Work Text:
Gabriel stepped inside a tall office building, a relief from the scorching heat outside at least. He was tired from the long commute there already: the bus with stains looking suspiciously similar to blood had been stuffed with people, and the train he took before that had been freezing cold. He had a complicated relationship with the train, it felt like something other than an AC was cooling it down too; the walls themselves seemed to radiate cold, but it was still drawing him in for some reason, making him often sit close to the wall.
He dragged himself up the stairs, finally reaching the top floor where his workspace was. His good-for-nothing coworker, who he often wanted to hit on the head with a folder or drag him back to doing his job by his stupid braided beard greeted him with no enthusiasm.
"Morning, Gabriel," Ettiene mumbled.
Gabriel only nodded as a response, not wanting to risk having to have a conversation with him. Arriving at his desk, to his horror he found a pile of papers, high enough to be mistaken for a cube. A cube of pain and misery.
He already had his schedule and tasks for the day; the tower of papers needing to be dated and signed was an unwelcome surprise. The thought of having to do all of that on top of having three calls with three different managers that didn’t know what they were doing even if they were supposed to wanted him to throw himself out of the window —or throw them out of the window, even better. At least he knew what he was doing, maybe he’d receive their paycheck.
He also had to pray not to put the wrong date on any sheet too, because if he did he had to reprint them personally and hope the printer would actually work for once. At least they were normal sized sheets, this time, because the bigger ones had to be printed on a bigger crab-looking printer that was definitely possessed by some dark, evil entity. While browsing the manga store, he had seen ridiculously long titles of light novels about fantasy villains getting reincarnated to the real world as everyday objects, perhaps that was the case with the printer. After all, at first it had refused to print pictures in any other colour than red, and no reason for it was found when inspected.
Gabriel sighed, the first call was in two hours, so dating the papers was probably the best thing to do —at least he'd get that out of the way. Picking up the first paper, the thin white piece of cellulose between his fingers weighed more than sin. Wishing for a coffee break before his day had even started —or, better yet, a glass of monet— he grabbed a pen and began the joyless task.
The minutes passed and Gabriel felt himself doing the task at hand with little focus, the numbers had become a blur, even he had to squint to differentiate between the 1s, 2s, and 7s in the dates. It wasn’t that important, he doubted anyone would even read them, and he hoped whoever did was aware that there was no month with 72 days. He started adding a dash to his 7s anyway, just in case the person reading the paper had the same level of intellect as the others working in his department. Some there were worse than others, he doubted Ettiene could even read.
After what had felt like an eternity, Gabriel's work phone rang. He looked at the piles of papers —he wasn't even half way done. Using the last bit of his mental strength, he picked up the phone, trying to sound normal; after the call he'd have to date another bunch of sheets, but then he’d have the lunch break; a short rest between those hours of torture surrounded by incompetent fucks.
The call that should have lasted half an hour went on for over an hour, and Gabriel really wished to crawl through the phone like the girl from The Ring and strangle the manager with his own hair. When the call finally ended, Gabriel's ears were ringing from the loud voice of the speaker and his hands had started to shake with the need of throwing the phone in the trash bin. There was another hour left before lunch break and he needed to take a break, so he rushed downstairs and outside like he was followed by a maniac, a cigarette already between his fingers. He smoked two cigarettes before feeling more calm; getting back in the building still felt like he was entering hell.
More than half the pile of papers was done when lunch break started. Gabriel was free —for an hour. He picked up his bag with his lunch —a simple sandwich with salami, which was still better than what the cafeteria offered, plates full of mushrooms and potatoes— and went downstairs and outside again. He squinted as the midday sun hit him head on, but still walked to a nearby bench, where the only other sane person from work already waited.
"You look like shit," Aaron noted the moment he saw Gabriel. "Tough morning?"
Gabriel sighed at the comment. "You know how it is."
“Want a cigarette?”
Gabriel accepted, and Aaron held up the lighter that was already in his hand and lit it. They had known each other since high school; they hated each other's guts at first, but had become best friends as time went on. It had been a great coincidence when they found out they worked in the same company, even if in different departments. They were also meeting outside work, playing Dungeons and Dragons together on Saturdays; hunting vampires as a full time job sounded better than wasting away in an office.
While looking at Aaron's hand he noticed a band-aid that had not been there yesterday.
"What happened to your finger?"
"The printer bit me."
"What?" Gabriel looked at him, bewildered.
