A/N - I have a vague headcanon that this happens sometime after Athira's been on the team for two or so weeks. 

PREPARE FOR DUMB, DRAMATIC, SANDWICH-BASED FLUFF

*+*+*+*

Shift took a deep breath and steadied himself.

This was it--the final touch before his efforts would finally bear fruit.

He paused, ham slice in hand, and frowned as he considered the thought. Bear fruit was dramatic, sure, but it felt wrong, given the subject matter. There had to be something better--maybe that his vision would be realised?

Shift nodded, settling on the alternative.

The final touch, and his vision would be realised.

With a steady hand, Shift laid the slice of ham across the rest of his sandwich and sealed it within a piece of bread before taking half a step back to take in his creation.

This was it--the perfect sandwich, each layer of stuff between the bread precisely cut and placed to sit flat and have an even spread. The cheese, the spinach, the cucumber, tomato, onion, cheese, crumbed chicken, and finally ham, all neatly kept together by a well-planned slathering of garlic aioli and a light sprinkle of salt.

It was beautiful, and he couldn't wait to devour it.

Yet as Shift reached for the plate, the alarm for an alert began to ring through the base.

"Not me," whispered Shift, eyeing the air around him suspiciously. "Not me not me not--"

"Shift!" came Kione's voice over the speaker. "You're up, bud."

Shift gestured dramatically towards his sandwich. "I'm a little busy right now, Kione! Isn't there anyone else?"

"I'm sorry, I'll let the civilians know you'll be late because their crisis has so rudely interrupted your rather late lunch."

Shift groaned, but he'd had the sandwich safely secured in the fridge and was heading for the door before Kione had finished his sentence. He needed this alert dealt with as quickly as possible, which meant it was time to bring out the big guns.

"Thira!" yelled Shift as he ran to the prep room to grab his gear , knowing Kione would pass the message on. "You're coming with me!"

*+*+*+*

Some twenty minutes later, Shift arrived back at Indigo base dangling beneath Athira as she flew them in.

"I don't get it," said Athira as she let go of his hand and dropped him in front of the entrance. "If you were so sure you left the oven on, why not just tell Kione to check it?"

"Beeecause," said Shift, scrambling for a reason as he checked his mic was disabled for the third time. He gave her what he hoped was a knowing look and dropped his voice to a whisper. "You know how he is about leaving his lab."

Shift didn't wait to see her inevitably blank-stare reaction to his flimsy attempt at an excuse and darted inside. He raced up the stairs as fast as he could while cursing every single one of them for existing between him and his sandwich.

The kitchen was the exact mess he'd left it. He scooted between the kitchen benches and swung open the fridge, mouth already watering at the thought of his perfect sandwich waiting within.

Only, it wasn't.

Shift's heart nearly stopped at the sight of the empty plate where he'd left his sandwich. He grabbed it, wondering if this was some kind of nightmare when he finally registered the note taped to the edge of the plate.

[I KNOW WHAT YOU DID. MEET ME ON THE ROOF AT DUSK TO CONFESS YOUR CRIMES.]

Panicked, Shift glanced at the clock. Dusk was in a little over an hour.

His sandwich didn't have that long.

Shift steadied himself with a breath. He'd dealt with enough ransom notes in his time. He knew how to handle them, even if they weren't usually so close to home.

The sandwich thief had been clever. They'd cut the letters out of a magazine and glued them to the page. There'd be no identifying their handwriting, but it also meant this move was premeditated. He'd only been gone twenty minutes, and this note would have taken nearly that long to create--unless, of course, it'd been made in advance, and its owner had been lying in wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself.

Twenty minutes. That was the window where the crime had been committed, which narrowed down the suspect pool to anyone inside the base at the time. When Shift had been leaving base, Kione had been in his lab, Raph in his office, Athira in the training room, while Talia and Zoe had been some five minutes out, still returning from the previous alert--though that didn't rule them out from the crime.

With his limited time, Shift knew he was going to need help--and of his five potential suspects, there was only one he could be sure was totally innocent.

*+*+*+*

"That's what this is about?" said Athira as she stared up at him from the waters of the lap pool in her swimsuit. "A sandwich?"

"It's not just a sandwich!" said Shift. "It's the perfect sandwich! It took me--"

"I knew you were being weird about something with that dumb oven excuse, but I assumed it was more than just a sandwich." She shook her head and turned to push off the wall for another lap. "I'm not--"

Shift leaned down and grabbed her by the hand before it left the edge of the pool. "Please, Thira? You're the only one I can trust. I need you!"

