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Miss Pauling was not going to make it to the zoo. The zoo was in Santa Fe. It wasn't usually open past six. Tonight was special. Tonight the zoo would be open until midnight, some sort of fundraiser. Miss Pauling didn't know zoos needed fundraisers. She had heard about it through the grapevine and given that the only other grapes on this particular vine were Mr. Bidwell, Mr. Reddy, and the Administrator (who was really more of a raisin as far as sociable gossip went, on the vine in question), she was lucky to have heard about it at all. But, Reddy had mentioned "A Wild Night at The Zoo!" and she had found out more about it, and it sounded fantastic. Food. Wine. Animals. A passable excuse for an adult woman to get dressed up and go to the zoo all on her own, solely for the reason that she had never actually been to a zoo before and really wanted to find out what the big deal was. Twenty-three years of never having made it to the zoo, enough was enough. She was pretty sure what Soldier had told her was wrong.
But she wasn't going to get to go to the zoo, because her scooter had broken down. A quarter of a mile from her last pickup of the day, out at Hightower. That had not been part of the plan. Pick up a briefcase. Bring it back to HQ. Do the paperwork. Tidy up her desk. Squeak out of work by eight and break a few laws to get to the zoo by eleven. Hope they had an elephant. Hope it would be visible after dark. Miss Pauling really loved elephants. She hadn't ever seen one in person.
Nor would she. Because it was probably going to take another half hour to push her stupid scooter the rest of the way to Hightower. It was hot and it was dusty and she was tired. She’d begged the Administrator to let her get a scooter, because her truck was terrible on gas. It had taken a year, time-and-motion studies, graphs, and pie charts to talk the Administrator into it. She’d had it picked out for the entire year. She had beamed the whole way to the dealership, with a carefully counted envelope full of the money she needed to buy it. She’d bought it new, it was still under warranty, but a fat lot of good that did her in the middle of the Badlands.
And Miss Pauling loved the scooter, she did. She’d never ridden one before, but she’d gotten lessons in town and she had gotten her little licence and it was actually kind of fun. Miss Pauling also loved her job, but this was probably the only part that was kind of fun. At least the kind of fun that other people recognized as fun. Miss Pauling also thought mummies were fun.
Pushing a stupid heavy scooter up the winding gravel road to Hightower was not fun. Miss Pauling was ferociously tenacious, but she was also exhausted and disappointed and she wasn't going to get to go to the zoo. So she stopped at the side of the road, and, a little vindictive, dropped the damn thing on the ground. She fumed for a few more minutes, before tugging her bag off the back of the scooter and slinging it over her shoulder. Then she stormed the rest of the way up to Hightower, and hoped that the Engineer had brought his truck out.
When she finally got to the top of the hill and into Hightower proper, the lights were on, but it was deserted. The mercs had gone home. And she just about sat down in the dirt and cried, except Hightower wasn’t actually deserted.
“HEY! YO, MISS PAULING!”
Oh my god he is like six stories up just hanging off a balcony in midair jesus christ what do I even do if he falls he is going to break his neck and then what am I supposed to do who do I call I don’t even know if the phone out at Hightower is wired in and I hate climbing those damn telephone polls oh goddamn it and my shovel’s all the way back with my scooter except I guess I wouldn’t actually be supposed to bury him oh for christ’s sake, Scout.
“SCOUT. GET DOWN FROM THERE.” She thought she saw him losing his grip and her heart nearly stopped, but he was just adjusting his hold to wave at her. Oh god that was worse. “NOW .” Because that would help.
“‘Kay!” He waved, cheerfully. Swung a leg over the balcony, vanished inside. Reappeared on the ground a remarkably short time later, grinned as she came stomping over. “Swear you sounded exactly like my ma just then. Been waitin’ for you. I was watchin’ for the light on your bike, though, didja just feel like a walk?”
“Scout, whatwere you doing up there, you could’ve fallen and killed yourself. Where the hell is the rest of the team?”
He glanced up over his shoulder, as though it was the first time he’d noticed that Hightower was well-named. “Aw, hey, I was fine. Ain’t that bad, would’ve respawned anyway, s'all still online. Those other guys knocked off early, so I said I’d do the drop-off. I was gonna hang around a while anyway, I like Hightower. Sunset’s nice an’ s’good for climbing. Sniper’s pickin’ me up tomorrow. Also, I guess you wanna pick up your briefcase? S’back in the office, Demo put it in the safe an’ I hope you know the combo ‘cause I forgot to ask.” Scout rubbed the back of his neck. “Nice night, hey? Your hair looks pretty.”
