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Entry tags:
Made Useful (Again)
Made Useful
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Grey has only ever been good at one thing, and then she meets the PIN.
Word Count: 2200
Notes: Freebie with awkward heterosexual sex. Takes place in 1976. Feel free to imagine the most hideous fashions available. Jesus, I can’t believe this is the first time Andersen and Vicky finally come up.
Grey has only ever been good at one thing, and that’s being in motion.
When she wrestles (or, more rarely, if someone insists on getting in a fight with her), it doesn’t matter who or what she is, only what she does. It doesn’t matter that she’s bad at being a boy and worse at being a girl, that words get tangled in her throat; her body says everything it needs to, all by itself. She knows what she needs to do and how to make it happen, and when she loses, she learns. It doesn’t cut to the bone the way her grades do, maybe because her parents don’t care about it.
They do care about her grades.
It’s not that Grey doesn’t care, it just seems to take her twice as long to learn anything. She’s always playing catch-up, and the only reason she hasn’t completely given up is that she wants to stay on the boys’ wrestling team.
In her senior year, one of her teammates hears about her troubles and says, “My kid sister’s real smart. She helped me get my grades up; maybe she could do it for you too.”
And so Grey meets Vicky, who’s ahead of her in everything, two years younger and a foot shorter, all hair, freckles, and thick glasses. When Grey’s parents warn her that Grey is slow and dumb, she looks taken aback for a second, then covers it with a polite smile and says in a mesmerizing voice, “I’ll be fine, thanks.”
It takes her about five seconds to figure out that Grey learns better when she’s moving. (“Oh, Harold’s like that too! I must’ve taught him half of algebra in a hammerlock…”) They get out of the house and orbit the block a million times as Vicky explains things with a sketchpad. They don’t even get to the lesson they’re supposed to be doing, because Vicky wants to make sure Grey understands all the prerequisites first. Grey doesn’t, but Vicky doesn’t roll her eyes or huff, she just goes back as far as she needs until she finds what Grey does understand, and then builds from there.
When they’re done, she says, “We did a lot of good work today, Grey!”
Grey jolts. Nobody calls her by her last name except the wrestling team; Vicky must’ve picked it up from Harold.
She sees Grey’s expression. “Wait, sorry, should I call you Eric?”
“No,” she says. She likes Grey better.
She also likes the way it sounds when Vicky says it, because Vicky has a voice like silk and water. It makes something in Grey stretch and purr like a cat in a sunbeam. The tingles aren’t the same as the burn that some of her teammates inspire, but as the tutoring continues, she tells herself that it’s attraction. The teammate burn, Grey wants to believe, is just adrenaline. It’s easy to think that, especially since the burn seems unrelated to how much she likes someone, and she does like Vicky. She wants to be the kind of boy who likes Vicky.
So do Grey’s parents. Even Grey can tell.
Her grades scrape upward into passing range, and the tutoring becomes less necessary, but she and Vicky keep meeting anyway, walking endless circles around the block, talking. Vicky introduces Grey to poetry, which is dead on the page but alive in her voice—Robert Frost, Edgar Guest, even Shakespeare, who always intimidated Grey too much to take in. After they’ve known each other a while, Vicky even starts reading Grey her poetry. It’s not love poetry, or the Beat stuff Grey’s parents like; it’s all about the stars, chemistry, and imaginary numbers, and Grey doesn’t understand half of it but she knows it’s beautiful.
“You don’t have to listen to this if you don’t want to,” Vicky says, blushing.
“I want to,” Grey says.
After a poem about covalence, Vicky kisses her. It’s fine, easy to take the flood of relief (somebody likes her, somebody wants her) for desire. When Vicky asks to go steady, Grey says yes, and her parents haven’t been so happy for years. Finally, a sign that Grey’s a boy who’s interested in girls, good for something, somebody.
They go out the whole rest of the year, and Grey grows to like Vicky more and more. She isn’t like Grey. She’s going places, good at things and putting them together in new and different ways, like science and math with poetry. She’s fast, but she doesn’t seem to mind that Grey isn’t. She’s kind about it, and not in a syrupy, charitable way. And she seems to find the world an interesting, wonderful place—things other people find annoying or stupid, she tries to figure out.
