Work Text:
Martin pecks at his report. It’s finished, mostly, just needs a bit of polishing before he turns it in—cut down the wordcount, double-check his citations, run it through Grammarly—or Jon will probably cut him in half.
At her desk, Sasha types with a speed that reminds Martin of his one shady administrative gig—specifically, of the other assistant at that gig, and her unfathomable ninety-five words per minute. (Martin caps out at a respectable sixty, himself. Would be faster, but, well. Spelling errors.)
Abruptly, Sasha stops. Sighs. “Tim,” she says, sounding—annoyed?
Martin tenses, wonders what Tim’s done now. He’s never heard Sasha properly irritated, not really. Fond complaints are about the extent of it. This is new, concerning. (Whatever Tim’s done, Martin needs to know so he can be sure he doesn’t do it himself.)
“Yeah?”
“How do you spell disorientated?”
Tim rattles off the answer in three-letter increments, like a phone number.
A clatter of keys as Sasha types along. “Thanks.”
“Mm-hm.” The flick of a page. Tim still working on the file, presumably.
...That’s all?
Martin shakes himself, turns back to his report.
-
“Tim,” Sasha says, irritated again, a few days later. “How d’you spell patients?”
“P-A-T—” Tim stops. “Actually. Patience like the virtue or patients like doctors?”
“Second one.”
“Okay, then—” He rattles off the answer.
“Thanks.”
“Course.”
Martin glances curiously at Sasha, then back down at the statement on his desk. It’s probably nothing, he thinks. Homophones get to everybody sometimes. Can’t always count on grammar-checkers to catch them. And not everybody uses those anyway.
-
Another couple of weeks pass, and Martin forgets, until—
“Tim?”
“Sasha?”
“Elevate? E-L-A—”
“E-L-E.”
“E. Right, okay.” More typing. Then, distracted, “Thanks.”
Martin’s positive he hasn’t been staring this time, isn’t even in the same room, just in the hall, newly returned from doc storage, and he wasn’t even eavesdropping, really, just walking normally and ended up pausing for a few beats, but it feels like he’s going to be shouted at all the same when he enters a few seconds later, file in hand, and both of their gazes flick to him for a second before going back to what they’re doing.
-
He files the moment away, plasters a large question mark on his mental Sasha-file, somewhere between likes bad puns and takes her tea with just one sugar. It feels a bit sour, hanging there, a bit not-right, sneaky and insensitive and, and insulting, in a way. And presumptuous.
It also feels warm. (Somehow, that makes it worse.)
-
A month or so after that, on lunch break, Sasha pauses mid-text. “Hey, Tim?”
“Yeah?”
“How d’you spell hoard?”
“Like Smaug or the orcs?”
“Smaug.”
“H-O-A—”
“Got it,” Sasha says, and Martin winces (his mum used to hate when he did that, interrupted her mid-spelling after she went to all the trouble of stopping what she was doing to help him with a very basic word).
“Cool. Ooh, is that for me?”
The last part is a little too loud and it takes Martin a moment to realize it’s actually directed at him, another moment to register that Tim’s talking about the tea he’s holding which is, in fact, very obviously in Tim’s usual mug so why is he even asking, and another few to register that Tim looks—sort of annoyed? In a way he frequently does with Martin but rarely when he realizes Martin can see.
And then another to actually nod and hand over the tea.
“Thanks,” Tim says, in a very customer-service sort of voice. Martin’s spent enough years cashiering that the message is perfectly clear: fuck off.
Martin swallows back an apology, nods, hands Tim his tea with a smile he barely feels that probably barely shows, hands Sasha hers without changing the expression an inch, and goes without a word to deliver Jon’s mug. Jon takes the mug without thanks and Martin heads straight to document storage, starts sorting through boxes.
As he does, he pieces things together. Tim’s reaction. What he might have done to elicit it.
He was staring, he knows that much. Possibly making some kind of face. Probably seemed judgmental. Or else like he was going to say something, or ask an invasive question, or laugh.
And Tim got mad about it.
...Which means it’s likely Sasha’s difficulty with spelling is an actual general thing, and not something Martin’s built up out of decontextualization and fairy floss and string.
