Bryony kept telling her to stop taking her late lunch breaks at the same time as the Boss and stalking him. But, since she was still at most the second creepiest person in the café at the moment, Celosia gave herself a pass.

Sometimes she wasn’t even the creepiest voyeur in the room, depending on whether Mable was doing her best impression of an all seeing noctowl. Though, today, it was just Celosia, the waitstaff, two booths with writerly types tapping away at laptops, and the Boss’s Special Corner.

She waved a grunt over, eyeing his vest and apron suspiciously. But he seemed in good enough repair, so she held back any disparaging comments. It wasn’t his fault he’d drawn the short straw and had to dress like that.

Well, it probably was, if he wasn’t good for anything but buying his place on the team, and moving trays back and forth across an open floor plan. But that wasn’t the point.

“How long has he been at it this time?” She asked instead, cocking her head towards Lysandre, looming over the corner booth and doing something with his face that she would almost call leering, save that she’d actually seen him leer before and it was much more horrifying overall. A baby leer.

He put his hand on someone’s shoulder, hidden between the shadow of his body and the high back of the booth itself. Disgusting.

“They’ve finished their sandwiches and he’s giving out free bits of ‘day old pastry’ now.” The grunt actually put his notepad beneath one arm so he could make air quotes.

This was worse than expected. He was lying about his own food’s standards just to buy time with them. Unbelievable.

Unacceptable.

Celosia sighed deeply, and reached out a commiserating hand to rest on the poor boy’s elbow. At least she was here by some morbid fascination. He was just being paid to watch it.

“I’ll have the roasted vegetables, and I’ll give you ₱2500 if you can drag him away from his swooning long enough to discuss, oh,” she paused dramatically, mouth pursing into a little pout as she made her lie obvious enough that even a grunt working a public floor could pick up on it. “Let’s say something to do with lens manufactury. The silica isn’t pure enough.”

Relying on a grunt to pass messages along was clumsy at best, particularly one she didn’t even know the name of, but he probably wouldn’t actually look at his texts until the wayward couple were already long gone.

Her food arrived first, and Celosia couldn’t help wondering if there was some sort of hierarchy of command in place for the waitstaff. She’d never worked with them beyond the occasional sandwich, but perhaps food orders came before superior officer orders in public spaces. Keeping up appearances and all that.

The grunt looked like he might throw up, but he did as asked, slipping Lysandre away from his looming and gesturing vaguely in Celosia’s direction. She paid the conversation no mind. Either Lysandre would be here momentarily, or he wouldn’t.

It was more interesting to sneak peeks at the occupants of the Boss’s oh so limited free time. She still couldn’t see most of the person Lysandre had been touching, but it must have been the Professor, because plainly visible in the empty space Lysandre had vacated was the man’s massive boyfriend.

Celosia had a brief, panic inducing flash of awareness that Professor Twiggy was stuck between two enormous walls of muscle, but at least the one he’d actually chosen seemed nice. He was always smiling, at any rate. He dressed like a peasant, but then again, so did Aliana when she was working, so perhaps it wasn’t too bad overall.

Still, she’d stick with being the most threatening person in her own relationships, thank you kindly. Bryony could probably kill her, but at least it would be a fair fight, anyway.

It was hard to tell, across the distance and with the lighting, but the mechanic didn’t seem particularly fussed that Lysandre had been touching his boyfriend for, oh, at least five minutes. While plying them with free pastries that were absolutely not more than six hours old.

There were three explanations for that, but she wouldn’t be able to pin down which it was unless she got closer.

Clipped footsteps and a falling shadow put that plan on hold. “Celosia.”

Oh, he sounded annoyed. Well good, he deserved it.

Celosia stood, bidding a fond farewell to her barely touched sandwich. It would be cold and soggy by the time she got back. But these were the sacrifices she made for love.

Not the boss’s love, by any stretch. He was going to be furious. But Bry had been whining about his absolute refusal to do anything but pine for a few weeks now, and the second hand misery was exhausting.

