'Close our eyes, pretend to fly' [Derek Morgan/Penelope Garcia] [1/2]
Title: "Close our eyes, pretend to fly"
Author: that_1_incident
Fandom: "Criminal Minds"
Art: Here by astral_angel and here by kymericl
Pairing: Derek Morgan/Penelope Garcia
Rating: PG-13/FRT
Word Count: ~16,500
Warnings: Semi-AU, the Boston Reaper, a fair amount of abyss-gazing, and a small guest appearance by Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
Summary: As the proprietress of Penny's - unquestionably the best coffeehouse in Quantico, Virginia - California transplant Penelope Garcia relishes her role as bright, carefree hostess while almost entirely divorcing herself from her past. When Supervisory Special Agent Derek Morgan walks into her life with his high-stress career in the FBI and his own personal tragedy in the rearview mirror, her barriers begin to break down amid Doctor Who posters, unsubs, macarons, and exploding ambulances. But opening up to Morgan - and, by extension, to his colleagues in the Behavioral Analysis Unit - is not without its difficulties, and only time will tell whether Penelope is truly up to the challenge.
Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me; I use them respectfully but without permission. Title from Hanson's Penny & Me. Some elements taken from actual "Criminal Minds" episodes; notably "Empty Planet" (2x8), "Lo-Fi" (3x20), "Mayhem" (4x1), "Omnivore" (4x18), and "Nameless, Faceless" (5x1).
Author's Notes: Written for cm_bigbang; my amazing artists were astral_angel and kymericl. Thanks to the LJ-less Xtina for the beta. Also posted here on FF.net and here on AO3. This fic came about in part because every fandom needs a coffeehouse AU - if one already exists in this fandom that I don't know about, oh my God, hook me up.
---<---<---@
Penny's was one of those establishments that was bigger on the inside than the outside would have led you to believe - which wasn't to say it was expansive, but rather, its layout made optimal use of the limited space available. There were standing bar-type structures against the windows for people-watchers and those waiting for someone, while larger parties and shrinking violets had a variety of tables to choose from - a delightful hodgepodge of different sizes, heights, and types of woods - and even a handful of booths in the back corners, although those were usually occupied by people typing with obscene focus. More often than not, these patrons would have enormous cups sitting beside their laptops - extra super huge, according to the sign in the front window, and that was actually what people asked for when they ordered, as the biggest-sized drink that Penny's carried was named as such by the owner, and very aptly, too.
Although a lot of the regulars came for the coffee, which was brewed strong and dark and in any flavor you could have thought to ask for, the real attraction was the bakery. Despite the fact that the owner had no formal training, the flair with which she decorated cupcakes was something that could not be taught, and even the staunchest dieter had trouble turning down her apricot danishes or Fluffernutter cookies.
Penelope Garcia wasn't as tall as she'd have liked to be, but few people considered her short, thanks to her stunning array of heels. She had seemingly endless pairs in a variety of garish colors and patterns - bright orange, deep purple, blue-striped and leopard-spotted - and she often coordinated these with the polish on her nails. As soon as you saw Penelope, you could tell that Penny's was every inch hers; her personality was obviously injected into the place, from the colorful wall hangings to the shabby-chic cushions situated as if at random on certain strategically-chosen chairs. Before she'd moved here and opened up the place, no one in her life had ever really called her Penny except for her parents, who died long ago and way before their time, but she'd embraced the name as part of her new start and hadn't looked back since. She didn't generally like to talk about her parents, but she displayed a photo of them on the wall behind the counter nonetheless so they could watch over her from their frame of modest gilt, sandwiched between a print of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's and a mini poster of the fourth doctor from Doctor Who, whom she particularly admired for his scarf.
Penelope couldn't remember the last time she took a day off, but she didn't feel burdened by her dedication to her job. The way she saw it, her livelihood wasn't really work if she was doing what she loved. Even on weekends, she was usually up with the sun concocting new recipes, updating the Penny's website, or simply walking along the Potomac River, brainstorming her next business moves as the wind ruffled her blonde hair.
When people think of Quantico, they typically imagine the base and nothing else. Certainly, the area is dominated by it, as it sprawls across more than five hundred acres and houses the FBI Academy, the FBI Laboratory, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service headquarters, among others, but Quantico is also a settlement in its own right, bordered on three sides by the base and on the fourth by the river. Inhabited by just a few hundred people, the part of Quantico that isn't the base has a sleepy, small-town feel belying its close proximity to Washington, D.C.
In a town of just eleven streets, Penelope's business didn't exactly face a lot of competition. Sure, there was a pizzeria, a bar, and a more upscale establishment named Scarpetta's that served mainly Italian fare and was only open in the evenings, but when it came to grabbing a coffee before work or partaking of a sandwich or sweet treat at lunch, Penny's was the place to go, and everyone knew it.
--
Penelope regarded customers as being like children in the sense that while she knew she wasn't meant to have favorites, sometimes she couldn't help herself. One regular of whom she was particularly fond was tall like a beanstalk, with long, lanky limbs and tapered fingers. He snagged a booth at the back whenever one was available, drank his coffee without milk but added about a million sugars, and read faster than she thought was humanly possible. She'd asked him about it once, inquiring whether he was actually taking in the words or simply skimming the pages, and he'd handed her his book and recited two paragraphs from memory to answer her question.
She didn't think she was that much older than him, but she still felt protective of him in a motherly sort of way. It was hard not to want to take care of this man, with his huge doe eyes and frenetic mannerisms. Penelope knew he worked as a profiler for the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI and wondered how the sweet, gentle soul she'd come to know managed to handle the horrors of such a career. If she didn't know better, she would have guessed he had a much more unassuming occupation, like teaching assistant or librarian. Even his surname supported this idea, as his name was Dr. Spencer Reid.
--
Reid usually frequented Penny's alone, although he was occasionally accompanied by a pretty blonde named JJ, with whom he worked. JJ didn't look like your typical FBI agent any more than Reid, but one thing Penelope had learned since opening up shop near one of the largest U.S. Marine Corps bases in the world was that for every suited-and-booted, stern-faced macho man, there was a member of the Bureau who didn't fit a single one of the stereotypes. In fact, whenever she saw a face she didn't recognize, Penelope tried to make things interesting by placing bets with herself about whether the person was FBI, NCIS, Marine, and so forth. She'd become pretty good at guessing, but there were still those who managed to fool her - something that secretly thrilled her because perfect batting averages were boring, after all.
It was raining the morning Reid stepped into the shop with a stranger, his light brown hair tousled with water. There was a bell above the doorway that tinkled gently every time someone entered or exited, and when Penelope glanced up, she froze. The newcomer was tall and mocha-skinned, with an impressive musculature obvious even from beneath his leather jacket. He looked around for a few moments, taking in the ambience of the place as Reid wiped the raindrops off his glasses with the sleeves of his cardigan, and when the unfamiliar man's eyes met hers, she immediately looked down at the cups and saucers she'd been collecting from a recently evacuated table and hurried behind the counter to take their orders, hoping her blush wasn't as pronounced as the hot sensation on her cheeks suggested.
"Well, hello," the stranger said to her as he approached, his voice deep, pleasing, and laced with flirtation. Next to him, Reid almost imperceptibly rolled his eyes, as if he'd seen this routine enough times to be bored with it.
Penelope smoothed the ruffles of the neon pink apron she'd donned earlier that morning.
"What can I get for you?" she asked - perhaps a little more breathily than she'd have liked, but all the words came out in the right order, so she couldn't really complain.
"Just the usual for me, thanks," Reid responded.
"For here?" she confirmed.
He nodded. Beside him, his comrade shifted his weight from right foot to left and perused the menu boards intently before eventually inquiring, "If I order a blondie, do I get a mini you?"
Penelope felt her face warm up even more and hoped to God that she wasn't blushing to the roots of her fair hair.
"Uh, not exactly. Blondies are like brownies, except they're made with brown sugar rather than cocoa." She pointed to a display in front of the register. "If you sign up for a Penny's Pals loyalty card, I can give you two for three dollars."
He grinned at her, and she was taken aback by the startling whiteness of his teeth. "Brown sugar, huh? You a fan of brown sugar?"
It'd been a while since Penelope had been flirted with like this - well, she wasn't sure she'd ever been flirted with exactly like this - but she picked up on the entendre nonetheless, feeling her heartbeat quicken in her chest.
"You could say I have a sweet tooth," she parried.
Although most of her attention was on the stranger, she couldn't help but notice Reid looking restless and immediately snapped back into her role as gracious hostess, getting the feeling Reid blended into the woodwork a lot when the other man was around.
"I'll get your coffee while your friend here makes up his mind, OK, honey?" she told him gently.
Reid smiled at her and actually held her gaze for a few seconds before glancing at the floor and saying, "By the way, this is Supervisory Special Agent Derek Morgan. I work with him at the BAU."
She felt a frisson of excitement run down her spine as she turned to grab a mug off the rack for Reid. The mugs at Penny's were much like the collection of assorted tables strewn about the space - no two were alike, and each customer had his or her own favorite. On her last jaunt to D.C., Penelope had picked up a Periodic Table mug at a museum gift store, and sure enough, Reid had immediately claimed it as his own.
"So you're based in Quantico permanently?" she inquired of Morgan, trying to sound nonchalant as she carefully poured the contents of her trusty coffee pot into Reid's mug. "How come I haven't seen you in here before?"
When she looked up, Morgan's eyes touched hers like sparks. He grinned again, and she felt her breath hitch in her throat.
"I ascribe to the Roll outta bed twenty minutes late, break the speed limit to get here, then suck down bad coffee in the kitchenette kinda mentality, but Dr. Reid here's been telling me to check this place out for like a month now -"
"Five weeks and three days," Reid murmured as he took the steaming mug from Penelope, and Morgan rolled his eyes.
"For like a month now," he repeated, though not unkindly, "so today I finally managed it, and you know what? I'm very glad I did."
Penelope felt her face heating up again.
"You haven't even tried anything yet," she pointed out, then remembered he'd expressed interest in a blondie and bustled over to the display cabinet. "Did you want that blondie?"
"Make it two for three bucks, and can you sign me up for the loyalty card? As for the coffee..." He glanced at the menu boards again. "Surprise me. Just not too sweet - unlike Pretty Boy here, I got no desire to give myself diabetes."
Reid bristled. "While ingesting high amounts of sugar may trigger diabetes in someone with prediabetes or other predispositions, it's not a direct cause of the condition," he pointed out, and Penelope sensed he'd had this conversation with Morgan in the past.
Morgan winked at her, then said to Reid, "Yeah, well, I'm already sweet enough on my own. You wanna show me where you normally sit in this joint?"
Reid wordlessly hoisted his messenger bag up on his shoulder and set off for the corner booth, clutching his Periodic Table mug. Penelope's heart skipped a beat when she realized Morgan's attention was now solely focused on her.
"Here," she said, grabbing a Penny's Pals card and scribbling Morgan's name on it before stamping it with a small heart. "Ten stamps earn you a free drink."
Their hands brushed as Morgan took the card from her.
"So you're sayin' I need to come back and see you nine more times?"
"Uh-huh." (By now, her face felt like it was on fire. She hoped it didn't show.)
"I don't think that'll be a problem," he said silkily. The butterflies in her stomach beat their wings more fiercely, and she decided on a goal of getting it together enough to behave like a normal human being in his presence by the time he got his tenth stamp. "I take it you're Penny?"
"Penelope," she blurted, then frowned at herself. Penny had become her alter-ego of sorts - her public persona, if you could call it that, and she wasn't sure why she'd just voluntarily drawn back the veil for a stranger. After all, Penny was the name of the bright, carefree person at the counter who offered every patron a smile and a great deal on blondies, while Penelope was someone else entirely, someone with tragedy in the rearview mirror. Even the name itself was kind of sad: Penelope, Odysseus' wife, faithfully fended off suitors in Ithaca for two decades when her husband was voyaging across the ocean, sleeping with witches and nymphs and all manner of other women. The unfairness of that little juxtaposition had always kind of pissed her off.