He wonders, fleetingly, not for the first time, if she’s dyslexic. Might not be, of course, maybe English just isn’t her first language, or it’s more of an education gaps thing, or a vision thing, or whatever else. But he kind of hopes. It’d just—be nice. Not being the only one.
He wonders if he should just say that. Apologize, explain himself.
…Probably best not. At best, he’ll sound like he thinks it excuses his poor manners. At worst, they’ll think he’s lying. (At worst, the information will spread and—probably not Jon, but maybe Elias will go digging for excuses to fire him that aren’t because of the disability and if he does—)
Martin shakes his head. Probably best say nothing, and just stop staring. That’s response enough.
He nods to himself, puts the boxes away, and heads back to his desk. He smiles briefly at Tim and Sasha as he enters the room, because he always does and it would be weird if he didn’t, and sets to work.
-
Martin doesn’t say a word to anyone for the rest of the day. He passes out the last round of tea with smiles, and gathers up the mugs an hour later with smiles, and washes them blank-faced.
When they’re dried and put away, he puts his report on Jon’s desk and goes home.
-
The next day, Tim acts like nothing’s happened. So does Sasha.
Martin figures this means it’s okay to talk to them again, so he does, a bit. Neither of them seem upset by it, so he figures he probably guessed correctly.
He still doesn’t look at them for the next two days.
-
Sasha still asks Tim to spell things for her, now and then. Martin keeps his head down.
-
Some weeks later, in the breakroom, just the two of them, Sasha mentions, offhand, being dyslexic.
Martin trips over himself trying to figure out how to respond, what words to use, what tone. He lands on a very awkward “Oh, um, well, actually—me too?”
“I wondered,” she says.
“Oh. Uh, me too.” He starts fixing her tea, as though it’ll distract from what a broken record he’s being. “Just, um. Bit familiar, some things. You know.”
“Yeah. Birds of a feather, and all.” He thinks she sounds a bit lackluster and more than a little fake til he turns round and she’s smiling just a bit, tapping her fingers soft on the tabletop the way she only does when Tim says something extremely Tim.
And all thoughts of how they’re not actually friends—how this is the longest one-on-one conversation they’ve ever had that wasn’t entirely about work—slip right out of his head, and he just smiles back, hands her the mug, still steaming hot, just one sugar. “Yeah.”
-
Martin worries, a little, that Sasha might go and tell the others—not maliciously, just offhand, just not realizing he wants it quiet—but only a little, and only in the way he worries he might get kicked out of a new grocery store the first few times he visits. (Nonsensically, intermittently, and unendingly, all the way up until he memorizes the layout. And then again when it inevitably changes, til he memorizes it again. And so on, forever.)
He knows she won’t, not really.
-
Still—
-
“You haven’t—” he begins, one very late night.
“No,” she says. “Course not.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“S’fine. Pass me that file?”
-
Martin overhears Sasha ask Jon how to spell elusive and nearly chokes on his tea. Of all the people, why on earth—
He braces himself for the snide comment, the snappish tone, the sneering look. But Jon just...spells elusive and leaves it at that. He doesn’t even sound annoyed, just sort of distracted.
Of course he does.
Martin wants to break something. The something he wants to break is, briefly, Jon. Then Sasha. Then his keyboard.
He steps away from it and slips into document storage instead. Fifteen minutes of pacing, around and around and around, going through every useless breathing exercise he knows.
Then it’s back to research, and doing Sasha a favor by pretending she doesn’t exist. Which is cruel and unfair, as she’s not actually done anything wrong, but better than trying to smile her way and staring like a dead fish instead, or trying to make conversation and snapping at her. So. Unkind, yes, but necessary.
And effective. He puts music in his ears and the whole world sighs, soft, before sinking down to the followup research in front of him and the wordless melodies winding through his head.
-
A tap on his desk.
Martin jumps a foot in the air, rips out his earbuds. “What?”
It’s Sasha, eyebrows raised. “Sorry.”
Martin looks down at his earbuds, winds them round his phone slowly, then looks back up. “No, I’m sorry. What did you need?” he asks again, softer.
“I was just curious,” she says, “if you’re finished with that file? I need to cross-reference.”
