Work Text:
“My email’s broken,” he says to one of the secretaries. She’s plump with ginger hair up in a bun, cats eye glasses, wearing a fuzzy pink sweater and pencil skirt combo, and clearly watching some stream on the sly, so obviously she’s free.
“What?” she asks, looking up from her stream to him like he just spoke some outer rim language.
“Or malfunctioning, whatever the lingo is,” he says impatiently. “Can you fix it? I need to send a report to the chief.”
“Your email,” she repeats, “is broken.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” he snaps. “Can you fix it or not?”
From somewhere behind the secretary he’s talking to, a couple of the other ones giggle and lean in to whisper to each other, looking at him. Heat climbs the back of his neck. He ignores it.
“But the mid season climax is almost here, Mr. Steel!” she protests.
Juno gives her an incredulous look. “So you’re not going to even pretend like you’re working?” And then, “Wait, how do you know my name?”
“Everyone in the station knows your name,” she says, and he doesn’t for one second think that she means it in a good way. “And the chief shouted your name really loudly yesterday when you was in his office yesterday, and I looked you up, and you’re wearing a name tag, and this isn’t the first time we’ve talked--”
“Looked me up?” he asks, alarmed.
“Just a little peek at your file, Mr. Steel, I do it for everyone at the station. Great work on the Baudelaire case, by the way! I love the way you write reports, I swear none of the other cops here have a sense for drama--”
“Secretaries have the clearance for that?” he asks, looking at her. She’s five feet tall, which somehow makes it harder to believe.
“Um,” she says. “Yes. Who else would… type them up? You know?”
He thinks about it. “That makes sense.”
She looks relieved. “Yes, it does, Mr. Steel. Now how about I fix this email problem of yours!” She stands up with gusto, sending her chair rolling back, mid season climax apparently forgotten.
“Right,” he says, “yes.” And, “What’s your name, now again?”
“Rita,” she chirps.
“Your last name,” he says. He hasn’t been in the habit of calling people by their first name since he was a kid. It feels too intimate now.
She gives him a look so dirty he’s taken off guard enough that he almost walks straight into a door frame.
“You never ask a lady her last name, Mr. Steel!”
“You’re thinking about age--”
“I know what I’m talking about!”
“Fine,” he says, giving it up as a lost cause in the face of her utter outrage. “Rita it is.”
She beams at him, anger forgotten just like that.
Juno Steel doesn’t get smiled at like that often. It sticks in his mind. He doesn’t forget her again, after that.
“Rita, I need you to find out the opening and closing hours of this store for me.”
A flurry of typing for just a moment.
“Eight to three, Mr. Steel!”
“Which means that the widow has to be lying!”
Footsteps--
“A thank you would be--”
A door slamming shut.
A sigh. More tapping on a keyboard, and then eventually the sound of giggling underneath the sound of a stream.
“Rita, what was the wife’s cars license number?”
She rattles off a string of numbers.
“And what kind of car?”
“Hmm, lemme check, I bet I can find a pic of it on her social media-- there we go! Ooh, it’s all white and sleek and oh, oh, the mistress on Passions of Venus was killed in this kind of car in the reboot! Classy.”
“I mean what kind of model. What’s the name, Rita.”
“She says in the tags that she calls it Betsy. Cute name! Doesn’t really fit the car though, I’d go for something more fancy like, like… Fancy?”
“In the tags? What does that even-- never mind. Just find out what model it is, will you?”
A sigh, long nails clicking against a keyboard, and then an answer rattled out in a bored monotone.
“But that means…” he says, and then trails off into muttering to himself as he walks away.
“Not even a goodbye, huh?”
“Rita, does the business partner take any pills? Prescriptions? If he had access to any kind of sedative... ”
“Mr. Steel, that’s confidential information.”
“So you can’t find out?”
The sound of knuckles cracking. “Now I never said that.”
“Rita, find out--”
He looks up from the file he’s leafing through at her desk. It’s empty. Or rather, it’s more cluttered than the evidence room, covered in pictures and magazines and half the break rooms mugs and at least a dozen half empty nail polish bottles all the colors of the rainbow. But there’s no Rita there. He looks at the empty space where she should be, feeling oddly like he just looked up into the sky to see that the dome had just disappeared while he wasn’t paying attention.
