Chapter 8 - A Normal Day of Work

“Welcome back Zee, did you have a nice break?” The manager questions me with a forced smile on his face.

“Ye-” The manager cuts me off before I can even answer him.

“I would care how your fucking break was if you told me about it before hand, you old damn crook!” The manager screams at me.

I am not unfamiliar with being scolded, in fact that is the way me and the manager interact most of the time, but now I feel like breaking his nose, or maybe even gouging his eye out with my dumb prosthetic finger.

“Sorry sir.” I say submitting to his authority, and also hiding my true desires, that is to harm him.

“Whatever, I can’t just fire a damn vet now can I? You fight a war and all of a sudden you get immunity for a few years, but hell, I can’t wait til everyone forgets about you pointless old, fucking crooks!” My manager screams at me as he turns to walk back to his office that is separated from the medium sized room of cubicles.

I am not surprised by his words. He just vocalized a harsh reality, everywhere we vets turn there are people treating us like heroes, but behind it all they cannot wait for a time where they can stop treating us like we are important, they can’t wait to forget about our sacrifices.

“Damn Zee, that was harsh.” A familiar female voice says to me.

“Oh, hey Deb, been a while.” I say to her.

“Yeah no shit, where have you been man?” Deb says to me with a look of concern on her face.

I pause, only now do I realize that I haven't thought of any kind of cover story for my absence, in only a few seconds her face changes from interested to concerned, until an understanding yet uncaring look is painted onto her face, she can clearly see that I am thinking of a lie to tell her.

“Well, no need to lie. If you can’t say why I don’t give a damn.” Deb says to me while patting my shoulder.

Deb is the closest thing I have to a friend in my life as a civilian, we don’t really talk outside of work, but she is nice to me compared to everyone else. I think she had a family member pass away during the War, she mentioned it to me in passing once, she said it was a young man who looked just like her, blonde hair and blue eyes, she said I remind her of him so she respects me to that extent. She never asks about my time in The War, but for some reason it is like she knows me, minus all the horrible things I did during The War. But I can’t shake the feeling that she knows me from somewhere, because if she didn’t, I feel like she would have never even spoken to me in the first place.

“I should get to work.” I say plainly as I walk towards the chair I am so familiar with.

“You’re as nonchalant as always.” Deb says as she giggles her way to her cubicle.

I sit in my chair and am greeted by a stack of papers. My only job here is to sort through eye witness accounts submitted to our paper, things like crimes or mildly interesting occurrences, and choose the ones worth putting into the paper. This essentially means that I spend my whole day reading through a bunch of rubbish, and only occasionally find something worth even attempting to put into the daily paper.

I flip the stack of papers upside down to ensure that I am reading the reports that came in first. The first few reports are about as uninteresting as I expected, I am practically throwing them in the trash at record speeds. A few minutes of me trashing report after report goes by, until the title of one catches my eye.

“The Fingerless Traitor.” I whisper to myself, reading the title of the account.

The report was written by the guy that me and Aloe had a run in with, I guess after the news this morning revealed the High Order to the public he wrote about his experience with Aloe and me. He writes about everything he knows about me, how I was never harmed and the things I did during the war. The man I know nothing about somehow knows so much about me, just based around my reputation amongst soldiers. For the hot head he appeared to be, he wrote very clearly, he stated that I was with Aloe the day it happened, he wrote about my physical abilities and how I am capable of killing people, even outnumbered. On top of all of it, he name drops me at the end of his well written report.

This is bad, even though it is just an accusation, people will buy it before they even look into proof. But I seem to have finally got my single stroke of luck, with the account landing on my desk out of all of the other desks. I have to make sure no one sees this.

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“Hmm I remember setting this on your desk. So, who’s this fingerless bastard?” My manager says as he reads the report from over my shoulder.

It's over, I jumped in reaction to him suddenly being behind me, I had my guard down again and my manager completely snuck behind me. He begins to read the paper out loud, something he does all the time when one of us finds something worth putting into the paper.

“Lucky bastard huh? Killed dozens during the war, and fully capable of killing some royals in a bar, hmm never been injured before?” The Manager summarizes the parts of the account that he finds interesting, and reads them aloud.

I yank the paper out of sight as he starts to get to the end of it, where my name is.

“What the hell are you doing you bastard!” The manager yells at me.

“T-this story is no good!” I yell, unable to hide my nervousness.

“I’ll be the judge of that, hand it over!” The manager orders me.

This isn’t good, I start to crumble the paper before a couple of my coworkers grab me by the arms and force the paper out of my hand.

“Hey! No need to get violent!” Deb yells as she makes her way towards the commotion.

“I swear you vets and your outbursts.” The manager says in a satisfied voice, finally able to express his disdain towards me due to my sudden outburst, something I have never done before.

“The name of this lucky bastard, and traitor to the royal family…” The manager pauses as he looks at me with a shocked look, “Zebedee Levin” He says out loud as his gaze shifts to my hand.

