Chapter Text
“Enough.”
The gruff command makes you jump with an undignified yelp, whipping around, your heart pounding in your chest. You nearly drop the files you’re holding, the papers fluttering as you scramble to keep hold of them.
For someone so huge, Sir Crocodile can be deceptively stealthy when it suits him.
“Oh, sir!” you say, pressing a hand to your chest as if you can physically force the frantic thumping of your heart to slow down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were still here.”
“Obviously not.”
The droll reply is tinged with something you can’t quite decipher – resignation? Disappointment? Even though you’ve been working under Crocodile for a while now, he’s still a difficult man to read, inscrutable as his namesake.
“I’ll just finish filing these and get out of your hair, then.” You say with a breezy smile, trying to exude professionalism to compensate for your earlier lapse.
But instead of waving you off to do your work while he goes about his own, more important business like he usually does, Crocodile instead fixes you with a look.
“What my employees do in their own time is of no concern of mine.” He says, abruptly, and already there’s a but lingering in his words. “And quite frankly, I don’t care. But not when it begins to affect your work.”
You stare at Crocodile blankly, still holding the files in your hands.
“Huh?” you say, thinking back to what you’d been doing before he scared the shit out of you, but all you could recall was a loud, heavy sigh, which you’d been doing quite a lot lately. “I don’t- “
“Don’t think I haven’t heard you sighing and muttering to yourself for the past week or so.” He cuts through your confusions and deflections as surely as a swing from his hook. “Plus, you’ve been unfocused. Staring off into space when you should be focusing.”
Your throat tightens, as does your grip on the folder you’re holding. Somehow, he manages to make you feel even smaller than you usually do when he’s in the room.
“Oh? Has my work been unsatisfactory?” you ask, and perhaps your tone is a bit too tart for his liking, because Crocodile’s brow furrows.
“Not yet. But you’re distracted and distractions make people sloppy, and sloppiness leads to mistakes.” He says, reciting this as if it’s a mantra he’s had drilled into him alongside other basics like the alphabet. “So, out with it.”
You blink. That…isn’t the direction you were expecting this sudden and rather uncomfortable conversation to go – from his scolding, you were expecting a threat to get your shit together or him telling you he was going to dock your pay or some other admonishment. This is something else entirely.
“Out with-?”
“Whatever it is.” Crocodile confirms impatiently.
He takes a cigar out of a case of his seemingly never ending supply of them – you’ve gotten so used to your boss’s incessant smoking you don’t even cough when he does it anymore, unless of course he’s particularly vexed and makes a point of blowing it into your face to make your eyes water. He doesn’t just do it to you, and fortunately only once or twice thus far.
“And hurry up, I don’t have all evening.”
You can hardly believe what you’re hearing. Crocodile wants you to tell him about issues in your personal life? What’s next, was Doflamingo going to barge into your room and read you a bedtime story?
You drop your gaze, put on the spot and feeling rather like an ant under a magnifying glass. You’d never considered Crocodile might notice a change in your demeanour, but that was naïve of you. He's almost unsettlingly perceptive.
“It’s not- it’s just a stupid relationship thing.” You say, feeling heat crawl up the back of your neck and across your cheeks even admitting that much to him. “It’s not that important.”
Crocodile just flicks open his gold-plated lighter in response, putting it to the cigar in his mouth, the end of it burning bright like a cat’s eye in dark as he inhales.
“I’m waiting.” He says in a warning tone.
Okay, he’s serious. He’s not going to let you leave or fob him off until you explain yourself. Once your boss decides that he wants something, he clamps on and won’t let it go. It’s a quality you usually admire – when it’s not being turned on you, that is.
You nearly sigh again before you stop yourself, since it’s doing that that seems to have gotten you into this mess in the first place. You might as well take the path of least resistance, even though something about letting your professional mask not just slip, but fall off entirely so you can open up to your terrifying boss about something so…mundane…is petrifying.
“I just…” you say, swallowing as you try to gather your thoughts to articulate what’s been swirling around in your head for ages. “My p-partner and I have been arguing a lot lately.”
Partner? Where the hell did that come from? Now you’ve made it sound like you’re married or something. You’re not and you’re sure Crocodile is already aware of that, but saying ‘boyfriend’ sounded so…juvenile.
“Hmph. Is that it?” Crocodile says. “About what?”
You lean your hip against the sideboard, fingers twitching to pour yourself a glass of whisky, which might make this conversation easier. You don’t because you’d quite like to keep your hands and helping yourself to your boss’s fancy liquor seems like a poor way to do so.
“Well, lately…he’s been hinting that he doesn’t want to stay here anymore.” You say, and seeing the look on Crocodile’s face, you hasten to add, “But that’s not the case for me. I like working for Cross Guild, it’s the best paying job I’ve ever had. I don’t plan on going anywhere for the time being and I don’t know why he’s suddenly getting so restless when everything seems to be going well.”