She straightened her skirt to fall properly over her hips, and nodded, businesslike. Fear curled in her stomach. This man killed people. And she was going to do something stupid because she wanted her girlfriend to do that thing where she tried to be angry but ended up sighing and smiling instead.

What was she, ten? One of those obnoxious kids running around ruining everything?

Well, she was a killer too, so there.

She took off at a purposeful pace, towards the pastry counter. Lysandre followed, grumbling with displeasure in a way that was more threatening gesture than sound. So creepy.

She was doing him a favour, even if he’d never notice it.

“Three of the chocolate almond profiterole, please.” She told the register girl, smiling too brightly. Over reaching in her nervousness. Lysandre coughed behind her. Well let him cough. It was his own fault anyway.

She really should have made Bryony do this. He liked Bryony. He wouldn’t murder her in her sleep probably. But Cela was valuable too. It would be hard to replace her at this late juncture.

“Plate or bag, ma’am?”

“Oh, a plate, absolutely.”

Celosia didn’t have to turn around to know that Lysandre would be gritting his teeth. For a businessman and someone of high blood, he really had no skill for acting. Maybe it was the revolutionary in him, overwhelming everything else.

The waitress dusted a fine porcelain plate with sugar and arranged the cream puffs equidistant, drizzling fresh chocolate syrup beneath each one to hold it in place.

For a grunt, with frizzy hair and cheap clothes no less, she at least knew how to communicate subtly. The tip of her blonde head towards the man behind Celosia’s shoulder spoke volumes, and all of them were titled ‘you are definitely going to die’ and ‘why would you even do this, I know you know exactly what he’s spent the last hour doing.’

But it didn’t matter, because now Celosia had a delicate, breakable plate in her hand, full of delicate, crushable pastries. Now, there was no way he could do anything without making a scene.

Her makeup felt heavy and she was surely sweating somewhere beneath the matte powder, but that was fine. Sweat away, as long as she kept walking steadily, smiling softly.

She tapped along the hardwood floor with a purpose. Directly to the corner booth. She didn’t hear Lysandre strangling to death on his own inhalation, but it was probably happening anyway.

It occurred to her distantly, as the conversation between the professor and his mechanic fell short, that if this didn’t work properly, she was actually almost certainly going to die.

She really should have listened to Bryony when she’d said to stop. But Aliana had thought it was a grand idea, and Mable hadn’t done anything particularly concerning. More of a shrug and a return to her texted conversation with Malva than anything.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Hello!” The professor more or less chirped. It was disorienting to be out-chippered by a man older than her, but that was Kalos’s most eligible Confirmed Bachelor for you.

“Can we help you, miss?”the boyfriend asked, and, wow, he had a voice on him. Unfortunately, it was the kind of voice that matched his bulking aesthetic and it didn’t really help with the vague certainty that she was about to die. But it explained somethings, at least.

“Actually, I think you could!” Celosia gushed, her smile widening to winning proportions. She didn’t sew down her plate yet, loathe to give up the illusory protection it afforded her. But she had already broken sacrosanct rules of nonintervention in the business of her superiors. The risk of smashing plates by dragging her away bodily wouldn’t hold Lysandre off for long. “You see, my girlfriend has a problem.”

There, identify herself as off limits first. Not that she was particularly concerned about the come ons of easily the three gayest men in the city, but it was good to set limits. And it might put Lysandre at ease. No, it wouldn’t. BUt the illusion. The illusion was key.

“And the problem is the two of you!” Her voice stayed light, and if her hand was trembling, well, the pastries were glued down with chocolate, so they’d never prove anything.

The mechanic’s face curled up in confusion, but the Professor dealt with both swooning and stroppy young women all the time probably. He leaned towards her, body language open and inviting and as nonthreatening as could be. It was a balm.

