I had to make my own way to work in the morning and Aunt May was a little surprised that I rode part of the way with her on the bus. Of course, I had made breakfast bagel sandwiches again and May had her bribes and I had my own that were still hot inside the thermal bag that was inside my gym bag.
A few people on the bus kept giving us odd looks, probably because we were sitting so close and had an arm around each other, so I started loudly whispering comnts and complints about May. I kept saying things like I loved her, that she was the best thing to ever happen to , how I thought she was the most beautiful woman on the planet, and that every man in the world was envious of
because I had her in my life.
All of the odd looks had quickly changed to admiration while May's face had beco bright red by the ti the bus had neared the stop where I had to change buses. I pulled the string to let the bus driver know I was getting off.
“I am going to kill you when I get ho.” May whispered when I leaned close and kissed her cheek.
“I love you with all my heart too, dear lady!” I exclaid and hopped up when the bus stopped. “No one else can compare to you and even the sun itself goes dim when you smile!”
“BEN!” May gasped and blushed even harder as several people made 'aww' sounds.
“Have a wonderful day!” I said and dodged her slap as I ran off the bus. Laughs sounded behind
and I chuckled as I turned and waved to May, who shook her fist at
instead of waving as the bus pulled away.
My bus showed up not long after that and I rode it to the office building with a grin still on my face. The stop was barely half a block away in the opposite direction I normally had a drive, so I would have to rember that in the future, assuming I didn't go and get my license early. I would have to check the minimum age for a beginner's license later.
I entered through the front door of the building and went up to my office to drop off my gym bag and took out the thermal bag, then I rode the elevator down to the administration floor and submitted my clothing reimbursent to Gail in HR before I entered the main administration office.
The woman at the counter smiled at
and let
in without even asking what I was doing there. “Good morning, Ben!”
“Good morning.” I said and opened the thermal bag and she took in a huge sniff automatically.
“What is that?” She asked with an interested look on her face.
“Homade breakfast bagels.” I responded. I wasn't surprised that she didn't comnt about the bump on the side of my head, considering it was mostly covered with my hair.
“You better have enough to pass around or I'm kicking you out.” She warned
with a crooked smile.
I chuckled and held the bag out to her. “Check it out for yourself and get them while they're hot.”
She looked in and saw how many of them I had. “You're actually sharing them? I was just joking.”
“I brought them in for you all because I know how hard you work.” I said as the other secretaries gathered around. “Just leave four of them for the computer departnt.”
Their hands quickly dove into the thermal bag and they grabbed one each.
“This better be real bacon I sll or you're going to regret it.” Another woman said with a fake glare.
“It is crisped to perfection.” I said and looked inside the bag to see that there were six left. “There's two more available to...”
The first woman dipped both hands into the bag and took them. “We have knives in the break room.”
I nodded and closed the bag before I walked across the secretarial pool and over to the door to go to the mainfra room. I went down the hallway and pushed the panel to open the scanner.
I put my hand on it and spoke. “Agent 111A.”
The door buzzed and clicked. I pushed it open and Kelly let out a gasp when she saw .
“Guess who is available all morning to work for you?” I asked and she let out a squeal of delight. “I have breakfast bagels for...”
“I don't care!” Kelly said and grabbed the thermal bag from
and handed it to one of the guys before she dragged
over to a spare terminal. “I'll be right back!”
She disappeared out the main door and the guy holding the bag gave
a questioning look.
“You can have one each and leave the other two, because you know she's going to realize later what she ignored in her haste.” I said, wisely.
The two guys chuckled and started chowing down on their bagel sandwiches after giving
nods of approval and thanks.
Kelly returned with a literal armful of stacks of papers and carefully put them down on the desk beside the terminal I sat in front of. She explained that I was to enter the numbers, even if they didn't have decimal points, and I was to add a decimal point and two zeros for those entries to keep activating the macro and it would move on to the next entry.
I nodded and she showed
how to log in with my own agent number, set my password, and I went to work. I wasn't surprised when she held a hand out to the two guys and one of them handed her the thermal bag. She opened it and let out a hungry sound and started eating a bagel while she observed .
I was pretty sure Kelly watched to ensure that my assessnt hadn't been a fluke and I quickly proved to her that it wasn't. The longer numbers slowed my entry per minute down slightly and she seed okay with that, because I burned through the top sheet before she finished chewing up her second bite of the bagel sandwich in her hand. She nodded and went back to her own terminal to continue working and she typed with one hand as she ate with the other.
I was done just over two hours later and typed in the end code to complete the assigned task. “Kelly, I'm done.”
“It's way too early to take a lunch break, Ben. Keep working until...”
“I'm not taking a break. I ant that I entered all of the numbers.” I interrupted her and all three of the workers stopped what they were doing, marked their places, and turned around to stare at . The surprised looks on their faces was a neat sight to see, because each of the stacks of papers Kelly had given
were now all upside down. I had flipped each page over after entering the numbers on them.
