The Prurient Pollen Pollutant Proposition (The Classic Mirrorverse AU)

When you get right down to it, Wendy knows she’s a totally bitchin’ bad guy.

Her wardrobe is filled with the appropriate color palette (black, black, and more black). She’s instilled an appropriately strong sense of loyalty in the Fatboy soldiers. She has a truly ridiculous amount of shiny hardware.

Plus, she’s managed to infiltrate the good guys’ top secret organization without much difficulty at all. She even had time to squash a rebellion in southern Oregon while she was at it. (Though that had been a little rougher than Wendy had thought it would be. Who knew that the lumberjacks would have had time to form a militia and make an attempt to retake Eugene?) Still, there are times when subterfuge is still required, and her current plan is the perfect example.

When the lockdown alarms go off, the Middleman says, “Well, isn’t this less fun than a scary clown on cake day?” in his low, bitter rasp. Wendy watches as he slumps down on a bench and takes a sip from his flask, grimacing as he does so. It looks as though he hasn’t shaved for three days, and a layer of stubble runs along his cheeks.

Wendy, on the other hand, is still feeling like a barrel full of monkeys, mostly because everything is going to plan, but also because she’s not in the middle of some broody “my sidekick is dead” wallowing. Not that she disagrees that it’s kind of sad that she had to kill the Middleboy. He was pretty cute. Maybe if things had gone differently she could have found him a nice, cushy job in Operations and, well, pretended to be the latest temp for a while. She likes pretending to be normal, when she has the time.

Still, she does appreciate what she got out of the deal. A chance to investigate the Middleman’s operation up close and personal by taking the role of the rebound sidekick, and one less annoying do-gooder sticking his head where it didn’t belong. The Middleman spiraling into his own emo whatevers is just icing, even though she finds his moping incredibly dull. Some of her techies are drooling over the bits and pieces of information on the HEYDAR that they’ve managed to extract from the tech they recovered from Middleboy’s body, and Wendy is looking forward to getting her hands on the specs for the real deal. After all, she has been looking for a new system to run all of the uMasters since Steve Jobs failed to adequately provide her with something usable. Pity that she had to send such a brilliant marketing genius into the coal mines of Western Virginia.

Wendy checks her Fatboy uNinja personal data assistant (connects to the PorkWeb faster than a kid in a candy store! comes in the color of your choice! hooks into the Middleman’s security system like a breeze!) for the duration she’ll have to endure before the lockdown can be lifted. Another two hours. Ugh. She could be doing things that are a lot more fun right now. Like planning the eventual takeover of Canada. Or possibly Mexico. She always did like to spread out from the center of the map when playing Risk.

She glances over at the Middleman again. He’s still slumped over, and Wendy thinks, why the hell not? There’s something vaguely ruggedly attractive about him from this angle, and Wendy is always up for getting laid while one of her plans is unfolding perfectly. There’s something about watching the pieces coming together that gets her all hot and bothered. After her takeover of Fatboy industries, she even considered seducing Pip for a while (there was just something about that clerical collar), though she ended up being too busy consolidating power to get around to it. And after all, her mother always said that you have to make your own fun, and Wendy has taken that advice very seriously.

Well, to be exact, her mother always said that when Wendy complained about being bored on long car rides, but the basic principle is the same.

Wendy takes off her pants and her bra, but she puts her top back on, letting the tails of her crisp, white shirt hang down to the tops of her thighs. “It’s all shit, you know,” the Middleman is saying on the other side of the room. “The good guys in this world, they don’t get shit.”

It’s true, as far as it goes. Wendy learned that the hard way. She also learned that better than anyone else did, and she doesn’t need to hear his lecture on it. After all, she’s the one who has a 90% marketshare of the international media and well, the United States of Fatboy doesn’t need anything resembling media anymore. The Middleman doesn’t seem to notice Wendy as she approaches him, his eye fixed on some point of the ceiling.

He says, “He was a good soldier, he was.” He tilts his head towards the side to fix his gaze on Wendy. “No place for good soldiers here.”