Miss Pauling had helmet hair and her heart was still in her throat and she was in no mood for being flirted with. “Scout, you don’t get off the hook by flirting with me, and also do not flirt with me. My hair looks awful. I am having a bad night. And anyway, what if you hadn’t killed yourself, what if you’d fallen and broken every damn bone in your body and just ended up lying here for hours until you died or until Sniper came or...Jesus Christ , Scout. Just. On top of everything else , if I’d have had to bash your head in with a rock because you fell off the top of Hightower, that would’ve ruined my night. What are you even doing here?”
“I just said,” he protested, somewhat indignantly, then his tone softened. “M’sorry you’re havin’ a bad night, Miss Pauling. I didn’t mean t’scare you. I was fine, honest. Anything I can do?”
She rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses. “You can haul my scooter the rest of the way up the road, get Engie back out here to fix it, and I would kill for a drink and a shower and a ride to the zoo in Santa Fe, but never mind. Do you know if the phone is hooked up? I need to call the Administrator and tell her I’ll be late.”
“Umm. Well. How’s three an’ a half outta six sound?”
Miss Pauling took a moment and exhaled a long, slow breath. “As long as one is the phone, I don’t honestly care.” She patted her hair absently, sighed again, pulled it out of its disintegrating bun and shook it loose. Took off her glasses. She was still hot and tired and her shoes were red with dust, and her legs hurt. But there was no reason to take it out on Scout. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.” Miss Pauling realized she was being stared at, blushed, and put her glasses back on. “Where’s the phone?”
Scout reached out, tugged at the strap of the bag she had dangling from her hand. Her fingers were tired from carrying it, and she let it go. “Here, lemme. I dunno about the phones, I think they might be down. But...I mean, come on back. Showers still work, there’s beer in the fridge an’ I can get your scooter. No big deal, that thing’s tiny. Also...I mean, I ain’t a patch on Engie, but I had a bike back home, I can at least take a look. Maybe it ain’t a big deal, might be able to fix it. I mean, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh...no, it’s fine, you don’t need…” Miss Pauling stopped. There were rocks in her shoes. Sand. Probably about half the Badlands. Her hair was down and she hated it when her hair was down, it made her feel like a little girl. She tugged it into a ponytail, hastily. There was a run in her stockings, her scooter was broken and heavy and still too many yards away for her to even want to think about walking back to it, never mind hauling it the rest of the way up the hill. And she wasn’t going to get to go to the zoo. And Scout had her bag. And the sun was setting and it really was nice. “Well. I mean...showers? And you...you wouldn’t mind? It’s a long way back, it was just heavy and I got it most of the way. It’s still new, only a year old and it hasn’t ever broken before. I’m going to have to take it back to the dealership and yell at them . I filled up the tank before I left, so it’s not like it’s out of gas and I have extra anyway. But...no, you worked all day. It’s not that much further, I don’t mind…” She was being stared at again. “No, you know, it’s all right. I’m sorry I asked, it’s fine.”
Scout was looking at her like she was crazy and she probably deserved it. He grinned, though, and rubbed his nose. “Miss Pauling, honest t’god, I am just screwin’ around Hightower. ‘Course I don’t mind. Keep me from breakin’ my neck for another twenty minutes, at least. An’ you didn’t ask, I offered. It’s fine. I could use a walk.”
Oh.
Oh, what the hell.
“Well. Okay. Thank you.”
------
The showers at Hightower were hot. The locker room shower was big and clean. A dozen shower heads, and Miss Pauling turned them all on. She filled the room with white noise and clouds of moist heat and had all the dust scrubbed off in five minutes, but lingered in the big, steamy room for another fifteen. She just sat in the middle of the hot water and the sound of it hitting the tiles, relaxing in a way that she really never did. Her shower at home was barely four feet square, and her hot water generally lasted about as long as it took her to lather her hair. Even as she went around, regretfully turning each one off, the water was still running hot. Miss Pauling made a mental note to remember this about Hightower.
She crept out of the shower, wary of Scout, and wrapped herself up in a big, fluffy towel. The mercs murdered each other all day, she supposed a nice shower at the end of it was the least they could have to look forward to.