“Sure,” he says, though he isn’t, and the idea of further delay makes him want to go back to document storage. “Have at it.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” He unwinds his earbuds again, puts them back in his ears, and puts on his favorite podcast, turns the volume up. (He won’t quite be able to follow it while he’s working like this, but that’s hardly the point.)
-
Sasha slides the file back on his desk after lunch with a smile, and Martin relaxes a little, takes out one earbud. She’s returned it earlier than he expected, there’s no more need to worry about being able to finish his work on time. (And the podcast is helping, loud and familiar and funny enough that irritation makes way for guilt and the desire to make Sasha tea.)
He opens his mouth to thank her for returning the file and ask if she wants a cup, but she’s already turned round, so he closes it again, sticks the other earbud back in.
He could still say it, still ask, he knows, but he’s struck with the terrible sense that if he speaks, the gentle calm that’s fallen over the room will shatter like sugar-glass. He opens the file instead and begins flipping through its pages, trying to lose himself in it.
He’s just barely succeeded when the door flies open and there’s Tim, breezing in with a joke Martin doesn’t quite catch through the podcast and the funny shudder in his ears at the barrage of footsteps (he knows it’s a joke, though, because it’s Tim and he’s got that little upturn to his lips, and because Sasha laughs, after).
Martin smiles a second too late, but no one seems to notice, so he turns back to what he’s doing.
“—you listening to there?”
Martin jumps, frowns, makes himself smile instead, and tries to figure out why Tim sounds so amused. He can’t figure it out and answer at the same time and turn down his volume at the same time, so he drops it. “Oh, uhh, nothing? Not any music or anything. Just, you know. Podcast.” Strictly speaking it’s listed as a radio sitcom, really, but. Semantics.
“Oooh, which one?”
Martin pauses it, takes out his earbuds, and tells him.
“Oh, think I’ve heard of that one. S’posed to be good. Not really sure what it’s about, though.”
Martin squashes the urge to explain in full. “I dunno,” he says instead. “I like it.”
“I trust your taste. Gimme the elevator pitch?”
“Oh, uhh…” Martin scrunches up his face. “I’m not the best at summarizing, but—”
His summary’s a few sentences too long to really be called an elevator pitch, and disjointed besides, but Tim just nods thoughtfully.
“Might have to give it a listen,” he says. “Sash?”
She shrugs. “Maybe. Not much of a podcast person, more audiobooks.”
“Can’t relate. Sound soup.”
“Well podcasts are voice soup.”
Tim shrugs, makes a conceding hand gesture. “They do blur together a bit. S’what transcripts are for.”
“Can’t read a transcript while you’re washing the dishes.”
“Can if you’re not a coward.”
It’s not his conversation anymore, but Martin can’t quite keep himself from laughing.
Tim glances over. “What about you Martin? Thoughts on audiobooks?”
“I mean,” he says. “I—they’re a bit long for me?” And a bit expensive. “So.” He wiggles a hand. “The soup thing, but.” He shrugs.
“But?”
Martin hesitates, then plows on with the sentence anyway. (It’s fine. He can just—omit some details. Most of the details.) “Well, they’re sort of—I just listened to a lot of them when I was younger. So, um. Bit of a soft spot.”
There’s a look on Tim’s face Martin doesn’t like. Not quite curiosity, not quite recognition. Something dangerously in-between. (Said too much, Martin thinks. Stupid, idiot, obvious, obvious, and now he’s going to think—)
“Oh, me too!” Sasha says. “Used to drive my aunt crazy, asking her to read to me all the time, so—” Sasha gestures like here we are. A pause, an amused grin. “And then I drove her crazy playing them at top volume all the time.”
Martin doesn’t say anything stupid about his mum reading to him Before, about his dad buying him all of one audio tape, about listening in a circle at the library. Or about trying to read to her, After, on good days, or throwing the tape away, or getting too old for circle time. He just smiles.
“I don’t so much anymore,” Sasha says, “but it’s like you said. Soft spot. Nice to be read to, sometimes.”
