Oh right. I decided to do that thing.
Oh lord have mercy on my soul.
On her one month anniversary, Bryony bakes an enormous joconde. They are not intended to be enormous, the delicate almond flour crumbling under it's own weight and the pressure of the gelled fruit inside. She has six failed attempts stuffed in varying states of destruction into her freezer, because it has only been eleven months since she was a student and old habits die hard.
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!"
Bryony is possessed of the immature urge to twiddle her fingers and mumble an apology. Instead, she meets the woman's eyes, and nods once, stiffly, before tottering out, already trying to wrap her head around battle theory she hasn't used since she was sixteen.
