Log: You Hiring?

[xp_changeling]

Kevin returns to the Snow Valley offices to ask for a job.



Kevin walked into the Snow Valley office, clad in an immaculate suit as always. He gave Clea a nod, despite having been gone for months. In this case, he walked directly to the heart of the beast; Marie-Ange's office. As he stepped in, he motioned to the woman behind the desk.

"Do you have a moment?"

Marie-Ange's office had changed since Kevin's departure - she had the desk moved so she could see the door without having to turn, the scattered papers that had littered every flat surface were now in file folders in a vertical filing cabinet, and the evidence of someone who barely slept - a folding cot, the makeup kit, the tea bags and energy drinks and pill bottles, all missing. The neatly labeled stacks of tarot cards remained, and she ignored Kevin for as long as it took to turn a card over, and then slip it back into the stack. "I set my next half hour free, so I have thirty moments."

"Fair. I'd like a job. I'd give you a resume, but my last official job was the US Army and Christie's Dairy Dell from the 1950s."

"Is this amnesia, and you have forgotten the last few years, or are you trying to be clever?" The tight curl to Marie-Ange's face spoke volumes - she was unamused at best.

"No, but I like the response. I like to think you're right now thinking that I'm a useful asset that you can control. In fact, I'm hoping for that."

"Right now I am thinking you are going to rope my team into another mystery trip into your psyche and then disappear for six months, and I have had my fill of assets..." She did not make air quote fingers, but the sarcasm was there. "Who are high-maintenance, require being controlled and then disappear right before we need them."

"I'd like to point out that I didn't rope your team into anything. Going into my head was about finishing a mission, not saving me. You could have let a good chunk of Brooklyn get atomized and it wouldn't have mattered a bit whether or not I woke up." Kevin said, still puzzled that having five people wander into his personal history was considered a kind of favour to him. "And while I acknowledge that running was a mistake, if you really needed me, you know there were ways to contact me. Hell, Gabe found me a couple of months ago on his own time. You've got every right to be pissed at me without hiding behind the job to do it."

"I could have spent time and energy looking for you but why?" Marie-Ange asked. "You have worked and lived with us for this long and do not understand that half of what this team does ends up being personal? I know you have read every single report any of us has ever written, I know what sort of operative you are, you did your background work before you even stepped foot into this office the first time. You left, you needed to, I do not know what to call it, find yourself perhaps, and the people who you had personal connections to found you. I knew you were not dead, or going to sell our secrets to Erik Lensherr."

"So I think we understand each other. At least enough to know why I'm coming to you asking for a job, rather than thinking that the one I ran out on is mine and waiting for me." Kevin said. He was well aware of what was ahead. "And you should know why I'm asking you first."

"I am not sure I understand you outside the job. Inside, yes, I agree." Which for Marie-Ange was unusual - it was uncommon to hire someone she hadn't at least a little personal experience with. "I will admit to curiosity, because if you had just come in and asked for your job back, I might have made you say please, but you and I both know that we need you here. Your professional experience alone is too valuable to turn down. Making the team less effective in an attempt to punish you would be impractical and ineffective."

"Entirely practical. It's exactly how I'd view it." Kevin said. "But... there's hurt and anger here and I'm the cause of it. And I think you're experienced enough to know those are considerations. Oddly enough, a good spy station is built on trust, and I don't have that here right now. With others. Maybe with you. So, is there anything you want to know first?"

"Do you want to be here all day?" Wry, and quick was easier, and while Keven would catch that it was deflection, Marie-Ange also was not trying to hide it. "Did you know I did the same thing once, left without much explanation, stayed out of contact and broke trust with most of the team?" She had quit, to be fair, but at the time it had looked to almost everyone like an angry break-up, not what it really was. "Returning was uncomfortable, but I had years of time spent building trust that I could rebuild once I explained why. You do not have that, and all my questions are because, it is not that we do not trust you so much as we do not even know you."

"Fair. And you don't know me because I didn't want to be known." He chuckled softly. "I'm 88 years old, Marie-Ange. I've been in service in one way or another since I was 17 years old. Except for the years I was dead. I'm not the easiest person to know because I lived a lifetime before most of you were born and it is easier to fill that gap up with booze, sex, and cynicism."

"I see the future and make stupid agreements with gods. Amanda may be actually married to the city." It was very possible Amanda was not going to appreciate that description one bit. "Wanda has a connection to something no one understands, Gabriel experiences time differently than the rest of us." Marie-Ange rolled her hand, as if to suggest she could continue on and on until she ran out of team members. "We all could be considered too alien to know, certainly none of us have an easy time of it, except maybe the four of us who went to school together, and Jubilee and I fight like cats and cats, so perhaps not even that. You took the easy option and I did not think you were the easy option sort of man when I first met you."

"There's where you don't know me. I haven't taken the easy option, because the easy option is what terrifies me." He said. "Bear with me for a moment. Have you ever thought about if you could run away and build a completely new life? Start over and be someone different?"

"I did not mean about running away." Marie-Ange explained. "I meant about not bothering to know most of us. I know, you are almost ninety, you are more a peer of my grandmere than any of us, and you left two decades under the Chesapeake Bay. You also put up great walls of whiskey and age and kept yourself apart. You are a very difficult man to know, but how much of that is your own deliberate doing?"

