Chapter Text
Renovations have been going on all week at Axe Capital, and the noise is really ruining the ambience of the office. Luckily for Rian, none of the construction work is happening inside the Mase Carb enclave, but glass walls don’t block out all the sound, just muffle it.
With everyone trying to make up the losses from the Shine-Lucence collapse, it’s been a week of late nights for the quant team. She’d expect the construction crew to have gone home by now, but they’re still in the building, and the constant clamor of saw and hammer still seeps through the glass. Maybe they don’t have a union.
Rian hits the button on another backtest and leans back in her chair. That should give her an hour at least to look into another project, or maybe just to relax.
She glances over to Winston, thinking of asking what he’s working on, but he doesn’t look like he’s working at all. Though technically he’s looking at his Bloomberg, or at least pointing his face toward it, his eyes are glazed over. His hands aren’t on his keyboard or mouse; one of them is clicking a pen every few seconds.
Rian pauses her music and takes off her headphones. Normally that would catch Winston’s attention, but he doesn’t look her way. She needs to be more obvious.
“¿Estás pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo?”
Winston’s eyes flick over to her, more focused now, giving her a half-hearted attempt at a death glare. He still doesn’t say anything.
“You’re really spacing out right now,” Rian says. “Like, you might as well be in the Oort cloud.” Oh, that’s a good metaphor, very fund-appropriate. She’d better keep that one in her back pocket.
The silent semi-glare lasts several more seconds before Winston speaks. “Long week. I’m tired.”
A hammer bangs against metal somewhere on the main floor, and Winston flinches, eyes flickering shut, fingers curling tighter around the pen. That doesn’t look like ordinary exhaustion.
“Construction getting to you?” Rian says, trying to be casual. Sounding too concerned would make it weird. “I can’t believe they’re still here.”
“Yeah. Can’t block it out, can’t focus.”
“Don’t you have headphones?”
“Broke last week. New pair hasn’t shipped yet.”
The muted clunk of the office door opening turns both Rian’s and Winston’s heads. Mafee’s walked in, and pushed the door so far open that it’s locked into place, letting the sounds of power tools flow in unfiltered. “You guys are still here?”
“Fuck off,” Winston says. A few analysts stare, but Mafee ignores him.
“You’re also still here,” Rian points out.
“Everyone on the trading floor’s gone home. Didn’t expect there to be anyone left here.”
Winston drops his pen onto the desk. “Shut the door, asshole.”
“Deal with it,” Mafee says.
“Do you know what the renovations are for?” Rian says, as Winston pulls off his glasses and buries his face in his hands. “Or why they’re continuing this late?”
“No clue.” Mafee yanks out an empty desk chair and drops into it with a clatter. “Back in the Westport office, Axe had the meditation room torn up and redone into a panic room. Maybe he’s doing that again.”
“What for?”
“Who knows? It’s Axe, no one has a fucking clue why he does anything until six months later.” A drill whines and buzzes outside; Mafee raises his voice. “I mean, when he was renovating the first time, he was crazy paranoid about there being a quisling in the office, and then in three weeks it was like he’d totally forgotten about it — whoa, hey, man —”
Rian follows his gaze to Winston, who’s pressing his open hands against his face again and again, so hard that it has to hurt. Red scratches run from his hairline down over his forehead. Mafee jumps from his chair and tries to pull Winston’s hands away from his face. “Dude, you’re gonna hurt yourself, don’t do that —”
“Don’t fucking touch me,” Winston grits out, barely intelligible, struggling to yank his hands free of Mafee’s grip.
“Help me out here,” Mafee says, turning back to Rian, but she’s never seen this happen, has no idea what to do.
Who would know?
Lauren and Wendy are nowhere in sight. Most of the other quants have gone home, and the few left, whose names Rian doesn’t know anyway, are pointedly ignoring events at Winston’s end of the desk. Taylor —
Taylor’s still here, in their office. Taylor knows how to handle problems, how to make things better.
“I’m going to get Taylor,” Rian announces, and gets up from her chair.
On her way, one analyst she passes dares to ask, “What’s going —”
“None of your business,” Rian says, because it seems fitting, and sounds a lot better than I don’t know either and I’m scared.
She slips into Taylor’s office. With their laptop open and the desk phone pressed to their ear, they don’t notice her even when the door shuts behind her. This might be a bad time.
