Hello, reader babes! Hope you are all well. Here's a new thing that attached itself to my brain and wouldn't let go. This story is fully borne of that "FBI agent watching me" meme, because the premise was so ridiculous that I couldn't forget about it.

I'd like to declare that I have done absolutely no research whatsoever for this story. Any similarities involving actual FBI surveillance/recruitment procedures are purely coincidental. ;)

Finally, thanks so much to jaded_envy, makapedia, Alliope & piercelovewonton for the eyes, and to jaded and kat for listening to me scream about this story every few days. :) Hope you enjoy!

The summer heat is suffocating, even in black and white.

They've been cramped up here for hours, pamphlets scattered across the floor, tiles stark white in the fluorescent lights. It's almost cruel, the irony of such a cold, unforgiving place completely devoid of air conditioning.

August heat in Washington D.C. is especially oppressive; humid and lingering, it's the kind of heat that makes you feel like the devil himself is rising up from the concrete to greet you, hovering just out of reach.

Luckily, Maka Albarn loves the heat. And catching demons is what she does best.

"Gotcha," comes a triumphant murmur from a corner of the room next to the window, where slanted light from the blinds mixes in with the fluorescents. A pair of eyes shines brightly behind a laptop screen, victoriously narrowed.

"You found 'im?" A short-haired girl in another corner of the room almost jumps out of her chair with glee, bouncing around the fold-out table to gaze down at the screen.

"He's in Silver Spring," Maka murmurs, eyes scanning the page.

"Nice," comes another voice, belonging to a woman in a cowboy hat and a satisfied smile. She pushes in her chair, already reaching for her purse.

"Liz," Maka says, eyes narrowing. "You're going now? Isn't that kind of far for you?"

"Nah," Liz says as she shuts her laptop with a snap. "That's not too far from our place, actually. Right, Patty?"

Patty interrupts her excited bouncing to nod. "We'll call Animal Control on the way over," Patty adds helpfully, and Maka's eyes narrow further.

"Like you did last time?" she says.

Liz's face tries its very best to not slide into a grimace, and it earns a C+ for effort.

"We… handled it," she says, drawing out the hand like she'd rather hand this conversation over to someone else which, incidentally, Patty takes her up on.

"And we couldn't have done it without you!" She elbows Maka in the ribs, which is meant to be affectionate, but it still leaves Maka wincing. "Our Master Hacker- hey, it's true!" she continues before Maka can interject. "Best in the business!"

"If this were a business, you'd think we'd have more money," Liz drawls as she grabs her sunglasses and perches them on her head. "You ready?"

"Yup!" Patty gives Maka a quick hug and follows Liz out the door, both of them waving their farewell.

"Be careful!" Maka calls after them. "And call me when you get home!"

"We will!" Patty yells from the other side of the open window, which is what she says every time, before she promptly and dependably forgets to call.

Liz starts the pickup with a familiar roar. As the rumble of the truck fades into silence, Maka finds herself gazing back at the screen, at the satellite image of a home down a long country road.

"Silver Spring," she says to no one. "I wonder if the water is really silver there."

"... Dunno," comes Liz's voice from her portable speakers, sitting innocently on the folding table where she'd left them. "If you ever meet your better half, you can let us know!" From the speakers comes a chorus of laughter and Patty making smoochy sounds, little pops puncturing the air.

"Will you quit bugging the room when I'm still here?!" Maka demands, throwing a pencil at the speakers.

"But we get so many good soundbytes!" Liz's faux indignation crackles through the speakers.

"Especially the ones of you snoring--" Patty says.

"Will you let me catch some more bad guys in peace, please?!" Maka says. "And you snore too, Patty, don't give me that-"

"I snuffle, thank you!" she cheers, and Maka bites back a smile.

"All right," she concedes, and the two of them laugh.

"Don't stay up too late, okay?" Liz says, and Maka nods, even though they can't see it. "We'll call."

"You better," Maka says, and as the little light on the speaker fades away, she lets an easy smile spread over her face as she gets back to work.

At 9 o'clock the next morning, laptop screen still open, she snores gently against the table as her phone lights up with a voicemail.

At 9 o'clock, Soul Evans wakes up drenched in sweat. (Not from a nightmare, just from August. Which is, in many ways, still kind of a nightmare.)

