Chapter Text
"So. You like Emily," Jesse grumbled aloud, as she stalked across the gangway away from the NSC Power Plant. "Why do you like Emily?"
Predictably, Polaris didn't respond with anything like words. Instead Jesse perceived a number of sparkling beacons pop into existence well beyond her current line of sight, presumably flung across the expanse of the Oldest House.
She stopped walking and sighed. "What is that, a scavenger hunt? Are you kidding me?" When Polaris offered no further response, Jesse just shrugged. "Fine. I'll squeeze that in after I find Dylan and save reality from extra-dimensional invasion or whatever."
Still, she couldn't help but be intrigued, and couldn't help but wonder what Polaris had already discovered about Emily Pope.
Ask Underhill.
It was a sticky note, scrawled in almost-illegible cursive, stuck on a report in the Mail Room that Jesse located at Polaris' prompting. According to the date stamp, Emily had submitted the report a week before the Hiss incursion.
"Who's Underhill?" Jesse murmured. Polaris didn't reply. Nor did she give any other hint as to why she felt warmly about this particular note on this particular report. Jesse peeled off the sticky note to read the report's title aloud: "'Applicable acoustic properties of the Rubber Duck quack.'" She snorted. "Sure. 'Cause why not?"
She flipped through the report, and while the physics were over her head, she was able to get the general gist of Emily's assertions about the measurable resonant distortion from an Altered Item with an auditory effect, and how that might allow field agents to better detect Altered Items in the wild.
That was... pretty cool, actually. Jesse grunted and kept reading, feeling like it was her first real insight into the researcher she'd conveniently bumped into amidst the Bureau's chaos. Emily's intelligence was already obvious, but the inventiveness of her hypothesis was something else entirely. Toward the end of the report, Jesse could even see the latent bureaucratic frustration leaking through the text as Emily plead her case for further field study.
Ultimately, none of that actually explained who Underhill was, or why Emily thought she should bring her hypothesis to someone else in the first place. Jesse scowled, and prodded at Polaris for some sort of clue about what she should do next. Polaris only fluttered, serene and unbothered, and pointed her toward the next control point.
It didn't take long for Jesse to tire of her own convoluted logic justifying her distinct categorization of "Emily Pope" vs. "literally the rest of the Federal Bureau of Control."
"She's just different, okay?" Jesse muttered. She fired one last shot at a shambling Hiss Guard, waited while it evaporated into hellish nothing, then returned to her search. "She's not like them."
Polaris didn't so much as ripple in reply while Jesse was elbow-deep in the cafeteria kitchen storage, rummaging about on shelves covered in tools and condiments.
Jesse sighed. "C'mon, I know you think so, too."
The ensuing silence felt distinctly like teasing.
Of course it wasn't ever as obvious as a gesture or a laugh, but the ever-present sentience attached to her mind seemed to twinkle in delight every time Jesse returned to Executive to check in with Emily, and definitely had some editorial input on how Jesse was prioritizing her efforts to restore order to the Oldest House based on Emily's suggestions.
At least this time, Jesse had to concede the teasing was a little bit warranted; she'd spent half an hour picking apart the cafeteria in Research trying to find the particular kind of tea that Emily had idly mentioned while Jesse was barely within earshot, and she wasn't even pretending to make progress on restarting HRA production.
She resisted the urge to launch a refrigerator across the kitchen in frustration, then wandered out past the kitchen door she'd ripped off its hinges, grabbed some pretzels out of a nearby vending machine, twirled a chair around to straddle it, and sat.
She wanted it known - by Polaris, the Board, or any other entities that might be observing - that she was not pouting.
"It's not like I'm being stupid and trusting her or anything," she mused as she snacked. Though even as she said it she had to acknowledge the sheer novelty of sharing the deepest, weirdest secrets she possessed, and being immediately believed.
She looked around, considered the bright, airy staircase and the strangely towering trees at the heart of Central Research, and wondered what it'd been like before the lockdown. Instead of the strange Hiss incantation, was there a nerdy hum of researcher collaboration, broken by the occasional cry of Eureka? The notion made her chuckle.
It didn't take much imagination to picture Emily here in the cafeteria, alone, bent over her clipboard, quickly sorting through whatever menial tasks Darling had assigned her way so she could resume the projects that truly interested her.