“I see! Well, I’m certain it’s just a passing crush, and that she loves you very much, my dear.” Okay, maybe a little condescending, but he usually worked with teens and tweens, so that probably made sense.

“Oh no, no,” She gasped, theatrically, and finally let the plate drop with a clatter onto the table so that she could clutch one hand at her chest and swipe to other in the direction of the seething mass that was her boss. “It’s not her that has the crush. It’s her friend, and I can’t hear about it anymore. I’ll die if I have to listen to her one more night, sighing and whining.”

She dragged her voice into the low, sad register of a Depressed Bryony Impression. “‘Oh, Cela, when will he just ask doctor skinny jeans and mister poorboy hat out? It breaks my heart watching him waste away for pining. He’s going to die of the agony, you know, watching them in his café, and never doing anything about it.’”

Weirdly, she’d expected the professor to make the connection first. But the mechanic had already followed her gesture to Lysandre, staring at him like he had the answers to this oddity hidden under his coat, and at ‘his café’ the man’s eyebrows went from furrowed and bewildered to disappearing up under the line of his hat. And bewildered.

And really, that kind of man wore a hat like that indoors.

“That is quite enough, Celosia.” Lysandre rumbled, but Celosia held firm, still not looking at him from more than the corner of her eye. She planted her hands on the edge of the table, leaning in towards the mechanic.

“Surely you’ve noticed it,” She said, her voice warbling with pent up emotion. Albeit mostly fear. But the effect was the same regardless. “The way he always makes time to wait for you two. The pastries that are too crisp to be from last night. How there’s always a table just for you. The touching.”

And, okay, maybe that was pushing things a little bit, because to be fair she had no idea how often this looming and grabbing the shoulders of seated patrons thing happened. But it had happened, at least once.

When Lysandre finally broke the trance of his own horror and propriety, Celosia had genuinely expected to be flung to one side like a rag doll. But, no, he just wrapped his iron hands around her elbow and pulled her inexorably away from the couple and their usual booth, and right out the front door.

Away from the eyes of potential suitors, he picked up speed, and the cobblestone walkways weren’t kind to Celosia’s heels. She stumbled behind him and into one of the many alleyways nearby.

“What did you think you were doing?” Lysandre growled, penning her into a corner between two looming buildings. There was a lot of looming in her day, today. She stared up him, and wished frantically for her visor and her jumper and her drapion. But she’d been working today, and hadn’t exactly dressed for battle.

“I was doing you a favour,” she spat, with far more intensity than she actually felt. He called her bluff with another half step towards her. She didn’t flinch, but she shrunk away.

“In what way was that little display a ‘favour’?” He asked. It was the kind of question which did not actually beckon for an answer. Celosia certainly didn’t have one.

“For real? I come all the way out here on the first train, just so I can see you roughing up girls a third your size?” Celosia’s knees buckled, and she hit the ground with a breathless thud, her blouse catching on the stucco the whole way down. But, there between Lysandre’s planted legs, she could see salvation in the form of diamond-cut leather pants.

Thank every listening legend for Mable’s obsessive texting with Malva, because Celosia was saved.

“C’mon. I had to take three hours on a pile of rattling magnets to get here, and even I know you’re a mess, Lysandre. Arceus only knows what it’s like dealing with you face to face. You can’t seriously blame them for wanting you to get your shit together.”

“There are standards to which those in my employ are held.” Lysandre said, but the murder was more or less gone from his voice already. Celosia risked a glance up- and up, and up- and he was definitely staring at Malva now. Time to make her daring escape.

Only.

Well.

If she did that, then what was the point of this entire plan?

And Mable had been so sure it was going to work that she’d called Malva in. Mable’s certainty held a lot of weight.

Plus, Celosia decided, she had already stared certain death in the face once today. What was a few more minutes of it?

She wobbled back to her feet, but straightening her skirt and tucking her blouse back in properly did a lot for her ability to move past the alarm. Malva and Lysandre were still talking, though the words sounded distant.

