Chapter Text
Holly Perez awoke to a chill as her phone’s alarm blared through her apartment. The cold wasn’t anything surprising to her for February, and she was well used to waiting until March for her room to be so comfortable in the morning. As she shuffled around the space left by her furniture, nothing suggested to her that today would be anything out of the ordinary. Holly caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and the hazel-furred deer woman that glimpsed back didn’t look out of the ordinary either. She straightened out the small, round frame glasses resting on her face before setting about absentmindedly brushing her bright red bangs to one side as she prepared for work.
Nothing about Holly was especially unusual. She was short, but not the shortest person she knew. She was thin, but never looked unhealthy. Her fashion never stood out, and she never particularly cared beyond wanting to seem nice enough. Even the louder color of the off-pink shirt she put on, paired with the simple black skirt that Holly had gotten used to pairing with almost anything and everything, managed to look like it could easily sink into the background. The doe’s friends had long joked that she looked to be the perfect blend of their average features, and she found the idea far too amusing to disagree with.
Out the door and onto the street, she continued to brush at her hair idly with one hooved hand while the other held onto her bag. By the time she descended into the nearest subway station, she figured she had gotten her shoulder-length cut into a state that certainly wouldn’t last the whole day, but hopefully would last long enough. The train ride to downtown was cramped and hectic, but between the noise, cold, and coffee she treated herself to at home, Holly was at least sure that she wouldn’t fall back asleep. Despite everything, her commute didn’t bother her.
What waited for her at the end of her commute, however, did bother her. Her stop downtown left her only a block’s length from an old, ornate skyscraper that towered imposingly over all of the modern offices surrounding it. Carved into the pale stone above the building’s broad glass doors was the name “Alabaster.” Most people wouldn’t have cared to make the distinction, but as Holly passed through the doors into a busy lobby she couldn’t help but note to herself that this building was only the head office of “Alabaster Pharmaceuticals .” It was dominant, surely, but still only one branch of the frighteningly large corporation she had learned Alabaster truly was. Alabaster was where Holly worked, and it was what bothered her about her average day.
Holly never wanted to say that she resented her line of work, however. She had confidence in her ability to connect to people, or otherwise get them to connect to ideas in the right ways, and still believed that work like it could be helpful under the right circumstances. The deer believed in this in spite of her current job, which she unquestionably resented. She had aimlessly drifted across careers until landing her current position at Alabaster a few years ago, though she swore it already felt longer than that. Her job here was in public relations, a role that usually left her working in circles. She went about finding ways to sanitize the words and actions of her higher-ups before they managed to damage the tenuous image of Alabaster any more.
Before she could begin any of that, however, the doe first had to navigate the impressively monotonous floor from the elevator to her desk. The monochrome palette of off-whites and beiges did little to provide any meaningful landmarks by which to recall the way to her destination. Holly was sure that, if she hadn’t already been doing her job from the same spot for years, she would end up lost in the maze of cubicles. Instead, she stepped into the practiced path she found was the quickest way there. She hoped to be able to get to her desk for a moment before having her first encounter with her supervisor for the day.
Almost as soon as she stepped off the elevator, though, Holly was met with the distinctive sneer of her tone. “You know you’re almost late, right?”
Holly turned about to the familiar sight of the middle aged skunk woman who she had called her boss since joining Alabaster. She was in the middle of blowing some faded-black and white hair from her eyes. Despite the impressive presence her large tail carried, the monochrome of her fur combined with the muted tones of her outfit blended together to produce the perfect camouflage for the office environment. Most workers on the floor, Holly included, couldn’t tell she was coming until she was already upon them. She scowled at the deer, her face not quite matching the hint of satisfaction in her voice.
Breaking eye contact as quickly as she could manage, Holly glanced down at her simple wristwatch. She had picked out the accessory specifically in an attempt to be able to check the time without confirming the skunk’s paranoia about people wasting company time on their phones. Now, its thin hands showed that the doe was precisely on time for the start of her work day.
“It looks like I’m right on time, ma’am,” Holly noted. Her back to the elevator, Holly had no physical escape routes from this corner of the floor, but she could at least insist that the older woman let her go.