"You have a last name or are you just Penelope, like Cher or Madonna?"
Penelope's own laugh took her by surprise. "For better or worse, I've yet to achieve that level of notoriety. It's Garcia - Penelope Garcia."
"Garcia," he echoed as if he were trying on her name for size, tasting the syllables on his tongue. "You mind if I call you that?"
"Um..." She'd never been among those people who went by their surnames at school, at work, or in social groups, but the idea of Morgan addressing her like that was oddly thrilling. "Sure!" she chirped, and Morgan looked pleased.
--
Penelope had learned to cherish the lull sandwiched between the hustle and bustle of the morning rush and the encroachment of the early lunch crowd, but the day she met Morgan, the quietness she usually embraced seemed more of an annoyance. Her whole day felt strangely off-kilter, like something had lodged itself under her skin, beneath her consciousness, but she didn't know what or how to fix it. She found herself wondering whether Morgan would drop by later in the day to sample her lunch fare, and for a couple of hours, she even had a Pavlovian reaction to the bell above her own door, looking up hopefully whenever she heard it jingle.
Closing time was technically five, but as Penelope fully accommodated stragglers, it ended up being more like six on most days. Rather than kicking people out, she tidied up around them, clearing plates and mugs off tabletops and scrubbing down the counter that she spent much of her day standing behind. She would offer half-priced baked goods to anyone who wanted them, and after the last patron had made his or her way out, she would lock the front door, turn off the lights, and either retire to the second-floor apartment she kept above the store or make her way down to the edge of the Potomac, where she'd crumble the remains of the day's bread and feed them to the ducks. She did the latter that day, eager for the cool, refreshing breeze that came off the water year-round. Breathing in the air and soaking up the sunshine of the waning summer day were simple, comforting rituals, and after just a few minutes, she was already feeling more centered.
By the next morning, she'd relegated Morgan to a small recess of her mind and was ready to direct her focus toward piloting her newest creation, Peppermint Pennies, which were pretty much exactly like Peppermint Patties except significantly larger and made with a secret ingredient. She greeted her regulars as brightly as usual, making sure to have Agent Gibbs' order ready and waiting on the counter for when he dropped by at the same time as always - an extra-super-huge, black as the ace of spades. When Reid stepped through the door unaccompanied, she barely pouted, and when she managed to serve him without inquiring into Morgan's whereabouts, she mentally awarded herself a gold star. Her preoccupation with Morgan, she decided, had been a twenty-four hour affliction, like the virus that felled her for a day in third grade before relinquishing its grip as quickly as it had seized her - a passing vulnerability, but nothing more.
--
Morgan didn't reappear for almost a week, which wasn't entirely surprising. After all, the bureau had its own cafeteria, and Penelope had learned from various sources including Reid and JJ that there were kitchenettes on every floor, equipped with refrigerators and microwaves for those who brown-bagged it or brought in frozen meals. The very idea of frozen meals made Penelope shudder, as most everything at Penny's was organic and Fair Trade, and a good third of the menu was vegan. She'd rather sacrifice a whole day's takings than ingest something bland and irradiated, a type of cuisine she suspected Morgan was used to eating quite frequently. The thought of this made her sad and a little indignant.
Beyond indulging in vaguely judgmental conjecture about Morgan's eating habits, Penelope didn't have a lot of time to dwell on the agent, as the new Peppermint Pennies were taking her clientele by storm. Her earnings were up, largely due to the number of people accepting her ingeniously named Penny-for-a-Dollar offer when they bought any hot or iced beverage. She even sold one of the sweet treats to Aaron Hotchner, Reid's boss and a stereotypical FBI agent if Penelope had ever seen one, from the stiffly parted hair on his head to the wingtip shoes on his feet. He looked a little embarrassed when he bought it, as if she'd caught him tuning in to American Idol or indulging in some other behavior he no doubt saw as frivolous, but when she smiled at him in reassurance, she was rewarded with one of the brief, sincere grins that he all too scarcely allowed himself to offer.
The fact that her attention was wholly on her customer meant she didn't notice Morgan had entered the establishment until he strolled up to the counter and clapped Agent Hotchner on the back.
"Hotch, my man," Morgan said by way of a greeting, and Hotchner surreptitiously tucked the Penny-containing paper bag into his suit pocket.
"Thank you," Hotchner said politely as Penelope handed him his coffee and Morgan pretended not to see what he'd just bought. "Good morning, Morgan. I'll see you at the office."
Penelope stood silently next to Morgan as the two of them watched Hotchner walk out, and when Morgan turned back to look at her, he had a smile on his face that made her want to smile too.
"I had a feeling I'd see him here," he told her. "JJ and Reid have been talking about those Peppermint Pennies of yours all week. Made me and Hotch crazy."
Penelope tilted her head. "So how come you didn't drop by until today?"
"The two of us were outta town conducting an interview. In uh, California, actually."
"Really?" she asked excitedly. "I used to live there! What part?"
Morgan weighed her question for a few moments before answering measuredly, "Corcoran."
"Where the prison is?"
She'd asked mainly for a point of reference, but the expression on Morgan's face told her yes, where the prison was, and yes, that was why they went.
"Oh."
She broke eye contact with him, oddly embarrassed. Of course he would have visited the prison. It was his job to catch the people whom the more upstanding members of society had deemed unfit to walk among them, so it made sense for his involvement not to end after they'd been apprehended. Reid had discussed the BAU's role with her once in his typical long-winded fashion, all the while spooning more sugar into his Periodic Table mug than most people would ever be able to handle. He'd explained that determining why the perpetrators of awful crimes did what they did was just as important as figuring out the identities of dangerous unknown subjects (unsubs, he'd called them) and, of course, stopping them from hurting anyone else.
"Um, did you want the same drink I made you last time?" she inquired of Morgan, desperate to diffuse the sudden awkwardness she felt. "The Mocha Surprise? And a Peppermint Penny, right?"
He smiled at her again, but this time, his eyes looked tired. "That sounds great."
He didn't volunteer any more information about the trip, and at first, she didn't ask, but as she fired up the coffee machine, she couldn't help but start searching her memory for why she'd recently seen Corcoran in the news. The answer lit up her brain like a lightning bolt - B.J. Sloane, better known as the Santa Barbara Butcher, had just been incarcerated at the prison after receiving fifteen life sentences, one for each of the teenage girls he'd charmed off the street, abducted, and tortured to death. She glanced up at Morgan with her mouth open, and he didn't look surprised to see that she'd made the connection.
"Was it -?"
"Yeah," Morgan cut her off with a long look, and she realized it wouldn't be the best idea for him to talk about his involvement with a convicted serial murderer while in a busy coffeehouse. He probably wasn't even allowed to discuss the details.
"What was he like?" she asked anyway.
Penelope would've thought she had no desire to learn anything about Sloane beyond what the news had already told her, but she couldn't help wanting to know more from someone who'd met him face to face. She'd only seen a couple of photographs, including one of Sloane on his wedding day that the media liked to trot out at every opportunity, delightedly capitalizing on the story of the quintessential guy next door who'd turned out to be a monster. Indeed, the man who'd stared out from her television screen hadn't seemed threatening at all. On the contrary, his sandy blond hair and friendly features reminded her of the guy who owned the pizzeria down the street, and making that connection caused a chill to run right down her spine.
"He was completely normal on the surface, Garcia," Morgan said with a touch of sadness as he took his coffee cup from her hand. "Completely normal."
--
The exchange with Morgan rolled around in Penelope's head all day, interspersed with remembered snippets of news reports about Sloane's crimes and images of the man himself. Her mind kept bringing her back to the look on Morgan's face, and if the eyes truly were the window to the soul, then Morgan's soul was tortured. She hated the thought of what he, Reid, Hotchner, JJ, and the rest of the unit all did for a living, hunting down demons and climbing inside their heads. What was it Nietzsche had said? She recalled the famous quote with a shiver: Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
The grim work of the BAU lingered in her mind at closing time, and she was about to douse the lights and head upstairs when it occurred to her that although she couldn't do anything about Morgan's chosen career path, there was a way for her to make his job - and the rest of his team's - marginally more bearable. She headed back behind the counter and opened her folder of recipes.
--
It took a few weeks for Penelope to get everything together, but by the time Morgan had earned the sixth stamp on his Penny's Pals loyalty card, she was ready to unveil the surprise. Morgan watched curiously as she bent down behind the counter and emerged with one of the boxes she used for large orders - a simple cardboard container with the Penny's logo printed on it, which essentially consisted of the name written in Penelope's handwriting next to a simple rendering of a sunflower.
"What's this?"
Penelope beamed at him. "What I do best. It's for you and your team to take on that fancy jet of yours. No charge, just something to make your days better as you launch into the sky to fight evil."
"You make us sound like superheroes," Morgan said with a laugh. "And how do you know about the jet?"
She raised an eyebrow at him.
"...Reid." He answered his own question, and she giggled as he opened the box. "Oh my God, Garcia... you're a princess, you know that?"
She beamed, not knowing quite what to say, but he gave her an out by continuing, "OK, so what are these?"
"Macarons." Penelope said the name with a French flourish. "They're something new I'm trying out, and I'm not sure which flavors to start with, so I figured I could let you guys be my guinea pigs, so to speak." She pointed to the selection. "These ones are vanilla, the darker ones are chocolate, the ones with the orange filling are pumpkin spice, then there's strawberry, cappuccino, and lemon."
Morgan stared in astonishment. "If there's one thing my team's good at, it's eating," he declared, reaching for a macaron.
"Hey," Penelope scolded gently. "Save them for the jet."
"C'mon, one bite?" Morgan cajoled, but there was a twinkle in his eye as Penelope shook her head with a smirk. "You, Penelope Garcia, are a tease."
She tossed her head, secretly pleased by how well she was holding her own in front of a man whose physical presence quite frankly made her forget how to breathe. "I pride myself on it."
He chuckled, then quickly grew serious. "Thank you for this, baby girl. You really are a princess."
The way he was looking at her made her heart flutter, and she recalled the goal she'd set the first time she'd met him - to be immune to his charms by the time he'd earned his tenth stamp and a free drink. It was safe to say she wasn't exactly progressing as fast as she'd hoped.
--
It quickly emerged that the members of Aaron Hotchner's BAU team were traditionalists when it came to macarons. Chocolate was the hands-down favorite, although the second-place position was more hotly contested, to the point where every single member (including Hotch, albeit sheepishly) made sure to drop by the coffeehouse and register his or her preference.
Reid, perhaps unsurprisingly, had the most to say. He delivered an oral treatise of sorts that delved into the merits and shortcomings of each flavor and ultimately concluded that while pumpkin spice would be the seasonal favorite, vanilla and cappuccino had the most long-term staying power beside chocolate and were therefore the best options to add to the menu, particularly in light of the present economic instability.
JJ, who'd accompanied Reid to Penny's that day, discreetly rolled her eyes at Penelope during Reid's speech, the corners of her mouth twitching as if she were holding back laughter. Penelope cleared her throat to stave off her own mirth as she reached for the Dalek salt shaker she'd ordered online and repurposed as a sugar container with Reid in mind.
"I wish everyone had your passion for macarons," she said sincerely, handing him the Dalek. He beamed at her while pouring a liberal amount of sugar into his coffee, then turned to his colleague.
"You coming, JJ?"
JJ glanced at Penelope. "I'll be over in a second, OK, Spence?"
Reid shrugged and headed off to his regular booth, and Penelope tilted her head toward JJ, sensing something was up.
Although the other woman dropped by frequently, she tended to keep to herself, so Penelope didn't know her as well as some other customers. That said, she knew people, interacted with them day in and day out, and while she was no profiler, she could sense when they weren't saying what they wanted to, when they were holding something back. Her tried and true technique was to hover in people's general vicinity until they caved and confided in her, but she wasn't above administering the odd verbal prod when that approach didn't work.