She cleared her throat, softly. Then again, more loudly. But it wasn’t until Malva pointed at her that Lysandre paid any attention at all.

Bryony and Lysandre were friends, like, real out-of-work-hours friends. But Celosia was pretty sure this was going to be new information and absolutely oversharing.

“Sometimes, Bryony and I go out shopping for men, instead of clothes.” She said, drawing her spine up straight and her shoulders square. She would absolutely not show any weakness. Not after that humiliating display. “It’s easy to tell which ones will come with us, because they act just. Like. You.”

She punctuated each word with a jabt of one finger into Lysandre’s chest. The effect was lessened somewhat by the fact that his chest was above her own eyes.

“And do you know what we act like, when we’re shopping? Because if a man put his hand on Bry’s shoulder and gave her free cakes in front of me, while we were on a date, and we didn’t want him there, he’d probably be dead. Now, I’m not saying either the professor or his boyfriend could commit murder, but they could make it known if you were unwelcome. Like, maybe, by not coming to your place of work twice a week, for a start.”

He’d stayed quiet during that whole little speech, and it was beginning to make Celosia nervous again. “And that’s why it was a favour. Because you obviously couldn’t tell, but me and Bryony can.”

Malva snorted from the mouth of the alleyway. “Yeah, and the rest of the entire team, too. You’re past transparent. I’ve seen plate glass hide shit better than you.”

Okay, now was the time for a great escape. Celosia brushed past Lysandre, strutting with certainty she definitely did not feel. Malva let her by, and then fell into step behind her, leaving their wayward superior to his sad little alley.

A perfectly manicured hand clapped onto Celosia’s shoulder, and she very nearly shrieked. Malva just laughed at her nerves.

“C’mon, I’ll get us into his office and we’ll watch the whole thing on his closed circuit. I give it ninety seconds before he realizes what a cossal fuckup he’s being.”

Celosia primarily agreed because she was tired of defying peopel who could probably kill her.

But it was at least a little bit worth it, when she got home that night and Bryony had made and entire tree of different croquettes. Celosia pried them into little pieces and dipped them in straight lemon juice, which usually warranted a complaint or three. But Bryony was far too busy listening to the saga of the whole mess to say anything about her girlfriend’s terrible eating habits.

Nonetheless, the hugeness of the cake is integral. Everything her supposed superior does in a day is based around the mantra smaller, faster, cooler. The oversized cake's bright violet icing, however, is scribed with circuit diagrams, brown up huge and purposefully clumsy. First drafts, collected by confused interns who hadn't wanted to disagree with her when she'd made the requests.

It isn't even subtle. Just a way of throwing up Celosia's failures in her face.

Failures like saying Bryony wouldn't even make it a month. 

She leaves the wobbling pastry in front of Celosia's office door in the morning, and by lunch, it has mysteriously relocated to the employee lounge, the diagrams all scratched out and smeared beyond recognizability.

Good.

She takes a slice for herself, lime gel and mixed fruits slipping all over her plate, and watches the rest of it be demolished by the end of the break. People like free desserts.

Celosia doesn't even get a piece, and it's not as satisfying as it should be. Bryony had wanted to watch her eat it, as a capitulation. But by not presenting it to her publicly... well. Next time.

If she asks the administrative assistant down in HR, she's sure she can find out Celosia's birthday. It isn't as if she'll be leaving anytime soon.

A week later, there's a cookbook on her desk. Débutante pâtisserie kalosienne. It has a bookmark on puff pastry, and it must be a coincidence, but it makes Bryony's ears burn beneath her hair.

Everyone knows puff pastries are finnicky at best. Everyone. It's hardly her fault that they tend to come out gummy and clinging rather than delightfully striated and how could she even know that anyway.

She muddles through the day's documentation with a constant rattle of the butter isn't cold enough, you've rolled it out too many times clanging in the back of her thoughts, and by seven o'clock she's so tense that she could almost fear her neck snapping under the pressure of her own shoulders.