Which is why, after they’ve been together a while, Grey tries to tell her about the pleasant buzz she gets from Vicky’s voice. Even as she does it, Vicky turns pink and Grey realizes how dirty it sounds; she tries to explain that no, it’s not like that, but her words just get more and more tangled until they’re both sitting there on the park bench, blushing and mortified. But then Vicky sees Grey’s face and goes into peals of laughter, the kind that’s with her and not at her, and she hugs Grey and goes in this overdone goofy voice, “what are you wearing, Grey?” And then they’re laughing together and it feels good.
When Grey turns eighteen, Vicky gives her an edition of Leaves of Grass as a present, not realizing that Grey doesn’t enjoy reading poetry half as much as listening to Vicky read it. Still, for her sake, Grey trudges through, reading it in bed to put herself to sleep. It works until she reaches “When I Heard At The Close of the Day”:
“I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to
me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover
in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined
toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was
happy.”
Grey shuts the book and hugs it to her chest, burning inside. Her door is shut, but she still feels caught.
It can’t mean what it sounds like. They read Whitman in school, all that stuff about Lincoln and democracy. Grey’s girlfriend gave her this. All that talk of “manly love of comrades” and “him that tenderly loves me” has to mean something else, friends or brothers or something, or they’d never let Grey read it. Maybe Whitman is writing from the perspective of a girl—and not the kind Grey is. Grey’s been told a million times that she’s not really a girl; she just can’t stop thinking of herself as one.
She reads it again, paying attention the whole way through this time. It still sounds exactly how she thinks it sounds, like it’s about someone who likes boys in the forbidden way that Grey does. No matter how she tries, the poem still sounds like it’s about loving a man and sleeping with him. It sounds… good.
Grey’s masturbated before, but never to poetry. Then she hides the book in her stack of textbooks and feels sick. She’s Vicky’s boyfriend now. She’s not supposed to feel this way anymore.
She prays her parents don’t notice the book.
When prom comes, Grey asks Vicky to go, because that’s what boys are supposed to do, and more importantly, because she knows it’ll make Vicky happy. Vicky wears an emerald green dress and she’s all smiles, and so are Grey’s parents. Finally, she’s doing things right.
Afterward, Grey and Vicky have sex in the back of the borrowed station wagon. It’s awkward and messy, and afterwards, Vicky asks uncertainly, “did you… like doing that?”
Grey shrugs. She likes making Vicky happy. What else is there?
Grey tries not think about how often she reads Whitman now, or how in Regionals, earlier in spring, she wrestled some blond boy who looked like a superhero. Grey never had much trouble keeping her mind on the match before, but she lost, and she found getting pinned weirdly thrilling. Not enough to show, but…
Vicky and Grey have a lot of sex over the summer, but it only works if Grey focuses entirely on making Vicky happy. Then it goes okay, and luckily, Vicky seems to enjoy it… at the time, anyway. She always seems guilty afterward.
“Are you sure?” she keeps asking. “I want to do something for you.”
This time that she’s saying it to Grey, they’re squished in the backseat of Grey’s father’s station wagon, under a picnic blanket with a mostly-unnecessary box of condoms. Grey wraps around her; this part, she likes. She tells Vicky what she always does:
“Tell me a poem.”
And she can tell Vicky doesn’t really believe that Grey likes this as much as she does, but she can’t resist either, because Vicky loves spinning poetry as much as Grey likes listening to it. So Vicky weaves one about the constellations in her silk water voice, and she cuddles Grey and pets her hair, and that’s the best. Since Grey can have the car up until Vicky’s curfew (Grey’s dad probably knows what they’re doing and wants to encourage the normalcy), they have plenty of time, so she dozes off.
Grey dreams of the boy in Regionals who pinned her. She dreams of a hand on the back of her neck, ragged breath against her skin, autumn moonlight, and when she wakes up, Vicky goes, “Oh, so you do… want to try again?”
It’s the one time Grey manages to consummate the thing halfway properly, the way she’s supposed to, and it makes her feel terrible. Vicky, who looked so relieved and hopeful, sees it and wilts.
“What’s wrong?”
She looks guilty again, like this is her fault, and Grey doesn’t know how to explain to her that it isn’t, it’s Grey, it’s always been Grey that’s the problem, because Grey’s not good at anything except being in motion, and Grey’s not good for anything at all, not even making Vicky happy. Vicky’s the only reason Grey got her diploma, they like each other so much, she’s smart and kind and interesting and Grey could listen to her talk for hours, and Grey still can’t do it right. She can’t even be a proper boy for her, and if Grey can’t manage that with Vicky, she’s not going to be able to manage it with any girl, ever.
