This was a prompt-fill type thing I did on Tumblr yesterday like a chump instead of working on my resbang. Rated T for language and vague implied morning wood, I guess.

Firecracker

She drops a towering stack of papers the height of your brother on your desk. "You did all of these wrong and I expect you to stay late to correct it all, Evans."

You are so eating her banana bread she's been hiding in the back of the breakroom fridge during lunch.

Look, you admit you'd be judgmental at first too, if some new hire showed up in your office with almost no prior experience for the job whose brother was head of HR of the company. At first. But you are, you'd like to think, a decent human being, who can amend first impressions with the phrase 'maybe I was wrong, and you're alright'.

So you can understand why your boss, Maka Albarn, who had scraped her way to her position in the company with her bare hands, had given you the stink-eye the moment you were shown your desk. But you landed this job by accident, not by your brother's influence– you had applied for the IT job, not the cube farm.

You knew that interview had been just a little weird, and it should have tipped you off– How are your phone-answering skills? Fine, you guess, it's not rocket science. Do you know your way around spreadsheets? Who doesn't? Can you use a fax machine? You've been fixing fax machines since you could reach the printer tray, what of it?

And when they called to inform you'd been hired, your vision swam with beautiful, shimmery sunshine daydreams of strolling around the building, restarting computers and playing with code, snoozing in the server room when you had nothing to do. Easy money and plenty of free time… but no.

Somehow you've become a desk monkey.

And your boss, who you're pretty sure is three years younger than you just to make you that much more irritated, hates your guts with the strength of an exploding firecracker warehouse, which is what her eyes look like when she's mad. Her eyes ignite you, and it would be so much easier to write her off as the pain-in-the-ass boss if that disdainful look didn't warp in your dreams and make trying to take a morning piss a fucking circus when you wake up.

It's not your fault you were hired for mindless data entry because someone saw your last name on the application and didn't want to get on HR's bad side. You hate her and her firecracker eyes. But she makes good banana bread. You leave teeth marks in the loaf so she knows exactly who did it.

She slaps a horribly familiar mountain of files on your desk. "I've told you a hundred times, Evans," she says, your name flying off her tongue like a winter-day loogie, "you need to initial every correction. I want this before 4:30."

She's having a bad day. The fact that you have learned how to interpret her various levels of bitch to determine this makes you wither in your uncomfortable desk monkey chair. Her bangs are in her face, her lipstick has made it to her teeth, and there's a poorly-Tide-penned bloom of ink on her front blazer pocket, where you can tell she tried to get rid of it but gave up halfway.

She wobbles away in her heels because her feet are tired but she refuses to exchange them for flats because she hates feeling shorter than everyone else. Kilik slinks out of sight behind his cubicle when she heads his way.

Maka's rampage of the cubefarm is detrimental to your productivity. You're finally just starting to get the hang of this stupid job– you can answer the phone and play Plague Inc simultaneously, answering questions and infecting Greenland like a badass. But you can't concentrate on viruses and insurance claims when everyone is fucking up the fax machine in terror. She's breathing fire down the necks of everyone in the office, and Tsugumi is too terrified to deliver the mail.

And now the file-mountain. You're only a third down the stack of files when you sigh and consult your last resort. You shoot a text to Wes, head of HR and therefore head of dealing with the very human side of office hellions.

[[wats best way 2 distract the Albarn? Shes gonna level claims in 15 if she dont chill]]

The reply is almost instant.

[[She's a romantic.]]

You squint over your cube wall, eyeing the tiny stray hairs that have come loose from her ponytail floating along the ocean of cubicle-horizon like a shark circling her next victim.

[[no way]]

[[Fact. Give her something to swoon over. Or you could mention her dad but I assume you want to live.]]

Oh, right. Spirit Albarn's been making tabloids again. [[thx]], you reply, but what are you supposed to do, hit on her? You'd rather get leveled.

[[How's the bread?]], Wes asks.