Did she have friends? Trusted colleagues? Jesse cocked her head. A romantic partner?
Or was Emily then much the way Jesse knew her now: professionally isolated, organizationally suffocated, and a target of barbed gossip from her peers?
And why did any of that matter to Jesse, anyway?
She stood and spent a minute gathering stray mugs and trays from the abandoned cafeteria tables, and put them on the nearby return carts. Then she paced around a little, as if waiting for inspiration, or perhaps another Hiss attack.
Eventually, the silence from Polaris was deafening.
Jesse slumped. "Look, I could use another friend right now, you know?" she murmured.
At that, Polaris thrummed, and the familiar sparkles reappeared across the breadth of the Oldest House. Only this time there was a new beacon that drew Jesse's attention, back in the kitchen by the coffee pots.
She bounced into the Board Room and grinned at Emily, who was charting data on a whiteboard. "Got something for you," Jesse announced, as she fished out the slightly-crushed box of tea bags from her pocket.
Emily took the box from her, though she looked perplexed. "For me?"
"You said you liked having an alternative to coffee, once in a while."
"I do," Emily agreed, though her tone wandered upward, hesitant.
"Oh, you didn't say that to me," Jesse admitted, suddenly awkward. "But I heard, when you mentioned it to your assistant, earlier..." She felt her cheeks flush as Emily studied her with curious eyes. "Not like it was hard to find, anyway," she lied. "I mean, your name's on it."
Emily turned the box over, spotting the sticky note left by the head of facilities as a long-forgotten favor, and she smiled. "Oh. Thank you, Jesse."
"Yeah, sure." Jesse waved it off and turned to the whiteboard, seeking a distraction. She spotted her own name on one of the graphs Emily had been working on. "So what's this stuff?"
Emily brightened. "Oh - well. It's Polaris, actually." She pointed to a particular section on a graph, with a noisy line of data wandering off the scale. "I mentioned that your readings are - well - amazing? The specific resonance fluctuation I detected - I've correlated it to those references I located for the Prime Candidate records and Hedron. And I was able to isolate it within the tests we ran when you invoked your connection to her."
Jesse traced her fingers along the graph, and Polaris pulsed around her in a kind of wonder. "You can see her?" Jesse whispered.
"Yes, in a manner of speaking," Emily replied. "I can definitely observe proof of her existence. I suppose that's sort of the same thing." She was practically vibrating with the dual thrill of making Jesse happy and discovering something absolutely astonishing, but then she noticed Jesse had gone very still, with a distant look in her eyes. "Jesse?"
Jesse sniffed and looked away abruptly.
Emily lifted a hand, but stopped short of touching her. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."
"You didn't," Jesse assured her. "It's just - this is, like, really validating." She took a shaky breath, not sure how she could begin to explain how she'd learned to hide so much of herself away for so long, only to accidentally encounter some science nerd who brought data to the great mystery of her life, and didn't try to talk her out of everything she thought she knew. "Thank you," she added.
"Of course," Emily said. Her voice was quiet and kind.
Jesse gave her a wry half-smile. "A smushed up box of tea doesn't exactly feel sufficient to pay you back."
"Oh, I wasn't keeping score," Emily assured her. She leaned in as if to share a secret. "But if you were ever inclined to secure the laundry facilities in lower Executive, we could call it even."
Jesse laughed. "Deal," she agreed.
While Jesse remained mostly focused on finding Dylan and trying to calm the chaos in the Bureau, she occasionally managed to find one of the beacons Polaris had scattered about:
- A memo Emily had composed offering to lead a collaborative effort between Parakinesiology and the Hypnosis Lab to measure the parameters of the paralytic effects of the Jasper Post Box.
- A memo attached to Emily's paper "The Parasensitivity of Sequels" reiterating her request to Darling to attempt recovery of the SHÜM gaming cabinets from their last known locations in Investigations, citing both their scientific merit and a boost to Bureau morale by way of cross-departmental game tournaments.
- A particularly outlandish proposal Emily had pitched to use the Bremen Basket Altered Item in coordination with the Animal Control agencies in New York City as a bid to control the rat population, or at least "lure the bulk of them away from my apartment building, please."
