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The worst part about being a failure, Pepper decided, was that she was also failing at being a failure. Pepper had a lot of time to think about her life choices while she incompetently swept up the day’s pastry detritus. The closing shift was just her and Natalie, today, which meant there wasn’t anybody here who actually knew how to operate a coffee shop, but at least there wasn’t anybody annoying.
Half her co-workers were teenagers, and half of them were taking and/or dealing drugs, and since there was actually plenty of overlap between those two groups, the third half of her coworkers were… fallen from grace. People who used to be entrepreneurs, or scientists, or lawyers. Or up-and-coming executives at cutting-edge tech companies, as a totally random hypothetical example. She’d thought it was a reasonable fallback, at the time, so she could lick her wounds for a bit before “moving on.” A sensible and mature way to have a breakdown. But if anything could be worse than the way things ended at StarkTech, it would be sweeping stale raisins, incompetently. She jabbed the broom under the display case, but the bristles stopped just shy of the piles of crumbs. How was she supposed to sweep this?
Everybody, as far as she could tell, was absolutely terrible at this job. But whereas the children and the drug dealers didn’t seem to mind, she and her fellow ghosts could remember a life where they accomplished meaningful tasks, and resolved problems, and never had to give crying adults consolatory juice boxes when they ran out of scones. She tried to stick to the drug dealers; dealing with their zany hijinks was just about the only part of this job for which she did have relevant transferrable skills. It honestly made her suspicious about how much she liked Nat. She seemed too emotionally stable to be a failed surgeon, which only left drugs.
Pepper got onto her hands and knees to try to use the brush that came with the dust pan, but the plastic handle of the brush itself was too wide and stopped with a dull thunk no matter what angle she tried. It didn’t even make it as far as the broom. Thunk. Thunk. She knelt, holding it, contemplating her fate, really plumbing the depths of her heretofore unknown wells of failure. It was impressive in its own way, really.
“Just use the broom handle to push it deep enough that you can’t see it any more,” Natalie said, already reaching in with the broom Pepper had discarded. After a moment of surprise — she wouldn’t have sat there gazing mournfully at a brush if she’d known anyone was watching — Pepper climbed back to her feet, glad for this to be someone else’s problem.
“That doesn’t actually solve anything,” Pepper told her, as Nat shoved expertly underneath the display case.
“So that’s something it has in common with whatever you were doing.”
Pepper couldn’t really argue with that. She watched dumbly for a moment while Natalie shoved at the sticky mass of raisins, and meditated on the number of minutes left before she could go home. Less than forty-five by now, surely. She hated closing shifts, because they couldn’t be reliably counted down; you had to stay until the closing checklist was complete. Or until you had enough plausible deniability that the opening shift wouldn’t swear vengeance against you.
Natalie let Pepper rest, leaning up against the counter, and executed a series of truly ingenious half-measures and quarter-measures that had Pepper revising her time-to-exit estimates downward to only twenty minutes. Natalie was, Pepper could only assume, an unusually subtle and competent drug dealer. It was the only way to make sense of her continued existence and serenity in this godforsaken cafe. Pepper liked Natalie, she decided.
And then, because she was dead inside and had nothing left to lose, she asked, “So, how do you cope with being a meaningless cog in an unwinnable fight against entropy?”
She realised that this wasn’t exactly a charming overture of friendship as soon as the words left her mouth, but Natalie just turned and looked at her for a few moments. Natalie’s face was serious, and quiet. Pepper was pretty sure that Natalie was always serious, and quiet.
“I’m not,” she said, finally.
You sure look like you’re coping to me, Pepper’s brain generated, but it stopped before the words (insipid and whiny) left her mouth. Because… that wasn’t, quite, what Natalie had said.
