Chapter Text
Cold … cold … cold … the only word suitable to illustrate the immediate peril afflicting Greg’s horribly, lanky form reverberated through his mind. Cold … cold .. cold . cold coldcoldcold, Greg’s thought quickened, as if in a feeble attempt to create warmth. No, he thought triumphantly, heat, heat, heat, heat! This will certainly inject some much needed warmth into his thoroughly numbed toesie-wosies, as his mother had so lovingly referred to them his entire life. Twenty-four years devoid of practical survival skills. He compelled his limbs to stretch out in front of himself, breaking them out of their resigned fetal position with an emphatic jerk. He readjusted himself into a bent knee Fowler’s position, slightly slumping against the concrete column attached to the palace to which he had been barred entrance.
Light assaulted his delicate eyelids, demanding he open them to receive a more complete violation of his optical nerves. “Waah,” he whined while drawing his gangly limbs to his face for protection. He cowered with his hands covering his eye sockets, gently trying to accustom them to the impudent light of the rising sun. A sharp kick caused Greg’s spindly legs to topple over to his right, away from his assailant.
“Get up,” a deep male voice commanded, shortly accompanied by, “Cousin Greg,” in a sarcastic, mocking tone.
Greg let his arms fall to his sides, pressing his hands against the floor in preparation to spring himself up for a quick escape if necessary, not that he would have been able to with his gangly appendages deprived of sufficient blood flow by the cold inexorable grip of mother nature. Greg opened his mouth to take a gasping breath and succinctly failed to close it. A male silhouette loomed above him in the likeness of Michelangelo’s David. The figure stepped forward and appeared as a divine visage emerging from the sun on a holy chariot engulfed in flames.
The man offered Greg an ethereal hand of milky-white, smooth skin with long delicate fingers. Greg accepted it, reaching out his own colossal, awkward extremity to grasp it. The savior hoisted Greg to his feet with a powerful yank. He maintained hold of Greg’s hand, making penetrating eye contact with his new Cousin. Greg slightly struggled to pull his hand away and meekly shifted his disgraceful gaze away from his warden as the man surveyed him, looking him up and down repeatedly. The man narrowed his eyes on the face of the ungainly giant standing over him and smiled at Greg, tilting his head, imparting a kind of sympathetic gaze one would give a sick puppy. He reached his hand up to Greg’s face and used his erect thumb and curled fingers to close Greg’s agape mouth. He waved his hand apathetically, indicating that the pair were going to go inside now. The man confidently whirled away and Greg scurried after him into the foreboding Family Business LLC Headquarters.
“So this is your little cubicle and your employee ID card. Then over here, this is your direct supervisor, your executive supervisor, your senior executive supervisor, your manager, direct, exec, senior exec,” The senior hiring officer (or something like that) motioned his hand to various pictures on the Wall of Recognition, shining a light on those dedicated workers able to climb onto the backs of their contemporaries in pursuit of the next rung on the intangible corporate ladder of success. The hiring officer droned on, imparting nonessential status-quo business talk, a large portion of which focused on the chain of command hierarchy modeled after that of the United States government and esteemed with similar delusions of grandeur; however, Greg’s mind was preoccupied with locating much needed sustenance and failed to retain anything the dull, boring man said.
He had already achieved hydration in the form of lapping up a kiddie pool’s worth of water from the drinking fountain next to the bathrooms in the main lobby. He then tried to fix himself up in the bathroom by washing his face in the sink and haphazardly brushing back his hair. As far as he was concerned, that along with the expeditious slaps to his cheeks to draw blood back into his face was efficient enough to make him presentable. He reemerged notably flushed and puffy. He failed to shed the slight sheen of dirt on his clothes, neck, and wrists giving himself a very oliver-twist air only reinforced by his watery eyeballs reconciling with the flush of warmth in this sheltered environment (the night before when he is locked out of headquarters and he gets bullied by people who throw him in a bush area or something; therefore, causing him to be litch-erally dirty). He stumbled around the unobstructed, posh lobby in search of his protector only to conclude he had been abandoned once again. He started hyperventilating, mouth ajar while swinging his pendulous head around himself in search of aid. Thankfully, he assumed due to his pathetic puppy-like display, he was approached by a secretary who very patiently communicated that he had been successfully employed at the Family Business in the public relations and advertising department as a general consultant or something. These details are not super important.
As his orientation continued, Greg was given a brief tour of his department’s floor. The only information he found relevant from this was the location of the break room which cockily boasted an excessive display of pastries, left over from one of the HR representatives’ birthday parties two days ago. They were most definitely stale, functionally acting as a dollhouse prop, not intended for nourishment.
