Fic one-shot: Bad Day at the Office
Title: Bad Day at the Office
Rating: PG for mild violence
Genre: Gen, post-series
Pairing/Characters: Quatre, OFC, random anonymous former OZ Soldiers
Summary: Quatre's had a bad day at the office, and he knows just the cure
Tossing aside the marks of celebrity and going incognito for a night wasn't nearly as hard as most celebrities made it seem. Then again, most celebrities were press-made, and they didn't know what to do without the flashing lights and obnoxious questions.
He rather considered himself a self-made celebrity. Some might consider him a born celebrity, given that he'd inherited his wealth and his position, but he liked to think he'd made himself, for surviving the war if for nothing else, like learning to be a smooth-faced politician and aggressive businessman at sixteen. So, when he needed one night of anonymity, in plain jeans and a t-shirt in a bar, it was easy for him. He was a self-made celebrity, so he didn't need attention. And he was capable of stealth - for reasons entirely unrelated to his business ventures.
The bar was dimly lit, and the alcohol was european-warm, but he didn't mind. Mostly he was glad he hadn't been carded. He didn't know what it was about an Armani suit that made him look sixteen still - perhaps because he still wore it like it was a school uniform. Jeans and t-shirts were sinfully comfortable. The pair of jeans he was wearing was old and soft, worn from age. He'd been pleased, earlier that evening, when he'd been tall enough to wear them without rolling up the cuffs at the bottom. Their previous owner had been taller, longer-legged.
He drained his shot glass more quickly than he'd intended, pushing green eyes out of his mind.
"What's got you so sore, sugar?"
The woman next to him couldn't have been much older than him, but the expression she wore was almost maternal.
He shrugged, trying to loosen the tension in his shoulders. "Had a bad day at the office," he said. It wasn't a lie. Then again, he wasn't above lying, not like some bright-eyed, death-dealing gods of war who could joke as quick as kill.
"Office?" She raised her eyebrows and gave him a skeptical once-over.
He leaned back against the bar, allowing her blatant staring. He kept himself in absurdly good shape. In the too-small olive-green tank top and faded denim jacket he probably looked more like a stevedore or musician than an office worker.
He laughed. "It's not like I wear the suit all day."
"If you say so." She sipped some more of her drink. Scotch on the rocks. He could smell it from where he was. "What made it so hard?"
"Just -- dealing with stubborn people," he said. It was true - even after nine years of running the business successfully, he still had to deal with the sneers and condescension of men who would rather talk over his head to his sisters than deal with the real CEO.
"Does the booze help?" she asked.
"Takes the edge off, at least." That was a lie. People saw what they wanted to see, when it came to him. Most days that was a slim, pale-haired, wide-eyed boy playing dress-up and trying on his dead father's shoes in his dead father's office. Other days it was a charming, handsome-faced young man who was the most eligible bachelor in the entire Sphere. None saw him for what he really was, a hollow-eyed terrorist with blood dripping from his hands and that damnable voice whispering, always whispering, in the back of his mind.
He could hear it even now, soft and soothing, reciting a rhythm of possibilities and probabilities, entrances and exits, enemies and weapons, casualties and collateral, ready for anything he had to do.
Except stop fighting.
He closed his eyes and sank into the voice's soft embrace, and when he opened his eyes the woman was looking at him oddly.
"Maybe you need something a little stiffer," she said.
That earned a laugh. "Not from you." Despite his refined upbringing, he'd spent enough time around soldiers to pick up some of their coarse humor.
She smiled, exasperated, and shook her head, then slid her glass over to him.
He accepted the alcohol with a nod of thanks, savored it like it was supposed to be savored, and slid the glass back.
"You look like you've had more than a hard day, kid," she said.
"I'm tired of people not taking me seriously, I guess." He shrugged his shoulders again, trying to make the tension go away.
You don't want to be taken seriously, the voice in his mind whispered, accompanied by a chorus of broken neck, severed artery, to the door in ten seconds.
"They don't?"
"No. I inherited my father's company, and they all act like I'm still a child."
"How old are you, kid?"
Whatever his answer was, she wasn't likely to believe it, given her fondness of the word "kid". It wasn't as if he would tell her his name. "I'm twenty-five."
