Chapter 67: 66 Work Can Be Fun

I had to make my own way to work in the morning and Aunt May was a little surprised that I rode part of the way with her on the bus. Of course, I had made breakfast bagel sandwiches again and May had her bribes and I had my own that were still hot inside the thermal bag that was inside my gym bag.

A few people on the bus kept giving us odd looks, probably because we were sitting so close and had an arm around each other, so I started loudly whispering comments and compliments about May. I kept saying things like I loved her, that she was the best thing to ever happen to me, how I thought she was the most beautiful woman on the planet, and that every man in the world was envious of me because I had her in my life.

All of the odd looks had quickly changed to admiration while May's face had become bright red by the time the bus had neared the stop where I had to change buses. I pulled the string to let the bus driver know I was getting off.

“I am going to kill you when I get home.” May whispered when I leaned close and kissed her cheek.

“I love you with all my heart too, dear lady!” I exclaimed and hopped up when the bus stopped. “No one else can compare to you and even the sun itself goes dim when you smile!”

“BEN!” May gasped and blushed even harder as several people made 'aww' sounds.

“Have a wonderful day!” I said and dodged her slap as I ran off the bus. Laughs sounded behind me and I chuckled as I turned and waved to May, who shook her fist at me instead of waving as the bus pulled away.

My bus showed up not long after that and I rode it to the office building with a grin still on my face. The stop was barely half a block away in the opposite direction I normally had a drive, so I would have to remember that in the future, assuming I didn't go and get my license early. I would have to check the minimum age for a beginner's license later.

I entered through the front door of the building and went up to my office to drop off my gym bag and took out the thermal bag, then I rode the elevator down to the administration floor and submitted my clothing reimbursement to Gail in HR before I entered the main administration office.

The woman at the counter smiled at me and let me in without even asking what I was doing there. “Good morning, Ben!”

“Good morning.” I said and opened the thermal bag and she took in a huge sniff automatically.

“What is that?” She asked with an interested look on her face.

“Homemade breakfast bagels.” I responded. I wasn't surprised that she didn't comment about the bump on the side of my head, considering it was mostly covered with my hair.

“You better have enough to pass around or I'm kicking you out.” She warned me with a crooked smile.

I chuckled and held the bag out to her. “Check it out for yourself and get them while they're hot.”

She looked in and saw how many of them I had. “You're actually sharing them? I was just joking.”

“I brought them in for you all because I know how hard you work.” I said as the other secretaries gathered around. “Just leave four of them for the computer department.”

Their hands quickly dove into the thermal bag and they grabbed one each.

“This better be real bacon I smell or you're going to regret it.” Another woman said with a fake glare.

“It is crisped to perfection.” I said and looked inside the bag to see that there were six left. “There's two more available to...”

The first woman dipped both hands into the bag and took them. “We have knives in the break room.”

I nodded and closed the bag before I walked across the secretarial pool and over to the door to go to the mainframe room. I went down the hallway and pushed the panel to open the scanner.

I put my hand on it and spoke. “Agent 111A.”

The door buzzed and clicked. I pushed it open and Kelly let out a gasp when she saw me.

“Guess who is available all morning to work for you?” I asked and she let out a squeal of delight. “I have breakfast bagels for...”

“I don't care!” Kelly said and grabbed the thermal bag from me and handed it to one of the guys before she dragged me over to a spare terminal. “I'll be right back!”

She disappeared out the main door and the guy holding the bag gave me a questioning look.

“You can have one each and leave the other two, because you know she's going to realize later what she ignored in her haste.” I said, wisely.

The two guys chuckled and started chowing down on their bagel sandwiches after giving me nods of approval and thanks.

Kelly returned with a literal armful of stacks of papers and carefully put them down on the desk beside the terminal I sat in front of. She explained that I was to enter the numbers, even if they didn't have decimal points, and I was to add a decimal point and two zeros for those entries to keep activating the macro and it would move on to the next entry.

I nodded and she showed me how to log in with my own agent number, set my password, and I went to work. I wasn't surprised when she held a hand out to the two guys and one of them handed her the thermal bag. She opened it and let out a hungry sound and started eating a bagel while she observed me.

I was pretty sure Kelly watched to ensure that my assessment hadn't been a fluke and I quickly proved to her that it wasn't. The longer numbers slowed my entry per minute down slightly and she seemed okay with that, because I burned through the top sheet before she finished chewing up her second bite of the bagel sandwich in her hand. She nodded and went back to her own terminal to continue working and she typed with one hand as she ate with the other.

I was done just over two hours later and typed in the end code to complete the assigned task. “Kelly, I'm done.”

“It's way too early to take a lunch break, Ben. Keep working until...”

“I'm not taking a break. I meant that I entered all of the numbers.” I interrupted her and all three of the workers stopped what they were doing, marked their places, and turned around to stare at me. The surprised looks on their faces was a neat sight to see, because each of the stacks of papers Kelly had given me were now all upside down. I had flipped each page over after entering the numbers on them.

