Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost) : Part 4 - Mitch
Title: Part 4 - Mitch
Series: Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost)
Pairing: Willow/Xander
Rating: R for sex
Setting: Season 4, post-Pangs, Mitch's office
Word Count: 2,337 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.
“No, no, no, no, no!”
Mitch slams into the shutting elevator doors, ice bitch’s smug look the last thing he sees before the stars come out. Okay, with the ouch, but he’s got more important things to worry about than whether or not a sort of demon person thing can get a concussion.
Rotational. Concussions are rotational force, not just blunt trauma. Although, honestly? He feels a little blunt right now.
Might be the ringing in his ears.
“Dude!” Kairos says, rounding the corner behind him, talons digging gouges in the cheap tile. “Dude, tell me you didn’t!”
“Yeah, no, I just brained myself against the elevator doors here ‘cause I didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” Mitch growls, jabbing at the button and idly wondering if he’d get fired for setting ice bitch’s office ablaze. Not like it’s warm enough down there to hold a flame, anyway, right?
“Cleveland!?” Kairos presses, like he hasn’t just witnessed the birth of several parallel universes a couple of minutes ago. “Seriously? Cleveland?”
“You said ‘the Hellmouth!’” Mitch literally shouts back, drawing awkward looks from his coworkers. The Nether Slug that makes the really great coffee gives him an uncomfortable look before sliding away from the doors, apparently content to take the stairs. “You said ‘Los Angeles and the Hellmouth’! Between Cleveland and Nipple of California, California, which one would you’a picked!?”
“The one that actually had a Slayer in it, Mitch!” Kairos shouts back. “What, you thought the girl was doing her tour of duty in Cally and palling it up in Ohio!?”
“I don’t keep track of this crap, K, you know that!” Mitch growls, jabbing at the button until the digital bing is drowned out by his whimper of discomfort when his thumb jams. He slides on without comment, however, making as much room for Kairos as possible so as to avoid the never-quenching flames that shroud his body.
Kairos just scoffs at him.
“That’s like saying you don’t know who pitches for the Red Sox,” he says.
“But I don’t know who pitches for the Red Sox!” Mitch counters, slapping the button selection to take him to the Fate and Related Affairs department. “Remember? Day in, day out, processin’ days in and days out? I don’t have time to remember every little thing!”
Kairos groans and unfolds his arms, covering his coal-black head with large hands. The tail that he tends to swish when bored or upset is deathly still, but Mitch figures it’s one of those little moments of consideration that Kairos tends to get around people that are, in fact, flammable.
Mitch groans as his arm hairs crinkle under the heat. Enclosed elevator and fiery harbinger of the flow of time? Not a good combo, really.
“You think you could-” Bing. “-never mind.”
Mitch slides off the elevator, Kairos’ flames licking at his arm as he goes, only to find himself upon a scene of madness. Kairos’ heavily thumping footsteps draw to an abrupt halt behind him, and the two stare across a floor that has been overtaken by chaos.
Everywhere he looks, demons from the etcetera sections of books on demonology scramble to make some sense of the situation. Papers billow across the room, blown by the fuming elemental trying to beat some obedience into the finicky copy machine this floor is infamous for. Supervisors and managers alike try to calm their charges, sometimes with words and sometimes with the exploding snap of a spell or demonic trait, rendering the walls gray with ash.
It’s like the first day back from a holiday, really.
“Dude, let’s just go,” Kairos whispers, standing closer than necessary. Mitch frowns at the heat and takes a half step away, glancing at his coworker. “No one knows it was you, right? So let’s just head back to the office and hide behind a stack of paperwork.”
“Like this can’t be traced!?” Mitch asks incredulously. In all honesty, no idea sounds better to him than to flee to his fortress of red tape, building a safety wall of stamps and A4 forms and staplers. People don’t bother him when he’s busy with paperwork unless they’re Kairos, and even then, he at least gets a semi-sincere query about the state of his business.