"You don't look it," she said, and that meant she hadn't looked hard enough. Anyone who looked hard enough saw it in his eyes when he couldn't be bothered to hide, which was more and more often these days. He could see her doing the mental math, and he knew, without reaching for the place in him that nearly sent him into a sympathetic coma whenever a close friend died, that she was coming to conclusions.
Raised rich. True enough.
Shut away in a private school somewhere far from the fighting when the war went down. Utterly wrong.
Naïve. Only half wrong.
"I don't feel it much," he said. He glanced at her, at the simple but elegant wedding band on her left hand, and asked, "No time with your husband tonight?"
She shook her head, sipping some more of her drink. She savored it properly too. "He's off-planet. On assignment." She glanced toward the window where the sky was already dark, where the stars struggled for visibility against the city lights. "Ever been to outer space?"
"I'm colony-born," he said.
She blinked at him, surprised.
He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. "It happens, you know. To millions of children every day."
"You're pretty brave, showing your face in an old FedAlliance bar."
"We already fought a war," he said flatly. "If they want to fight something already settled, let them. They won't like what they get from me." Then he tilted his head to the side and asked, "If I hadn't said anything, would you have even known I was colony-born?"
She looked stubbornly embarrassed but shook her head.
"Then what does it matter, where I was born?"
"It changes what you believe in," she said. She looked away, jaw tight. "My father died in the war."
"So did mine," he said, and that was true, even though, during the belated rebellious teenage phase he'd gone through, he'd thought, callously, that when his father died, the man had been somewhere else, far removed from the reality that was the war.
She narrowed her eyes. "We lost our home. Our food. Almost froze to death a couple of times before Mother scrounged up enough to get us a ticket to the tropics. Half of us died from disease there. We were all victims. Not everyone was a solider."
"No, not everyone was, but everyone wanted to be at the end, when our lovely Foreign Minister came down off her pink puffy cloud and gave a rousing speech." He threw down a few more creds, got himself another shot, this time of tequila rose. He remembered the outrage in the girl's eyes when he and the others dragged the fallen hero from her arms. She had always felt so proprietary toward the cold boy, the perfect killing machine, and she'd thought she'd saved him from ever having to kill again. The only person she'd saved was herself. He and the others - they still had nightmares, horrors of which they could not tell. Government secrets, after all.
"You heard her speech?" The woman looked startled.
Wanted to slice her lips off as she gave it, he thought viciously, and the voice chimed in, It was a good distraction. So many more bodies in so short a time, to the cadence of that feminine pitch --
"Didn't the entire Sphere?" He downed the shot, reveled in the burn, opened his eyes to find the woman eyeing him warily once more.
"I believed in what she said." The woman toyed with the rim of her glass. The scotch was almost gone, dilute in the melted ice by now. "I still want to. But then she went on to become a politician, and we're back to hating each other."
"I don't know that we hate each other," he said. "Our conversation is civil." He didn't tell her about earth trying to turn the colonies into factories once more, to do all the dirty work the earth-born were too good to do.
"It is." She held out her glass, and the bartender poured her some more. "You have a girlfriend? Good-looking, successful guy like yourself has to have someone pretty and fun warming his bed."
"The only fun, pretty thing I have warming my bed is a brand new laptop," he said dryly. "And even if I did want a pretty thing, I wouldn't want her to care about my success." Lord knew most of the ladies he met on a night out about town cared very much about his success.
"You can't get everything you want," the woman said.
"I already have everything I want," he said, brutally candor. He didn't miss the anger that sparked in her eyes at that. Anger and jealousy. "Somehow, I manage not to have anything I need."
The woman tossed her head. "I knew it when you walked in here, you know. Even though you're dressed like that, I could see it. You're spoilt and rich. You've probably never been hungry a day in your life --"
"On the contrary, my good woman, OZ soldiers are rather willing to starve a colonial terrorist for a week straight if it means he'll talk." He smiled, and this time the expression was razor sharp, the smile no one saw but himself when he looked in the mirror and smiled at the voice that had once talked through him, when five boys were facing down automated massacre and the sucking black vacuum of deep space.
The woman shrank back when he rose to his feet. He leaned down and said, near her ear,
"What I need is a good fight. Haven't had one in so very long."
"I thought you said the war was over," she said, voice weak with something that should have been fear.
