Work Text:
A painting hangs on the green-grey wall of the small, shabby office: a wooden frame containing a stretch of sharply blue sky above fields of golden wheat, all in oil paint.
It hangs behind the squat, metal desk, which is totally buried in scribbled-on forms and unread memos and dusty floppy disks. A good bit of the mess spills out from a fat folder marked “ABSOLUTELY TOP SECRET” that’s stained with several overlapping coffee-rings. The small black and green monitor screen is reflected in a pair of glasses, behind which two electric blue eyes squint uncomprehendingly.
After a long, silent moment, the young man heaves out a loud groan of frustration, sitting back heavily in his chair and dragging a hand down over his face. “Are you trying to make me feel stupid?” he demands of nobody in particular, his musical accent exaggerating his irritation. After a pause, and then a sigh, he reaches for his mug, shutting his eyes and tilting it back to slurp at the cold dregs of coffee in the bottom. He wipes at his mouth with the back of his sleeve, then looks back towards his monitor, behind which is the doorway, in which stands a little girl.
The young man jumps up with a shout, knocking over his chair and sending several floppy disks clattering to the ground.
The girl takes a step back, clutching her stuffed toy to her chest.
Peering at her through skewed glasses, the young man relaxes with a harried sigh of relief, lowering his fists. “Oh, thank God.” He pushes his glasses back up his nose, then smiles kindly at the girl. “Hello, there. Who’re you?”
The girl is small, six or seven, and dark-haired. Her face is frowning, but she isn’t pouting or sniffling or crying. Her jaw is set, almost stubbornly. She doesn’t speak.
The young man steps out from behind the desk, looking apologetic. “Right, sorry about all the fuss, I just thought… well, they train you to react quite aggressively to scare off nosy government officials, and …” He wipes his hands on his pants.
She’s silent and still, staring at him. Her eyes are very grey.
“Er.” He pauses, then walks towards her, stopping in front of her and extending a hand. “Look, come in here and sit down and I’ll have a go at finding out who you belong to, alright?”
The little girl hesitates, staring hard at him. After a moment, though, she tucks her toy into the crook of one elbow and reaches to take his hand and nods.
Smiling, he leads her back to his desk. “Let me just clear a space…” He scratches at his head, then shrugs and shoves some documents and disks aside haphazardly. He bends down and gently lifts her up and sits her on the edge of the desk. “Is that comfortable?” he asks, and gets another curt nod. “Brilliant.” He rights his chair, then sits down in it and reaches for the phone and dials a short extension. After a few rings, someone on the other end answers. “Hello, Fisher? Yeah, hi, this is Wheatley from… Yes, right. Look, sorry to bother you, it’s just this little girl’s wandered into my office and I’m fairly certain she’s lost. Would you mind sending out… Yes, ok. Good. Brilliant. Thank you.” Hanging up, he looks over at her with a smile. “Well, I’ve got the old wheels in motion, now, haven't I? You’ll be all taken care of soon. All right if I get back to work?”
The little girl is busy looking around the room, eyes lingering over the painting, completely focused.
“OK, silent type. No point in idle conversation. Mum’s the word. Reminds me of this bloke down in Legal, never utters a syllable unless it’s to explain why the company doesn’t owe you a dime in damages. Last year, when I had an accident—well, two, but on the same day—I remember…”
He continues chatting to her as he works, long bony fingers clacking on the keyboard, and she swings her legs and looks at him and tilts her head sometimes, stuffed toy still carefully clutched to her chest.
He exclaims happily when he finds a certain vital document he’d presumed lost, and there’s a brief quiet as he carefully inputs the data. He finally hits the Enter key and sits back and looks back over to the little girl. He almost starts to speak again, but pauses and then smiles.
”Hey, found my Rubik’s Cube, have you?” The multi-colored piece of plastic rests in her hands, and she stares down at it. “Bloody difficult, that thing. Had me giving up after about two minutes. But maybe you’ll have better luck.”
She starts to turn it over, looking at it from every side.
“Pretty sure the lads gave it to me as some sort of stupid joke, anyways. I always get the sense Parker’s having a laugh at me, whenever we talk…”
He continues to cheerily fill up the silence until there’s a quiet rap on the doorframe, and a female voice asks, “May I come in?”
