Chapter Text
Stiles slides into what he's already thinking of as his and Maya's table with a sigh and uses the remaining of his willpower not to face-plant into the pasta he's chosen as today's fuel.
“That's a deep sigh,” Maya notes, looking a little amused.
“I've been arguing with budgets for three hours,” Stiles informs her, poking his fork through the spaghetti like it's an expense report. “The BAU's Administrative Specialist caught me with a milk frother, made a break room inspection, then made me justify receipts like it's my job. I didn't even ask them to reimburse me, I'm upgrading their coffee game for my own personal interest,” he rants, almost flicks sauce everywhere with his hand movements, then sets the fork down before it becomes an actual hazard, “JJ saw me in Mrs. Trent's office at ten and walked the other way, the traitor.”
Maya looks like she doesn't know whether to frown or laugh, “Did you get in trouble?”
Stiles scoffs, “No.” He takes a sip of soda and then adds, “but I did get stuck making a spending map of the unit's P-Card transactions and travel pre-checks of the last quarter,” ugh, so much math. “Also, do you know how expensive a jet is? I mean, I get why it's necessary with the whole rush to the scenes, need for privacy and all that, but even with pay-per-trip saving them from overnights, it totals almost two mil a year, no wonder Mrs. Trent couldn't be talked into the benefits of an espresso machine.”
His mostly-for-show indignation at the last part gets a chuckle out of her. “That might put a wrench on your whole caffeine revolution.”
Stiles considers it and settles on, “I can live with aeropress and less scrutiny over my syrup receipts.”
“I wish we had the same break room, I've been having microwave tea for a week,” Maya sighs, swirling some salad around on her plate. “We should go down to the city sometime, get some decent caffeine you didn't have to make yourself.”
“Ooh,” a voice cuts in and Zayd drops onto a chair on Maya's left, “Did I hear field trip? I'm in.”
Stiles catches the slightest frown before Maya nods like she planned for this, “Yeah, but should we go during lunch break or after hours?”
“Might take longer than our lunch break,” Stiles points out.
“We could meet at the door by four,” Zayd suggests, “make it a whole QAPT thing. We're all scattered around, but it's still the same program, we should stick together.”
“I'm down,” Stiles shrugs, figuring why not, then remembering exactly why, “Uh- actually… I might be a little grounded, but I can talk my way around it, probably.”
Maya hides a snort behind her hand and Zayd's brows go up. “Grounded?”
“Unfairly,” he clarifies. “If I rant about the health benefits of teenage socialization for long enough, Hotch will say yes just to make me stop, don't worry about it.”
“Hotch, huh?” Someone else chimes in from right behind him, “That's SSA Aaron Hotchner, right?”
Stiles blinks, turns his head, and meets Ben's inquiring brown eyes, wondering if the guy actually means to sound a little stalker-ish or if it just happens naturally. “Yeah? He's my cousin.”
Ben slides into the last chair like it was saved for him, “So the BAU seat was kinda locked, then?”
Stiles doesn’t flinch. “If it was reserved, I’d have an espresso machine by now,” he says, dry. “Mrs. Trent just made me justify syrup receipts and build a travel spend map. That’s not what pull looks like.”
Ben’s mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “I had to fight through three people to land Scheduling. No cousins.”
“I still had to apply,” Well, technically, his dad applied for him, but he definitely didn't just magically get handed a spot. “The BAU thing is a training chair near a whiteboard, not an instant badge. JJ signs my logs, Hotch can’t grade me. My day is OCR, PII, filing, and trying not to cry at a scanner.”
Maya nods once in confirmation.
Ben rolls his water bottle between his palms. “It just reads… easier.”
“Different door, same hallway,” Stiles says, lighter. The last thing he wants is to pick a fight in a federal building, so diffusion it is. “You’re carrying rosters, Maya’s buried in metadata, Park’s counting Pelican cases, I’m labeling PDFs no one will ever thank me for. We all got the glamorous assignments.”
Ben exhales, some tension going with it. “Fair.”