(That last one in particular had made Jesse chuckle.)
While Jesse enjoyed the incremental discovery - especially as it offset some of the horrors she'd discovered elsewhere across the Oldest House - she was still fairly perplexed about what, exactly, Polaris was trying to get her to see.
She'd learned that Emily was persistent, clever, charming, and even entrepreneurial, as evidenced by the rangers she'd overheard talking about the weird stuff they'd found in a given Threshold and how they would "monetize it" by delivering it to Pope.
As she was waiting for Arish to finish giving his team orders and wondering where the hell Marshall had gotten off to, Jesse meandered about Central Executive, and happened to spot Polaris' alert on a whiteboard under a geometric equation: Can you write a formula to show the sum? I offer a coffee if you do!, complete with a little drawn heart.
Jesse had definitely missed more than her share of math classes during the years she'd spent scurrying away from FBC attention, so she didn't even bother attempting to reach a solution. Instead she focused on that heart.
The message wasn't signed, but Jesse was positive Emily had left it, and had even tried to tame her wild handwriting for her audience. Jesse found herself smiling, picturing Emily standing here sometime before the lockdown, drawing a triangle with a straightedge in a bid to interface with a Bureau that seemed nigh impenetrable, inaccessible. Emily was the insider who nonetheless couldn't blend in, yet she sought connection and left fingerprints of herself all across the Oldest House.
Almost like... a friendly face.
"Oh," she blurted out loud. So that was why Polaris had liked Emily, from the beginning.
"Hey boss? You good?"
Jesse turned to Arish and nodded. "Yeah. You said there was something you wanted me to look for in the field?"
The beacons across the Oldest House dimmed, ensuring her attention was focused on the task at hand.
Jesse poofed into existence at the control point in Executive again, an occurrence that had become so commonplace the researchers nearby barely even startled anymore. She grinned and skipped up the steps to the Board Room, eager to talk to Emily about the plants in Central Research, how they'd totally perked up when she chatted with them, and how cool was that?
Except Emily wasn't in the Board Room.
For a second, Jesse choked on pure panic, but then the research assistant in the back of the room waved over at her and explained that Emily had stepped out to get some sleep.
Jesse spun on her heel and wandered back out to Executive, a little disheartened as she wondered just how long they'd all been at this, anyway. The passage of time in the Oldest House was confusing at best, and the valiant efforts of the agents she'd encountered thus far meant they were all working well past the point of exhaustion. (She didn't have to issue a Directorial order for people to nap, did she? How would she even do that?)
She rested her hands on her hips and stood for a bit, idly scowling at the enormous black pyramid looming over them all. Finally she realized she was drawing concerned attention by her very inaction, so she sighed and trudged back down the steps, intending to head to Ahti's office and see if he had any more jobs for her.
Polaris twinkled in her periphery, leaving a sparkle in a dim corner of the room next to a pair of vending machines. Jesse shrugged and changed course to head that direction, then caught sight of Emily curled up on one of the leather couches, asleep under a garishly branded FBC blanket, with her ubiquitous clipboard balanced across her legs.
Jesse smiled, entirely by reflex, and felt the tension slip from her muscles. She grabbed a protein bar from the vending machine, opened it carefully so as not to make too much noise, wolfed it down in a couple bites, then dropped onto the couch perpendicular to Emily's with a profound whoosh of breath.
She fidgeted and stole a few sideways glances over at Emily, allowing herself to entertain the fleeting notion of waking her up to talk about literally anything, since everything about the Oldest House was better when Emily was there to keep her company.
Ultimately she kept quiet. She tilted upright just long enough to set Emily's clipboard on the nearby coffee table, and to carefully tug the blanket back in place around Emily's shoulders.
Jesse sat again and used a tiny burst of telekinetic power to pull the coffee table a bit closer, then propped her feet on it and settled in for a nap of her own.
She jerked awake sometime later, incredibly disoriented and flailing at the feeling of something restraining her until she realized it was just a blanket - the same blanket she'd tucked around Emily earlier.
"Jesse?" Emily called, gently, from the other couch. She set aside her clipboard to watch Jesse with sharp eyes. "You okay?"
