Two Peas in a Pod [Nao/Closed]

It was shaping up to be a long day, but she was eternally grateful for that. After her last foray into the world of the living, she could take a century of long days in the office. That Shaman had scared her half to death, and his actions had nearly finished off the other half.

”Oh, but you got a wonderful new friend out of it,” Murat sarcastically chimed in after hearing her thoughts. She’d spent over eight decades daydreaming about being able to talk to her Zanpakuto and, now, she wished nothing more than to shut his ass up. He’d been incessant, as if he’d spent that entire time quietly waiting and building up a list of things to tear into her over. She wondered how the other Shinigami in her unit managed to get any work done if theirs were half as rude as hers.

They were supposed to guide you and help you develop, so why was hers offering nothing but insults and telling her to slack off at work. One time, he had even suggested she try to extort a favor out of a Second Division member submitting a records request! She, of course, hastily complied with their paperwork and guaranteed the best possible service, pointedly doing so free of charge. Worst of all, that insistence had led to an offer to expedite any requests she might have of Second. If his chiding remarks were obnoxious, the laughter and congratulations were somehow even worse.

She had, of course, not told anyone about his helpful advice. The formal paperwork announcing her successful Shikai was filed in triplicate with the necessary offices, but she had not shared the information with anyone in her life, not that she had anyone she would have confided that in anyway.

It was such that, hearing a knock on her door, Nao stood up in a huff. Her desk was covered in its traditional wild pile of paperwork, as was the bulk of the nearby floor. That was another thing Murat had been hounding her about. Just unleash him, use the ability to manipulate text, and she could finish up her entire shift in a matter of seconds. Nao could never do something so disrespectful to the work product, not to mention how much her supervising officer would freak out if suddenly all of her work was done. They had careful metrics that needed to be maintained and, if Nao suddenly was accomplishing all of the work of her eight Shinigami work unit, it would make the others look bad, especially the five who were personal friends of her supervisor.

Pushing these thoughts to the back of her mind, Nao did a brief breathing exercise to calm herself before opening the door to greet her guest. Finally comfortable on the inside, she caught her reflection in a mirror, straightened out her hair, refastened one of her silver barrettes, and adjusted her uniform to not be bunched up around the middle from a day spent sitting. Making her way to the door, she pulled it open and immediately bowed down. ”Nao Aoki. Welcome to forms and processing. How can I help you?” she repeated from rote memory after, not bothering for a second to actually look at who it was at her door until she had finished her standard introduction.

Nao got up from her bow quickly and was immediately concerned that her greeting had contributed to the precarious position that her guest now found himself in. ”Of course, right this way, Hatayama-san,” she offered with a hasty gesture for him to come in. Ahead of his entry, she hurried over to her workspace and pulled off a manila folder full of form revision requests off to clear room for him, setting it on the ground to the side of her desk.

”Was it the front desk guys again? This must be the third time this week we’ve had misfiled requests like that coming through,” she casually remarked as she got back behind her desk in order to be able to brace and prevent the new pile from falling over once he set it down. The previous sets of improperly routed records she’d received had been nothing like the size of what Hatayama had in his hands. She could easily see these taking all day to review, and her supervisor wasn’t going to like that.

She could feel the temptation to use her power to streamline this rising to even greater levels, but she fought it back. She would not give in to temptation. She was a member of First Division and she was going to respect and hone her work product just as a warrior would practice their blade strikes or a healer would study the mystic arts, especially when she was in front of another member of her Division. The thought of what might be said about her upstairs if news got out about her using her talents to speed up work caused Nao’s face to flush red with anxiety as she eyed Hatayama’s approach to her desk.

”How old are these anyway?” Nao wondered aloud as she picked up a form from the top and started looking it over. Sure enough, it was using an outdated format. The proper signatures and markings were in place and it could still be routed and archived as it was, but there were several fields that had been added and a few that had been removed which were not present on the report in her hands. This was going to be even more time consuming than she had thought when she first saw the stack.