But no. You don’t get out of accidentally creating alternate timelines because of a combination of ignorance and good old fashioned incompetence with a slap on the wrist and a warning. This is bigger than losing a gold star on your name at the end of the month, and it’s even bigger than having to try and find a new job in a fairly restrictive market.
He’s looking at Grade A dismemberment if he’s lucky. Unless he owns up to it.
And fixes it, most likely.
“Sorry, K,” Mitch says, shouldering past a chaos demon-you’d think a chaos demon would thrive on chaos, not stand there on the spot panicking-and just barely manages not to slip in the slime trail it leaves behind and crack his skull. Kairos follows shortly afterward.
It really would be a good idea to let Kairos lead the way, since most people have a habit of making room for the walking ball of demonic fire, whether they are themselves demons or not.
Kairos stays behind him. Mitch can’t color himself surprised.
There’s a line outside the boss’s door, piled long and, in some places, wide, and Mitch thinks it a miracle that he doesn’t explode from frustration just then. Instead, he holds his breath and waits with Kairos close behind, and when the door to the office opens and one of the peons bolts out, trailing ashes, Mitch cuts in front of the next person in line.
Kairos slams the door behind them.
Unable to keep from grinning at the smattering of insults that are actually leaving black symbols crawling in the glass-it’s never a good idea to cut in front of a demon, after all-he turns his attention to the form behind the desk.
He stops grinning. Averts his eyes, hopes that they’re just watering and not bleeding, and waits to be spoken to.
“Mitch. Kairos.” There’s a laugh, and it chills Mitch to the bone. “You’re not in my department.” There’s a beat of silence, and then another laugh. “What can I do ya for?”
Why do powers have to be so damned inconsistent like this? Drk’Nath the Devourer could melt your eyes out of their sockets just by looking at you. And he also steals lunches from the refrigerator.
“Well, uh, Mr. Manu,” Mitch begins, tugging at the suddenly too tight collar of his shirt. “The thing-ha-hey, so. Um. This whole thing that went down today? You know, the thing?”
“The temporal reassertion, yes,” Manu says, his voice tickling the edges of Mitch’s consciousness like a spider legging at a crack in the floor, knowing that a clutch of helpless flies are trapped just on the other side. “I’ve heard nothing but grief about it over the past ten minutes. I assume you have a problem, as well?”
Kairos nudges him from the side, and Mitch manages not to yelp in pain at the fiery digit burning at his ribs. Instead, he cuts as dirty a look as he can manage in his coworker’s direction, blatantly ignoring the pleading way Kairos is shaking his head.
“Not, uh, personally, we don’t,” Mitch goes on. “Just, uh. You know. I was put on context duty for it. Not that you didn’t know that-I know you probably knew that. I don’t think you didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s good,” Manu says, sounding obviously confused. “‘Cause that’d mean you’re making light of my omnipotent knowledge, and you know how that usually turns out!” He ends it with a laugh, like they’re sharing a joke. Like Manu can’t just trace Mitch’s life back like a thread hanging from the loose sweater of All That Is, and just hack it right off.
“Good,” Mitch says. “Yeah. Good. You and your-” He swallows. “-omnipotence.”
“So, seriously, boys. What d’you-”
“Mitch did it!” Kairos suddenly belts, and Mitch is so mad that he doesn’t know whether to cower in fear of Manu or spin around and tackle his office buddy. Neither course is going to end well for him, the former because of the whole omnipotence thing and the latter because of the whole on fire thing. He settles for discreetly flipping Kairos off behind his back, getting only a gleaming red wink in return.
“Ah, did what, Mr. Kairos?” Manu asks. Before Kairos can speak, Mitch clears his throat loudly.
“The, uh, incident,” he says. “With the thing. The do-over. I-” Pick your words carefully. “-may have screwed up.”
Carefully? No, picking your words like a complete and utter dumbass probably works well, too.
“May have?” Manu asks. “Oh, you’re referring to the fact that you tried wiping the lines of context in a city that has no context, rather than the lines of context in a city that has multiple lines of context. Yes, if you look at it that way?” Mitch feels the room get about twenty degrees colder. “You may have screwed up.”