Something flickered across Athira's expression, and had Shift not known any better, he'd have suspected a blush. She sank a little lower into the water, her eyes above the waterline and locked on him as she blew bubbles with her mouth.

Shift just held her stare and gave her his best kicked-puppy expression, hoping it'd be enough.

Athira broke first, surfacing with a huff.

"You aren't going to leave me alone until I go along with this, are you?" she said finally.

"Nope," said Shift with a solemn shake of his head.

Athira sighed and tossed her head back against the water. "Fine."

Shift released her hand, and Athira floated herself out of the pool, drying herself off with a quick flicker of Black.

She pointed a finger at him. "I'll tag along, but you owe me a milkshake. Chocolate, with extra chocolate. Understood?"

"Done!" said Shift. "Now, this is what the culprit left behind."

Athira took the note and raised an eyebrow as she read it.

"So you're telling me," she said, a strange note to her voice that Shift couldn't quite figure out, "that you read this note, and couldn't work out who it was?"

"Should I have?" said Shift, wondering if he'd missed something.

Athira just shrugged and gave him back the note. "No, but now I have to ask: what did you do?"

"I don't know!" said Shift. "You think I keep track of everything?"

"Maybe it was a team effort," said Athira, a smirk tugging at her mouth. "How likely is it that you managed to annoy them all enough that they decided to kidnap your sandwich together?"

Shift pouted. "We're currently keeping all possibilities open to investigation at this time." He sighed. "My poor sandwich. It didn't deserve this."

Athira just rolled her eyes and headed for her clothes. "Okay, turtle boy. Where do we start?"

"The only place that makes sense," said Shift in a conspirator's whisper, his eyes on the corners of the ceiling. "We start with the eyes and ears of the base."

*+*+*+*

Their investigation began in Kione's Tech lab.

Shift entered first followed closely by Athira, who trailed after him with her arms folded wearing an expression of half-baked amusement.

Kione, however, didn't look anywhere near as entertained as he spun around in his chair and greeted them with a deadpan, "You really let him drag you into this wild goose chase, eh?"

Shift was about to protest when Athira stopped beside him and shrugged. "It was either follow him around and watch him try to figure this out, or see how long he could hold his breath before he drowned after I got sick of listening to him complain about the sandwich. Less paperwork this way."

Kione accepted that explanation with a considered nod and turned back to his consoles. There was an untouched sandwich on a plate beside him, but a quick glance was all it took for Shift to know it wasn't his perfect creation.

"I'm kinda surprised you left the door unlocked," said Shift. "Does this mean you have information for us about the sandwich thief?"

"I couldn't care less who took your sandwich, Shift," said Kione, typing something across the keyboard. "I just didn't want my walls broken when you inevitably bullied Athira into opening them for you."

"Buuuut you could check the cameras for me?"

"Could," said Kione without looking up. "Not going to. I'm busy, unlike you." He tapped a hand against the plate of his uneaten sandwich. "Take mine if you're that desperate."

"Okay, one, that's been sitting there for at least three hours," said Shift. "And two, it'd take you like, what, three seconds to check the cameras? You could just--"

Kione spun around in his chair, and when Shift saw the smile, he knew he wasn't going to like the next words that came out of that mouth.

"All right then," said Kione, steepling his fingers across his lap. "Tell you what. You shift Orange, and I'll let you check the camera footage yourself. What do you say?"

Shift wrinkled his nose. He hated shifting Orange, and Kione knew it.

Yet for the sake of his sandwich, it was a burden Shift was willing to bear.

He extended a hand. "Deal."

Kione hesitated. "Wait, really?"

"Yep," said Shift, expression grim. "I'll do whatever I need to for my sandwich."

Kione considered that for a long moment, directing more than one confused glance at Athira, who answered them with a shrug of her own.

"We could still drown him," she said.

"I hate paperwork," muttered Kione. "Fine. I'll check the cameras for you--if only because I don't want you breaking anything when you try to use my Orange."

*+*+*+*

The camera footage had been tampered with.

Some ten minutes after Shift had left base, there'd been a strange white-out across the cameras for a few minutes that made it totally impossible to figure out who'd been in the kitchen at the time of the theft.

"I have no idea what keeps causing this," grumbled Kione. "This is the third time this week the cameras have whited themselves out. If you figure out who's behind it, please let me know, because I'd like to have a discussion with them about why they hate me." He began furiously tapping away at his keyboard. "It has to be someone outside the base. I've checked the internal system at least five times and..."