She set the one she’d grabbed down on her immediate workspace with a grimace and looked back to Zenji. ”Your family has a Kido library?” she asked, his previous statement coming back to her now that she’d actually looked at the forms. A light stammer began to work its way into her speech, and she needed a brief moment to take a deep relaxing breath and calm herself. Why had so many nobles been coming by her office lately? First Helena and now this Zenji. This was an unwelcome trend for her nerves.

Calm enough to speak without a nervous stutter, Nao looked back to Zenji and bowed her head once again, nearly smacking it into her desk in her vigor. ”My apologies, Hatayama-sama, I didn’t know. Someone more suited for the requests we receive from our betters normally handles any requests that come from the nobility, but my supervising officer is out of the building at the moment.”

”We shouldn’t destroy them!” Nao exclaimed with a panicked look on her face, both because the idea that this completed paperwork should be thrown out was anathema to what she’d learned in her time in forms and processing as well as the fact that she’d had the audacity to contradict the request of a noble. She hadn’t done something like that since her Academy days, and she’d long since learned her lesson in crossing that social divide.

Blushing and sputtering, she took a moment to calm at least her mouth down. She had already crossed the threshold, and there was no taking that back. If her boss found out she was destroying unprocessed paperwork, she’d be in deep trouble. If word made it back that she’d made a member of the upper crust angry, she’d be in even deeper trouble.

Her face might still be a deep red, but she had at least gotten her lips and breathing under control enough to stop her from making a blubbering fool of herself. It didn’t stop her from talking at a mile a minute, though, and she soon blitzed through her explanation. ”What I mean to say, Hatayama-sama, is that we should still file these. Though the information in them might be outdated, it’s still important that we keep that historical record. You never know when one of the people in these documents might be under consideration for an assignment. It’s also not uncommon for a new supervising officer to request the complete file of any subordinates they are taking over.”

Of course it had been a joke! Nao should have known better. The carefree girl with good humor who had entered the Academy nearly a century ago would have understood that, but she’d spent enough time being reprimanded and punished for not taking things seriously enough that she’d long since adopted a policy of implicit trust in anything her superiors were saying to her, and there was no denying that, even if they had the same relative rank, Nao knew that Hatayama was her superior.

”We can handle the routing. It may take a while to get through this many forms, but that’s where the ‘processing’ part of ‘forms and processing’ comes into play,” she remarked as cheerfully as she could, trying desperately to cover up for her prior outburst. ”While it is important they get processed quickly, a few extra days wait won’t hurt them. I’ll also need to prepare letters explaining the delay to the sections they need to route on to. That’s really the most time-consuming task of it all.”

She wasn’t looking forward to that, especially since there was bound to be anger directed at her over the age of the stack on her desk. She couldn’t point the blame at Zenji, though. ”Why not? They’re his files, after all,” that unpleasant voice asked her, but she quickly brushed it aside. She’d sooner fall on the proverbial sword than listen to what the spirit in her literal one was implying she do.

”Do it,” her spirit bluntly urged at the offer of repayment. She knew it was just an offer of kindness, but she dreaded hearing Murat drone on and on whenever a mistake presented itself that she needed to make use of that favor. What would she even ask for in return from someone like him that wouldn’t be a gross overstepping of her bounds, though?

She had been quiet and polite at his initial sign of appreciation, merely nodding along in understanding and accepting that, under no circumstances, would she be directing her supervisor to anyone in Zenji’s station. The nobility had priorities and abilities that superseded that of common Shinigami, a simple fact of life she had come to accept. As she thought back to the day that acceptance crystallized for her, a idea struck Nao. She could ask something of him, and she knew that if she didn’t it wouldn’t just be Murat hounding her over it. She’d be beating herself up.

Her recent conversation with Helena, coupled with the potentially deadly meeting with the shaman Anatoly, had made her realize just how much she had regretted what happened. It wouldn’t even be a big ask for him to do it. Just a friendly question to the right people and she’d know. She didn’t know what she would do with that knowledge, but she suspected just knowing would be enough to silence her thoughts.

