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“Hang on, did you get me a coffee?”
A single crease sat along Gwen’s brow, a nice little accessory to match with the dark circles under her eyes and the frizzy strands of hair peeking out over the top of her headband.
Yeah, Lena fired me because of your massive backlog, so I’m fetching coffees for DoorDash now. That and my Only Fans side hustle. The words were perched on the edge of Alice’s tongue, the special reserve of sarcasm she had set aside for Gwen already eager to spring forth.
Sam beat her to it. “Yeah. You like mocha?”
Alice shot him a dirty look. Sam, not taking any notice, went on smiling pleasantly at Gwen. It was a smile that said, Look, we’re all friends here, aren’t we?
No, they weren’t all friends.
Gwen moved to scratch her arm. Her pale eyes darted suspiciously. “Yes,” she said. Gwen’s voice was small. All of her seemed small right then.
Sam nodded at her brightly, encouraging.
Gwen studied the coffee, as if searching for trip wires or maybe a really tiny bomb. Alice rolled her eyes. Even if she did decide to swap her lousy civil service job for a lousy assassin job, a coffee cup would be a stupid place to put a bomb.
Gwen finally picked up the mocha and took a tentative sip. Some of the tension bled from her shoulders instantly, and she held the cup with both hands, chasing warmth.
Alice watched her. She really did look like shit, like she’d crawled her way out of a grave and right into hurricane winds.
Gwen met Alice’s eyes. “Thank you, Alice.”
Sam glanced at Alice and raised his eyebrows.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“I—sure. Whatever,” Alice muttered. “Don’t get used to it.”
Gwen’s face was doing a weird thing. Her eyes were wide, and the lines of her cheekbones and jaw toggled between sharp and softened like an optical illusion. It reminded Alice of the time she had tagged along with Luke to practise, way back when he was still with Bullets for Saint Sebastian. She had watched one of the band members tuning his guitar, twisting the peg and winding the string tighter and tighter, until finally it snapped with a discordant twang. Something about the straining string had stuck with Alice, and here she was, watching it happen again.
But Gwen didn’t snap, or even explode. It was worse than that. Gwen smiled faintly at the mocha in her hands, just the quiver of an upturned mouth.
Gwen thought Alice was being nice .
Alice could feel the new dynamic settle like a layer of slime over her skin. Her arms itched with the wrongness of the sensation. She was overcome by the sudden urge to wash her hands.
Sam was looking at her approvingly. Alice was going to be sick.
Alice couldn’t shake the feeling that something in the fundamental rhythm of the office had been knocked off balance. First the whole thing with Sam poking his nose where he wasn’t supposed to, then Lena hiring the new girl Celia out of the blue, and now whatever was going on with Gwen.
Alice hadn’t had a chance to set things straight about the mocha incident before Gwen vanished off to Lena’s office. Fucking mochas.
Alice sighed, rotating through a slow spin in her desk chair. She had a nice routine going here. Alice would tease Gwen for having a stick up her arse about promotions and filing accuracy, Gwen would tell her to shut up and get back to work, and then Alice would get back to work minus the shutting up bit. In a lot of ways, this job was like an endless run in a hamster wheel, finishing one batch of backlogged cases only to tackle a bigger batch of fresh ones. A cosy hamster wheel where the hamsters listened to horrors beyond human imagination in return for a civil service salary.
It was late—or early, Alice supposed depending on how you looked at it. She would’ve left ages ago if not for the fact that she was picking up the slack for the backlog that training Celia had created. And Christ, she must have gotten stuck with a couple of cases that were supposed to be Sam’s because she was still slogging through cases an hour later.
Alice dragged a hand through her hair, pushing it away from her face. At this rate, Sam owed her a lifetime supply of Choco Leibniz, as much as those vermicelli arms of his could carry.
A door slammed abruptly, startling Alice, and in trudged Gwen. She was almost ghostly in the dim light, hands shoved into her coat pockets and bunched into fists. Alice hadn’t heard her footsteps in the stairwell.
“Oh,” said Gwen, stopping short of her desk. “You’re still here.”
“Yeah, I’ve got this friends with benefits thing going on with Freddy. There’s something so sexy about his spooky robotic monologuing. Cosmic horror and the existential dread of an uncaring universe just get me all hot and bothered.”
Gwen’s upper lip curled as she sat and tapped away at her keyboard, her back to Alice. “Don’t be gross.”
Alice ran a seductive finger along the edge of her monitor. “Our love is entirely natural.”
