The not-legit stuff I wanted to write ~ Sentinel/Indigo/ShadowSong

INDIGO - Shift and the Case of the Missing Sandwich

[I KNOW WHAT YOU DID. MEET ME ON THE ROOF AT DUSK TO CONFESS YOUR CRIMES.]

Panicked, Shift glanced at the clock. Dusk was in a little over an hour.

His sandwich didn't have that long.

Shift steadied himself with a breath. He'd dealt with enough ransom notes in his time. He knew how to handle them, even if they weren't usually so close to home.

The sandwich thief had been clever. They'd cut the letters out of a magazine and glued them to the page. There'd be no identifying their handwriting, but it also meant this move was premeditated. He'd only been gone twenty minutes, and this note would have taken nearly that long to create--unless, of course, it'd been made in advance, and its owner had been lying in wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself.

Twenty minutes. That was the window where the crime had been committed, which narrowed down the suspect pool to anyone inside the base at the time. When Shift had been leaving base, Kione had been in his lab, Raph in his office, Athira in the training room, while Talia and Zoe had been some five minutes out, still returning from the previous alert--though that didn't rule them out from the crime.

With his limited time, Shift knew he was going to need help--and of his five potential suspects, there was only one he could be sure was totally innocent.

*+*+*+*

"That's what this is about?" said Athira as she stared up at him from the waters of the lap pool in her swimsuit. "A sandwich?"

"It's not just a sandwich!" said Shift. "It's the perfect sandwich! It took me--"

"I knew you were being weird about something with that dumb oven excuse, but I assumed it was more than just a sandwich." She shook her head and turned to push off the wall for another lap. "I'm not--"

Shift leaned down and grabbed her by the hand before it left the edge of the pool. "Please, Thira? You're the only one I can trust. I need you!"

Something flickered across Athira's expression, and had Shift not known any better, he'd have suspected a blush. She sank a little lower into the water, her eyes above the waterline and locked on him as she blew bubbles with her mouth.

Shift just held her stare and gave her his best kicked-puppy expression, hoping it'd be enough.

Athira broke first, surfacing with a huff.

"You aren't going to leave me alone until I go along with this, are you?" she said finally.

"Nope," said Shift with a solemn shake of his head.

Athira sighed and tossed her head back against the water. "Fine."

Shift released her hand, and Athira floated herself out of the pool, drying herself off with a quick flicker of Black.

She pointed a finger at him. "I'll tag along, but you owe me a milkshake. Chocolate, with extra chocolate. Understood?"

"Done!" said Shift. "Now, this is what the culprit left behind."

Athira took the note and raised an eyebrow as she read it.

"So you're telling me," she said, a strange note to her voice that Shift couldn't quite figure out, "that you read this note, and couldn't work out who it was?"

"Should I have?" said Shift, wondering if he'd missed something.

Athira just shrugged and gave him back the note. "No, but now I have to ask: what did you do?"

"I don't know!" said Shift. "You think I keep track of everything?"

"Maybe it was a team effort," said Athira, a smirk tugging at her mouth. "How likely is it that you managed to annoy them all enough that they decided to kidnap your sandwich together?"