"What did I say about destroying things?!"
"You very strongly recommended against it," Gnocchi looks up at him without batting an eye when he barges in through the door of the backroom, "but never explicitly said we couldn't."
"Aren't you a clever little-" He notices Dee's wide eyes staring directly at him. He shuts his mouth. He looks around the room but there don't seem to be signs of anything being destroyed. "What were you doing in here?" He decides to take a new approach to his questioning.
"The Director has me organising the paper archives. All of them." For once, Gnocchi actually looks remorseful.
"Why didn't I hear about this? Why-" He narrows his eyes at him. "What did you do?"
Gnocchi just averts his gaze.
"What were you doing?" he asks more forcefully.
"I was…stealing food from the vending machine. Machines," he mumbles.
"You were doing what?" he shouts. "You moron! What kind of an idiot do you have to be to get caught for such a stupid thing? Even more important, why were you even doing that in the first place?! Don't they feed you at home?"
"Well…"
"Don't try to lie to me. I've met your parents. They invited me over to your house for dinner just last week."
"To be fair, I wasn't eating them. I was just-" Gnocchi shuts his mouth. "Actually, never mind. That's not important and you don't need to know it. And trust me," he smiles, remembering something, "I remember. Pepperoni and Mocha really didn't like you."
He does not like to remember that part. (He also does not like to remember the part about being served seconds so many times (despite his protests) he threw up as soon as he got home.) He had been sure he was going to be torn apart, his life flashing before his eyes. "That was not my fault. You and your little devils-"
"Who are Pepperoni and Mocha?" Dee interrupts.
Gnocchi's face immediately lights up, as it does everytime he talks about his two dachshunds. "They're my girls," he pulls out his phone, immediately pulling up pictures of him with his dogs. "Here. See? Aren't they adorable?"
Dee curls her upper lip. She opens her mouth to say something, but Kit clamps a hand over their mouth before they can. He might not know exactly what they were going to say, but he knows, whatever it was, a fight was definitely gonna break out.
"Yes, yes, very lovely," he starts walking backwards towards the door, dragging Dee along with him, with only minimal resistance. (He counts this as a win. Just yesterday morning she would probably have tried to bite his hand off if he had tried the same thing.) "But you," he looks directly at Gnocchi, trying to put on a strict face, "need to continue organising these files. Now."
Grumbling, Gnocchi tucks his phone back into his pocket and turns to the shelves filled to the brim with files.
He focuses his attention on Dee, "And you and I need to get started on that first lesson."
Dee's eyes sparkled with excitement.
~~~
Turns out, Dee doesn't know shit about fuck.
What were those useless old geezers at headquarters even teaching this kid?
He had done a quick rundown of all the classes taught at the Academy, deciding where he should start. Maybe he would get Mousie to teach her some alchemy and Gnocchi to give them a basic introduction to potions. Language and history he could mostly gloss over, since the Bureau should have covered the most important parts in the past years, and spirit exorcising and the arts could come as an afterthought. He figured he could just focus on seals and arrays, since that was technically what he had been tasked with teaching her.
"Okay, let us see you do a basic protection charm," he handed her a brush with ink and a paper tag. He had decided to start small, one of the most basic of basic seals, an essential seal any aspiring Academy student had to know. He wanted to first evaluate her form and determine how advanced she was and if he needed to correct anything from their penmanship, then he would have an idea from where to start.
Dee had just stared blankly at him. "A what?"
…Maybe he had started out too hard? "What about a guard against evil spirits?"
Dee, "....." A drop of ink fell from the brush onto the paper.
He started to sweat. "Do you at least know how to use Indigo?"
She blinked at him a couple of times. "...This isn't ink?"
"Do you even know what Indigo is?"
"Of course." She stared at him expectantly.
"So?"
"It's a colour."
He banged his head against his desk. Did this kid not know anything?
"...Isn't it?" they had asked hesitantly.