Upon entering the break room, Greg had affixed his gaze on the display of sweet edibles for approximately one minute and forty-seven seconds until the man noticed and broke his monotone babbling to note, “Those are complementary.” Greg’s gaze did not falter. The man waved his hand in front of Greg’s face and received a head bob followed by a blinking stare from the somber giant. “These are complimentary,” The man repeated motioning his hand towards the angelic exhibit of ressurectional confections.
“What?” Greg shifted his eyes between the man and his oasis. The man looked at him, his face breaking into what appeared to be a rare uncontrollable expression of concern and confusion. “Free?” Greg gulped loudly.
The man nodded and the graceless ostrich pounced, greedily grasping handfuls of the dry desserts, cramming them into his mouth in a porcine fashion. The man lurched back from him, mouth ajar and eyebrows scrunched in shock and disgust, (not poggers) no longer concerned. He turned to run out of the room and almost ran into the head of the public advertisements department, Tomathew Wambsgambsles. He crooked his neck to look up at the towering 6'3" pillar of corporate authority looking over him to the ravenously feasting, hunch-backed, whimpering 6'7" Greg. As a 5'7" entirely average Joe, notably also named Joe, he was unable to distinguish the pure unadulterated joy and generosity in Tom’s eyes as he watched the desperate display. He mistook his long silence as waiting for an explanation or corrective action from him.
“I -- I was just going through orientation with him and--”
“Stop,” Tom thrust his hand with an upright pointer finger toward the man, commanding him to be silent. His arm hung in the air at the level of his eyebrows, just slightly failing to reach the man's head. Tom walked forward, letting his arm fall to his side after the rest of his body had left. He flanked his prey from the rear, gently placing a hand on the shoulder of the feasting Brachiosaurus.
Greg’s body recoiled in response expelling an “awagh,” sort of sound effect followed by a strenuous gulp of the remaining unchewed pastry already confined within the amphitheater of his mouth. After several more swallows and a few gasping breaths, Greg responded, “Hey.”
“Hey,” Tom mimicked Greg’s colloquial stoner-bro tone. “I see you like .. sweets,” Tom surveyed Greg’s unkempt, slouched form for several seconds until committing to self-indulgent, salacious eye contact. Greg squirmed under the unceasing pressure and existential horror of observation, but once connected, he gallantly maintained the searing eye contact. The following 90 seconds created an immortal imprint of the virginal, premier essence of this Cousin Greg in Tom’s mind: just a boy, unmarred by the cumbersome burden of education. A humanoid-giraffe rife with ignorance, prone to kindness, and devoid of the Machiavellian characteristics necessary for deception. Naturally naïve.
Perfect … perfect … perfect, reverberated through Tom’s mind with increasing fervor as his eyes searched deeper into Greg’s psyche. He let out a raspy, laughing breath as the hairs on his arms stood up. He started to reach his arms out toward the tall columnar tree trunk standing before him, craving consumption, but he was rudely interrupted. He froze as if that could make him invisible to the interloper.
A businesswoman, with orange hair pulled into a tight-ass bun and striking blue-green eyes, stomped into the break room and began announcing with the magnification of a loudspeaker, “Tom, my brother is pissing and shitting all over your office right now. He wanted you to deal with that article about him having the smallest dick ever documented or whatever like yesterday,” Her eyes assessed the situation, holistically taking in the nearly embracing couple. “So … uh, what’s going on here, Tom?” She inquired, slowly sauntering towards a chair on which she gently placed both of her hands.
Tom gave Greg a small smile and allowed his arms to continue their movement, instead of grasping, opting to brush the crumbs off of Greg’s jacket. “There you go,” He said, taking one large step backward away from Greg and then decidedly turning away from him and walking towards the woman, “Shiv, I was just getting Cousin Greg here acquainted with his new job. He is family after all.” Shiv raised an eyebrow and opened her mouth into an O shape, clearly about to say something, but Tom interjected, “But I’ll get right on that. I am like a fly on shit,” His face contorted into a forced indrawn smile while he simultaneously gave a slight nod of disapproval at his flustered, gauche idiom. He turned back to Greg and said, “Let Linda know if you need anything, Greg … Alright, well, I’ll be seeing you.” He smirked at the dumbfounded Greg and then trotted away.
Just as Shiv was exiting the break room, Greg gave a weak, “Hi, Shiv,” to which she reciprocated a short wave, a smile, and a head tilt quickly followed by a heel turn and march following the expeditious Tom. Their heels clicked away on the stone floor as the pair rounded behind one of the insular hallways forming a maze Greg was uniquely unsuited for navigating. Greg softly yelled after them, “Um, uh .. who’s Linda?”