The skunk’s tail merely flicked in response. “If you’re not early, you’re late,” she remarked. “You should know this by now.” Indeed, Holly had gotten the platitude repeated to her countless times, usually coming from this exact person. “You’re on time today, maybe, but if just one thing slows you down next time around then you’ll be cutting into company time.” At last, a sardonic grin grew across her face, bringing her expression in line with her tone. “I could almost write you up for that.”
Before Holly could think, her mouth began moving. “You wouldn’t,” she said, trying to defend herself in any way she could. The more she considered the situation, the more she thought that such flaunting of power was entirely characteristic of her boss.
“I would,” she retorted simply, “if it meant that we wouldn’t have to keep paying you to not be here.” The elevator behind Holly opened again, and the skunk finally stepped aside to enter it herself. As she passed the doe, she slowed her pace. “So, set your alarm a few minutes earlier, would you?”
“Right, sorry,” Holly relented, knowing better than to fight a losing battle like that.
The skunk, now appeased, nodded and disappeared into the elevator. Despite the conversation being over, Holly waited a moment longer to let the doors behind her slide shut completely. She breathed a silent sigh of relief, then continued on her usual route to her desk. The cubicle she worked from was tucked away in a perfect position where it didn’t quite catch the light of the broad, humming lights above on either side. One was slightly farther, leaving its side just shaded enough to make reading anything on that end of the desk an annoying process. Much of the desk arrangement Holly had produced for herself came from adapting to these little idiosyncrasies.
Her morning rushed by in a familiar, hectic flurry. She wrote, revised, and conveyed messages across numerous levels of the company, both above and below her. As soon as she had finished one task or was left to wait on a response from another, several more had already been lined up to take her attention. So much focus was devoted to juggling the day’s work that Holly nearly missed the approach of her lunch break. It had happened before, leaving the deer scrambling to take what time she could get while also not falling behind on meeting times later in her day, so she was thankful to have caught herself this time.
Holly knew how full the office was. Despite that, she couldn’t help but feel like she was walking through an oddly empty space on the way back to the elevator. So many figures were sequestered away from view precisely enough to make the workplace appear especially lifeless even when at the height of its activity.
She thought she would be taking another elevator ride alone, only for the tall figure of another worker to rush around the corner as the doors began to close. Holly recognized the coworker, a lanky red squirrel with meticulously combed hair and a dark suit that always looked a size or two too large to the doe.
“Hold it, please,” they called out, and Holly reached a hand to push the closing doors back open. The squirrel grinned down at Holly once inside. Their tall figure didn’t fill much of the space on its own, but Holly still retreated to the opposite corner to avoid being accidentally smothered by the bushy tail to her side.
“Thanks for the save, Perez,” they said, apparently having burst into a sprint for the last leg of the way to the elevator to catch it in time. “Hate wasting minutes of break just standing there waiting for a ride, you know?”
Holly nodded, taking a second to respond. “Not that more time outside is much better around now.”
They shivered at the thought of it. “I swear it’s not just out there, it’s like it’s colder in here too, these days.”
Before she could speak up again, they continued. “It’s why I’m going to be out of here, next week. Got a whole vacation lined up way down south that should thaw me out after a winter like this.” They looked from the floor number above the elevator door to Holly herself. “Got anything you’re doing with your time off?”
She shrugged, knowing that she hadn’t had the time to even consider a vacation with everything already on her mind. It must have been so long since her last that she would soon have weeks of time saved up, but the logistics of actually going somewhere far away to use it felt daunting to Holly. Beyond that, she didn’t even want to start considering just how much something like it would cost.
“I guess I’m still thinking about my options,” she finally said. Just as she did so, an electronic chime rang out and the doors to the elevator slid open to reveal the lobby once again. It had been filled on Holly’s way in, but was now so open that she could see halfway across the building’s ground floor through its myriad glass walls and doors flanking it.
The squirrel took the initiative to step out first. “Well, you’ve got lunch to think about it now, huh?”
Holly nodded as she stepped out and parted ways from them, only to almost immediately push the thought aside for a later date. Walking at a quick pace to keep out of the chill for long, she took a deliberate turn down the sidewalk as soon as she had left Alabaster. The deer always took her lunch at a cafe down the block from the office building. The walk there and back always took precious time from her break that she wouldn’t have lost by packing something to leave in the break room, but she wasn’t sure she would be able to handle the rest of her work day without the added distance from the office during her break.