Martin nods. Searches for words that aren’t sharp or barbed or dripping with exaggerated melancholy, because he’s been too quiet and if he’s quiet a second longer he’s going to go icy again. “Yeah,” he says. “S’how stories were meant to be told, anyway. Out loud, person-to-person. Like—” Martin goes on a bit about oral tradition, catches himself somewhere between Beowulf and Aboriginal history and cuts himself off before he can spiral any further off from the point.
“Anyway,” he says, wringing his hands, and is about to apologize when Sasha—who’s been nodding—expands on his last point, adding something he didn’t know, and then he’s got to ask about it and she answers and there’s back and forth and he’s vaguely aware of Tim off to one side occasionally chipping in but mostly just standing there looking absolutely delighted and maybe he should be a bit embarrassed but mostly it’s just—it’s just really nice, talking like this, sharing and learning and—
“Excuse me.”
Martin’s next question dies in his throat.
“I’m trying to record,” Jon says, frowning straight at him. “Please keep it down.”
Martin picks up a file at random and tries not to shrink into it too obviously.
Jon turns around and heads back into his office.
A beat. Two. Three.
“...Speaking of oral storytelling,” Tim says quietly.
Sasha’s shoulders shake with suppressed laughter. “He does get into it, doesn’t he?”
“Theatre kid. Stake my life on it.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“You wound me,” Tim says, pressing a hand to his chest.
“Not really helping your case there.”
Martin laughs, covering his mouth with the back of his wrist, then shakes his head and turns back to his computer. (It won’t do to be caught slacking off twice.)
He unpauses the podcast—only one earbud this time—and gets back to work.
-
Weeks later, Tim casually quotes Martin’s second-favorite episode.
Martin casually dies, just a little.
-
Weeks after that, Martin scowls at spellcheck. Jon’s expecting this in little over half an hour and it’s mostly done, but for the life of him he can’t figure out which of google’s two spellings is right for this one particular word. Both make sense, when cut down to bits, but they can’t both be right. And of course the statement-giver used this word so many times in the followup interview that Jon would consider it inaccurate and irresponsible to swap it out for a synonym, so—he’s got to figure it out somehow.
He glances across the room—no sign of Jon—and sucks in a breath.
“Guys?”
“Yeah?” Tim says, as Sasha hums inquisitively.
“How,” he begins, but the words stick like hard candy on carpet. “...How about some tea?”
“Sure, yeah. Thanks!”
“If you don’t mind.”
Martin goes to make tea and only curses at himself a little.
-
Martin passes out the tea with a bit less than half an hour to go, and then sits back down at his desk. He stares at his laptop. Stares at it some more.
Glances over at Sasha, typing steadily, then Tim, flipping through no fewer than six files at once, ping-ponging between them. Then back at his screen. He tries googling a few more times, then pushes the keyboard away with a grimace.
“Guys,” he says again.
“Yeah?”
“How—” Again, the words stick. He decides to just skip them. “Phantasmal?”
There’s a terrible second where he thinks Tim’s going to ask him to explain what he’s on about, and then—
“P-H,” Tim says, at the same time as Sasha says, “Like phantom, not fantasy.”
“Right,” Martin says, and types phantasmal. “Um, thank—”
“Really, either’s fine,” Tim says. “But—”
“Jon’s picky,” Sasha says.
“—phantom’s more on-brand,” Tim finishes.
Sasha snorts. “Not to hear him tell it.”
“Shit, you’re right.” Tim affects Jon’s accent. “The derivative of fantasy is obviously more appropriate in this particular scenario, as the subject has clearly—”
“Tim!” Martin tries keep a straight face. “The walls aren’t that thick.”
“Your point?” Tim goes right back to miming Jon’s at maximum snide. “As I was saying, the subject has clearly recently imbibed excess amounts of pipe-weed—”
Martin gives up trying not to laugh.
-
He forgets about having asked until a few days later, when he runs into another word an initial google search won’t clarify.
He thinks about how easily the others answered before, how easily they moved on. How easily it might happen again, if only he asks.
He doesn’t, of course. Bats the notion away, sorts it on his own, hums with satisfaction.
And keeps humming all day, after, off-and-on under his breath, thinking of ghosts and hobbits and pipe-weed. (And feathers.)