Kelly came over to my terminal and used her own access code before she checked over the entry logs and then she started laughing. It wasn't a full blown belly laugh or anything, though. It was just a soft and constant laugh that lasted for about thirty seconds while she browsed the massive amount of data I had entered for her.

“Ben, if I was even a little bit amoral, I would be very tempted to kiss you right now.” Kelly said in a serious voice. “I'm going to call you every single time we get another stack of data like this to enter into the computers.”

“I'm sure it wasn't that impressive.” I said and she huffed.

“You just did a full day's work in about two hours.” Kelly said. “That's only a quarter of the time.”

“Okay, maybe it's a little impressive.” I admitted. That was a good compression rate.

“That's for all three of us.” Kelly said and motioned to the two men in her department. “We split large data packages like this between us, like we did during your assessment, and it usually takes us all day to get through it.”

I wasn't sure what to say in response to that.

“So, yes. It's impressive. I can also see why HR didn't want to assign you specifically to me, because you would be sitting around and not doing much for a good portion of the day.”

I nodded in agreement.

“What department were you going to visit next?” Kelly asked as she gathered the papers up again.

“There's almost two hours left before lunch, so I could probably visit R&D or the robotics lab.”

“R&D won't want you hanging around, unless you can help them with something.” Kelly said.

“Or give them another project to work on, which means I'm probably going to the robotics lab.” I said and logged out from the terminal before I stood and retrieved my thermal bag.

Kelly walked me over to the door and paused as she looked at me. “Thank you for choosing to come here first.”

“I remember someone saying they would beg to have me assigned to her department.” I said and smiled. “I didn't want to disappoint them, so as soon as I had some free time, I came right here.”

Kelly smiled back and hit a button to buzz the lock on the door and it clicked before she opened it for me. “I'm glad you have your priorities straight.”

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I chuckled and nodded to her as I left. I had been tempted to offer my cheek for her to kiss, then thought better of it. Her words about being amoral enough to do it, had given me pause. Not for the implication that she was stricter with her own moral choices; but, for the fact that my brain had come up with several scenarios for me to see just how far away from her normal morals I could take her.

As I passed through the secretarial pool, I waved and said goodbye to the women there and left the administration office. The elevator ride down to the floor with the robotics lab seemed short and I stepped off to go to the lab. I didn't knock or anything, because that could bother someone in the middle of an experiment or at the important part of a critical calculation.

I had to smile when I saw my improvised AT-ST being used as a paperweight on the department head's desk. “Good morning, sir.”

The man smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Parker. What brings you into my bailiwick?”

“I have spare time this morning until lunch. Are there any projects that need an extra brain cruncher to assist?” I asked and the smile on his face grew.

“How are you at quadratic equations?”

“I've read two college level books on the subject and one was centered on advanced mechanics.”

“Then you need to come with me.” He said and stood to lead me out of his office and towards another area. “We're having a problem with the updated computer system on our latest VTOL, or vertical take off and landing Quinjet transport. For some reason, the rotary blades of the five turbojet engines used for the main lift are out of sync and Harris can't track the fault in either the coding or the physical engines themselves.”

“I can't promise to be anything except another pair of eyes to look for the problem, sir. The most experience I've had with birds like that is seeing a couple of the operation reports and the pretty pictures of the outside.”

The man chuckled and opened a door that had a mechanics shop behind it and a partially stripped Quinjet. “Then you are about to get a crash course on the main systems we use.”

“Sir, please don't use terminology like that.” A man's voice said from inside part of the fuselage.

“Harris, I've brought someone to check your work.” The department head said and Harris sighed.

“Yes, sir. I understand.” Harris said and poked his head out through the hole where one of the engines was supposed to be. “You can either crawl in here and ruin your nice suit or I can just describe everything and you can see it for yourself later.”

I chuckled and took off my coat, flicked it to have it flare out and it floated over to land almost perfectly on the back of one of the chairs at the large workbench. “The agency reimburses suit purchases.”

Harris gave me a genuine smile and moved back to let me crawl in through the hole with him.

“You two have fun and let me know if you find anything.” The department head said with a laugh and walked away.

An hour and a half later, Harris and I were both covered in more grease and fluids than should have been possible, and we had worked out the problem. Or, I should say problems. The head of the department looked quite pleased to hear the explanation.

“It never occurred to me that it could be a combination of both.” Harris said and scratched the side of his head. “The computer was sending the wrong signal to the rotary control and the physical mechanism on the third lift engine stuttered because it was wired backwards.”

“Wait, you don't mean just on this Quinjet, do you? You mean all of the third engines are cross-wired?” The department head asked, surprised.

“Yes, sir. Ben and I have already checked another bird remotely in the main deployment hangar from... ahem... you know where.” Harris said and gave me a side-eyed glance.

I smirked at him. “If you mean from the Helicarrier, I'm in the know of that particular not-so-secret secret.”