Pepper could feel her face arranging itself into what was, once, a comfortably familiar expression to her — a studiously neutral expression that bought her time to think fast without letting anyone know that every word out of their mouths was handing her more ammunition. Of course, here, she hadn’t bothered looking anything other than haggard and miserable, so a neutral expression probably looked odd— she tried to let go of the facial instinct, tried to show miserable, because there was something there she wanted to think about, and she needed time— but she’d never put on miserable on purpose before, and she couldn’t focus on her face when she needed to focus on Natalie — she left her face in neutral and grasped for a way to buy time, said on desperate instinct, “Cool.”
That bought her a few seconds, conversationally; Natalie spent them gazing, exquisitely neutral and solemn, at Pepper’s face. Pepper let her face return the favour and thought furiously: Natalie is not a meaningless cog. Natalie is doing something else. If it’s drugs, it’s not drugs the way anyone else here is doing drugs. If it’s not drugs, it can’t be legitimate, or it wouldn’t require Natalie to make mediocre cappuccinos for men whose poetry is so important every barista needs to hear it read aloud. But whatever it is, it has to be interesting.
“I miss that,” she said, holding Natalie’s careful, careful, neutral gaze with her own.
---
Pepper replayed the conversation in her head. “I’m not.” Every time, it seemed less momentous, less worthy of replaying and analysis. “Cool. I miss that.” She groaned and rolled over in bed again. And then, of course, she had to spend several minutes tugging and pulling at her pyjama set to get rid of all the uncomfortable bunching and pulling. And she had to adjust her sleep mask, which had worked itself loose. And her hair was getting in her nose — she should have done something with it before she went to bed, but at the time she’d felt too tired. She was never going to fall asleep at this rate, and she had a morning shift tomorrow.
“How do you cope with being a useless cog in a meaningless fight against entropy?”
“I’m not.”
“Cool. I miss that.”
That was her super-subtle sneaky message? “Cool?” (Or worse, she might have said “awesome” — she was panicking too much at the time to really remember now.) “Awesome, please invite me to join whatever secret illegal thing you’re doing, because I am extremely bored and will do literally anything to have friends again.” “You have some kind of alternative to this drudgery? Nifty, sign me up, no questions asked!”
And the way she’d just stared at her — Natalie’s face had floated back into Pepper’s mind all evening long, as she’d made her commute home and tried to get through her nighttime routine. She’d looked distant, inscrutable, and, Pepper had realised with a gut-punch of shock while brushing her teeth — gorgeous . She had forgotten what lust felt like, when she forgot everything else about what it was like to be a person, and now it was all rushing in on her again at once. Her imagination built a whole mountain of promise and pleasure behind that tiny charged signal that had passed between them, and she almost couldn’t bear how badly she wanted .
Though, really, the most likely thing here was that there weren’t any signals at all. “How do you cope with being a meaningless cog in a meaningless machine?” “I don’t.” “Awesome.” End of conversation.
Pepper flopped onto her back, pressing her hands over her eyes, as if squashing her sleep mask more firmly onto her face would bring the sweet release of sleep.
When her phone chimed, she was almost pathetically grateful to shove the mask up into her hair and see the incoming message. Usually she silenced her phone when she went to bed, but tonight—
“meet at 189 Sherwood 5am before shift”
“if u wanna”
Pepper was there at 4:45am.
When she left home, she’d been almost pathetically eager, bubbling over with nerves and excitement; it took her two tries to lock her door. She got off the train a stop early so she could walk a little more, taking in the neighbourhood in the pre-dawn darkness. The area was quiet, mostly residential, a few of the bodegas and breakfast carts starting to caffeinate the early-morning crowd, in sync with the opening shift at her own little corner of hell (blessedly not her responsibility today), making its own futile attempt to make New Yorkers less miserable. She bought a small black coffee off a cart, revelling in her power, and tried get her bearings.
As the street numbers counted up, she could almost feel her brain coming back online. She peered at every building she walked past, wondering who was inside it, and whether it was like the one she was walking toward. Her destination turned out to be an apartment building, only four stories, with no shops on the first floor -- a little run-down, but not so appalling as to suggest anything out of the ordinary. A blocky, brick building, the sort you'd walk by without even looking at it, but she found herself noticing the little details that would let her recognize it next time: a pattern of patched brick that looked a little like the Iberian peninsula; a floral pattern carved into the lintel above the main door. Natalie walked out of it just as Pepper got near, as if she’d been watching from the window, as if she’d been anticipating this too—
“Hi,” Pepper said, excited and cheerful, smiling. “Good morning.”
