Chapter Text
Rey was not at risk for being late on the first day of work. She was at risk of being lost forever in this godforsaken building.
Rebellion Inc., local insurance giant, stood in a skyscraper downtown and owned a massive chunk of its floors. Rey was a pathetic mouse wandering through the expansive, glossy lobby in a sad attempt to find the elevators, which were nowhere in sight. The sea of people bustling around all turned a blind eye to her, thankfully; they were all dressed in fine clothes that made her meager, thrifted outfit even more stifling.
She was beginning to feel like a bumbling intern rather than IT staff.
But she had to keep looking. She had to keep going.
The elevators show up eventually around a corner. Rey reads the placard that designates which floor belongs to who, and she hits the button that summons the lift.
Ding... ding... ding. The doors open. There’s a front desk. Rey beelines to it, shoulders tense with nerves as she gives her best smile to the receptionist.
“Hi,” Rey says, “would you mind pointing me to the HR office? I'm new.”
“You're on the wrong floor entirely,” the blue-haired woman says. She rattles off a list of directions that Rey hardly keeps up with, and then she's back to the elevators, scurrying in to try again.
She goes to the upper floor. That... doesn’t look right. She goes down a floor. It’s a sea of cubicles.
Rey wanders around, looking for glass walls and a sign, something, anything. There’s nothing. People have their heads down at their desks or they’re on the phone, some are chatting and drinking coffee. It doesn’t seem like... the worst working environment. Nobody looks horrifically depressed and there’s no yelling.
Ultimately, Rey arrived nearly half an hour early, and that precious time was rapidly dwindling. She could not find HR. It’s hard to pick someone to interrupt, and she checks her watch anxiously, wondering if she should head back down to the front desk and prostrate herself again.
There’s no other choice, really. Rey commits to the walk of shame back to the elevator, nervously smoothing out her skirt and hair. Everyone she walks by looks so clean and crisp and she feels like a frumpy fake infiltrating. It’s crowded, too and it makes her start edging toward claustrophobic.
The elevator dings softly on the way down. When the doors open, Rey exits in a hurry, searching the room for the front desk, and finding it unmanned. Oh. Well.
She doesn’t even know if everyone on this floor works here. Or if that was a general front desk. Her palms are starting to get clammy. She categorically refuses to be late, but if she doesn’t figure out where the hell this stupid HR office was she was going to be fired before she even got onboarded.
Rey heads back to the lift, face hot and clutching her laptop bag in front of her. She waits an eternity for the doors to ding and part, and she quickly enters to stand beside the only other passenger.
The elevator doors shut. They reflect the pair of them back to her; it is a man dressed in a sharp pinstriped suit, and he’s so tall it’s almost uncomfortable. His hair is crow black, and surprisingly long for someone so professional-looking. In one hand he holds a coffee cup and his phone in the other, and his face could only be described as byronic and dour as he stares at the screen bitterly. His cologne makes the elevator smell very expensive and good. He can’t be that much older than her, but he’s definitely high up on some invisible ladder.
He... was not who Rey wanted to ask directions from. Distracted, she forgets to even press a button, but she checks her watch again, and her blood begins to run cold. She needs to get to HR in the next five minutes.
“...Excuse me,” she says, voice breaking the delicate silence of the elevator.
The man does not look up. She waits, balking, but suddenly he seems to realize he’s being spoken to, and stares at her as if she’s just appeared in front of his eyes.
“I’m lost,” Rey explains quickly, knowing she has a limited amount of this man’s time, “could you point me to the Rebellion HR office?”
The man regards her in that same bemused way before seemingly coming to his senses. He considers her request, then says, “Yes.” And that’s it. No directions. No elaboration.
Rey nods. Okay. Cool.
The man returns to his phone until the doors open on the top floor, just like the desk woman had originally directed.
The problem is that the top floor is completely fucking unbelievable.
This was the penthouse of workplaces. This was a place with a lounge in the center, and where everyone had a corner office, it seemed. Beautiful plants and furniture filled the space. There were fancy vending machines. It felt totally foreign, like another world to Rey. The man doesn’t bat an eye at any of it; Rey obediently follows him through the sanctuary, down one of the glassy, minimalist halls, past rooms with Chief something something outside each door. His gait is long, and she has to power walk to keep up with him.
Down the end of the hall far away from the C-levels, is a beautiful door with Human Resources — Amilyn Holdo inscribed across it.
“Thank you so much,” Rey blurts out, and the man just looks at her and nods once. Then he turns around and leaves, shiny Italian leather shoes clicking against the tiles.
Okay. Well. That was something. At least she made it to HR.
Rey takes a fortifying breath, then knocks on the door.
“Come in.”
—
The first two days of work are spent onboarding. Rey fills out a litany of paperwork with everything ranging from tax information to an NDA (she would be working with sensitive information, technically) and spends an inordinate amount of time sitting and waiting for the next thing to do. All in all, she had a feeling this job would be very... slow.
It was strange.
Rey is sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs in Amilyn’s office, admiring the abstract art she has on her walls. They look real. The signatures in the corners do, at least, and the paint leaves a thick, impasto texture that isn’t generally replicated by machines.
