[Cowritten: Chase/Eleanor]
Red Tape was, Eleanor Mayhem had decided a long time ago, the scourge of the earth. It was a fact few people would ever have tried to challenge her on, but given the last few days, given the amount of paperwork unloaded on the newly appointed Inspector, she'd decided that there was something worse than simple red tape.
Red Tape when you don't have a desk.
The video of her pleading with fellow ACME agents to help save the career of Chase Devineaux had been released to the agency at large 5 days ago, and had been released to the news stations not long after that, though not by her hand. As promised in the video, after releasing the video she'd gathered her nerve, taken her letter of resignation in hand and marched herself to the Sheraton Seaside where the board of directors had started meeting after the tower was gone. Walking past the secretary she'd busted into the boardroom... and found them all watching her video. On channel 5.
By the letter of what she'd wanted everything had turned out better than she'd been hoping. Chase was not only kept on but promoted to Director of Operations. Eleanor still had a job. She hadn't even been demoted, but more handed a mountain of paperwork to take care of and talked around instead of to before being shoveled out the door.
The boardroom, however anger inducing, was nothing compared to when she finally realized the full effect of having her video released to the public. Her mother had called 5 minutes after she'd left the hotel, crying of reporters and people pretending to be ACME calling to ask questions. It took Eleanor 15 minutes just to get her mother to hand the phone over to her father so she could tell him to go to Aunt Mildred's where things would be quiet.
That was all 5 days ago - and Eleanor had been digging herself out from under her mountain of paperwork since, experiencing 10 hour days sitting at her borrowed table in the hidden lounge somewhere on the fourth floor in the back of Portwood Hall. It was a large space with wide bay windows opening towards the sea but the glaring sun in the afternoon tended to make it less comfortable to the ACME Agents in Training who used spaces like this for an afternoon nap.
Checking her watch and rubbing her eyes as she hit hour four of paperwork for the day Eleanor took a long sip off her mug of tea and gave a stretch, her movements hardly even drawing attention to the three students working at their own tables.
After the meeting with Chip Masters and laying out exactly what the Specialist was expected to do, Chase Devineaux spent his lunch hour outside of compounds. He drove to Ocean Beach and had grilled Atlantic salmon at a local restaurant just above the Golden Gate Park Visitor's Center.
Winter in San Francisco reminded him of his childhood in Maine where the weather was mostly cold and damp. He used to stare out at the ocean like it was a formidable enemy. He couldn’t fight it, and it wouldn’t fight him, but he wanted to conquer it because it was the only challenge his boyish mind could fathom; Dad was in Europe, and to get there, you have to cross the ocean. During the few summers of his young life when his father was in the States, they took trips to the west coast, a few times to San Francisco. Chase had fond memories of this city. Here was a different ocean; the Pacific, always warm, always blue, and unlike the frigid Atlantic in Maine, it swallowed the golden sun. It wasn’t until he started working in San Francisco did he realize the Pacific Ocean's deceptive mood swings. No matter how nice the west coast summers, winters were wet and miserable.
When he returned to ACME complex, his first goal was to find Eleanor Mayhem and finally talk about this ruckus of a video. After considering the amount of work she was given, and the lack of desks at the academy, Chase guessed that she was hiding either at the Library or at Portwood Hall’s fourth floor. He picked Portwood Hall because it featured a small canteen, and Eleanor couldn't smuggle her precious chai into the library.
Through the glass windows from the hallway, Devineaux spotted the Inspector and three younger agents in the lounge. Opening the door, he got the response he wanted: all eyes directed to him, expecting orders.
“You, you, and you,” he pointed to the agents not involved in the upcoming conversation, “get out.”
They gathered their things like tired sailors.
“Move it!” he opened the door wider. They jolted to a start, and as they rushed out he commanded, “Come back in exactly 25 minutes.”
There was a prompt ‘Yes sir’ in response, but Chase didn't hear it when he shut the door.
“Right, sorry to barge in,” he apologized, “How are you holding up? Can’t have been an easy week.”
Eleanor gave a soft laugh under her breath as Chase commanded the eager ACME agents to be out of the room, her eyes moving back down to the paper under her hand as she finished her business and signed off on it before placing it into a pile on the right side of the table without any notable increase in speed due to Chase’s presence.