”Do you mean it? she asked as she tried to suppress her nerves, her hands trembling slightly. She pressed them together to hide the shaking as best she could before continuing. ”You’d be willing to do something for me? Nothing crazy, obviously, but you’d do something to help me out?”

”Well, and if this causes you any trouble then feel free to say no, but I had this,” she started, pausing for a bit. What were they? He had been special to her, but after what happened with them, she hadn’t been allowed anywhere near him. Someone had made sure that her supervising officer had routed any and all paperwork related to the reclusive Shinigami to someone else, so she found no way to keep tabs on him even from a basic administrative perspective. When she, after years of being kept in the dark, finally worked up the courage to ask why, she’d been told to just act as if he’d died that day.

She had truly cared for him, and he had been the one person not just inside their walls but in the whole world who she could actually fully relax around. If it hadn’t been for his position of prestige, perhaps these restrictions wouldn’t have been in place, but there was no changing that. He was her better, and she was simply unworthy. Her guest, however, he wouldn’t raise any eyebrows by just asking a few questions. Maybe a few years after the fact he might, but it had been nearly a century.

”There was someone who was special to me, but we haven’t talked in a long time. I’d, if you could, as long as it doesn’t cause you any trouble, but don’t mention my name, just quietly, I’d really like to,” she started, quickly devolving into a string of nervous qualifiers.

”Fucking spit it out already.”

The rude interruption broke her chain of thought, causing her to raise her eyebrows slightly and glance down at the tanto on her hip. With a sigh, she cleared her head and readdressed her guest. ”His name is Tetsuya Akimoto, of the noble Akimoto house. If you could look into how he’s doing and let me know, I’d be more than happy to handle this and any other misplaced files you come across.”

It felt good to have it finally out of her mouth. Decades of waiting and wondering, a normal human lifetime kept lingering on that secret wish, only for it to finally be given a voice. Forget good, this was exhilarating. Just saying his name had been enough to conjure up images of happier, freer days. Days spent talking about the future, ravenously devouring any knowledge they could get their hands on, and wondering countless what if’s.

She could see it now. He’d talk to Tetsuya, her old friend would hear about her requesting it, he’d hatch some plan to get away from his family, and together they would leave this dreary office and go for a walk by their old hiding places. Maybe then she’d finally find it in herself to say some of the things she should have said back then. Shinigami lived for ages. 80 years was a drop in the bucket, a few weeks away on a business trip for a mortal. They could pick up right where they left off.

Where they left off.

The question hit her and dragged her back to reality, her previously soaring heart crashing down into a deeper pit than it had originally been in. Of course none of her daydreams would come true. They never did. That’s why they were dreams.

Tetsuya had a family, a powerful family with many Shinigami. It had been a dumb stroke of fate that his niece or cousin or whatever Helena was had come to her office and drudged up all these old feelings. The rest of his family would not be so understanding. Helena might not be so understanding if she knew the truth, either.

She could feel tears starting to well up in her eyes and quickly diverted her gaze upward to keep them from falling. She’d already had her vision bouncing all around the room. What was a quick look upward going to do to change his opinion of her, anyway? Bringing a hand up to brush away the pooled liquid once she felt she could safely look down, she missed a single thick droplet that quickly made its way down her cheek as she reestablished her gaze with Zenji.

”I’m not allowed to talk to him,” she explained, deciding there was no point in hiding the reason she was making her request. Her voice broke from the effort of keeping the tears back, but she managed to not break down any further thanks to the effort. ”I’m the reason he was hurt.”

”If you do bring a healer along, they’ll know I sent you,” she said dejectedly before trying to put on a halfway passable it’ll be okay face, ”I just want to know how he’s doing is all. It’s not my place to be seen on a noble’s grounds, even if it’s open to the public. I’d love to go, and I appreciate the offer, but I’m sure your family wouldn’t like seeing the rabble hanging around.”

She gave a little huffing laugh at that, her eyes falling back on the pile of work on her desk, not just the new addition he had brought but her own previously existing collection. This was going to take weeks if not months to get through everything and, with the rest of her team being given extra personal hours as reward for the unit exceeding its metrics goals, she had to double down on her work again.