“Not now, please,” Gwen said, prim as ever. “I’m really not in the mood.”
“Well, me and Freddy certainly were until you interrupted.”
“Alice,” Gwen said, frustration finally crackling beneath the surface of her tone.
Alice smirked. There we go. Back to normal.
It was more than a hobby, really. Pissing off Gwen was an art. Gwen with her hair neatly tucked behind her ears, an impenetrable helmet under her headband or a ponytail in bobby-pinned armour, orderly and proper in a way that made Alice’s skin crawl—a way that made Alice want to tug a few strands of hair loose to see what Gwen would look like if she was more human.
“You got it, boss. I wouldn’t want to stop you from orchestrating paradigm shifts in holistic project management to foster a dynamic and agile work environment.”
Gwen didn’t bite. All Alice could hear was increasingly frantic mouse-clicking. She peered around the side of her computer screen. Jesus, you could practically see how tense Gwen’s back muscles were through her jumper.
“What happened to the rest of my cases for today?” Gwen spun to face Alice, her voice the broken glass kind of fragile.
“You didn’t do your cases today?” Alice clamped a hand over her mouth in mock scandalised horror. “I should’ve known,” she tutted. “The second you get a shiny new title, you’re sticking us peasants with your workload.”
“No, I was—I was out,” Gwen finished weakly.
“Right. Stuck on the tube again?”
“I’m serious, Alice,” Gwen demanded. “Who filed my cases?”
Realisation clicked into place. Perhaps Alice owed Sam an apology. She’d already texted him that she would set the wrath of the Choco Leibniz gods upon him if she didn’t have her penance biscuits by tomorrow night.
Before Alice was completely aware of what she was saying, her instincts took over. “Your backlog, you mean? I filed them. I’m not just hot. I’m magnanimous and humble as shit.”
Gwen was too worked up to even roll her eyes. “Was there anything…disturbingly violent?”
“I thought we only had one new hire this week,” Alice tilted her head sympathetically. “Heads up? The relentless nightmares last for a year, but then it’s smooth sailing.”
“I mean, more than usual,” Gwen pressed.
Alice shrugged. “No talkers, if that’s what you mean. Haunted house, haunted boat, and cannibal duck.”
Gwen frowned. “Cannibal duck?”
“Duck eating other ducks,” Alice said. “Keep up, Gwendolyn.”
Alice half-expected Gwen to insist on reviewing the DPHWs and verifying satisfactory filing accuracies, but Gwen simply turned away and slumped forward onto her desk. Alice couldn’t tell if Gwen looked relieved or defeated. Honestly, it must have been a bit of both.
Gwen mumbled something into the surface of her desk.
“Did you say something?” Alice asked the back of Gwen’s head.
Gwen sat up, directing a sheepish sort of smile in Alice’s direction. Okay, Alice thought. Weird .
“I’ve been dealing with a lot lately, and I know we don’t always get along—”
A cold terror permeated Alice’s bones.
“But I appreciate that you’ve gone out of your way—”
No, Alice thought paralysed. No.
“To help me,” Gwen said. She swallowed, the words clearly uncomfortable on the grooves of her lips. “Thank you.”
There were a million things that Alice probably could have said to restore the natural order of the universe. She could have explained about the coffee and the backlog and her general annoyance at Gwen’s generally annoying presence.
Alice didn’t say anything.
There was a strand of straw-coloured hair, freed from the constraints of Gwen’s headband and plastered to her forehead.
Alice was staring.
Alice spent the whole morning trying to figure out how to escape this weird alternate dimension that she’d stepped into. How did you tell someone that every pleasant interaction they’ve had with you was purely accidental and through no fault of your own? Don’t get the wrong idea, but I’m actually a total dick. Oops.
Alice was trapped in this bubble of cordiality. Of course, she had made jokes about the lot of them being one big happy family, but now she was suffocating in the fake politeness of it all, scratching at the gilded edges and never leaving a mark. When Alice came in ten minutes late, Gwen didn’t make a passive-aggressive comment about punctuality and professionalism. When Alice purposely ‘forgot’ to refill the kettle in the break room, Alice got to sip her tea and watch, mystified, as Gwen completed the task in gracious silence. When Alice told Sam that the solution to the hollow feeling of your ambition and life force being drained by soulless government work was to enter all your DPHWs as 6969, Gwen didn’t bat an eye.
At lunch, Sam ventured to ask Alice, “What’s with you and Gwen?”
