Prosecutorial Misconduct // Rafael Barba

02 || A REGULAR FRIDAY MORNING

As they reached the finish line of a rather stressful and exhausting week, those in the sixteenth precinct were taking advantage of the peacefully quiet Friday morning.

Liv hadn't come in yet. Rollins had taken the entire day off. Meanwhile, Melanie, Fin and Carisi were all using their free time to finally catch up on their backlog of paperwork from the busy month behind them. Well, Carisi was supposed to be catching up on his but instead he was just leaning back in his chair like he owned the place, staring blankly at the wall in the distance and clicking his pen an irritably record breaking number of times.

It was driving Melanie crazy, the sound. She'd already asked him to stop once and in his defense he did... for about thirty seconds before he sighed from boredom and started right back up again. Normally, it wouldn't have bothered her. She was as bad as he was when it came to making annoying noises to fill the eerie silence, but right now all she wanted was some quiet. She was almost finished with her first load of case files which would have really put a dent into the backlog of unfinished reports that were piled high on her desk, but it was getting rather hard to focus on her words with the constant click, click, click of Carisi's pen.

Every single one of them made her eye twitch something terribly and eventually, after the five hundredth or so click, she finally snapped, "Sonny, I swear to God if you click that pen one more time I'm going to light you on fire."

With widened eyes Carisi held up both his hands in surrender and let go of the pen, allowing it to clatter against his desk in the most dramatic way possible. He kept them in the air until Melanie nodded in satisfaction and allowed her eyes to fall to her laptop screen as she began typing away again, unbothered by the rather heinous threat of arson and murder she had just fired in her partner's direction.

As Carisi allowed his arms to fall, Liv came strolling into the bullpen with a large coffee in one hand and her purse in the other, the soft clacks of her shoes against the floor gaining the attention of a few fellow officers that were scattered around the place. Carisi was one of them. And so, done with his paperwork for the time being and looking to annoy Melanie more, he swivelled in his chair to face her.

"Hey Sarge, Mel is threatening me again. Is it alright with you if I throw her into the cage for an hour?" He asked seriously, hearing the sudden stop of Melanie's fingertips against her keyboard as she no doubt went back to glaring a hole into his head.

Coming to a stop Liv sighed, peering over her glasses towards them and no one missed the clear humour in her tone as she asked, "Melanie, did you threaten Carisi?"

"I would never," Melanie said, in clear and mocking offence as she placed her hand on her heart.

Rolling a smile, Liv then turned to Fin, "Fin?"

"I ain't hear nothin'," Fin replied plainly, making Melanie fight against a smug smile as a frown pulled on the entirety of Carisi's face.

"Two for two, Carisi," Liv shrugged, before carrying on towards her office.

"Yeah, only because Rollins isn't here," Carisi muttered, spinning back around in his chair and picking up his pen, which he clicked a handful of times just to aggravate Melanie even more. She glared at him again, her jaw tensing as she slowly started to wrap her slender fingers around her sharkmouth-shaped stress ball.

"Oh, Fin," Liv popped her head around her office door just before Melanie could throw the aforementioned ball at Carisi's face, catching the final bounce of it on her desk as she dropped it immediately. "I'm expecting Barba, when he shows up will you ask him to hang around? I have to make a quick phone call first."

Fin nodded, "Yeah, I'll tell him."

"Thanks," Liv smiled, and then she was gone.

Ignoring the intense flutter that seemed to build in her stomach over the memory of last night, Melanie forgot all about Carisi and his pen. Instead, she wheeled herself back in her chair and stood up, stretching out her back and letting out a quiet groan at the stiffness. She said nothing as she stalked away, her long locks swaying against her back as she headed for the break room — just as the one person she'd been dying to see all morning finally came strutting into the precinct.