“Kairos helped!” Mitch says quickly, perfectly willing to hop in the canoe renowned for passengers abandoning one another without paddles. “I mean, he helped by not helping! He didn’t say which city it was supposed to be in, and he told me there were only two people I needed to worry about anyway! And-”
“Mitch?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know who pitches for the Red Sox?”
Mitch looks up but immediately regrets it, finding the floor again. Manu chuckles behind the desk, shuffling papers and pushing the chair back a little. Despite the chill, icy sweat glides down Mitch’s back. He figures that, if Kairos were even capable of producing body moisture, he’d be sweating, too.
“Personally,” Manu continues, “I don’t think it’s so much that one of you screwed as it is that you’re both complete morons. But, you know, that may not be fixable.”
Mitch has a rare moment of intelligence, wherein he chooses not to argue with that statement.
“But the situation is fixable. Do you see all those people out there?”
Mitch doesn’t have to look-he certainly saw all the office workers while cutting in line to get in. He half expects a barrage of hexes as soon as Manu’s done hexing him, but it’ll be worth it if he can own up to what he did and avoid getting banished to a pit of eternal torment.
Still, he looks, and the chaos outside is even worse than it was before.
“That’s not your typical we just reversed time case of troubles,” Manu says. “I mean, aside from your odd person here or there that’s just sensitive to these kinds of things, and aside from those of them that are the leaders of apocalypse cults, and aside from the context lines that you were supposed to fix that, instead, you did not fix, there’s still the parallel dimension problem. Oh, and the army of demons in Sunnydale that you accidentally raised but-” Manu seems to ponder their options for a moment. “-I think that one can wait.”
The room is quiet for a moment, and Mitch knows that Kairos is wanting him to be the one to ask about the army. Merging parallel dimensions isn’t all that difficult, depending on who’s at the center of each universe, but dealing with an army of demons? An army that’s probably going to show up in each separate timeline?
“Um,” Kairos finally ventures, “army?”
“Oh, you know,” Manu says. “Slumbering demonic army camped on the Hellmouth, inadvertent fumbling of temporal reassertion sets them off. Very quick, more paperwork than anything else. Plus, all right, maybe the death of every single human being in the Western United States.”
Manu pauses, and if Mitch could imagine Manu’s form, he would imagine him pursing his lips and looking at the ceiling.
“How many humans are there in the Western United States?” he asks. “You know what? Doesn’t matter. Look, if you two did this, then I need you two on maintenance. Time and fate and rules and all that. Maybe-I dunno. Some of that context went to friends of the Slayer, right?”
“Er,” Mitch aborts glancing at Kairos. All he gets for his trouble was a shrug. “We think so?”
“That’s good,” Manu says. “Maybe get them to help. A couple of humans can slow down an army of darkness right?”
“Uh-”
“Fantastic. You get them on that so you two can sort out the rest of this mess. Slap everything back together, I guess. At least a few timelines will need to stay relatively intact to merge back with that vampire’s universe. So, get on that, yeah?”
Mitch finally lifts his eyes long enough to stare at Manu for all of a second, averting them again once the strain becomes too much.
“Uh, sure,” he says. “Yes sir. We’ll get right on that.” He doesn’t thank Manu for letting them off so easy, because there’s a good chance that Manu has no idea that he’s letting them off so easy. Which might result in him letting them off less easy.
“Excellent,” Manu says. “I trust you’ll handle that.” He shuffles more papers and waves his hand-it’s all Mitch can do not to be knocked over by the gust of wind it creates. “Oh, and, you know. If you fail, it’s off to the realm of endless torture with you!” He giggles like the overly energetic boss he is, chuckling like it’s little more than a joke. “Oh, we like to have fun up here.”
Mitch is quiet, glancing at Kairos and jerking his head toward the door. Together, the two of them start to leave the office before Manu cheerfully speaks up again.
“Don’t let the temporal nexus hit you on the way out!”
Oh, Mitch. It may be time for a career change.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.