"For a soldier, the war is never over," he replied and savored the look of utter shock that spread across her features. He crossed the bar where a group of young men sat, drinking. They were wearing threadbare blazers stripped of their old Specials insignias. He would know that color anywhere. He even recognized one of their faces, and he knew that he didn't really want this, that the voice in his head wanted this, but his body wanted it too. He hadn't kept such rigorous hours at the gym for nothing.
He came to a stop behind the one he recognized, hands on the back of the chair like an old comrade, and said,
"At the Lunar Base, you ran while your comrades were blown to pieces by a half-starved fifteen-year-old boy who'd stolen your service revolver," he said.
Five heads swiveled; five gazes fixed on him, four puzzled, one utterly furious.
"How dare you?" the man began, but his twisted mask of hate turned to fear when he met Quatre's gaze.
"I'm more well-fed this time," Quatre said, and stepped back before the switchblade could catch him. The voice in the back of his head rose to nearly a shriek, probabilities and strategies flying through his mind beyond the speed of words, but he ignored it all.
All that mattered was his body.
He gave much better than he got. It was almost disappointing, how easy it was to take down five poorly-armed men. Wufei had always been kung-fu perfect, all shao-lin and proper form. Duo had been gritty and perfect, all street instinct and unbridled fierceness. Trowa was the shading of the hues between Duo and Heero, channeling Duo's fierceness into Heero's exacting military efficiency. And Heero was the epitome of military efficiency, moving like the CGI figures Quatre had watched in his training vids.
Quatre was none of them. He was himself, assassin-smooth and ruthless. Cold. Calculating.
And when they were all down on the ground, groaning and nursing their wounds or out cold, he was still high on adrenaline.
He turned and walked back to the bar, ordered one last shot. The bartender and the woman he'd been talking to could only stare, and the bartender served him quickly, careful not to touch him when he handed over the creds.
The bar patrons who hadn't fled at the first sign of a brawl stared at him as well, but he was used to scrutiny.
The woman finally worked up the courage to speak. "Who are you?"
"Me? Just a spoiled rich boy who was sent off to a boarding school to wait out the war. Or a terrorist who gave everything he had to his colonies and then murdered a million people when outer space turned him away." He smiled then, the sweet smile he'd given up when he'd first climbed into the cockpit of Sandrock, and walked out the door.
Rating: PG for mild violence
Genre: Gen, post-series
Pairing/Characters: Quatre, OFC, random anonymous former OZ Soldiers
Summary: Quatre's had a bad day at the office, and he knows just the cure
Tossing aside the marks of celebrity and going incognito for a night wasn't nearly as hard as most celebrities made it seem. Then again, most celebrities were press-made, and they didn't know what to do without the flashing lights and obnoxious questions.
He rather considered himself a self-made celebrity. Some might consider him a born celebrity, given that he'd inherited his wealth and his position, but he liked to think he'd made himself, for surviving the war if for nothing else, like learning to be a smooth-faced politician and aggressive businessman at sixteen. So, when he needed one night of anonymity, in plain jeans and a t-shirt in a bar, it was easy for him. He was a self-made celebrity, so he didn't need attention. And he was capable of stealth - for reasons entirely unrelated to his business ventures.
The bar was dimly lit, and the alcohol was european-warm, but he didn't mind. Mostly he was glad he hadn't been carded. He didn't know what it was about an Armani suit that made him look sixteen still - perhaps because he still wore it like it was a school uniform. Jeans and t-shirts were sinfully comfortable. The pair of jeans he was wearing was old and soft, worn from age. He'd been pleased, earlier that evening, when he'd been tall enough to wear them without rolling up the cuffs at the bottom. Their previous owner had been taller, longer-legged.
He drained his shot glass more quickly than he'd intended, pushing green eyes out of his mind.
"What's got you so sore, sugar?"
The woman next to him couldn't have been much older than him, but the expression she wore was almost maternal.
He shrugged, trying to loosen the tension in his shoulders. "Had a bad day at the office," he said. It wasn't a lie. Then again, he wasn't above lying, not like some bright-eyed, death-dealing gods of war who could joke as quick as kill.
"Office?" She raised her eyebrows and gave him a skeptical once-over.
He leaned back against the bar, allowing her blatant staring. He kept himself in absurdly good shape. In the too-small olive-green tank top and faded denim jacket he probably looked more like a stevedore or musician than an office worker.
He laughed. "It's not like I wear the suit all day."
