You got me feeling like I was too mean

She released a small sarcastic laugh. Murphy's law described it perfectly. Astrid was, by all means, a workaholic, and her one weak attempt at taking her mind off it ended up with her mind being unable to focus on anything else. “This is the type of fuck-up that could be handled without me, if the guy working today hadn’t payed his way through college and got the job through daddy’s connections.” She understood the irony of saying that when she had been born into wealth, but somehow it felt different (and annoying) when people fully took advantage of their privilege that way. “Honestly, if they just fired him, I’m sure I would have a lot more free time. Even if they didn’t hire anyone else.” She looked at Lara. She hadn’t really thought that she would enjoy the silliness of the town, having the image of a no-bullshit woman. Astrid didn’t really know all that much about the other yet, when she thought about it. “It really is fun, right? I was a big sci-fi nerd when I was little, it’s fascinating to walk around a town dedicated to it.”

"I used to travel a little too, but I don’t do it all that much anymore. Most of the time I just wandered a little while going back and forth between England and France, so you probably know more of Europe than me." She started stretching her arms, enjoying the pause in her daily run. Astrid missed Europe, sure, and it would always feel like home, but whenever she remembered it, the memory that overtook her was always the coldness of her parents and the exclusion she felt in boarding school. “Oh, that’s cool. I wanted to go to Harvard at first, but I ended up choosing Stanford.” She chuckled. “It’s not too late to move. Do you have a lot of roots here? You can always get a new job.” A sense of relief overcame her as she realized the other didn’t know her at all. “Yeah, we probably just bumped somewhere. Where do you work?”

Astrid turned her eyes to the person beside her, then released a deep sigh. How to even explain the situation on a simple way? Someone had just doubled the work she’d had to do the next day for no reason, and although it wasn’t such an emergency as to justify her running back to the office, she was still exasperated. “They didn’t touch my physical stuff, they touched my work.” She her eyes back to the floor in front of her. “Which is honestly worse, I can buy new stuff quicker than I can rewrite lines of code.” Honestly, she would prefer to have a coworker who kept stealing her stuff but could do their job well. She was tired of working with idiot. “Also I can’t yell at my coworkers. I’m pretty sure that would get me fired.”

Astrid stopped to think for a bit. Being a writer wasn’t one of her abilities, in fact she had payed a lot of money for other people to edit her papers in college because of that very reason. She really cared about Suraj and their writing, though, and thought long and hard about their problem. “Well, people emphasize important sentences with names sometimes.” She started, her eyes lost at the wall behind Suraj as she tried to think. “Like, ‘but do you really think that, Suraj?’ People do that sometimes.”

It was a little weird, hanging out with someone so close to her old life, a shadow of everything she used to be (and should have been, if her parents had their way). Ender was around the age of her daughter, which was enough to knock down most of her defensive system, even if she still sometimes wondered if the girl ever mentioned Astrid to her parents. She hoped the girl didn’t, though it’d always be hard to trust someone from her mother’s family. She wondered what the girl even knew about what happened between her and their family, her being barely a teenager when everything happened. Maybe she didn’t even know that she had cut ties with everyone. She’d never ask. Instead, she just let out loud sigh. “Work has a way of spoiling most of my days.” Astrid fully understanding her hypocrisy. She loved working more than she liked most people and she certainly loved it more than all the half-baked hobbies she’d attempted throughout her life. “Don’t you like horror stuff? I’m pretty sure sci-fi and horror are neighbour genres. Didn’t sci-fi start with Frankenstein?” She remarked, smiling as work and her past evading her mind for a little bit.

Astrid looked at the man, one of her eyebrows raised as she smiled absentmindedly, like her mind was far away. It really was. She let out a deep sigh. “Yeah, well, sometimes it does feel like whenever I’m not at work, someone decided to make me think about work.” She chuckled, knowing fully that it would be hard for her to relax for the rest of the day. Astrid was a workaholic as is, she really didn’t need her coworkers trying to make it worse. All she could think about now was how to fix what they had texted her about, even though she didn’t even have all the information yet. She had a problem. “Do you have asshole coworkers too, or just assholes in your life in general?”

"Boarding school." She said, simply. One trick she'd learned about keeping her past hidden was that she could get away with revealing any amount of information, as long as she was careful with what she said afterwards. There was no point in hiding her European roots, since her English accent was still very thick. “It was a nice place to live, but I didn’t really get to meet the country too much.” She chuckled. “Are you from the Mediterranean, or did you just visit?” She felt a chill go down her spine as the woman appeared to recognize her, though she didn’t remember ever seeing her at her parents’ world. “Did you go to Stanford?” She tried to sound nonchalant. “I’ve been living in Roswell for a couple of years, too, so maybe we bumped at some point.”

Upon seeing Lara, Astrid felt her shoulders relax a bit. Although she didn’t have a lot (or any) really close friends, she had come to consider the woman at the very least a trusted person, someone who was unlikely to sell her information off to her family. She looked like someone who had her own secrets to protect, and although that would put off a lot of people, it was almost an umbrella of protection to Astrid. “You can sit.” She smiled softly. “Work stuff.” She said, with an eye roll. “It seems that whenever I decide not to think about it for a little bit, they can sense it as prime time to fuck things up.” She waved her worries away, deciding to focus on the moment for once. “But you’re right, it’s not worth the botox. What are you doing here, Lara?”

Astrid liked to keep in shape, and one of the ways to do so, was by sometimes going on walks after work, though it had become harder and harder due to the heat of the summer. As she walked, Astrid could feel sweat dripping down her forehead, which just made her want to turn back and walk back home (though that would still be walking). She stopped near a woman who then remarked about the same weather that was killing her. “Right?!” She took a deep breath. “It’s on days like this that I miss France the most.”

Astrid frowned her eyebrows. She had come to the Crash Down in the hopes of going over some work stuff, and seeing as Suraj seemed to be here for the same, she had chosen to ignore them. That was, until they turned to her and asked that question. “What?!” She said, gears turning inside her head. “Like, in a ‘I don’t wanna use pronouns way’ or in a ‘I’m trying to make sure I remember your name later’ way?” She took a sip of her coffee. “Because one of these is weird and cute and the other is just weird.”

After all this time living in Roswell, Astrid hadn’t really made many close friends, so a lot of the times, she ended up visiting landmarks of the city by herself, walking around the many alien-themed establishments and letting herself smile and relive the few good parts of her childhood. She was a huge nerd for most of her early years, and even during her time in boarding school, she had spent a huge chunk of her time reading and watching sci-fi. At that moment, after walking around through the “authentic” alien paraphernalia, she had decided to sit down and rest for a bit, a content smile stamped onto her face, and check her phone. There was a single message from a coworker, asking her if she could come early the next day to fix something. She sighed, typing a quick “okay”. “Can you do nothing without me?” She whispered to herself, feeling her mood sour a bit. “At least stay away from my stuff.”