Everyone else leaves at five, so at least she has the department to herself. She comes in late, stays late, so that there's actually progress for her to write about, when she's writing. So that there's always new information for her to process, running numbers and filling out formulaic paperwork.

She's good at it.

Celosia should not be there, teetering out of her office looking smug and exhausted. Rationally, Bryony knows the only real explanation is that she stayed late, running some numbers of her own, and solved some long term, niggling problem.

But it feels like an indictment on her anyway. If you can't even manage the necessary technical dexterity to roll out pastry, how can you be trusted with such complex mathematical requirements?

She's a doctor, is how. She's been doing it for over a decade, is how. She doesn't need to defend herself to anyone.

She doesn't.

She stalks over to Mlle Correa anyway, book in hand, and slams it against the other woman's chest with a heavy thud.

"Like you could even compare." She spits, before Celosia can ever recover her breath. "You self entitled little brat. Who do you think you are?"

Celosia must be more exhausted than anything, because she barely even blinks in response, and Bryony can see the sluggish gears turning behind her dark eyes as she tries to figure out why, exactly, she's being assaulted with textbooks.

"You're even more vain than I thought." Is her eventual response.

And that's the end of Bryony's patience, as she brings her handbag around sharply, slapping the leather and buckles against Celosia's side, impact dulled by the cheap polyester of her jacket, just as stupidly purple as everything else about her. 

A warm hand catches her wrist in a death grip, bones grinding together, and Bryony simply switches to the other arm, slapping Celosia soundly across the cheek, her brightly manicured nails leaving behind raised, ugly welts where they dragged down a tanned face.

She doesn't have time to admire her work, because breathing has suddenly gone unbelievably difficult, and it's less a pain radiating out from the knee in her stomach so much as it is a viscerally terrifying paralysis. She teeters ominously, and twists her caught wrist to free it, hauling down on Celosia's shoulders until they've both crashed on the ground together, a grappling mess of rayon and silk, and the fact that both their outfits are made of stronger stuff than either of them is the only reason blood hasn't been shed yet, their nails scrabbling and failing to break through.

Celosia is the first one to remember she has teeth, clamping down on the hinge of Bryony's jaw tightly enough that she yowls out like her liepard would if someone stepped on her tail, a high, ragged screech.

Neither of them hears the door open, but light is suddenly spilling in from the hallway, and someone is yelling at them.

Huge claws are prying them apart, holding them both off the ground by their collars. The voice is coming out of a redheaded woman, her Urobosian accent thickened by her anger, and by Bryony's own still murky higher brain functions. 

It doesn't take much to realize they're being treated to a surreal dressing down, all too reminiscent of primary school.

"Well she started it," Celosia spits back, just to make the image complete. The Urobosian woman's druddigon shakes them both, rattling Celosia into silence and sloshing Bryony's stomach.

"I cannot even believe you right now! Is everything a personal attack? I don't even know this woman, and I know you instigated it! Dear machinma, what is your problem! She's bleeding! Are you some kind of zombie now?!"

What?

Gingerly, more to avoid being swung around like a ragdoll by an over eager druddigon than out of any real concern, Bryony brings her fingertips up to the thudding, achey bitemark on her jawline, and lo and behold, the barest pressure causes needling pricks of pain to bloom out of it. She doesn't even need to look at her hand to realize it's absolutely true.

Someone says 'I'm going to kill you,' and the distant echo in the back of Bryony's head informs her that she said it, but for the most part she's still baffled at how this even happened.

The dragon trainer turns to glare at her, and Bryony falls limp and submissive in her Druddigon's hold. "And you! Cela is a complete nitwit with no impulse control, but what's your excuse, hmm? Everyone on this campus is a regionally certified trainer, so what , what, could possibly have made you think 'Yes let's just hit her and see what happens' rather than going to the gymnasium like any responsible adult would!"

Oh. Right.

