Anne sat in her room with a laptop open on her desk. With several windows for two separate CAD programs, open on her laptop.

She was working on the latest contract to fall into the lap of her little mom and pop magic-crafting company.  Looking through some troublesome product designs that she’d been sent by a certain electronics company. Working to make them gremlin proof.

She had been doing so for the last twenty-two hours and seemed to be making little headway in understanding why the game console seemed to randomly spew out an evil little girl with no eyes and a hankering for human souls, from its connected monitor, every three hundredth time it was turned on.

Once the project was done and she and her team were finished with it, she’d come away from it with a cool $300,000 dollars, which split between her staff and her, according to the company’s pay structure. would mean Anne making around $60,000 from the job…$45,000 after taxes and overhead, which was still fairly good for a minor troubleshooting gig.

Normally this kind of job would be right up her alley, but right now Anne couldn’t concentrate. She’d started off being furious, then she’d gotten sad and shamefully teary-eyed. Now she just felt blah, a feeling of ennui sweeping through and draining away all her motivation.

“Clancy...you idiot.”

Sometimes, it was like no matter what one did...one still ended up being misunderstood. The points one was trying to make and the feelings behind them never seeming to bridge the gap between what was in one’s head and what one was trying to get across.

Even if you’d known the other person for forever, even if the two of you seemed to generally be on the same wavelength. Even if you literally shared headspace between one another, your thoughts and theirs, your soul and theirs, being linked by a metaphysical connection.

Even with all that, you could still find yourself trying to talk to them, speaking slowly as if to a small child or an obnoxious tourist, and still see them not getting what you were trying to say.

“Stupid! Stupid!...Argh…”

Anne went over the fight in her head, not sure whether she was more mad at Clancy or mad at herself.

All this time she’d figured that Clancy understood that while she could accept that the nature of his profession was dangerous in and off itself, she would not accept him taking extra risks with his life.

One stray bullet, one stray spell, one unaccounted for mass of muscle, scales, stingers and teeth that was allowed to sneak up on him for an end of the film jumpscare, and their life together would be over just like that.

She knew the man was good at what he did, but no one bats a thousand, eventually he would make mistakes.

Or rather forget eventually, she’d seen what happened when Clancy screwed up, she’d watched him come home with the kind of gruesome crippling injuries, that would get normal men discharged from the service.

The kind of injuries that could result in a Foundation representative coming over with a blown up photo from his membership card, the first check from his life insurance policy payout, and their condolences.

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She’d always remember the day, that he’d come through their front door in a wheel, with everything from his waist below, just missing. She’d recall standing in the hallway that separated the living room from the kitchen, with a phone in her hand, and secretary from one of the Foundation’s dedicated hospitals informing her that they’d seemed to have misplaced her boyfriend. Who till just a day ago had been too utterly damaged to be identified as more than a John Doe.

That was one time where she chose not to have it out with the man, just keeping her anxieties and upset over the incident bottled up.

Even with all this, the man still thought it was a question of “how much” he risked himself, which to be fair was partly true because the whole job was a risk. He was working for an organization that initially viewed him as more of liability and a target to be contained than anything else. Gallivanting through the countless highly dangerous, highly volatile alternate realities of the monochrome.

Anne would spend sleepless night, sitting making all these designs for armors and weapons and talismans and potions, anything to keep himself, anything to keep her from having to think about exactly how much trouble he was getting himself into.

But for the most part he’d usually either not use what she made for him or he’d say it was better off being put on the market to help their income.

Which in her head made absolutely no sense, since she would have figured that keeping her reckless other-half alive was a marked protection of “half” the couple’s income.

So he’d turn down most of her attempts to help him, saying that he could handle it, and that he was using the danger to push himself and other nonsense to that end.

Which she’d swallow because what else could she do, she couldn’t sit on his chest and stay there, till he did what she told him to. That would be nuts. And he’d probably just get turned on, because everything turned the man on, he “was” a lust-type caster after all, which wouldn’t really help.

Honestly, while it was true that the line between significant other and parental guardian figure might sometimes blur, the simple fact was, that a wife was not a mom.

Clancy was a big boy and some things she’d accepted that there were some thing that she just had to let him decide on his own.

What got her, what really set her off, was that he was making all these decisions and then on top of it, he’d decide to go and take more risks.

Worse risks, with worse odds where he was tired and under-equipped and usually wounded in some capacity.

All done for the sake of helping them “make end’s meet”. She’d tried gently telling him not to do it, and he still did it anyway. She tried not so gently telling him not to do it, and he still did it anyway.

She called his friend, Dennis, and told him to keep an eye on the man and remind him he had a girlfriend at home who’d be fairly pissed if he still took his hands into his life for the sake of a few extra thousand dollars that they could definitely either make up elsewhere or save by cutting back their costs a little and he still did it anyway.

Then a week ago, he gets kidnapped by some random wicked-witch wannabe who was playing with summoning spells and while Anne would admit that this probably put her on edge, she knew from their shared headspace it put him on edge too.

She also knew that he knew that she knew, and so he should have known that this would not be the time for taking extra risks since they were both feeling very vulnerable. But what the did the man go and do? He went and did what he always did, taking needless risks, coming back to her beat to hell.

She knew this because he mostly took the dressing down she gave him without too much argument. At least till she said he was acting “just as arrogant as his father”. Which she knew she’d regret saying even as she said it, but was running too hot at the time, to swallow the words back.

Things blew up and now she was all alone in her room, and Clancy was out, wherever, probably doing something rash, for both their sakes. Because he always acted like it was his job to take care of her, when the truth was they were both stuck in this terrible/wonderful, extended twilight episode that they called a life, together.

“....”

Anne sighed, sat up and ducked below her bed, scrounging around looking for her cell phone. At first she considered calling Clancy back so she could apologize and maybe give him a chance to apologize too since she was definitely not the only one who was wrong in this.

Then she decided to call a few other numbers instead, numbers she’d kept at the bottom of her contact list, because she knew of at least one sure-fire way to keep the man safe, and keep them as resource rich as they needed to be to keep their conditions, and the expenses that came with those conditions, from consuming them both.