Chapter Text
With her eyes tightly shut, Lin Beifong held her breath. She then exhaled slowly through her nose in an attempt to compose herself, as she pressed her overheated forehead up against the cool back wall of her office. Holding her breath once again, she opened her eyes slowly on the inhale, allowing her tired eyes to begin their slow focus on the tiny pores and imperfects in the plasterwork before them. By the time she was ready to exhale again, she had made a mental note to ping someone in facilitates, having already spotted the beginnings of a hairline crack, one plastered-over eyelash, and two fingerprints.
A hack job, she decided. That just wouldn’t do, not in her new office.
She had run herself ragged over the past four months, or at least more so than she usually would in the last four months. Her standard twelve hour days, had turned into fourteen hour days, before warping into whatever the hell kind of waking and working patter she had found herself in now. She had decided that if she were to practically live and breath in this grand new office of hers, one that had been so graciously “gifted” to her by the new President of Republic City, it would need to look as clean-cut and sleek as she always aspired to be.
She reminded herself of this aspiration now as she caught sight of one of her tired eyes in a scuff-shined patch of plasterwork before her. The bags that now seemed to permanently reside there had never looked so dark, she mused briefly, before snapping both eyes closed once more.
Lifting her head gently from the wall, she leaned forward and pressed it back into the plaster with slightly more force than necessarily required. She raised tired arms above her head slightly, with the tight tailored sleeves of her olive hued blazer stretching with the bulge of her toned biceps, as she pressed hot palms against the wall beside her head, pressing intently with the tips of each manicured finger. What she wouldn't give to be able to bring this whole spirits-damned building down with one push of her hands, if only such a skill existed. Maybe then she’d get a day off. Or at least an afternoon, surely.
She took a moment to remind herself how much she supposedly loved this job; lived and breathed for it in fact. Recently, with the violent surge in triad activity in and around the city to near government-toppling proportions, she had to work harder and harder to believe fact. It had been her success in dismantling this twisted crime-network and her subsequent unsurmountable arrest rate in response to this uprising which had earned her favour with the new President Raiko, and a relocation of her entire precinct to new offices to boot.
It was this gram of increased comfort for her fellow overworked officers in the form of better working conditions that now caused her to breathe easier and open tired eyes to face the evening once again, despite the ton of daily bureaucratic bullshit that she still felt weighing heavily on her broad shoulders.
Damn, evening already? She mused, as clearer eyes now traced the outline of her shadow projected against the back wall by the fading orange light of day.
Releasing her pent up frustrations in one final sigh, she decided to stop feeling sorry for herself as she pushed her strong shoulders back, and pulled herself up to her full height as she turned toward her west-facing floor to ceiling window. She had allowed herself all of two minutes to slack off, and that was almost unforgivable.
Back in the game, Beifong.
Looking down at herself, she brushed invisible creases out of her freshly dry-cleaned blazer with the flat of her palms. Scarred knuckles and long-healed scratches littered the backs of her hands and glistened in the light of the setting sun like daggers of ice literally the surface of a frozen lake.
Satisfied that she at least looked more alive and composed than she felt internally, she levelled her gaze out toward the horizon, or at least as much as she could see of it through the concrete jungle that now greeted her everyday from the window of her new office. She resisted the urge to give in and stare into the fiery depths of the setting sun, and succumb to the relative comfort of the blaring white intensity that would come with temporary blindness.
God, I need to call my mother.
With that, Lin Beifong decided enough was enough.
Coffee was needed, possibly heaps of it. Potentially in multiple different forms. Simultaneously.
If she was going to be in this Raava-forsaken office until the crack of dawn (for at least the second time this week), she was going to be caffeinated…heavily so.
Her mind made up, she tore her eyes from the sunset and strode towards her office door, ripping her black trench from the coat stand whose hooks protruded of at ‘artsy’ angles off towards her recently delivered, green Chelsea sofa. Her hovering hand paused over the door handle briefly, before she could yank the it open, as she took one last look down at the offending item of furniture; the couch that represented yet another forced gift, one that was both incredibly over-expensive and entirely uncomfortable, at least for the purposes of sleeping (which she had been guilty of using it for, for the last several months). With one final grunt and a raised eyebrow aimed at the sofa which not only represented her sorry excuse for a non-existent work-life balance, but was also already looking as worn-out and overused as she felt, she stormed over the threshold of her office, slamming the reinforced steel door behind her.
She skulked with intent down the corridor, out towards the lift. The staccato clinks of her metal tipped loafers punctuated the previously silent air, broadcasting the shortness of her temper to any who accidentally dared to remain on the top floor of the office building at that hour.
She would aim to be dangerously caffeinated, she decided.