Work Text:
“Yo, where’ve you been, man?”
Carmen G’s voice comes in a whisper, but in the silence of the office, he may as well be yelling the question.
Miguel hears the clicking from the new guy’s desk pause and when he glances up, through the gap between the workstation dividers, he has a clear line of sight to where Carmen sits diagonally opposite him in the hexagon.
His almond eyes peek back wide and curious and slightly concerned.
He shrugs. “I think I had an accident,” Miguel replies simply, because he can’t exactly explain the gauze taped to his chest, but it sure as hell can’t be ignored. There’d been a dull ache near his shoulder when he’d found himself in the elevator, which was the first sign that he’d missed a couple days of work, even if from his point of view, he’d only just clocked out.
Confirmation comes from the new guy, who’s peering around the wall that divides them.
“You’ve been gone for three days.” Enrique M isn’t really new. He’d been in the office when Miguel had come back from sabbatical (—Seven months, Carmen had told him at the water cooler the day he returned. Man, we thought for sure you were never coming back… I wasn’t moping—shut up, Ryan—hey, you look good, though, Miguel. Tanner. Musta had one hell of a vacation—) and it’s still hard to get used to that sometimes, given how much time Miguel’s continued to miss, off and on.
He wonders, sometimes—worries, even—if his Outie is accident prone or something. No one else seems to miss as much work as him, something Carmen makes sure to rib him about.
“Anything interesting happen while I was gone?”
A head pokes out from Miguel’s right. “No,” Ryan O tells him before disappearing again.
“I closed Chris K’s files yesterday,” Tobias B volunteers, his voice floating up, muffled by the dead air of the office. “I’ll have to go over to Department B later to follow up with him.”
“Is that what they call it now?” Ryan mutters.
An office chair squeaks. “Kids, a little bit more focus here this morning?” Bob R suggests, unseen from where he’s already clicking away on his console, sorting numbers.
Miguel can see Carmen smile at him through the dividers, mouthing Later as he swivels his chair closer to his desk, all but the right shoulder of his crisp white work shirt disappearing from sight.
It was Carmen who’d been there when Miguel opened his eyes to the Severed floor of Oswald Industries for the first time—Carmen who’d opened the meeting room door with an infectious grin on his face. Sure, Miguel had promptly swung on that smiling face, but once he’d figured out what the fuck he was doing there—once the whole split perceptual chronologies thing had been explained to him, he’d apologised, and Carmen had accepted it good-naturedly. Basically did the same thing to my orientation leader when I joined, he’d said with a smirk. They’ve been friends ever since.
As good of friends as Innies can get, anyway. There’s certain lines that will never—can never—be crossed. They’ll never be more than coworkers. They’ll never get to hang out outside of the office like Miguel senses friends are supposed to. Hell, his Outie might not even know Carmen’s Outie.
“Does it hurt?” Carmen wonders, peering down the opening in Miguel’s work shirt to the bandage below.
Even though they’re on break, standing in the brightly lit kitchen corner that branches off the main floor of their Department, Miguel glances over his shoulder, quickly buttoning up his collar and tightening his tie again before Murphy comes around to see how productivity is going and says something like What the hell are you dinks doing?
Last thing he needs is a trip to the Hole, or worse, the Wellness Director’s. Ms. Reimondo is nice enough, but she always seems sorry to see Miguel in her office.
“Nah,” he says. “I think…” He lowers his voice further, leaning in. “Bro, I think I got stabbed, though.”
“Really?”
“When I went to the bathroom earlier? I looked under the bandage. Looks like I fuckin’ got stabbed.”
Carmen is pouring sugar into an empty coffee mug now, shaking his head. “Sure it ain’t a scrape? Looks close to your heart, I mean. If it’s a stab wound, shouldn’t you be dead?”
“Guess I’m lucky.” Can’t be too lucky, with all the scars Miguel’s noticed on his body. There’s the one on his face, of course—glaring and ugly (Bad ass, Carmen insists). He feels sorry for his Outie, sometimes, but it helps to imagine that the accidents are from having lived an interesting life, doing things that matter to him, the way work in the Department matters. From some of the facts about his Outie that Ms. Reimondo had shared in a wellness session once, Miguel thinks he must be a good guy, anyway.
Your Outie is a caring person; he sacrifices for the people he loves… your Outie is courageous; he faces conflict head-on…
“I’m telling you, compadre. Bet your Outie’s a spy or something.”
There he goes again. Spectating on Miguel’s Outie is a kind of running game for Carmen, given how eventful Miguel’s outside life seems to be. It’s tougher to dish out the same treatment; Carmen rarely misses a work day and as far as Miguel can tell, he looks like a normal guy, always has, well-groomed and always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the start of a new day. He’s got that sociable personality, sure, but that doesn’t mean anything about his Outie, according to Tobias’s theory:
I mean, at the core, yes, we probably have personality similarities. But think about it: we have no history beyond the Severed floor. In the great debate of nature versus nurture, we are what comes natural to our Outies. Yet environmental factors could mean that they act completely differently than we do.
So you’re saying we’re more real than our Outies? Ryan had found that amusing.
I’m just saying we’re different.
So we could be total psychopaths out there, Raoul H had mused. It’d been back before Enrique’s arrival.