JJ probably drank the most coffee out of anybody at the BAU, with the exception of Beth Griffith, who was part of a separate team to the one Agent Hotchner headed. Penelope wasn't exactly sure what JJ's job entailed, but she saw the other woman on the news sometimes when the FBI was handling high-profile cases, hair always immaculate and skin glowing, remaining alert and composed even as the press yelled questions from all directions, so all that caffeine obviously agreed with her. JJ gratefully took her cup and eyed the display of Peppermint Pennies that had been placed by the register to catch the attention of patrons.
Penelope glanced at the clock that hung behind the counter, one of those cat-shaped ones with a tail that acted as a pendulum and eyes that counted the seconds. It was hot pink with white stripes.
"You have time to get something else," she noted, because she'd come to know JJ's schedule over the months, as much as anyone could be familiar with the comings and goings of somebody prepared to fly anywhere in the country at a moment's notice. Penelope wondered whether the BAU had handled cases in all fifty states, but thought it would be inappropriate to ask. "And while I ring that up for you, care to tell me what's bothering you?"
JJ looked surprised for a moment, then smiled at her sheepishly. "That obvious, huh?"
"Kinda." Penelope shrugged. "You don't have to be a profiler to know when something's going on with someone you care about."
JJ's blue eyes softened. "I was actually worried about you."
"Me?"
"Well, I heard you met Morgan."
Penelope could feel the blush instantaneously begin to creep up her neck and willed her body to knock it off. "He's been in here a couple of times," she confirmed noncommittally.
"So you're aware of how he can be."
"How he can be?"
"He's..." JJ trailed off as if she were searching for the words, finally settling on, "He's Morgan. With his tight shirts and that silky voice he puts on for all the girls."
Penelope forced herself to laugh. "Uh, yeah, I'm familiar."
"Just..." JJ bit her lip in thought as she considered how to best finish her sentence. "You know he does that with a lot of women, right?" she asked eventually. "But he likes to have fun with them, not necessarily settle down with them. I don't think he means to lead them on, but more often than not, he ends up doing it anyway."
"Sounds like a lot of other guys I know," Penelope said wryly, ignoring the empty feeling inside her that JJ's words had elicited, and the other woman barked out a chuckle.
"You and me both, sister." Her face grew serious. "I just wanted to make sure you didn't get hurt, and to thank you again for the macarons, particularly the strawberry ones."
Penelope's laugh was sincere this time. "I make those for all of you guys, because when you board that jet on any given day, you're usually flying into hell," she told JJ quietly. "I know there's only so much any of you can tell me, but I see some of your cases on the news, and they're horrific, JJ." She shrugged. "If letting you taste-test some of my potential new recipes makes things a little less awful for you, then I'm glad to do it. And as for Morgan, I can give the flirtation right back to him, don't you worry," she assured, printing out JJ's receipt and stamping her loyalty card. "Two more stamps and you earn a free drink!"
JJ winced, tucking the card back into her purse. "That's the second one this month. One of these days, I'll quit caffeine, Penny."
"That would be terribly bad for business," Penelope joked.
--
When Morgan dropped by later that week, Penelope had a box waiting for him on the counter as usual. It was the first time she'd seen him since her conversation with JJ, and she was expecting to somehow feel differently about him in light of their talk, but her heart skipped a beat just the same.
"Hey, baby girl."
"Good morning, sweetness," she responded, swatting at him as he tried to open the box. "How many times have I told you not to peek at the merchandise while you're still in my shop?"
He grinned boyishly at her, looking for all the world like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Does this mean you're gonna spank me?"
She raised an eyebrow. "This is a place of business."
"After hours, then."
"Behave. Oh, and try to get the double-chocolate whoopie pie before any of your colleagues - I made it with you in mind," she told him coyly.
"Oh, yeah?"
"Mm-hm. It's called the Chocolate Thunder."
"I swear you're trying to kill me, woman."
Penelope just smiled.
--
The next time Morgan dropped by the coffeehouse, it was during the lull between when Penny's was technically meant to close and the time it actually did. The place was deserted, but Penelope hadn't locked up yet. When she heard the familiar jingle of the bell hanging over the door, she looked up with a smile that only grew wider when she saw the identity of the last-minute visitor.
"Well, hello, hot stuff," she began, but her grin faded when she saw the expression on Morgan's face. "What happened?"
"Hard case," Morgan said simply, and Penelope didn't push him to divulge more. As he walked toward her, he snagged a chair sitting at one of the taller tables in her mismatched collection and pulled it up to the counter. Wordlessly, she fired up the coffee maker she'd been about to wipe down for the day and grabbed the necessary syrup to create his usual.
"Can you make it a double?"
She blinked. "Double espresso? Double syrup?"
"You got a shot of anything harder?"
Penelope frowned at him, worried, and he shrugged in response, the two of them lapsing into silence as the machine hissed and steamed. When it was done, she grabbed Morgan's favorite mug - one she'd purchased with him in mind after he'd come in a few times, it had the phrase ONCE YOU GO BLACK, YOU NEVER GO BACK emblazoned upon it in huge white letters. The syrup heart she drew in the foam raised a slight but unconvincing smile from the agent, and he nursed the mug as if he were sitting at a bar, staring into it broodingly.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"Not really."
"OK." Penelope pulled on her rubber gloves and reached for the cloth she used to clean the outside of the coffee maker, intending to let Morgan sit in silence for as long as he needed - which turned out not to be very long at all.
A couple of minutes later, he said softly, "I met this woman in Seattle who had a bomb under the seat of her car."
Quietly, Penelope rinsed the cloth, sensing it would be better not to interrupt him. She'd seen the case of the anti-technology bomber on the news and, as she always did when a few days went by without Morgan or any of the others dropping into the coffeehouse, had wondered if the BAU was brought in to investigate.
"We got to her in time, but she was already in the car and we couldn't get her out until we disabled the bomb," Morgan elaborated, his voice remarkably steady until it cracked a little on the last word.
Still, Penelope said nothing.
"So the bomb tech is there and Hotch is telling me to step back, because if something gets messed up somehow then the three of us are gonna be blown to pieces, and there's no reason for me to be involved anymore, you know?"
Penelope nodded.
"But I couldn't do it." Morgan shook his head. "I know I was breaking protocol, I know it was stupid, but she, uh. She reminded me of my mom."
Penelope's stomach lurched at the thought of the situation ending less favorably.
"I don't think it was stupid," she said honestly. "I think it was brave."
This time, Morgan's smile was genuine, albeit small and a little shaky. He looked tired. "We got back a couple hours ago, and Hotch told me to take the rest of the day off. Clear my head, you know?"
"And you ended up here," Penelope observed, trying not to sound flattered.
"Sure seems that way," he acknowledged wryly, and she could see the old Morgan returning piece by piece. He slid his hand into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and held out his Penny's Pals loyalty card and a few dollar bills. "What do I owe you for the coffee?"
She rolled her eyes, waving away the proffered payment but stamping the card nonetheless. "Please, it's on the house."
He opened his mouth to protest, and she silenced him with a Look.
They fell back into not speaking after that, but it was a much more companionable silence than the previous one they'd shared that night. Morgan watched Penelope clean, periodically offering to help even though they both knew she'd shoot him down every time, and eventually he took to gazing at the wildly decorated walls, making comments every so often.
"David Bowie, huh?"
"David Bowie forever."
Morgan must have been unable to think of anything to say to that, because he was quiet for a short while before asking, "Why do you have a map of Narnia on the wall?"
Penelope's "Why not?" elicited a similar non-response.
She was nearly done sweeping the floor behind the counter, her last task before she could lock up, when Morgan said "Hey, Garcia?" and tilted his head in the direction of the back wall. "Those your parents?"
"Audrey Hepburn and Tom Baker?" she asked airily, making a halfhearted bid to distract him with her Breakfast at Tiffany's print and Doctor Who poster.
He looked at her carefully, and she felt silly for hoping that tactic would work with a trained FBI profiler.
"Nah, the two people in the middle," he clarified gingerly, as if he'd realized he was on delicate ground and didn't want to push. "The lady looks like you; that's why I noticed the picture."
Penelope knew from her conversations with Reid that geographic and locational profiling were key components of the BAU's work, and the team could often gain insight into an unsub's psyche simply by analyzing the spaces where he or she lived and worked, the sites where crimes were perpetrated and bodies dumped. She wondered what the layout of Penny's said about her, whether the variegated selection of tables and chairs reflected an inability to commit or if the photos, wall hangings, and other pieces of art that crowded the walls made it seem like she was overcompensating for the emptiness inside her, staving off her own sadness with as much technicolor clutter as she could.
"Who's the guy?" Morgan continued in the same cautious tone, still watching her closely. "I don't see a family resemblance."
When she didn't reply immediately, he reached across the counter and brushed his fingertips across the top of her hand. The contact made her nerves short-circuit, and she desperately hoped he couldn't tell. Part of her wished she hadn't taken off the rubber gloves.
"It's OK if you don't wanna talk about it, Garcia."
He could sense she was uncomfortable and was giving her an out, which she normally would have taken but for the unexpected and powerful need welling inside her to finally share the burden of what happened to her parents with another human being.
"That's my stepdad," she told Morgan, talking to the hand that had just been touching hers rather than looking at his face. "My mom and dad got divorced when I was a baby, so he raised me. I took his last name."
Morgan nodded slowly, squinting a little at the photo. There was something stamped in the bottom right-hand corner, a date she'd committed to memory as the day the last image of her parents ever captured in life was taken, and she knew he was putting the pieces together in his mind.
"What happened to them?" he asked quietly, and she shrugged.
"A drunk driver, when I was eighteen." She was surprised and a little shocked by how aloof she sounded, saying the words out loud for the first time in as long as she could remember. She wondered if her tone made it seem as if she didn't care, but then she thought again about Morgan's profession and figured he wouldn't be fooled by her flat affect. Haltingly, she met his eyes.
She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting to see in them, but it wasn't what she found, which was a clear, sharp pain that went far beyond detached sympathy and crossed into something even more personal than the experience in Seattle that he'd relayed to her earlier.
"My father was killed trying to stop a robbery when I was ten." His voice sounded rougher, huskier than usual, and she felt the hurt of his admission almost as sharply as she had her own. "I was with him."
"I'm sorry," she whispered after a beat, at a loss for anything else to say.
There was a tenderness in his eyes now, and for a short, electric second, she wondered if he would lean in to kiss her, but he cleared his throat instead.
"I'm sorry too," he said finally, sounding at once like the same old Morgan again, as if a mental curtain had come down and sectioned off the anguish that had been so apparent mere seconds before. "I wouldn't have asked about the photo if I'd known."
"It's OK," she responded quietly, and in an odd way, she meant it.
She'd kind of fallen off the grid after her parents died, lost herself in a series of artists' communes along the West Coast, eventually got a job at a coffeehouse that helped her figure out how to translate her talent for mixing colors and mediums into brewing java beans and baking, then moved clear across the country to found her own business in Quantico, Virginia, using her inheritance as startup capital. She'd chosen Quantico because it seemed safe to her, reminded her of the law enforcement officers who so gently broke the news to her that awful day, and with the childlike logic of someone who was barely more than a child herself, she'd rationalized that the more high-ranking and numerous the law enforcement officers around her, the more secure she would feel. At no point in time since then had she ever really discussed her parents, beyond faux-casually confirming the identities of the people in the photograph to patrons who asked, which didn't happen as often as one might expect. Before Morgan, no one had been sufficiently observant to notice how long ago the photo was dated - or, at least, had never thought to question it, a state of affairs that didn't really surprise her. Although the Quantico community had grown fond of her, the sentiment stayed mostly at a superficial level; she was the blonde behind the counter who always had a cheery greeting for everyone, sold the best baked goods in town, and made your coffee exactly the way you liked it, but she wasn't generally seen as someone with whom to have a deep conversation, and for the most part, she was grateful for that.