-Delmore Schwartz
Series: Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost)
Pairing: Willow/Xander
Rating: R for sex
Setting: Season 4, post-Pangs, Mitch's office
Word Count: 2,337 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.
“No, no, no, no, no!”
Mitch slams into the shutting elevator doors, ice bitch’s smug look the last thing he sees before the stars come out. Okay, with the ouch, but he’s got more important things to worry about than whether or not a sort of demon person thing can get a concussion.
Rotational. Concussions are rotational force, not just blunt trauma. Although, honestly? He feels a little blunt right now.
Might be the ringing in his ears.
“Dude!” Kairos says, rounding the corner behind him, talons digging gouges in the cheap tile. “Dude, tell me you didn’t!”
“Yeah, no, I just brained myself against the elevator doors here ‘cause I didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” Mitch growls, jabbing at the button and idly wondering if he’d get fired for setting ice bitch’s office ablaze. Not like it’s warm enough down there to hold a flame, anyway, right?
“Cleveland!?” Kairos presses, like he hasn’t just witnessed the birth of several parallel universes a couple of minutes ago. “Seriously? Cleveland?”
“You said ‘the Hellmouth!’” Mitch literally shouts back, drawing awkward looks from his coworkers. The Nether Slug that makes the really great coffee gives him an uncomfortable look before sliding away from the doors, apparently content to take the stairs. “You said ‘Los Angeles and the Hellmouth’! Between Cleveland and Nipple of California, California, which one would you’a picked!?”
“The one that actually had a Slayer in it, Mitch!” Kairos shouts back. “What, you thought the girl was doing her tour of duty in Cally and palling it up in Ohio!?”
“I don’t keep track of this crap, K, you know that!” Mitch growls, jabbing at the button until the digital bing is drowned out by his whimper of discomfort when his thumb jams. He slides on without comment, however, making as much room for Kairos as possible so as to avoid the never-quenching flames that shroud his body.
Kairos just scoffs at him.
“That’s like saying you don’t know who pitches for the Red Sox,” he says.
“But I don’t know who pitches for the Red Sox!” Mitch counters, slapping the button selection to take him to the Fate and Related Affairs department. “Remember? Day in, day out, processin’ days in and days out? I don’t have time to remember every little thing!”
Kairos groans and unfolds his arms, covering his coal-black head with large hands. The tail that he tends to swish when bored or upset is deathly still, but Mitch figures it’s one of those little moments of consideration that Kairos tends to get around people that are, in fact, flammable.
Mitch groans as his arm hairs crinkle under the heat. Enclosed elevator and fiery harbinger of the flow of time? Not a good combo, really.
“You think you could-” Bing. “-never mind.”
Mitch slides off the elevator, Kairos’ flames licking at his arm as he goes, only to find himself upon a scene of madness. Kairos’ heavily thumping footsteps draw to an abrupt halt behind him, and the two stare across a floor that has been overtaken by chaos.
Everywhere he looks, demons from the etcetera sections of books on demonology scramble to make some sense of the situation. Papers billow across the room, blown by the fuming elemental trying to beat some obedience into the finicky copy machine this floor is infamous for. Supervisors and managers alike try to calm their charges, sometimes with words and sometimes with the exploding snap of a spell or demonic trait, rendering the walls gray with ash.
It’s like the first day back from a holiday, really.
“Dude, let’s just go,” Kairos whispers, standing closer than necessary. Mitch frowns at the heat and takes a half step away, glancing at his coworker. “No one knows it was you, right? So let’s just head back to the office and hide behind a stack of paperwork.”
“Like this can’t be traced!?” Mitch asks incredulously. In all honesty, no idea sounds better to him than to flee to his fortress of red tape, building a safety wall of stamps and A4 forms and staplers. People don’t bother him when he’s busy with paperwork unless they’re Kairos, and even then, he at least gets a semi-sincere query about the state of his business.
