Chapter Text
There is water dripping onto Alice’s desk. Again.
The buzzing strip lights of the OIAR flicker dully over red-tinged forms, now sodden. Days’ worth of work slips down the pages and pours slowly, tortuously, to the floor. An arrhythmic tap, tap, drip.
Alice pushes back, wheeling into the shared office space, and halfheartedly kicks the scratchy carpet a few times until she’s spinning in her chair, the office a whir of headache-grey around her. “Colin,” She calls, to no response, “Colin!”
The spinning is making her dizzy and sick and the new hire is shooting her dirty looks, but she tucks her knees up to her chest and spins faster. It’s like being at the centre of the world, the single point of gravity in a universe rapidly spiralling out of control. Heavy, her head falls to rest on her knees, magenta curls dropping down around her like a curtain.
“Coooooliiiiiinnnnnn-” Her voice comes out wavy and distorted. All of a sudden the chair jerks to a stop.
Alice looks up.
A wide arm extends over her shoulder, bracing the back of her chair like an anchor. Its owner smells like day-old coffee and exhaustion, a round frowning face a dozen inches from Alice’s own. She breathes in the smell. Grounding.
“What now?” Colin grumbles, though there’s no malice in his tone. Alice gesticulates mutely to her flooded desk.
He follows her gaze. “What do you want me to do? I’m the tech guy.”
“The technology of writing is being impaired.” She smiles like it’s almost a joke, crooked but dull.
Colin takes two long strides over to Alice’s desk, picking up a single document sheet between finger and thumb. “This is why we digitise.”
“Are you gonna help me or not?”
“Not.” The paper hits the table with a wet slap, landing in a crumpled heap. Then, on second thought, Colin smoothes it out. “Call maintenance. Some of us have real work to be getting on with.”
And then he’s gone.
Alice does just what he says, to little avail. She’s been passed from operator to operator, been put on hold more times than she can count, and has she any solace to show for it? She does not.
“We’ll send someone down.” Drones Luc form maintenance, who she’s known for years, “To… where were you again?”
“Archives.” Alice groans over the line. “Look, I can just come and get…”
“No, no.” A hearty sigh. “We’ll send someone down when we can.”
“It’s not really a ‘when we can’ kind of situation. My desk is drenched, all of my files-” She’s scooped them up and deposited them onto her chair where they sit, dripping and miserable, pulp gluing itself to the wet pleather.
“We understand your distress. I’ll submit the report… as fast as I can.”
“Lucius, I can hear the Candy Crush theme.”
“If there’s nothing else…” The line goes quiet, and Alice slumps forward onto the slippery desk, droplets falling like bullets into the back of her skull. Her forehead aches where she hits the table a little too hard, and for a minute she just lies there, drowning.
“Ah, Alice.” A smug voice slithers into her ears. “I was looking for you. Lena wants those external reports by the end of the day.”
Alice doesn’t move, face still plastered to the table. “Gwen.” She says simply, all spirit thoroughly drained.
Gwen doesn’t seem to know quite how to respond. “Alice…?”
Alice peels a cheek away with a wet squelch, opening one wide brown eye. She stares up unblinkingly for what feels like an eternity.
“W-well.” A deep inhale, wherein Gwendolyn Bouchard seems to straighten every bone in her body like a neat stack of paper. A neat, dry stack of paper. “Well. You’d better have all the forms-”
With as much energy as she can muster, Alice points to the oozing stack of pulp waiting patiently on her seat. “I’m getting to it.”
“Well. Good.” Gwen tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’ll have to reprint, I presume. And find a dry workspace until maintenance gets down.”
Silence in the office. The clatter of keys. The scratch of pen nibs.
“Are you offering?”
“Am I what?”
“Your desk. Are you offering?”
“No.” It’s short, sharp, and unapologetic. “No, I am not.”
“‘S what I thought." Alice glances around the rest of the room. Her colleagues are all distinctly avoiding eye contact. “Yeah,” she sighs into her desk, “About right for an office full of twats.”
“Alice!”
“I’m going, I’m going.” She stumbles to her feet, bodily exhausted, scooping up the pile as she does. “I hope it’s your desk next.”
She leaves a trail of water in her wake.
The corridor is empty, and again she’s calling for him.
“Colin?” Arms full, she kicks twice on his office door, and it heaves open with an almighty groan.
He’s at his desk, typing furiously, lines upon lines of blue and white code bathing his face in a ghostly light. “This better be important.” He grunts as soon as she crosses the threshold.
“The- hah- the shitheads kicked me out.” His typing slows, considerate. “Mind if I work in here?”
Eyes still fixed on the screen, he mutters, “Bin’s in the corner. You can run print jobs from my spare laptop.”
“Thanks.” It’s a fragile thing, splintering from Alice’s mouth like glass.
A beat.
“Bad day?”
“My desk’s practically Atlantis.” It’s meant to sound like a joke, but it doesn't. The smile dies halfway to her lips. “All yesterday's work down the drain, and only because Gwen thought it would be, I don’t know, aesthetic? To work in fucking fountain pen, so we’re fucking- who even uses paper? In the big year of 2023? I’m done with this job, Colin, I’m fucking…” She trails off, exhausted. Somehow, she’s ended up on the floor.
Colin doesn't speak for a long while, long enough for Alice’s breathing to slow, for tears of frustration to prick at her eyes. She’s not sure if he’s letting her think or just ignoring her.
“It’s not- a good job, you know? I mean there’s you, there’s the pay, but there’s also Gwen, and all those fucked up statements, and I-” She runs her nails through the scratchy carpet, grounding herself in the noise. “Sometimes I wonder why I even stay on.”
For a moment, there is silence. Colin stops typing. Alice maybe stops breathing.
Then he says, “I’d miss you, if you quit.”
Another moment that stretches to infinity.
“But I’d want you to, I suppose.” He sighs heavily. “You’re right. It is a shithole here. I’ve gotten better offers. But Feddie… God, he’s a bastard, but nobody knows him like I do. And I’m this close, I’m always just this close…”
More silence.
“But you should get out. Go see the sun.”
“The sun! Who gives a fuck about the sun. Shiny bastard.” Her tone’s still off, but it’s closer. Almost funny, but not quite.
“Hm.” There’s the click of keys again. “Don’t you have forms to print?”
“Or… do I have forms to procrastinate printing?” Alicce stretches her arms above her head and rolls across the floor like a demented preschooler. She rifles through Colin’s desk drawers, pulling out an old, battered deck of cards. “Shithead?”
“Fitting.” Colin snorts, “But no. Some of us have work to do.”
Alice sighs, and crawls slowly and dejectedly back to her corner. The laptop plays half a tune as it starts up, blasting the room with a new angle of blinding white light. She taps the keys one at a time, making small, sad noises as she does so, until eventually Colin looks up.
“One game.” He swears. “And only to shut you up.”
“Yess!” Alice’s voice breaks as she cheers, bright persona still fractured from the worst workday in all of human history. “You won’t regret it.”
“I will.” Colin informs her matter-of-factly. “Hand me the deck. I’m not letting you shuffle.”