"Hey, are you doing anything tonight?"
For a second, Penelope thought Morgan was talking to someone else, which was stupid because they were the only two people in the building.
"Am I what?" she stalled.
"This evening. Do you have plans?"
She thought of the Cake Boss episode on her DVR and the copy of Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef sitting on her bedside table.
"Um, no, I don't have plans."
Morgan shrugged. "Seems like we could both do with a pick-me-up, and for once, I'm not working. You wanna hit up Scarpetta's with me?"
Penelope's stomach flipped. "I... OK."
--
Although Scarpetta's wasn't inordinately fancy, it did have a dress code, and at that moment, Penelope didn't meet it. Morgan was wearing a suit jacket and nice jeans, and she felt woefully underdressed in the faded turquoise sundress and lime green cardigan she'd donned early that morning, before the sun had come up.
"I would need to change, though." She hastily tried to picture the state in which she'd left her apartment and was pretty sure it would pass the guest test. "If you don't mind coming upstairs for a few minutes..."
"Like I'd ever deny a beautiful woman a request like that," Morgan teased, and she couldn't help but laugh.
"Slow down, sugar," she told him whimsically, picking up the cash box that contained the day's takings and beckoning Morgan in the direction of an unobtrusive door sandwiched between the women's bathroom and the store room. After she unlocked it, Morgan leaned over and held it open.
"Ladies first, Garcia."
She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged in response. Flirting was something he couldn't help, it seemed.
He climbed the stairs behind her, and it was strange having somebody follow her. Of course, her landlord came to check up on things periodically, and one time she'd needed to call an electrician after a brainstorming session involving new frosting flavors and too many mixers caused a power surge, but aside from them, nobody else had seen the place where she spent most of her time away from the shop.
After she reached the landing at the top of the staircase and unlocked her front door, she saw her wall art and knickknacks as if for the first time and wondered again what Morgan thought of her decorating style and what it said about her. She scarcely had any possessions that predated her move to Quantico, which she supposed Morgan would interpret as an effort to erase her past, but she'd acquired a lot of tchotchkes from day trips she'd taken and eBay auctions she'd won, so the apartment was by no means bare. During her time in Virginia, she'd visited basically everything that could be considered a tourist attraction at least once, and had been to most of the museums in D.C. multiple times as different exhibits came and went. Her favorite exhibit of all was the permanent one in the Popular Culture wing of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, because she loved to look at the original pair of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore while filming The Wizard of Oz.
The only trace of Penelope's old life resided in a frame on a side table by the couch - a photo of her when she was about seven, gap-toothed and smiling, riding a horse on the beach, flanked by her mom and stepfather. Even now, she found it impossible to look at without feeling a twinge of bittersweet nostalgia deep within her chest.
"I won't be too long," she told Morgan, picking up the remote from the side table and holding it out to him. "Feel free to watch TV or something."
"I might just take you up on that. Take your time, baby girl."
Penelope was about to close the door to her bedroom when DC Cupcakes crackled into life on the screen and Morgan laughed in delight.
--
For the most part, Penelope lived modestly. Her apartment was the same size as the coffeehouse below but seemed a lot smaller, as the space was divided between the combined living room/kitchen area that Morgan was currently occupying, the bedroom off to one side, and the bathroom beyond that. One would think Penelope's biggest extravagance was the flatscreen television Morgan was currently watching - which, incidentally, she'd snapped up on clearance the previous year - but her real investment was inside her closet. It wasn't that she bought expensive clothes, more that she purchased a lot of them in all different colors of the rainbow, and she fought a losing battle to keep them at least vaguely organized on hangers or shelves, or stacked in neatly folded piles. She regarded her collection now, wondering why, if there were so many individual pieces, she couldn't find a single thing suitable to wear to Scarpetta's.
"Yo, Garcia?" Morgan called from the other room, and she rolled her eyes. So much for letting her take her time.
"I'll be out in a minute!" she shouted back, unearthing a simple mini-dress with a black-and-white houndstooth pattern that had been half hidden behind a heavy leopard-print coat. She regarded it critically. It could work with the appropriate accessories.
"Nah, no rush - I was just wondering if you know how to make banana cupcakes with peanut butter frosting."
She blinked. "...Are you still watching DC Cupcakes?"
There was a pause. "Maybe."
Penelope had to bite her lip to keep herself from laughing. She'd been to Georgetown Cupcakes several times, and while she deeply respected the craft of creating so-called designer cupcakes, she hadn't been impressed by how much everything cost.
"I can make you any kind you want, sugar, at half the price they're asking."
She grinned in anticipation, expecting a flirtatious response, and she wasn't disappointed.
"I knew there was a reason I liked you, princess," Morgan called back, and the fact that she could clearly hear the smile in his voice made her stomach flutter.
"I'll be ready soon, OK?" She cringed at the way her voice sounded - a little higher than usual, thrilled and girlish - and hoped Morgan hadn't picked up on the difference.
"Take your sweet time, baby girl. Can't rush perfection."
When she glanced at herself in the full-length mirror that hung on her door, she found she was blushing furiously.
--
Penelope decided to go with the houndstooth dress, pairing it with a classic pearl necklace, matching earrings that reminded her of the ones Princess Diana used to wear, and the soft, tall, white leather boots she loved but didn't wear often for fear of dropping coffee grounds on them. She cinched the dress at the waist with a magenta belt and added matching eyeshadow to her upper lids to complete the look. As she ran a brush through her hair, she critiqued herself in the mirror and was secretly pleased with what she saw. She didn't often have occasion to dress up.
"Hey, Garcia?" Morgan called again, and she felt a warm fondness spreading in her chest at simply hearing his voice - which, she conceded, was probably a negative development. "Would bubblegum frosting be completely disgusting?"
"Bubblegum?" she yelled back skeptically, wrinkling her nose.
"Uh-huh."
She added a touch of gloss to her lips, took a deep breath, and opened the door that led back into her living room.
"Probably, but I can figure out a way to whip some up if you'd like to try it," she said at a normal volume, and Morgan turned to look at her.
He was silent for a second, which prompted her to nervously touch the skirt of the dress, smoothing away nonexistent creases.
"...What?" she asked finally.
His eyes swept across her body, lingering on her chest before eventually settling on her face. "Damn, you look amazing."
The quickening of her heartbeat was instant. "I had to go all out to keep up with you," she shot back, and the grin this elicited made her knees weak. Yeah, she admitted to herself, she was kind of in trouble here.
--
Scarpetta's was just a short walk away, but by the time they arrived, the butterflies in Penelope's stomach felt like they were about to burst out of her body altogether, which would for sure have ruined her dress. Morgan held the door open, and the expression of the man at the front desk - an infrequent customer of hers - metamorphosed from detached politeness to filial friendliness as soon as he caught sight of her companion.
"Derek!" he exclaimed, and Penelope was pretty sure this was the first time she'd seen two men bump fists while wearing suit jackets. "You been busy working? You haven't brought anyone here in a couple weeks."
"You know how the job can be, man. This is Penelope, by the way."
Penelope curtsied as she took the man's hand, her curiosity piqued by how well he and Morgan seemed to know each other.
"How are Angela and the kids?" Morgan asked.
"Fine, fine." The man continued talking as he led them to a table. "You know that science fair Frankie was gettin' himself all worked up about? First place."
Morgan beamed. "I knew it. Tell him I never had a doubt in my mind, will you?"
"Will do." He handed them both menus. "Jane will be over in a second to take your drink orders, OK?"
"Thanks, man."
As his friend walked away, Morgan focused his attention solely on Garcia, and at once, her breath quickened. It was amazing how he could turn the intensity in his eyes on and off like that, and she was a little incredulous about how instantly it affected her.
"I'm really glad you agreed to come out with me tonight," he told her with sincerity - or what she interpreted as sincerity, at least. He'd seemed so open, so unguarded earlier at the coffeehouse, but his familiarity with the staff at Scarpetta's had sparked a sense of cautionary mistrust in Penelope's brain.
"You haven't brought anyone here in couple weeks?" she echoed, quoting his friend's words instead of responding to what Morgan had just said to her. "How often do you come here?"
He shifted in his seat. "From time to time."
"When was the last time?" She tried to keep her tone casual, quashing the sinking feeling taking root in her stomach as much as she could.
"Uh, about two and a half weeks ago."
"On a date?"
"You could call it that." He tilted his head, his expression somewhere between amused and confused. "You interrogating me now?"
She shrugged. "I'm just interested. Didn't go well?"
"Oh, you know," Morgan, suddenly a master of discretion, was vague. "Things between us... fizzled."
What he meant, she thought, recalling the conversation she'd had with JJ, was that he'd met a pretty young thing, wined her, dined her, sixty-nined her, then lost interest.
"Oh," Penelope said lightly, trying her best not to seem upset. If she were honest about it, her disappointment was directed more toward herself than him. After all, JJ had explicitly warned her against falling for his charms, so when it came down to it, she thought, she only had herself to blame.
"Hey." Morgan's voice was quiet now, and he touched her hand as he'd done earlier that night at Penny's. "You didn't think this was a date, right?"
He sounded genuinely concerned, and although the rational part of Penelope's brain reminded her that if anyone could authentically fake emotion, it would be an FBI profiler, she couldn't shake the feeling that he was legitimately worried about inadvertently leading her on.
For all his flirting and teasing, she'd been quite aware their outing hadn't been a date; it had simply been easy to let her own feelings affect her perception. What was it he'd called it? A pick-me-up - two people enjoying each other's company by unwinding at a local restaurant after a trying day's work - but that hadn't stopped her from hoping. Her mind helpfully replayed the moment when she'd emerged from the bedroom and Morgan had stared at her cleavage for a little too long, but she swiftly banished the memory.
"Of course not," she said breezily, affixing him with the same bright smile she offered her customers. He looked searchingly at her for a moment before finally giving her a slow nod.
"You cool with red wine?"
"Please."
--
When Penelope didn't see Morgan for a few days after their non-date at Scarpetta's, she thought he might be avoiding her, but then she realized she hadn't seen any other members of his team either. In time, the rest of them drifted back, Reid as geeky and loquacious as always, Hotchner austere but unfailingly polite, JJ quietly luminous. (When JJ found out she was pregnant by her boyfriend, a New Orleans police officer she'd met the previous year on a case, she'd told Penelope before any of her colleagues, something that meant more to Penelope than she could put into words.) As the days went by with no sign of Morgan, Penelope felt him slipping into the annals of her life, one more relic of her past, a what if never answered. She watched the news sometimes and wondered whether Morgan was involved in investigating a suspicious explosion in Texas, a spate of suicides in Pennsylvania, the disappearance of a child at a mall a mere half-hour from Quantico, and she caught herself looking for him in the background of the footage, peering at the screen of the same TV on which he'd watched DC Cupcakes and then called out to inquire about bubblegum frosting.
By the time a series of fatal shootings in Manhattan hit the headlines a few weeks later, Penelope had essentially given up on seeing the special agent again. With Morgan's schedule, things could never work with him anyway, she'd told herself, comfortably adopting the same numbness in which she'd found such solace after her parents died. One thing still bothered her, though, a question she couldn't shake - why had Morgan managed to get under her skin in a way no one else could before? It kept her up at night sometimes, the simple fact that there was a puzzle piece missing, a virus without an antidote, because it didn't fit with the way she lived her life and, in a way, she hated Morgan for it.
Historically, Penelope Garcia was not a mooner. She was a go-getter, a firecracker, someone who made things happen for herself and didn't wait for anybody, because she knew firsthand that even the best laid plans can go awry. She learned that lesson when she was eighteen and hadn't committed to anything more serious than baked goods, roasted coffee beans, and paying her bills on time ever since.