Vicky’s talking now, trying to find out what’s wrong, how to fix it, like it’s her problem, and Grey can’t take it, so she tells Vicky everything.
Afterward, Vicky just sits there and goes, “oh.”
There’s nothing more to say. It ends.
That night, Grey goes to her job pushing a mop, which she got because it doesn’t require her to talk to anybody and she finds cleaning empty buildings soothing and satisfying. It’s the kind of job her family disapproves of, but they’re okay with her for now—they saw the break-up as another sign of normalcy. The peace won’t last, though. Eventually, they’ll figure out that there won’t be another Vicky, not ever.
Grey cleans a hardware store, and as her body goes through the familiar paces of wiping, mopping, and scrubbing, she makes her plan. She’ll use the summer to get things together and save a little money, then join the Army. At least it’ll get her out of here. At least she’ll be useful there. Maybe they’ll even be able to make a proper man out of her, finally.
She hears a clunk, something scurrying, and looks up from the toilet she’s scrubbing. Her boss told her that every once in a while, someone tries to break in for a laugh, and if so, it’s Grey’s job to drive them off, but the closest Grey’s come to that is finding a nest of kittens hidden in the boiler room. Feeling silly, she grabs a hammer off the wall and goes to investigate, hoping it’s kittens and not people.
It’s neither. It’s worse.
It’s like a small cougar, only it’s the wrong color and shrieks like a person and it makes something in Grey’s mind never stop screaming. Then it tries to kill her.
Grey has only ever been good at one thing, and she’s had years of practice doing it regardless of her mental state. She goes into motion.
When Andersen arrives, with his PIN Neurophysics box and his gun and his unflappability, Grey is terrified, bloody, and surrounded by wall fasteners, but alive. Andersen kills the cougar and the screaming in Grey’s head stops, leaving her shaking and sweaty with adrenaline.
“My mistake,” Andersen says. “Thought no one worked here nights.”
Grey just stands there, wheezing. Her throat has locked tight, but Andersen doesn’t seem to notice, just goes about tagging and bagging the animal.
“Your broadcast’s funny; think I mistook you for the Zar!” Andersen shakes his head. “Maybe that’ll do you favors someday.” In a decade or so, Ops and Neurophysics will separate and he’ll lead the latter, but even now, as a young man with nobody to manage, he looks leathery and fed up.
Grey hiccups and rocks and calms down as Andersen works. Her forearms go from stinging to throbbing, and they’ll scar, but she can tell they’re not maimed. She wraps them in her handkerchief and Andersen’s, and then, because cougar or not, injuries or not, it’s her job, she picks up all the wall fasteners and puts them back in their places. She washes the hammer and puts it back, then gets her mop to clean the blood and dirt off the floor. She’s already cleaned this aisle once today, but it’s the principle of the thing. Andersen watches her do this with an unreadable look… listening, she realizes later.
Later generations of the Neurophysics box get more coherent and reliable. But Andersen’s box, however esoteric and synesthetic, is very good at what it does with enough interpretation, and even in 1976, Andersen’s had a decade of practice with it.
“You’re the janitor,” he says.
Grey keeps mopping. She figures her actions are self-explanatory.
“You’re not attached to this job, are you?”
Grey looks up.
“I work for a national agency concerned with the protection of people like you from things like that,” he says, responding to Grey’s unspoken question. “And I know how people work. It’s good, hard, physical work.”
Grey isn’t scared of hard work.
“Didn’t think so. Look, you’re big, obedient, and you know how to handle yourself. There might be a place for you with us… if you keep your hands to yourself.”
Grey freezes, but Andersen is unperturbed, just sits on his box and lights a cigarette. He’s small, wiry, and unafraid, clearly aware that he’ll win a fight.
“Relax, boy. Nobody else in Ops has a box like mine; your secret’s safe with me.”
Later on, thinking back on it, that’s when Grey realizes that the boxes have limits. Because Andersen might be smart and have a box that reads thoughts, but he only knows one of her secrets. But in the moment, her mind is still trying to catch up with everything, and so she doesn’t react, which is probably the only reason she doesn’t out herself then and there.
“Follow protocol and I could care less what you do with yourself,” Andersen continues. His eyes flick up. “Can you keep your dick to yourself?”
Yes. It’s not like it’s in demand.
Andersen smiles around his cigarette. “Then I’d say you’re golden. What do you say?”