[[im having withdrawls and im mad]]

It's cliche, but romantics typically are cliche, probably. Right? Hell, you don't know. But if you were wearing a skirt that tight all day you'd probably appreciate some flowers from a secret admirer. Maybe. Actually you'd appreciate a pizza but that doesn't sound swoon-worthy, so.

The bouquet delivery cost more than half a day's work, so these overpriced roses better fucking work or you're going back on banana bread detail (which you had put on hold the past week because your waistline was getting alarmingly snug). The roses' color was called 'candy corn', white and yellow and orange all swirled together in each bloom, and you told the florist, who was giggling so much you wanted to throw yourself off the building, what to write in the love letter. But when Tsugumi had hesitated to deliver the bouquet on the mail cart, you realized the damned florist had put your name on the card because you're the one who bought it.

You distracted Tsugumi by telling her Anya had been checking her out all day, and that she should go and ask her out again because you've known Anya since you were twelve and she's too inept to understand social protocol, like calling someone back after a date. It was a lie, but you don't think it'll end poorly so who cares?

With Tsugumi out of sight and a quick prayer to god that no one is looking, you snatch the card in the bouquet, copy its purple prose contents you dug up from the most candy corny part of the internet to a sheet of printer paper, and sign it Secret Admirer, because that's how cliches go, probably. You shove it into a dumb-looking blank business envelope, stuff it between the roses, and make a mad dash for lunch, though you're not sure why.

You wonder if your desire to run away is because, maybe, you don't want to see Albarn's face when she reads the message and thinks it's real. But that's stupid, seeing as you hate her. You push all thoughts of your boss away and order an overpriced cheeseburger in the company cafe.

Nothing changes when you come back from lunch. Or rather, there is no improvement with the advent of flowers, and Albarn is thirty times worse than before. 4:30 comes and goes, people fleeing for safety while you're stuck scribbling your initials on all these god damn files you fucked up. You're going to enjoy the next six months of banana bread and you are going to sneak to HR and put scotch tape over all the sensors of the infrared mice in Wes's office for him giving you such shitty advice.

It's a quarter after six when you finish, and Albarn is still in her office, which you weren't expecting– though, you suppose, it's probably not much of a surprise. The woman fits every inch of the workaholic profile. Dropping the stack of files on her desk for a change is more than slightly satisfying. The look on her face when she sees it is a triumph in your life.

"I believe you have to sign off on all the corrections."

But damn, she looks like she's been scraped off the bottom of a boot. "Thank you," she says, pulling a stamp out of her desk on auto-pilot and flipping through each file, hunting for your signature, and stamping next to it.

This surprises you. "What, not gonna check to see if everything's right?"

"You typically don't make the same mistake twice. Except for your goddamn signature, for some reason."

"A-ah. Yeah." Should you thank her for being acknowledged? Probably not. "Sorry." As you wait for her approval, you glance around for the flowers. You bite down on your tongue when you see those expensive 'candy corn' petals swirled together haphazardly in her trash can.

That's half a days work. You are instantly enraged. You want to bring it up, except you shouldn't because you'll probably give yourself away. But your money is candy corning in her garbage. "Those look expensive," you grit out in your most bored tones.

Albarn glances up and sees where you're looking. She harrumphs. "From my father." What. "He's always trying to buy my love. Waste of time and money."

"Your dad sends you roses?" you blurt, incredulous.

"Mm. Though this is certainly the smallest arrangement he's ever sent."

That fucking banana bread is yours for all time. "H-how can you be sure? You didn't even open the note."

Maka slaps shut the last file and levels you with eyes that don't have a single hint of firecrackers. "Who else would send me flowers, Evans?"

It's then you realize that your romantic boss's life must be pretty sad if she lives every day with the thought of zero romantic prospects as default. You almost say something encouraging, but you don't actually know how to do that, and also you stand a good chance at blowing your cover, so you drawl, "Fair point," to stay in character.

