"No Holly for Mr. Wells"
Lyn Belzer-Tonnessen
Andrew Wells, Wolfram & Hart, Lilah Morgan, et al are the sole property of Joss Whedon. I'm not actually a Mutant Enemy writer, I would just like to be one when I grow up. The character of Hodder belongs to James Reese. But Holly Quinn is all mine.
A head of short brown hair was bent over the desk lit by a banker's light. The housekeeper vacuuming near her desk stopped cold at the sound of low muttering. Just as Maria Gonzalez was about to become the Wolfram & Hart Housekeeping and Maintenance Department's third resignation this month, she noticed that the low words had no rhythm or meter to them. And they didn't rhyme. So Maria ventured closer.
"Como está, Señora Holly?"
Startled blue eyes blinked themselves clear behind bifocals. "Oh, nothing, Maria. Señor Hodder just dumped a paper sack of receipts sixteen hours before his quarterly expense reports are due. And you know how Señor Harold in Accounting is about deadlines.
Sí, thought Maria, mortal.
A funny, lopsided smile appeared on Holly's face. "Besides, there's something very zen about being here. It's so quiet, and it's only me and the numbers."
Maria was reminded of something her old Tía in Brooklyn used to say, "Zen, schmen." It was then she noticed the younger woman's poor color and twenty years of mothering took over. "Have you eaten, pobre cita?"
The smile twisted. "After I finish April. I promise."
Maria threw her hands up in mock exasperation. "Ai yi yi, you should take better care of yourself. Señor Hodder, he does not appreciate you enough."
Dark blue eyes rolled. "Don't I know it. Now shoo," she made shooing motions with her hands. "Get done so that you can get home to Izzy." Izzy—Israel, really—was Maria's grandson. Holly had seen him around Wolfram & Hart a few times, working with the grounds crew. The third time she'd seen him during school hours, though, Holly'd dropped a bug in Hodder's ear about the boy's intelligence. Izzy was now the best paid after-school gun cleaner in LA.
The next receipt through her hands turned the almost-pride to a profound annoyance. God bless it! How many times do I have to tell Hodder that his little excursions with Harmony can't be counted as expenses if they're not under the direct supervision of the Wolfram & Hart SWAT team? Good grief, he even tried to itemize the bullets…
Enough. Food, and probably a drink, were called for. Holly had begun shoveling the unsorted receipts into her desk to be locked up when the stone in the silver bracelet around her right wrist grew warm and turned a dark muddy red.
Holly looked up sharply, peering into the shadows. At the sound of the elevator bell, her head snapped up and she reached behind her to the .22 in the small of her back, and aimed.
What walked out of the elevator almost made her drop the gun.
A geek. A full-bore, red-blooded, pencil-necked geek. And he was dressed like the narrator from Search for the Holy Grail to boot.
He was still an intruder, however poorly dressed. Holly shot, aiming about six inches to the right of his right foot, just like Hodder had taught her.
"Hey!" he squeaked.
"Hay is for horses," Holly drawled, sounding bored. In reality, her heart raced. What on earth had gotten past George downstairs on the night security desk? "How did you get up here?"
"Uh, the elevator?"
Holly took a step closer. The gangly, dim-looking kid with sandy hair really didn't seem to grasp that what he'd done was a task of literally Herculean proportions. That's the last time a cerberus sits night desk, if I have anything to say about it. Holly lowered her gun marginally. "Did you see George downstairs?"
"Oh, yeah. The Dodgers are losing, so he's in a bad mood, but he's there. Look, I just wanted to talk to you."
Holly's suspicion renewed and the gun came up again. "What do you want to talk to me about? I'm just a secretary." Her tone was flat.
Somehow, this seemed to get things back on script for the geek. "Ah! But no! You are far more than a secretary." It even sounded like he was reading, albeit badly, from cue cards. "Into every generation—"
Oh, no.
"—one is born who will stand—"
Crap.
"—against the… No, wait, that's not right. Into every generation a few are born. Actually, according to our current estimates, there are a couple thousand, which I know sounds like a lot, but when you consider the entire population of the world is something like ten billion people, it really isn't. See, we haven't gotten around to revising the speech yet, and—"
Holly shot at his foot again. Four inches, this time. Her patience was running thin.
"I work for Wolfram & Hart. I'm familiar with the Slayer Spiel. What do you want with me?"
The kid was really starting to get on Holly's nerves. Apparently the feeling was mutual, because he frowned petulantly, saying, "Hey! Stop shooting at me. Mr. Giles said if I went on recruitment that no one would shoot at me anymore."
Several shifting puzzle pieces fell into place in Holly's head at the mention of Rupert Giles's name.
"I remember you. You were here a few weeks ago when Spike went missing." Between having been granted pretty free access to the building just a few weeks ago and George's fascination with baseball, no wonder he'd had no problem getting in.
The kid—Arthur? Alfred? Andrew, that was it—puffed up. "That's right. I helped rescue Spike."
Holly's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, you also took a dangerously psychotic sociopathic Slayer into private custody and more or less flipped off Angel on the way out of town."
Holly had never actually seen someone squirm and preen all at the same time.
"That was Council stuff. You couldn't be expected to understand."
Two inches. Just because he'd ticked her off.
"Look, tall, receding, and dorky, do you know who my last boss was?"
Andrew shook his head, mute with terror.
"Lilah Morgan."