Grey says yes, and for the first time, she becomes good for something.
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Grey has only ever been good at one thing, and then she meets the PIN.
Word Count: 2200
Notes: Freebie with awkward heterosexual sex. Takes place in 1976. Feel free to imagine the most hideous fashions available. Jesus, I can’t believe this is the first time Andersen and Vicky finally come up.
Grey has only ever been good at one thing, and that’s being in motion.
When she wrestles (or, more rarely, if someone insists on getting in a fight with her), it doesn’t matter who or what she is, only what she does. It doesn’t matter that she’s bad at being a boy and worse at being a girl, that words get tangled in her throat; her body says everything it needs to, all by itself. She knows what she needs to do and how to make it happen, and when she loses, she learns. It doesn’t cut to the bone the way her grades do, maybe because her parents don’t care about it.
They do care about her grades.
It’s not that Grey doesn’t care, it just seems to take her twice as long to learn anything. She’s always playing catch-up, and the only reason she hasn’t completely given up is that she wants to stay on the boys’ wrestling team.
In her senior year, one of her teammates hears about her troubles and says, “My kid sister’s real smart. She helped me get my grades up; maybe she could do it for you too.”
And so Grey meets Vicky, who’s ahead of her in everything, two years younger and a foot shorter, all hair, freckles, and thick glasses. When Grey’s parents warn her that Grey is slow and dumb, she looks taken aback for a second, then covers it with a polite smile and says in a mesmerizing voice, “I’ll be fine, thanks.”
It takes her about five seconds to figure out that Grey learns better when she’s moving. (“Oh, Harold’s like that too! I must’ve taught him half of algebra in a hammerlock…”) They get out of the house and orbit the block a million times as Vicky explains things with a sketchpad. They don’t even get to the lesson they’re supposed to be doing, because Vicky wants to make sure Grey understands all the prerequisites first. Grey doesn’t, but Vicky doesn’t roll her eyes or huff, she just goes back as far as she needs until she finds what Grey does understand, and then builds from there.
When they’re done, she says, “We did a lot of good work today, Grey!”
Grey jolts. Nobody calls her by her last name except the wrestling team; Vicky must’ve picked it up from Harold.
She sees Grey’s expression. “Wait, sorry, should I call you Eric?”
“No,” she says. She likes Grey better.
She also likes the way it sounds when Vicky says it, because Vicky has a voice like silk and water. It makes something in Grey stretch and purr like a cat in a sunbeam. The tingles aren’t the same as the burn that some of her teammates inspire, but as the tutoring continues, she tells herself that it’s attraction. The teammate burn, Grey wants to believe, is just adrenaline. It’s easy to think that, especially since the burn seems unrelated to how much she likes someone, and she does like Vicky. She wants to be the kind of boy who likes Vicky.
So do Grey’s parents. Even Grey can tell.
Her grades scrape upward into passing range, and the tutoring becomes less necessary, but she and Vicky keep meeting anyway, walking endless circles around the block, talking. Vicky introduces Grey to poetry, which is dead on the page but alive in her voice—Robert Frost, Edgar Guest, even Shakespeare, who always intimidated Grey too much to take in. After they’ve known each other a while, Vicky even starts reading Grey her poetry. It’s not love poetry, or the Beat stuff Grey’s parents like; it’s all about the stars, chemistry, and imaginary numbers, and Grey doesn’t understand half of it but she knows it’s beautiful.
“You don’t have to listen to this if you don’t want to,” Vicky says, blushing.
“I want to,” Grey says.
After a poem about covalence, Vicky kisses her. It’s fine, easy to take the flood of relief (somebody likes her, somebody wants her) for desire. When Vicky asks to go steady, Grey says yes, and her parents haven’t been so happy for years. Finally, a sign that Grey’s a boy who’s interested in girls, good for something, somebody.
They go out the whole rest of the year, and Grey grows to like Vicky more and more. She isn’t like Grey. She’s going places, good at things and putting them together in new and different ways, like science and math with poetry. She’s fast, but she doesn’t seem to mind that Grey isn’t. She’s kind about it, and not in a syrupy, charitable way. And she seems to find the world an interesting, wonderful place—things other people find annoying or stupid, she tries to figure out.