It's just close enough to fall for him to really resent the summer. Even though it's still early, morning sunshine arcs through his blinds, branding little warm lines on his arms and bathing the music posters on his walls in bars of light. The entire wall behind his bed is a homage to the good shit - a sprinkling of indie, folk, jazz - as well as Weird Al, who is currently glaring down at him, eyes illuminated by a box of sunlight like the billboard in The Great Gatsby.

Receptive as he is to Weird Al's judgement, he slides out of bed, scoffing before leaning down and picking up his phone, which is still stuck in his pants pocket from the day before.

"...Huh?"

Stuck in his sauna room, clad in shark boxers, with Weird Al's gaze upon him, Soul wipes his eye with the back of his hand and blinks, staring down at his phone again and finally registering the time on the screen.

"Shit."

He does an awkward dance into his pants, and tugging them on causes his phone to fall out of his pocket again - the cross he must bear for wearing skinny jeans in the summer. On the screen now reads a message, in angry all caps: WHERE ARE U? THE KID IS IN TODAY SO U BETTER BE ON TIME.

As his motorcycle skids into the parking lot at 9:18 a.m., he is most certainly not on time. When he slinks into the boardroom at 9:23 to mounting feelings of dread, he makes a feeble attempt to remind himself that ultimately, time is all an illusion anyway.

"Evans," says a calm but clearly displeased voice - which, to be fair, is what The Kid sounds like all of the time, so he's not quite sure how to take it. "Nice of you to join us." Striped hair turns its way back to the table. "Barrett was just updating us on the July recruitment numbers."

Soul chances a glance at Barrett - who literally no one calls Barrett, for the record, because he goes mysteriously deaf until people call him by his code name, Black*Star. With a star in the middle.

"The middle star is silent, but very important," he'd said once. "I get it. Like the k in knife," Soul had said, to which Black*Star had replied, "there's a k in knife?"

They're an odd bunch, the FBI. Sharp as hell, but some of them are weirder than good 'ole Al himself.

"As I was saying," Black*Star says, shooting Soul a look. "Numbers are down. Way down. You gotta step up and find us some fresh meat, newbie."

It's true; none of his contacts have brought him anything in weeks. It's been a dry summer.

"Look," Soul explains. "Nobody's thinking about joining the FBI right now. Everyone's on vacation, all of my sources are lying on the beach sipping cocktails-"

"You'll be able to join them soon, if you like unemployment," The Kid says lightly. "It's not personal, and it's not a threat," he adds as Soul winces. "Our tech division is swamped, and they can't handle the workload. We need operatives, and we need good ones. So recruit us some, or it'll be your job on the line."

Soul hadn't expected an ultimatum like this at 9:43 a.m., and clearly neither had Black*Star, who's looking between the two of them with his mouth slightly agape.

"Listen, Kiddo-" Black*Star says. The Kid stares at him blankly. "Uh. Sir Kid… Your Kidness-" The Kid's gaze turns to pure ice, and Black*Star quits while he's behind. "A-anyway, Soul here's a great recruiter. He'll find us some good meat, I know it. Especially since I'll be there to help him out!"

Soul glances at Kid again, who seems to be weighing whether or not to clock Black*Star for legitimately referring to him as Your Kidness.

"I hope so, for both of your sakes," The Kid says, and Black*Star blanches. "Now tell me more about those numbers."

As Black*Star starts to yammer on about recruitment again, face considerably paler than before, Soul pulls his phone out of his pocket.

He sends a message to many, many people, all of his little birds, hoping for his job's sake that he'll get some kind of response.

[[ need a name. send me whoever youve got ]]

The meeting adjourns late (likely since it started late) and Soul walks back to his cubicle with his very annoying boss in tow.

"I even sent you a text," Black*Star says woefully from behind him. "You couldn't make it on time just once?"

"That's rich, coming from someone who's never here before 10-"

"Is that the way you talk to your superior, pleb?" But he can almost hear Black*Star's face break into a grin as they sit down in their neighboring cubicles.

"Of course it is," Soul says, turning on his computer. "Especially when I see him shitting his pants at someone whose name is literally The Kid-"

"Hey, I'm not scared of anybody!" Soul can imagine Black*Star's determined fist-clenches on the other side of the cubicle. "But he's in charge of my livelihood, dude, and I've got a family to provide for. The-"

"The black-haired goddess," Soul says along with him, mimicking his swoon. "I've heard."