Giles must have shoved some background down Andrew's throat because his eyes bugged out at the name.
Holly advanced on the cringing would-be Watcher. "Do you know what my current boss's old job was? Champion for the Powers That Be." She didn't pause for him to answer. "So believe me when I say that I understand.
"I understand that rebuilding the Council is a big job. I understand that it's stressful. I'm even willing to go so far as to understand that it's stressful enough for the common sense center of Rupert Giles's brain to occasionally shut down long enough to put you in charge of something. Although I do have my suspicions about exactly who delivered your orders and how they were worded, though. That last stunt particularly had Xander Harris's high school insecurities written all over it, am I right?"
Andrew's jaw actually dropped.
"So, how is the patient?" It was a cheap shot. Holly had filed (and read) the intelligence report yesterday while Harmony was doing her nails, and knew exactly how Dana was doing. And what she'd done. And to whom.
"I guess in the old days it was easier, you know, when the girls had no contact with their families. Condolence calls can be so draining on time and resources."
Now Andrew looked like she'd punched him in the gut. Good. Holly just stared at him, "Go away" emanating from every pore. Maybe making him too scared to move was a bad idea.
Finally Andrew gasped out, "B-but you're a Slayer! That's why I came. To rescue you and bring you over to the side of truth and light!"
Good heavens, the little git actually meant it. Holly sighed, briefly closing her eyes. She then reholstered her gun, walking back to her desk. She unlocked a drawer and then briefly held her Wolfram & Hart ID to it and muttered. Once the drawer opened, Holly drew out a thick accordion folder.
"Let's take care of that first misapprehension right away," she said slapping the file into Andrew's chest, nearly knocking him over. "That's my medical file. Full work up. CT scans, blood work, complete genetic analysis. The gene that makes girls Slayers is on chromosome thirteen. The allele is enlarged on the left. Mine's clean. I'm not a Slayer."
Andrew's brow furrowed as he perused the file. "Why do you keep a full medical file on yourself at work?"
Holly gave him a Look. "I work at Wolfram & Hart. There isn't a week that goes by in which I don't have to prove my humanity. In more ways than one."
The pipsqueak still wasn't satisfied. "But someone said you threw a chair across the room last week."
Holly rolled her eyes. "Harmony was cranky and hungry and Angel was out of town. You do the math. It's called adrenaline. And it was only until I could get down the hall to Wesley's office. Whereupon I collapsed. The doctor's report for all the muscles I pulled is in the back of the file."
Andrew finally conceded defeat. "So," he said, looking for all the world like a kicked puppy, "you're evil?"
Holly actually felt sorry for him. She had been this young, once.
"No, kid, look. I'm not evil. I'm not good. I'm a secretary. I type, I file, I generally keep the world spinning on its axis. Sometimes literally. I like my life and I like my job."
"But I offered you the chance to be a Warrior of Light!"
I was never this young.
"If I want to be a," ye gods, she actually said it, "warrior of light, do you not think I have the resources to find an outfit frankly better organized and run than you folks?"
Andrew actually looked hurt. "So you're evil then."
Holly's eyes narrowed, her patience run out as quickly as sympathy had briefly lengthened it. "You haven't been listening. A couple of weeks ago, you were pretty busy strutting around here delivering messages, so take this one back to your beloved Council.
"There is more than one way to be Good. And you really need to start figuring that out. Because one day you'll need allies, or resources, or both, and you won't have any. Because you'll have offended, annoyed, or generally pissed of anyone who might have even a smidgen of sympathy for your cause."
Andrew tilted his head, like she'd just declaimed the St. Crispin's Day Speech to a cocker spaniel.
"Get a clue. Gray ain't black."
Andrew made a sort of "oh" sound with his mouth. Like she'd just explained cosines to him and he needed to go do some practice problems to really get the hang of it.
Holly checked her watch. Flipping midnight. Enough of this.
"Look, Andrew, I need to eat, and I really need a drink."
"Ooh! Where do you want to go? I hear there are some great clubs—"
No wonder Giles exported this nut as often as possible. Holly's sympathy for Giles went up a fraction. "You're not invited. I need to eat and drink in peace before I finish my boss's insanely botched quarterly expense report on time so that Harold doesn't send a fourth class Accounting demon after my hide, and that's not hyperbole. So either you walk into that elevator and out of my life—forever—or I punch one of the three buttons here on my desk." Holly gestured to the elaborate phone system on her desk. "Yellow brings up George. Orange brings out the Wolfram & Hart SWAT team."
"What does black do?" asked Andrew, craning his head to see around the stacks of files.
"Black brings Hodder."
There was a kind of eep sound from the blur that dashed to the elevator, punched the call button, and cowered in the corner as the doors slowly closed.
As she watched the numbers above the elevator descend to 'L,' Holly resumed securing Hodder's receipts, mentally noting that she needed to have a talk with him about the appropriateness of expenses from strip bars, too.
The old Sunnydale crowd wasn't bad. They were smart enough to get Andrew out from underfoot as often as possible. But they had a lot to learn about playing in the big leagues. She hadn't been kidding. That black and white world view was going to get them all killed one day.
Everything secure, Holly went to the elevator. As the view of the Top Floor was replaced by polished stainless steel, she continued to consider the New Council.
They need a clue. They need two. They need practicality. They need clear, even handed administration.
They need a secretary.