Message: XVIII

"Callaghan? What are you doing here at this hour?" Toussaint raised her eyebrows with surprise when she spotted her partner outside the precinct, smoking a cigarette, with her back laid to her car's side. Aria shrugged, glancing at her watch. She could see it was seven.

"I don't know, Baguette, probably I'm working." She exhaled a huge, thick cloud of suffocating smoke. The black shadows under her eyes seemed even darker than the day before, but Toussaint didn't comment on that. "Like, you know, a cop I am."

"That's actually surprising, since you behave like a finest delinquent." Chyler admitted, but, yet again, she saw that Callaghan didn't even react into pokes like those. "Mind if I join you?"

"What do you want?" Aria lighted up another cigarette, and then she glowered at her partner. Toussaint sighed.

"Did you find anything about the Hellblades?"

"No." the answer was fast, unamused, and pretty repulsing.

"No...?"

"What the fuck didn't you understand, Brie, 'no' means 'no', full stop." She snarled. "Nothing. I need to check the databases here, just in case. Maybe Saskatchewan's cops would know something. I don't know, you have colleagues, not me." She shrugged, still angry because of the reason unknown to Chyler.

"If you were nicer maybe someone would like you." She noticed, but Aria just huffed with growing irritation.

"Yeah, 'cause everyone would believe that's natural for me. Don't you have shit to do, Choucrute, instead of coming up with ideas that are worse in quality than my grandpa's briefs after forty years of no laundry?" she scoffed, making Chyler just shake her head.

"You're not going to be easier to come by would you?" she asked with resignation, and Aria just exhaled a whole cloud of smoke straight into her direction. Toussaint started coughing and waving her hands to quicken the dispersion of the smoke.

"Take me or leave me." She snarled, throwing the end of the cigarette to the pavement and crushing it with the heel of her combat shoe, so the ember died between the concrete and thick rubber. "I need to go back to work."

"Ready when you are." Chyler shook her head, feeling like she had failed again that day.

And it didn't even start properly, damnit.