The young man looks up. At the sight of the tall, attractive woman in a tailored skirt and jacket, standing in the doorway and smiling with faint amusement, his eyes widen and he jumps up again, managing to grab the chair as it starts to topple over. “Miss!” he says, swallowing as he sets it upright and turns to her. “Why are you—What brings—Er, good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon,” she says, stepping inside. “Who’s your friend?”
“My… Oh, her?” The girl’s eyes are fixed on the woman. “This is, um—Actually, I’m not entirely sure.”
The woman looks at him with one eyebrow arched, and he hurries to explain, “She, er, she just wandered in here—doesn’t really talk, never told me her name—I-I’ve made a call, someone’s meant to come and fetch—”
“Ah,” the woman says, cutting him off and stepping up to the desk. She looks down at the girl with a soft smile, then up and around the messy room. “Hmm. What an enriching, hazard-free childcare facility.”
“Oh, w-well, I…” The young man stammers. “I wasn’t really expecting a kid to—”
Suddenly, sharply, the woman’s eyes narrow and she holds up one finger, silencing him. “Did you do this?” she asks, voice hard, and the young man stiffens fearfully for a moment before he looks where she’s looking and relaxes.
“No, no, that’s just my Rubik’s Cube she’s got, it…” He pauses, gazing, and his eyebrows slowly knot. “Wait, wait, but… when I gave it to her, it wasn’t…”
The little girl hold the finished puzzle to her chest along with her stuffed toy protectively, staring up at the adults.
Slowly, the young man’s confusion clears, and a delighted smile spreads slowly over his face. “That’s…That’s bloody fantastic, that is!” He reaches out to ruffle the hair of the girl, who actually smiles a little as she flinches away. “How’d you do that, huh?”
The woman is watching only the girl. “How indeed,” she says.
The young man shakes his head, grinning, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Really, though, did I leave the instructions somewhere in this mess, or—”
He’s cut off as the girl suddenly and violently pushes herself down off of the desk in a small landslide of paper, and stands, trembling, fists at her sides, glaring with intensity at the woman in front of her.
The woman has the girl’s stuffed toy tucked under her arm. The Rubik’s Cube is in her manicured hands, being methodically and deftly undone, until all of the small colored squares are completely mixed. She nods, and then shifts her gaze to the girl, holding out the cube, and smiles. “Solve this again, please,” she says.
The girl pauses. Her grey eyes take in the cube, then flick to her toy, then to the woman’s face, then to the cube again.
She grabs it and begins.
The young man and the woman watch her, the woman’s gaze exact and calm, the young man’s agitated and concerned as he looks between the two females. “M-Maybe,” he falters. “Her toy… she’s very small.” The calm eyes turn to him and he almost cringes, mouth shutting tight.
Finally, after many minutes, the girl thrusts the cube up at the woman, defiantly, victoriously. Each side is uniform.
The woman takes the puzzle out of the small hands and looks it over, as if checking for some form of foul play. Then, after a long moment, she gives a short nod and removes the stuffed toy from under her arm and wordlessly offers it to the girl, who snatches it away and nuzzles into it for a moment with her eyes shut before clutching it tight to her chest. The young man relaxes, letting out a long-held breath.
The woman’s smile is tight as she looks down at the girl and places the Rubik’s Cube down on top of a stack of papers. “That was very impressive,” she says. “Maybe when you’re all grown up, we’ll hire you.”
The girl only glares.
The woman doesn’t stop smiling as she nods and turns. “Her father works down in Testing,” she says, as she leaves. “Escort her there, won’t you?”
The sound of heels on tile fades as it clicks down the hall, and the young man and little girl are left alone together again.
He clears his throat and turns to her, trying to smile. “You heard her. If you’re good enough to work here, you’re good enough to work anywhere, yeah?”
The girl is staring hard at the empty doorway.
The young man sighs and goes to her, and she holds onto his hand tightly when he takes hers and offers no protest as he leads her out of the office and down the hall in the opposite direction. “So, I can see that you fancy cubes quite a bit, eh? Except your toy is much nicer than my Rubik’s—yours has lovely hearts on it.”
***
Somewhere deep beneath the Earth’s surface, a young woman in orange wakes up.