"Well… You're not completely wrong," he muttered, "but not in this case. Indigo is a special ink already infused with magical energy used specifically to create seals and arrays," he recited numbly, recalling the definition from his school time textbooks.
"Ah." They sounded a little embarrassed.
He raised his head up weakly. "Hey kid, do you at least know how to write?" At this point he wouldn't put it past the higher-ups to have completely neglected their education.
"Of course I do," they scoffed. He gestured for them to show him. Dee stared, perplexed, at the brush in their hand.
"Here," he extended his hand for her to give him the brush back, exchanging it for a normal pen.
"What should I write?" They smiled sweetly at him.
"Just your name should be fine. Maybe the date," he adds as an afterthought.
They hummed in agreement, quickly scratching down some symbols on the paper tag he had given her earlier. When they passed it back to him though, he didn't know if he was having a stroke or Dee's handwriting was simply that awful.
"What is this?"
"My name," they pointed to the upper part of the scribbles, "and the date," pointing to the bottom.
He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Could this even be called chicken scratch handwriting? It was less than illegible. It was a crime against whoever laid eyes on it, that's what it was. It was an affront to everything seals masters from all generations, past and future, stood for.
He had previously thought he would have to start her education from scratch, but now it looked like he would have to start from even less than scratch.
He cleared his throat. "New lesson plan. If we're establishing priorities, we need to correct that so-called handwriting of yours as soon as possible."
"What's wrong with my handwriting?"
WHAT WASN'T WRONG WITH THEIR HANDWRITING?! he wanted to scream. "A lot. For starters, it's impossible to read."
"Hey! I can read it!"
"The first and only."
She thought for a little while. "But isn't that what's most important? That I'm able to read it?"
"..."
"What?" She looked confusedly at him.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Let's start with some calligraphy exercises, shall we?"
Dee seemed to visibly deflate at that.
So that's what they have been doing for the past couple of hours. The continous scritch-scratch of the pen on paper becoming background noise as Kit writes the report for yesterday's pixie job, which he hadn't been able to do because… Well, because he had ditched work with Baz.
Talking about Baz…
"I hate you," Valentine seethes at Baz, "I really do hate you, you shitty old man."
"I'm sorry, OK?" Baz tries to plead with her. "Besides, it was just one time…"
"Not good enough! You'll have to do better if you want me to forgive you!"
Those two… Kit can feel a headache starting just from glancing at them. They had been at it for the last twenty minutes already, when Baz had finally resurfaced from the bathroom, refreshed and once again looking like his usual showy self. (Goddamned peacock, Kit thought to himself, rolling his eyes, when he saw him emerge.)
"How dare you leave me abandoned here all day yesterday?!" Valentine's nostrils flare.
"I'll make it up to you," Baz offers meekly.
"You went to Mozzarella Bruciato without me!" she almost shrieks. "You didn't even bring me some take out!"
"Do you want me to get you some then?"
"NO!"
"What do you want me to do then?" Baz seems to be despairing.
"You figure it out!" She stomps away.
He catches Baz's eye from across the room, and Kit shrugs helplessly. Baz shrugs back, and turns back to pretending to do some paperwork. Kit knows from experience he's just filling out crossword puzzles.
He should really try to finish this report today…
He hears the sound of heels clicking on the tile floor. Jessica, the office secretary, walks up to his cubicle, a manila folder in her hand.
"You have a new job," she tells him, handing him the folder.
Another one? He wants to tear his hair out. So soon?
He thanks Jessica, but she's already left. As he scans the contents of the folder, his eyebrows only furrow deeper.
But… this could also serve as some hands on experience for his new apprentice.
He glances at her from where she's sitting at a desk across from his. She has been diligently doing her exercises all this time, he reasons, and a break would be good for them, let them stretch their legs. Kit realises with a jolt this is probably the longest she's been still aside from when she's sleeping.
"Hey, Dee," he calls her, her head immediately shooting up to look at him, "how do you feel about going on your first job?"