She rolls her eyes pushes the stack of files back to you to put away.

You feel like an asshole. Before you think too much about it, you walk over to the trash and extract the business envelope with its cellophane window giving a preview to the '-mirer' at the bottom of the love letter, and toss it on Albarn's desk.

When she scowls at you, you scowl right back. "Tsugumi was terrified of you today. Anya had to give her a pep talk for her to deliver your mail– the least you can do is read it," you say, grabbing the stack of files and leaving her in her office.

Knowing her, she'd probably just thrown the letter right back in the trash. The next two weeks are as hellish as usual, though every now and then you notice Albarn catches herself in the middle of a rant, awkwardly throwing in an unexpected compliment or short bit of praise to take the edge off. She's especially conscious around Tsugumi, and before the second week is out they're practically best friends. You want to barf.

Well. The eating is good, anyway. Kilik's bitched at you for your banana burps but once you slip him a slice of a loaf, he shuts up. It's stellar shit.

It's lunch break on a Friday– about the only time in the week where the glimmer of hope on the horizon is enough to keep the office in high spirits– and your arm navigates around coffee creamer bottles and month-old Chinese takeout containers to that foil-wrapped holy grail Albarn keeps hidden wedged between orange juice and Italian dressing.

The room is empty. The stars have aligned. You unwrap the glorious banana bread of heaven and take a mondo-sized bite right out of the heel of the loaf, where the sugar gets all crunchy and caramelized on the edges.

Then, things go wrong.

"Hello Evans," Satan herself says, poking her head around the fridge door just as your mouth begins to catch fire. "I changed my recipe a little bit. I'm glad to see you approve."

Chili flakes. All the walnuts have been replaced with chili flakes. You can not eat spicy food. On a scale from wuss to ghost pepper salsa, you make a wuss look like death metal.

Your eyes hurriedly flit to the shelves of the fridge door– there's no milk.

You turn to the breakroom's sink. There's a paper taped to the faucet, 'out of order' notarized by a smiley face.

Your desk has a stash of water bottles now.

It's been a shitty day. You order pizza and have it delivered to the cube farm because you need to be romantic to yourself. It's nearly 7:00pm and you can not, for all the love in the world, get through this beheaded-hydra-stack of insurance claims.

This is when Maka Albarn shrieks bloody murder in her office. It's not the angry kind of shriek, but the kind that gives you chills– you've never heard your boss be scared before, so you run to her office and surge through the door.

There are papers falling off her desk and onto the floor, and you watch as Maka pulls the case door off her smoking computer and sticks her hands inside.

"What the fuck, stop–" you yell, hurrying to her desk and pulling her blazer off the back of her chair. You beat the smoking motherboard with it, smothering the tiny fire.

Then you realize she's chanting, "–the hard drive, the hard drive, the drive the drive GET THE DRIVE," and she tries to go for it again, but the wires are hot and she pulls her fingers away, hissing and desperate.

You don't know how to make words yet, so you wave her hands away and simply growl until you can. "STOP. Idiot."

The two of you stand in awkward silence, eyeing the still-smoking computer-guts.

"Fuck," she says, and it's the first time you've heard such a small person drop an F-bomb. "I had compiled everything the office has done today... It's gone."

"What? You should have backups, though."

She shakes her head, slowly coming to a defeated seat in her executive chair. "Backups don't run until I log out. Everything is slow if it runs while I'm working."

She's doing that thousand-yard stare thing, but you just twist your mouth a little and eye her desktop computer. "The hard drive wasn't on fire. Maybe I can pull something off it. Lemme plug it into my machine."

Albarn blinks, owl-eyed, and squeaks, "Excuse me?"

"Do you know what you're doing?" she says, curled up in your shitty desk chair. She's already expertly worked all the levers to tilt it to her liking, as if she's been well acquainted with shitty desk monkey chairs long before you were.

