Part 1: The cleaning woman
He stared at her, that was the problem.
She tried to ignore it - tried to dust and clear up around him. But for an hour each morning he would sit there in that over-sized arm chair and watch her intently, expressionless. He was always in shadow against the bay-window, but when she glanced over in his direction, she was painfully aware that his blue eyes never left her.
It was starting to really creep her out.
It's not like she hadn't cleaned other Evil Headquarters (after all, there was good money in Evil. The pay was great). She expected a certain level of weirdness, if not downright moral dubiousness, in this job. But this… this staring? What did he want?
It went against etiquette to talk to him, of course. The servants weren't supposed to berate the owner for anything! And she'd had far more cause to be fed up with Fury Leika with what that... woman... had left lying around her Evil Headquarters. This new one was a relatively tidy guy by comparison. There really wasn't much to do and it was an easy job apart from the occasional odd smell that drifted in from the lab in the basement. In fact, she didn't really know why they employed her to clean every day. She supposed he must be one of those anal obsessives?
He'd only talked to her once, when she'd first got the job. He'd been reticent - almost shy. She'd called him Sir. They weren't allowed to call him Doctor Horrible. He didn't even look like Doctor Horrible, since he never wore that Mad Scientist get-up in the house. In fact, in the first few days she'd worked there, she'd kind of got used to thinking of him as "the boss" (which was how she referred to him to her Mum back home) until she'd seen him putting on the white coat and goggles to head down at the lab. She'd almost dropped her duster as he glanced over at her with the blank, menacing stare before she'd hurried on with her duties. The effect of that outfit was terrifying, after all. Not in itself - the costume was almost silly when you though about it. But it was iconic - it represented the sum of his terrible atrocities, so well publicised by the city's press. From that moment on, she couldn't see him and not see Doctor Horrible.
It was all there in his eyes - in that stare. In the stare that was tuned in on her for one hour every day, beating away at her like the ocean eroding a piece of rock. She'd break, she knew that. Not today perhaps, but someday soon. And she'd lose a great steady job.
Oh, why did he have to stare?