The secretary sitting next to her empty desk who he wouldn’t be able to pick out of a lineup smacks his gum. “Rita’s sick.”
“Oh,” he says. He looks down at the file. Frowns, and looks up at the other secretary. “Find out if the victim and the suspect were ever in the same part of town at the same time in the last two weeks.”
“What?”
“I said--”
“I can’t do that!”
“Why not? Can’t you just--” he mimes typing at a keyboard in the air.
“Um, no?”
“Why?”
“Because the internet isn’t a magic box that knows everything?”
“Rita could find out,” he says, definitely not whining. “It’s a reasonable request.”
“It is absolutely not,” the secretary says, and then turns in his chair to the secretary sitting behind him. “Brad, back me up here.”
Brad doesn’t even bother looking up from his computer. “It’s crazy unreasonable,” he says flatly. “Do you even know how the internet works?”
“But,” he says, feeling ganged up on, “Rita would find out.” She would. He’s certain of that. She always finds out.
The secretary gives him a Look and snorts. “As if,” he says. “Rita’s an idiot.”
He doesn’t know what to say in response to that.
Actually, after about three hours of a nagging feeling in the back of his head as a casually disdainful Rita’s an idiot looped in his mind he abruptly decides that he does know what to say in response to that, and he gets up from his chair in the midst of writing a report, right in the middle of a sentence, marches up to the secretary with the forgettable face and nonexistent name, and he settles things the Hyperion City way.
He starts a fight.
“What were you THINKING?” Chief Khan roars at him. His office door is closed, but Juno doesn’t think for a second that the whole bullpen can’t hear the old bear as clear as day. “Attacking a defenseless SECRETARY? RIGHT IN THE OFFICE?”
“Hey!” Juno snaps, voice slightly nasally from how he still has to pinch his nose shut to stop blood from getting all over his shirt. This is his last un-blood-stained shirt, damn it. “That ‘defenseless secretary’ tried to shove a pencil into my eyeball.” It’s not that the HCPD specifically required for their paper pushers to be ready to murder if provoked; it was just a common side effect from growing up in Hyperion City.
“Which is the ONLY REASON I haven’t kicked you the curb yet, Steel! Now, what did he say to set you off?”
“How d’you know it was something he said?” he asks, narrowing his eyes suspiciously, and then immediately stops as he’s reminded of his new black eye. God, that’s the last damn time he’s underestimating a secretary. At least he’d given as good as he got.
“Chad’s uh… a bit of a pill,” Chief Khan admits in an abashed tone of voice lowered all the way down to the shocking volumes of Sane Indoors Speaking Voice. He coughs sheepishly. Juno stares. Apparently, Khan’s only comfortable shouting and screaming insults when it’s about Juno. Noted.
“He called… it’s stupid.”
“I already know that,” Khan says. “It’s you. Just tell me what kind of stupid.”
He mumbles something.
“Speak up, Steel,” Khan snaps. “My eardrums aren’t what they used to be, wish I could figure out what’s causing--”
“--said Rita’s dumb,” he says, resentful at being made to do… whatever this is.
Khan looks at him, blinks, squints his eyes. “Pardon?”
“She’s not.”
“The secretary?”
“Yeah.”
“The one with the sweaters that keep shedding all over the office?”
“Yeah.”
“That keeps marathoning streams on the job no matter how much I shout at her?”
“Yup.”
“The one with the,” he gestures a large vague shape around his eyes.
“With the glasses, yeah.”
“That can shriek louder than me?” His tone of voice seems to indicate that this is her worst sin yet.
“Got it in one, chief.”
Khan scrunches up his face like he’s thinking real hard and it’s hurting him just a bit. “You’re friends?”
“I never said that!” Juno snaps immediately.
“Then why’re you all defensive, huh?”
“She just isn’t dumb.”
“Isn’t she?”
“No!”
“You know she doesn’t know her left and rights, right?”
“She-- what? Really?”
“Found it out during a division wide bar night that turned tragic during a dart game. Poor Rebecca…”
“Well, that’s,” he says, and thinks about people coyly snickering because oh Officer Juno doesn’t know how to update the router or fix his email or filter the cloud or search the firewall or whatever, oh Officer Juno hasn’t watched any movies, doesn’t catch any references, watch this one fly over his head just like all of the others, did you know that he graduated from that school? In Oldtown? Can you believe it? They’ll let anyone become a cop these days… “That doesn’t matter! She’s the best damn secretary in this building.”
