Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost) : Part 1 - Mitch
Title: Part 1 - Mitch
Series: Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost)
Pairing: Willow/Xander
Rating: R for posterity
Setting: Season 4, post-Pangs, Mitch's office
Word Count: 1,912 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: There are a lot of ways to spend a day. There aren't quite so many ways to get a second go at it.
Mitch observed the paperwork piled high on his desk-scratch that.
Mitch observed the completed paperwork piled high on his desk, a day’s worth of toils on this (im)mortal coil, his life’s purpose while he counted down the days to oblivion. Every day a hassle, every day a furious rush from start to finish.
It was all going in the incinerator.
Kairos nervously chewed his lip, standing in front of the desk, and when Mitch deigned to look his coworker in the eye, he hoped it was with something well away from absolute rage.
“A do over,” Mitch said, working the word in his mouth like peanut butter well past its expiration date. Sticky, pretty far from tasting good, and it stuck going down. “You’re-uh-you’re just yankin’ me, right?”
“Wish I were,” Kairos said, leaning against the wall-he had to make sure his tail was out of the way-and taking a sip from his coffee mug. The dude needed to slow it down with the coffee, if the stains in his fangs were any indication. “Just got the word from the boys upstairs. Some mess in Los Angeles with one of the world bigger players, I think. They weren’t big on details.”
“I-” Mitch aborted the thought, mostly because he wasn’t exactly the first on the list of need-to-know, and since Kairos had been in this business a lot longer than he had-and still wasn’t on the list-it might not do to complain about it. His eyes fell on the pile of paperwork again, and he ran a hand over a mostly-bald head. “The whole day?”
“Look at it this way,” Kairos said, “at least you’ll be able to breeze right through this time, right?”
“Oh, definitely,” Mitch said more sarcastically than he should have. “I mean, those guys like to drop a do over just for the hell of it. There’s no way things are gonna come out differently, m’I right?”
Kairos’ attempt at a grin diminished until his jaw was set, before he promptly took another sip of his coffee and set the empty mug down on the desk.
“I guess it’s easy to joke when I’m not the one doing the paperwork,” he said. “I just thought I’d give you a heads up. They’re pulling the plug in a few minutes, so I thought you might want to watch.”
Mitch sighed and shoved hard against the desk, rolling himself back and climbing irritably to his feet. His shirt stuck awkwardly to his chest in the heat of his dingy office, and the fan did little to combat the mugginess. Kairos stepped aside, letting him slip out first.
“Do we have any idea how much context we need to take care of?” he asked. Kairos chewed his lip for a moment, idly thumbing the horn that sprouted from his chin, before offering a shrug.
“We weren’t given much, I guess,” he said. “There’s the vampire that needed the thing done, and-”
“Hold up, vampire?” Mitch said, stopping in his tracks. His snort was far from respectful. “I didn’t know the bosses would bend over backwards for any old Joe. I oughta keep that in mind.”
“Careful,” Kairos warned, but he was grinning. “Don’t want to say the wrong thing in case they’re listening in on us little people.”
Mitch joined him in the derisive chuckle, letting the twelve foot tall mailman waddle by, passing them each a few envelopes, before moving down the hall to the rest of the cubicles.
“Anyway,” Kairos said, “there’s the vampire. He stays in the know, of course.”
“Good,” Mitch said. “I hate working with memories that go any further back than a few decades.”
“Then there’s the girl there. You know how these things go-love and all that. She’s the Slayer, too, so you’ll have to be extra careful.”
“Oh for f-you didn’t say it was that vampire,” Mitch said, rolling his eyes and wiping a hand down his sweaty face. Kairos shrugged as they turned the corner, where the rest of the office had turned out to watch the ball drop.
“And-let’s see, what else? The vampire’s friends in Los Angeles with him. Oh, and a couple of kids on the Hellmouth. Friends with the Slayer, apparently. The boss is probably worrying a little too much, but they’re close enough to the vampire that they might-I dunno. Notice something.” He finished counting off on his fingers, looking at Mitch again. “Pretty sure that’s it.”