“Hey, are you busy?”
“Excuse me for a moment,” Taylor says into the phone, before setting it on the desk. “Yes. Is this urgent?”
“Well, Winston’s kind of freaking out, and Mafee and I don’t know what to do,” Rian says, “so… yeah?”
Taylor looks toward Winston, and their brow furrows over widening eyes. They pick up the phone just long enough to say, “I’m sorry, but I’ll need to call you back another day,” before hanging up and slamming the laptop shut. In less time than it took Rian to decide to ask Taylor for help, they’re out the door; she follows them.
“Please go home and close the door behind you,” she hears them say to the remaining quants, who hurry to shut off their computers and pack up their things. When they get to Winston, they wave away Mafee — he’s gotten the message to get his hands off Winston, it seems, and was just entreating him to calm down instead. (It isn’t working.) No reason why Rian’s presence would be any more helpful; she retreats to the couch near the office entrance, the door finally swinging shut behind the last analyst to leave.
Taylor sits in Rian’s chair, leaning in close to Winston and talking too quietly to hear from across the room. That doesn’t stop Rian from trying, and she’s straining so hard to pick out their words that it’s almost a surprise when Mafee sits down next to her. “Do you think he’s having a stroke or something?”
“I think if he were having a stroke, Taylor would have called 911 instead of handling it themself.” Rian shifts on the couch. Mafee’s sitting partly on her cushion and partly on the one next to it, and it’s throwing off her equilibrium. “You haven’t seen this before?”
“Never.”
Relative quiet settles over the office — the racket from outside is muffled again, and inside there’s only Taylor’s voice, low and calm, and Winston’s breathing, slowing.
Both of them get up, and Winston follows Taylor to their office. Through the glass, Rian watches him collapsing onto the couch just inside the door and Taylor pulling down the window shades. Seems like it’d be helpful if the glass walls on three sides also had shades. Maybe this would have been avoided if they were in a normal building.
Winston described it to her, once, the building that Taylor Mason Carbon had called home when it was named Taylor Mason Capital and not under Axe’s control. An old warehouse, refurbished, across the river in Dumbo. Exposed wood and stone and solid doors, low light and quiet, rather than Axe Cap’s glass and chrome and glaring fluorescents and soaring staircases that declare the future is here and now and it is insane wealth. He’d obviously missed it, and she can see why.
On the other side of the glass, Taylor sits down beside Winston, shoulder to shoulder, their backs to everyone else, and Rian aches.
“I think maybe we should leave,” Mafee says.
“We should.”
Rian pushes herself off the couch to return to her desk. The backtest will have to finish another day. She turns off her Bloomberg, scoops up her laptop and headphones, and doesn’t let her focus linger on Winston’s glasses, askew on his keyboard.
When she turns for the door, Taylor is there, and Rian almost jumps. It’s spooky how quietly they move sometimes. “Before you go, I need to speak with you. And Mafee.”
“Sure.”
A nod from Taylor summons Mafee from the couch. He comes over demanding to know, in a not-quite-whisper, “What the hell was that about?”
“Winston will be taking a few days off.”
“Because he gave himself a concussion and said ‘don’t fucking touch me’ when I tried to stop him?”
“In a case like that, I would suggest that you not fucking touch him.” Taylor shoves their hands in their pockets. “It likely exacerbated the situation.”
“There wasn’t a situation until he tried to tear his face off.”
“There kind of was,” Rian says. “Before you came in, he said he was tired and the noise from the construction was bothering him. And you leaving the door open probably didn’t help.”
“Exactly. Being subjected to noise at that volume for this long can be… overstimulating.” Rian steals a glance toward Winston, who’s now lying down on the couch. “Some people are more sensitive to that kind of disruption than others.”
“Winston? Sensitive?”
So the pot is calling the kettle callous now? “Unlike you.”
Mafee shrugs, hands falling open helplessly. “It’s not like I wanted him to suffer or something. I didn’t know he wasn’t just being a jackass about me leaving the door open.”
“Anyway,” Taylor says, curt. “Winston will be out next week. I’ll see what can be done about the renovations before he returns —”
“But he’s going to be fine, right?”
Surprised looks from both Mafee and Taylor land on her like laser sights. Damn. She sounded too concerned and she’s made it weird.
“Yes.” There’s no impatience in Taylor’s tone now, just sympathy. “He will be.”