Cooper
Despite the strangeness Cooper had encountered at Ivan’s office, there were no more acts of lunacy from the universe on the way home. No flying pigs (or flying monkeys, for that matter). No alien entities dropping from the sky.
Cooper wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.
Relieved, definitely. He wouldn’t know what to do with a flying pig if he came across one. Take it to an animal rescue?
He summoned his boldness and asked the driver to stop at the corner of his block so he could head into the bodega. He gathered a few energy drinks and an armful of red licorice packages, plus a box of trash bags, since he was pretty sure he was out. He also ordered a chicken parm hero while he was at it, recognizing the need to eat something real for dinner. Or…lunch? Time was confusing when he’d been sleeping at odd hours, tucked in his workroom. He glanced at the clock—lunch it was.
So he’d eat half for lunch and save half for dinner, and bam, that was two square meals right there. Just like any old real, functioning human.
The guy manning the register knew him and knew Cooper wasn’t much for chatting. He never commented on Cooper’s eyes or said anything about the nutritional value of his purchases, so Cooper had an immense amount of fondness for him.
When the driver dropped him off at his apartment building—he’d insisted on waiting at the corner and dropping Cooper off directly at his building (“Boss’s orders, Coop”)—Cooper nodded to the doorman and headed up, ledgers in one hand and bags from the bodega in the other.
The building Ivan had set him up in was expensive as fuck, Cooper was pretty sure, but it wasn’t fancy in a way that set Cooper’s teeth on edge. The doorman and the guard at the desk were always polite but impersonal, and the other tenants all minded their own business. All in all, it was a pretty good deal for someone who didn’t like leaving the house much.
Once Cooper had unlocked his ten different locks and reset them all behind him, he headed to his workroom, dropping the ledgers in the corner and eyeing the mess.
It was even worse with fresh eyes. His actual work area was fine—the large, L-shaped desk with its monitor, two desktops, and ergonomic keyboard, plus the laptop he kept to the side for convenience. There were a few half-empty energy drinks tucked here and there, but otherwise it was all clean enough.
It was the rest of the room that was the issue. Cooper hated when he got like this, or at least when he had to face the evidence of it. It reminded him too much of his father at the end, before Cooper had realized he needed to move in with him—when his dad had been too sick and drunk to look after himself but too ashamed to ask Cooper for help.
Not like this,umnitsa,his dad had pleaded one night, bleary-eyed and only half-conscious.Don’t—don’t remember me like this.
But what other way was there to remember him? Cooper blinked stinging eyes. He may not have been a drunk—he was too afraid to touch the stuff, considering how his dad had ended up—but he supposed he had his own ways of getting lost in his demons. Focusing too hard on projects and forgetting to take care of himself, for one.
He needed to watch himself, make sure he kept coming up for air. He couldn’t lose it completely, not like that.
He got to work cleaning, which mostly involved stuffing garbage into trash bags and then taking them all to the chute. He did a cursory dusting and vacuum afterward and managed to make it look like a functioning person lived there by the end.
He settled in his cushy computer chair, eyeing his laptop and the message from Rabbit. It was tempting to respond now, but work came first, before he forgot about his tasks.
The false identities would have been fun to tackle, but Cooper needed to get in touch with a contact about social security numbers before he could really begin. He sent the message on a secure network, then swiveled his chair to face the corner, glaring at the ledgers he’d left there.
He really should get started on those. If he left them, he’d never want to tackle the chore. And he only needed to scan them in and send them back to Ivan—it wasn’t like he actually needed to organize the data. Ivan would hire someone else for that part, probably a real accountant. A dirty one.
So Cooper gathered the ledgers and set them on his desk. They were all pretty much identical—big, old-fashioned, leather-bound things—barring the book Nix had reminded him to grab, which was much smaller.
Cooper pulled the scanning app up on his phone and got to work. It was—just as he’d expected—dull as all fuck.
He got through two ledgers, scarfing bites of his sandwich in between pages, before he had to stand and stretch the kinks out of his neck. Just the two books had taken him hours already—the stupid, thick things were full of stupid, thick data.
It was annoying—give him a good project and Cooper could go for more hours than this without even realizing he needed to pee. But give him a mindless task like this and he was painfully aware of every passing minute.
His gaze fell on the one outlier in the group. It wasn’t just smaller than the other but also…pretty, kind of? Definitely designed with more in mind than just function. There were etchings on it, and it looked older than the rest. Cooper set it in front of him and—after making sure his hands were clean, no sandwich drippings to be found—began flipping through the pages, sipping on an energy drink as he did so.
There weren’t any numbers in the thing, which was odd. And the writing wasn’t in any language Cooper had ever seen before. It definitely wasn’t Russian; he knew that much. The book was filled with intricate symbols set across from stanzas that were either ancient or…made up?
Why the fuck would Ivan want this thing digitized? Was this some black-market artifact he was hoping to sell? It wasn’t like he needed the extra cash…
Either way, the symbols were cool to look at. At least it gave Cooper something different to stare at for a while. And it was, what, maybe a hundred pages? He could get through it fast, no problem.
Then he’d reward himself with a break. It wasn’t like Ivan had given him a deadline with these things. It was only that Cooper knew if he didn’t tackle them now, he’d forget they existed when more interesting tasks came along.
He got through the first fifty or so symbols without issue, but then he stopped. The symbol he’d just revealed was…interesting. They were all cool-looking, really, and Cooper wasn’t exactly sure why this one was more entrancing than the others. Maybe the color? It was a bright, golden yellow, and the symbol was a mess of swirling loops, the kind of thing where the eye couldn’t tell where one line ended and the next began.
The longer Cooper’s gaze settled on it, the more it seemed to almost move.
