Disclaimer: So ... for those who kept up with my "Dick Roman" story this is the events of what happened before the charity ball they go to. Going from her point of view is filling in some missing pieces of what's going on when Kate isn't there and hopefully making what's going on make more sense. I had some trouble with this chapter at first as I tried to get the sense of the character and while she might seem contradictive at time I hope that it will show how conflicted she feels but what she does and doesn't do and that she isn't just a straightforward character with a basic story line. Anyway here it is and as always enjoy!
I leaned back against the glass of the elevator and tried not to think of the unnatural way it climbed floors without simulating the movement in the box. Not box. Elevator. I nodded to confirm the correction and the replacement to the definition. The red number flashed from a four to a five before a six and stopping in its pace. That at least I felt. The double doors opened with a ding and I crossed through them, the small crowd of people waiting outside stepping back to allow me and reforming after I left. Humans. Dick insisted on keeping them around to fill up the ranks. Not that I minded but I found it curious. Working them to their own end and expecting them to smile while we did. It seemed cruel on a subtle level while I tended to go more towards the brashness of knives and blood. Red. It still seemed strange to me.
"Ms. Roman."
One of the humans – one with graying hair and an unfortunate tightness around the jaw – nodded to me as I passed and tried for a smile that didn't fit to his jawline. I kept my face blank in acknowledgment and his fell in his own. It was strange how expressive they were but how matched Dick wanted me to be in hiding my own. 'Keep them in the dark, he'd say with that trademark smirk that always made him look cold. Keep them guessing and on their toes. That is how we do things.' That is how he did things and how I meant to obey. The thought tasted bitter on my tongue and I rolled it trying to determinate the emotion and how it had a taste. Hurt? Anger? Regret? I hated not knowing.
"Ah, the little sister returns."
I looked up at Dick coming towards me, his suit tailored to perfection and the yellow tone of his tie and cuff links nauseating in the fluorescent light and leaving me with that thought instead of the questionable taste.
"Richard."
I nodded with the name and he laughed, his teeth curled under his lip and his Adams apple tightened in his throat with how hollow it sounded. It was odd seeing him in human form. More so then being in one. He had always been just out of the comfort of ordinary and now he had been confined into one. Another taste I couldn't name and one just as bitter.
"So formal. And even with our lines of familiarity – no matter how I wish I could deny it. Please ... call me Dick."
He kept on the cold smile and I inwardly questioned how something supposedly so warm could be contradictive into something that made me feel chilled. Another human quality I didn't quite understand.
"Come. There's someone I want you to meet. Someone you actually has a sense of purpose and worth. But you wouldn't know about that would you?"
He put his hand on my back to gesture me into the office and I breathed through the insult even as it came out tender and confused by his remaining smile and how warmly it should have been intended. But he knew human nature better than I did. The complexities of them and their expressions. The cold smiles, the lies, the degradation ... I understood what I saw and could touch. If it hurt, if it bled, if it screamed ... He knew what they looked like when they didn't scream or they pretended that they didn't hurt. Like with Kate. Maybe even why he liked her. Another thing I didn't quite understand.
"Charlie Bradbury."
I turned on the unfamiliar name as a redhead girl I often found watching me walked in with her face going pale and her fingers tightening in the hem of her shirt. Fear. She was afraid and she didn't even know the full extent of why she should be.
"Dick. Sit."
He gestured to the chair in front of me and she uneasily cast a glance my way as if I could be a comfort and almost making me smile at the irony. Irony; Noun: an outcome of events to what was, or might have been, expected.
"Charlie. I've been running things for a while ... feels like since before the dawn of man."
The corner of my lips twitched at the honesty but I swallowed it back.
"Always had a vision. I'm close to realizing that dream. I don't want to brag, but the world is my dinner plate. And I don't want anything to jeopardize that – definitely the not actions of one tiny, little person."
He pressed down hard on each of the last words so they sounded like an insult unto themselves. I repeated the distinction in my head to try and get the feel of it for if – or when – I would use it myself.
"Sir, sir I can fix this. Please – please don't fire me."
She stumbled over her words, hands again fidgeting as she tried to explain even as she didn't know what to explain and making the attempt – in my eyes at least – more than a little futile to begin with.
"What is she talking about?"
Dick's eyebrows creased in his forehead as he looked at the man who had come in with her who had smiled at me in the highway. He picked up her tactic of stumbling and looking to me for answers that seemed to amuse Dick when he noticed.
"Don't look to her she doesn't know anything."
He scoffed at the suggestion that they thought different and I bowed my head to look down at the tiles and running through the steps of suppressing anger that I had found in my research. Step 1: Take a break as soon as you recognize you're angry. Stop what you're doing, get away from whatever is making you angry and take a breather ...
"Is that about hacking those Super PAC's? Cause that was adorable. Tell me, how does a high – school dropout become one of the brightest minds at Roman, Inc?"
Still lost in the former moment he had moved on and delivering the compliment as easily as he had done the insult. I didn't understand that either.
"Um ... honestly ... historically, I've had this problem with authority – no offense – so I realized the only way to get away with being me was to be as indispensible as possible. Sorry."