Jesse froze and sucked in a deep breath. "Yeah, I'm good," she said, almost convincingly. She scrubbed at her eyes and sat up straight. "Didn't mean to sleep that hard."
"You probably needed it," Emily offered. "Honestly, I wasn't sure if I should have woken you earlier. You didn't look terribly comfortable."
"Oh, it's fine. Definitely slept on worse," Jesse muttered, as she thought back to the rushed travel to New York, which had involved far too many furtive naps on benches in bus stations and random parks, and left her with a crick in her shoulder that had bothered her ever since. She grabbed a fistful of the blanket and made a vague gesture with it. "Thanks."
"Sure. Was there anything you needed from me, before?"
Jesse shook her head, even as her mind raced to find something to chat about, to extend the moment of quiet camaraderie.
Emily stood and stretched. "Okay. I'm gonna get us some coffee."
When she returned, she spread out her notes on the coffee table, and they huddled together, talking through the next priorities to secure the Oldest House.
It was the first time they'd really collaborated outside of their usual pattern of Jesse venturing forth, reporting back, then wandering off again. By the time they wrapped up, Jesse was feeling energized, ready to take on whatever new challenges she'd discover. She bounced to her feet, intending to grab a shower and some food, then start work in the next sector.
"We should do this more often," she said, while Emily gathered her notes and returned them in meticulous order to her clipboard.
"Of course. Doctor Darling and Director Trench had a fairly irregular briefing cadence, but we could be a bit more deliberate about that, at least until things get back to normal."
Jesse looked around and chewed on her lip. "I kinda think this is our normal, you know?"
"I suppose you're right," Emily said, with a thoughtful nod. "I'll prioritize regular briefings for you."
"I'll be there," Jesse promised. She leaned a little closer and dropped her voice. "Listen, I hope this doesn't sound incredibly fucked up, but I'm really glad you're here."
Emily laughed. "Honestly, yeah, that is a little fucked up. But I'm really glad I'm here, too."
Finally Jesse had found Dylan, she'd shut down the slide projector, and she was settling into some sort of Director-type routine. She and the Bureau staff were clearing Black Rock shelters one at a time, and remobilizing those personnel with HRAs. The Oldest House was nowhere near "normal," but the invasion was abating with each passing day.
The overall mood in Executive definitely turned a little turbulent after she'd selected Emily to take over as Head of Research, but sentiment settled quickly, especially since they'd continued their habit of daily briefings out in the open. They occasionally picked up an audience, or a department representative would show up to advocate for a particular priority. In any case, the transparency helped cement Jesse's leadership, and validated her trust in Emily.
What had started as a periodic infodump to the Bureau's newbie had evolved into a slow and steady bonding. Jesse looked forward to it every day, and sometimes she even managed to continue the habit she'd cultivated of learning new things about Emily herself.
They'd gotten through their agenda and were finishing their usual coffee when Jesse asked a question she'd long wondered about. "Hey - why were you in Executive when the lockdown happened?"
Emily hummed and made a speculative face. "I've wondered that, myself. Doctor Darling specifically asked me to work out of his office in this sector that week. I didn't know why at the time, but now I wonder if it was a sort of 'designated survivor' procedure. He knew Executive would be well-guarded, heavily shielded, fully stocked with HRAs, and that I'd be likely to avoid the worst of the incursion here." She looked down, and her jaw worked for a long moment. "To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about that."
Jesse stayed quiet and watched her.
"Of all the possible outcomes, I am glad I'm here. I'm beyond glad that you found me. But I definitely have a degree of survivor's guilt." She exhaled a sardonic noise. "Not to mention enormous frustration about all the institutional knowledge we lost." She shook her head. "I just feel like it could have gone differently."
"Yeah? What would you have done instead?" Jesse asked.
At that, Emily sat up straight, with her shoulders back. "I have a multi-chapter incident postmortem report composed. I'll have it on your desk by end of day."
Jesse blinked. "Oh, I wasn't actually asking for..."
"And I have a proposal to completely overhaul containment and screening procedures for Bureau personnel that are exposed to level 3 paranatural phenomena or higher. We'll need a few hours to review it together so you can sign off."
"A few hours?"