He had lured her into a sense of false security with a box of Choco Leibniz, and now it was too late. Alice tried to stall by chewing her biscuits slowly, but she could feel Sam’s curious brown eyes trying to get a read on her.
Alice shrugged. “She recruited me to be the charismatic leader of her rich people cult and now I have a thirst for blood.”
Sam just blinked at her, unfazed. “You’ve been uncharacteristically nice to each other lately. Almost friendly.”
“ Friendly? ” Gwen said, wrinkling her nose.
Christ, that was the last straw. Alice had a reputation to maintain!
She found herself studying Gwen, searching for the right button to press for a hard reset. Gwen kept five gel pens positioned horizontally at the upper righthand corner of her desk. Red, green, blue, violet, black. Alice wondered if rearranging their order would be like removing the keystone in the foundation of Gwen’s sanity.
Gwen bit her lip while she worked, and never swivelled in her chair or tapped her feet under her desk. Gwen clearly preferred mochas, but restricted herself to black coffees at the office, lips puckering as she drank them, unless she felt she deserved a mocha. She never drank mochas. Gwen’s computer background was the OIAR logo, clean and devoid of file folders or any sign of personality.
Gwen had pale eyes, almost uncannily so, as if someone had taken watercolours and diluted them, leaving behind a washed out pigment that hardly stained the parchment. Alice returned to those eyes over and over again, tirelessly searching for repressed volcanic anger bubbling right below the surface. Surely Gwen was raring to tell Alice to shut up? Surely she couldn’t bear to go on like this any longer? The guitar string was buzzing with anticipation. Something had to give. Alice was certain of it.
Gwen couldn’t bear to go on like this for much longer. Every time she closed her eyes she could hear that booming voice, could see the rancid, sagging folds of skin, could feel the stare of those bulging eyes. The memory of that thing was imprinted on the backs of her eyelids, how it tore and chewed the envelope she had been holding mere moments before into soggy clumps between its jagged, yellow teeth. She woke up in the middle of the night, tangled in sheets, swearing that she could feel its foul, hot breath on her cheeks.
The nightmares were one thing, but the waiting—the waiting was a beast on its own.
Lena had told her to watch the cases closely in the following days, and the anticipation moved like a vicious, crawling thing in Gwen’s chest. The feeling slithered between her lungs and pooled in her diaphragm. She could almost pretend it hadn’t happened. There was no envelope, no address, no name. Until she heard it, no such case existed.
But Gwen knew there was blood on her hands. All that was left was for the inevitable case to reveal the stains like a beam of ultraviolet light at a crime scene.
She was scared, scared of what she saw as she drifted off to sleep. Most of all, she was scared that when she heard the case, when she finally learned the true consequences of her actions, she wouldn’t care.
And then there was Alice and the unwarranted mocha, and Gwen finally had something else to puzzle over. Alice, who never missed an opportunity to ridicule Gwen for actually giving a damn about this job, buying Gwen her favourite coffee two days after the single most terrifying experience of Gwen’s life.
Something strange had happened to Gwen that morning as the bitter-sweet taste of espresso and chocolate coated her tongue.
Categorisation was Gwen’s job. You take something and you put that in a box, and then you break that box down into little boxes until everything makes sense again. Quantify, identify, repeat. That was the problem with people like Alice: too messy, too amorphous and unpredictable to be categorised. Gwen had tried once, tried to file the disruption of Alice into category and subcategory. She’d gotten as far as Annoyance (colleague) and given up before settling on the crosslink.
No, Alice defied categorisation. Just when Gwen had become accustomed to the controlled blaze of irritation that Alice so often sparked in her—just as she had found a box for the frustrating yet harmless pattern of rivalry they’d fallen into—Alice had to interfere. Alice had to send Gwen reeling with a steaming cup of coffee and a helping hand with backlog.
Something had fractured within Gwen.
Because it wasn’t frustration that clawed at Gwen’s throat now when she thought of Alice. It was confusion, doubt, and a smidge of relief, tangled like Christmas lights that had been in the attic all year.
There were sticky notes all over Gwen’s computer. She dragged her mouse across the screen and genuinely couldn’t tell if the machine was on beneath the layer of neon greens and pinks.
She plucked one from her monitor and scanned a few lines of slanted, loping handwriting. The handwriting clearly belonged to Alice, distinct from Sam’s compressed, spiky hand and Celia’s neat, round letters.
Norris is waiting with you at the hospital before your heart transplant. He kisses you and promises, “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.” You smile at him and then the doctors come in to start the operation.
