The Illusion of CTRL

No Good Deed

While J hadn't thrown Uzi for quite the same loop as V, seeing her as N had once known her, before she deemed his existence a personal insult, was still a jarring experience. At the very least, Uzi fully expected the "Scheming Coworker" type. The kind of person who would smile in your face, make you think you were friends, maybe even outright flirt with you, all the while stealing every idea you had, and documenting every off-color joke, meaningless touch and out-of-context remark for an HR nuke.

But what Uzi got was something else entirely.

"Hello, J! Nice to finally meet you!" N greeted his pigtailed coworker with a beaming grin and an outstretched hand. "I'm N, the new butler and personal attendant! Tessa sent me to introduce myself and help you out."

"Did she now?" J replied dryly, looking up from her clipboard she was using to catalog the contents of what appeared to be a storage room to eye his hand like it was a new and particularly gross insect. Then, with a long-suffering sigh, she clipped her JCJenson branded pen to the side of the board, turned to N and took it. "J, Head Maid and personal attendant to Lady Tessa James Elliott."

"I'm looking forward to working with you!" N said, not letting J's...standoffishness get to him in the slightest.

"I'll bet you are," J replied flatly, going back to her clipboard like he wasn't even there. "But you'll be moving things around in here so I can properly see everything, so I'd rather you look where you're going and get the job done," she clicked her pen like it was the period at the end of her sentence.

"Of course! That's actually a good call; I'm not the most coordinated drone out there," N added another layer to his cover with a sheepish smile that probably wasn't all fake.

He had already told Tessa that he didn't like lying to the people whose trust he was trying to earn.

"...I know Tessa would never drag you in here without telling you what you were walking into."

"That's right," N answered, even though he knew it wasn't a question.

"So you know you basically just said, 'I'll be dead by the end of the week', right?" J asked with a raised eyebrow.

"...Is it really that bad?" N asked quietly.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, he was probably still hoping Tessa was exaggerating like children tended to do.

"Knowing what they do to their own daughter, did you really just ask that?" J asked with an incredulous sneer that was...kind of understandable, actually.

"As much as I love seeing that optimism again, you know better, N," Uzi sighed.

"Sorry, it's just...I was, uh, hoping, y'know?" N explained.

"Well cut it out," J huffed. "We're here to make sure Tessa is taken care of, and she has some kind of happiness here. To do that, we have to stay alive and employed, and 'hope' isn't going to do that. We need performance. We need tangible value. We need nothing less than your A-game! Otherwise, go strip out all the parts Tessa gave you, crawl back to whatever landfill she pulled you out of, and save us all some time. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Ma'am," N replied with a bow.

"Good. And save that for the Madam and Master of the house; proper groveling can and will save your casing around here."

The memory froze with N standing by, blank-faced and awaiting orders, at which point Uzi stared hard at J's still form.

Yeah, she was mean, but it clearly came from a place of stress and frustration rather than real malice. J was just a professional who took her job very seriously and maintained the personal distance anyone would expect from an established employee towards a newbie.