Kelly ca over to my terminal and used her own access code before she checked over the entry logs and then she started laughing. It wasn't a full blown belly laugh or anything, though. It was just a soft and constant laugh that lasted for about thirty seconds while she browsed the massive amount of data I had entered for her.
“Ben, if I was even a little bit amoral, I would be very tempted to kiss you right now.” Kelly said in a serious voice. “I'm going to call you every single ti we get another stack of data like this to enter into the computers.”
“I'm sure it wasn't that impressive.” I said and she huffed.
“You just did a full day's work in about two hours.” Kelly said. “That's only a quarter of the ti.”
“Okay, maybe it's a little impressive.” I admitted. That was a good compression rate.
“That's for all three of us.” Kelly said and motioned to the two n in her departnt. “We split large data packages like this between us, like we did during your assessnt, and it usually takes us all day to get through it.”
I wasn't sure what to say in response to that.
“So, yes. It's impressive. I can also see why HR didn't want to assign you specifically to , because you would be sitting around and not doing much for a good portion of the day.”
I nodded in agreent.
“What departnt were you going to visit next?” Kelly asked as she gathered the papers up again.
“There's almost two hours left before lunch, so I could probably visit R&D or the robotics lab.”
“R&D won't want you hanging around, unless you can help them with sothing.” Kelly said.
“Or give them another project to work on, which ans I'm probably going to the robotics lab.” I said and logged out from the terminal before I stood and retrieved my thermal bag.
Kelly walked
over to the door and paused as she looked at . “Thank you for choosing to co here first.”
“I rember soone saying they would beg to have
assigned to her departnt.” I said and smiled. “I didn't want to disappoint them, so as soon as I had so free ti, I ca right here.”
Kelly smiled back and hit a button to buzz the lock on the door and it clicked before she opened it for . “I'm glad you have your priorities straight.”
I chuckled and nodded to her as I left. I had been tempted to offer my cheek for her to kiss, then thought better of it. Her words about being amoral enough to do it, had given
pause. Not for the implication that she was stricter with her own moral choices; but, for the fact that my brain had co up with several scenarios for
to see just how far away from her normal morals I could take her.
As I passed through the secretarial pool, I waved and said goodbye to the won there and left the administration office. The elevator ride down to the floor with the robotics lab seed short and I stepped off to go to the lab. I didn't knock or anything, because that could bother soone in the middle of an experint or at the important part of a critical calculation.
I had to smile when I saw my improvised AT-ST being used as a paperweight on the departnt head's desk. “Good morning, sir.”
The man smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Parker. What brings you into my bailiwick?”
“I have spare ti this morning until lunch. Are there any projects that need an extra brain cruncher to assist?” I asked and the smile on his face grew.
“How are you at quadratic equations?”
“I've read two college level books on the subject and one was centered on advanced chanics.”
“Then you need to co with .” He said and stood to lead
out of his office and towards another area. “We're having a problem with the updated computer system on our latest VTOL, or vertical take off and landing Quinjet transport. For so reason, the rotary blades of the five turbojet engines used for the main lift are out of sync and Harris can't track the fault in either the coding or the physical engines themselves.”
“I can't promise to be anything except another pair of eyes to look for the problem, sir. The most experience I've had with birds like that is seeing a couple of the operation reports and the pretty pictures of the outside.”
The man chuckled and opened a door that had a chanics shop behind it and a partially stripped Quinjet. “Then you are about to get a crash course on the main systems we use.”
“Sir, please don't use terminology like that.” A man's voice said from inside part of the fuselage.
“Harris, I've brought soone to check your work.” The departnt head said and Harris sighed.
“Yes, sir. I understand.” Harris said and poked his head out through the hole where one of the engines was supposed to be. “You can either crawl in here and ruin your nice suit or I can just describe everything and you can see it for yourself later.”
I chuckled and took off my coat, flicked it to have it flare out and it floated over to land almost perfectly on the back of one of the chairs at the large workbench. “The agency reimburses suit purchases.”
Harris gave
a genuine smile and moved back to let
crawl in through the hole with him.
“You two have fun and let
know if you find anything.” The departnt head said with a laugh and walked away.
An hour and a half later, Harris and I were both covered in more grease and fluids than should have been possible, and we had worked out the problem. Or, I should say problems. The head of the departnt looked quite pleased to hear the explanation.
“It never occurred to
that it could be a combination of both.” Harris said and scratched the side of his head. “The computer was sending the wrong signal to the rotary control and the physical chanism on the third lift engine stuttered because it was wired backwards.”
“Wait, you don't an just on this Quinjet, do you? You an all of the third engines are cross-wired?” The departnt head asked, surprised.
“Yes, sir. Ben and I have already checked another bird remotely in the main deploynt hangar from... ahem... you know where.” Harris said and gave
a side-eyed glance.
I smirked at him. “If you an from the Helicarrier, I'm in the know of that particular not-so-secret secret.”