But no. You don’t get out of accidentally creating alternate timelines because of a combination of ignorance and good old fashioned incompetence with a slap on the wrist and a warning. This is bigger than losing a gold star on your name at the end of the month, and it’s even bigger than having to try and find a new job in a fairly restrictive market.
He’s looking at Grade A dismemberment if he’s lucky. Unless he owns up to it.
And fixes it, most likely.
“Sorry, K,” Mitch says, shouldering past a chaos demon-you’d think a chaos demon would thrive on chaos, not stand there on the spot panicking-and just barely manages not to slip in the slime trail it leaves behind and crack his skull. Kairos follows shortly afterward.
It really would be a good idea to let Kairos lead the way, since most people have a habit of making room for the walking ball of demonic fire, whether they are themselves demons or not.
Kairos stays behind him. Mitch can’t color himself surprised.
There’s a line outside the boss’s door, piled long and, in some places, wide, and Mitch thinks it a miracle that he doesn’t explode from frustration just then. Instead, he holds his breath and waits with Kairos close behind, and when the door to the office opens and one of the peons bolts out, trailing ashes, Mitch cuts in front of the next person in line.
Kairos slams the door behind them.
Unable to keep from grinning at the smattering of insults that are actually leaving black symbols crawling in the glass-it’s never a good idea to cut in front of a demon, after all-he turns his attention to the form behind the desk.
He stops grinning. Averts his eyes, hopes that they’re just watering and not bleeding, and waits to be spoken to.
“Mitch. Kairos.” There’s a laugh, and it chills Mitch to the bone. “You’re not in my department.” There’s a beat of silence, and then another laugh. “What can I do ya for?”
Why do powers have to be so damned inconsistent like this? Drk’Nath the Devourer could melt your eyes out of their sockets just by looking at you. And he also steals lunches from the refrigerator.
“Well, uh, Mr. Manu,” Mitch begins, tugging at the suddenly too tight collar of his shirt. “The thing-ha-hey, so. Um. This whole thing that went down today? You know, the thing?”
“The temporal reassertion, yes,” Manu says, his voice tickling the edges of Mitch’s consciousness like a spider legging at a crack in the floor, knowing that a clutch of helpless flies are trapped just on the other side. “I’ve heard nothing but grief about it over the past ten minutes. I assume you have a problem, as well?”
Kairos nudges him from the side, and Mitch manages not to yelp in pain at the fiery digit burning at his ribs. Instead, he cuts as dirty a look as he can manage in his coworker’s direction, blatantly ignoring the pleading way Kairos is shaking his head.
“Not, uh, personally, we don’t,” Mitch goes on. “Just, uh. You know. I was put on context duty for it. Not that you didn’t know that-I know you probably knew that. I don’t think you didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s good,” Manu says, sounding obviously confused. “‘Cause that’d mean you’re making light of my omnipotent knowledge, and you know how that usually turns out!” He ends it with a laugh, like they’re sharing a joke. Like Manu can’t just trace Mitch’s life back like a thread hanging from the loose sweater of All That Is, and just hack it right off.
“Good,” Mitch says. “Yeah. Good. You and your-” He swallows. “-omnipotence.”
“So, seriously, boys. What d’you-”
“Mitch did it!” Kairos suddenly belts, and Mitch is so mad that he doesn’t know whether to cower in fear of Manu or spin around and tackle his office buddy. Neither course is going to end well for him, the former because of the whole omnipotence thing and the latter because of the whole on fire thing. He settles for discreetly flipping Kairos off behind his back, getting only a gleaming red wink in return.
“Ah, did what, Mr. Kairos?” Manu asks. Before Kairos can speak, Mitch clears his throat loudly.
“The, uh, incident,” he says. “With the thing. The do-over. I-” Pick your words carefully. “-may have screwed up.”
Carefully? No, picking your words like a complete and utter dumbass probably works well, too.
“May have?” Manu asks. “Oh, you’re referring to the fact that you tried wiping the lines of context in a city that has no context, rather than the lines of context in a city that has multiple lines of context. Yes, if you look at it that way?” Mitch feels the room get about twenty degrees colder. “You may have screwed up.”