“Good to see you,” Natasha replied, a hint of a smile on her face too. She reached out to take Pepper’s hand and squeezed it, briefly— not quite a greeting, not really a gesture that made any sense, even, but it sent another thrill through Pepper and she smiled again. Natalie let go of her hand and turned to open the door.
Pepper felt almost giddy, following Natalie up the stairs. She was turning over all the options for what might be about to happen, weighing them and making her decisions, evaluating what she already knew and what she needed to know — it made her feel like herself again.
And then, at last, they were on the threshold. The apartment, once Pepper could see inside, was a crowded with lived-in chaos that was, to Pepper’s eyes, only just on the livable side of squalor. The living room was, unexpectedly, crammed full with half a dozen people on mismatched couches and chairs, who greeted Natalie with cheers when she entered. A golden retriever darted up to receive a pat on the head from Natalie, and to sniff happily at Pepper’s hands.
“Gang, I’d like you to meet Pepper,” she said, and Pepper could feel a wonderful little bit of warmth in the way Natalie said that.
"Pepper, meet Clint," Natalie said, pointing to a scruffy blond man who appeared to have just poured coffee down his shirt, and then Natalie kept pointing around the room: "Clint’s infinitely superior half Laura; Clint’s other and also better half Lucky” — this was, it seemed, the dog — “Clint’s third and best half, Kate; Kate’s completely equal half, America; and last but not least, Wanda, who’s with me."
Pepper waved. Natalie loped into the comfortable living room and settled into a loveseat, but Pepper paused.
Looking around the room, and knowing what to look for, she could see evidence of some kind of project nearing completion. The stack of pizza boxes by the door, of course, and takeout menus on the kitchen counter, were suggestive of late nights. The sheer number of charger cords for phones and laptops, clearly taking up long-term residence among all the outlets, suggested ongoing group activity. Odd sets of seemingly-disconnected reference texts, books and magazines and fliers for local businesses, sat in suggestive piles. And scattered with the books, abandoned mugs lost in odd places, on the windowsill or the shelf of a bookcase, clearly set down mid-thought and then lost with the train of thought.
“Before I go any further," she said. "Is it human trafficking?”
Clint looked comically appalled by this accusation, and sputtered wordlessly; Natalie smiled and said, “No.”
“Okay.” Pepper hung her coat on one of the overloaded hooks by the door. “Is it weapons?”
This time Clint sputtered with words, getting out “No, we don’t—!” while Natalie’s smile became a grin and she shook her head.
“Okay,” Pepper said again, and stepped properly into the room. She sat on the loveseat next to Natalie, a little closer than she would ordinarily have allowed herself, but too giddy to restrain herself. “I’m in,” she said.
From here she could see that half of the dining room table was too bare compared to the rest of the aprtment, where some kind of incriminating stack of papers had been hastily cleared away; and across from it, a decorative swatch of fabric pinned to the wall, evidently covering some kind of bulletin board. She'd have to come up with some better visitor procedures, so they looked less obviously up to something if someone came by.
“Don’t you want to know what we’re actually doing?” Kate asked.
At that particular moment, pressed up against Natalie’s soft, warm body, Natalie’s arm around her shoulders and Natalie’s fingers toying gently with the ends of Pepper’s hair, Pepper’s curiosity had very little urgency. She could already tell that she would have a lot to learn for a long time, here, with these people who were all so different from each other but so warm and comfortable together. She could take her time. But she smiled, and said, "Tell me."
Clint leaned in, and spread his hands to gesture a beautiful expanse of possibilities.
"Real estate," he breathed, reverentially, and Pepper laughed herself silly, pressing her face joyfully into Natalie's beautiful neck.