Work Text:
Pi's pencil broke.
That didn't happen often. He was usually careful about taking care of his things, especially at work. But he'd been in his office for— he glanced up, but, right, the clock was broken— a long time, and he was starting to really feel it.
So he'd started chewing on and fiddling with the poor carbonated stick. And now it was broken.
That made him a lot sadder than he expected.
It was only a pencil, he rationalized. He shouldn't be feeling so broken up about it. But. But his mom was Ecoversian. Even though he didn't have leaves, he felt an intimate connection to trees and plants, or at least he tried really hard to.
The stick had been a tree once. And then it had been cut. Enslaved and hollowed out and then they put pencil lead in it. And now the tree was the casing of a thousand pencils exactly like this one.
And this one was broken. And they'd all break and chip away. All of the pencils.
Pi's green eyes had glazed over by the time he reached this profound conclusion, and that was the state Madam President found her assistant in.
She frowned. Squinted at his slump over form, the almost heartbroken look he was giving a broken office instrument he had so far failed to discard. He didn't react to her entrance, either.
She sighed and shook her head, tiptoed over to a shelf off to the side of the office. That was where he kept blankets, right?
Pi completely failed to react to the rainbow intruder that called itself a president until he was rudely grabbed by the shoulders. "Mhmm???"
"Pi. Go sleep. You've been here all night."
Pi's sleepy brain didn't quite process her words, but his body, begging for rest, eagerly followed her directions. Once he was in a horizontal position on a couch, he realized it was already morning.
Oh.
"I'm—"
"Just sleep." She threw the blanket over him. "I'll make sure the clock's replaced today, you can have the morning off." Tucked him in a little more comfortably.
Pi yawned. Wow. He was really bone tired... "Thank you... The pencil..?"
"...I threw it away?"
Ow... So cold... The poor thing... Pi fell asleep with a slight frown, muttering nonsense.
The president shook her head, pinching the root of her nose. What. It was just a pencil. And it was snapped in half???
Pi woke up a few hours later, groggy. Where..? It took him a few seconds to remember why he was waking up at work and not at home, and a few minutes to eat and make himself presentable.
He was ashamed. He was the assistant of the president, dangit. This was an Indigo kind of mistake.
Pi slunk back to his office, pretending that everything was normal.
His hand went to find something to write with. What with this, he was going to be behind on schedule. What if he missed some important calls—
His eyes fell on the writing instrument on his desk, and he couldn't repress a smile.
Rainbow tape holding them together— two halves of a pencil.