An arrow at the bottom corner of the sticky note prompted Gwen to flip it over, and she did as directed, eyebrows knitting together.
Once you’re out of surgery, you rush out of the room to find Norris, but he’s not there. You ask a nurse, “What happened to the anthropomorphised text-to-speech voice I arrived with?” The nurse responds, “Who do you think gave you the heart?”
Gwen frowned as she read it over. Was that it? Was she missing out on some sort of inside joke? And then, more urgently, she realised the message was written in gel pen. Gwen’s eye twitched as she hastily took inventory of her own collection.
“Oh, relax,” Alice called from behind her desk. “I only borrowed it.”
Gwen swivelled her chair to face Alice. “What’s all over my computer screen?”
Alice grinned crookedly at her. “Imagines.” She was leaning back in her chair in that haphazard way that Gwen always warned her would lead to a fall, only to be dismissed with a careless wave of Alice’s hand.
“Imagine what?”
“You know, like the really bad One Direction ones?”
Gwen was familiar with the band, but didn’t quite know what they had to do with heart transplants. She picked another sticky note at random and read it out loud. “Chester crawling in your ear. You tell him to stop but he is in there.” She paused and shook her head lightly. “What does that even mean?”
“Imagine he’s in your ear,” Alice suggested unhelpfully.
Gwen pressed her lips together into a thin line. “I don’t want him in my ear.”
“I imagine that’s why you’d tell him to stop.”
Alice was watching her expectantly, leaning halfway out of her chair in the process.
“Right,” said Gwen, not certain how Alice wanted her to respond.
The grin slid from Alice’s mouth. She looked almost disappointed. After a moment of charged silence, Alice’s fingers sprang to life on her keyboard, clacking away.
Gwen was too wrung out to make an attempt at decoding that interaction. Instead she began scraping the rest of the sticky notes off of her computer screen, skimming a few of them.
The ones that didn’t encourage Gwen to imagine herself being courted by Chester, Norris, or Augustus, were cookie cutter inspirational messages, not exactly brimming with authenticity.
Among them were get it, girlboss, winners never quit, and grindset, which Alice had underlined twice.
Gwen glanced at Alice, wondering when she’d had the time to pull this off. Despite the execution, Gwen couldn’t help thinking that it was almost…sweet.
God knew she could use the positivity, or at the very least, the distraction.
She couldn’t be sure, (as it had been a while) but Gwen thought she felt the faintest stretch of a smile on her face.
The thing about sorting life into boxes, Gwen was quick to discover, is that the boxes never fit as much as you thought they would. Now, sat at her computer as Norris’ voice returned to its robotic monotone and finally trailed off, the image of Mr. Bonzo’s teeth rending limb after limb under halting club strobe lights was seared in Gwen’s mind.
The gristly snap of bone, tendon, and muscle.
You couldn’t put fear in a box. Not this kind of fear that seeped inky black and oozing from between the gaps.
“Jesus Christ,” Gwen breathed.
“I go by Alice now, actually.”
Gwen hadn’t noticed Alice entering until she was perched on the edge of Gwen’s desk, arms crossed.
“Gwen?” Alice waved a hand slowly in front of Gwen’s nose. “Hello?”
Gwen swallowed, blinking quickly as if this would refocus the world around her. “What?” she said when she finally regained control of her vocal chords.
Alice tilted her head back, exasperated. “Okay enough is enough. How am I meant to wind you up if you’re already at the end of your rope?"
“Don’t.”
Alice frowned and leaned forward to peer down at Gwen’s face. “Wow. Are you, like, actually okay?”
“Yeah,” Gwen said, running on pure instinct.
But that wasn’t the truth was it? He wants to play. He wants to stay. The melody thumped in tempo with her heartbeat. She knew every word. She had known every word since she was a kid, watched every Saturday night for Mr. Bonzo and his pranks.
Maybe it was the mocha or the sticky notes or the way Alice’s eyes had gone soft with concern, but Gwen’s defences crumbled instantly. Guilt pummelled its way out through her ribcage, breaking her open, raw and real.
God, she was pathetic.
Hot tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, and for the first time, Gwen let herself cry in front of Alice Dyer.
Ah, fuck , was Alice’s first thought.
To be honest, she had thought that after all the trouble she had gone through to wind Gwen up, it would be more rewarding when she finally snapped. But now—
Now, here Gwen was, all pale blue eyes overflowing with tears and flyaways escaping at her hairline, face blotchy with the effort of holding herself together even as she was breaking down, and Alice didn’t feel proud of herself at all. It was just awkward. Alice didn’t think she was meant to see Gwen so human. Embarrassing, really, for the both of them.