"With respect, Director, we are not subjecting the Bureau to that kind of risk again."
Jesse's eyebrows shot up, but she nodded. "Okay. We'll get it done."
"Thank you." Emily immediately relaxed. She'd clearly been expecting resistance to her operational efforts. She set down her coffee mug and took a deep breath to speak again before Jesse interrupted.
"If you're about to apologize, don't," Jesse said. "You're doing the job I asked you to do, and you're fixing what I asked you to fix. Thank you."
Emily dipped her head in a nod, and offered a tiny smile. "Yes ma'am, Director Faden."
Jesse shook her head, but didn't scold her for the tease, this time. "Right. Well, I'm gonna head to Research and apparently help with 'extra-dimensional Mold.'" Her face screwed up in a wince. "Is that as gross as it sounds?"
"Definitely," Emily confirmed. Her smile broadened to a grin. "Good luck."
All things considered, Jesse found herself glad she'd met Emily Pope before Raya Underhill, otherwise she might have simply turned around and left the Bureau to fend for itself.
"You’ve pulled Excalibur from the stone and now decree as you see fit, O Queen. What a true meritocracy we live in," Raya proclaimed.
She'd almost dipped in a fucking curtsy.
Fortunately Jesse was too distracted to engage with the acidic commentary. "Hey, did Emily ever talk to you about her study of the Rubber Duck quack... thing?" (Jesse still found herself truly enjoying the nonsensical turns of phrase she uttered within the Oldest House.)
Raya huffed in annoyed distraction as her brain tried to process the unexpected question. "I do vaguely recall that, yes. Truly a pointless exercise. The data speak for themselves."
Jesse folded her arms. "'Pointless' to seek validation from a colleague? Isn't that, like, what you scientists do? Try to replicate results? She had a theory or whatever, and she values your expertise enough to ask you to help her prove it."
Raya bristled, obviously prepared to wield her usual snark about scientific method.
"You know, she specifically asked me to look for you," Jesse continued, preempting her. "All hell's broken loose across the Oldest House, but she was hoping you made it."
At that, Raya grit her teeth, then worked her way through an irritated sigh. She turned to a pile of papers on her desk, where she fished out a file and handed it over. "Well then. If you'd be so kind as to return this to her?"
Jesse immediately recognized the report as a copy of the one she'd originally found in the Mail Room. She flipped through it, eyeing the multitude of scribbled formulae and diagrams.
"You can tell her I was able to validate her hypothesis," Raya added, with a touch of impatience.
Jesse's hackles lowered a fraction. "Okay. I'll do that."
"And... please do also extend to her my thanks, for ensuring that our new Director does her job and protects vital Bureau personnel." She spun on her heel and returned her attention to her microscope, clearly having dismissed Jesse.
Jesse barely restrained an eye roll as she left. She returned to Executive, and strutted, triumphant, into the Board Room.
"Your friend - Underhill? She's fine," Jesse announced, as she handed over the marked up copy of Emily's report. "Asked me to give you this."
"Oh, I wouldn't call us 'friends,'" Emily replied, with a faint laugh. "But thank you, Jesse. I appreciate you checking on her." She was then promptly distracted by Raya's notations as she flipped through the file.
Jesse watched her for a moment, and smiled at the intense concentration that likely meant Emily had all but forgotten she existed. For some odd reason, she could feel Polaris rummaging about at the back of her mind, as if impatient. "So... would you call us friends?" Jesse asked, suddenly. She gestured between them with a wave of her hand. "You and me?"
Emily wrenched her attention painfully back to Jesse, blinked a bit while she considered the question, then smiled. "I would," she said, quietly. "If that's all right with you."
"Yeah," Jesse said, in a tone she hoped passed for breezy. "Cool. Well, enjoy your data." She only barely stopped herself from making a deeply awkward fingerguns gesture at Emily before she turned and wandered out.
This time, as she stood at the top of the stairs and stared down the looming pyramid, she grinned, broad and confident.
She belonged here. She would fight for this place, for Dylan. For her friends.
"Have you noticed the Director usually looks a lot happier after she talks to Pope?" a researcher chirped nearby. "Better time your next budget request for after their meetings."
Jesse blushed and got back to work.