Total psychopaths wouldn’t come to work for Oswald Industries, Carmen had laughed. They’d never pass the psych eval.
Who says there was a psych eval? Ryan had pointed out. Hey, you’re all lunatics to me!
Of course there’s a psych eval, Bob had interjected, returning from the water cooler. He was always the voice of reason, and having worked on the Severed floor since its beginnings five years prior, he knew the most about the place. How do you think Ms. Reimondo holds our wellness sessions?
“Why would a spy get the Severance procedure and work at Oswald?” Miguel says now, rolling his eyes.
“Why wouldn’t a spy get the Severance procedure?” Carmen replies, reaching past Miguel for the non-dairy creamer. The coffee machine beside them starts to sputter as it sucks up the last of the water in the reserve tank. “If you have no memory of who your Outie is or what he does, the enemy can’t torture the answer out of you.”
“The enemy ain’t breaking into Oz, man,” Miguel says, amused.
Carmen's eyes get wide for a second, flashing in a conspiratorial challenge as he tosses his trash in the counter trash bin and sidles closer—so close they’re practically breathing the same air. “Maybe,” he teases as the coffee finishes brewing beside them, “the enemy’s already in here.”
*
There’s a pounding in Miguel’s head as he comes off work detail that afternoon.
Tearing at the tight knot of the tie at his throat, there’s an aftertaste of coffee on his tongue, stinking up his mouth, and he knows his Innie must’ve been throwing back the java again. He hopes the motherfucker thinks the caffeine addiction is fucking worth it, because it takes forever for him to fall asleep after lockdown, and surely his Innie can feel that sleep deprivation. Maybe that’s why he’s always drinking the coffee, on the other hand. Goddamn self-perpetuating cycle.
Back in his pod, Miguel’s quick to strip off that work uniform, peeling off his tie and pressed shirt before he even remembers to take it easy.
An itchy pain shoots across his chest.
The spot where Guerra stabbed him stings, the healing skin pulling tight under the gauze and making him hiss and toss his shirt aside with more force than necessary. It flutters lightly onto his bed and Miguel snatches up a long sleeve shirt, tugging on the comfier fabric before the cold of the unit can really set in.
It’s anyone’s guess as to what his Innie must have thought, arriving to work today with a bandage against his chest, but he guesses the guy is used to it, too. Must be. He bets that they get fed a lot of bullshit down there, where they have no memory of a life outside of work, anyhow.
Better that way, Miguel thinks.
It’s a kind of freedom after all, isn’t it? Beats the other waking hours—the ones spent behind bars. If he can do his time without knowing it’s time he’s doing, then he’ll fucking take it. Beats Solitary, too.
Walking back out of his pod, Emerald City is bustling with everyone from the Severed floors returning in staggered groups before dinner. Miguel sees Rebadow, strolling back in with Busmalis, the two of them tending to meet up on their walks back from work detail. They have a theory, although McManus says it’s best no one speculate—that they work in the same area. No doubt their Innies are attached at the hip just like them. Then there’s O’Reily, grinning as Cyril bounds over from the TVs to meet him—ask him how his day went, a question Ryan always answers with a load of bullshit, as far as Miguel can tell. Beecher comes in as Miguel takes a seat at one of the card tables with Augustus, the guy looking as fucking haggard and listless as usual these days. In the beginning, he’d tended to wear his work uniform around even after returning to Emerald City, like maybe wearing the fancy clothes made him feel civilised, or reminded him of being a lawyer. Now he goes straight to his pod to change out.
“Alvarez, how’s your little boo-boo?”
Guerra’s arrival at Emerald City comes with one of his obnoxious, sneering taunts, and Miguel just stares at the card deck Augustus is shuffling.
“Ignore him, man,” Augustus mutters.
“Think your Innie cried without your pain meds?” Guerra says.
Fucking wound doesn’t even hurt with your sissy-ass technique.
In the end, Miguel grits his teeth but can’t help glancing up to cast a baleful look in the pendejo’s direction.
The guy looks stupid in his suit—always has—and looks even stupider now, pretending to hang himself with his own tie as he struts by. Was one time years ago that Miguel had come back from work with a weird bruise on the side of his neck and the motherfucker has never let go of the idea that Miguel’s Innie had gone postal and tried to kill them, Innie and Outie both.
(Your Innie was moving a heavy box from a high shelf, McManus had explained. The box fell on your shoulder.)
Miguel flips Guerra off, but it’s about as effective as a red traffic light to a guy in a high speed police chase. Guerra just spins around, cackling as he hops up the stairs to the second tier, unbuttoning his work shirt as he goes.
“Dick,” Miguel says, glowering at his retreating back.
“Hey, at least you don’t have to see him at work,” Augustus jokes.
“Yeah.” Another nice thing he likes to believe about his Innie; Miguel’s a social guy—always has been, so he doesn’t doubt his Innie gets along with the others he works with. Doesn’t doubt his Innie’s judgement—knows the guy can probably see Guerra’s shittiness from a mile off, too. Bets he steers clear, if they even see each other at all down on the Severed floor. And, given that he always feels that split second of utter peace and contentment when he comes back to himself in the elevator?
Well, Miguel doubts that they do.