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blackfoxreddog · 5 months

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Bonus

Happy particular Monday! Here’s a story for it, which came about mostly because I wanted to put a couple of people into a clichéd situation, and then I had to do leadup and aftermath... anyway, it’s intended to be a two-parter (yes, I know; aspirations) set in a not-entirely-canonical season 4, in which the Warehouse did get brought back and Helena did leave without explanation, BUT Artie doesn’t go full Father Data and Leena doesn’t suffer the consequences—mostly because Mrs. Frederic has sensed some badness to come and thus sent Artie and Leena away. Because why not? Also I have Claudia jumping into Caretakering, and even a bit of Artieing, with some enthusiasm.

P.S. I know I haven’t yet finished last year’s Christmas story—that’s a pain point—but I genuinely am working to get back on various horses, including that one. Weather (in all senses) permitting.

Bonus

“I genuinely cannot believe we’re stuck in an elevator,” Myka says. It may be the most true statement to which she’s ever given voice.

****

SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER...

Myka’s reasonably pleasant thought, burring along as background to her monotonous tasks, is I don’t mind this. She and Steve are in the Warehouse office early in the morning, doing file inventory, and it’s true: she doesn’t mind it. It’s a little lacking as a holiday activity, but with Artie, Leena, and Pete all away, “lacking” is pretty much the flavor of the moment.

Claudia pokes her head in and says, “Ping.” She’s unenthusiastic, speaking of lacking. Where’s the usual revving about what it might be this time? “At some midwestern accounting firm, because it’s important to have a boring Christmas.”

Ah. “An accounting artifact?” Myka asks. Speaking further of lacking: here, it’s artifacty zing. Then again, artifacty zing got Myka trapped in Alice’s mirror, among other catastrophes, so maybe boring isn’t so bad. “Balance sheets?” she ventures. “Pluses and minuses?”

“Some people at this pingy company just got extremely large Christmas bonuses,” Claudia says, “and some got their pay extremely docked. So yeah, ‘balance sheets, pluses and minuses’ just about covers it. Probably. I mean, I might be trying to manage expectations here.”

Claudia’s certainly right, in that getting one’s hopes up—about anything (or anyone)—is a fool’s game.

But still, there’s something to be said for boring-but-remunerative, even only for some people... what a nice idea. “I’d like a Christmas bonus someday,” Myka says, “instead of a Christmas penalty. Which I think pretty accurately describes the Pete-plus-artifacts situation.”

“It’s two days before Christmas, and he hasn’t done anything yet,” Claudia says. “That you know of,” she amends.

“Because he’s been with his family in Ohio for the past week,” Myka points out, and she’s gratified when Claudia rolls her eyes. It’s practically a concession.

Steve says, “It’s inappropriate to say ‘Christmas’ bonus these days. It’s ‘end-of-year.’” The contribution suggests he’s listening with only one ear.

“I wish appropriateness mattered here,” Myka says, not really to him but in general. Who knows how a Warehouse HR department would make heads or tails of the application of employment laws—much less employment niceties? “Not that it makes a difference. Christmas, end-of-year... call it Fred, and we still wouldn’t get one.”

“If I ever do get a bonus, I’m absolutely naming it Fred,” Claudia declares.

Myka shakes her head. “Poor Fred. Doomed to be injected right back into the discretionary economy.”

“Inject-o-what are you even talking about?”

“Just a guess, but: you’d spend it on things you don’t need.”

Claudia harrumphs. “Thanks for lumping me in with the avocado-toast-and-Starbucks crowd. My fiscaling is way more responsible.”

“Really? What would you use Fred for?”

“Asus VG278HE gaming monitor. Plus a graphics card, maybe the Nvidia GTX 690, depending on how hefty Fred is.” At Myka’s snort, Claudia challenges, “Fine, where would you inject it?”

“My Roth IRA,” Myka says immediately. She’s not sure what assets her evil, crazy, or dead self will need in retirement, but given the many and varied forms each of those, or combinations thereof, could take, it seems like a good idea to have a financial plan in place. That’s another thing a Warehouse HR department might be useful for...

“You’re the actual human manifestation of an accounting artifact,” Claudia accuses. “Speaking of which, here’s the deal. I gotta stay here—some Mrs.-F homeworky stuff—and Steve’s busy reassuring all the misfit toys in the building that Leena hasn’t deserted them forever. And I’d say ignore the ping entirely, but your never know what’ll go viral, and I bet Artie’d say the last thing we need is another financial crisis. Or maybe you’d say it. Anyway, you’re it. And for your backup, when you get to Cleveland—”

Myka groans. “Cleveland? Seriously? Pete’s going to be so mad about you pulling him away from the family.”

