Hit squad HR, please hold

That first day, Luke had been about as quiet as she would ever see him, sitting there smiling, getting distracted by a million different things only some of which were on his phone, his ADHD so obvious she wondered how this “point shooter” would keep from forgetting what he was doing halfway into a mag change. She had pegged him as a nice guy, hard worker, who’s selfishness and bluntness was caused maybe not so much out of any narcissism or psychopathy as by just a general distraction that pulled his focus away from other people’s feelings like a big auto magnet hanging over his head, like someone else getting offended or feeling ignored fell into the same category as the lagging half of a sentence or a new sound that repeated itself at a steady rhythm, something to be noticed for an instant, but just couldn’t keep his focus.

And like most of her first time gut-generated readings of people, it turned out correct.

About half an hour into their get-to-know-you session, she had another way too accurate gut-reading as Catrino pulled up, late and loud as shit, and swaggered inside.

“You beat cancer?” He said with a smile, pointing at her short hair (which she had started pushing about halfway through Philip’s training, when a stray round popped open her hair clip). But a worm was already working its way through her stomach before he had even spoken (a worm she would unfortunately later misidentify as maybe something more pleasant), a slimy feeling which had sprouted the moment he had looked her in the eye and shook her hand but was still too small to speak for itself.

“Yeah I beat the shit out of it. Hope you beat your SMS.”

He had laughed it off, but the smile had a sharp edge to it. She could see him sitting there, arms spread on the recliner arms, his over-pumped muscles displayed like his smile, for a purpose she didn’t want to think about. He was shorter than Luke and Philip, a fact which probably added to the difficulties he had with them, with gelled up wavy hair and suits that made him look like a movie mobster, especially compared to Domino’s high fashion sense and even Philip’s bank-robber-on-the-run-forced-to-partially-swap-clothes-with-a-street-wear-enthusiast style, and always smelling of a spicy cologne that Sam once asked (as she always did, completely serious, and as always, it was taken as a dig) about the tactical ramifications of, as in “wont they actually smell you coming?”.

He stuck in her mind like a sour taste. Like a bad spot on the rest of the sweet memories, but because he was so far away from what she was trying to pull her mind away from, she let her mind roll over their entire “history” together (though phrasing it like that would have made her grimace), even the bits she had left un-touched for months.

At first she hardly even saw him outside training, and even then he was practicing his role, which kept him far away from her, Luke, and Philip (the “three stooges” as Catrino “playfully” called them, which often elicited a fake laugh from Luke, like something between Goofy and a donkey, complete with leg slapping and which got more laughs than Cat’s little dig every time). He was a flank (“isn’t that another word for asscheek?” Luke said with a finger on his chin) in which role traditionally a single Hardworlder or small team waits for the main action to kick off then maneuvers quickly to take advantage of any opening, often forming interlacing fire or cutting off an escape, but in Cat’s case flank meant waiting in the wings, complaining about their positioning, giving un-asked for tactical advice, and just generally blowing up the comms, then when the shit did pop off he would often be too caught up trying to do some “splinter cell shit” as Luke called it to actually clinch the fight.

Of course, it was never his fault. The set up was fucked. Luke wasn’t focusing the right targets. They had put him on the wrong side of the street. Domino wasn’t making any sense with his intel.

“Is ok Gato. You’ll get the bitches next time,” Luke would say in an exaggerated Mexican accent like an old western movie villain. Luke had been calling him Gato since before Sam joined, “Because he’s sneaky like a Cat, and his name is Cat, that’s all,” he said with a strained smile as Catrino seethed and tried to work up an insult. Anytime Catrino got noticed by the defense (as he often did, trying to sneak up with a silenced pistol, dressed in all grey or something, begging Luke and Philip to let him “make the first kill”) , or tripped over a curb, or dropped a mag or something, Luke would smile or meow and call him by his nickname and they’d get into it.

