Chapter Text
The first thing that swam into her awareness was nausea like she was on a roller coaster on a boat in a storm and her innards were trying to jump ship. The second thing that came was that the hard thing digging into her cheekbone was a toilet seat.
Luckily, her aim was good, but her head still pulsed violently with every involuntary heave. By the time she lurched up to the sink, a splitting headache had set up shop. Cold water washing various fluids off her face and mint replacing the acrid taste in her mouth did wonders, but she still felt like roadkill shit.
What the hell happened?
Mercifully for her headache, her bedroom was directly across the hall and the city light pollution that always flooded her apartment was enough to make her way across.
Her bed was made. According to her phone dock, it was just after 3 in the morning. The witching hour.
Undershirt and boxer briefs, bed made, no lights on: she must have been getting ready for bed and passed out or something. If she'd collapsed, her face would hurt like hell from slamming into the toilet, so she must have fallen asleep. On the floor. Prepared to puke.
She shuffled her way over to the still-unopened moving boxes by her closet and started searching them mostly by touch.
Maybe she was coming down with something. She felt...well, she felt like week-old roadkill that'd been microwaved too long. Dizzy, dehydrated, exhausted, achy, shaky, and drenched in a cold sweat. Those could all be chalked up to the hurling and the headache, though. Incredibly hungover, maybe. A blackout would explain why she couldn’t remember what she'd been doing immediately before losing consciousness.
She finally found her sunglasses in the third box she searched and clutched them to her chest as she moved into the open plan living area of her apartment.
Nothing looked out of place in the dim light, just furniture and boxes, boxes and furniture. The light from the fridge stabbed her brain even with the dark lenses protecting her poor eyes, and her stomach cramped as she stared blankly at the six pack of beer dark and solitary against the fridge's stark white plastic insides. She was a step below the narrator of Fight Club with her lack of condiments, but she had beer. A drunken blackout was looking more and more likely. No food meant she probably went out to eat and had way too many. Her dumb ass should have just ordered pizza.
She confirmed the matching lack of food in the freezer and cabinets before she returned to her room on a quest for soft pajama pants and a hoodie.
24-hour breakfast restaurant staff were hardly going to be scandalized, and she was too hungry and in too much pain to give much of a fuck even if they were. Same went for the valet and front desk people. They probably all saw way less dignified shit every weekend. This was, like, base level pathetic. Hardly memorable. She hoped.
Thankfully, none of the diner staff batted an eye at her. Hell, the cops sitting in the far corner didn’t so much as glance over when the literal door bell rang, which struck her as rather careless. What if she’d been planning to rob the place?
She picked the booth furthest from the cops where she could still see them, the kitchen, and the door with ease. A waitress who looked almost suspiciously perky for the hour was at the edge of the table before she had even settled into the seat.
“What can I get for you, sir?”
Oh god, it was way too fucking early for unnecessary gender bullshit.
“You’ll make me feel even older than I already do if you keep that 'sir' up,” she protested with a weak smile.
The waitress smirked and cocked her hip playfully. “Alright. What can I get for you, young man?”
Well, she'd tried.
She sighed, ordered, and fought the packaging for the pain meds she’d picked up from a convenience store on the way. The orange juice came a minute after she swallowed the pills dry.
She kept trying to remember what she had been doing yesterday, or the day before, or the week before, but so much was missing.
She remembered that she’d just moved in, but she couldn’t remember the dry feel of cardboard against her fingers as she packed, or where she’d been living before. She remembered the sun on her neck while her dad was showing her the ropes under a hood, but not the make of the car. She remembered her sister was a terrible cook but not how she knew that. She remembered staying up late working on a major research paper for her consumer behavior class, but her freshman roommate was faceless.
Everything felt eerie and...slippery, like nothing was quite settled, like it could all be swept away with a firm hand and a washcloth.
She kept circling back to the hard press of the toilet seat and the six pack. Upset stomach, godawful headache, disorientation, and significantly impaired memory all sounded like things that would be associated with heavy drinking. Prioritizing beer over any actual food and then drinking away from home anyway sounded like A Problem. Was she an alcoholic? Surely she should remember that. Then again, she should really be able to remember where she’d been living two days before.
The ring of the bell over the door was barely audible under the racket the gaggle of young college-aged kids made as they tumbled in. Her head pulsed with the noise as they crammed into a booth two down from her own despite there being a whole other wall of booths and a counter wide fuckin' open for the taking.
By the time the waitress brought her food over, her temples and eyes felt like they were being tattooed with knitting needles. The group burst out in obnoxious, tipsy laughter. She sighed, stood, and walked over.
“Hey.”
The guy with a girl in his lap and hair like a sea urchin regarded her with open hostility. “You want something, gramps?”
Her stomach clenched with annoyance—not quite enough to bring the nausea back, but enough that she wasn’t going to be able to enjoy her bacon as much as she would have a minute ago. She really should have just tried to sleep through whatever the hell was going on with her.