But then, she'd met Morgan.
---<---<---@
Part Two.
Author: that_1_incident
Fandom: "Criminal Minds"
Art: Here by astral_angel and here by kymericl
Pairing: Derek Morgan/Penelope Garcia
Rating: PG-13/FRT
Word Count: ~16,500
Warnings: Semi-AU, the Boston Reaper, a fair amount of abyss-gazing, and a small guest appearance by Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
Summary: As the proprietress of Penny's - unquestionably the best coffeehouse in Quantico, Virginia - California transplant Penelope Garcia relishes her role as bright, carefree hostess while almost entirely divorcing herself from her past. When Supervisory Special Agent Derek Morgan walks into her life with his high-stress career in the FBI and his own personal tragedy in the rearview mirror, her barriers begin to break down amid Doctor Who posters, unsubs, macarons, and exploding ambulances. But opening up to Morgan - and, by extension, to his colleagues in the Behavioral Analysis Unit - is not without its difficulties, and only time will tell whether Penelope is truly up to the challenge.
Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me; I use them respectfully but without permission. Title from Hanson's Penny & Me. Some elements taken from actual "Criminal Minds" episodes; notably "Empty Planet" (2x8), "Lo-Fi" (3x20), "Mayhem" (4x1), "Omnivore" (4x18), and "Nameless, Faceless" (5x1).
Author's Notes: Written for cm_bigbang; my amazing artists were astral_angel and kymericl. Thanks to the LJ-less Xtina for the beta. Also posted here on FF.net and here on AO3. This fic came about in part because every fandom needs a coffeehouse AU - if one already exists in this fandom that I don't know about, oh my God, hook me up.
---<---<---@
Penny's was one of those establishments that was bigger on the inside than the outside would have led you to believe - which wasn't to say it was expansive, but rather, its layout made optimal use of the limited space available. There were standing bar-type structures against the windows for people-watchers and those waiting for someone, while larger parties and shrinking violets had a variety of tables to choose from - a delightful hodgepodge of different sizes, heights, and types of woods - and even a handful of booths in the back corners, although those were usually occupied by people typing with obscene focus. More often than not, these patrons would have enormous cups sitting beside their laptops - extra super huge, according to the sign in the front window, and that was actually what people asked for when they ordered, as the biggest-sized drink that Penny's carried was named as such by the owner, and very aptly, too.
Although a lot of the regulars came for the coffee, which was brewed strong and dark and in any flavor you could have thought to ask for, the real attraction was the bakery. Despite the fact that the owner had no formal training, the flair with which she decorated cupcakes was something that could not be taught, and even the staunchest dieter had trouble turning down her apricot danishes or Fluffernutter cookies.
Penelope Garcia wasn't as tall as she'd have liked to be, but few people considered her short, thanks to her stunning array of heels. She had seemingly endless pairs in a variety of garish colors and patterns - bright orange, deep purple, blue-striped and leopard-spotted - and she often coordinated these with the polish on her nails. As soon as you saw Penelope, you could tell that Penny's was every inch hers; her personality was obviously injected into the place, from the colorful wall hangings to the shabby-chic cushions situated as if at random on certain strategically-chosen chairs. Before she'd moved here and opened up the place, no one in her life had ever really called her Penny except for her parents, who died long ago and way before their time, but she'd embraced the name as part of her new start and hadn't looked back since. She didn't generally like to talk about her parents, but she displayed a photo of them on the wall behind the counter nonetheless so they could watch over her from their frame of modest gilt, sandwiched between a print of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's and a mini poster of the fourth doctor from Doctor Who, whom she particularly admired for his scarf.
Penelope couldn't remember the last time she took a day off, but she didn't feel burdened by her dedication to her job. The way she saw it, her livelihood wasn't really work if she was doing what she loved. Even on weekends, she was usually up with the sun concocting new recipes, updating the Penny's website, or simply walking along the Potomac River, brainstorming her next business moves as the wind ruffled her blonde hair.
When people think of Quantico, they typically imagine the base and nothing else. Certainly, the area is dominated by it, as it sprawls across more than five hundred acres and houses the FBI Academy, the FBI Laboratory, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service headquarters, among others, but Quantico is also a settlement in its own right, bordered on three sides by the base and on the fourth by the river. Inhabited by just a few hundred people, the part of Quantico that isn't the base has a sleepy, small-town feel belying its close proximity to Washington, D.C.
In a town of just eleven streets, Penelope's business didn't exactly face a lot of competition. Sure, there was a pizzeria, a bar, and a more upscale establishment named Scarpetta's that served mainly Italian fare and was only open in the evenings, but when it came to grabbing a coffee before work or partaking of a sandwich or sweet treat at lunch, Penny's was the place to go, and everyone knew it.
--
Penelope regarded customers as being like children in the sense that while she knew she wasn't meant to have favorites, sometimes she couldn't help herself. One regular of whom she was particularly fond was tall like a beanstalk, with long, lanky limbs and tapered fingers. He snagged a booth at the back whenever one was available, drank his coffee without milk but added about a million sugars, and read faster than she thought was humanly possible. She'd asked him about it once, inquiring whether he was actually taking in the words or simply skimming the pages, and he'd handed her his book and recited two paragraphs from memory to answer her question.
She didn't think she was that much older than him, but she still felt protective of him in a motherly sort of way. It was hard not to want to take care of this man, with his huge doe eyes and frenetic mannerisms. Penelope knew he worked as a profiler for the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI and wondered how the sweet, gentle soul she'd come to know managed to handle the horrors of such a career. If she didn't know better, she would have guessed he had a much more unassuming occupation, like teaching assistant or librarian. Even his surname supported this idea, as his name was Dr. Spencer Reid.
--
Reid usually frequented Penny's alone, although he was occasionally accompanied by a pretty blonde named JJ, with whom he worked. JJ didn't look like your typical FBI agent any more than Reid, but one thing Penelope had learned since opening up shop near one of the largest U.S. Marine Corps bases in the world was that for every suited-and-booted, stern-faced macho man, there was a member of the Bureau who didn't fit a single one of the stereotypes. In fact, whenever she saw a face she didn't recognize, Penelope tried to make things interesting by placing bets with herself about whether the person was FBI, NCIS, Marine, and so forth. She'd become pretty good at guessing, but there were still those who managed to fool her - something that secretly thrilled her because perfect batting averages were boring, after all.
It was raining the morning Reid stepped into the shop with a stranger, his light brown hair tousled with water. There was a bell above the doorway that tinkled gently every time someone entered or exited, and when Penelope glanced up, she froze. The newcomer was tall and mocha-skinned, with an impressive musculature obvious even from beneath his leather jacket. He looked around for a few moments, taking in the ambience of the place as Reid wiped the raindrops off his glasses with the sleeves of his cardigan, and when the unfamiliar man's eyes met hers, she immediately looked down at the cups and saucers she'd been collecting from a recently evacuated table and hurried behind the counter to take their orders, hoping her blush wasn't as pronounced as the hot sensation on her cheeks suggested.
"Well, hello," the stranger said to her as he approached, his voice deep, pleasing, and laced with flirtation. Next to him, Reid almost imperceptibly rolled his eyes, as if he'd seen this routine enough times to be bored with it.
Penelope smoothed the ruffles of the neon pink apron she'd donned earlier that morning.
"What can I get for you?" she asked - perhaps a little more breathily than she'd have liked, but all the words came out in the right order, so she couldn't really complain.
"Just the usual for me, thanks," Reid responded.
"For here?" she confirmed.
He nodded. Beside him, his comrade shifted his weight from right foot to left and perused the menu boards intently before eventually inquiring, "If I order a blondie, do I get a mini you?"
Penelope felt her face warm up even more and hoped to God that she wasn't blushing to the roots of her fair hair.
"Uh, not exactly. Blondies are like brownies, except they're made with brown sugar rather than cocoa." She pointed to a display in front of the register. "If you sign up for a Penny's Pals loyalty card, I can give you two for three dollars."
He grinned at her, and she was taken aback by the startling whiteness of his teeth. "Brown sugar, huh? You a fan of brown sugar?"
It'd been a while since Penelope had been flirted with like this - well, she wasn't sure she'd ever been flirted with exactly like this - but she picked up on the entendre nonetheless, feeling her heartbeat quicken in her chest.
"You could say I have a sweet tooth," she parried.
Although most of her attention was on the stranger, she couldn't help but notice Reid looking restless and immediately snapped back into her role as gracious hostess, getting the feeling Reid blended into the woodwork a lot when the other man was around.
"I'll get your coffee while your friend here makes up his mind, OK, honey?" she told him gently.
Reid smiled at her and actually held her gaze for a few seconds before glancing at the floor and saying, "By the way, this is Supervisory Special Agent Derek Morgan. I work with him at the BAU."
She felt a frisson of excitement run down her spine as she turned to grab a mug off the rack for Reid. The mugs at Penny's were much like the collection of assorted tables strewn about the space - no two were alike, and each customer had his or her own favorite. On her last jaunt to D.C., Penelope had picked up a Periodic Table mug at a museum gift store, and sure enough, Reid had immediately claimed it as his own.
"So you're based in Quantico permanently?" she inquired of Morgan, trying to sound nonchalant as she carefully poured the contents of her trusty coffee pot into Reid's mug. "How come I haven't seen you in here before?"
When she looked up, Morgan's eyes touched hers like sparks. He grinned again, and she felt her breath hitch in her throat.
"I ascribe to the Roll outta bed twenty minutes late, break the speed limit to get here, then suck down bad coffee in the kitchenette kinda mentality, but Dr. Reid here's been telling me to check this place out for like a month now -"
"Five weeks and three days," Reid murmured as he took the steaming mug from Penelope, and Morgan rolled his eyes.
"For like a month now," he repeated, though not unkindly, "so today I finally managed it, and you know what? I'm very glad I did."
Penelope felt her face heating up again.
"You haven't even tried anything yet," she pointed out, then remembered he'd expressed interest in a blondie and bustled over to the display cabinet. "Did you want that blondie?"
"Make it two for three bucks, and can you sign me up for the loyalty card? As for the coffee..." He glanced at the menu boards again. "Surprise me. Just not too sweet - unlike Pretty Boy here, I got no desire to give myself diabetes."
Reid bristled. "While ingesting high amounts of sugar may trigger diabetes in someone with prediabetes or other predispositions, it's not a direct cause of the condition," he pointed out, and Penelope sensed he'd had this conversation with Morgan in the past.
Morgan winked at her, then said to Reid, "Yeah, well, I'm already sweet enough on my own. You wanna show me where you normally sit in this joint?"
Reid wordlessly hoisted his messenger bag up on his shoulder and set off for the corner booth, clutching his Periodic Table mug. Penelope's heart skipped a beat when she realized Morgan's attention was now solely focused on her.
"Here," she said, grabbing a Penny's Pals card and scribbling Morgan's name on it before stamping it with a small heart. "Ten stamps earn you a free drink."
Their hands brushed as Morgan took the card from her.
"So you're sayin' I need to come back and see you nine more times?"
"Uh-huh." (By now, her face felt like it was on fire. She hoped it didn't show.)
"I don't think that'll be a problem," he said silkily. The butterflies in her stomach beat their wings more fiercely, and she decided on a goal of getting it together enough to behave like a normal human being in his presence by the time he got his tenth stamp. "I take it you're Penny?"
"Penelope," she blurted, then frowned at herself. Penny had become her alter-ego of sorts - her public persona, if you could call it that, and she wasn't sure why she'd just voluntarily drawn back the veil for a stranger. After all, Penny was the name of the bright, carefree person at the counter who offered every patron a smile and a great deal on blondies, while Penelope was someone else entirely, someone with tragedy in the rearview mirror. Even the name itself was kind of sad: Penelope, Odysseus' wife, faithfully fended off suitors in Ithaca for two decades when her husband was voyaging across the ocean, sleeping with witches and nymphs and all manner of other women. The unfairness of that little juxtaposition had always kind of pissed her off.
