Chapter Text
Marcus passes by the blur of activity on the ground floor of the Foundation building, hands tightening around a set of very pertinent documents, single-mindedly in pursuit of a particular door on the second floor. This time, she is wearing no scarf to cover her mouth and neck with; she has long since learned how impolite the look comes across. To match the summertime heat, she has also reworked her wardrobe and has set aside her thick, blue coat in favor of the white buttoned dress she kept underneath.
Unlike the quadrangle, the second and third tiers of the building have no privilege of smelling like soft grass and open air. The hallway outside Madam Z's office smells of old paper and something faintly floral yet artificial. It is the kind of scent that has soaked so deeply into the checked walls of the Foundation over the decades that it has started belonging to the building itself. Marcus had always found it grounding. Today it feels like standing inside someone else's memory.
She knocks twice. Precisely twice. It is the way that the Field Mission Manual recommended for superior officer meetings, which she has re-read on the transit from cover to cover, and not only that, but several times over. That is just the kind of person she is.
"Come in, Marcus."
Madam Z's office is, as always, immaculate. Everything is in its place. Everything is deliberate. The woman herself sits behind her desk, her glasses showing a faint reflection of whatever she is working with on the screen of her computer.
Marcus enters. She straightens her jacket before remembering that she's left it at her room before coming out. And she feels all the more naked without her trusty suitcase clipped to her underarm. Her wooden companion has always made her feel like a warrior, less alone, prepared, and gearing to march into battle.
Swallowing a defeated sigh, she places the folder on the desk with both hands. She sits on the plastic chair across her new superior.
"My diagnostic results," Marcus says. "And the somnambulism treatment sign-off from Ms. Mesmer Jr. And the secondary psychological clearance. And p—" she pauses, catching herself. "There are seven documents. I've indexed them."
Madam Z opens the folder. She does not comment on the index, which is color-coded and has a table of contents. She turns the pages at an unhurried pace, and Marcus sigs very still and watches a point slightly above Madam Z's left shoulder. She tries not to fidget with the strap of her bag.
The silence lasted long enough that Marcus has begun mentally composing three different apologies for things that had not yet gone wrong.
"Your recovery progress," Madam Z says at last, "has been, by all formal measures, satisfactory."
Marcus is on alert stance. "Yes," she answers.
"You're sleeping approximately."
Madam Z looks up. Marcus held the look for two full seconds before her eyes moved back to the shoulder.
"The artificial somnambulism sessions," Marcus says, more carefully now, "were—productive. I believe the correct term in the report is 'emotionally integrative.' Which is—I think that's a real phrase. I didn't invent it."
"You didn't."
"...I wasn't sure. I've been second-guessing my vocabulary lately. It's a documented stress response, actually, there's a paper from 1931 that—" She stops. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize."
"Sorry. I mean—" She closes her mouth. Opens it. "Noted."
Madam Z sets the folder down and folds her hands on top of it, digressing. Marcus recognized the shift and felt her spine straighten another degree without her permission.
"You've been officially cleared from health watch as of this morning. The Foundation is satisfied with your recovery."
"Thank you."
"I am going to give you a new assignment."
"I understand." Marcus reaches into her bag for her notebook. Force of habit. Her pen is already uncapped.
"San Francisco. Chinatown district. We have a low-priority field observation request... arcane atmospheric irregularities in the residential blocks near the old market quarter. Nothing classified. No active threat indicators. What we need is a set of trained eyes making routine documentation passes over approximately four to six weeks."
Marcus writes this down. She writes it down in two colors.
"It's a rest posting," Madam Z says.
Marcus does not look up from her notebook. "I understand the assignment."
"I want to be clear about what I mean, Marcus."
"I understand what you mean."
The pen moves. Atmospheric irregularities — residential, Chinatown district, SF — four to six weeks — low-priority—and then Marcus' handwriting, normally so precise, pauses for a fraction of a second before she added the next word, and the line it makes is very slightly softer than the rest.
Madam Z watches this.
"Your plane ticket is arranged for Tuesday," she says. "Transport to the airport will be available from the Foundation's east entrance at seven in the morning. You'll be met on arrival by a local Foundation contact. Standard per diem, standard equipment allowance."
"And the contact's file?"
"You'll receive it in your briefing packet." A pause. "Everything you need will be there."
Marcus caps her pen. She tucks her notebook away with both hands and gives the folder on the desk a final, fleeting glance: seven documents representing the past months of her life reduced to clinical language and check-boxed clearances, everything that had happened to her in Vienna translated into the Foundation's preferred grammar of satisfied and satisfactory and progress and recommended for return to field duties. And she thinks, distantly, that madam Hofmann would have had something dry and precise to say about paperwork being the way the Foundation processed grief, and then she thinks about madam Hofmann having thoughts at all, and feels the familiar sensation of reaching for something that isn't there anymore.
She tucks that that away too.