“‘Pretty sure?’” Mitch repeated. “I’ll need more than pretty sure, K. A lotta good a do over does if everyone knows it’s happenin’. I don’t wanna go makin’ any parallel universes over a crap job of a do over.”
“You worry too much,” Kairos said. “The whole office is gonna take care of the thing. The bosses just wanted you to handle the lines of context. L.A. and the Hellmouth. Just two cities, right? It’s no big deal.”
“You say that now,” Mitch said. “Next thing you know, I miss somethin’ and some poor shmuck in New Guinea’s flippin’ out ‘cause he’s relivin’ the day. I really don’t need that on my record.”
Kairos just laughed, stepping around Drk’Nath the Devourer’s transdimensional leylines, patting said world-ender on the back and complimenting him on the job in the World without Shrimp.
Drk’Nath just nodded silently, dangerously, and Mitch had to fight not to roll his eyes.
Some of these guys bought into their own images just a little too much. So what if you couldn’t look at Drk’Nath for longer than a few seconds without your eyes melting from your skull? That didn’t mean he couldn’t crack a grin once in a while.
“How long?” Mitch asked, watching the swirling mass of time-concentrate as it prepared to change the world. Kairos shrugged, checking the watch that had been blackened by the flames that perpetually shrouded his body.
“Looks like-‘bout five minutes?”
“Ugh, they don’t give me enough heads up on these,” Mitch groaned. “I gotta head down to receiving and sign off on L.A.” He turned, and jogged off.
“And the Hellmouth!” Kairos called after him, the amusement in his voice pretty obvious, despite the fact that, when he talked, there was this terrifying echoing effect that had a tendency to make your blood run frigid.
Mitch waved a hand absently over his head as he made it to the elevator, shaking out his writing hand-cramped up after handling the paperwork for a twenty-four hour period that was about be erased. What a day to have on his rotation, right?
He stepped onto the elevator without waiting to make sure it was empty, prompting an annoyed roar from the minotaur inside. Rather than make an issue out of it, Mitch just backed off, grinning a little apologetically and waving a hand with a flourish. The snort he got in reply sounded enough like a thank you to keep him from saying something stupid or unprofessional or both.
The elevator shook when it hit the barrier to the dimensional pocket, just like it always did, and when he stepped off, he tried to ignore the way his breath froze solid when it was barely past his lips, letting tiny crystals of water vapor tumble to the ground. The very fabric of the universe crunched under his shoes, and he uncomfortably scuffed one hand against a chubby arm.
The woman behind the desk looked well at ease, if bored, and she barely made eye contact when he stopped in front of her.
“Signing off?” she asked lazily, tugging a clipboard from the corner of her desk and passing it to him unceremoniously. “Cutting it short, aren’t you?”
“Got a pen with that lip?” he asked before he could stop himself. She glared at him a little poisonously, but she passed him one nonetheless.
“Just check off the cities you want scrubbed,” she said, but he was already thumbing through the thick packet.
All the cities of the world, with little boxes next to them. He made his two notations and flipped back to the front page, signing at the bottom. He handed the clipboard back a little gingerly, holding it like an olive branch, but she just snatched it and lobbed it into the floating blue flame behind her chair.
“Thanks for a job well done,” she recited without meaning it, and he nodded stiffly and a little awkwardly before heading back to the elevator.
The little jolt didn’t bother him, so used to it he was, and neither had the woman’s attitude. Was it possible to feel nothing but contempt for a coworker whose name you didn’t even know? Sure, it wasn’t like she was going to be tearing his soul out by her mere proximity-that was Tony, in customer service-but she wasn’t much warmer than the room she’d been given as an office.
When he hopped off the elevator, he could hear some of the more annoying office workers counting down-starting with one hundred. It kind of killed the suspense, replacing it with annoyance more than anything else, but Mitch still tapped his thumb against his knuckle with each number. As much extra work as these do overs tended to bring up-particularly when he was on chronicling rotation-they were always pretty fun to watch.
And the bosses tended to buy their cooperation with donuts. Rubbing his gut, Mitch idly noted that it had been a long time since he’d turned down a donut.