"You have a last name or are you just Penelope, like Cher or Madonna?"
Penelope's own laugh took her by surprise. "For better or worse, I've yet to achieve that level of notoriety. It's Garcia - Penelope Garcia."
"Garcia," he echoed as if he were trying on her name for size, tasting the syllables on his tongue. "You mind if I call you that?"
"Um..." She'd never been among those people who went by their surnames at school, at work, or in social groups, but the idea of Morgan addressing her like that was oddly thrilling. "Sure!" she chirped, and Morgan looked pleased.
--
Penelope had learned to cherish the lull sandwiched between the hustle and bustle of the morning rush and the encroachment of the early lunch crowd, but the day she met Morgan, the quietness she usually embraced seemed more of an annoyance. Her whole day felt strangely off-kilter, like something had lodged itself under her skin, beneath her consciousness, but she didn't know what or how to fix it. She found herself wondering whether Morgan would drop by later in the day to sample her lunch fare, and for a couple of hours, she even had a Pavlovian reaction to the bell above her own door, looking up hopefully whenever she heard it jingle.
Closing time was technically five, but as Penelope fully accommodated stragglers, it ended up being more like six on most days. Rather than kicking people out, she tidied up around them, clearing plates and mugs off tabletops and scrubbing down the counter that she spent much of her day standing behind. She would offer half-priced baked goods to anyone who wanted them, and after the last patron had made his or her way out, she would lock the front door, turn off the lights, and either retire to the second-floor apartment she kept above the store or make her way down to the edge of the Potomac, where she'd crumble the remains of the day's bread and feed them to the ducks. She did the latter that day, eager for the cool, refreshing breeze that came off the water year-round. Breathing in the air and soaking up the sunshine of the waning summer day were simple, comforting rituals, and after just a few minutes, she was already feeling more centered.
By the next morning, she'd relegated Morgan to a small recess of her mind and was ready to direct her focus toward piloting her newest creation, Peppermint Pennies, which were pretty much exactly like Peppermint Patties except significantly larger and made with a secret ingredient. She greeted her regulars as brightly as usual, making sure to have Agent Gibbs' order ready and waiting on the counter for when he dropped by at the same time as always - an extra-super-huge, black as the ace of spades. When Reid stepped through the door unaccompanied, she barely pouted, and when she managed to serve him without inquiring into Morgan's whereabouts, she mentally awarded herself a gold star. Her preoccupation with Morgan, she decided, had been a twenty-four hour affliction, like the virus that felled her for a day in third grade before relinquishing its grip as quickly as it had seized her - a passing vulnerability, but nothing more.
--
Morgan didn't reappear for almost a week, which wasn't entirely surprising. After all, the bureau had its own cafeteria, and Penelope had learned from various sources including Reid and JJ that there were kitchenettes on every floor, equipped with refrigerators and microwaves for those who brown-bagged it or brought in frozen meals. The very idea of frozen meals made Penelope shudder, as most everything at Penny's was organic and Fair Trade, and a good third of the menu was vegan. She'd rather sacrifice a whole day's takings than ingest something bland and irradiated, a type of cuisine she suspected Morgan was used to eating quite frequently. The thought of this made her sad and a little indignant.
Beyond indulging in vaguely judgmental conjecture about Morgan's eating habits, Penelope didn't have a lot of time to dwell on the agent, as the new Peppermint Pennies were taking her clientele by storm. Her earnings were up, largely due to the number of people accepting her ingeniously named Penny-for-a-Dollar offer when they bought any hot or iced beverage. She even sold one of the sweet treats to Aaron Hotchner, Reid's boss and a stereotypical FBI agent if Penelope had ever seen one, from the stiffly parted hair on his head to the wingtip shoes on his feet. He looked a little embarrassed when he bought it, as if she'd caught him tuning in to American Idol or indulging in some other behavior he no doubt saw as frivolous, but when she smiled at him in reassurance, she was rewarded with one of the brief, sincere grins that he all too scarcely allowed himself to offer.
The fact that her attention was wholly on her customer meant she didn't notice Morgan had entered the establishment until he strolled up to the counter and clapped Agent Hotchner on the back.
"Hotch, my man," Morgan said by way of a greeting, and Hotchner surreptitiously tucked the Penny-containing paper bag into his suit pocket.
"Thank you," Hotchner said politely as Penelope handed him his coffee and Morgan pretended not to see what he'd just bought. "Good morning, Morgan. I'll see you at the office."
Penelope stood silently next to Morgan as the two of them watched Hotchner walk out, and when Morgan turned back to look at her, he had a smile on his face that made her want to smile too.
"I had a feeling I'd see him here," he told her. "JJ and Reid have been talking about those Peppermint Pennies of yours all week. Made me and Hotch crazy."
Penelope tilted her head. "So how come you didn't drop by until today?"
"The two of us were outta town conducting an interview. In uh, California, actually."
"Really?" she asked excitedly. "I used to live there! What part?"
Morgan weighed her question for a few moments before answering measuredly, "Corcoran."
"Where the prison is?"
She'd asked mainly for a point of reference, but the expression on Morgan's face told her yes, where the prison was, and yes, that was why they went.
"Oh."
She broke eye contact with him, oddly embarrassed. Of course he would have visited the prison. It was his job to catch the people whom the more upstanding members of society had deemed unfit to walk among them, so it made sense for his involvement not to end after they'd been apprehended. Reid had discussed the BAU's role with her once in his typical long-winded fashion, all the while spooning more sugar into his Periodic Table mug than most people would ever be able to handle. He'd explained that determining why the perpetrators of awful crimes did what they did was just as important as figuring out the identities of dangerous unknown subjects (unsubs, he'd called them) and, of course, stopping them from hurting anyone else.
"Um, did you want the same drink I made you last time?" she inquired of Morgan, desperate to diffuse the sudden awkwardness she felt. "The Mocha Surprise? And a Peppermint Penny, right?"
He smiled at her again, but this time, his eyes looked tired. "That sounds great."
He didn't volunteer any more information about the trip, and at first, she didn't ask, but as she fired up the coffee machine, she couldn't help but start searching her memory for why she'd recently seen Corcoran in the news. The answer lit up her brain like a lightning bolt - B.J. Sloane, better known as the Santa Barbara Butcher, had just been incarcerated at the prison after receiving fifteen life sentences, one for each of the teenage girls he'd charmed off the street, abducted, and tortured to death. She glanced up at Morgan with her mouth open, and he didn't look surprised to see that she'd made the connection.
"Was it -?"
"Yeah," Morgan cut her off with a long look, and she realized it wouldn't be the best idea for him to talk about his involvement with a convicted serial murderer while in a busy coffeehouse. He probably wasn't even allowed to discuss the details.
"What was he like?" she asked anyway.
Penelope would've thought she had no desire to learn anything about Sloane beyond what the news had already told her, but she couldn't help wanting to know more from someone who'd met him face to face. She'd only seen a couple of photographs, including one of Sloane on his wedding day that the media liked to trot out at every opportunity, delightedly capitalizing on the story of the quintessential guy next door who'd turned out to be a monster. Indeed, the man who'd stared out from her television screen hadn't seemed threatening at all. On the contrary, his sandy blond hair and friendly features reminded her of the guy who owned the pizzeria down the street, and making that connection caused a chill to run right down her spine.
"He was completely normal on the surface, Garcia," Morgan said with a touch of sadness as he took his coffee cup from her hand. "Completely normal."
--
The exchange with Morgan rolled around in Penelope's head all day, interspersed with remembered snippets of news reports about Sloane's crimes and images of the man himself. Her mind kept bringing her back to the look on Morgan's face, and if the eyes truly were the window to the soul, then Morgan's soul was tortured. She hated the thought of what he, Reid, Hotchner, JJ, and the rest of the unit all did for a living, hunting down demons and climbing inside their heads. What was it Nietzsche had said? She recalled the famous quote with a shiver: Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
The grim work of the BAU lingered in her mind at closing time, and she was about to douse the lights and head upstairs when it occurred to her that although she couldn't do anything about Morgan's chosen career path, there was a way for her to make his job - and the rest of his team's - marginally more bearable. She headed back behind the counter and opened her folder of recipes.
--
It took a few weeks for Penelope to get everything together, but by the time Morgan had earned the sixth stamp on his Penny's Pals loyalty card, she was ready to unveil the surprise. Morgan watched curiously as she bent down behind the counter and emerged with one of the boxes she used for large orders - a simple cardboard container with the Penny's logo printed on it, which essentially consisted of the name written in Penelope's handwriting next to a simple rendering of a sunflower.
"What's this?"
Penelope beamed at him. "What I do best. It's for you and your team to take on that fancy jet of yours. No charge, just something to make your days better as you launch into the sky to fight evil."
"You make us sound like superheroes," Morgan said with a laugh. "And how do you know about the jet?"
She raised an eyebrow at him.
"...Reid." He answered his own question, and she giggled as he opened the box. "Oh my God, Garcia... you're a princess, you know that?"
She beamed, not knowing quite what to say, but he gave her an out by continuing, "OK, so what are these?"
"Macarons." Penelope said the name with a French flourish. "They're something new I'm trying out, and I'm not sure which flavors to start with, so I figured I could let you guys be my guinea pigs, so to speak." She pointed to the selection. "These ones are vanilla, the darker ones are chocolate, the ones with the orange filling are pumpkin spice, then there's strawberry, cappuccino, and lemon."
Morgan stared in astonishment. "If there's one thing my team's good at, it's eating," he declared, reaching for a macaron.
"Hey," Penelope scolded gently. "Save them for the jet."
"C'mon, one bite?" Morgan cajoled, but there was a twinkle in his eye as Penelope shook her head with a smirk. "You, Penelope Garcia, are a tease."
She tossed her head, secretly pleased by how well she was holding her own in front of a man whose physical presence quite frankly made her forget how to breathe. "I pride myself on it."
He chuckled, then quickly grew serious. "Thank you for this, baby girl. You really are a princess."
The way he was looking at her made her heart flutter, and she recalled the goal she'd set the first time she'd met him - to be immune to his charms by the time he'd earned his tenth stamp and a free drink. It was safe to say she wasn't exactly progressing as fast as she'd hoped.
--
It quickly emerged that the members of Aaron Hotchner's BAU team were traditionalists when it came to macarons. Chocolate was the hands-down favorite, although the second-place position was more hotly contested, to the point where every single member (including Hotch, albeit sheepishly) made sure to drop by the coffeehouse and register his or her preference.
Reid, perhaps unsurprisingly, had the most to say. He delivered an oral treatise of sorts that delved into the merits and shortcomings of each flavor and ultimately concluded that while pumpkin spice would be the seasonal favorite, vanilla and cappuccino had the most long-term staying power beside chocolate and were therefore the best options to add to the menu, particularly in light of the present economic instability.
JJ, who'd accompanied Reid to Penny's that day, discreetly rolled her eyes at Penelope during Reid's speech, the corners of her mouth twitching as if she were holding back laughter. Penelope cleared her throat to stave off her own mirth as she reached for the Dalek salt shaker she'd ordered online and repurposed as a sugar container with Reid in mind.
"I wish everyone had your passion for macarons," she said sincerely, handing him the Dalek. He beamed at her while pouring a liberal amount of sugar into his coffee, then turned to his colleague.
"You coming, JJ?"
JJ glanced at Penelope. "I'll be over in a second, OK, Spence?"
Reid shrugged and headed off to his regular booth, and Penelope tilted her head toward JJ, sensing something was up.
Although the other woman dropped by frequently, she tended to keep to herself, so Penelope didn't know her as well as some other customers. That said, she knew people, interacted with them day in and day out, and while she was no profiler, she could sense when they weren't saying what they wanted to, when they were holding something back. Her tried and true technique was to hover in people's general vicinity until they caved and confided in her, but she wasn't above administering the odd verbal prod when that approach didn't work.