“I’m not pulling him away,” Claudia says, blinking like she’s some innocent little lamb.

Myka groans again. “You’re making me do it?”

Claudia shrugs. “Sure. Why not. You’re partners, right? But here’s some advice: wait till you get there to call him. You know, put off the misery, if that’s what it is, as long as possible. Besides—more advice—I really think you should spend your travel time thinking about bonuses. Who gets ’em and why. Because what’s a bonus, really?”

“An economic stimulus whose nametag reads ‘Fred,’ if I’m understanding things correctly.”

“We’ll see what you think about that when you get to Cleveland.”

“On the day before Christmas eve,” Myka grouses. “By the way, that’s a whole lot of ‘advice,’ coming from somebody who’s over a decade younger than I am and not technically my boss.”

“By the way,” Claudia mimics, archly mocking, “we’ll see what you think about that too.”

“When I get to Cleveland?”

“When you get to Cleveland. On the day before Christmas eve.”

“Sounds like the title of a lesser Christmas carol,” Steve says—he’s tuned back in to the conversation. He then says, with his grin that curves so impish, “Think we could get Mariah Carey to sing it? It’s a hit if we get her, right, no matter how lesser?”

“‘When You Get to Cleveland on the Day Before Christmas Eve?’” Claudia skeptics. “Hit-wise, that’s gonna need a lot more power: Mariah dueting with Darlene Love at the very least. Plus we’ll need a Destiny’s Child reunion for at least one chorus.”

“Thanks for reinforcing my sense of how awful this is likely to be,” Myka tells them both, and Steve’s grin turns apologetic.

Claudia, however, shrugs. “Maybe you’ll sing it different.”

Myka is now the one to roll her eyes. “I won’t sing it at all.”

Surprisingly, Claudia doesn’t go with another eyeroll. “We’ll see,” she says, and Myka is struck by the Mrs.-Frederic resonance in her words. Does the homework include practicing the enigmatic tone?

Steve looks up and catches Myka’s eye. He winks. Myka would wink back, but he would probably interpret that as her saying she understands what’s happening. And that would be a lie: serious enough, probably, to make him wince and massage his temples.

So Myka just blinks—not Morse or any other code, just basic eye-moistening blinks. Then she goes upstairs to collect her always-packed travel bag for her trip to Cleveland.

****

Her flight departs late, of course; it’s December in South Dakota. But that’s this-time fine, because it allows Myka a necessary excess of opportunity to prep her Pete-placation. Under her breath, she practices the delivery of such words as “shorthanded” and “necessary,” aiming for maximum sincerity.

When she at last emerges from her Cleveland Hopkins jetway, that extensive prep deserts her entirely, for what awaits her is the manifestation of a Christmas wish she has worked overtime to convince herself would not, could not possibly be granted:

Helena.

Whose arms are crossed, and whose posture betrays that her foot might recently have been tapping out impatience with the plane’s tardy arrival. The attitude is so normal, so entirely of-the-world (rather than of-its-imminent-end), that Myka wants to reverse course, get back on the plane and redisembark, just so she might meet it again, meet it and refeel this wash of absolute relief at seeing Helena impatient in an airport.

Devious, Claudia, Myka thinks. Outstandingly devious. “Hello, Fred,” she murmurs, then tries, in the ten seconds she has before she and Helena are in proximity to speak, to engage in a far more consequential prep.

For Helena has been gone—has been, as Myka put it to Steve not so long ago, “god knows where”—since shortly after the Warehouse did not explode. She was there, in the Warehouse, but then she was gone, and Myka was told only that Helena had “matters to attend to.” God presumably also knew what those matters were, but Myka hadn’t, in the wake of that first moment of absence, and hasn’t since, been able to pry any information about matters or their whereabouts out of anyone, divine or otherwise.

And through the seemingly endless wondering, Myka’s mind and heart have gnawed themselves ragged.

Until this moment, when the wondering and gnawing end: now her blood speeds, coursing with urgency even as everything else seems to slow.... her movements, her reactions, her thinking, all are sluggish, unresponsive; only her blood matters. This blood knowledge. For all her wondering, she’s been avoiding gnawing her way to that answer.

“Claudia said you needed backup” are Helena’s words when they meet.

Myka’s attempt at prep has fallen grievously short—not that she could have risen to such an occasion, not when hearing that voice for the first time in some time, and certainly not when faced with what her blood’s embarrassing insistence has forced her to confront anew. “I... assumed I’d be calling Pete,” she says, to at least go with truth.

“Interesting assumption. Perhaps necessary, if you believe I’ll be insufficient.”

