Chapter Text
Ness had been getting a lot of headaches recently. She had been drinking plenty of water and getting plenty of sleep, even taking painkillers, but the headaches wouldn't go away. It didn't help that whenever the headaches flared up, she'd hear a growling voice. She figured it was just the resonating sound of power tools messing with her ears, and hearing the whirring of a drill at 3 am was normal for someone who stays in such close proximity to power tools so often, but she swore she sometimes heard it speak real words.
Sometimes, the headaches would be dehabilitating and she'd hear someone speaking to her, and other times, it was a light buzz. After her second day off in a week, her colleagues were getting worried and tried thier best to help, but to no avail. The headaches stayed, and all she could do was power through it.
Ness arrived at work, looking rather worse for wear, but her colleagues were also her friends, and whilst her headaches were painful, being able to be around them helped a lot more than bundling up alone at home.
"At least if I pass out, someone will be around to call an ambulance!" Ness joked about her headaches with Luis as she made herself a hot chocolate.
Whilst she'd usually have coffee, Mark had suggested that caffeine may be contributing to her headaches, so she decided to stave off the coffee for a while to see if it helped.
Sitting down in the break room next to Luis, she sighed. A total change of tone from her joking mere seconds ago, "you know, I've never had a headache go on for this long before, and I'd feel like a burden going to the doctors for this."
"You're not a burden," Luis replied, "It might be serious. We have insurance with the one doctor in this country that's actually affordable, and with this whole animatronic delivery situation, I'm sure she wouldn't mind running a check-up on you personally to check for ghosts."
"Your right. One of the animatronics could have brought a ghost with them." Ness smiled back, happy that her dearest was there to help her think straight when she couldn't. Happy that despite the incident, he still cared for her.
Then, the conversation topic moved away from her headaches, and onto more mundane things. Ness liked talking about mundane things; it took her mind of her current situation. It let her feel normal. These just-before-work conversations in the break room were the highlight of her morning and what got her out of bed, and she was glad she could simply just chat with Luis about anything and everything, no matter how mundane. She was glad that despite the incident a few days ago, they could still talk about normal things.
Luis checked his watch, and there was about two minutes before the two of them were supposed to start work. As Luis stood up, Ness tapped him on the shoulder.
"Hey, Luis. You're working on the servers today, right?" Ness asked, slightly nervous that he would think she had become weird and clingy after the incident that had happened a few days after they had both gone out together for coffee.
"Yeah!" Luis replied, "I'll be in the server cupboard if you need me. Hopefully I can figure out what's up with the network and hopefully get a patch rolled out so that that contractee stops seeing our emails."
"Do you want help? I could help?"
Luis froze for a second before smiling back, "Sure! Just be careful, the room is kind of small and it's cable spaghetti in there, but with two if us, it should make it easier!"
Ness was a general helping hand, sometimes working with Steven on maintaining code for animatronics they were storing, and sometimes she'd work on the code that kept the servers at the maintenance firm running, so helping Luis with the cable spaghetti was something well within what she could do. Perhaps helping with some of the hardware of the IT systems may help her with some of her other odd jobs around the maintenance firm. Perhaps it could help her get closer to Luis as well.