As you speak, you think back to an argument you and your boyfriend were having a few days ago, about how you were coming home later. It couldn’t be helped – if you got extra work from Crocodile, telling him ‘no’ wasn’t really on the table. Something in you wanted to prove yourself to him, even though most of the time you weren’t even sure he knew you existed. But even if you did come home, it seemed like you were always coming back to the same thing.
“I don’t know, maybe it bothers him, now I’m the one making more than he is. He says he doesn’t like how hard I’m working, that I’m running myself ragged, but I don’t know…I get that I’m not home as much as I used to be, but…”
Crocodile groans in what seems to be exasperation, or maybe he’s just resigned, spewing a stream of smoke as he tilts his head to the ceiling.
“Tch. I forgot how…dramatic young couples can be.”
You can feel the embarrassment in you swelling as he speaks, like a fungus thriving in a humid room. Why did you tell him all that?! Why didn’t you just, you know, lie and say you weren’t feeling well? He might have given you a day off to rest instead of mocking you for your stupid problems. You want the fancy carpet to rear up and drag you underground.
“At the end of the day, you have to decide on what you’re willing to compromise on.” Crocodile says, cigar gritted between his teeth. You’ve often wondered how he manages to talk so much with that thing constantly in his mouth without either accidentally dropping it or inhaling it. “And what principles you’re not willing to bend.”
You can only gape at him. Firstly the notion of Sir Crocodile, of all people, making concessions for anyone is a shocking notion in of itself, but secondly that he’s actually giving you advice on your silly little problems – good advice, at that.
He huffs at your look of stunned disbelief, slightly amused.
“Don’t look so shocked. You think I haven’t gone through crap like this before?”
“Well…” you say, licking your lips, trying to think of how to answer honestly but diplomatically. “You always seem so…certain of everything.”
He huffs, but less irritably than before. In fact, you think you even see the hint of a smirk flickering at the edges of his lips before he takes a long drag of his cigar.
“Nobody starts out in this damn world knowing everything, girl. That only comes from experience and time.”
He taps ash off the end of his cigar, holding it between forefinger and middle finger.
“You want my advice, don’t keep going along with something just because it’s what you’ve always done. It may feel like a bigger risk to break things off and go it alone, but really, what are you missing out on if you do?”
You don’t answer, because there’s nothing you can really say to that. He’s right, and maybe you’ve been diving into work to hide from it. Crocodile takes your silence as assent and he continues on;
“There’s no point in dancing around someone else’s feelings, especially if they’re as fragile as that. Do you really want to put your stock in someone you can’t rely on? You’ll only grow to resent someone you keep making concessions for when they wouldn’t do the same for you.”
“How…did you-?” you stammer, wondering how he’s able to so accurately pinpoint what you’ve been feeling but unable to name.
“Like I said,” he interrupts with a wave of his hand, the jewels on the rings studding each finger winking at you in the ambient lighting of his office. “You have to decide if the things you want and the things the other person want align. And if they don’t…”
He shrugs, exhaling smoke from his nose. Somehow, he manages to make it look elegant.
He lets his unfinished sentence hang, because he doesn’t need to finish it- you know he’s right and he knows you know. Perhaps you were just clinging onto the one thing that was familiar, working in such an environment as this one, you’re always teetering on the edge of danger. Having a relationship with an ordinary person was a peculiar sort of safety net, but now…perhaps you don’t need it anymore. Perhaps what was intended to keep you grounded is now in fact holding you back.
“Yeah…you’re right…” you say slowly, feeling strangely relieved, like a heavy coat has been removed from your shoulders and now you can finally stand up straight. Saying the words out loud is oddly liberating. “There’s no point in being pulled in two directions. I guess I’ve just been delaying the inevitable.”
Crocodile grunts, stubbing out his cigar, grinding it down in the heavy glass ashtray, the smouldering embers making the rings look like molten gold.
“Good. Now get out of here. I expect you back to work on Monday with your attention where it should be. Understood?”
“Got it.” You nod, but you’re smiling as you head out. You pause in the doorway, looking back at Crocodile. “Thanks, boss.”
“Go on, out.” He waves you off, a familiar gesture that makes you chuckle softly as you walk out, your footsteps lighter than they’ve been in weeks.
Crocodile watches you slip out the door, listening to your footsteps fading. With a scoff, he opens up his desk drawer and pours himself a drink – swilling the glass as he gazes across the room, a look of thoughtful contemplation on his face.
It was quite the fortuitous timing, catching you alone and distracted and citing poor work ethic as an excuse to prod things in the direction he wanted. Now he’d sown the seeds, all he had to do was sit back and wait for you to carry out the inevitable, and he could rest easy again.
Like he’d let a useful little employee like you go waltzing across the seas with some loser, when it was obvious that you’d do far better working under him, where you should be.
Crocodile took a sip of his red wine, which was just as expensive as everything else was in his office, and smirked to himself.
After all, victory was the perfect accompaniment to a good drink.