JJ probably drank the most coffee out of anybody at the BAU, with the exception of Beth Griffith, who was part of a separate team to the one Agent Hotchner headed. Penelope wasn't exactly sure what JJ's job entailed, but she saw the other woman on the news sometimes when the FBI was handling high-profile cases, hair always immaculate and skin glowing, remaining alert and composed even as the press yelled questions from all directions, so all that caffeine obviously agreed with her. JJ gratefully took her cup and eyed the display of Peppermint Pennies that had been placed by the register to catch the attention of patrons.
Penelope glanced at the clock that hung behind the counter, one of those cat-shaped ones with a tail that acted as a pendulum and eyes that counted the seconds. It was hot pink with white stripes.
"You have time to get something else," she noted, because she'd come to know JJ's schedule over the months, as much as anyone could be familiar with the comings and goings of somebody prepared to fly anywhere in the country at a moment's notice. Penelope wondered whether the BAU had handled cases in all fifty states, but thought it would be inappropriate to ask. "And while I ring that up for you, care to tell me what's bothering you?"
JJ looked surprised for a moment, then smiled at her sheepishly. "That obvious, huh?"
"Kinda." Penelope shrugged. "You don't have to be a profiler to know when something's going on with someone you care about."
JJ's blue eyes softened. "I was actually worried about you."
"Me?"
"Well, I heard you met Morgan."
Penelope could feel the blush instantaneously begin to creep up her neck and willed her body to knock it off. "He's been in here a couple of times," she confirmed noncommittally.
"So you're aware of how he can be."
"How he can be?"
"He's..." JJ trailed off as if she were searching for the words, finally settling on, "He's Morgan. With his tight shirts and that silky voice he puts on for all the girls."
Penelope forced herself to laugh. "Uh, yeah, I'm familiar."
"Just..." JJ bit her lip in thought as she considered how to best finish her sentence. "You know he does that with a lot of women, right?" she asked eventually. "But he likes to have fun with them, not necessarily settle down with them. I don't think he means to lead them on, but more often than not, he ends up doing it anyway."
"Sounds like a lot of other guys I know," Penelope said wryly, ignoring the empty feeling inside her that JJ's words had elicited, and the other woman barked out a chuckle.
"You and me both, sister." Her face grew serious. "I just wanted to make sure you didn't get hurt, and to thank you again for the macarons, particularly the strawberry ones."
Penelope's laugh was sincere this time. "I make those for all of you guys, because when you board that jet on any given day, you're usually flying into hell," she told JJ quietly. "I know there's only so much any of you can tell me, but I see some of your cases on the news, and they're horrific, JJ." She shrugged. "If letting you taste-test some of my potential new recipes makes things a little less awful for you, then I'm glad to do it. And as for Morgan, I can give the flirtation right back to him, don't you worry," she assured, printing out JJ's receipt and stamping her loyalty card. "Two more stamps and you earn a free drink!"
JJ winced, tucking the card back into her purse. "That's the second one this month. One of these days, I'll quit caffeine, Penny."
"That would be terribly bad for business," Penelope joked.
--
When Morgan dropped by later that week, Penelope had a box waiting for him on the counter as usual. It was the first time she'd seen him since her conversation with JJ, and she was expecting to somehow feel differently about him in light of their talk, but her heart skipped a beat just the same.
"Hey, baby girl."
"Good morning, sweetness," she responded, swatting at him as he tried to open the box. "How many times have I told you not to peek at the merchandise while you're still in my shop?"
He grinned boyishly at her, looking for all the world like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Does this mean you're gonna spank me?"
She raised an eyebrow. "This is a place of business."
"After hours, then."
"Behave. Oh, and try to get the double-chocolate whoopie pie before any of your colleagues - I made it with you in mind," she told him coyly.
"Oh, yeah?"
"Mm-hm. It's called the Chocolate Thunder."
"I swear you're trying to kill me, woman."
Penelope just smiled.
--
The next time Morgan dropped by the coffeehouse, it was during the lull between when Penny's was technically meant to close and the time it actually did. The place was deserted, but Penelope hadn't locked up yet. When she heard the familiar jingle of the bell hanging over the door, she looked up with a smile that only grew wider when she saw the identity of the last-minute visitor.
"Well, hello, hot stuff," she began, but her grin faded when she saw the expression on Morgan's face. "What happened?"
"Hard case," Morgan said simply, and Penelope didn't push him to divulge more. As he walked toward her, he snagged a chair sitting at one of the taller tables in her mismatched collection and pulled it up to the counter. Wordlessly, she fired up the coffee maker she'd been about to wipe down for the day and grabbed the necessary syrup to create his usual.
"Can you make it a double?"
She blinked. "Double espresso? Double syrup?"
"You got a shot of anything harder?"
Penelope frowned at him, worried, and he shrugged in response, the two of them lapsing into silence as the machine hissed and steamed. When it was done, she grabbed Morgan's favorite mug - one she'd purchased with him in mind after he'd come in a few times, it had the phrase ONCE YOU GO BLACK, YOU NEVER GO BACK emblazoned upon it in huge white letters. The syrup heart she drew in the foam raised a slight but unconvincing smile from the agent, and he nursed the mug as if he were sitting at a bar, staring into it broodingly.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"Not really."
"OK." Penelope pulled on her rubber gloves and reached for the cloth she used to clean the outside of the coffee maker, intending to let Morgan sit in silence for as long as he needed - which turned out not to be very long at all.
A couple of minutes later, he said softly, "I met this woman in Seattle who had a bomb under the seat of her car."
Quietly, Penelope rinsed the cloth, sensing it would be better not to interrupt him. She'd seen the case of the anti-technology bomber on the news and, as she always did when a few days went by without Morgan or any of the others dropping into the coffeehouse, had wondered if the BAU was brought in to investigate.
"We got to her in time, but she was already in the car and we couldn't get her out until we disabled the bomb," Morgan elaborated, his voice remarkably steady until it cracked a little on the last word.
Still, Penelope said nothing.
"So the bomb tech is there and Hotch is telling me to step back, because if something gets messed up somehow then the three of us are gonna be blown to pieces, and there's no reason for me to be involved anymore, you know?"
Penelope nodded.
"But I couldn't do it." Morgan shook his head. "I know I was breaking protocol, I know it was stupid, but she, uh. She reminded me of my mom."
Penelope's stomach lurched at the thought of the situation ending less favorably.
"I don't think it was stupid," she said honestly. "I think it was brave."
This time, Morgan's smile was genuine, albeit small and a little shaky. He looked tired. "We got back a couple hours ago, and Hotch told me to take the rest of the day off. Clear my head, you know?"
"And you ended up here," Penelope observed, trying not to sound flattered.
"Sure seems that way," he acknowledged wryly, and she could see the old Morgan returning piece by piece. He slid his hand into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and held out his Penny's Pals loyalty card and a few dollar bills. "What do I owe you for the coffee?"
She rolled her eyes, waving away the proffered payment but stamping the card nonetheless. "Please, it's on the house."
He opened his mouth to protest, and she silenced him with a Look.
They fell back into not speaking after that, but it was a much more companionable silence than the previous one they'd shared that night. Morgan watched Penelope clean, periodically offering to help even though they both knew she'd shoot him down every time, and eventually he took to gazing at the wildly decorated walls, making comments every so often.
"David Bowie, huh?"
"David Bowie forever."
Morgan must have been unable to think of anything to say to that, because he was quiet for a short while before asking, "Why do you have a map of Narnia on the wall?"
Penelope's "Why not?" elicited a similar non-response.
She was nearly done sweeping the floor behind the counter, her last task before she could lock up, when Morgan said "Hey, Garcia?" and tilted his head in the direction of the back wall. "Those your parents?"
"Audrey Hepburn and Tom Baker?" she asked airily, making a halfhearted bid to distract him with her Breakfast at Tiffany's print and Doctor Who poster.
He looked at her carefully, and she felt silly for hoping that tactic would work with a trained FBI profiler.
"Nah, the two people in the middle," he clarified gingerly, as if he'd realized he was on delicate ground and didn't want to push. "The lady looks like you; that's why I noticed the picture."
Penelope knew from her conversations with Reid that geographic and locational profiling were key components of the BAU's work, and the team could often gain insight into an unsub's psyche simply by analyzing the spaces where he or she lived and worked, the sites where crimes were perpetrated and bodies dumped. She wondered what the layout of Penny's said about her, whether the variegated selection of tables and chairs reflected an inability to commit or if the photos, wall hangings, and other pieces of art that crowded the walls made it seem like she was overcompensating for the emptiness inside her, staving off her own sadness with as much technicolor clutter as she could.
"Who's the guy?" Morgan continued in the same cautious tone, still watching her closely. "I don't see a family resemblance."
When she didn't reply immediately, he reached across the counter and brushed his fingertips across the top of her hand. The contact made her nerves short-circuit, and she desperately hoped he couldn't tell. Part of her wished she hadn't taken off the rubber gloves.
"It's OK if you don't wanna talk about it, Garcia."
He could sense she was uncomfortable and was giving her an out, which she normally would have taken but for the unexpected and powerful need welling inside her to finally share the burden of what happened to her parents with another human being.
"That's my stepdad," she told Morgan, talking to the hand that had just been touching hers rather than looking at his face. "My mom and dad got divorced when I was a baby, so he raised me. I took his last name."
Morgan nodded slowly, squinting a little at the photo. There was something stamped in the bottom right-hand corner, a date she'd committed to memory as the day the last image of her parents ever captured in life was taken, and she knew he was putting the pieces together in his mind.
"What happened to them?" he asked quietly, and she shrugged.
"A drunk driver, when I was eighteen." She was surprised and a little shocked by how aloof she sounded, saying the words out loud for the first time in as long as she could remember. She wondered if her tone made it seem as if she didn't care, but then she thought again about Morgan's profession and figured he wouldn't be fooled by her flat affect. Haltingly, she met his eyes.
She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting to see in them, but it wasn't what she found, which was a clear, sharp pain that went far beyond detached sympathy and crossed into something even more personal than the experience in Seattle that he'd relayed to her earlier.
"My father was killed trying to stop a robbery when I was ten." His voice sounded rougher, huskier than usual, and she felt the hurt of his admission almost as sharply as she had her own. "I was with him."
"I'm sorry," she whispered after a beat, at a loss for anything else to say.
There was a tenderness in his eyes now, and for a short, electric second, she wondered if he would lean in to kiss her, but he cleared his throat instead.
"I'm sorry too," he said finally, sounding at once like the same old Morgan again, as if a mental curtain had come down and sectioned off the anguish that had been so apparent mere seconds before. "I wouldn't have asked about the photo if I'd known."
"It's OK," she responded quietly, and in an odd way, she meant it.
She'd kind of fallen off the grid after her parents died, lost herself in a series of artists' communes along the West Coast, eventually got a job at a coffeehouse that helped her figure out how to translate her talent for mixing colors and mediums into brewing java beans and baking, then moved clear across the country to found her own business in Quantico, Virginia, using her inheritance as startup capital. She'd chosen Quantico because it seemed safe to her, reminded her of the law enforcement officers who so gently broke the news to her that awful day, and with the childlike logic of someone who was barely more than a child herself, she'd rationalized that the more high-ranking and numerous the law enforcement officers around her, the more secure she would feel. At no point in time since then had she ever really discussed her parents, beyond faux-casually confirming the identities of the people in the photograph to patrons who asked, which didn't happen as often as one might expect. Before Morgan, no one had been sufficiently observant to notice how long ago the photo was dated - or, at least, had never thought to question it, a state of affairs that didn't really surprise her. Although the Quantico community had grown fond of her, the sentiment stayed mostly at a superficial level; she was the blonde behind the counter who always had a cheery greeting for everyone, sold the best baked goods in town, and made your coffee exactly the way you liked it, but she wasn't generally seen as someone with whom to have a deep conversation, and for the most part, she was grateful for that.