She throws one leg over him, sliding into his lap. “Yeah?” she says. “Too bad.” God, if she has to hear another story about Tyler’s ability to grill ’truly mouth-watering’ ribs and triangulate the location of a Denebian sloth-bat at the same time, she’ll find some way to have his remains put into Deluxe Fatcat Cat Chow.

The Middleman gives her a once over, his hands settling on her hips. She likes the way his gaze is crawling over her skin. “You’re not wearing a bra,” he says. He sounds unsurprised, but then again, she’s not exactly shy about how naked she is in front of him. Take that decontamination shower they had to go through last week, right after they got sprayed by zombie fish juice.

She grins, glancing at her chest and then looking at him. “You have to admit that the girls are totally pulling it off.” She likes this, watching his nostrils flare, his pupil dilate. “Seriously,” she leans closer, “are they not amazing?”

His hands slide up underneath her shirt, and the callouses on his palms make her shiver as they run over the bare skin of her back. Oh yes, way more fun than watching him mope. It might even rank above developing more disgusting versions of nutrient soup, though she’s very proud of that high-protein one she helped develop a couple months back.

“Fucking sex pollen --” the Middleman says, his lips curled into a sneer.

Wendy laughs and wonders if she should play this through as if she was infected. It’ll give her plausible deniability at the very least if he’s the clingy type. It’ll even be a great for when they find the holes she’s cut on the second floor, just the right size for some of her agents to sneak in. But then again, he might get all noble and chivalrous and put a kibosh on the sexyfuntimes, and Wendy isn’t willing to risk that. So she kisses him, letting her teeth scrape along his bottom lip. “Don’t bother worrying about my virtue,” she says. “I’m fine.”

His forehead creases as if he’s considering her words, as if he’s not sure he believes her own judgment in the situation. “That’s not how it works, shortpants. Ida wouldn’t trigger the lockdown without a reason, and no one can tell when they’re under the influence of sex pollen. And sorry, I don’t fuck drunk chicks.”

Wendy makes a mental note to look into the possibility of weaponizing the stuff at a later date. It would come in handy when taking over France, she thinks, but that’s a little far in the future at the moment. Right now she has to deal with how much she’s willing to reveal to him about the real reason for the lockdown. She leans in close, so that her lips brush his ear. She can feel his muscles tense as she does, waiting to react to whatever she’s about to do. “Do you know how easy it is to convince Ida to engage a lockdown?”

“It isn’t,” the Middleman says, though she can feel him twitch, doubting it for a second. “Ida would tell you to go shove it so that she could get in a few more rounds with the tanning bed.”

“Not when you threaten to rewrite her entire operating system in Haskell,” Wendy says. She has the programmers who would do it, too. They might scream in agony for a while, but they’d do it in the end. They all know what happened to Steve Jobs, after all.

The Middleman shudders. “That’s cold,” he says. “Even Ida doesn’t deserve a fate like that. Not even after that time she pumped me full of those drugs after those slugs from Alpha Centauri attacked.”

Wendy smirks as she says, “Yeah, but it got the two of us here, didn’t it?” She doesn’t tell him more than that; no need to give away here entire plan, though she’s impressed how she has crafted a plot that is sheer elegance in its simplicity. It’s not quite up there in the Greatest Hits of Wendy’s Plans, like that time she convinced Manservant that he had to drop himself into that vat of nitroglycerin, but it’s not that bad. She licks the Middleman’s neck, sucks on a patch of skin hard enough to leave a hickey.

He makes a rough sound in the back of his throat, almost a choked-down grunt. She kisses him again, sliding her tongue against his.

“So, my plan?” she says. He doesn’t know this, but right about now, her handpicked team of teenaged computer geniuses have probably infiltrated the control room and are using the latest in Fatboy Techscan technology to replicate detailed specifications of the Middle-operations’ precious HEYDAR.

“Didn’t completely suck,” the Middleman says against her skin, and Wendy grins, because he has no fucking idea. A voice in the tiny radio transmitter in her ear alerts her to the fact that the operation has been successful, and the android didn’t get in their way.

Yeah, totally a bitching bad guy.

FIN.