“Of course you are.” The department head said with a chuckle. “How can they all be wired wrong?”

“It was a manufacturing error in the transmitted plans to one particular contractor.” Harris said and handed his boss the dirty laptop with the tracked results on it. “Ben helped me navigate through the mainframe to get the order forms for that model of rotary engine and where it came from.”

The department head looked at the information. “I can see that. Good work, both of you.”

“Thank you, sir.” We both said.

“Now, can you explain why they all ended up being the third engine in each Quinjet being produced?”

“Procedure, sir.” Harris said with a chuckle. “When the first bird was assembled, they marked down where each part number was assigned in the plans and kept it there.”

The department head blinked his eyes at us for several seconds and looked surprised. “Are you telling me that the damn build crews are sorting the identical engines and putting them in order and in the exact same spot in each Quinjet that's produced?”

“Yes, sir.” Harris said and hit a key on the laptop to show him. “Their meticulousness is going to help immensely in this case, because we only have to tear out the secondary hull to get at the third engine and not take the entire vehicle apart to look for the engine we need to fix.”

The man's mouth opened and closed several times, then he closed it with a snap, nodded to us, and walked away with a determined look on his face.

“I think someone is getting a new asshole torn today for not triple checking the damaged engine's construction.” I whispered.

Harris barked a laugh and nodded. “You better go get cleaned up if you're going to spend lunch with a certain mysterious beauty, Ben. You can't keep women like her waiting.”

I nodded back and wiped my hands off on a rag that hung from his pocket, grabbed my suit coat, and walked away at a fast pace. I had an important lunch to get to and I wasn't going to disappoint her.

*

Melinda left her small office after she had spent a little extra time freshening up her make-up and added a bit more of a wave to her hair. She was sure that she would catch Ben as he noticed the difference, even if he didn't mention it. He seemed to observe everything around him when he entered a room and she recognized the practice as one she used herself.

She couldn't help but notice how fluidly he moved and how his muscles looked under his stylish shirts. She knew he worked out between his training sessions and she was quite tempted to follow him and see where he did his workouts. Her curiosity about that distracted her just enough to keep her mind off of what she had gone through.

Melinda had always believed that taking any life would always cause a reciprocated karmic strike, even though she had committed a lot of similar acts previously. Taking the life of a child, even an extremely dangerous one, weighed heavily on her heart and her mind. Well, it had until recently.

She had dozens of people tell her over the last few months that she had done the right thing and even Director Fury himself had chimed in. She didn't believe them, because they were just words that they used to try and ease her guilt over the horrendous act that she had perpetrated and to keep her as an agent. The words didn't really mean anything to her and didn't affect her... until Ben told her what he did.

Ben admitted to her that he had committed four murders, as if it was nothing, during a supposedly normal conversation over lunch. It was a shock to her at the time, especially because he hadn't... not once... said the same words that everyone else had said to her. He didn't placate her, he didn't coddle her, and he didn't tell her that everything would be okay eventually.

It had been such a refreshing encounter that it had stuck in Melinda's mind like a catchy song that you couldn't stop playing in your thoughts. She had sought Ben out to see if he had just been grandstanding or had faked his nonchalance about everything, then they started talking about food and she ended up having a great time shopping with him and shared her thoughts on cooking.

She had even gone home with him to meet his family and hadn't once had her mood ruined by stray thoughts about the day she almost quit SHIELD or about what she had done. Her mind was once again hers and it wasn't plagued with doubt, uncertainty, or the darkness that had threatened to consume her completely.

Melinda was broken out of her thoughts when a freshly showered figure dressed in a stylish suit approached her. “Should I ask you what you've been up to on your supposed morning off?”

Ben's eyes quickly roamed over her in a searching way, and not a lewd way, before he gave her a warm smile. “You know that old saying about getting into something by burying yourself into it up to your elbows?” He asked and she nodded. “I was into something all the way down to my ankles.”

Melinda couldn't stop her smile from both his comment and that he had noticed her sight alterations to her appearance. “I know it wasn't with a woman, because the rumor mill has upgraded us from dating to being engaged.”

“We haven't even made an appearance at lunch and it's already at that stage?” Ben barked a laugh. “How many times have we broken up?”

“Only once, then you smartened up and realized how great I am.” Melinda said, smugly.

Ben laughed and held an elbow out for her to take. “At least they got one thing right.”

Melinda blushed a little as she accepted his escort offer and slipped her arm through his. She knew what part he meant and the genuineness of the compliment touched her deeply.

“Have you decided when are we having an epic fight to break off the engagement?” Ben asked her with amusement on his face as they entered the cafeteria.

“I'll let you know sometime next year.” Melinda said, teasingly.

Ben laughed and a lot of people looked over at them as the talking and muttering became loud. They chose their food delicately for health and a balanced diet before they went to a relatively empty table and sat down to enjoy some more conversation.

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