"Hey, are you doing anything tonight?"
For a second, Penelope thought Morgan was talking to someone else, which was stupid because they were the only two people in the building.
"Am I what?" she stalled.
"This evening. Do you have plans?"
She thought of the Cake Boss episode on her DVR and the copy of Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef sitting on her bedside table.
"Um, no, I don't have plans."
Morgan shrugged. "Seems like we could both do with a pick-me-up, and for once, I'm not working. You wanna hit up Scarpetta's with me?"
Penelope's stomach flipped. "I... OK."
--
Although Scarpetta's wasn't inordinately fancy, it did have a dress code, and at that moment, Penelope didn't meet it. Morgan was wearing a suit jacket and nice jeans, and she felt woefully underdressed in the faded turquoise sundress and lime green cardigan she'd donned early that morning, before the sun had come up.
"I would need to change, though." She hastily tried to picture the state in which she'd left her apartment and was pretty sure it would pass the guest test. "If you don't mind coming upstairs for a few minutes..."
"Like I'd ever deny a beautiful woman a request like that," Morgan teased, and she couldn't help but laugh.
"Slow down, sugar," she told him whimsically, picking up the cash box that contained the day's takings and beckoning Morgan in the direction of an unobtrusive door sandwiched between the women's bathroom and the store room. After she unlocked it, Morgan leaned over and held it open.
"Ladies first, Garcia."
She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged in response. Flirting was something he couldn't help, it seemed.
He climbed the stairs behind her, and it was strange having somebody follow her. Of course, her landlord came to check up on things periodically, and one time she'd needed to call an electrician after a brainstorming session involving new frosting flavors and too many mixers caused a power surge, but aside from them, nobody else had seen the place where she spent most of her time away from the shop.
After she reached the landing at the top of the staircase and unlocked her front door, she saw her wall art and knickknacks as if for the first time and wondered again what Morgan thought of her decorating style and what it said about her. She scarcely had any possessions that predated her move to Quantico, which she supposed Morgan would interpret as an effort to erase her past, but she'd acquired a lot of tchotchkes from day trips she'd taken and eBay auctions she'd won, so the apartment was by no means bare. During her time in Virginia, she'd visited basically everything that could be considered a tourist attraction at least once, and had been to most of the museums in D.C. multiple times as different exhibits came and went. Her favorite exhibit of all was the permanent one in the Popular Culture wing of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, because she loved to look at the original pair of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore while filming The Wizard of Oz.
The only trace of Penelope's old life resided in a frame on a side table by the couch - a photo of her when she was about seven, gap-toothed and smiling, riding a horse on the beach, flanked by her mom and stepfather. Even now, she found it impossible to look at without feeling a twinge of bittersweet nostalgia deep within her chest.
"I won't be too long," she told Morgan, picking up the remote from the side table and holding it out to him. "Feel free to watch TV or something."
"I might just take you up on that. Take your time, baby girl."
Penelope was about to close the door to her bedroom when DC Cupcakes crackled into life on the screen and Morgan laughed in delight.
--
For the most part, Penelope lived modestly. Her apartment was the same size as the coffeehouse below but seemed a lot smaller, as the space was divided between the combined living room/kitchen area that Morgan was currently occupying, the bedroom off to one side, and the bathroom beyond that. One would think Penelope's biggest extravagance was the flatscreen television Morgan was currently watching - which, incidentally, she'd snapped up on clearance the previous year - but her real investment was inside her closet. It wasn't that she bought expensive clothes, more that she purchased a lot of them in all different colors of the rainbow, and she fought a losing battle to keep them at least vaguely organized on hangers or shelves, or stacked in neatly folded piles. She regarded her collection now, wondering why, if there were so many individual pieces, she couldn't find a single thing suitable to wear to Scarpetta's.
"Yo, Garcia?" Morgan called from the other room, and she rolled her eyes. So much for letting her take her time.
"I'll be out in a minute!" she shouted back, unearthing a simple mini-dress with a black-and-white houndstooth pattern that had been half hidden behind a heavy leopard-print coat. She regarded it critically. It could work with the appropriate accessories.
"Nah, no rush - I was just wondering if you know how to make banana cupcakes with peanut butter frosting."
She blinked. "...Are you still watching DC Cupcakes?"
There was a pause. "Maybe."
Penelope had to bite her lip to keep herself from laughing. She'd been to Georgetown Cupcakes several times, and while she deeply respected the craft of creating so-called designer cupcakes, she hadn't been impressed by how much everything cost.
"I can make you any kind you want, sugar, at half the price they're asking."
She grinned in anticipation, expecting a flirtatious response, and she wasn't disappointed.
"I knew there was a reason I liked you, princess," Morgan called back, and the fact that she could clearly hear the smile in his voice made her stomach flutter.
"I'll be ready soon, OK?" She cringed at the way her voice sounded - a little higher than usual, thrilled and girlish - and hoped Morgan hadn't picked up on the difference.
"Take your sweet time, baby girl. Can't rush perfection."
When she glanced at herself in the full-length mirror that hung on her door, she found she was blushing furiously.
--
Penelope decided to go with the houndstooth dress, pairing it with a classic pearl necklace, matching earrings that reminded her of the ones Princess Diana used to wear, and the soft, tall, white leather boots she loved but didn't wear often for fear of dropping coffee grounds on them. She cinched the dress at the waist with a magenta belt and added matching eyeshadow to her upper lids to complete the look. As she ran a brush through her hair, she critiqued herself in the mirror and was secretly pleased with what she saw. She didn't often have occasion to dress up.
"Hey, Garcia?" Morgan called again, and she felt a warm fondness spreading in her chest at simply hearing his voice - which, she conceded, was probably a negative development. "Would bubblegum frosting be completely disgusting?"
"Bubblegum?" she yelled back skeptically, wrinkling her nose.
"Uh-huh."
She added a touch of gloss to her lips, took a deep breath, and opened the door that led back into her living room.
"Probably, but I can figure out a way to whip some up if you'd like to try it," she said at a normal volume, and Morgan turned to look at her.
He was silent for a second, which prompted her to nervously touch the skirt of the dress, smoothing away nonexistent creases.
"...What?" she asked finally.
His eyes swept across her body, lingering on her chest before eventually settling on her face. "Damn, you look amazing."
The quickening of her heartbeat was instant. "I had to go all out to keep up with you," she shot back, and the grin this elicited made her knees weak. Yeah, she admitted to herself, she was kind of in trouble here.
--
Scarpetta's was just a short walk away, but by the time they arrived, the butterflies in Penelope's stomach felt like they were about to burst out of her body altogether, which would for sure have ruined her dress. Morgan held the door open, and the expression of the man at the front desk - an infrequent customer of hers - metamorphosed from detached politeness to filial friendliness as soon as he caught sight of her companion.
"Derek!" he exclaimed, and Penelope was pretty sure this was the first time she'd seen two men bump fists while wearing suit jackets. "You been busy working? You haven't brought anyone here in a couple weeks."
"You know how the job can be, man. This is Penelope, by the way."
Penelope curtsied as she took the man's hand, her curiosity piqued by how well he and Morgan seemed to know each other.
"How are Angela and the kids?" Morgan asked.
"Fine, fine." The man continued talking as he led them to a table. "You know that science fair Frankie was gettin' himself all worked up about? First place."
Morgan beamed. "I knew it. Tell him I never had a doubt in my mind, will you?"
"Will do." He handed them both menus. "Jane will be over in a second to take your drink orders, OK?"
"Thanks, man."
As his friend walked away, Morgan focused his attention solely on Garcia, and at once, her breath quickened. It was amazing how he could turn the intensity in his eyes on and off like that, and she was a little incredulous about how instantly it affected her.
"I'm really glad you agreed to come out with me tonight," he told her with sincerity - or what she interpreted as sincerity, at least. He'd seemed so open, so unguarded earlier at the coffeehouse, but his familiarity with the staff at Scarpetta's had sparked a sense of cautionary mistrust in Penelope's brain.
"You haven't brought anyone here in couple weeks?" she echoed, quoting his friend's words instead of responding to what Morgan had just said to her. "How often do you come here?"
He shifted in his seat. "From time to time."
"When was the last time?" She tried to keep her tone casual, quashing the sinking feeling taking root in her stomach as much as she could.
"Uh, about two and a half weeks ago."
"On a date?"
"You could call it that." He tilted his head, his expression somewhere between amused and confused. "You interrogating me now?"
She shrugged. "I'm just interested. Didn't go well?"
"Oh, you know," Morgan, suddenly a master of discretion, was vague. "Things between us... fizzled."
What he meant, she thought, recalling the conversation she'd had with JJ, was that he'd met a pretty young thing, wined her, dined her, sixty-nined her, then lost interest.
"Oh," Penelope said lightly, trying her best not to seem upset. If she were honest about it, her disappointment was directed more toward herself than him. After all, JJ had explicitly warned her against falling for his charms, so when it came down to it, she thought, she only had herself to blame.
"Hey." Morgan's voice was quiet now, and he touched her hand as he'd done earlier that night at Penny's. "You didn't think this was a date, right?"
He sounded genuinely concerned, and although the rational part of Penelope's brain reminded her that if anyone could authentically fake emotion, it would be an FBI profiler, she couldn't shake the feeling that he was legitimately worried about inadvertently leading her on.
For all his flirting and teasing, she'd been quite aware their outing hadn't been a date; it had simply been easy to let her own feelings affect her perception. What was it he'd called it? A pick-me-up - two people enjoying each other's company by unwinding at a local restaurant after a trying day's work - but that hadn't stopped her from hoping. Her mind helpfully replayed the moment when she'd emerged from the bedroom and Morgan had stared at her cleavage for a little too long, but she swiftly banished the memory.
"Of course not," she said breezily, affixing him with the same bright smile she offered her customers. He looked searchingly at her for a moment before finally giving her a slow nod.
"You cool with red wine?"
"Please."
--
When Penelope didn't see Morgan for a few days after their non-date at Scarpetta's, she thought he might be avoiding her, but then she realized she hadn't seen any other members of his team either. In time, the rest of them drifted back, Reid as geeky and loquacious as always, Hotchner austere but unfailingly polite, JJ quietly luminous. (When JJ found out she was pregnant by her boyfriend, a New Orleans police officer she'd met the previous year on a case, she'd told Penelope before any of her colleagues, something that meant more to Penelope than she could put into words.) As the days went by with no sign of Morgan, Penelope felt him slipping into the annals of her life, one more relic of her past, a what if never answered. She watched the news sometimes and wondered whether Morgan was involved in investigating a suspicious explosion in Texas, a spate of suicides in Pennsylvania, the disappearance of a child at a mall a mere half-hour from Quantico, and she caught herself looking for him in the background of the footage, peering at the screen of the same TV on which he'd watched DC Cupcakes and then called out to inquire about bubblegum frosting.
By the time a series of fatal shootings in Manhattan hit the headlines a few weeks later, Penelope had essentially given up on seeing the special agent again. With Morgan's schedule, things could never work with him anyway, she'd told herself, comfortably adopting the same numbness in which she'd found such solace after her parents died. One thing still bothered her, though, a question she couldn't shake - why had Morgan managed to get under her skin in a way no one else could before? It kept her up at night sometimes, the simple fact that there was a puzzle piece missing, a virus without an antidote, because it didn't fit with the way she lived her life and, in a way, she hated Morgan for it.
Historically, Penelope Garcia was not a mooner. She was a go-getter, a firecracker, someone who made things happen for herself and didn't wait for anybody, because she knew firsthand that even the best laid plans can go awry. She learned that lesson when she was eighteen and hadn't committed to anything more serious than baked goods, roasted coffee beans, and paying her bills on time ever since.
But then, she'd met Morgan.
---<---<---@
Part Two.