It always seemed that, somehow, they managed to clear through literally the same amount of work that she ended up falling behind. If Nao had the backbone to say something about it, she might have even asked her supervisor why it was that depositing the papers on her desk counted as them clearing things away but she was forbidden from doing the same back to them. With a resigned gesture to her stack and a defeated smile, she explained to him in a less sad, but somehow more depressing voice. ”Besides, I really shouldn’t let my work sit. My supervising officer wouldn’t be happy if it turned out I was relaxing right now. I went away from the office on assignment a little while ago and my IPQ, that's Inbound Paperwork Quota, tripled in size in the matter of a day.”

”Oh, I get breaks,” she said reassuringly with a dismissive wave of her hand, ”My supervising officer gives me nights off as long as my metrics for the day are good and, if I finish enough of my assigned work, I’m able to take a day off once a month. My numbers are behind the rest of the team this month, so no luck there, but, if it really is free to the public, I could make a trip by on my next day off.”

”Pathetic.”

She ignored the slight from her spirit as best she could, opting to attribute it to her failings in the office than to how lacking she was in any semblance of a spine. Yes, the rest of her office usually only put in 30 hours of work individually in any given week, but Nao either didn’t or wouldn’t make the connection to the fact that her ‘poor’ performance was down to her covering for their workload and not an actual lack of effort on her part.

”Actually, if,” she started, a sudden idea hitting her and causing her eyes to brighten up slightly. She could have him ask Tetsuya to meet her there! If someone saw them, it was a public garden and she had just happened to be there at the same time as him. They could find a nice big tree and just sit and talk to each other like they used to. It was perfect! As long as his family didn’t find out, they’d have nothing to worry about.

Zenji’s previous statements echoed in her mind. ”My social peers are chatterboxes,” he had said. Whatever she told him stood the very real chance of getting out. Maybe not through Zenji, but someone at his estate would be bound to see it and bound to report back. Never mind the troubles that might cause her, his family could crack back down on him again. No, her idea was beyond stupid. With a quick shake of her head, the brief genuine happiness she had felt faded back to her previous forced professional politeness. ”No, that’s silly. Nevermind. Just letting me know how he’s doing and offering your garden is more than enough. Really, I shouldn’t be asking for anything. This kind of stuff is my duty, after all.”

This Zenji, he was deadest on throwing Nao through a rollercoaster of emotion. Sure, she’d thought about how great it would be if Testuya happened to find out about it from Zenji, but could she be so bold as to actually request that her name be mentioned? It was certainly crossing the line between a check-in and trying to find her way back into his life.

”Just do it already. He’s practically begging you to use him.”

Nao hated that thought. She wasn’t supposed to use people. It was the way of the world for that to go the other way around. She was the helper, the assistant, the one whose work made the important person shine. Aside from those three years she spent glued to Tetsuya’s side, she had always served as best she could in a supporting role. She’d supported Tetsuya too, but he had bolstered her and lifted her up along with him instead of just using her as a footstool.

”Do it,” she said, a little surprised that she managed to work up the will to say the words. She had almost mirrored Murat’s irritated blunt insistence from earlier and, though it made her feel a little dirty to compare herself to her spirit, that feeling was overpowered by a rare upwelling of confidence. ”Tell him I’m asking. If he’d like to meet me again, I can do it at any time or place. I’ll skip sleeping if I have to so I can have a day off for him.”

She wasn't sure where the will to say that came from and doubted she'd be able to find it again if she had to, but she'd gotten through it. Her heart and mind were racing and her face was flushed scarlet with mingled embarrassment and excitement, but there was no turning back now. Once Zenji stepped out of her office, she wouldn't have any way to claw that back. The way he'd been talking to her seemed more genuine than most Shinigami she was used to dealing with, and a large part of her believed that, even if she told him no at this point, he'd still likely reach out to Tetsuya. They had been old acquaintances after all, and her mentioning his injury would no doubt make the man want to check in independent of anything Nao said or did.