“Also,” Stiles adds, tipping his head, “if you think I wouldn’t trade my seat for two fewer hours with Mrs. Trent’s highlighter, you vastly overestimate family perks.”
That finally gets him, since Ben huffs a laugh. “Okay.”
Zayd claps his hands once in a not-so-smooth pivot. “Great, settled. Group chat time, so we can schedule a coffee field trip. Gimme your numbers.”
Phones go to hands, and soon enough Stiles is added to a group chat of six — Zayd apparently already had Rowan and Priya's numbers — named ‘INTERNal Affairs’.
He huffs a laugh at the pun, “Nice, now I can ask for survival tips in real time,” Ben types a ‘hey’ into the chat, Priya sends a single question mark, and Rowan responds with a sticker of a raccoon popping its head up from a trash bin.
Priya: What is this.
Zayd: Coffee field trip planning
Zayd: Also mutual aid, drop the intern hacks
Stiles: scanner stops confusing 1 with I at 400 dpi + grayscale + deskew
Maya: Digi lab label printer hates warm stock. Fan the labels.
Ben: Bring a hoodie, the AC is set to Antarctica. Ctrl+Shift+L toggles filters, saves lives.
Rowan: Earplugs. The range thumps through two walls.
Zayd: Don't try to name the projectors
Stiles: do it secretly they can't stop you
Zayd: Good point
Maya: Okay, field trip. Wednesday after four? Someone can get Grace and Park in here by then.
Zayd: On it
Priya: My kingdom for some Chai.
Stiles: pending my parole officer, sure
He then adds out loud, “I’ll ask and report back,” then eats a few quiet bites while the table drifts to normal stuff. Zayd’s little sister tried to feed their cat a grape, Maya’s mom mailed her a box of dried mango, Ben swears the Scheduling bullpen is colder than the walk-in at his family’s diner. It’s easy to sit there and let the noise smooth him out, and he doesn’t even realize the fork’s stopped clinking until Maya nudges her water toward him so he’ll drink something that isn’t soda.
They break off once lunch break ends, each towards their assigned corner of the building, but intermittent silent vibrations from his phone tells him they're planning on staying in touch from now on.
Back upstairs, JJ’s already flagging him over with a pen. “I’ve got ten minutes before a call. Can you pull three public pieces on crowd panic, old training articles are fine, and boil them into a one-pager? Five bullets, short sentences, neutral tone. Drop it in the TrainingNet folder and print me a copy.”
“On it,” Stiles says, taking the time to fetch his laptop before dropping down on the visitor chair. He opens a doc, titles it, and lets his fingers hover for half a beat before getting to work.
He keeps it simple: crowd funnels, line of sight, loud cues, exits. He trims the verbs, trims again, then glances up like he just remembered a thing.
“Hey, uh, totally unrelated… Some of us interns were thinking coffee on Wednesday after four. Off base.” He tips his head. “Okay with you if Hotch’s okay with it?”
“After hours is his call,” JJ says, sounding neutral enough. “Just text me when you leave and when you’re back at the door so I can send an escort.”
“Cool,” he nods to himself, figuring that means they don't need a chaperone for their coffee excursion. “I’ll ask him later.” He goes back to the bullets and adds a tiny header line — sources listed at the bottom — so no one has to chase where he pulled them from. Printer hum, one page out. He sets it on her blotter.
“Thanks,” she says, tucking it under a binder clip. The phone on her desk lights. She doesn’t pick up yet, eyes skimming a list beside it, pencil tapping once, then stopping.
Stiles watches the small, quiet sorting. “How do you decide who gets a yes?” he asks, softer than his usual. “Like… when the calls pile up.”
He's seen piles of files on her desk every day since starting his internship, how can someone decide what to prioritize like that, especially with so many requests, all probably priorities to the people who reach out to the BAU for help.
She leans back, finally meeting his eyes. “Short version? We say yes when a profile changes what happens next. If it’s active harm and time-sensitive, someone escalating, a pattern tightening, we move fast. If locals have evidence that'll close it, like DNA back in twelve hours, a clean plate, a suspect in custody, then we consult and let them run. We look for signals, not noise, so multiple jurisdictions tripping over each other, a signature that means behavior is the key, not forensics. We ask what our forty-eight hours buys the victims.”