Myka’s impulse is to reassure: “More than sufficient—you’re necessary,” she would shout, or better yet, whisper. Instead, because Helena’s tone is neutral—is she in actuality indifferent?—she falls into a defensive, businesslike crouch, offering only implicit denial of the premise of Helena’s statement. “Let’s head for the accounting firm,” she says, internally cursing herself.

Cursing, but also justifying: Helena is here as backup, thanks to Claudia’s cleverness, and Myka should not assume (speaking of assumptions) that she even wants to be here. All focus should be on retrieving the artifact. Certainly on that and not on Myka’s (honestly) predictably overexcited blood.

She tries to concentrate on Claudia’s advice (while at the same time trying not to resent her success at being cryptic about it): what’s a bonus, really? Helena’s presence, the sight of her, the apprehending of her impatience, the experience of blood: whatever else may happen, these have been—must be—are!—the bonus.

****

The cab ride is quiet. Myka’s resolve to think only of backup and bonus is dissolving by the second, and she lets words reach her tongue that might start a conversation with Helena about things... but those words don’t escape her lips, for a strand of formality seems to be stiffening Helena’s spine. Does she know how Myka cherished her impatience? Is she attempting to discourage such adoration?

Myka, in regret and relief, follows that more-strict lead.

That’s a bonus too, though, for it turns the ride into unpressured, liminal time, perfect for simply basking in presence. It’s best, Myka is now thinking, to treat this reunion as something that was of course going to have happened. For backup or other professional purposes. Despite the fact that it’s the thank-god fulfillment of recurring, desperate dreams.

However: at one point in the traffic-backed silence, Helena, completely unprompted, turns and smiles at Myka.

Myka smiles back.

It’s a previously missing puzzle-piece slotting into place... yet in its aftermath, Myka finds herself having to push with force against a will to worry over other missing pieces; in particular, she must fight the fret-intensive futility of trying to count them.

****

They find the accounting firm’s lobby spacious but quiet—holiday-low staffing, presumably. Myka asks the receptionist, “Is there someone we can talk to about end-of-year bonuses? Also penalties?”

“I’m a temp,” says the young man. His tone suggests it’s his answer to every query... but then he adds, very quietly, “Unofficially, there’s this one guy...”

That has the ring of “artifact,” so Myka nods, encouraging him.

“Super-vocal about his paycheck the other day. How tiny it was. I mean, he’s the kind of guy you might have theories about what else is tiny, but I—”

“Who was that?” Myka interrupts, even as she feels Helena’s readiness to laugh. Mr. Super-vocal is thus probably not a wielder of an artifact; more likely, one of that wielder’s... victims?

“Bob,” the temp says. “I’m sure he’s got a last name, and I’m sure he thinks everybody should call him ‘Mr. Lastname,’ but my care level? Anyway he’s down the hall—one of the only ones in the farm today. Spite-working. Maybe on his anti-everything-manifesto.”

“Down the hall” turns out to be a vast expanse of cubicles: definitely a farm.

Myka says to Helena, “Follow my lead?”

“Always,” Helena says.

It’s a tonally sincere utterance—and in that, admirable—but it’s also manifestly untrue; nevertheless, Myka’s blood decides to believe it, to recognize it as another puzzle-piece. I really need to function, Myka tries to explain to her interior. So if we could climb down just a couple rungs. Like to the cab-ride level, maybe?

Her body refuses the agreement.

Of course.

The occupant of the first inhabited cubicle they find is an over-coiffed middle-aged man who clearly spends far too much time in tanning booths. He’s typing aggressively, as if the force of his keystrokes will power his message. His manifesto?

“Are you Bob?” Myka asks him.

“You better be here about my money,” obviously-Bob says, clearly spoiling for a fight.

Myka finds his demand incongruous—his job has to do with other people’s money, and Myka and Helena are manifestly other people. Who could have money. Fred or otherwise.

“In a way,” she says. She follows up with “We’re from the IRS,” and it’s never not funny for that to be useful. “We’ve noted some suspicious discrepancies in end-of-year reporting.”

“You have?” Bob asks. Now he’s avid rather than confrontational.

“Looks like some overreporting. Also underreporting. So you see our concern, particularly about effects on withholding.” She is making this up, as she generally does whenever she has to go actual IRS on someone. Read up on tax law, she reminds herself, as she generally does every time. Not that she’ll ever have the leisure to do that... “What we need to find out is whether it was in error, or if it warrants a full investigation.”

“Nancy Sullivan,” he says, with contempt, the name itself a curse. “She’s the one you should investigate, and then send straight to jail. She’s always been a witch about year-end, but now? On steroids. Talking about making her list, threatening to mark down people she doesn’t like, including yours truly, as naughty... and then we got our paychecks, and somehow she did it! No idea how she managed to push that garbage through, but I swear you better get her up on some kind of charges!”

