Work Text:
you’re sat at a wooden table outside a kitschy sandwich shop on a warm evening, trying to charm your way into a job.
not at the sandwich shop. that would honestly be harder. harder to stomach, at least. you’re better than that. you have to be better than that. you didn’t read reflections on the motive power of fire cover to goddamn cover half a dozen times to end up spreading dijon on a blackbean burger.
no, you’re just trying to paint yourself as a pretty new face at the restaurant this company’s director of special projects is known to frequent. the kind of guy you could bump into, say,
“god, sorry! what a klutz, eh?”
with just the right tinge of crafted softness in your voice, just the kind of amicability to follow up with a recited, rehearsed,
“hey, don’t i see you around here a lot? do you work nearby?”
he does work nearby. the main office is half a block over, a tower of blackened glass and steel, and when he tells you just that, you nod like you’ve walked past it ever day for months (you’ve never been here in your damn life, never seen him in your damn life), nod like you’ve always just sorta wondered what that building was (there’s a dossier about him, about it, that you wrote yourself, sitting on your hostel bed in a half-empty duffel with a shitty, rusty lock).
he’s a year younger than you. highest ranking in his division. jealous doesn’t suit you, but maybe bitter does, livid does.
you’re sober, faking tipsy to sound unthreatening. (faking tipsy to hide the desperate grief that’s been caught under your nails since this day in 2009.)
you don’t own that grief. it’s not yours. there was a man named daniel jacobi with your very same face who wasted away for two years trapped under the dead weight of a mistimed bomb and a stack of human charcoal. he croaked soaked in booze in a bar in san francisco, and you crawled out of his corpse.
you read over his memories with an editor’s eye.
that spinning, that breathless drowning desperation you watch this stranger feel as he kills a team who trusted him.
oh, no, that won’t do at all. a red mark through that one. you lack mercy now. much more compelling.
and the mistake that made it happen?
no, no, you would never do such a thing. you’re good at what you do. you’re good at what you do.
you walk you fingers across the table slowly, a tilted head and half lidded eyes and a traitor’s soothing smile at no one at all, like you’re playing villain, like you know exactly how beautiful you are because you’ve made sure of it every second you’ve ever been around another soul.
something in you falters; you hide it instantly. flawlessly. because you are not the corpse on that dirty floor of that boring bar.
but you’re not the thing that crawled out, either, because that daniel died too, and another new you got up out of the carcass and tried to get the dead daniel’s boyfriend shot in the head on a space station.
after all that, after the screaming and the threats and the forfeited counter-coup, funny enough, you looked in the mirror and almost recognized it. like part of you reverted, back to the you from san francisco that was so certain the worst was over.
a shed skin isn’t — isn’t skin anymore. it’s not body, not self, it doesn’t feel, doesn’t bleed with you. maybe, if you treat it really nice and stitch it up real good, well, at best, it’s a coat. and you didn’t do either of those things. didn’t even try.
you have to be that person again.
you have to be a person again.
you have to shrug that human shell back over your shoulders. slip back into that skin and wear it like it’s still yours, like you didn’t leave it to go cold and rotten and sallow in that bar, like it’s not impossibly heavy to lug around when you’ve gotten so used to that weightless, guiltless drift you’ve been moving through the world with. you have to be a person you don’t remember being.
he was a bastard too. there’s depravity in the kind of carelessness that birthed your little anniversary, and more in the resent you wore in your voice like cryptic coloration. men worth being don’t piss away their rent money on icy booze.
your worst self is all of them. any of them. every last one. your truest selves are the ones who think that this time it’ll be different.
your palm goes flat on the surface of the table you’ve conveniently made yourself comfortable at, and its heat fogs a halo of a handprint around the plane of contact. he asks if you’ve ordered food already, and you put on that little quirked smile and tell him, “no, actually, i was heading over to, but —”
“ah, sorry,” he says, and his voice makes you feel nothing. “i distracted you, didn’t i?”
“oh, not at all.”
“at least let me order you something.”
(you hear him say it and it makes your teeth hurt.
somewhere, a ghost whispers really? because i was just about to offer to buy you a drink.
you should’ve killed warren yourself when you had the chance. woulda paid your way into heaven with a bullet, just like the good old days of indulgences. shot your boyfriend dead in front of christ and all the saints.)
but this man doesn’t buy you a balvenie, just something toasted and warm with fig and brie and turkey, and it takes a good chunk of effort not to show how long it’s been since someone’s gotten you to sit down and eat a real meal.
you’re here, now, listening to this man repeat words you’ve seen before on the company website, and debating if you should “accidentally” touch his hand now or after he’s finished his second beer.
look.
you would just apply. you would. faking identifying documents is easy. faking a resume when half your life’s work has ended up in black archives is… well, tougher . faking references when you’ve burned every bridge that’s ever been built for you? ha. yeah. sure.
“so what are you doing up here? work around here, too?”
you put on a new face, something sweet and pitiable. “ah, not working around here just yet. had some troubles with family recently —” (family’s one thing to call it) “— and now that that’s all done, i’m remembering just how tough it was to find someone who’s hiring orbital ballistics specialists the first time around. i’m in no rush, fortunately.” you give a little laugh. he matches it.
“call it serendipity,” he says, and you don’t call it serendipity. you call it a long story short. “my department’s actually looking for someone in a similar field right now.”
“well,” you reply, (recited, rehearsed, ) “i’d love to hear more about that. but first,” (your chin on your hand. a little lean in.) “i mean, let’s not just talk about work all night. i wanna hear more about you.”
if there’s one thing warren taught you, it’s how to make intentional seem accidental.
how to make them think it was meant to be.