Despite a lack of clear-cut evidence, the altered footage still gave them a primary suspect. Aside from Kione, Raph was the only one able to directly interfere with the base's security system, and so--after confirmation from Kione that Raph was in his office--Shift grabbed Athira by the hand and dragged her up the stairs, heading to the second floor.

"This is ridiculous," said Athira. "Why don't you just make a new sandwich instead of running around looking for your old one?"

"It's the principle of the matter," said Shift. "If I just made another sandwich, the sandwich thief wins." He cleared his throat. "Also, we're out of ham."

"So you'll shift Orange for your sandwich," said Athira mildly. "But you won't go shopping to get more ham?"

"Shopping? Sure," said Shift. "But being mobbed by a horde of teenagers is a totally different--"

He cut off mid-sentence as the door to the second floor opened and a voice came through.

"Yeah, yeah, Raph," came Talia's voice. "I'll make sure no one touches it until we're ready."

Shift grabbed Athira and yanked her back down the stairs, out of view of Talia as she entered the stairwell.

"I swear he's paranoid sometimes," Talia muttered to herself, jogging up the stairs. "It's not like Shift's gonna find the damned thing anyway."

Shift's eyes went wide as he directed a look at Athira, who replied to this shocking turn of events with a single, bored, blink. She opened her mouth to speak, but Shift clamped a hand down over her mouth and pulled her against him.

"Shh," he whispered into her ear, his eyes on the stairs above, hoping Talia hadn't heard the slight scuffle. "We need to follow her without being noticed and see where she's keeping the sandwich."

Athira replied, her words muffled into his hand as she wriggled, and obligingly, Shift let her go.

"What on Thols--" she began.

Shift hushed her. "Shh!" He jabbed a finger after Talia. "Sandwich suspect, remember?"

Shift was fairly certain Athira was weighing the pros and cons of murdering him right there and then when she drew in a breath through her nose.

"Two milkshakes," grumbled Athira as she grabbed Shift by the back of his collar and yanked him into the air with her.

Shift had to hand it to her: Athira could be sneaky when she wanted to be. She slipped them both through the walls and floors of the base with ease, trailing after Talia without her ever knowing she was being followed.

Talia headed to the sixth floor where the bedrooms were located and headed down the hallway to her room. She opened the door without even glancing behind her--a dastardly kind of confidence that Shift had to respect--and once inside, the door quickly slid shut behind her.

Athira phased them out of the walls and completely into the hallway, where she dropped him. "Well, guess that ends that fun little expedition. I'm ever so disappointed--can I go now?"

"What?" said Shift. "Clearly, she has my sandwich in there. We have to go after her."

"Uh, no," said Athira, a hand on her hip. "That's her bedroom. She'll kill you, and I'll applaud her."

Shift narrowed his eyes. "Exactly. It's the one place she'd never think I was brave enough to look."

Athira just stared at him. "And are you brave enough?"

Shift sucked in a breath. "For my sandwich, I can do anything!"

"Spirits save me," muttered Athira as Shift strode up to the door.

Shift banged on the door. "Talia, open up! It's over!" No response--but he knew she was in there, which only cemented her guilt in his mind. "I'm coming in!"

He entered the code to her door. It slid open to Talia's empty bedroom, where her wall-mounted mirror had been slid aside to reveal a secret passage into an adjoining room.

Shift rushed in, triumphant. He burst into the secret passage, finding Talia inside the hidden room that looked suspiciously like their storage room where he yelled "Ah-ha!"

Talia jumped, nearly tripping over a box on the ground beside her feet. "What in the hues, Shift?!"

"I've caught you now, sandwich thief!" announced Shift. He held out a hand. "I heard you talking after you left Raph's office. Hand it over."

"Sandwich thief?" said Talia. She reached towards a shelf behind her and grabbed a box. "I was talking about this, genius."

Shift glanced at the box in her hand--a special edition of Rainbows, the board game they often played as a team.

He looked around the room, realising it was indeed the storage room--usually only accessible from the floor below--that someone had reshuffled half the space to resemble more of a walk-in wardrobe.

"Raph told me to hide it in the storage room, specifically from you, until we were ready to use it," continued Talia in a prickly tone. "You remember what happened last time, don't you?"

Shift sucked in a breath. "I may recall a certain incident."