“Oh, its just another week in paradise. If I were any more spoiled I might have to start and wonder why they’re paying me to do this.” she replied with an obvious note of sarcasm, though a lack of venom behind the statement considering the amount of times she’d had to sign her name in the last few days. “Though, I’ll be honest, I don’t think you’re too sorry about barging around anywhere, Mister Director of Operations. Not after the last few days.”
Giving a short nod to acknowledge E's dripping sarcasm, Chase Devineaux walked to the inspector's 'desk'. Midway, he grabbed a chair, swung it 180 degrees, and straddled it.
"Let me play this out," he said with his arms on the chair's top rail, "you overhear a private conversation between two superior officers... how did that lead to the video airing on IBN?"
There was a pause, a beat of silence as she looked at him over her glasses, an eyebrow raising for a moment.
“Well, I was trying to hold out for Barbara Walters but she wouldn’t bite so my choices were limited.” she replied, her hands taking a similar position on her table as his did on top of his chair. “Or, put another way, I discovered that the head of a company that I’ve worked for and protected was going to take out all its mistakes on one man, and I believed it was wrong. I used the information I had to fix this problem, which is what I do best. There were... repercussions I hadn’t expected but, given what happened, it could have been much worse.”
"If this was what you do best," he suggested with condescension, like he usually does when an agent didn't perform to expectations and gave him an unwarranted excuse, "there shouldn't be repercussions."
“I thought better of ACME than to have someone from within release video to the press.” she shot back. “Then again I thought better of the board of directors... goes to show where my faith’s been getting me lately.”
"Faith? Only shows you weren't thinking."
“Says the man whose job not only got saved by my ‘lack of thought’ but who got himself promoted due to it.”.
"No, E, you made a mistake," he laid it out, "You don't get to use my promotion against me."
Eleanor’s eyebrow raised again at his tone, displaying a sense of disbelief at his words. “It was NOT a mistake.”
"So the leak to IBN was good?"
“No! It--”
"You're an inspector, Eleanor! Videos get leaked, you should have known that."
“What happened was worth it.”
He breathed, and tapped his shoe slowly against the lacquered floor.
"You went against protocol," he started, "I wish you hadn't, but you did. The board requesting my resignation wasn't something you could have changed, or should have tried to change."
He couldn't tell her that the Board approved his plan to deal with ACME Tower by enlisting the aid of Intelligence Forces conveniently near Tunisia. Chase was confident that if the Tower was his last performance, he had no regrets. Eleanor Mayhem's video helped expose a weakness in the ACME structure that even members of the Board were unable to deny, but to Chase Devineaux, she had betrayed his trust. Her tenacity was always mixed with irrationality, but now, it was even more clear she made decisions with her heart.
“Protocol doesn’t hold water when its working against the people it's supposed to be protecting.” Her tone had turned sharp. “The board wasn’t doing what it was because it was the right thing to do, it was doing it because it was easy. Because at the end of the day it's easier to blame one man than for an entire company to man up, grow a pair and tell the world that, collectively, it messed up.”
He lowered his voice, "So you went ahead and told the world for them."
“I told ACME.”
"Risking your career?"
“It was what I had to give - If it had been enough on its own do you think I’d have asked 1200 people to do the same?”
"You had no right to bring anybody into this," his tone, though seething, was still stable, "you created confusion, and once leaked, that caused a frenzy."
“Alright, what would YOU have done if you were in my place? If the Board of Directors decided that instead of taking responsibility for its actions that Chief Weller was going to be fired? Just to make an example of him?”
"Theoretical questions won't help your logic."
“Answer it!” Eleanor’s hand slammed down onto the table.
Chase Devineaux straightened in his chair, showing contempt to her action.
"Respecting his decisions," he replied steadily, "I'd leave it up to Chief Weller."
“I don’t abandon people like that.”
"People need to make their own choices."
“And if it were me? Or Nevon? Or Ivy?”
"What do you mean?"
“I mean no one should be forced to make that decision.”
"That's your problem," he needed to point out this flaw in her thought-process, "You can't be objective, you can't let things be -- exactly why you're not--" he stopped because the expression on her face instantly changed.