“Cutting it close, aren’t you?” Kairos asked with a toothy grin when Mitch made it to the back of the crowd. They were pressed in tightly, the bastards, so all he could see of the spectacle was the upper half of the pulsating orb of cloudy light, flashing with lightning and images too awesome for mortal minds to comprehend.
“I don’t even wanna hear it from you,” Mitch groused, taking his eyes off the light. “First I get about a ten minute warnin’ on a complete temporal rewrite, in addition to the fact that the paperwork I slaved over for twenty-four hours is gonna have to go to the incinerator-oh, hold up, did you get someone to pick out the context forms? Not much of a do over if one of the connected people become the rulers of their own little universes.”
“Christy took care of it,” Kairos said, grinning over Mitch’s groan. Kairos had a thing for Christy.
“Twenty! Nineteen!”
“The vampire’s memories are already being processed, and they’ll be shipped to the vault,” Kairos went on. “Then the L.A. and Hellmouth memories should go through processing. They’ll go to the incinerator, of course.”
“Assuming you didn’t forget anyone,” Mitch said. “We don’t need another breakdown. That’s just more paperwork.”
“Hey, as long you checked off Sunnydale and Los Angeles, everything’s golden,” Kairos said with a grin.
“Sixteen! Fifteen!”
Mitch blinked.
“Uh, Sunnydale?”
Kairos glanced at him.
“Ten! Nine!”
“Sunnydale,” he repeated. “You know, the Hellmouth.”
“Cleveland,” Mitch insisted, “Cleveland’s got a Hellmouth.”
“Holy-Mitch, tell me you didn’t.”
Mitch just stared at him, his brain back in the frozen office, with the clipboard in his hand, as he watched himself check the cities off. Los Angeles.
And Cleveland.
He looked back at the ball, now an amalgamation of all the day’s events in every universe in existence.
“Two! One!”
He groaned.
“Son of a bitch.”
Where's he going with this one, I wonder?
That one ended up quirkier than I'd intended. Still, let's keep it to the comedy before we hop on the drama, shall we?
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
-Douglas Adams
Series: Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost)
Pairing: Willow/Xander
Rating: R for posterity
Setting: Season 4, post-Pangs, Mitch's office
Word Count: 1,912 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: There are a lot of ways to spend a day. There aren't quite so many ways to get a second go at it.
Mitch observed the paperwork piled high on his desk-scratch that.
Mitch observed the completed paperwork piled high on his desk, a day’s worth of toils on this (im)mortal coil, his life’s purpose while he counted down the days to oblivion. Every day a hassle, every day a furious rush from start to finish.
It was all going in the incinerator.
Kairos nervously chewed his lip, standing in front of the desk, and when Mitch deigned to look his coworker in the eye, he hoped it was with something well away from absolute rage.
“A do over,” Mitch said, working the word in his mouth like peanut butter well past its expiration date. Sticky, pretty far from tasting good, and it stuck going down. “You’re-uh-you’re just yankin’ me, right?”
“Wish I were,” Kairos said, leaning against the wall-he had to make sure his tail was out of the way-and taking a sip from his coffee mug. The dude needed to slow it down with the coffee, if the stains in his fangs were any indication. “Just got the word from the boys upstairs. Some mess in Los Angeles with one of the world bigger players, I think. They weren’t big on details.”
“I-” Mitch aborted the thought, mostly because he wasn’t exactly the first on the list of need-to-know, and since Kairos had been in this business a lot longer than he had-and still wasn’t on the list-it might not do to complain about it. His eyes fell on the pile of paperwork again, and he ran a hand over a mostly-bald head. “The whole day?”
“Look at it this way,” Kairos said, “at least you’ll be able to breeze right through this time, right?”
“Oh, definitely,” Mitch said more sarcastically than he should have. “I mean, those guys like to drop a do over just for the hell of it. There’s no way things are gonna come out differently, m’I right?”
Kairos’ attempt at a grin diminished until his jaw was set, before he promptly took another sip of his coffee and set the empty mug down on the desk.