“N-no.” I stutter, unable to conjure an excuse, or defend myself.

The room goes silent, as if they are unsure how to react, everyone looks at my hand in an attempt to see if I am missing a finger.

“H-hey, this guy has a fake finger! Look!” The coworker holding my right arm raises it and yanks the prosthetic finger from my hand, revealing my missing finger.

Half the office lets out a huge gasp, and the other half is silent in shock.

“Z-Zee, that is just from the war right?” Deb says, in denial of the reality of the situation.

It is only now that I realized I should have never come back to work, I should have listened to Aloe’s warning. Trying to cling onto the boringly average life I led was always a pipe dream, and wearing a prosthetic was a dumb plan, one that I am sure Bastion already knew was dumb, but for some reason went along with. Thoughts of what my life will be from now on start to flash in my mind, If I will be sent to the infamous Fortress D’if or if I will be put to death, as those are the only two possibilities for a traitor of the royal family. For some reason I want to accept it all, I don’t want to struggle any more, I belonged either behind bars or dead before all of these accusations, for everything I did during The War.

“Yeah, I am the third person, I am a traitor to the royal family.” I say, no longer nervous or stuttering, but entirely resolute.

The room is silent again, I look towards Deb who is shocked with everyone else but has a hint of worry in her expression.

“S-someone get the cops here!” The manager screams.

Thinking back to the last couple weeks, I see the new people I met, to the resurfacing of my urges, and ultimately to Angela. Did she really have something to do with this? Would she be so cruel to the point of ordering the death of two of her sisters, and others who thought fondly of her? Can I go away and be satisfied with never knowing why this all happened? I never thought I would see her again, and now I am about to be arrested for her kidnapping, and a plot I had nothing to do with. This isn't fair, I realize that now, but what can I do? Kill all my coworkers? It would be easy, but just because some of them are assholes to me doesn’t justify their deaths, I would have nothing to cling onto a supposed innocence, like during The War, when I was ordered to kill. Is my own well being enough to justify what I want to do?

“Oh this is big! We might get paid big bucks for turning you in.” The manager starts to brag.

Suddenly I get the chills, I look towards Deb again, she is still shocked, but I can see now that she must really care about me for some reason. This really isn’t fair. These people don’t care about justice, they only care about how full their pockets are.

“Deb…” I call out.

“Y-yeah?” Deb answers my call, a hint of fear in her voice.

“Thanks for trying to be my friend. I am sorry, but you had the wrong idea about me.” I say as I plunge my fist into the mouth of my manager, teeth fly out into the open air.

The manager falls back and holds his mouth as blood begins to leak between his fingers and down his chin. I pick up a pen, ready to plunge it into his neck, I walk towards him and he crawls backwards on the floor in an attempt to get away from me. Everyone is standing around, reaching a new level of shock, unable to move or stand against me, I am no longer their silent coworker. No, I am now a murderer in their eyes. They all know that I am gonna kill the manager, but they instinctively know that they can do nothing about it, so they just stand there, waiting for it to happen.

“Zee stop!” The voice of Deb, the only person that has been kind to me in this job, calls out to me.

The sound of her voice is desperate, and for some reason when I hear her call out to me, I realize that I cannot kill the manager, this is not justified, no matter how shitty he is to me. Before I know it I am bursting through the exit and running through the familiar hall towards the building exit. The muffled screams of my manager telling them to catch me and to not let me get away can be heard throughout the whole hallway, but I continue running, and no one follows me. I emerge onto the street only about fifteen minutes after I arrived at work and I look towards the direction I came from, back towards the home of Bastion, but I know I can’t lead anyone back there. I only have one place to go, and that is my own home.

I start running down the street as I hear someone call out to me, I look back and see Deb yelling at me from the window of our office.

“Zebedee! Thank you for being friends with my Paul!” She shouts out to me from the window.

Suddenly I remember back to a conversation I had with Paul, my young friend from the war, even if it was for a brief time near the end of the war. That conversation I had with Paul back then, when we were both writing letters, He talked about his sister being his only family, and he told me that he was writing to his sister about me, saying that I am his first ever friend, and that he was excited for his sister to finally know that he was capable of having friend. He did mention her name, but I guess that didn’t really stick with me, but now I know why she was being nice to me this whole time.

Deb starts to cry, finally able to speak to me as the friend of her brother, not just the nonchalant veteran she worked with. I don’t say anything back to her, I don’t know what I could even say, I just turn and continue running as the memory of Paul’s demise enters my mind again, the gruesomeness of it, just like me, the world was unfair to Paul. Tears flow down my cheeks and along with my hurried footsteps, I can hear my own whimpers, and I am unable to stop them for once.

Where did it all go wrong? Why do people like me and Paul have to suffer the unjust and unfair nature of this world? Why… just why?