The Open Secret

13

The universe, in its infinite wisdom, decides to grace him with a cold in the middle of May.

It begins in his head, congesting his sinuses until they feel pressurized enough to explode. By Tuesday morning, it's escalated to full-blown sniffles and sheer misery. It's a familiar turn of events, happening two or three times a year when his immune system finally loses its ability to keep pace with him, and Rob decides to power through it as best he can. He doesn't have time to be sick.

Ever since arriving in the Kamer, he's held himself to a near-impossible standard. It is his job to be perfect. Unimpeachable. His relative youth, coupled with his catapult to party leadership, has forced him to work harder than everyone around him to prove that he deserves to be there. Failure has never been an option; if he fails, they will say it's because he's too young, too inexperienced. If he fails, it will prove his detractors right, and that he won't allow.

It's worn him down little by little over the years, like a rope beginning to fray. He feels sometimes like he could snap at any second.

He just barely drags himself out of bed in the morning to make an early meeting with the members of D66. He's fifteen minutes late, and he doesn't often allow himself to slip like that, but he feels unusually strung up by his nerves and half-high on cold medicine. He sits through the meeting in a haze that not even copious amounts of caffeine seem to be able to dispel, and Sigrid notices because Sigrid notices everything. She approaches him afterward, standing over him where he sits at the table and staring down with a scowl.

"You look like shit," she tells him frankly, without so much as a hello.

He's so tired her words don't register for a moment, and he isn't sure how to respond when they do.

"Uh, thank you?" he croaks, then immediately sneezes.

"If you're sick, you should go home. Take the rest of the day off. You've been pushing yourself too hard."

He flips his notes closed and collects them, then stands. "I can't. I have a full day of meetings and question time at two, and-"

"Go home," she cuts him off, voice gentle but with an audible edge to it that indicates he shouldn't disobey her further. "You're not any use to me when you're like this, and I don't want you infecting the rest of us. If you send a single email, I'll find out, and I'll find a new deputy. Don't think I won't do it."

Sigrid leaves before he can object, but he doesn't have the energy, nor does he want to. One way or another, Rob manages to drag himself back to his flat like a bag of bricks, where he falls onto his sofa with a muffled thump and covers his eyes with one hand, feeling another headache begin to form there.

For a while, he only sits there, taking in the place that has never felt like home. Somehow, it doesn't feel like much of a refuge anymore either. It's all high ceilings and cold, sleek chrome, impersonal and too pristine. He's considered trying to make it homelier a few times over the years but always loses interest after buying a few pieces of decor and stowing them haphazardly in a closet. He thinks it probably looks like a ghost lives here, with the utter lack of personal touches. Or a serial killer.

It's unnerving, having a moment alone with his thoughts like this. So unnerving, in fact, that he decides he has to drown them out and reaches over to switch on his television for only the third or fourth time since he bought it years ago. He flips through the channels for a while, pausing to watch snippets of things before quickly losing interest and moving on. He repeats this pattern a dozen times - until, all at once, he finds himself staring Jesse Klaver in the face.

That holds his interest very well.

Rob blinks at first, certain that he's had too much cough syrup and begun to hallucinate, but he hasn't. Jesse peers back at him from the screen, seated in a studio across from the host of a news program, clad in a navy suit with his hair damp as if he'd recently showered. He is being interviewed live about something and gestures with his hands as he speaks, giving a long, in-depth response to a question about the per-kilometer road use tax.