Page 12 of Static/Cling

“The suit?”

“Oh. Dampens his electrical field. Long as he wears it, and keeps his hands covered, he can’t wreck the machines.”

“Mmm.” The box scraped across the table. “You’ll get their desks out of storage.”

“I’m doing something here.” He waved at his computer screen.

“Sal can’t carry a desk and Roger…” She sighed. “Well. Roger.”

Kassian pushed his keyboard aside. “Fine. I’ll get their desks.”

“Thank you. Was that so hard?”

It was a good thing she wasn’t their boss most of the time, because she irritated the shit out of him.

“Maybe the pretty one doesn’t need a computer,” she mused, picking at the items in the box.

“They’re both pretty,” Kassian said absently as he passed her, headed for the storage room.

“Ugh. I do not want to know.” She muttered something about workplace romance and human resources.

He spent a moment in the storage room pushing unused furniture aside to get at two more of the standard metal desks that the rest of them used. In doing so, he unearthed a huge wooden desk made to share, with one person sitting on either side, facing each other.

“This one,” he announced, because that only made sense. A metal desk would make the workday of someone prone to collectstatic electricity a nightmare. He ignored the part of his brain that wanted to ask why that should matter to him.

“I am not a monster,” he said after a minute of moving more furniture to get the wooden desk free.

“Yeah, but he’s not really my problem, either.”

“Don’t be an ass,” he told himself.

The mean part of his brain sulked.

It took him longer to tetris the other furniture out of the way so he could get the big desk out, but he’d committed.

“What are you doing?” April asked from the doorway at one point.

“Getting a desk.”

“Why that one? Oh. Well, that makes sense. The pretty one will like that. Good thinking.”

“Bjorn,” he said as he pushed the desk out and towards the opposite corner to Sal and Roger’s. It was the best place for the desk. The placement had nothing to do with the fact that a slight turn of his head to the right when he sat at his own desk would afford him a view of it. And, subsequently, its occupants.

“Don’t care,” he muttered as he pulled network cables from along the baseboard and up on top of the desk for plugging in later.

He snorted at himself as he headed back into the storage room for chairs. He was in there, looking for anything that wasn’t a metal chair, when April “toodle-looed” from the doorway.

When he returned, carrying two solid oak office chairs that were probably older than his parents, she was gone

He’d barely settled back at his desk when Sal appeared from the door to the bathroom at the back of the office.

“Hey,” they mumbled, scratching at their hair.

“Hi.”

“April gone?”

“Yup.”

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