Alice stood motionless, only a few inches away. She had always been shit at comforting people.
She was contemplating going for the gentle “there, there” and pat on the hand combo, when Gwen hastily wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and cast a watery but stern glare in Alice’s direction. “Not a word,” she ordered.
To her credit, Gwen managed to keep her voice from shaking.
Alice tapped her fingers against the edge of Gwen’s desk, trying to dispel some nervous energy. “I’m guessing you don’t want to talk about it.”
Gwen shook her head sharply, pointedly refusing to meet Alice’s eyes.
“Perfect,” Alice said. “I’m great at not talking about things. Not talking about things, not thinking about things. I’m phenomenal at minding my own business. You know, that’s probably why I’m such a valuable asset to the British government.”
“Sure,” Gwen said flatly.
“You’re just jealous of my talent for pointless data entry, happy-go-lucky attitude, and team spirit.”
Gwen raised a sceptical eyebrow at her.
“Yeah, I’m captain of the fucking morale squad over here. Preserving our happy little family one day at a time.” Alice smiled saccharinely.
Gwen let out a bitter laugh at that.
Hey, at least the tears had stopped. Alice was getting good at this.
“You laugh now,” Alice warned. “But wait until Lena promotes me to official OIAR mascot, costume and all.”
“And which one is that? A lion, a unicorn?”
Alice shrugged. “I’m still working on the pitch. Maybe something with sex appeal like that fox from Zootopia.”
Gwen groaned. “Alice, for God’s sake—”
“You know, the fuckable one?”
Gwen was looking at her like Alice had deposited a decomposing roadkill carcass on her desk.
“No, not humanoid enough for you?” Alice tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I guess there’s always the Teletubbies. Or—oh, I know! How about good old Mr. Bonzo?”
Gwen had gone very still.
“You know, Saturday on Six?” Alice prompted, cheerily nudging Gwen’s shoulder.
“I’m familiar with the television program, yes,” said Gwen stiffly.
“What, don’t tell me he spooked you as a kid?”
Gwen didn’t respond.
“I mean, I get it,” Alice admitted. “Mr. Bonzo certainly nails the ‘eldritch being ominously masked behind unassuming, technicolor family-friendliness’ vibe. Now that I think about it, thematically he’s not a bad fit for our office mascot.”
Gwen was silent a moment longer, and then quite suddenly she began giggling maniacally. Alice just stared at her as Gwen’s shoulders trembled with loud and delirious laughter. She didn’t look comfortable or entirely sane.
I’ve broken Gwen, thought Alice. I’ve broken Gwen, and the world’s ending.
Gwen’s face was bright red from the effort and her chest heaved as she took in great gulps of air. “You are,” she managed in between breaths. “Absolutely ridiculous.”
“Why, thank you, Gwendolyn, darling,” Alice said, tossing her hair. “You flatter me.”
“Not a compliment, by the way.”
“Oh, stop. You can’t get enough of me,” Alice declared with completely unearned confidence. “Just think of how lost you’d be without me to shield you from boredom and existential dread. Seriously, you should be thanking me.”
Gwen had gotten herself under control it seemed. Well, mostly. One side of her mouth crept upward in a subtle half-smile. It was almost…cute, Alice decided.
No. No, no. Gwendolyn Bouchard wasn’t cute. Gwendolyn Bouchard was barely tolerable.
“Thank you for shielding me from boredom and existential dread.” Gwen said, looking up at Alice. “Can you get off my desk now? You’re sitting on my gel pens.”
Gwen’s eyes still sparkled with amusement. Alice reached for a witty retort but came up blank, finding Gwen suddenly very tolerable.
Holy shit. The world really was ending.
“Shut up,” Alice snapped, no real heat to the words. “You owe me a coffee.”
Gwen didn’t argue.
And then softer, forcing the syllables out before she could regret it, Alice said, “You can talk to me. If—if you’d like to.”
Gwen held her gaze for a second, inscrutable.
Then, she nodded.
The next morning when Alice came into the office, there was a coffee on her desk. Someone had stolen a neon green sticky note from Alice’s desk drawer and pasted it to the side of the cup. She picked up the cup for a closer look.
Ah. Just as she expected. The message had been written in black gel pen. The culprit’s handwriting was rigid and evenly spaced.
Here’s your coffee, it said.
It also said: Thank you.
Alice smiled and took a long, satisfied sip.