Talia put the box down. "You have exactly three seconds to evacuate my room before I make you a permanent addition to the decor. One--"

Talia hadn't said 'two' by the time Shift was out of her room and back into the hallway. Talia stalked after him, the promise of a painful death in her eyes.

Athira, who'd remained in the hallway, leaning against a wall with her arms folded, raised an eyebrow as Shift returned.

"Incident?" she asked innocently.

"It was nothing," said Shift. "Just a minor--"

"Shift and Zoe had a disagreement about who got to play what side of the board," said Talia. "So genius here decided to hide one set of the pieces, but when it came time to play, guess who couldn't remember where he'd hid them?"

Athira snorted with laughter.

"We couldn't play for a week until the replacement set came in," said Talia. "And I promise you--touch this set, and I will personally shove them somewhere you'll never lose them again. Understood?"

Shift frowned, glancing back into her room, distracted from the threat by something else. "How long has your mirror led into the storage room?"

Talia replied with a smug smile. "About three weeks after I moved in. I figured we didn't use the storage room much, and I needed some extra space for my clothes. Took me a week to work out the rune, but as you can see, it was well worth it." She scowled. "Now get lost."

The door closed, sealing them away.

"Well," said Shift, giving Athira an encouraging smile. "That narrows down the suspect list significantly. Let's go see Raph."

*+*+*+*

"No," said Raph as Shift first entered his office.

"But... there's been a crime," said Shift. "There's a ransom note."

"It's a sandwich," said Raph. "And unless you're here to give me my own sandwich, I don't wanna hear about it."

Shift narrowed an accusing stare at Raph. "You seem to know an awful lot about this situation for someone who's supposedly innocent."

"Kione told me," said Raph, flicking something on his wall-screen across to the other one. "No clue what happened to the cameras, either." He glanced at his wristlet. "Besides, shouldn't you be on the roof? It's basically dusk."

Shift gave the clock a panicked glance. "Chroma, you're--wait." Suspicion crept in. "I never showed Kione the note, Raph. How'd you know what it said?"

Raph hesitated, caught off guard for a split second before he recovered. "Kione saw it on the cameras."

Silence stretched between them for a long moment.

"You're lying," Shift said finally. "How could you, Raph?"

"It wasn't my idea," said Raph with a resigned sigh. "But I'd suggest going to the roof. They'll be waiting for you--and knowing you two, this will escalate beyond belief if you don't comply."

"I can't believe you'd betray me like this," said Shift.

Raph shrugged. "It seemed pretty justified at the time."

"I thought we were friends, Raph!" said Shift. "That sandwich was innocent, and I--"

"From the way you're acting, it sounds like he murdered someone," muttered Athira, grabbing Shift by the collar for the second time. "Let's go meet your sandwich thief, apologise for whatever you did to annoy them, and with any luck, I'll be able to forget any of this ever happened."

Shift didn't get the chance to protest before Athira yanked him off his feet and through the ceiling, all the way to the rooftop of Indigo base.

*+*+*+*

Shift was released from Athira's grip just outside the rooftop door of Indigo base.

Dusk had settled in across the city, marked by the steady glow of neon flickering to life across the skyline as night crept in. A brisk breeze stirred the air around them, rustling through the leaves of the privacy hedges.

"They should be here already," muttered Shift, suppressing a shiver as he surveyed the rooftop, scanning every shadow for a potential assailant. "Show yourself!"

Beside him, Athira muttered a curse and something about throwing him off the rooftop.

The door to the greenhouse swung open.

Shift recognised the culprit's silhouette before they'd stepped fully into the light.

"You," he said.

"Me," said Zoe, coming to a stop at the edge of the light.

Shift only had one question. "Why?"

"I warned you last time you took my OmNom bars," said Zoe. "If you sneaked them again without asking, I'd have to do something drastic. The punishment had to fit the crime--you took my food, and so, I decided to take your sandwich."

"I didn't take your OmNoms!" said Shift. "I swear--"

Zoe flared with light as she pointed a finger at him. "Swear on your sandwich so I know you mean it!"

"I swear on my sandwich!" said Shift instantly, much to Zoe's wide-eyed surprise. "I would never--okay, well I would, but I haven't in at least the last week!"

"Then who's been taking them?" said Zoe. "Because I had seven yesterday, I ate one, and today, there's only four left!"

"How should I know?" said Shift. "There's four other people that live in this base, y'know!"

Behind Shift, Athira cleared her throat.

