Settle Down

Prologue: A Powerpoint, Really?

If you had told 16 year old Y/N that she'd be working at the FBI, she would've called you batshit.

Not only, did you not have any respect for authority or any inclination for rules in that matter, working for the FBI was never in the forefront of your mind. But when given the option of Jail or a full time job with benefits, it was fairly easy to make a choice. You remember the first day when you met your work partner and now best friend Penelope Garcia or specifically the day she caught you.

You were waiting tables like you did every weekend to stay afloat. Today was unreasonably slow so you were just finding small things to do. That's when she came in, an extremely brightly dressed woman, sat at the bar of the diner.

"Hi, how can I help you?" You smile at the woman who looks up at you and smiles.

"Yes, I'm looking for the Emerald City." She says, smirking at you. Your face drops, you knew what she was talking about.

When you started hacking it was only supposed to be a one time thing. You grew up poor, spent most of your life poor so when you saw your childhood home was set to be demolished to build a fancy new headquarters for Scotty Realins, an upcoming asshole tech CEO, without a cent going to your parents. Something in you snapped. You had already been pretty decent at code and you flirted with a couple of guys in your STEM classes to learn how to hack so you would say you were pretty good at this point. So you hacked into the website and made sure all the Revenue for that day actually was wired to lower-income housing. At the end of the day, it was only a couple hundred thousand dollars but what was pennies to Scotty Realins changed some people's lives.

So you started doing it more, to different companies under the pseudonym OZ. The money always went to different places that needed it whether it was paying the rent for a bunch of families or anonymous large donations to food banks or soup kitchens. You gained a bit of fame in the hacker community as a modern day Robin Hood.

All good things come to an end though. And the end was standing in front of you in clunky, rainbow colored jewelry.

"You don't look like a cop." you say, crossing your arms.

"I'll do you one better." She says, pulling her FBI badge out, showing it to you briefly. You curse under your breath. "I've been following you for a while, OZ. Though I wasn't expecting the man behind the curtain to be a woman. I will say, having my computers route back to a loop of "We're not in Kansas anymore." everytime I tried to track your IP was impressive. I couldn't even be mad about it."

"Clearly not that impressive because you found me."

"Still took me longer than usual, which is saying a lot."

"This is a really long winded conversation if you're just here to arrest me." You say, taking off your apron. No use in keeping it on if you were going to be in handcuffs soon.

"That's because I'm not here to arrest you. I'm here to offer you a job, to work under me as a Tech Analyst in the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI." Penelope says.

"And if I don't want to?"

"Then you're going to want a lawyer and my very good handsome friend outside is going to arrest you. You're smart and you have a chance to help people which is why you started hacking in the first place, right? Please don't make me do that." She looked at you pleadingly like she really cared and didn't want you to go to prison. You didn't say anything but something told you she'd been in the same boat as you before.

"Hmmm.... I'm tired of waiting tables anyway."

So you uprooted your life and moved from Philadelphia to Quantico. Garcia took you under her wing and pretty soon the two of you functioned in her batcave like a well oiled machine. You could do without the constant gore that filled your screens but at the end of the day, you loved what you were doing and you wouldn't change that for the world.