You steal a SATA cable from Kilik's machine so you can plug Maka's hard drive into your computer. "I didn't actually apply for this department. I apped to IT but I guess someone fucked up when they realized I was Wes's brother and I got shoved here even though I had no experience." You fiddle with the boot order and look up from the floor to see your boss's desktop eventually appear on your monitor. There are seven million too many icons and you shoot her a disgusted look over your shoulder.

She's got firecrackers in her eyes again, face filled with relief. Looking at you, she asks, "Are you a genius?"

You scoff. "No, I'm just actually working with things I know how to use. As opposed to signing my name next to my mistakes."

A tiny laugh bubbles up her throat and shit. You've never seen her laugh with anyone except Tsugumi at the Keurig.

"Wait, so why did you stay if you didn't apply for this job?" she asks.

Your mouth opens, but an answer doesn't immediately come out of it. Why had you stayed?

"I-I don't know. You yelled at me, and I don't like to suck. Doesn't matter where I work right now, I just need cash while I'm going to school," you mutter, rubbing the back of your head. You scoot out of the way, so she can sit properly at your desk. "All yours."

She doesn't immediately get to work, instead watching you with careful eyes. She takes a quick breath. "I apologize. I… uh–" She can't keep eye contact for long, apparently. One hand comes up to fiddle with her loose bangs. "I should have known better than to… well. You know. Make assumptions. Sorry." She gives you a shy glance. "I was wrong– you're probably an alright guy, Evans."

Your mouth goes dry.

You end up walking her to her car in covered parking, though she assures you she can beat the shit out of anyone who might attack her. She's won awards.

"Thanks for staying, though. My luck would make your computer explode the moment you left."

You shrug. "Thanks for helping me finish that pizza." She laughs again, and it echoes in the parking garage. You suddenly want to run into a concrete pillar and pretend you never heard such a thing in resonant surround-sound.

Once she's in her little Hyundai, she rolls down the window and says, "Hey, I can fill out a request to have you moved to another department, if you want."

You blink. "You can do that?"

"I am a manager, believe it or not."

"That'd be… really cool." At least, you're pretty sure it'd be cool. The IT department is on a different floor of the building, though. Different breakroom. Which reminds you, as she's rolling her window back up– "Hey, Albarn!"

"Yeah?"

"Sorry for eating all your banana bread."

She gives you a glare, but it's not at all like the ones she's given you up til now. "If you wanted me to make you some, you should have just asked," she says, backing out of her manager's parking spot. You smile despite yourself, and she returns it.

Then she says, "I'll have the form on your desk in the morning," as she drives away, and the smile flies off your face.

There's a mini loaf with the department transfer request form. You don't know what to do with either of them.

In the afternoon, she calls you to her office.

You shut the door behind you. "…'Sup?"

She doesn't greet you, just gestures to a file on her desk. You've worked on it a few times, before, and she's opened it to one of your corrections. You watch as she places a sheet of printer paper next to it.

The way you scribble your 'S' is uniquely ugly, both for your first initial and for 'Secret Admirer'.

"Did you mean it?" she asks, face and voice so neutral that it makes your gut sink.

She has singled you out and persecuted you, mistakenly thinking that your big-wig brother had landed you this job, but you think, this time, you probably deserve whatever wrath she has in her tiny body. Even if being her secret admirer might be a lot closer to true now than it had been when you ordered that damned bouquet she'd thrown away, Maka Albarn has only just recently seen you for you and not who she thought you were. To have those firecracker eyes trained on you so unerringly, without misconceptions, makes you unable to lie.

You sigh, shoulders slumping. "I asked my brother how to distract you so you would stop terrorizing the entire department."

And the worst part is that she looks as if she'd expected this. Not just from you, but from literally anyone in this world, and you watch the fire in her eyes go out, smothered by her lack of surprise.

She dismisses you with a tiny wave of her hand.

The banana bread goes to Kilik and you fill out the transfer form, signing your name at the bottom with a grimace.