"If you say so." She sipped some more of her drink. Scotch on the rocks. He could smell it from where he was. "What made it so hard?"
"Just -- dealing with stubborn people," he said. It was true - even after nine years of running the business successfully, he still had to deal with the sneers and condescension of men who would rather talk over his head to his sisters than deal with the real CEO.
"Does the booze help?" she asked.
"Takes the edge off, at least." That was a lie. People saw what they wanted to see, when it came to him. Most days that was a slim, pale-haired, wide-eyed boy playing dress-up and trying on his dead father's shoes in his dead father's office. Other days it was a charming, handsome-faced young man who was the most eligible bachelor in the entire Sphere. None saw him for what he really was, a hollow-eyed terrorist with blood dripping from his hands and that damnable voice whispering, always whispering, in the back of his mind.
He could hear it even now, soft and soothing, reciting a rhythm of possibilities and probabilities, entrances and exits, enemies and weapons, casualties and collateral, ready for anything he had to do.
Except stop fighting.
He closed his eyes and sank into the voice's soft embrace, and when he opened his eyes the woman was looking at him oddly.
"Maybe you need something a little stiffer," she said.
That earned a laugh. "Not from you." Despite his refined upbringing, he'd spent enough time around soldiers to pick up some of their coarse humor.
She smiled, exasperated, and shook her head, then slid her glass over to him.
He accepted the alcohol with a nod of thanks, savored it like it was supposed to be savored, and slid the glass back.
"You look like you've had more than a hard day, kid," she said.
"I'm tired of people not taking me seriously, I guess." He shrugged his shoulders again, trying to make the tension go away.
You don't want to be taken seriously, the voice in his mind whispered, accompanied by a chorus of broken neck, severed artery, to the door in ten seconds.
"They don't?"
"No. I inherited my father's company, and they all act like I'm still a child."
"How old are you, kid?"
Whatever his answer was, she wasn't likely to believe it, given her fondness of the word "kid". It wasn't as if he would tell her his name. "I'm twenty-five."
"You don't look it," she said, and that meant she hadn't looked hard enough. Anyone who looked hard enough saw it in his eyes when he couldn't be bothered to hide, which was more and more often these days. He could see her doing the mental math, and he knew, without reaching for the place in him that nearly sent him into a sympathetic coma whenever a close friend died, that she was coming to conclusions.
Raised rich. True enough.
Shut away in a private school somewhere far from the fighting when the war went down. Utterly wrong.
Naïve. Only half wrong.
"I don't feel it much," he said. He glanced at her, at the simple but elegant wedding band on her left hand, and asked, "No time with your husband tonight?"
She shook her head, sipping some more of her drink. She savored it properly too. "He's off-planet. On assignment." She glanced toward the window where the sky was already dark, where the stars struggled for visibility against the city lights. "Ever been to outer space?"
"I'm colony-born," he said.
She blinked at him, surprised.
He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. "It happens, you know. To millions of children every day."
"You're pretty brave, showing your face in an old FedAlliance bar."
"We already fought a war," he said flatly. "If they want to fight something already settled, let them. They won't like what they get from me." Then he tilted his head to the side and asked, "If I hadn't said anything, would you have even known I was colony-born?"
She looked stubbornly embarrassed but shook her head.
"Then what does it matter, where I was born?"
"It changes what you believe in," she said. She looked away, jaw tight. "My father died in the war."
"So did mine," he said, and that was true, even though, during the belated rebellious teenage phase he'd gone through, he'd thought, callously, that when his father died, the man had been somewhere else, far removed from the reality that was the war.
She narrowed her eyes. "We lost our home. Our food. Almost froze to death a couple of times before Mother scrounged up enough to get us a ticket to the tropics. Half of us died from disease there. We were all victims. Not everyone was a solider."
"No, not everyone was, but everyone wanted to be at the end, when our lovely Foreign Minister came down off her pink puffy cloud and gave a rousing speech." He threw down a few more creds, got himself another shot, this time of tequila rose. He remembered the outrage in the girl's eyes when he and the others dragged the fallen hero from her arms. She had always felt so proprietary toward the cold boy, the perfect killing machine, and she'd thought she'd saved him from ever having to kill again. The only person she'd saved was herself. He and the others - they still had nightmares, horrors of which they could not tell. Government secrets, after all.