Her smile faded as she heard the words and swallowing down adding more so she appeared nervous again even as she detailed her own salvation. But she didn't know that and so thus couldn't be expected to give it its due. Ignorance was bliss. Or so someone, somewhere had once said and not fully understanding what that meant.
"You're kind of completing me right now, Charlie."
Dick closed his eyes with that amused smile that still managed to look cold even as it spoke the compliment. It was confusing. How the tone said what the words didn't or vice versa. How you could smile as you threatened someone's life. But only if you took your own pleasure from it. That was easy. That was honest. This wasn't. It was too subtle. A hidden cruelty which to me was much much worse.
"You have that spark, that thing that makes humans so special. Not everyone has it, you know. Those people – they can be replaced. But people like you ... are impossible to copy."
He mulled the confliction over in his words as he walked back over to the desk, the question of how people worked and why that had left me in shreds but he had gleaned right through. Was that why he had made me take on Kate's shape? To him was she irreplaceable. I looked down at the hands that were hers and not mine and the scars over her fingers from battles both lost and remembered. Every detail – every piece of her was in me now and playing through my thoughts in memories that I had repeated to her when I was angry or hurt to inflict it on her. Had I replaced her? Was it really that easy? My stomach twisted coldly even as I knew it wasn't and that nothing was easy when it came to him and that nothing I'd done or would ever do would be rewarded in the effort.
"Take the compliment."
I started at the words out of place to the conversation and reminding myself to pay attention.
"This belonged to one Frank Devereaux."
He picked up the hard drive piece that I had collected for him so I remembered my own memory of his relief at thinking I was alive and Kate's own memory of what it mattered with the overlap of red blood and the screams that gurgled with them.
"Thought he could bring down the whole company. He was wrong. Let's keep him wrong. It's encrypted or whatever you crazy kids say these days. Break it open and bring it back to me."
He handed it to her as she turned it over in her hands with the green details on the back catching the light and the gold lines embedded reminding me of the complication of technology and that I hadn't yet begun to piece together even with all my research.
"Yeah, I'm on it. And – thank you."
She breathlessly smiled up at him and I found comfort that it was all warmth with nothing sinister hidden underneath it.
"You're welcome. You have three days or you're fired. Good talk."
He changed between the tones from warm to cold and back so I found trouble keeping pace until he snapped his fingers at me with the unspoken order that I was to follow. He left and turned out the doorway as I went after him and casting a look back at the red head who still appeared breathless but somehow differently from when she thanked him and making me question how that was.
"I need you to get Katherine's dress ready for tonight."
He didn't turn back to look at me as he spoke, his attention on a fraction on me when it was at all as humans based and stepped aside to make uncomfortable way. I jogged slightly to catch up with him and the heels I wasn't yet accustomed to digging tightly into my ankles.
"Dick?"
He turned; sighing like it was an effort to speak to me and making me fall to an awkward stop to avoid me running into him. I cleared my throat and brushed back my hair in a method I had picked up may illustrate innocence but that we both knew was a lie for me to suggest.
"For the charity ball. For the lobsters or otters that they're hosting a dinner for which seems somewhat pointless when they could just serve them for the meal."
He nodded to several more humans who passed and I watched them go, their pace quickened to get out from under his stare and me trapped always beneath it.
"You're taking her?"
Confusion and hurt twisted up into my stomach so I felt like choking and again contemplated the physical strains of emotion and how inconvenient it was that one affected the other.
"Of course. It's why we stopped your ill performed efforts to make her croak so she could be presentable for public viewing."
He shook his head at me, disappointed that I hadn't followed his way of thinking and discouraged if even I had found a way to myself.
"But ... why not me?"
That bitter taste was back under my tongue as I asked but I swallowed it down as I tried to hold back the other words, the other questions. The desire for his love and appreciation that I was always more than my finger tips from but still I scrambled for.
"I can be her."
It was quiet. A surrender I didn't want to make. That it wasn't Kate that was replaceable but me. That I took on shape after shape with lesson after lesson of how to behave and think and obey until I was more those I took on then myself with personality I couldn't remember or grasp lost in between. I had her memories. I had her face, her hands, her body ... I could be her. I could be anyway. Except me. Never me.
"No."
He smiled, indulging a small child for what they wanted but couldn't have and more hurtful then if he had been colder from the start. Another confliction. Something else I didn't understand. He reached his fingers underneath my chin to lift my gaze up to his and the coldness behind his eyes that never betrayed anything else. Never love or affection. Respect or concern. Just begrudged bearing and hatred. Pity and disinterest for the little sister he once loved and who he had forgotten how to though she never did.
"No. No you can't be. You could never be her. She's irreplaceable and you ... you're barely a consolation prize."
His grinned widened as he bent his head to dip his nose to me in an affectionate touch he had once teased me with when his smile had been warm and when I knew what he thought when thoughts were honest and actions that never contradicted one another.
"Have it ready for her by six. Maybe at least this you can get right."
He dropped his hand from my chin and turned to go with that farewell – that insult that I felt under my skin and tearing it up so I was left in her bones with the sense that my identity – my skin – was in shreds all around me.