"Professional training. That's kind of the point." Kevin said. "It's easier for me to become someone else... anyone else. Because I can jettison 90 years of habits, training... life. No one would know better. But changing? Letting people in..." He let out a breath. "It's harder, especially when decades reinforce the opposite. But... I was reminded recently why fighting for myself actually might matter. And to do that, I need to be back on the job. I need to do something that means something."

"Just so, and now you are here, asking for your job, knowing that I need to accept because we need you here." Marie-Ange would have - six months prior - dug the heel of her hand into her eye and pressed until she saw starbursts behind her eyelid, and now she just tilted her head, considering Kevin, and what was beyond Kevin. "What does that mean, something that means something, for you? What is your personal cause to keep being Kevin Sydney, and not, ah I do not know, clever name choices are not my area of expertise, someone who is not Kevin."

"I think you missed the most important part. The reason I'm talking to you." He said, leaning back in his chair. "I'm talking to you because regardless how much you might need me, you're the one people who is willing to say no."

He spread his hands. "In another world, you're a promising operative that we're looking at a solid career path to develop. In this world, you're the one who gets to make the hard decisions. And that, let me be frank, is garbage. You still have so much to learn... so much goddamn potential, and you've lost the people who are supposed to provide it. Yes, you do need me. Badly. In fact, you need someone like me calling the shots and helping to turn you all into the best versions of the professionals you could be. But that means nothing unless you want me here. I don't know how to tell you that the guy who disappeared on a personal crisis has earned that. Because I haven't."

"Of course I am going to say no." Marie-Ange said, with a sigh. "I cannot make that decision for my entire team. I make hard decisions, but not one that would damage this team, and installing you as our, ah, what would we call it, Operations Director, without so much as a by your leave to my peers?" She continued to look just past Kevin, head tilted. "At the very least on a personal level it would be disrespectful of people I trust, and on the professional, I do not think it would suit this team to have you calling all the shots, as you say. You understand how to be an operative, better than all of us, even David, but perhaps not yet how to be part of a team that operates like this one."

"Oh, I wasn't suggesting that you can make me the one in charge. I'm saying that in a proper world, you'd have me... actually, you'd have at least five of me in charge and training and turning you into the operatives you could be." Kevin said, settling the idea that he was demanding anything specifically. "And the reality we face is that isn't an option. Which hurts what we're trying to do, because this is an imperfect world and we all get fucked in our own ways. Which brings us back to the original point. I asked you for my job back; not the job that is best for the team or the mission or whatever. Just the job I was doing. And you have the option to say no because regardless of how much you might need me or whatever value I bring in the objective sense, if you can't get past my leaving as a betrayal, it doesn't matter how much I'm needed or necessary. It will fall apart. So it's up to you."

Now Marie-Ange pinched the bridge of her nose, and rubbed her finger along the scarring that peeked out from the eyepatch. "You have no idea how accurate you are, about everything going quite to shit without you here, in your job." She waved her free hand at the stack of tarot cards at the corner of her desk. "No more migraines, but in exchange I get to know nine hundred horrible things between now and next Tuesday. I need you in your job, and whether or not I feel betrayed is irrelevant. The real question for me is if you can do the job we need, and I had that answer, because you are here, and not on the next train to Atlantic City."

"I can't stand Atlantic City. Imagine not being able to be as classy as Vegas, of all places." Kevin stood up. "Fifty years ago... no, not fifty years ago, because you'd have been stuck as an office manager but... you're going to have this one day. I don't know when, but one day. And the eye-patch actually suits you."

"The crystal ball said Atlantic City." Marie-Ange stood up as well, and came out from behind the desk. "So did the bus schedules. Your office is still yours, I do not even think anyone stole any of your horrible alcohols." The fact that she still shared seven-dollar-a-bottle wine with Amanda some nights was certainly not relevant, or the reason for a teasing smile. Of course not. "You never did tell me what your personal cause is. You said you need to do something that matters, but not why, and your answer will not change your job being here, but, at the risk of quite mangling a metaphor, do not burn the bridge before you build it?"

"I've been a spy twice as long as you've lived. And I'm a mutant who can literally change into whatever I want and live a different life. Which means that my old life is as a ghost. And any new life offers me limitless opportunities." Kevin said, rolling his neck. "So if I decide to fight for myself, I need to accept that means building value in the shadows. In the people I inhabit it with. Maybe it sounds a little trite, but I need to believe in something, otherwise, I get am pulled towards anything and nothing simultaneously."

"So if you have to pick something it may as well be us, since we are already here?" It was not quite a question. "That is fair. And while none of us should have you in charge, we have wasted your expertise. You have been, as you said, a spy twice as long as I have been alive and the only one of us taking advantage of that is Gabriel." Marie-Ange touched the eyepatch briefly and then nodded towards the door. "Perhaps if we had, I would be the only one with a permanent marker of a disastrous mission. I need you tomorrow here filling in knowledge and training we do not have, but today I just need drinks."

"Ah yes, my other area of expertise. I can escort you to several excellent establishments which I regularly bill back to Worthington if you're interested."

"I had hoped. The only thing better than drinks is ones I do not have to pay for myself."

"The only thing better than those are the drinks that someone you fucking loathe is paying for." Kevin said, waving towards the elevator.