Work Text:
The story of how Teddy got into management consulting begins with a bank robbery gone wrong, gets kicked into action thanks to some pissed off cartel freaks, features a shocking-but-not-as-shocking-as-it-should’ve-been lack of support from his mother, zig zags between various shootouts at gas stations across the country, involves several stolen trucks and Molotov cocktails, features the two weeks he spent pretending to be a cop that were as ironic as they were surprisingly homoerotic, takes a shocking-but-not-as-shocking-as-it-should’ve-been turn towards cannibalism, drags through another repetitive bout of near-death experiences, meanders during a long undercover stint in Mexico, and climaxes with a sitcom-level identity switcheroo at a tech conference in Cabo that lands him on a plane headed straight to Galweather Stern. (Also, he was a werewolf throughout all of it, but somehow that never ends up affecting his journey all that much.) Told in its entirety, the whole tale is confusing, depraved, largely felonious, and more than a little embarrassing, so Teddy usually just tells people the short version: he did a lot of cocaine in his twenties.
Teddy likes consulting. It’s pretty similar to his old life, really–a lot of suits, a lot of posturing, a lot of talk about slashing and bleeding things dry. But he mostly likes it for all the ways it isn’t like his old life at all. He does occasionally miss being so unimaginably rich he could buy a Jaguar on a whim with an actual jaguar in the backseat, but he feels happier most days not having to worry about getting arrested or gunned down while driving said Jaguar down the street. He really likes his coworkers, too, especially Doug, even though he’d never say something like that out loud. Doug might actually be the most pathetic guy on Earth, but that’s better than being a cold-blooded killer, particularly because it makes Teddy feel better about the fact that he isn’t a cold-blooded killer either. There’s nothing Teddy loves more than pushing Doug’s buttons and reminding himself that Doug is genuinely intimidated by him, that Doug looks at the wolf teeth in his smile and believes there’s real bite beneath his bark. Never mind that Teddy probably wouldn’t even be able to nick him with a kitchen knife without feeling a little nauseous.
And Teddy’s good at management consulting, too. Well–not the numbers part. That stuff makes no sense to him. But he’s been using nonsense spreadsheets and randomly generated graphs since he was hired and no one’s called him on it, thanks to every business major’s natural inability to admit they don’t understand something. The important part that Teddy understands is recognizing weakness. He may be the family fuckup, but he’s the Lobo family fuckup, goddamn it, and that means that whatever else his flaws may be, he’s got an instinctual sense for sniffing out soft spots. It’s the little habits, nurtured out of stupidity or sentimentality, that drag people away from their fullest, most ruthless potential. There’s always lazy goons who toss corpses in the shallow end of the lake, street rats who would switch sides for half a stack of cash, honorable types who spare the mooks that off them later. His mom had always said that the way to stay on top of the food chain is to not only find vulnerability in their enemies and use it, but to see it in themselves and snuff it out. In a crime family, that skill is called targeted assassinations. In management consulting, it’s organizational efficiency.
Teddy wonders a lot whether he was his mom’s weakness. She never made it a secret that he was nothing but a liability to her empire. If she didn’t love him at all, couldn’t she have just taken care of him–in a murder sense, he’s not so delusional as to expect caregiving from his mom–years ago? He’s always suspected she wasn’t above it. Nobody ever did figure out what happened to his dad. Then he wonders what it says about him that he’s willing to regard the fact that his mom didn’t order his murder as an act of maternal love. That being said, therapy’s for bitches, and it doesn’t matter what his mom does or doesn’t think anymore. He’s got a good life; it’s freeing, not needing someone else’s power. He’s got a great life, not because he’s using the Lobo name, but because he’s using Clyde Oberholt’s, whoever the fuck that is, and he built it for himself.