He rises abruptly, clutching a slip of paper; his chair topples over behind him. He shoves the paper in Myka’s direction, his knuckles nearing her astonished nose—but in the instant before contact, Helena intervenes, her arm blocking his, stopping his forward motion.

Backup.

Helena plucks the paper from his pushy hand. “And what’s this?” she asks.

A pretty minimal manifesto, Myka thinks initially. But then she replays his screed in her head, and his babbling about Nancy Sullivan resolves into meaningful references; struck by the realization, she very nearly misses his next statement: “My pay stub. She can’t just do this.”

Helena says, “Of course not.” She’s soothing him, her voice a faux-caress. It’s enough to tempt Myka to act out, just to hear it directed her way, but Helena continues, “But we understand some of your colleagues, to the contrary, received large bonuses.”

His “tanned” skin darkens further. “Guess she thought they were nice. To her. Suck-ups.”

Mya looks a Find out anything else that’s relevant at Helena, who nods. Retreating back to the pre-cubicle hallway—relieved that her nose is intact—she Farnsworths Claudia. She skips the pleasantries, starting with, “A very disgruntled employee says the woman who signs off on bonuses was making a list.”

Claudia chortles. “You’re hilarious. Was she checking it twice?”

“This is my point. We don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, not yet, but I bet that’s the crux.”

“I should’ve known you weren’t aiming for hilarity. So you really think this is some Santa thing?”

“No. I’m saying words about lists because I think it’s a grocery thing.” Myka wants to shake her fist at the heavens and every deity who occupies it. Occupies them. All the heavens. “Of course I think it’s a Santa thing! I also think it’s Pete’s fault somehow.”

“Just because it’s Christmas? C’mon.”

“Christmas and Ohio?” Myka snorts. “You c’mon. I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“Maybe you should though. For peace of mind?”

“That’s another thing I don’t believe in. Just see if you can find anything about a Santa’s-list artifact, would you?”

“Roger. By the way, how do you like your backup?” She chortles again and disconnects.

“I like my backup like I like the sunrise,” Myka tells the blank Farnsworth screen.

“What about the sunrise?” Helena asks from directly behind her.

Myka wishes the sound of her voice were either more or less startling. She wishes also that she knew exactly how much overhearing had occurred.

“It’s inevitable,” she sighs.

In response, Helena blinks.

They take the elevator to Nancy Sullivan’s office.

In that elevator, which is aggressively mirrored, Myka can’t help but glance repeatedly at herself. So many reflections. You called this into being, thinking about Alice’s mirror before, she accuses. She tries not to focus on how her hair could really stand to be more controlled... she’d focus on Helena instead, but who knows how that would be received? Instead she allows herself one glance, then looks down.

She likes being on the elevator with Helena, though; it’s a space of relative privacy, like the cab. Have they ever before been on an elevator together? Alone or otherwise? She runs through their interactions, fast-forwarding from the Wells house to D.C., Tamalpais to Moscow, Yellowstone, Colorado Springs, Ohio (here Myka trips over the fact that Helena’ s now been to Ohio twice, if only once in physical form), Pittsburgh, Hong Kong...

The review—the speed with which she can conduct it—reminds her of how limited that time has been, so: an elevator ride. Yet another bonus.

“That fellow,” Helena remarks, and Myka looks up again; their eyes meet in the mirror of the elevator’s doors. It’s uncanny, as if they’re both holograms, so Myka turns her body toward Helena, who meets Myka’s actual eyes and continues, “He attempted to make a lewd joke about his willingness and ability to be naughty when it’s called for. I pretended not to understand.”

Myka can’t help it: she snorts. “I bet he didn’t buy that for a second.”

“I have the ability to perform ‘prim’ when it’s called for,” Helena says, and Myka has to acknowledge that statement as good evidence of itself. Then Helena’s face reshapes into a devilish grin as she says, “In a slightly different vein, his quailing at those three letters with which you assailed him? Hilarious.”

“Letters?” A little perverse-quirk makes Myka want to hear Helena say them, though she’s probably not pulling off “disingenuous” in making the request.

Helena seems fine with the perversity, for she obliges: “I,” she begins, then draws out “Aaaaare.” Then, after a beat: “Esssss.”

Myka now herself feels assailed—by how right Helena’s reading her. She tries to step it down with, “I wasn’t aiming for hilarity. I never do. Claudia can vouch.” But she does spend a little moment thinking about the context of that previous assailing: we’re from the IRS. We are here, together, from an agency. We, together, represent. It isn’t by any means everything Myka would have wanted... but it’s something: part of this bonus. “Fred,” she says, sotto voce.