Whenever Sam asked why they fuck he was even here, Luke would stay quiet, and Philip would frown,

“Domino brought him on,”

And that was it. Sam came to the conclusion (after running through every other possible explanation from familial relation to blackmail to romantic interest) that Domi had initially hired Catrino as a favor to another old friend (a fact which Catrino had accidentally alluded to one time as Philip glared at him like he had mentioned looting during a national tragedy) but had kept him on because a) Domi refused to accept failure, and b) Domi was going through a painful transformation of his own, from renowned flank gunner of two decades to “wires man” as he called it or “Overlord” per Philip’s words, and in transforming Catrino from moron to capable flank, he hoped to somehow justify his own transition, or maybe the possibility of it, which was completely idiotic to Sam (and to Philip when she mentioned her theory, which he accepted with a sad shake of his head) because while Domi could probably take up RP’ing in Arthel professionally and be a pro in a matter of months, it was hard to imagine Catrino being overly capable at anything beyond lifting weights and not taking a hint.

But anyway, eventually Luke and Philip had accepted Cat wasn’t going anywhere, and figured out how to turn his weakness into their strength.

“Damn, you see that guy glaring? Always funny how much an actual vehicle makes the shitbox drivers seethe.” Philip had sighed into the mic in a very un-Philip like way that only Sam and Luke could pick up on. Catrino, who never took enough notice of anyone else to tell the difference, took the bait.

“What guy?”

“In the dusty ass gray Corolla when I got over.”

“You get the plate?”

“Uh, yeah guy, of course. I get all the plates of every—”

“Never mind dickhead, I see him.”

And Catrino had pulled behind the car, in which a few of the guard team scouts sat with comically stoic faces, like critics watching an unexpectedly good play or something, and left about an eyelash’s length of space between their bumpers.

The gunfight had been quick, with Philip and Luke moving in and taking out the rest of the guard team as they sat laughing at the deranged crash dummy emptying his suppressed pistol from behind a gas pump.

“Damn. Nice to be the flank,” Luke had said in between snapping pictures of the corpses faces and plugging cards into phones.

Most times they would get him to “stealth” up to the target, or “assassinate” some lone sentry, either through taunting or “accidentally” letting some intel slip or something else. It became a kind of game within the game, with their main objective sometimes even feeling secondary to the primary goal of getting Cat to “jump”.

But other times they could barely get any words out before he was pouncing on some perceived straggler, and ironically living up to his tongue and cheek nickname more than any of them had intended or expected.

Maybe it was his persistence, even in the face of all the failure and taunting, that had made him somewhat endearing. Her mind bounced back from the softer feelings to their first solo drive together, trying to find the lapse in disgust that had almost let him in.

He had been pissed from the jump. Bitching about Philip and Luke going off together and leaving him with her.

“It’s cause this job is really important,” she said.

She had meant that, like, they couldn’t afford to get distracted toying with him, because if they clinched this job then ST67 would be on the fast track to better contracts, and so they had decided to pair her with Catrino, hoping she could maneuver him into a situation where he would actually be effective, maybe where he wouldn’t worry about trying to one up or impress Philip and Luke or whatever it was he did that caused his fuck ups, but Catrino took it as “this job is too important to have you involved in.”

Which, as she tried to explain once he blew up on her, would have also meant that it was too important for her to be involved with either, which was ridiculous because Philip preferred her driving to Luke’s.

But Catrino was far beyond hearing that. She retreated from his torrent of shit talking by reflecting on the fact that Philip had tasked her with keeping Catrino in line and getting him into something like a useful position, and she had failed to do even that.

“Just bullshit him for the time being. I’m still working on getting Dom to can him. Give him some praise. Don’t matter how phony. He can’t tell the real shit from the fake anyway.”

At the time, she had nodded and uh-huh’ed and took it as just another task from Philip that she wanted to ace with flying colors, though after the fact she went off on him in their one-on-one for making her do the emotional labor of mommying the fucking rage case just cause she was the only girl, which too his credit Philip acknowledged as partially true.

But anyway, somewhere in the middle of Catrino’s dressing down, Sam had gotten an idea and slammed on the brakes, causing him to spill his energy drink all over himself.

He sat there, dead quiet, as it dripped off of him, and she smiled and said something like, “oopsie, guess you’re right, I’m not that good a driver anyway,” and tried to maybe turn the mood into one of playful teasing, which his complaining had kinda seemed like until she had said the thing about the job being important, but he just let another ten seconds or so of acid silence pass, then said,

“Don’t say a motherfucking thing for the rest of the ride.”