On this particular lunch break, scrolling through a social media feed on her phone as she sat tucked away in a booth awaiting her lunch, Holly happened on a post that surprised her with a rush of nostalgia. It came from an account posting old advertisements and commercials, and her attention had been caught by one featuring a print ad for the candy brand Fords’ Fantastic Fooderies. The vibrant violet and gold branding registered to Holly’s eyes before she had recognized the familiar, cartoonish logo of a sheep sporting a large bow around the neck. Crisply scanned, the image must have been recently taken from some magazine page of old.
Quirky products, as expected of the brand, took center stage on the ad. Chocolate milk-bomb roulettes and color-changing mood jelly beans were displayed proudly alongside what was the latest among the brand’s eccentric ice cream flavors, one mimicking waffles with syrup. They drew up vivid memories that Holly supposed must have been decades old by this point. From how many she personally recognized, the doe supposed the advert must have been put out around when she was a child. She didn’t recognize the exact ad pictured, but still let her mind connect back to how those like it had reached her in those days.
Long had a younger Holly’s imagination been captured by the image of Fords’ as a brand. The bright displays in stores, the rainbow assortment of novelty ice cream flavors in freezer aisles, and nearly any other appearance of the company’s sweets created something more interesting out of an otherwise mundane shopping trip with her parents, whether or not they bought anything. To the deer, it truly seemed that Fords’ could make any fantastical idea for candy into reality, no matter how improbable it might be. Naturally, she now lacked that particular kind of naivete and placed a far more realistic expectation on it. It wasn’t to say that she personally understood how any of Fords’ products were made better now than she did as a child, but her years of work with the technical terms of Alabaster’s production gave her a few, far more mundane, ideas of how they possibly went about it.
Holly couldn’t help but wonder to herself what had happened to the brand since. It had been many years since the doe was an avid candy consumer, mostly for the sake of her teeth’s health, and so she supposed that this could have been the first time the company had been brought to her mind in years. She hadn’t heard any news in the meantime, and she was sure that a brand so old and timeless couldn’t quietly disappear. Before there was any opportunity to sate her curiosity, however, the deer noticed just how close her break was to ending. Rushing back to the office, any curiosity quickly turned into a passing thought when faced with the immediate need to keep up with the rest of the day ahead.
That morning, Holly’s energy had carried her through a quick rush of work and activity. Now, it faltered, and the afternoon began to feel like it stretched into the realm of days. Despite taking a light lunch, her sluggishness persisted for hours. Checking at her watch idly, she again confirmed that the clock mounted on a nearby wall had fallen behind by several minutes once again. In her early days at Alabaster, well before picking up her wristwatch, she had been burned by the misleading time on the clock more than once.
Time was only further dragged out by the waits between important responses and the sit through of another meeting called by her boss to convey what could just as easily have been an email sent to everyone involved. On her way back to her desk from the meeting room, she couldn’t stop her gaze from wandering to the row of small board rooms and private offices which lined the far wall of the floor. Through each open door, she caught glimpses of important-looking figures in expensive suits, lounging on chairs and couches that looked many degrees more comfortable than her own. The doe didn’t find herself envying them, if only because she didn’t want to make the fight to stay awake any harder on herself.
As Holly walked back home at the end of the day, she passed a small corner store not far from her apartment building. In its window was a display including, among countless advertisements for lotteries and cigarettes, a poster depicting new lines of Fords’ Fantastic Fooderies products now in stock. Any thoughts of curiosity the deer had held earlier in the day had completely left her mind by this point, however. She didn’t even notice the Fords branding as she passed and made her way back up to her apartment.
Sitting on her worn couch, Holly’s phone began to buzz expectantly on the coffee table in front of her. A text had just come in from an old friend of hers, asking if she was free that night. There was nothing at all planned for her that day after work, but she hesitated to immediately answer truthfully. Holly knew that it would immediately be followed by trying to organize some evening out with her and the others, and that, after a day as tiring as hers, she would surely struggle to even find the strength to lift herself from the couch for the next hour, at least. Instead, she added to her worrying trend of turning down opportunities to meet up for lack of energy, hoping that she might be luckier the next day.