The office they’re seeking is on the building’s highest floor, suggestive of Nancy Sullivan’s bonus-approving rank; it features several large windows, one of which affords the office a view of the hallway, and vice versa. Through it, Myka and Helena watch a woman, presumably that powerful Nancy Sullivan, writing with a quill-esque pen.

“It’s the pen,” Myka says, because it has to be. “It’s always the stupid pen.”

“Always?” That’s unusually tentative, like Helena’s trying not to step.

“Okay, once,” Myka concedes. “My dad and Poe and a pen, and as a result I’ve developed a severe aversion to those quill things.”

Helena takes a beat. Then: “I never liked feather pens.”

“Are you just saying that,” Myka says, because she might be, and she might admit it, and that might be good or bad or something else Myka has no way of evaluating. Why does Helena say words like this? And for that matter, why does Myka keep spending her limited time on this planet trying to parse them?

“Yes? In that I’ve... said it?”

That really didn’t help with any of the whys. “I mean, just to make me feel better?”

Helena shrugs. “The fact is, today’s ballpoints et cetera are far more reliable. Does that make you feel better?”

She’s playing at being obtuse—surely that’s for a reason? But Myka has no time to wonder further, for Helena is knocking on the office door and opening it without waiting for an invitation, and the real retrieval is underway.

Myka flashes her badge. “I’m Agent Myka Bering, and this is Helena Wells. We’re from the IRS.” She glances at Helena—all these glances!—and gets a small smirk in response.

Rather than introducing herself, the woman says, “Really? I bet that’s not true.”

“Why?” Myka asks. Have she and Helena, over the course of the elevator ride, lost their ability to perform “official” correctly?

“I have a feeling you’re here for this,” Nancy Sulllivan says, and she lofts the pen, waving it like a wand. “Mostly because I also have a feeling that I want to close my fist around it, punch my way past both of you, and make my escape.”

Well. “That’s self-aware,” Myka says. “Unusually so.”

“Thank you? Although it’s less self-awareness than kind of a... sixth sense.”

Helena raises an eyebrow at Myka. “Sixth sense aside, we appreciate your good sense to refrain from attempting to punch your way past us. That would have ended poorly.”

“I wish I’d had the good sense not to use this pen,” Nancy Sullivan says.

“Is there a reason for your wish?” Helena asks. She sounds, to Myka’s ears at least, like a recently summoned, slightly flummoxed genie.

“Because of how much I liked using it—particularly when I realized nobody was going to question anything. I signed off on all these orders, and it was like...” she trails off. Then she concludes, “Magic.”

To keep her talking, Myka prompts, “Was it?”

“Having the power to reward good people has been fantastic,” Nancy Sullivan continues, “but penalizing the awful ones? I mean I’ve sort of resented feeling compelled to use the word ‘naughty’ about them, because that’s way out of character for me. But other than that? Utterly spectacular.”

“Bob,” Helena suggests.

“Oh, god, you met him?”

Helena offers a dry “Alas.”

Nancy Sullivan’s smile is as dry as Helena’s tone, astringently vindictive. “I could not have been more thrilled to hit him and everybody like him where it hurt... I admit I’ve always been kind of judgmental, but wielding this pen? Intensified. Like, the hates are more. In particular, the hates are more. I’m not saying the Bobs of this company didn’t deserve what I did, but I feel it more. Punishment. It’s satisfying, but also weirdly costly. Grinch-in-reverse costly.”

That’s a little on the nose. Myka glances at Helena again, because the satisfactions of punishment, of judgment, even of hate, are among the things they will need to talk about. Maybe. Someday. If they are to have a someday that is theirs... if that is even possible after so much time and tribulation... Myka lets the glance grow into a gaze, a resting regard, and it stays that way until Helena, too, glances, with the result then that their eyes meet and lock... such a clasp, Myka feels, could ground that potential, and potentially necessary, talk of things, if only they were not in the middle of a retrieval...

...which makes Myka think. Why are they in the middle of a retrieval?

“I wish I didn’t feel like I need to articulate this, but where did you get the pen?” she asks. Because she has a niggling sense of something larger happening, something beyond her grasp. Nevertheless, it is not—repeat, not—a vibe.

Fine. It might be a vibe.

“My cousin gave it to me,” says Nancy Sullivan.

“Your cousin,” Myka says. “Whose name is?” Now she’s knows what’s coming, and that has nothing to do with a vibe: no, it is entirely deduction based on experience.

“Pete Lattimer.”

TBC

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