She wasn’t even that old, for fuck’s sake.
Her smile wasn’t nice. “You’ve got less than a decade to go until you're a 'gramps' too, buddy boy. Unless you’re illegally tipsy, of course, in which case I imagine those officers would be real interested in how your night’s been going, McLovin. I hear they’ve got quotas.”
Sea Urchin scowled and a couple others shifted uncomfortably.
Lap Girl snapped out, “The fuck do you want?”
“I want you to use your insides voices so my head doesn’t explode and splatter brains all over you. And for you to tip our waitress well for having to put up with you.”
“Whatever.”
A chorus of profanity-heavy grumbling acted as a soundtrack for her getting resettled at her table, but at least they were quiet about it.
She scarfed down half her meal before it occurred to her to check her phone.
Her family members were listed in her contacts by name but there were few other numbers saved. The camera gallery was mostly pictures of her apartment without the boxes—right, she’d gone for the furnished option so she didn’t have to haul so much shit herself or pay people to bang up her furniture—and some snaps of sunsets and the city skyline. The notes included login info for various websites, a grocery list, and “research Sandover in prep for interview.” The calendar had the day before annotated as “moving day” and the coming Thursday as “interview.”
She had an interview in a few days. She didn’t even remember applying. Shit.
She polished off her food, put down a 20 because she wouldn’t be surprised if the punks didn’t tip at all just to spite her, ignored the homophobic slur Sea Urchin spat at her as she passed, and was home by 4:30. She set her alarm to wake her up in three hours and surrendered to exhaustion.
There was a message on her phone.
The shower must have drowned out the sound of the call, but the reminder beep had startled her out of staring at herself and cataloging how much she still looked like unshaven, sleep-deprived shit. She had to hunt down the voicemail pin number in the note full of logins, but she got there.
“Hello, this is Kassady with Sandover Iron and Bridge. I’m calling to remind you of your 10 o'clock interview this Thursday. I just sent the position information, the resume you submitted, and directions to the office to the email address you provided. Please bring copies of your resume to the interview. If you have any questions, call the number in the email signature. Thank you.”
Well that should give her a starting place.
She set her laptop up to charge while she got to work setting up her bedroom, but then ended up on her bedroom floor for a solid ten minutes, just contemplating her packed clothing.
Aside from undergarments and sleep wear, it was almost all business clothes: slacks, button ups, ties, suspenders, jackets, sweaters. It all seemed so...stiff. And bland, despite the myriad of patterns. Most of it would need to be ironed before she could wear it, which was going to be a pain in the ass.
More than that, it all just contributed to people calling her the wrong things all the time. Granted, people would still do it even if she dressed more casually--as evidenced by her diner adventure--but the fancy menswear sure as shit didn't help. May as well be otherwise comfortable if it was going to happen either way. In the end she didn’t get anything unpacked before checking on her laptop.
She may have still looked like crap, but she actually felt better--far less spacey, far less like Leonard Shelby. The wonders of a nap and a shower.
Clicking around on her computer was weirdly reassuring. She found notes from a business class she remembered, records of investments she remembered stressing over, pictures from a hike a couple years back and of her blowing out the candles of a birthday cake in her old living room, all of which she remembered. Honestly, she must have been on the verge of needing hospitalization in order to forget the smug, unrepentant look Ash would give her every time she was slightly traumatized because he didn't put a tie on their doorknob when he had "me time." She'd mostly liked the guy but had been so damn relieved when he transferred to MIT.
Back on task: right at the top of her inbox was an unread email titled “Interview Information." Her last job had mostly consisted of putting out fires set by the company’s wildly incompetent higher management, but judging from the job description attached and what she found on the Sandover Iron and Bridge website, getting this job would be a marked improvement from that situation. They even included people like her in their non-discrimination statement, which she'd never seen done before, holy shit.
When she clicked open the resume she’d submitted, she froze. At the very top, in obnoxiously large font, was “D. Smith”.
Not Dean Smith, her actual name. Why wouldn’t she have put—
Her desk chair hit the wall when she shot up to her feet, wide fucking awake, adrenaline flooding through her.
New city, new apartment, expensive clothes in a fuckin' cardboard moving box rather than on hangers with garment covers like they should be, ambiguous name stand-in.
Had she been—?
Fuck, she absolutely could.
But should she?
She lowered her hands from her hair to her hips and frowned. Well, why the fuck not? She had plenty other recent emails confirming job application submissions. Even if she got discriminated against in the Sandover interview despite their official statement, she could just go back to her default for her next interview if need be. It wasn’t like she was going to be doing anything irreversible in a window of a few days.
She’d have to watch her back, and be ready to be laughed out of the building, but....
She grinned, reined her chair back in, and hunkered down to do a shit-ton of research and chart out a plan.
Yeah. Fuck yeah.