She ticks points on quiet fingers. “We also look at resources. Are we already ground down from three travel days? Is there a unit better suited, Crimes Against Children, Cyber, Counterterror? We don’t chase cameras. If the mayor is yelling and the facts are thin, that’s a ‘monitor,’ not a jet.”
Stiles keeps still so he doesn’t miss anything, the words slotting into little labeled boxes in his head.
“Sometimes ‘yes’ is remote,” JJ adds. “Phone consult, geographic pass, media guidance, then we step back. Sometimes it’s a ‘not yet’, where we watch for a second event, then move. And when we say no, we say it kindly and mean it. False hope wastes time.”
He nods, quiet. “So it’s… triage.”
“It’s triage,” she agrees with a hint of a smile. “Half gut, half receipts. If I’m on the fence, I buy an hour and call the smartest person I know.” She tips her chin toward the bullpen. “There are a lot of those around here.”
He huffs, then sobers. “Okay. That makes sense.”
“Good.” She taps the folder again. Her cell buzzes. She glances at the screen and stands. “I’ve got three to return before noon. Be useful for Morgan for an hour.”
“I can alphabetize his muscles,” he says, deadpan.
“Try his evidence request queue,” she shoots back, already moving. “Go.”
He goes.
By the time he and Hotch are on their way back home, he's been useful to more people than Morgan, is way more aware of the Bureau’s yearly budget than he'd ever expected to be, and no closer to getting them an espresso machine. Stiles waits a whole block, which for him is restraint, then clears his throat like he’s about to present at a school board meeting.
“So, purely hypothetical,” he starts, “if a group of very responsible teen interns wanted to acquire some caffeine off-base on Wednesday after four, group outing, daylight, what would a certain guardian say?”
Hotch doesn’t answer right away. Classic. He adjusts a vent, taps the turn signal, lets him dangle.
Stiles fills the air, because of course he does. “Peer time is actually good for adolescent brains, you know. Social connectedness correlates with lower anxiety, better sleep, fewer dumb choices- okay, some dumb choices. There’s this whole thing about protective factors and belonging and I’m pretty sure my cortisol has a vendetta. Also, microwave tea is a human rights violation.”
“Mm.” Hotch’s noncommittal noise could mean anything from absolutely not to draft me your itinerary.
“We’d meet at the door at four,” Stiles barrels on, “all together, no detours, fifty minutes tops, back by five-thirty so I can ride with you. I text JJ when we leave, I text JJ when we’re back at the door, and I text you both if anything shifts. No Metro alone, no wandering, just… coffee. Maybe a pastry. For morale.”
Another beat. The turn signal ticks. Finally, “Who’s going?”
“Maya, Zayd, Ben, probably Priya and Rowan. Grace if her supervisor lets her out by four, she might logic Park into joining,” He lifts his hands. “It’s the QAPT herd. We’ll be loud and harmless.”
“What shop?”
He remembers the exchanged texts and is quick to answer, “Uh, two options within five minutes, one with chai Priya suggested, one with pastries Maya swears by. I can send links. Or we can try the one with the terrible logo but excellent reviews that's ten minutes out, I’m flexible.”
Hotch’s mouth tugs, almost a smile. “Ground rules.”
Stiles sits up. “Hit me.”
“Meet at the front door at four. Stay together. If the unit’s busy or we get a call-out, it’s off. Text JJ when you leave, text both of us when you’re headed back, and if I tell you to go straight home, you go straight home. If anything feels off, you come back. No solo side quests.”
“Absolutely no side quests,” Stiles echoes, solemn. “We’re talking main quest, fetch coffee, return. I can do that.”
“And Stiles-” Hotch glances over. “If Noah asks, you’re still grounded.”
Stiles throws him a wounded look. “I'm the most grounded person who ever grounded, but yes. I'll represent our shared delusion with honor.”
Hotch spares him an unamused look and Stiles responds with his best impression of pure innocence, already pulling his phone out.
Stiles: field trip is officially government approved