"You're cranky," Black*Star observes. "We still gotta find you a Soul-mate." Soul responds to this familiar jab by turning his gaze to his desktop, which is now updating at a snail's pace.

"Whaaaat?" Black*Star says, peeking over the cubicle, spiky hair framing his face. "You usually have something to say to that-"

"Dunno what to tell you," Soul mutters, eyes still on the screen. "Not really interested, and it's not really likely, anyway. You're the 33%, Black*Star. The rest of us are condemned to a newspaper life."

Black*Star raises a confused eyebrow at him, to which Soul replies, "Black and white? Right?"

"Ohhhh," Black*Star says, drawing it out. "Yeah." His eyes brighten. "And in your case, there's a little bit of 'red all over' too-"

"Huh?"

"Nooooothing," Black*Star says, sinking back into the cubicle sea, but he's cackling, the way he does when he thinks he's said something impossibly clever.

Soul rolls his eyes and watches the update bar crawl forward, then glances down as his phone as it lights up with a text.

"...I'll focus on keeping my job first," he says.

"Agh!"

Maka taps her fingers against the keyboard absently, tapping her other hand against the table in frustration.

"I don't get it," she says to no one, eyeing the black box of code that sits on the screen, taunting her.

"Here, take a break." From behind her comes the familiar thump of file stacks being tossed to the ground, and she swivels around in her chair to see Liz, sunglasses askew on her head, cowboy hat abandoned for the moment as she sets down a massive box.

"What are these?" Maka asks, picking up a flyer that features numerous sad-eyed pets and reads Eastside Animal Trackers: Hurt One of Us, and Death Will Find You.

"New propaganda," Liz says with a wink. "I'm meeting with the head office to get them approved today - whatcha think?"

"They're uh…" Maka takes in the skull clip-art that borders the page. "Very intense."

"That's the goal," Liz says, pulling out her laptop. "Trying to scare people into submission so that we can have a nice, relaxing fall. The printer assured me that the word Death is in red. And it better be, 'cause I had to pay an extra 10 cents per copy for that shit."

Maka laughs. "Very dramatic. It's great. Hey Liz…"

"Sup?"

"Where's Patty today?"

"Ice cream," Liz says as she pulls out her portable mouse. "You know, the job that actually pays her money."

"Ah, yes." Maka smiles. "I can't believe I've never asked - do you not have any other jobs?"

Liz looks a little wary for a second, shoulders tensing, but eventually she says, very evasively, "I dabble in some things, here and there."

There's a clear implication to drop it, so that is what Maka does. Even with the strangeness of the exchange, they soon fall into a comfortable silence, Maka returning to wrestle with technology while Liz pulls out a file and starts going through it, rotating between the file and her laptop. Every few minutes, she's clearly consulting something else, however, as she keeps chuckling to herself.

Maka throws her a couple of questioning looks that Liz just shakes her head at, until finally, after one particularly choking laugh, Maka demands, "What is so funny?"

"I'm just uh… catching up with a friend, sort of. Sorry. I'll be chill."

"It's okay," Maka says. "Old friends are great."

"Eh, he's not really an old friend," Liz says. "It's kinda like… one of those new friends that feels old. Y'know?"

Maka smiles. "Yeah. I know what you mean." But as she gazes back at the screen, her face falls again.

"'...What's up, Master Hacker?" Liz asks. "What's got you stumped?"

"It's just this program," Maka says with a huff. "I can't get it to do what I want it to do. I've been trying to get into a satellite for like three hours to find a location on this guy, and I can't do it."

"You're trying to hack a satellite?!" Liz exclaims, though her face smooths out quickly enough. "Eh. I guess I shouldn't be surprised."

"I'd just been thinking, if someone were to run for it, I could stay on them. I know there's a lot more I could be doing to catch these people." Maka pauses, chewing on her lip, weighing what she should say next. "Can I tell you something?"

"Sure," Liz says, closing her laptop to give her her full attention.

"...Honestly, I've been thinking a lot about how big of a difference I'm actually making, cooped up in the EAT office. I need more resources, and more people to bounce ideas off of. It's not that I don't love it here!" she interjects, as Liz's expression falls. "I just feel like I could be-"

"Doing more?" Something is stirring behind Liz's eyes, but before Maka gets a grasp on it, it's gone, replaced by her normal steely stare. "With a more precise goal? As part of a team, maybe?"