Which is why, after they’ve been together a while, Grey tries to tell her about the pleasant buzz she gets from Vicky’s voice. Even as she does it, Vicky turns pink and Grey realizes how dirty it sounds; she tries to explain that no, it’s not like that, but her words just get more and more tangled until they’re both sitting there on the park bench, blushing and mortified. But then Vicky sees Grey’s face and goes into peals of laughter, the kind that’s with her and not at her, and she hugs Grey and goes in this overdone goofy voice, “what are you wearing, Grey?” And then they’re laughing together and it feels good.
When Grey turns eighteen, Vicky gives her an edition of Leaves of Grass as a present, not realizing that Grey doesn’t enjoy reading poetry half as much as listening to Vicky read it. Still, for her sake, Grey trudges through, reading it in bed to put herself to sleep. It works until she reaches “When I Heard At The Close of the Day”:
“I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to
me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover
in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined
toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was
happy.”
Grey shuts the book and hugs it to her chest, burning inside. Her door is shut, but she still feels caught.
It can’t mean what it sounds like. They read Whitman in school, all that stuff about Lincoln and democracy. Grey’s girlfriend gave her this. All that talk of “manly love of comrades” and “him that tenderly loves me” has to mean something else, friends or brothers or something, or they’d never let Grey read it. Maybe Whitman is writing from the perspective of a girl—and not the kind Grey is. Grey’s been told a million times that she’s not really a girl; she just can’t stop thinking of herself as one.
She reads it again, paying attention the whole way through this time. It still sounds exactly how she thinks it sounds, like it’s about someone who likes boys in the forbidden way that Grey does. No matter how she tries, the poem still sounds like it’s about loving a man and sleeping with him. It sounds… good.
Grey’s masturbated before, but never to poetry. Then she hides the book in her stack of textbooks and feels sick. She’s Vicky’s boyfriend now. She’s not supposed to feel this way anymore.
She prays her parents don’t notice the book.
When prom comes, Grey asks Vicky to go, because that’s what boys are supposed to do, and more importantly, because she knows it’ll make Vicky happy. Vicky wears an emerald green dress and she’s all smiles, and so are Grey’s parents. Finally, she’s doing things right.
Afterward, Grey and Vicky have sex in the back of the borrowed station wagon. It’s awkward and messy, and afterwards, Vicky asks uncertainly, “did you… like doing that?”
Grey shrugs. She likes making Vicky happy. What else is there?
Grey tries not think about how often she reads Whitman now, or how in Regionals, earlier in spring, she wrestled some blond boy who looked like a superhero. Grey never had much trouble keeping her mind on the match before, but she lost, and she found getting pinned weirdly thrilling. Not enough to show, but…
Vicky and Grey have a lot of sex over the summer, but it only works if Grey focuses entirely on making Vicky happy. Then it goes okay, and luckily, Vicky seems to enjoy it… at the time, anyway. She always seems guilty afterward.
“Are you sure?” she keeps asking. “I want to do something for you.”
This time that she’s saying it to Grey, they’re squished in the backseat of Grey’s father’s station wagon, under a picnic blanket with a mostly-unnecessary box of condoms. Grey wraps around her; this part, she likes. She tells Vicky what she always does:
“Tell me a poem.”
And she can tell Vicky doesn’t really believe that Grey likes this as much as she does, but she can’t resist either, because Vicky loves spinning poetry as much as Grey likes listening to it. So Vicky weaves one about the constellations in her silk water voice, and she cuddles Grey and pets her hair, and that’s the best. Since Grey can have the car up until Vicky’s curfew (Grey’s dad probably knows what they’re doing and wants to encourage the normalcy), they have plenty of time, so she dozes off.
Grey dreams of the boy in Regionals who pinned her. She dreams of a hand on the back of her neck, ragged breath against her skin, autumn moonlight, and when she wakes up, Vicky goes, “Oh, so you do… want to try again?”
It’s the one time Grey manages to consummate the thing halfway properly, the way she’s supposed to, and it makes her feel terrible. Vicky, who looked so relieved and hopeful, sees it and wilts.
“What’s wrong?”
She looks guilty again, like this is her fault, and Grey doesn’t know how to explain to her that it isn’t, it’s Grey, it’s always been Grey that’s the problem, because Grey’s not good at anything except being in motion, and Grey’s not good for anything at all, not even making Vicky happy. Vicky’s the only reason Grey got her diploma, they like each other so much, she’s smart and kind and interesting and Grey could listen to her talk for hours, and Grey still can’t do it right. She can’t even be a proper boy for her, and if Grey can’t manage that with Vicky, she’s not going to be able to manage it with any girl, ever.