The last time he ever thinks about his mom is on a random Thursday night, staying late at the office with Marty and Doug, reading through the financial documents of one of their client’s competitors. It’s an endless list of all the businesses they’ve worked with or gotten investments from or bought pizza from once, Teddy doesn’t remember. He doesn’t even remember exactly why he’s looking for dirt on them, something to do with divorced rival CEOs with joint custody of a kid–or dog?–that’s involved in a criminal malpractice lawsuit. All he knows is that all of the peripheral drama isn’t doing anything to make the work in front of him any less dull.
“You think their CAGR seems a little artificially inflated?“ Doug asks, sifting through his own depressingly large stack of paper.
“Sure, probably,” Teddy replies sarcastically.
He has no idea what a CAGR is. If it turns out Doug is right, he’s going to pretend he wasn’t being sarcastic.
“It can’t be something that small,” Marty insists from his desk. “Janice said there’s something big enough to make Bivtec's stock plummet faster than Bush’s approval rating in ‘08. We need to find a bomb here. Also just like Bush.”
Janice is their client. She’s manipulative and slightly insane, which is why she’s been pretty successful in life as a tech startup CEO so far. Teddy is pretty sure she and Marty are fucking, and he’s somewhat sure that it has a nonzero amount to do with the fact that her name sounds a lot like Jeannie’s. (They’re going through a really weird patch right now.) Teddy likes Marty, so he’d hate to entertain the idea that Janice was lying and Marty’s been duped. But, well, Marty is particularly susceptible to crazy chicks and ego stroking, and they haven’t found so much as a misplaced decimal in half a week of searching.
Then again, Teddy could be subconsciously scrounging for any excuse to get out of work. He’s tired, and hungry, and a little off-kilter in the light of the waxing gibbous moon, but most importantly, he’s bored, and Teddy absolutely cannot stand being bored. His brain is going to blow itself out if he has to look at another stupid one-syllable startup name with two x’s and no vowels. All the words are starting to blur together; he’s just started a new page but he could’ve sworn that he’s read one of these company names a million times before.
“Oh,” Teddy realizes, voice uncharacteristically quiet, but Marty and Doug’s eyes instantly snap to him anyway.
“What? You found something?” Marty walks over to Teddy’s side and leans over his shoulder.
“Yeah, it’s–” Teddy points to one company name, more simple and innocuous than the rest. “That company’s a front for my–for a mob.”
Marty’s eyes go wide. “Seriously? You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Holy shit,” Marty interrupts, eyes alight. “Holy shit, we got those sons of bitches on mafia ties, holy fucking shit.”
Doug narrows his eyes. “And how exactly did you know that company has mafia ties?”
Teddy shrugs. “Lot of cocaine in my twenties?”
He realizes belatedly that neither Doug nor Marty has questioned whether or not he’s actually right about this, even though he hasn’t offered any proof or justification. They’re too tired, or they just–trust him, implicitly. He doesn’t really know what to do with that, so he mentally shelves it for another time. Maybe he can use it to fuck with Doug later.
“I don’t care if you ran the goddamn mob yourself if you can take these guys down,” Marty snaps. “Do you think there are more fake companies in there?”
Teddy laughs disbelievingly. “Oh, there’s got to be.” His mom never liked to keep all her eggs in one basket.
Marty snatches Doug’s papers out of his hands and throws them onto Teddy’s lap. “You think you can find them all by Monday?”
“Monday? Fuck that, I could find them all before you guys finish eating dinner tonight.”
“And you’re really sure we can put Bivtec in jeopardy over the strength of these mob connections?” Doug asks.
Teddy grins. “Well, Doug, we’re definitely not getting them over the fucking CAGR.”
Only after another round of celebratory swearing from Marty and the other two leaving the office does Teddy realize he’s accidentally talked himself into working late with three times the workload he had before. Teddy is briefly furious with himself for engineering this situation. He never used to have to do this kind of work. He’d just fuck off to get high or naked in a club somewhere while his mom’s people handled all this shit for him.
Oh well. Teddy flips to a new page and starts scanning. It’s his job now. That’s the new price of being Teddy fucking Lobo, apparently. Or–Clyde fucking Oberholt, or whatever. Same difference.