Miss Pauling had left her dusty skirt, her torn stockings, her sweater on the bench in the locker room. Her towel was big and fluffy and she didn’t want to put on her dirty clothes. Well. Her bag was there. And “A Wild Night at the Zoo!” was supposed to have been semi-formal. At least someone else would get to think her dress was pretty. She toweled off, tugged her dress on and did the zipper most of the way up the back, and padded out of the locker room in her bare feet. She made a brief stop in the break room for a beer, and grabbed a second one for Scout as an afterthought.
She had missed the last of the sunset, but Scout had brought her scooter the rest of the way up the hill, all the way into the RED base, and parked it just inside the door. He didn’t look up when she came down the stairs, he’d already pulled the cowl off the wheel well, and was examining the engine. “I don’t mean it in a personal kinda way, Miss Pauling, but the motor in this thing belongs in a frickin’ lawnmower .”
“Well, if you found the motor at all, you're already further than I would have gotten.”
“You ever wanna get more out of it, lemme know, I could probably wrangle somethin’ half-decent together, the junkyard in Teufort actually ain’t that…” Scout glanced up, and Miss Pauling couldn’t pretend she hadn’t been at least a little curious to see his expression. She wore a dress to work every day. Well. A skirt and a blouse. But she didn’t wear a dress with a flirty, flowy hemline and a v-neck and rhinestones and an absence of sleeves. There was a way he stopped in mid sentence when he saw her, sometimes. A way his eyes lit up. Usually just for a single, genuine moment, before he covered it up with a smirk or a dumb comment. Long enough for her to wish, fleetingly, that her job wasn’t so complicated and demanding, to the end of excluding any possibility of a life outside it.
“What’s the occasion? Hot date?”
Miss Pauling shrugged. It would be a long time before it was brought to her attention, but Miss Pauling had a way of lowering her eyes, tilting her head down to hide a smile, when she was shy or pleased or both. It was a rare moment that made Scout wish he’d been smart enough to go to college and get a white collar job and have a chance at being even remotely in what he considered to be her league. “I was going to the zoo.”
“I think one of us maybe’s got the wrong idea ‘bout what you wear to a zoo. An’ also about when they’re open. Generally speaking.”
“Mr. Reddy told me about a fundraiser at the zoo in Sante Fe. I was going to try and go. Before…” she gestured towards her scooter with one of the bottles she carried. “Well, you see how my night’s gone.”
He had ducked his head again, she put the beer she’d brought him down on the footboard of her scooter. “I think it’s probably just your sparkplug’s a little gummed up. It just stalled out on you, right? I tried gettin’ it goin’ an’ you can , but it’s a hard start. Ain’t good for it. Dust gets inta everything out here, y’kinda gotta keep on top of it. Won’t take me long if that’s all it is. Pull it out, five minutes with a lighter. Burn the gunk off, no big thing. An’ your spare tire’s a little flat, I’ll fix that since I got her open anyway. Pyro keeps compressed air around, he won’t mind. Last damn thing you need if y’get a flat out here, y’find out the spare’s bad too.”
Well, she’d gotten this far. And she certainly wasn’t going to make it to the zoo. And she never had any fun, except with her scooter. Miss Pauling leaned forward, a few strands of damp hair clinging to her neck as she put a hand on his shoulder and peeked at what he was doing. She had no idea what he was doing. “I didn’t even know I had a spare tire.” Triumphantly, she thought she noticed a slight flush of red on his cheeks, and she smiled to herself as she retreated to sit on the stairs down from the base interior. She didn’t have a bottle opener. Miss Pauling didn’t especially like beer anyway, she just cradled the slightly damp bottle in her hands. She tilted her head back, resting up against the handrail. It was a warm night, but the breeze was cool.
Scout kept working in silence for a few more minutes. "Is Reddy the tall one?" he asked, finally.
"Hmm? Oh. No, Reddy is the little pudgy one." Miss Pauling winced. “Don’t tell him I called him pudgy. I didn’t mean pudgy, he’s...stout. Stocky? Husky? I don’t know what the good word is.”
He laughed. “Me neither, I’ve always been a scrawny bastard.”
Miss Pauling knew all the good words for scrawny, particularly as they applied to Scout. Lean. Wiry. Lithe. Slender. Rangy, but not gangling. Broad across the shoulders, tall enough to make up for it. Tall enough for her to feel petite but not tiny. Miss Pauling couldn’t remember if she’d ever known a boy her own age (or near enough) as long as she’d known Scout. Long enough to know he had definitely been scrawny when they’d first met. Long enough to have seen him grow out of it. “You aren’t scrawny.”