“Steel,” Khan says, and then he leans in across his desk and speaks in what he probably thinks is a discreet whisper, “we think that she may be hacking confidential files. My files. We’re planning a sting on her. She’s not a good secretary.”
You’ll never catch her, is his first thought, and it’s utterly confident. “Well, she’s certainly something,” he grumbles.
“She is that,” Khan agrees, surly. Juno’s got a feeling that different thoughts are crossing their minds.
“But not an idiot,” he says firmly, “and if Charles--”
“Chad.”
“--whatever, if he says it again then he knows what’s coming to him.”
Khan grins. “A punching bag?”
“--Shut up. I gave as good as I got, alright?”
“Sure, Steel. Now get out of my office.”
Rita shows back up to work the next day, a little stuffy in the nose but otherwise seemingly fine. She makes a beeline straight for Juno’s desk when she comes in.
“Rita, what is--” the rest of his sentence is swallowed by a confused wheeze as she tries to suffocate him. Wait, no. He thinks this might be one of those hug things. “Wffh,” he says, trying to say why. Oh god, he’s got sweater fuzz in his mouth now.
“Mr. Steel,” Rita says, voice wrought with emotion, “you’re the sweetest.”
He makes another confused, muffled sound, and starts trying to paw his way towards freedom and air.
“We’re best friends now,” she says, “I just decided.”
He starts hitting on her arm, trying to get her to let go.
“I knew planting those bugs in Chief Khan’s office was a good investment,” she says, and Juno freezes for a moment, and then he redoubles his efforts to try and get free. “I mean, it was just kind of an impulse thing at the time, ya’know? But wow my horoscope was right that day--”
He breaks free, gasps, chokes on sweater fuzz, spits into his coffee mug, and then gasps some more. Rita pats him hard on the back.
“Got a cold, Mr. Steel?” she asks, sniffles. “I heard it’s going around the office, real nasty bug--”
“You did what?” he demands.
She blinks at him. “I got sick, didn’t you hear--”
“No, not that! With the bugs! The other bugs, the, the listening kind, in Khan’s office?”
Rita giggles. “Aww, your voice still breaks?”
“That’s so illegal.”
“So?” she asks, by all appearances utterly, completely genuine in her confusion.
“I! Am! A! Cop!” He smacks his hand down on his desk in time with his incredulous outrage.
“Yeah, what about it?” she asks, idly twirling a string of curly hair around her finger.
“Cops stop crime.”
She frowns. “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” she says. “But that’s just one of those lies they tell on the streams, right? Like how chloroform works, or that everyone loses their virginity when they’re sixteen.”
Juno stares at her. “You are an idiot.”
“Nope,” she replies cheerfully. “I heard what you said in the office, Mr. Steel! No take backsies.”
“I absolutely take it back.”
“Sorry, but that’s against the law, Mr. Cops-stop-crime.”
“You don’t get to talk about breaking the law!”
“You think I’m smart,” she sing songs.
“I think you’re an idiot!”
“The,” she lowers her voice to cartoonishly low and gruff levels, “best damn secretary in this building.” She breaks out into gleeful giggles. Juno flushes at having the truth slung in his face.
“Nope, you’re an awful, terrible secretary. You bug your boss’ office. You probably read his files too. You don’t even really have clearance, do you?”
She shrugs happily, smiling and perched on his desk. People are glancing over at them and rolling their eyes like the two of them bickering at each other is something to be exasperated over rather than surprised. When the hell did that happen?
“You think I’m brilliant,” she says with smug relish, preening and teasing.
“Maybe,” slips out of him, and she beams, and he flushes, and he says, “but you’re an idiot too. Not mutually exclusive things.”
The thought enters his brain fully formed and so out of nowhere that it startles him: so you’re in good company, then. Two genius morons screeching at each other and bothering everyone and not giving a damn because you’re having fun, damn it.
“So you’re gonna apologize to Chad then?”
“Who?” He blinks, distracted.
“Guy who clocked you.”
“I clocked him back. And hell no. That guy was an asshole.”
“Right!?”