Less than a month ago, she was in a cubicle with a headset on, taking support tickets and getting paid almost minimum wage. She could barely afford her apartment, let alone car insurance and groceries and bills and everything else required to live and exist. None of this felt remotely real. Rey needed to remember to take Rose out to a very expensive dinner for all of this — she was the one who recommended her, AKA forced her to apply to the IT opening. You’ve got what it takes, she’d said, in that confidently insistent way that was basically infectious, just study up a little bit and I’ll see if I can refer you!
She’d been referred. She got the interview. She studied. A lot. And she got a call back, and after completing a short quiz and a final interview, well. She was hired. When Rey saw her salary (salary!) she nearly had a heart attack. The number couldn’t be right. She texted Rose. Rose texted her twin sister, Paige, in finance. The number was right.
And now she was in an opulent HR office, with the head of HR, waiting to be readied for her own office (holy shit).
Amilyn Holdo was an aristocratic-looking woman even with lilac hair, which said a lot about the company, frankly. Both warm and poised, she managed to be welcoming and intimidating at the same time, and Rey was currently trapped at her desk until the woman had finished electronically granting her permissions to all the correct programs and platforms.
They made some small talk. Rey managed to avoid explaining too much about her life and showing her ass this early into her tenure; Amilyn, on the other hand, sounded well-traveled, worldly, cultured, and entirely out of her league in every regard. Rey quickly could not wait to be given her office so she could hide in there as soon as possible. She did not belong with these people.
“Well, Rey,” Amilyn says after what feels like an eternity, “I believe I have you set up with everything I can do on my end. Let me show you to your office and then you can break for lunch if you’d like, start making it feel a little more like home.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Rey agrees politely, and promptly follows the older woman.
Rey is prepared to go down a few floors and be given one of the cubicles in the cubicle ocean. Already in her head she’s working out what she’s going to put on her desk and tack on her walls; she has a few posters, and a couple interesting trinkets she’d thrifted and found at estate sales over the years. They seemed very plant-friendly here. Maybe she could bring some.
Amilyn pauses at one of the few doors in the hall, pulling out a key. We must be stopping for something, Rey thinks to herself, but they head into the office where the soft lights automatically flicker on, and after pressing a few buttons, a screen comes up revealing a windowed wall that overlooks the city behind them. A large, modular desk sits in the center of the room, and there’s empty shelving along the edges.
“Please feel free to make yourself comfortable here. We do have a budget for a new chair and accessories if you need anything, I can order it through the proper channels. Here is a key,” Amilyn passes the small key to Rey, who is trying not to gawk at her, “have a good lunch.”
And Amilyn sweeps away just like that, leaving Rey in her new office.
Rey just stands there for a while, taking it in. Overwhelming is the word she would use — it was overwhelming. She did not feel comfortable at all accepting this. She was nobody. For a moment, there’s almost a constricting guilt that she’s taken this spot from someone who truly deserved it, because there’s no way that person could be her.
She wished very badly that Rose or any of her other friends were here. She pulls out her phone and taps Rose’s chat.
[12:01] thjis is insane
[12:02] rosie posie: What do u mean? Lol
[12:02] image attached PX0987.jpg
[12:02] rosie posie: Awww omg is that ur office?? <3 <3
[12:03] what do you mean awww omg??? This is fucking crazy how do i have an office
[12:03] rosie posie: This is a big girl job reyrey 🙂
[12:04] im going to lunch.
Rey leaves her laptop bag in her office on the desk awkwardly, not sure where else to put it. She fishes out her wallet and decides to go find coffee and a croissant — she wouldn’t get her first paycheck for another week and a half and she wasn’t sure she could stomach more than that anyway.
Through the wall, there’s a raised voice, and Rey frowns.
It’s coming from her next door neighbor, she ascertains; it’s not shouting, but it’s not happy. She can’t tell if the speaker is alone or having a conversation, but either way, she doesn’t want to find out. Rey absconds from her new office, shutting the door behind her and hastily heading towards the elevators. There was a cafe around the corner, and that was safe, and normal, and familiar. It would be a nice treat for her frazzled nerves.
Outside the building it’s a drizzly, grey, misty day and Rey had forgotten any sort of coat. She tightens her blazer around herself with a disappointed sigh, and hustles down the sidewalk to get into the coffee shop as dry as possible. Inside, she orders her croissant and a nice, boring latte with whole milk to sip on, and tips the barista.
And... there’s no rush. Her lunch break is not a timed half an hour. In fact, it’s not timed at all. This could be life now. A lunch break that lasts more than an hour with nobody supervising it. Rey finds herself considerably less anxious, not being rushed for once, and when she gets back to her office, decides she can start setting up her work station and maybe watching some bullshit while she’s on break.
Except her office neighbor — she thinks Amliyn called him Kyle, in passing — is still kind of shouting.
It’s so far the only thing ruining her idyllic experience, minus her own irrational nerves and issues. The voice is deeper and masculine, and the volume changes in a loud-quiet gradient, indicating the owner is pacing back and forth. Rey grimaces and hopes the occurrence isn’t a normal one, but she has a sinking feeling that it’s something everyone on this floor is just used to. It was the C-level hell, after all. People here were definitely likely to get what they wanted here.
Her croissant is flaky and buttery and warm, at least. And the coffee washes it down in a way that is heavenly, even if it is a little burnt.
“...don’t care...not what...the fucking fundraiser...!”
With her free hand, she opens her laptop, and heads to Amazon to look up noise-canceling headphones.