"I, uh, might know where they went," said Athira, stepping forward, lifting one hand off her folded arms. "I had one yesterday after we got back from that alert, and I took another one earlier this morning when I woke up late for training. Raph won't let me in until I've eaten something and we were out of fruit."

"Oh, you took them?" said Zoe. She broke out into a smile and skipped forward. "That's fine, then."

"Wait, how come Athira gets a free pass to steal your OmNoms?" said Shift.

Zoe threw an arm around Athira and squished her in a hug, a soft, golden light around them. "I'm just happy she's eating more than milkshakes."

"Favouritism," muttered Shift with a shake of his head. "So, since I'm clearly innocent--where's my sandwich?"

"Oh, right," said Zoe, releasing Athira and walking towards the door. "I put it in the minifridge I keep up here. Where else was I gonna put it?"

"Who am I to know the mind of a sandwich thief?"

Zoe rolled her eyes and glanced at Athira. "You'd think I'd murdered someone from the way he's acting."

"I did consider murdering him a few times," muttered Athira as Zoe darted inside the building, leaving Shift alone outside with Athira.

Shift elbowed her with a smirk. "I'm kinda surprised you tagged along for as long as you did. If I didn't know better, I'd have said you were enjoying..." He trailed off, realising something. "Wait--why would you tag along for so long? You could have left at any point, but you didn't." He gave her an accusing stare. "It can only mean one thing."

Athira, for her part, continued to stare at him as expressionless as ever. "That you're an idiot?"

"You knew who the sandwich thief was," said Shift. "You knew from the note!"

"Honestly I'm surprised you didn't," said Athira carelessly. "At least two of those words were spelled wrong. Even if Zoe weren't dyslexic, Raph and Kione never would have left a ransom note with errors, and Talia would have just waited til you walked through the door and thrown the sandwich in your face."

Shift huffed. "Maybe the errors were just to throw me off, ever consider that?" He waved a hand at Athira, trying to banish her smug look from the corner of his vision. "Besides, there's still the cameras to consider. Zoe obviously had help."

Zoe returned, carefully wrapped sandwich in hand. "Oh, the cameras were easy." She gave Shift his sandwich and leaned in close, a hand to the side of her mouth. "Kione made the cameras light sensitive, but if you blind one particular camera's sensor, it whites out the whole lot for a few minutes until he notices and reboots them." She grinned and leaned away. "Don't tell him--I wanna see how long until he figures it out. It's driving him nuts."

Too focused on unwrapping his sandwich, Shift didn't hear much of her explanation outside of 'cameras' and 'reboots them' as he peeled back the final layer of foil and held his breath, praying his sandwich had survived.

Shift groaned. "It's soggy!"

"Gee, really?" said Athira. "Who could have possibly guessed?"

"I'm sorry, Shift," said Zoe. "I know what that sandwich meant to you, but I really did think you were stealing my OmNom bars."

Shift sighed, giving himself a moment to mourn his sandwich before he was finally ready to let it go.

"To be fair," said Shift, placing his sandwich down on Zoe's outdoor table and staring dramatically off into the night. "I've stolen more than a few in my time. This is probably just karma coming back to bite me. I'm just sorry my sandwich was the one to pay the price."

"Can I go now?" muttered Athira, attempting to go through the doorway still blocked by Zoe.

Zoe grabbed Athira around the shoulders in answer and pushed her closer towards Shift. "Weeeeeell, you know what the best thing is to mourn a lost sandwich?"

Athira tensed, eyeing them suspiciously.

Shift perked up, meeting Zoe's gaze as Athira attempted to wriggle out of her grip. "More food?"

Zoe nodded enthusiastically. "More food!"

Athira's shoulders sagged.

Shift raised an eyebrow. "Did you think we were going to say something else, Thira?"

Athira narrowed her gaze at him, her lips pressed tightly together around a few short, clipped words. "With you two, who knows? Ritual sacrifice was on the table."

"Eeeeh, maybe after dinner," said Zoe. "So, who wants to order noodles?"

*+*+*+*

Bonus paragraph:

Shift considered it for a moment. "Noodles sound good..." He flicked his gaze to Athira, who turned bright red as his attention landed on her. He gave her a slow, lazy smile. "But I do have to say, Athira's looking like a snacc." 

REMINDER TO GO CHECK OUT THE INDIGO WEBTOON [Hunting Ground Zero] AND VOTE ON IT 

LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT A LINK TO THE PRETTY ART ✨