"You heard her speech?" The woman looked startled.
Wanted to slice her lips off as she gave it, he thought viciously, and the voice chimed in, It was a good distraction. So many more bodies in so short a time, to the cadence of that feminine pitch --
"Didn't the entire Sphere?" He downed the shot, reveled in the burn, opened his eyes to find the woman eyeing him warily once more.
"I believed in what she said." The woman toyed with the rim of her glass. The scotch was almost gone, dilute in the melted ice by now. "I still want to. But then she went on to become a politician, and we're back to hating each other."
"I don't know that we hate each other," he said. "Our conversation is civil." He didn't tell her about earth trying to turn the colonies into factories once more, to do all the dirty work the earth-born were too good to do.
"It is." She held out her glass, and the bartender poured her some more. "You have a girlfriend? Good-looking, successful guy like yourself has to have someone pretty and fun warming his bed."
"The only fun, pretty thing I have warming my bed is a brand new laptop," he said dryly. "And even if I did want a pretty thing, I wouldn't want her to care about my success." Lord knew most of the ladies he met on a night out about town cared very much about his success.
"You can't get everything you want," the woman said.
"I already have everything I want," he said, brutally candor. He didn't miss the anger that sparked in her eyes at that. Anger and jealousy. "Somehow, I manage not to have anything I need."
The woman tossed her head. "I knew it when you walked in here, you know. Even though you're dressed like that, I could see it. You're spoilt and rich. You've probably never been hungry a day in your life --"
"On the contrary, my good woman, OZ soldiers are rather willing to starve a colonial terrorist for a week straight if it means he'll talk." He smiled, and this time the expression was razor sharp, the smile no one saw but himself when he looked in the mirror and smiled at the voice that had once talked through him, when five boys were facing down automated massacre and the sucking black vacuum of deep space.
The woman shrank back when he rose to his feet. He leaned down and said, near her ear,
"What I need is a good fight. Haven't had one in so very long."
"I thought you said the war was over," she said, voice weak with something that should have been fear.
"For a soldier, the war is never over," he replied and savored the look of utter shock that spread across her features. He crossed the bar where a group of young men sat, drinking. They were wearing threadbare blazers stripped of their old Specials insignias. He would know that color anywhere. He even recognized one of their faces, and he knew that he didn't really want this, that the voice in his head wanted this, but his body wanted it too. He hadn't kept such rigorous hours at the gym for nothing.
He came to a stop behind the one he recognized, hands on the back of the chair like an old comrade, and said,
"At the Lunar Base, you ran while your comrades were blown to pieces by a half-starved fifteen-year-old boy who'd stolen your service revolver," he said.
Five heads swiveled; five gazes fixed on him, four puzzled, one utterly furious.
"How dare you?" the man began, but his twisted mask of hate turned to fear when he met Quatre's gaze.
"I'm more well-fed this time," Quatre said, and stepped back before the switchblade could catch him. The voice in the back of his head rose to nearly a shriek, probabilities and strategies flying through his mind beyond the speed of words, but he ignored it all.
All that mattered was his body.
He gave much better than he got. It was almost disappointing, how easy it was to take down five poorly-armed men. Wufei had always been kung-fu perfect, all shao-lin and proper form. Duo had been gritty and perfect, all street instinct and unbridled fierceness. Trowa was the shading of the hues between Duo and Heero, channeling Duo's fierceness into Heero's exacting military efficiency. And Heero was the epitome of military efficiency, moving like the CGI figures Quatre had watched in his training vids.
Quatre was none of them. He was himself, assassin-smooth and ruthless. Cold. Calculating.
And when they were all down on the ground, groaning and nursing their wounds or out cold, he was still high on adrenaline.
He turned and walked back to the bar, ordered one last shot. The bartender and the woman he'd been talking to could only stare, and the bartender served him quickly, careful not to touch him when he handed over the creds.
The bar patrons who hadn't fled at the first sign of a brawl stared at him as well, but he was used to scrutiny.
The woman finally worked up the courage to speak. "Who are you?"
"Me? Just a spoiled rich boy who was sent off to a boarding school to wait out the war. Or a terrorist who gave everything he had to his colonies and then murdered a million people when outer space turned him away." He smiled then, the sweet smile he'd given up when he'd first climbed into the cockpit of Sandrock, and walked out the door.