Vicky’s talking now, trying to find out what’s wrong, how to fix it, like it’s her problem, and Grey can’t take it, so she tells Vicky everything.
Afterward, Vicky just sits there and goes, “oh.”
There’s nothing more to say. It ends.
That night, Grey goes to her job pushing a mop, which she got because it doesn’t require her to talk to anybody and she finds cleaning empty buildings soothing and satisfying. It’s the kind of job her family disapproves of, but they’re okay with her for now—they saw the break-up as another sign of normalcy. The peace won’t last, though. Eventually, they’ll figure out that there won’t be another Vicky, not ever.
Grey cleans a hardware store, and as her body goes through the familiar paces of wiping, mopping, and scrubbing, she makes her plan. She’ll use the summer to get things together and save a little money, then join the Army. At least it’ll get her out of here. At least she’ll be useful there. Maybe they’ll even be able to make a proper man out of her, finally.
She hears a clunk, something scurrying, and looks up from the toilet she’s scrubbing. Her boss told her that every once in a while, someone tries to break in for a laugh, and if so, it’s Grey’s job to drive them off, but the closest Grey’s come to that is finding a nest of kittens hidden in the boiler room. Feeling silly, she grabs a hammer off the wall and goes to investigate, hoping it’s kittens and not people.
It’s neither. It’s worse.
It’s like a small cougar, only it’s the wrong color and shrieks like a person and it makes something in Grey’s mind never stop screaming. Then it tries to kill her.
Grey has only ever been good at one thing, and she’s had years of practice doing it regardless of her mental state. She goes into motion.
When Andersen arrives, with his PIN Neurophysics box and his gun and his unflappability, Grey is terrified, bloody, and surrounded by wall fasteners, but alive. Andersen kills the cougar and the screaming in Grey’s head stops, leaving her shaking and sweaty with adrenaline.
“My mistake,” Andersen says. “Thought no one worked here nights.”
Grey just stands there, wheezing. Her throat has locked tight, but Andersen doesn’t seem to notice, just goes about tagging and bagging the animal.
“Your broadcast’s funny; think I mistook you for the Zar!” Andersen shakes his head. “Maybe that’ll do you favors someday.” In a decade or so, Ops and Neurophysics will separate and he’ll lead the latter, but even now, as a young man with nobody to manage, he looks leathery and fed up.
Grey hiccups and rocks and calms down as Andersen works. Her forearms go from stinging to throbbing, and they’ll scar, but she can tell they’re not maimed. She wraps them in her handkerchief and Andersen’s, and then, because cougar or not, injuries or not, it’s her job, she picks up all the wall fasteners and puts them back in their places. She washes the hammer and puts it back, then gets her mop to clean the blood and dirt off the floor. She’s already cleaned this aisle once today, but it’s the principle of the thing. Andersen watches her do this with an unreadable look… listening, she realizes later.
Later generations of the Neurophysics box get more coherent and reliable. But Andersen’s box, however esoteric and synesthetic, is very good at what it does with enough interpretation, and even in 1976, Andersen’s had a decade of practice with it.
“You’re the janitor,” he says.
Grey keeps mopping. She figures her actions are self-explanatory.
“You’re not attached to this job, are you?”
Grey looks up.
“I work for a national agency concerned with the protection of people like you from things like that,” he says, responding to Grey’s unspoken question. “And I know how people work. It’s good, hard, physical work.”
Grey isn’t scared of hard work.
“Didn’t think so. Look, you’re big, obedient, and you know how to handle yourself. There might be a place for you with us… if you keep your hands to yourself.”
Grey freezes, but Andersen is unperturbed, just sits on his box and lights a cigarette. He’s small, wiry, and unafraid, clearly aware that he’ll win a fight.
“Relax, boy. Nobody else in Ops has a box like mine; your secret’s safe with me.”
Later on, thinking back on it, that’s when Grey realizes that the boxes have limits. Because Andersen might be smart and have a box that reads thoughts, but he only knows one of her secrets. But in the moment, her mind is still trying to catch up with everything, and so she doesn’t react, which is probably the only reason she doesn’t out herself then and there.
“Follow protocol and I could care less what you do with yourself,” Andersen continues. His eyes flick up. “Can you keep your dick to yourself?”
Yes. It’s not like it’s in demand.
Andersen smiles around his cigarette. “Then I’d say you’re golden. What do you say?”
Grey says yes, and for the first time, she becomes good for something.