She dismissed his concerns with agreeable nods of affirmation, but Nao knew there was no chance she would be calling on Zenji to help her with her work. What he was doing was already more help than she could have ever asked for anyone, even if a part of her was full of dread over the possibility of blowback.

Her supervising officer was, she suspected, aware of enough of what had happened between her and Tetsuya that any rumors of what she had arranged with Zenji passing over her boss’ desk would land her in a whole mess of trouble. Zenji would be safe, no doubt, as his rank within the upper crust of society would make his indiscretions negligible.

There would be time for her to agonize over how stupid she’d been to make the request in the future. Whatever came of it, she had to imagine that anything her supervisor could throw at her would dwarf in comparison to the irritation Murat could have caused for her not doing something with the offer, and at least this option got her something that she actually wanted rather than giving in to his interior decorating suggestions. She couldn’t deny that the man had a nice office, but there was no way she could in good conscience misappropriate enough funds to work in anything nearing the level of luxury she saw when Anatoly shoved her inside of that room.

All concerns for later, though. She politely escorted Zenji from her office, carefully avoiding her new pile of work on the way and preparing to get the door for him. ”I’ll be sure to call on you if I need any help, Hatayama-sama,” she replied to his departing address with a deep bow of her own, ”Really, I can’t thank you enough for looking into this for me. If you get any more files that seem out of place, please don’t hesitate to bring them down and I’ll make sure they are properly taken care of and routed.”

Seeing him away with a smile, she waited until he was out of sight to close her door. Nao pivoted back to look at her desk and, instead of heading back to her chair, dropped down into a small ball up against her door, thoughts ranging from the trouble she’d be in, the amount of work she’d just agreed to take on, and a million different fantasy date ideas running through her mind in a chaotic mess.

Perhaps she was dizzy from the confusion, but Nao soon found a sense of lightheadedness overtaking her as her own ideas and worries ran rampant in her mind. Whatever the case, she soon found herself seated cross the desk from the man she’d previously watched do battle against Anatoly using her form. She wanted to yell at him, to berate him, to tell him to stop interrupting her thoughts and let her be. Her angry raised finger soon drooped slightly as she saw him smiling earnestly, though.

”He’s right, you know?” the businessman said as he stood up a tall glass in his hand, ”You need to learn to relax.” She watched as he walked over to his bar and mixed her a drink, his back to her the whole time, strangely unable to come up with any particular insult to hurl his way. When he turned back, the glass was full of a dark liquid and had a metal straw poking out of the top.

Setting it on a coaster in front of her, he gave her a pat on the shoulder. ”Finish that and I’ll let you go. Don’t chug it, though. It’s called an Inin-jō.”

”Inin-jō…” she muttered reflexively, momentarily forgetting that it was the word he told her to use to draw her out. ”"Murat-" she started, turning around to say something to him about how she needed to get back to work, but he had already vanished by the time she did. Not wanting to try blindly braving the halls looking for him or a way out, she eventually gave in and did as he requested, sipping at the sweet drink and finding her mind delightfully blanking out.

It wasn’t until she reached the bottom of the glass that she snapped back awake. She was still seated against the wall, but something horrifying had happened. Her desk was clear of paper. Along the walls of her office, in neat individual perfectly formed stacks, sat every form she had been working on earlier as well as those Zenji had left behind.

”Murat, you son of a bitch!” She was furious, standing up and storming about the room. She could hear the spirit laughing at the back of her mind uproariously. Sure enough, he had somehow tricked her into using her power to complete all of her work. She didn’t know how long she had been out, but her back certainly felt like she had been uncomfortably stationary for a few hours at least.

”I can’t believe you fell for that. Thanks, Nao. I would have gouged my other eye out if I had to sit there and watch you sort all of that for the next month just so you could go on a fucking date.”

The laughter continued, though it faded away some as she started looking over the nearest pile, carefully reviewing his work for any errors. She might have subconsciously agreed to let him help her cheat and speed through the forms, but she wasn’t going to risk submitting anything that that man had touched until she was confident that nothing was out of place.

//END