There was a pause. It didn’t matter that he’d stopped, in Eleanor’s mind she’d heard the sentence finish with unspoken words. “Why I’m not special ops.”
Chase remained silent. He didn't mean 'special ops' directly but he spent too long gauging her reaction, nothing he could say now would help.
Her eyes lowered for a moment, her body taking in a deep breath as if recovering from a slap in the face. In all the years she’d worked for ACME, with Chase, she’d called his eyes ‘steel doors’. He hid behind them, he kept himself safe behind them, he faced the world looking like nothing could touch him. Of everything she admired about him she admired those steel doors - because her eyes were nothing like his. As they raised from the floor back to his her blue eyes were windows, letting him see right through. Eleanor was hurt - her failure to become an operative was a scar that never truly healed.
There was a long silence as she just looked at him, the anger and hurt wanting to manifest itself in so many words, words that would slice him down where he stood, make him crawl out of the room broken, beaten. She wanted to tear down those steel doors and make him feel as much a failure as she did.
“We both know that I wasn’t cut out for special ops.” A bitter note hung on her words, “I should have known the moment I figured out that I’d have to change just to get past you. But I did it. I thought, if I could just get better I could be the best of the best, I could be just like Chase.”
Quietly, Devineaux exhaled. Don't say anything*, he thought to himself, you'll end up pushing her.
Pressing her palms to the table she slowly rose from her seat. “I lost 60 pounds, packed on 25 pounds of muscle, changed my hair, my face, my accent, my clothes, my name, all because I believed that it would make me better, that being special ops would make me better. I should have realized it the moment that Chief told me that he wanted me to trail you around Europe just because he was tired of being left out of the loop. The moment the Cayman came into the garage with scrapes up and down its sides I should have second guessed. After I got rejected, after I got my runner up prize and settled for Inspector, I still kept thinking I could do it. I’d prove you wrong, I’d become the best. Even when you disappeared three days during a media storm I didn’t see it. Its pretty damn funny that in the end it was protecting you that made me realize what my problem is, why I’ll never cut it.”
You had nothing to prove, he wanted to say, but her accusing tone suppressed any verbal rebuttal from him. Chase's knuckles felt tight, without him realizing, his hands had gripped taut against the chair's back.
"Because I’m not here to do ACME’s dirty work, to be its dirty little secret. I’m not willing to turn a blind eye and just say ‘The ends justify the means’. Because I’m the woman that threw her career on a grenade for a man who doesn’t give her a second glance, and did so without thought or remorse. I always will be. And, you know? Sometimes, I wish you were actually the man you make yourself to be."
Devineaux lowered his head at that statement, intensifying his gaze on the speaker.
"I can give everything I have, change everything I am but I don’t make the cut because I could never make the kind of sacrifices supposedly required of me. Because they leave you empty. And in the end, you're just a shell with a million-dollar smile and a shiny suit--"
Before her sentence wrapped, Chase Devineaux firmly surged from his seat to a standing position.
“I think you’re done,” his low voice dismissed harshly.
Even if she wasn't done, Eleanor made her point. This was no longer about a misplaced video, it was about a misplaced ideal. She was right to wish he was a better man, because for all that he was, the only thing in Chase's arsenal was a diversion into work. He removed a thin mobile drive from his pocket and placed it on her table.
“Copies of security footage from the tower,” his tone cooled with authority, “Up to the point the security room got fried. Yours to process.”
Then he left, reaching the exit just as the three younger agents returned. Each gave a sign of respect when they saw him. It was decent timing, and he walked past them, letting the door swing shut.
She watched as Chase walked away before turning her head downward, closing her eyes, breathing deep, trying to calm herself down. Eleanor could hear the students entering finally, feel their glances at her direction but stood still and remained frozen until she heard a soft tapping from the table beneath her.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Eyes opened to locate its source, finding cold tears falling onto the exposed documents she’d left out. At last Eleanor gave a heavy sigh and gathered up the papers scattered across the table with a practiced hand. She added the hard drive to the pile and placed the lot of it into a briefcase before she stood up fully, taking a moment to square her shoulders and wipe her eyes, and then removed herself from the room without a second glance to the others inside.