“I guess it’s easy to joke when I’m not the one doing the paperwork,” he said. “I just thought I’d give you a heads up. They’re pulling the plug in a few minutes, so I thought you might want to watch.”
Mitch sighed and shoved hard against the desk, rolling himself back and climbing irritably to his feet. His shirt stuck awkwardly to his chest in the heat of his dingy office, and the fan did little to combat the mugginess. Kairos stepped aside, letting him slip out first.
“Do we have any idea how much context we need to take care of?” he asked. Kairos chewed his lip for a moment, idly thumbing the horn that sprouted from his chin, before offering a shrug.
“We weren’t given much, I guess,” he said. “There’s the vampire that needed the thing done, and-”
“Hold up, vampire?” Mitch said, stopping in his tracks. His snort was far from respectful. “I didn’t know the bosses would bend over backwards for any old Joe. I oughta keep that in mind.”
“Careful,” Kairos warned, but he was grinning. “Don’t want to say the wrong thing in case they’re listening in on us little people.”
Mitch joined him in the derisive chuckle, letting the twelve foot tall mailman waddle by, passing them each a few envelopes, before moving down the hall to the rest of the cubicles.
“Anyway,” Kairos said, “there’s the vampire. He stays in the know, of course.”
“Good,” Mitch said. “I hate working with memories that go any further back than a few decades.”
“Then there’s the girl there. You know how these things go-love and all that. She’s the Slayer, too, so you’ll have to be extra careful.”
“Oh for f-you didn’t say it was that vampire,” Mitch said, rolling his eyes and wiping a hand down his sweaty face. Kairos shrugged as they turned the corner, where the rest of the office had turned out to watch the ball drop.
“And-let’s see, what else? The vampire’s friends in Los Angeles with him. Oh, and a couple of kids on the Hellmouth. Friends with the Slayer, apparently. The boss is probably worrying a little too much, but they’re close enough to the vampire that they might-I dunno. Notice something.” He finished counting off on his fingers, looking at Mitch again. “Pretty sure that’s it.”
“‘Pretty sure?’” Mitch repeated. “I’ll need more than pretty sure, K. A lotta good a do over does if everyone knows it’s happenin’. I don’t wanna go makin’ any parallel universes over a crap job of a do over.”
“You worry too much,” Kairos said. “The whole office is gonna take care of the thing. The bosses just wanted you to handle the lines of context. L.A. and the Hellmouth. Just two cities, right? It’s no big deal.”
“You say that now,” Mitch said. “Next thing you know, I miss somethin’ and some poor shmuck in New Guinea’s flippin’ out ‘cause he’s relivin’ the day. I really don’t need that on my record.”
Kairos just laughed, stepping around Drk’Nath the Devourer’s transdimensional leylines, patting said world-ender on the back and complimenting him on the job in the World without Shrimp.
Drk’Nath just nodded silently, dangerously, and Mitch had to fight not to roll his eyes.
Some of these guys bought into their own images just a little too much. So what if you couldn’t look at Drk’Nath for longer than a few seconds without your eyes melting from your skull? That didn’t mean he couldn’t crack a grin once in a while.
“How long?” Mitch asked, watching the swirling mass of time-concentrate as it prepared to change the world. Kairos shrugged, checking the watch that had been blackened by the flames that perpetually shrouded his body.
“Looks like-‘bout five minutes?”
“Ugh, they don’t give me enough heads up on these,” Mitch groaned. “I gotta head down to receiving and sign off on L.A.” He turned, and jogged off.
“And the Hellmouth!” Kairos called after him, the amusement in his voice pretty obvious, despite the fact that, when he talked, there was this terrifying echoing effect that had a tendency to make your blood run frigid.
Mitch waved a hand absently over his head as he made it to the elevator, shaking out his writing hand-cramped up after handling the paperwork for a twenty-four hour period that was about be erased. What a day to have on his rotation, right?
He stepped onto the elevator without waiting to make sure it was empty, prompting an annoyed roar from the minotaur inside. Rather than make an issue out of it, Mitch just backed off, grinning a little apologetically and waving a hand with a flourish. The snort he got in reply sounded enough like a thank you to keep him from saying something stupid or unprofessional or both.