“Kairos helped!” Mitch says quickly, perfectly willing to hop in the canoe renowned for passengers abandoning one another without paddles. “I mean, he helped by not helping! He didn’t say which city it was supposed to be in, and he told me there were only two people I needed to worry about anyway! And-”
“Mitch?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know who pitches for the Red Sox?”
Mitch looks up but immediately regrets it, finding the floor again. Manu chuckles behind the desk, shuffling papers and pushing the chair back a little. Despite the chill, icy sweat glides down Mitch’s back. He figures that, if Kairos were even capable of producing body moisture, he’d be sweating, too.
“Personally,” Manu continues, “I don’t think it’s so much that one of you screwed as it is that you’re both complete morons. But, you know, that may not be fixable.”
Mitch has a rare moment of intelligence, wherein he chooses not to argue with that statement.
“But the situation is fixable. Do you see all those people out there?”
Mitch doesn’t have to look-he certainly saw all the office workers while cutting in line to get in. He half expects a barrage of hexes as soon as Manu’s done hexing him, but it’ll be worth it if he can own up to what he did and avoid getting banished to a pit of eternal torment.
Still, he looks, and the chaos outside is even worse than it was before.
“That’s not your typical we just reversed time case of troubles,” Manu says. “I mean, aside from your odd person here or there that’s just sensitive to these kinds of things, and aside from those of them that are the leaders of apocalypse cults, and aside from the context lines that you were supposed to fix that, instead, you did not fix, there’s still the parallel dimension problem. Oh, and the army of demons in Sunnydale that you accidentally raised but-” Manu seems to ponder their options for a moment. “-I think that one can wait.”
The room is quiet for a moment, and Mitch knows that Kairos is wanting him to be the one to ask about the army. Merging parallel dimensions isn’t all that difficult, depending on who’s at the center of each universe, but dealing with an army of demons? An army that’s probably going to show up in each separate timeline?
“Um,” Kairos finally ventures, “army?”
“Oh, you know,” Manu says. “Slumbering demonic army camped on the Hellmouth, inadvertent fumbling of temporal reassertion sets them off. Very quick, more paperwork than anything else. Plus, all right, maybe the death of every single human being in the Western United States.”
Manu pauses, and if Mitch could imagine Manu’s form, he would imagine him pursing his lips and looking at the ceiling.
“How many humans are there in the Western United States?” he asks. “You know what? Doesn’t matter. Look, if you two did this, then I need you two on maintenance. Time and fate and rules and all that. Maybe-I dunno. Some of that context went to friends of the Slayer, right?”
“Er,” Mitch aborts glancing at Kairos. All he gets for his trouble was a shrug. “We think so?”
“That’s good,” Manu says. “Maybe get them to help. A couple of humans can slow down an army of darkness right?”
“Uh-”
“Fantastic. You get them on that so you two can sort out the rest of this mess. Slap everything back together, I guess. At least a few timelines will need to stay relatively intact to merge back with that vampire’s universe. So, get on that, yeah?”
Mitch finally lifts his eyes long enough to stare at Manu for all of a second, averting them again once the strain becomes too much.
“Uh, sure,” he says. “Yes sir. We’ll get right on that.” He doesn’t thank Manu for letting them off so easy, because there’s a good chance that Manu has no idea that he’s letting them off so easy. Which might result in him letting them off less easy.
“Excellent,” Manu says. “I trust you’ll handle that.” He shuffles more papers and waves his hand-it’s all Mitch can do not to be knocked over by the gust of wind it creates. “Oh, and, you know. If you fail, it’s off to the realm of endless torture with you!” He giggles like the overly energetic boss he is, chuckling like it’s little more than a joke. “Oh, we like to have fun up here.”
Mitch is quiet, glancing at Kairos and jerking his head toward the door. Together, the two of them start to leave the office before Manu cheerfully speaks up again.
“Don’t let the temporal nexus hit you on the way out!”
Oh, Mitch. It may be time for a career change.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.
-Delmore Schwartz