His blue eyes flicked up again, over the seat of her scooter. “That’s maybe one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me.”
That couldn’t be true. “That’s not true.”
Scout shrugged, and then, offhandedly, “I don’t think you keep track.”
The breeze seemed a couple degrees cooler. And Miss Pauling was suddenly in the midst of a personal crisis. Because she wasn’t nice. She just wasn’t. She was friendly, thoughtful. She worked hard, she’d been at this job for four years now, she wanted desperately to be good at it and she was pretty sure she was. Nice, though. She would have had to go out of her way to be nice. And she was a professional, career-oriented woman. Nice didn’t fit anywhere into her version of that persona.
But that was terrible. That was really, really terrible. Because how had she spent four years working with someone who she liked, someone she knew all the good words for, someone whose crush on her was just enough to flirt with the border between flattering and obnoxious, but had never crossed it. Someone who was up to his elbows in the guts of her scooter just to make her night a little bit better--how had she spent four years neglecting to even just be nice to Scout?
And if one of the nicest things she’d ever said was just to disagree with his own self-deprecating comment? And if he kept track? She was terrible. Abruptly, genuinely, Miss Pauling found herself really regretting that. “Wow. You’re right, I’m really sorry.”
“Hmm?”
Miss Pauling fumbled slightly for the words. "I'm not nice to you. There hasn't been a day since I met you that you haven't been nice to me, but I haven't ever made the effort to be nice to you."
Scout stood up behind her scooter, a sparkplug in hand. He'd unwrapped the bandages from his hands, and they were clouded with dark grease from fingertips to wrists. He rubbed his nose anyway, smudged it. "Oh, hey. Naw, Miss Pauling, I wasn't tryin' t'give you any crap about it. Ain't like you're mean t'me. I take it back, I think you're plenty nice."
"You're doing it right now," she marveled. "Not being mean isn't the same as being nice. I’m awful at being nice. We’ve been working together, we’ve been friends for four years now, and I’m just not nice to you." An irrational insecurity swelled up inside her. “We...we are friends, right?”
Miss Pauling didn’t know what she looked like, sitting on the stairs. She wasn’t particularly self-aware, and as she did a job that left her disheveled and covered in blood half the time and had her penned up in an office for the other half, she’d quickly grown out of being self-conscious. She wasn’t nice. But between the fact that she didn’t think of herself from the inside or the outside, it was no wonder she didn’t really understand why Scout sometimes looked at her the way he did, the way he looked at her now.
With her bare feet on the raw metal of the steps, in her pretty purple dress, with her hair down and damp and clinging to her neck. Petite, pretty. Turning a damp, unopened bottle over in her hands, and afraid that after four years, they still weren’t friends. On a beautiful night, in one of his favourite places in the world. Scout would never be able to pin it down, but it would always be the moment when he realized he had a more serious problem than just a crush on the pretty girl from the office.
“C’mon, Miss Pauling. Well, yeah. ‘Course we’re friends.”
“I wish I was better at acting like it.”
Scout came over, sat down on the bottom step beside her. She moved her feet to make room, turned so she was sitting straight. He plucked the beer bottle out of her fingers, levered it open with the top of the other, handed it back. Popped the lid of his own off with a ring on his middle finger, one she’d never noticed he wore. Downed a third of it and grinned at her. “Hell, Miss Pauling. What d’you think friends do ?”
Heavy took me ice skating, that one time. I was so homesick, I used to go ice skating on the pond behind my parents’ house, I didn’t even know Teufort had a skating rink. I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that Heavy knows how to skate. Sniper showed me all his old gun catalogs, from back in Australia. They make the most beautiful guns. I didn’t know the first thing about guns when I first got here, he taught me so much. I like to just talk with Pyro, Pyro’s a really good listener . I like to talk with all of them. “Umm. I don’t know, I guess. Just talk, maybe.”
“Sounds good. Y’know me, I’m damn good at talkin’.” Scout pulled a lighter out of his pocket, toyed with her spark plug for a few moments, then held the flame up to the end of it. He was quiet for a long minute, before glancing over at her. “Uh. Did you need me t’get you started, or…?”
Yes. Actually. In more ways than one, apparently she had. “O-oh. Um! H-how was your day?”
Scout grinned, picked up the beer she’d brought him, and took another drink. “Better, once you showed up.”
She smiled back, then lightly tapped the lip of her bottle against the one he held. “Hey. Mine too.” She paused. Only three more months until November, and she did have that day off coming up. “So...do you like ice skating?”