"I'm going to kill her pokémon?" Bryony hazards, feeling like she's being siphoned back into control of her own body one hazardous drop at a time. 

"Knock out," The Urobosian corrects between gritted teeth. "Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable." 

She nods, and apparently it's a command of some sort, because the druddigon lets Bryony down with excessive care considering it had just been playing ragdoll physics with her body. She wavers on her feet for a moment, and the redhead continues without a breath. "You're going to go home now, and if you're very lucky, I won't report this happening at all. You can come back on Saturday with your team and fight this out like civilized people!"

1) Introductions

Dr. Racine was a doctor. She reminded herself of this fact often, on the grounds that if she forgot, other people might forget as well. People respected doctors. They tended not to respect twenty six year old women with neon dyed hair and shorts with pockets longer than their hemlines. 

So, it was imperative, she had learned after surviving her thesis defense with her sanity more or less in tact, that she introduce herself by her title.

Generally, this mean meeting new colleagues at work- and wasn't she lucky that her rambling hulk of a boss had actually managed to follow through on his philanthropic notions of technology rather than falling down under the pressure, and had a job waiting for her?

But as the habit grew more and more ingrained, over the months- almost a year now- she had taken it up in casual conversation as well. 

"Doctor Racine," She would offer, hand held out in a parody of ancient Kalosian courtiers, limp and demure. Aside from nails in a Flare's bloody red, lacquered and tough, and long enough to rip a man's throat out. They tended not to notice. No one did, really, but it made her feel better. Stronger. 

Psychology was, after all, an important factor in improving her chances of success, even if it was purely in her own head!

Most people shook her hand. A few of the more charming- or at least more firmly believing in their own charm- would draw it up to kiss her knuckles in a matching archaic gesture of introduction. 

"Oh, another one." The woman sighed, wrapping her warm fingers around Bryony's too tightly. Her shake was nearly violent, three stiff pulls up and down. Controlled though. The kind of shake she had been exposed to all too often from grumpy old men in the statistics department.

Not one she would associate with twitchy looking girls with bright purple pixie cuts. 

"Welp. I'm Celosia, you can call me Celosia. No doctorates here. Just a lowly secondary school graduate. 'S'at gonna be an issue, miz doctor?"

"I mean," Bryony began, off footed by the dismissal. That wasn't the general reaction to her title. In fact, it wasn't any reaction she'd seen so far, although of course ten months was hardly an expansive sample set. Still, it was broad enough to mark this girl as, if not an outlier, then at least an extreme. "No?"

"No, it's not going to be an issue, or no you're confused as to why I'm even here and you wanna go run back to finance like a baby?"

What the hell?

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Look, I get a new doctor every month, and I keep telling the boss, I keep saying 'no more stuffy PhDs with twisted panties and superiority complexes, it's a waste of time. They hate me and they run off and then I have to train a new one!'"

"Well, I can't imag-"

"And then he's all 'maybe if you didn't treat them like pond scum just because you have an inferiority complex,' the nerve of that man, I swe-"

"Hey! That man happens to-"

"Everyone in this place is basically a huge dick-"

"Be my friend you ridiculous-"

"And really the only option I have for getting ahead is being a bigger-"

"Twit! How dare you! What are you even here for if-"

"Brassier set of balls just so they fear me properly without-"

"Not to help him reach his ultimate-"

"A fancy doctorate!"

"Goals!"

They stared at eachother, both faces flushing darker, though on Bryony's paler palette it was more obvious. 

What an abominable little twit! No wonder she'd never been accepted to a university, talking like that! Horrid creature that she was, she must have been punched by an interviewer in the first ten minutes.

Shoulders curled defensively around their ears, eyes narrowed, lips pulled, they looked like mirror images. Palette swaps, perhaps.

"I am here because it is my job, and if you think I went through all the hoops of becoming a doctor, which is a title that demands respect you pissy little ratata, just so that I could be torn down by the likes of you, you've made a mistake."