"The paper got jammed, as always. I was trying to get it out, and the damn thing moved and somehow cut my finger."
"First time I've heard about a violent printer," Gabriel shook his head.
"Are you surprised?" Aaron asked.
"No. Ours printed in black and white for all last week and even the assistance couldn’t make it print in colour. In the end we kicked it, and now it's working properly again."
Aaron chuckled and put out his cigarette. "I'll only have one, Baptiste wants me to reduce the amount I smoke."
Gabriel nodded, reluctantly putting his own out too. "We should go eat, I'm starving already."
The break was over way too soon, and the pair had disappeared back to the building, Aaron leaving him on the second floor. The pile of documents waited menacingly on Gabriel's desk, he wished he could incinerate every single one of them. The pen in his hand felt like it had thorns as he painstakingly filled the last batch. Gabriel looked at the clock on the wall once again; he had spent over four hours dating the papers. He wanted to cry.
He had finished just in time for the second call of the day. That one was not by phone like he had hoped, it was in a meeting room he didn’t even know where it was. Gabriel’s head hurt just thinking of the stupid things he would have listened to in a few minutes, and even worse, he should have checked his expressions while listening to them. It was still not as bad as filling the documents, he thought when he sat down in the meeting room ten minutes after its beginning. His thoughts wandered to the DnD campaign his younger sister Amelie was DM'ing; he would much rather be holding a sword than a pen to fill papers, having become a legendary hero in that world already.
When the meeting finally ended without anything being resolved, he returned to his desk only to find another surprise waiting for him: a folder full of technical documents for every department in front of his computer. Despair filled him as he opened it and noticed the notes on those documents were written in cyrillic alphabet.
Gabriel could not read it. He wanted to go to the toilet and cry.
He took it and carried it to the printer to scan them, hoping it was a good day for it and that every sheet would be whole by the end of it. It wasn’t, of course, and he had to fix many of them with tape. At least every department had to suffer through those alien notes with him.
When Gabriel came back he checked the scans he did, hoping they were fine and trying to laser every unfamiliar letter into thin air with his eyes. When he finished, he finally collapsed on the table, almost letting out a scream that would have sent all the birds within a kilometer flying away in terror.
"Are you okay, Gabriel?" he heard Ettiene ask.
He lifted his head enough to look at the objects on the table, anything but the folder in front of him, or the stupid beardbraid behind him. His eyes landed on the stapler, wondering if it could be turned into a lethal weapon. Vivid images of him slashing Ettiene's throat open before making him fall off a bridge flashed in his mind in the fit of rage.
Gabriel took a deep breath and slammed his head against the desk twice, the pain was nothing compared to the suffering caused by the tasks he has yet to do and that he should have started doing that morning. He should have stayed in that nightmarish place over his work hours. Again.
"Sure. I’m just tired," he managed to choke out.
Ettiene mumbled something incomprehensible and left him alone, at least he had enough reason in his walnut-sized brain to know when to fuck off.
He took the paper where he had written down the stuff he should have done that day, and tears stained it; the weight of defeat was crushing him. He had lost. His stupid office job had won. He now knew what it was like to be tortured in a dungeon. At least this dungeon had an air conditioner.
He ran to the men's restroom, locking himself inside a stall and pulling out his phone. Immediately, he noticed he had gotten a text from the horse ranch where the horse he had bought earlier that month was being taken care of, he had found horse riding relaxing and wanted to do so more often. Annabelle, named after the creepy doll for her unnerving expression, had broken all of her legs and randomly died on the spot with no reason whatsoever. Gabe sobbed after reading the news, he was in hell masquerading as an office. His sorrowful weeping was interrupted with the phone ringing —the last call. He was a broken man, looking at the phone like a criminal at a noose he'd be hanged from.
The ringtone changed.
"Gabe? GABE, WAKE UP!"
Gabriel jolted awake, screaming. He looked around, seeing concerned Aaron in front of him, he was in a tent illuminated by a single chymical globe. Coming back to reality from the nightmare, he remembered he was on a trek to Charbourg to kill the Forever King, the familiar presence he had felt in the train. Once his breath had calmed down, he looked at his best friend, and without a warning hugged him, endless tears falling from his eyes. He knew not what had happened in the dream, the environment fully unfamiliar to him, but he was glad to be back to the world destroyed by daysdeath, rather than whatever that place he had been in in his nightmare was.