“Of course you are.” The departnt head said with a chuckle. “How can they all be wired wrong?”
“It was a manufacturing error in the transmitted plans to one particular contractor.” Harris said and handed his boss the dirty laptop with the tracked results on it. “Ben helped
navigate through the mainfra to get the order forms for that model of rotary engine and where it ca from.”
The departnt head looked at the information. “I can see that. Good work, both of you.”
“Thank you, sir.” We both said.
“Now, can you explain why they all ended up being the third engine in each Quinjet being produced?”
“Procedure, sir.” Harris said with a chuckle. “When the first bird was assembled, they marked down where each part number was assigned in the plans and kept it there.”
The departnt head blinked his eyes at us for several seconds and looked surprised. “Are you telling
that the damn build crews are sorting the identical engines and putting them in order and in the exact sa spot in each Quinjet that's produced?”
“Yes, sir.” Harris said and hit a key on the laptop to show him. “Their ticulousness is going to help imnsely in this case, because we only have to tear out the secondary hull to get at the third engine and not take the entire vehicle apart to look for the engine we need to fix.”
The man's mouth opened and closed several tis, then he closed it with a snap, nodded to us, and walked away with a determined look on his face.
“I think soone is getting a new asshole torn today for not triple checking the damaged engine's construction.” I whispered.
Harris barked a laugh and nodded. “You better go get cleaned up if you're going to spend lunch with a certain mysterious beauty, Ben. You can't keep won like her waiting.”
I nodded back and wiped my hands off on a rag that hung from his pocket, grabbed my suit coat, and walked away at a fast pace. I had an important lunch to get to and I wasn't going to disappoint her.
*
linda left her small office after she had spent a little extra ti freshening up her make-up and added a bit more of a wave to her hair. She was sure that she would catch Ben as he noticed the difference, even if he didn't ntion it. He seed to observe everything around him when he entered a room and she recognized the practice as one she used herself.
She couldn't help but notice how fluidly he moved and how his muscles looked under his stylish shirts. She knew he worked out between his training sessions and she was quite tempted to follow him and see where he did his workouts. Her curiosity about that distracted her just enough to keep her mind off of what she had gone through.
linda had always believed that taking any life would always cause a reciprocated karmic strike, even though she had committed a lot of similar acts previously. Taking the life of a child, even an extrely dangerous one, weighed heavily on her heart and her mind. Well, it had until recently.
She had dozens of people tell her over the last few months that she had done the right thing and even Director Fury himself had chid in. She didn't believe them, because they were just words that they used to try and ease her guilt over the horrendous act that she had perpetrated and to keep her as an agent. The words didn't really an anything to her and didn't affect her... until Ben told her what he did.
Ben admitted to her that he had committed four murders, as if it was nothing, during a supposedly normal conversation over lunch. It was a shock to her at the ti, especially because he hadn't... not once... said the sa words that everyone else had said to her. He didn't placate her, he didn't coddle her, and he didn't tell her that everything would be okay eventually.
It had been such a refreshing encounter that it had stuck in linda's mind like a catchy song that you couldn't stop playing in your thoughts. She had sought Ben out to see if he had just been grandstanding or had faked his nonchalance about everything, then they started talking about food and she ended up having a great ti shopping with him and shared her thoughts on cooking.
She had even gone ho with him to et his family and hadn't once had her mood ruined by stray thoughts about the day she almost quit SHIELD or about what she had done. Her mind was once again hers and it wasn't plagued with doubt, uncertainty, or the darkness that had threatened to consu her completely.
linda was broken out of her thoughts when a freshly showered figure dressed in a stylish suit approached her. “Should I ask you what you've been up to on your supposed morning off?”
Ben's eyes quickly road over her in a searching way, and not a lewd way, before he gave her a warm smile. “You know that old saying about getting into sothing by burying yourself into it up to your elbows?” He asked and she nodded. “I was into sothing all the way down to my ankles.”
linda couldn't stop her smile from both his comnt and that he had noticed her sight alterations to her appearance. “I know it wasn't with a woman, because the rumor mill has upgraded us from dating to being engaged.”
“We haven't even made an appearance at lunch and it's already at that stage?” Ben barked a laugh. “How many tis have we broken up?”
“Only once, then you smartened up and realized how great I am.” linda said, smugly.
Ben laughed and held an elbow out for her to take. “At least they got one thing right.”
linda blushed a little as she accepted his escort offer and slipped her arm through his. She knew what part he ant and the genuineness of the complint touched her deeply.
“Have you decided when are we having an epic fight to break off the engagent?” Ben asked her with amusent on his face as they entered the cafeteria.
“I'll let you know soti next year.” linda said, teasingly.
Ben laughed and a lot of people looked over at them as the talking and muttering beca loud. They chose their food delicately for health and a balanced diet before they went to a relatively empty table and sat down to enjoy so more conversation.
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