Enjoy~ A short one this time, but I like it.

Diego
(For deadlysnipe12)

I have a confession to make...

I used to be a tea drinker. No, really. I drank gallons of the stuff. None of this fancy herbal crap, just pure boiled leaves in a mug. Black tea, no sugar. And like any loyal tea-drinker, I was totally against the idea of coffee. I came from a family of tea-drinkers, and tea was my beverage of choice.

When I started working at Grossberg's, I found that tea wasn't enough. I was twenty-one, twenty-two? The old man piled on the work, and Hammond often siphoned his own off onto me, too. I found myself falling asleep at the office, head on a pile of paperwork, more than once. And so I tasted my first cup of coffee. It was...unremarkable, but it did the job. I got through the nights on one or two, still much preferring tea. There was no immediate affection to the beverage that would explain my obsession.

When I was twenty-three, I had my first case. A murder trial - Grossberg loved throwing newbies in at the deep end, something which (as we all know) Mia took after him - and quite a grizzly one, too. Eight year-old girl and her mother mother found dead, the former beaten to the point where the poor kid gave up and the latter poisoned. The father was arrested for it.

It was a long trial; just before the three-day system came in on the initial trial system. It lasted maybe two weeks, three, before it went to the High Court. That was two or three weeks I spent in horror. The pictures of the beaten body of that poor little girl dwelled on my mind at night, while during the day I forced myself to be detached. God knows how she must have suffered. Every time I closed my eyes at night, she was there, begging her parent to stop, pleading with him that she'd be good from now on - all of this was from testimony from a neighbour who had heard the girl's cries and nothing else; they'd alerted the police, but it was too late when they arrived. Current assumption was that the man had poisoned the mother before going for the child. And when I couldn't sleep, I couldn't focus.

Coffee, for those weeks, was a lifesaver. I drank so much of it, desperate to stay awake, to get away from the horrible images of that little girl. And it helped. It focused my mind. I looked at the times of their deaths and found out that the mother died ever so slightly afterwards. We eventually discovered the truth - it was a murder-suicide. My heart went out to the broken man on the defendant's chair when his innocent verdict was announced. What was a verdict, to him? He'd been accused of murdering his wife and daughter, dragged through hell, only to find out that his beloved wife herself had taken them both from him. He thanked me dully for my help. I offered him a mug of coffee.

This wasn't it, either, in case you're wondering. This wasn't why I began drinking seventeen cups to every trial, despite the coincidence of the seventeen nights I spent on it. No, the real reason is much more trivial...and much more important.

Grossberg hired a new girl the next year, and I became attached to her immediately. Oh, Mia, if only things had worked out differently, we would be married today. But no, I'm getting ahead of myself. I teased her often, and she bantered back well. She was adorable when irritated, and beautiful all the time. I fell in love with her fairly quickly, though she wouldn't find that out for another year or so.

One day, during another particularly grueling case (although, of course, much shorter now), I was brewing myself some coffee, and offered a mug to the young lady who was puzzling over a trial video on the sofa. "No thanks," she replied. "I don't understand how you can drink that stuff, and black like that. It stinks up the place."

I perked up. "Does it annoy you, Kitten?"

She looked up at me, wary. "No," she replied eventually. "No. It's not like you're drinking like seventeen cups every day."

And that is when coffee became a regular staple of my diet.

...It was all for her.

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