair and was currently sitting on the other side of Jo's desk, papers spread out between them as they tried to match facts from several different points of view into one cohesive document. The page Pepper was peering at appeared to have been written by a drunken two year old. "You would think they could invest in handwriting classes. I'm not sure whether this is actually words, or just ink vomited onto the page."
"It's why some of them have secretaries," Jo admitted, leaning over the desk to brush Pepper's hand away so that she could steal the document much more easily. Her lips purse. Pepper, being one of her favourite Hitwizards (for numerous reasons) made this rather tedious task less inspiring of a quill through the eye. She actually smiled before letting her eyes fall to the document at hand.
Her face grew immediately careworn; "It's a description - exact as if we don't currently know it - of the Dark Mark." Pause. "I'd really like to see the analysis of the ashes, you know? I want to know what spells were used and why in Merlin's name noone was awoken."
"Yes, I've certainly never seen a Dark Mark before." Pepper rolled his eyes, leaning his chin on a loose fist as he considered the question. The wife and child had been downstairs, that was true, but how long had it taken them to get there? Surely they'd have been able to make it to the door and outside if they'd woken immediately, rather than being overcome by smoke inhalation. "Could have been deep sleepers. If the bedroom door was closed the smoke might well have got them first. It would be a lot of damage for a single incendio though, particularly if the house was warded at all."
" ... but the pattern clearly shows that the fire started outside of the house. It's especially maddening that the Charm reports show that there was no work done to disable the wards. Could they have stood on the street and fired Incendio with no one the wiser?" It was mind boggling, these English and their twisted logic.
"Muggle area, middle of the night. Surprising that none of the neighbours noticed the flames, but they wouldn't have known the significance of someone standing outside without going near the building, I suppose." He frowned, tapping a finger of his free hand idly on the surface of the desk. "The structure was relatively intact when we got there, but the insides were fairly well gutted. Idiots not to have some kind of alarm system in."
She bit her lower lip. " ... but if they were just standing there? And hexes throw odd lights." The paper was slammed down on the desk as she looked at Pepper rather witheringly. "What I wouldn't have given for a Peeping Tom."
Neither the noise nor the look particularly bothered him; Pepper just smirked back at her, completely unruffled, though he did stop the movement of his hand. "You'll have to warn me in advance next time, sorry. I was all tucked up in bed asleep. They might have used anti-Muggle charms of course, to keep people from looking, but of course any traces of that would be completely lost as soon as the gophers started setting up the crime scene wards."
"I keep thinking I'll go and interview the Muggles about the neighborhood. I keep thinking ..." and she sighed, giving him a wink when he alluded to his Peeping Tom skills. "Pepper, any girl who'd see you looking through their window would be liable to pull you through the window and bat you about the head."
He laughed at that, a quiet chuckle that wasn't heard particularly often inside the walls of the DMLE. "Thus distracting me utterly from the criminals outside. It happens a lot, it's why I never get to arrest anyone from Knockturn Alley." Shaking his head, he dropped both hands to the edge of the desk again, sliding one of the reports over to skim through idly. "Even if we could figure everything out, there's nothing to pin actual people at the scene. They'd have to have been standing directly under a street light and staring someone full in the face for them to get a good enough look for any kind of identification.
She knew that he was right. Oh, she knew he was so right and so for being that man she stood up rather quietly and made her way to stand next to him. "Let's see if I can get this expression correct ..." she took a deep breath. "Aw, sod off, Pep!" was punctuated by a fist in his shoulder.
"Inter-department abuse! I could arrest you for that. You'd probably look very fetching in cuffs." Pepper gave Jo his best charming smile, reaching up to rub at his shoulder where she'd hit him and resisting the urge to sweep her feet out from under her in an attempt to make her land in his lap. Most likely she'd hit him again, and mean it that time.
With hands to hips, she blew him a kiss and stood quite in the same spot. "Wouldn't you like to peep through my window and see?" she asked, grinning.
"You regularly play with bondage supplies in your bedroom?" he retorted, one eyebrow raised. He rubbed his chin in an exaggerated gesture of thoughtfulness with a smirk at the mental image. "I'm sure I could help you with the proper way to restrain people, if you wanted."
"Doesn't everyone?" was asked rather innocently. Well, this wasn't office talk but Jo was never one much for being entirely appropriate (as was evidenced by her participation in the sit-in and her massive doing of weed). "I don't know if you could show me anything new. Proper, though? Surely."
"I could always try the old tricks in new ways," Pepper suggested, a roguish note in his tone. "You pick up all sorts of interesting things from the sort of people in my neighbourhood. I'm fairly certain I actually have quite a thick book on the subject, it's like the kama sutra of bondage fetishists." Admittedly not the entire book was actually on bondage, but that was completely beside the point.
Her brows rose. " ... holy fuck," was a breath as she gazed at her co-worker and dropped a quick kiss on his nose. "Come over when you get off work," she said, stalking across to sit opposite once again. Her tone regained normalcy. "You're suggesting that we close this case."
Had Jo really just kissed him on the nose? Pepper knew he should probably be more surprised at the invitation, but he'd always thought nose-kissing was restricted to the realm of the insufferably cute couples attempting to out-sugar each other in some sick attempt at giving themselves diabetes. Not that he could really say he particularly minded. Twisting back to face her, he tried to regain the thread that they'd dropped somewhere along the way. "Not close, just... shelve somewhere out of the way. I don't think we'll be getting much new information."
She hated - she loathed - to be stymied in her work and it seemed that, in recent times, she'd been feeling like this increasingly more. "Absolutely."
He could see the frustration on her face and he had to admit it mirrored his own. Much as he didn't really have any strong political opinions, Pepper did at least take some degree of pride in his work, and he didn't like how things were progressing these days - more cases like this, and less time to solve them in. "Pity we can't just arrest people for being slimy and suspicious," he muttered, thinking of quite a few people who he was absolutely certain were not above this sort of crime, but were far too slippery to leave enough evidence to prove it. "The advantages of a crooked system."
" ... alas the day that we ever entered law enforcement," she replied acidly. "Because that's always the first to go in a crooked system." She still preferred Madame Guillotine in these circumstances. It was with some heaviness in her limbs that she propped her feet up on her desk and twisted her dangling necklaces around her index finger.
"We'd be in a prime position to take bribes though," he pointed out as though he'd never done that before (not often at least). Glancing up at the clock, he grimaced a bit at the time - they'd been going through these files for over an hour now. "I should probably make sure Aubrey hasn't gotten into anything. Can't leave him unattended for long, you know."
"Give the baby a pat on the cheek for me," she muttered, gazing at Pepper askance. His unruly black curls and pale skin did make him an attractive sort. Even here in this bloody office where every man was trying to remind her of her femininity or rob her of it. At least he acknowledged her talent and intellect.
He smirked at that, rising out of Dawlish's chair and kicking it out of the way, though not bothering to return it. "Of course. Shall I see you tonight, then?"
A grin was his to own. "If you can figure out where I live!"
"I'm sure I can find a way. If not I'll have to follow you home sometime when you're not expecting it." Tossing her a wink, he turned to head back to the hit wizard's office and the tediousness of real work again.
Stopping short of writing her address on the closest scrap of paper at hand, she smirked and pointed at his retreating back with her quill. "If you're late I'll hex your bollocks periwinkle!" And her feet came back on the floor as she regathered her papers, looking over Nettles's bulging folder with some sense of this being only the first in a steady string of similar cases.