Work Text:
It hadn’t seemed unreasonable, when she had first signed the contract. Granted, it was the first time she’d ever signed a contract that was thicker than a phonebook. The Teufort phonebook wasn’t exactly War and Peace, but still. And the advance she had gotten when she was hired had immediately taken the edge off the near complete poverty she had found herself in, upon arriving in Teufort.
The nicest thing that could be said about Teufort was that there were some parts of it that weren’t terrible, and that you would be fine if you didn’t drink the tap water and kept your door locked. At least it was warm here. February usually meant snow in Rhode Island. She tried not to miss snow too much.
Tomorrow was going to be her day off. Her first and only day off, and she’d been on the job for five months. It was a good job. It was a complicated job. It was the first job she’d had that had been challenging, because it was the first job she’d had at all.
Miss Pauling had terrible parents. She didn’t know why they were terrible, probably there were some people who just weren’t meant to have children. It was her luck that two of them had gotten married and had her anyway. As far as she knew, they didn’t particularly care that she was broke and in New Mexico. Her father had told her that he would be happier if she came back from law school with a husband instead of a degree, which didn’t really matter, since she had been expelled before she could come home with either, and that had been that.
She hadn’t realized that the worst thing they’d done had been not to let her want for anything but affection. She’d never needed to work, and there was a certain attitude among her parents’ class of people that it wouldn’t have been appropriate.
The Administrator had been shockingly accommodating about the whole thing. Miss Pauling realized, after she had applied and interviewed and been accepted for the job, that it wasn’t the sort of position she should have gotten, with no experience, and nothing to adorn her resume but three short tenures at three separate schools and nothing to show for her time at any of them. She hadn’t had the right temperament for nursing, though she’d excelled at anatomy. She had been embarrassed to be in secretarial school, and had more or less gotten herself thrown out on purpose. Law school had been her last chance, and she didn’t even like to think about how badly she’d messed that up.
So one day off a year had seemed reasonable. She could hardly say no, she’d been sent back to Teufort with an advance of five thousand dollars, tucked neatly in a briefcase, to get herself established in town. It had made her feel terrified and professional at the same time.
Miss Pauling had thrown herself into the job. If her parents had done her one favour, they had made her desperate, obsessive about proving herself. And she was stubborn, determined. She had arrived for her first day of work, perfectly punctual, and hadn’t batted an eye when the Administrator had told her that there was a purple truck outside with a tarp wrapped body in the back, and that she should take it out into the desert, cover it in quicklime, and bury it.
It had probably been the hardest thing she had done in her life, up to that point, but certainly not the hardest thing she’d dealt with since then. Once she’d gotten a mislabeled bag of quicklime. It had been Quick-rete. She had found out too late. She had needed to be creative with that one.
This morning, she got up extra early. Typically she would be on the road by six, for the hour long drive out to the Badlands proper. She showered, dressed. Her apartment was still fairly bare, she hadn’t had time to buy furniture properly. There was a Flea Market in Teufort tomorrow, though, and she was going to bring her truck home from work and finally get some furniture. Maybe some nice decorations. Her mattress on the floor in the corner of her studio apartment was forlorn, and she still lived out of her suitcase. She just hadn’t had the time for much else. She was on the road by quarter after five, in case the Administrator had anything extra for her to do, before her day off.
There were dead spots along the highway out to the office, and her radio was staticky and crackled, sometimes. Her car was a robin’s egg blue Ford Falcon, and she loved it the way you loved your first car, but it had only cost her six hundred dollars. It had broken down four times in the time she’d been on the job, which seemed terrible, but which she knew could have been much worse. Miss Pauling had learned its quirks as quickly as she could, but it still surprised her occasionally.
Her truck was more reliable. She loved her truck the way you love a car you can depend on. And the radio worked, and it had a cassette player. She sang along, once she’d gotten over her initial shyness, and realized that no one would hear her on the usually empty highway.
She was always glad when her little Falcon made the drive into work successfully. She had taking to patting the hood after she parked it outside of the office, for good luck. She tended to have a dusty handprint on the hem of her skirt, where she wiped off her hand, afterward.
Up the steps, into the cool, dim hallway. Miss Pauling glanced idly at the calendar, posted on the bulletin board outside of the office, the mercs were out at Badwater today. She liked Badwater.
The Administrator sat at her desk, bathed in the blue glow of dozens of video feeds, flickering through the clouds of tobacco smoke wafting around her. She was watching old footage of the Mercs, tearing around Hightower. Her name was Helen. That was as much as Miss Pauling knew, though it wasn’t what she called her. The Administrator wasn’t nice. But Miss Pauling liked her. While she wasn’t exactly warm and cuddly, she did seem to appreciate the fact that her assistant was shy, industrious, and not squeamish in the least. She’d gone as far as to praise Miss Pauling for her particular knack for the job, despite the fact that she had some initial reservations about hiring her. More than once, even As far as Miss Pauling was concerned, the Administrator was practically a surrogate mother figure.
“Good morning, ma’am,” she offered. There was already a half-full ashtray on the Administrator’s desk. Miss Pauling made a mental note to come back in ten minutes to empty it. “How’s your Friday going?”
“It’s Saturday, Miss Pauling.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Did you need something?”
“O-oh.” Oh, darn it. Darn it, darn it, damn it. “Saturday. My day off, Saturday.”
“Surely you made plans, Miss Pauling.”
She had planned to sleep in. She had planned to make herself a breakfast that was more than just hastily burned toast and coffee. She had entertained a dream of driving out to Santa Fe and going shopping. Reallyshopping, not just ferreting through the cast off junk of the citizens of Teufort. She’d been saving up for a really good shopping trip. “Y-yes, ma’am. Well. No. Not really. Umm. If it’s all right, ma’am, can I lie on the floor here for a little while?”
“Please don’t.” The Administrator lit a fresh cigarette, still staring at the monitors. “As long as you’re here anyway, the mercs are still out at Hightower, they’ve finished for the week. Drop off their schedules for the next rotation. And there was a poacher who ran afoul of one of the Engineer’s new sentries. Most of him needs to be disposed of. It’s a light day, but as long as you’re here, Miss Pauling.”
Well. There would be next year. “Of course, Administrator.”