She got pretty shook up, given his hand on his gun and his tone unlike any way she had ever been spoken to too, even when Philip took her hostage which was funny when she thought about it, so her voice had cracked and her hand had been shaking when she reached for the radio and said,

“Ok, fine. I got nothing to say to you anyway, so,”

But she had barely gotten the classical station tuned before Catrino grabbed the face plate and ripped the whole thing out of the console, which took him a few tries and, besides scaring the shit out of her, also made her feel kind of guilty (for some stupid reason) for expecting him to be unable to get it out and end up looking like an even bigger idiot.

Philip had called him into a Hardworld meeting the same day they dropped out of the job, and about an hour after that Cat had met up with Sam at the training grounds, looking shaken and subdued, apologizing profusely for his “anger issues” and “innate lack of respect for women caused by my own insecurities” and other phrases that looking back, must have been crafted by Philip to cause him as much shame as possible.

Sam was nothing if not forgiving to a fault, so she flooded him with “its okay”s and self-depreciating statements about her own lack of a filter, and by the end of it, Cat was looking at her as if she had started levitating.

That had kicked off the second Catrino/Sam arc, which now flittered through her mind like old photos being dumped out of an overturned drawer, smiles and scenes flashing and vanishing with a flip as they dropped into oblivion.

He had showered her with kindness. The best guns out of his stash. Coffee on a stake out. Playing chase in training. Even Arthel gold once he found out she played. Letting her choose the music in their rides. Then one day, after another one of his missteps, as she applied a tourniquet to his thigh, the carefully toned muscles now rendered useless, he had said something about the unexpected dexterity of her little hands, purred in her ear that she should get it tighter, then asked her out.

“No.”

“Why not?” No flash of anger. Like her ‘No’ was just another joke.

“We work together.”

“You care about that?”

“And you said really fucking awful mean things to me. Remember? The radio?”

“I was nervous. I’ve been nervous since you started. You do something to me.”

And that worked, cause she’s a fucking idiot she guessed, and suddenly every fuck up he had ever made had a romantic tinge to it.

“Okay. But I want to do it in Arthel. You’d look funny in armor.”

But after the job, probably the moment he had reviewed the mem, Philip had called Sam into a meeting while Dom went to work on Cat.

“You can’t date co-workers.”

“Why not? I thought you wanted us to get along?”

“Not that well! And do you really see something in Catrino?”

Philip had never been more Dad than he was right then, and it twisted Sam all up so much she spoke the unobstructed truth.

“He likes me a lot. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why he was such a dick.”

“So you’re trying to help him? Doing him a favor?”

“He’s given me a bunch of stuff. He does stuff for me all the time now.” It sounded wrong the moment it came out.

“So you want things from him?” If it was possible to imply someone was a whore gently, Philip was doing it.

“No! I don’t really want all that. I’m just saying he’s changed.”

Philip just looked at her, his eyes full of a pity that revealed everything to her in an instant, and after a while she looked at the ground, and said,

“Fuck.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. Dogs like that know where to bite.”

Despite her new certainty that Catrino was the same guy who had ripped the radio out, she hadn’t been one hundred percent behind rejecting him when she met him after that, and a part of her hoped he would laugh it all off, hold her in his arms, and say something like “we just won’t tell them then”, or something.

But he sure as fuck didn’t do that.

“Philip says we can’t date coworkers,” was about the only sentence she remembered saying. Fortunately, mercifully, most of what Catrino said had also faded from her memory, leaving only the smeared syllables of what had once been razor sharp anger, accompanying wide eyed snarls and every tone from ear shattering yells to whispered hisses.

Basically, he accused her of leading him on, of ratting him out to Philip, of fucking Philip, fucking Luke, being a “dyke”, laughing at him behind his back, trying to milk him for Arthel gold, and a few other things she couldn’t remember. Characteristically, she just stood there stunned and tried to interrupt uselessly, until his communicator blared in his ears and he was called away to a meeting with Dom and Philip, which obviously led to him throwing the worst shit he could think of out of his mouth as he stormed through a summoned door.