jadegrave

“The chief should be waiting right here–” Samjo cuts himself off and clicks his tongue. How he does it around the lollipop in his mouth, Dante doesn’t know.

“Chief,” Samjo says, tucking his clipboard under one arm before briskly walking over to the slouching, dead-eyed man in a lab coat standing in the middle of K Corp’s lobby. “I’ve told you a hundred times to remember to fix your tie. You’re the pride of our department, after all; you should look the part.”

“Such airs suit not our humble rank, Samjo," the apparent chief says, tonelessly. Samjo finishes straightening his tie, then starts on the disheveled mess that is the chief's hair. "What need have we for empty vanity?"

It's the most roundabout way of saying, "I don't care," that Dante's heard yet. Though Dante supposes it would be easy not to care when you have a personal assistant who will sort your personal grooming for you, too; Samjo batters the chief’s cowlicks into straightened submission with an exasperation and ease that suggests he's done so at least three dozen times before.

"We'll get the department of the year award this year for sure, Chief," Samjo says, dusting his hands. "Then you'll really need to shape up. At least bother to look nice when we can start gloating in front of Miss Shrenne."

He cuts off the chief's tired sigh. "And I've brought your guests here," he says, clipboard once again in hand. "Limbus Company, as requested."

Dante supposes this is their cue. They turn slightly, looking for Faust who, as usual, will provide the introductions in their place. But their gaze catches on Dongbaek, first.

Dongbaek's anger is as ephemeral as her beloved fireworks: quick to rouse, and twice as quick to dissipate. Dante has seen her all set to strangle Ryoshu, and then not ten minutes later, the two of them laughing gleefully arm in arm (at some poor fellow who had his legs blown clean off and spattered over Mephistopheles's front, but still).

So this kind of rage as she looks at Samjo's chief is a shock. The bitterness in that disgusted glare is the kind that has been left to steep for years.

"This is where you ended up?" she spits, and Dante has never heard a voice so quiet and yet so loud all at once.

Samjo bristles, either at Dongbaek’s tone or the implication that being head researcher of a department of K Corp is the kind of place where you just ‘end up’--quite possibly at both. But the chief raises a hand to forestall Samjo’s oncoming tirade. His expression continues to remain placid, still as death.

"There comes a time when flying crows must rest," he says. “In makeshift roosts, to pass the stormy night. What right have you, or I, to pass judgment?”

"What right? You ask what right I have, after all you’ve done? You?”

"O-oi, Dongbaek, maybe you calm down a little-"

Ishmael's hand on Dongbaek's shoulder is violently shrugged off. Just as Dante starts to worry that they may get thrown out of K Corp for violently assaulting one of their employees, Boughless and with a hell of an explanation to give to Vergilius, the chief finally looks up and meets Dongbaek’s gaze head on.

For some reason this startles her, giving the chief time enough to say, with a voice ever so barely shifted in ways that Dante doesn't know him well enough to parse, "I am glad you have found your colors again, Dongbaek. But now, to business. I am Chief Researcher Yi Sang of K Corp's Animal Welfare and Veterinary Sciences Department. I look forward to working with you all."