"...Yes," Maka says, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. "Exactly. How did you-"

"Mm. Heard it before." Liz shrugs dismissively, turning her attention to the flyer at her side. Maka watches her for another moment and then swivels back to the computer. "But hey," Liz adds from behind her, "Sometimes you've gotta start small, right? It leads to big things."

"Yeah." Code starts to whiz beneath her fingertips once more, eyes alight with tiny screen-boxes as she falls back into focus. "I think I just might… be ready for a bigger thing."

As she resumes her coding, Liz's eyes flick up to look at her again, hand stilling against the paper.

"Eater."

He needs no further introduction; Liz is the only one who still uses his code name.

"sexypistol888," he throws back."Whadya want?"

She makes an unimpressed noise on the other side of the line. "Polite and nosy as ever, I see," she says cooly, and his lip curls into a smirk. "When are you gonna drop that?"

"Listen. Why you still had AIM downloaded in 2016 is beyond me." He twirls his keys around his finger, affecting boredom. "Cover your tracks, slacker. Getting access to your old screen names was too easy."

"Yeah, alright," she says. "Ain't proud of it. It's almost as humiliating as your old livejournal entries."

His smirk dissolves into a surprised scowl. "Wait. What? How the-"

"Slow your roll, slacker." Her smile carries through the phone, and he hates it. "Is that how you treat someone who's callin' you in a favor? I promise I won't quote anything if you behave."

This gives him pause, as Liz is the first person to bring him a name since he sent out that text, so he decides to ignore this bright new and shiny total invasion of his privacy and opts for being an Actual Professional™ ... which does not suit him, and Liz knows it.

"Contact details?" he says with a grimace.

"Very good. Already sent." She chuckles as he tabs over to his inbox and skims the information.

"... She's already in D.C.?" he says in disbelief. Most of Liz's contacts hail from other, stranger corners of the globe.

"Only a couple of years outta college, too," Liz says. "Just like you. Newbie."

He grumbles at this. "A newbie whose first mission was to get you into the game, don't forget."

"Surely," Liz confirms. "Though… I got a somewhat steady paycheck out of that, and you got a pain in the ass who calls you every couple of months, so who's the real winner here?"

"You're not wrong," he mutters as he skims the rest of the document. "Hey - no photo?"

"Nope. She likes her privacy. I'll let you loot through the rest. Oh- and Eater?"

"Yeah?"

"Watch out for this one. She'll out-hack you if you give her the chance."

He scoffs, keys stilling in his hand. "Tch. I'd like to see that."

With a promising contact finally in his sights, Soul initiates stage 1 of the FBI recruitment process: the surveillance period. Seeing what hackers are capable of without a test is a nice first point of entry, says the FBI. It's easier to throw them them curveballs when the time comes.

She's mostly online in the middle of the night, which suits Soul just fine. A nine to five work schedule is for squares, anyway, and staying at the office through the night doesn't bother him if he's got the coffee machine. Honestly, he's happy to embrace a nighttime surveillance schedule again, especially after the last recruit. Ox Ford had had a schedule like clockwork - up at six, asleep by nine - which, despite its comfortable predictability, was also boring as hell.

Now, he is graced by the distinctly unpredictable nature of 3 a.m. cat videos mixed with afternoon Tai Chi workouts - and in between, some very interesting code.

He's never seen someone hack the way that she does. Most people try to find a back door, a silent way to creep into the system to access the information they need. She, on the other hand, knocks down the back door like she owns the place, whizzing past whatever security measures they have in place with zero subtlety, relying either on her victim's ignorance or simply butting through with sheer force of will.

Actually, now that he thinks about it, her code does remind him slightly of someone else.

"Black*Star, look at this."

His boss appears behind him in milliseconds. He refers to this as his 'ninja approach' and it is guaranteed to give Soul a hernia every fucking time.

"Whoa," Black*Star says, leaning in over Soul's shoulder. "This the new meat?"

"Jesus. Y-Yup," Soul affirms after properly adjusting his heart rate and sending Black*Star a glare for good measure.

"She's good," Black*Star says in disbelief, ignoring him. "Not as good as me, but-"

"My source warned me about her," Soul says dryly. "Said she'd outhack me."