The IT department is a lot harder than you thought it would be, mostly because the majority of people in this company are computer illiterate old farts who don't know how to open email attachments. Between work and night school, you manage to avoid Maka Albarn for a good while.

But one day you're called to a floor you've never been on, presumably because some old-fart user probably couldn't find the power button on his Ipad. Except it's not. Of course it isn't.

She's on the phone when she sees you, and something passes in her face that you can't read. She waves you in, working on ending her call. It smells like burned plastic.

"How do you keep managing to explode things?"

Maka tosses her phone on her desk. "I don't know, alright? Everything I touch just catches on fire."

"Like banana bread," you say without a single ounce of thought, hand slapping over your mouth.

She cough-laughs in surprise. "Well. You deserved it. Though I, um, didn't think you would throw up all over the breakroom, to be honest." She scoots her chair out of your way.

"Yeah," you groan, looking inside her computer case. You shake your head at its scorched contents. "I hope you backed up your shit this time."

"I don't make the same mistake twice."

Your insides twist a little. "Ah," you say, poking around the wires with the end of a pen-light. "Nice office, by the way."

"Promotion."

"Congratulations."

Her voice is lifeless. "Thanks. Apparently productivity goes up when I don't terrorize everyone. We improved so much I got a raise."

You suck your lips into a line, because there is nothing you can say in reply that won't make you sound like an ass. Instead, you say, "I can put together a new machine and have it up here by tomorrow."

You weren't expecting her to be there at six in the morning, and especially not sitting on the floor with her work laptop, various things spilling out of her purse and across the carpet. She's picking at banana bread as she's checking emails.

"Oh," you say, rolling the media cart into her office.

Maka blinks up at you, a tiny blush touching her ears. "Hi. Had a conference call this morning," she says, fumbling for a hair clip in her purse's innards and swiftly pulling her hair back. "I'll get out of your way."

"Ah–no, you're fine," you say, wheeling the cart in. "I won't be long."

Nothing happens. She works as she always works, which is with the dogged ethic of a workaholic, and you plug in her new machine and set up all the programs she requires. You hardly exchange any words.

In fact, it's not until you're done and pushing the empty cart on your way out of her office that you see a single rose, mixed white and yellow and orange, hanging upside down on the wall next to the door, carefully dried. There's dozens of flowers, actually, meticulously pinned up. The only person who sends Maka Albarn flowers is her father, and she has apparently saved one from every arrangement. But that particular rose is from you– the color you chose not because of candy corn, but because it reminded you of firecrackers.

You don't wait for her next computer to explode. You just show up with another bouquet at a quarter to seven, because you know she'll be there like the workaholic she is.

"Evans," she says, dumbfounded. When nothing is on fire, her office eternally smells like banana bread and you suck the air greedily into your lungs. "Wh–"

"I don't make the same mistake twice," you say, placing the arrangement on her desk. "The first time was a lie. This time it's not."

She schools her face into something careful and controlled, reaching for the post-it note you hastily stuck to the vase.

"Please go out for pizza with me," she reads aloud. "Your secret admirer." Maka Albarn gives you the blandest of looks. "This is still a lie."

Indignant, you blurt, "No it's not–"

"Soul, how can you be my secret admirer if I know it's you?"

You groan into your hand for a moment before yanking the post-it out of her grip. You carefully rip the 'Secret' off the note, leaving a gaping hole between 'your admirer'.

You hand it back to her with a frown.

She takes it and places it on her desk, eyebrows furrowed. Well she's not yelling at you, so this isn't as bad as you had expected, but you still nervously mutter, "Look, I know pizza is not really romantic, but… what are you doing?"

You watch in amazement as Maka pulls her stamp out of her desk and presses her initials on the note.

"I want chili flakes on my pizza," she says, eyes bright, bright, bright.

Thank you to my all my Tumblr peoples for your hilarious retags, briichigo for providing the prompt, and you guys here on ffn for all your support.