The elevator shook when it hit the barrier to the dimensional pocket, just like it always did, and when he stepped off, he tried to ignore the way his breath froze solid when it was barely past his lips, letting tiny crystals of water vapor tumble to the ground. The very fabric of the universe crunched under his shoes, and he uncomfortably scuffed one hand against a chubby arm.
The woman behind the desk looked well at ease, if bored, and she barely made eye contact when he stopped in front of her.
“Signing off?” she asked lazily, tugging a clipboard from the corner of her desk and passing it to him unceremoniously. “Cutting it short, aren’t you?”
“Got a pen with that lip?” he asked before he could stop himself. She glared at him a little poisonously, but she passed him one nonetheless.
“Just check off the cities you want scrubbed,” she said, but he was already thumbing through the thick packet.
All the cities of the world, with little boxes next to them. He made his two notations and flipped back to the front page, signing at the bottom. He handed the clipboard back a little gingerly, holding it like an olive branch, but she just snatched it and lobbed it into the floating blue flame behind her chair.
“Thanks for a job well done,” she recited without meaning it, and he nodded stiffly and a little awkwardly before heading back to the elevator.
The little jolt didn’t bother him, so used to it he was, and neither had the woman’s attitude. Was it possible to feel nothing but contempt for a coworker whose name you didn’t even know? Sure, it wasn’t like she was going to be tearing his soul out by her mere proximity-that was Tony, in customer service-but she wasn’t much warmer than the room she’d been given as an office.
When he hopped off the elevator, he could hear some of the more annoying office workers counting down-starting with one hundred. It kind of killed the suspense, replacing it with annoyance more than anything else, but Mitch still tapped his thumb against his knuckle with each number. As much extra work as these do overs tended to bring up-particularly when he was on chronicling rotation-they were always pretty fun to watch.
And the bosses tended to buy their cooperation with donuts. Rubbing his gut, Mitch idly noted that it had been a long time since he’d turned down a donut.
“Cutting it close, aren’t you?” Kairos asked with a toothy grin when Mitch made it to the back of the crowd. They were pressed in tightly, the bastards, so all he could see of the spectacle was the upper half of the pulsating orb of cloudy light, flashing with lightning and images too awesome for mortal minds to comprehend.
“I don’t even wanna hear it from you,” Mitch groused, taking his eyes off the light. “First I get about a ten minute warnin’ on a complete temporal rewrite, in addition to the fact that the paperwork I slaved over for twenty-four hours is gonna have to go to the incinerator-oh, hold up, did you get someone to pick out the context forms? Not much of a do over if one of the connected people become the rulers of their own little universes.”
“Christy took care of it,” Kairos said, grinning over Mitch’s groan. Kairos had a thing for Christy.
“Twenty! Nineteen!”
“The vampire’s memories are already being processed, and they’ll be shipped to the vault,” Kairos went on. “Then the L.A. and Hellmouth memories should go through processing. They’ll go to the incinerator, of course.”
“Assuming you didn’t forget anyone,” Mitch said. “We don’t need another breakdown. That’s just more paperwork.”
“Hey, as long you checked off Sunnydale and Los Angeles, everything’s golden,” Kairos said with a grin.
“Sixteen! Fifteen!”
Mitch blinked.
“Uh, Sunnydale?”
Kairos glanced at him.
“Ten! Nine!”
“Sunnydale,” he repeated. “You know, the Hellmouth.”
“Cleveland,” Mitch insisted, “Cleveland’s got a Hellmouth.”
“Holy-Mitch, tell me you didn’t.”
Mitch just stared at him, his brain back in the frozen office, with the clipboard in his hand, as he watched himself check the cities off. Los Angeles.
And Cleveland.
He looked back at the ball, now an amalgamation of all the day’s events in every universe in existence.
“Two! One!”
He groaned.
“Son of a bitch.”
Where's he going with this one, I wonder?
That one ended up quirkier than I'd intended. Still, let's keep it to the comedy before we hop on the drama, shall we?
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
-Douglas Adams