Black*Star bursts out laughing, clapping him on the back. "Man. I hope she does, newbie. For both of our sakes, I really hope she does."

The surveillance process continues for several days without a hitch, and in addition to her code, Soul learns several other interesting things about his potential new recruit: she's a Vegas native, transplanted to the east coast. She apparently has a cat, which explains the whole 'save all the animals' shtick that she's got going on. Her music taste is terrible; he is convinced she subsists only on top 40 dubstep remixes, and he's inclined to give the surveillance period up early just to have an excuse to absolve himself of his very persistent bass-induced headache. For someone so private, he's learned quite a lot.

And yet, he still hasn't managed to get an actual visual on her; their database system has turned up nothing, which basically never happens. She doesn't seem to have any social media accounts. The old dependable 'post-it over the webcam' trick is a useful one, and hers is permanently in place.

So when he hears some fateful words on a Thursday afternoon, he's quick to seize the opportunity.

"Hey, Mama." A new voice appears in his ears and he jumps, flipping back over to his surveillance tab. "Let me get my camera set up."

It's the first time he's heard her speak, and something about it plants a seed of curiosity in him. He chalks it up to the fact that putting faces and voices to names is useful in this profession, and she's been so intent on hiding her identity that he finds himself a little intrigued.

Her mother is already there on the screen - light-haired, with lines at the corners of her eyes. Young, but with a stressful job of some kind, he deduces. Or a stressful life.

"Yo pleb, you comin' for lunch?" Black*Star's voice echoes distantly from the doorway. "We've got dooooonuts!"

"Uuuhhh, yeah, just a second." Soul stares down at his still-hot coffee mug in his hand, having only arrived at work an hour prior, thanks to someone's desire to watch cooking videos from 4 to 7 a.m. He really should have given up on watching for anything interesting after she pulled up a fourth recipe for butter chicken. All it had done was make him hungry.

And as Soul sits there, pondering whether Black*Star had meant that his entire lunch would consist of donuts, Maka clicks on her icon and makes her face appear in full screen.

There's the unexpected, and then there's the flat-out unthinkable, and from one blink to the next, the flat-out unthinkable happens.

Before Soul's eyes, the world transforms, the screen suddenly bombarding him in a surge of unfamiliar sensations as a strange… sharpness seizes his senses. A hazy white (or what he thinks is white) decorates the sides of his vision, everything blurring into a whirl. He blinks furiously, confused, legitimately wondering if he's having a convulsion or something, until everything slides back into focus.

He takes a deep breath, and then another. Heartbeat pounding in his ears, he takes in the tabs on his screen, with little strange icons that he recognizes, but now have little bursts of… of something new. He gazes down at his desk, at the strange vividness of his coffee cup and of his coffee which, oh, he's managed to spill entirely down his shirt thanks to his trembling hand.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit. Shit." He jumps up, only now registering the searing heat leaking through his shirt, and flutters his button-down away from his torso, cringing. As he gets up, instinct telling him to grab a napkin or something despite the presence of infinitely more pressing matters, he glances as the screen again, and there is a question he immediately needs answered.

"Black*Star," he croaks, and he coughs, clearing his throat, urgency forcing his voice into cooperation. "Black*Star!"

For once, he is grateful for the ninja approach.

"What, pleb? Oh hey, new meat finally showed herself! Nice."

Soul turns to see Black*Star with a half-eaten donut in hand and almost gets dizzy again, the potency of whatever color that is on his head causing Soul to take a literal step back, knocking into his chair. But he ignores that, ignores everything except for the question on his mind, because there's something he has to know, right now.

"Black*Star." He points to the screen, to the… the hue of something on the screen. "What... what color is that?"

"What, her eyes?" Black*Star says, little bits of donut spilling from his mouth. "They're green, why?"

Soul says nothing as he tries to grapple with what exactly is happening at this moment. His coffee-soaked shirt and his boss's strangely vivid hair choices sit in his peripheral as he looks at the ground helplessly, waiting for Black*Star to put the pieces together.

It doesn't take long.

"Wait," Black*Star says. His face slides into the wickedest, most conspiratorial grin Soul has ever seen. "...What do you mean, what color is that?"

Thanks so much for reading! See you in two weeks ;)