A significant part of Ber was always reluctant to take a seat in Woodwick’s, or any superior’s, office because that implied that he would be there for some amount of time, so with a sinking feeling in his gut, the soldier moved toward the chair and sat. What came out of Woodwick’s mouth next only validated the sentiment. Suddenly every other menial chore he’d completed as a part of staff duty seemed heavenly compared to the nightmare staring him in the face. An entire day, possibly two, stuck in an office with Woodwick and Woodwick’s paperwork. Ber was far from perfect, but surely, surely nothing he’d ever done wrong was bad enough to deserve this cruel and unusual punishment.

For a long moment, the soldier debated simply feigning ignorance. He was an orphan commoner, so illiteracy wasn’t outside the realm of possibility - or that far from the truth, if he was honest. More importantly, Woodwick already knew that, and if he was asking Ber, then he wasn’t sure about Ber’s own literacy levels. And they both knew an inability to read and write would surely prevent him from being of any use to the captain - an ideal state. But no, they both also knew that the military provided the most fundamental literacy lessons to commoners such that they could at least sign their name on the required paperwork. And Ber and Evie had talked about sending letters to each other, and he had no idea if Woodwick had heard about that or not. Damn.

With a quiet breath, Ber glanced away. “Not well, sir,” He answered finally, willing to elaborate on his own shortcomings in this one particular instance. Whatever it took to convince Woodwick to summon someone else to be his assistant. “And I’ve never really done any paperwork before.” Nor did he want to.

Oh no. That was a big pile - too big. Granted, Ber would have considered a stack with a single piece of paper too big in this context, but this pile held way more than a single page. There had to be at least - he didn’t even know, but the number was dishearteningly large. And now all of it sat expectantly in front of Ber and his growing dismay, which amplified as the pieces started to click together. Woodwick’s desk had been cleared off. The captain himself put a second fountain pen and inkwell in front of Ber.

No. The one saving grace of this entire assignment had been that the soldier could have at least retreated to Gerard’s desk by the door, but it appeared as though he wouldn’t even get that much. Too busy digesting this particular realization, he barely registered Woodwick’s not-so-veiled condemnation of incompetence, let alone the compliment they contained.

Ber nodded at the instructions that made this entire endeavor seem deceptively easy and, with the utmost reluctance, scooted the chair forward so he could actually see the forms in question. Dark eyes traveled from the lines of text on the top one to the single line of text that Woodwick had just written, in handwriting far neater than Ber could ever manage, on the blank sheet of parchment: Pvt Stormcrest via Cpt Woodwick. Resignation creeping in, he nodded again in response to the other man’s question.

It all made sense - or at least as much as it needed to for him to get the job done. Ber just really, really didn’t want to do it.

Woodwick grabbed the form that the soldier had eyed rather dubiously and put it down in front of him. He followed the captain’s finger down the page as he explained what to do, eyes skipping ahead to the bottom of the page. Then he looked over at the next form on the top of the pile, then again at the pile as a whole. I do have a question, sir, He imagined himself saying. If I quit, would I still need to do this? Except, technically, he couldn’t even quit because he’d signed over another five years to get that bonus. Damned by paperwork on all sides.

Instead, Ber sighed. “No, sir, I think I’ve got it.” Reaching over, he picked up the pen and pulled the form closer to him in order to fill it out as indicated. Through some stroke of luck, he managed to spell everything correctly - a couple of glances to the side helped with the signature - and not leave an ink blot on the page.

Careful not to smear the drying ink, he set that one aside and moved on to the next, which appeared to be something about requisitioning more swords to replace the irreparably damaged ones. As far as he could tell, it just required a signature at the bottom. Ber obliged, though the pen ran out of ink halfway through. After dipping the point into the inkwell again, he tried to trace over what he’d already written, but the end result turned out almost worse than the initial attempt. Hiding a wince, he set the page aside and reached for the next.

This was going to be a long day.

By the time someone knocked on the door and jolted him from his thoughts, Ber’s mind swam with more words than he’d read in the past month. He looked from the paper he had just pulled from the top of his pile - an incident report of some altercation - to see a servant stepping into the office. Woodwick ordered some sort of lunch, and the captain did not have to make the offer twice before the soldier gratefully set down the pen. Flexing his fingers, he leaned back and gazed blankly at his stack of completed forms, which didn’t seem nearly as tall as it should have been given the tired haze that had settled over his thoughts. Then he blinked, ran a hand over his face, and tore his gaze away.

Was there anything he didn’t understand? “Why—” As he began an inquiry that was half genuine question and half complaint, he gestured vaguely to the papers in front of him, where the form detailed the incident and why it happened. Ber had only skimmed part of it before Woodwick had invited him to take a break, but he couldn’t see the necessity for so many words when the events and conclusions drawn from what he’d read were simple enough. “It says his… arms and hands were badly injured and then talks about how that happened. But, I mean, isn’t that obvious?”

He looked over at the captain. “When people are attacked and defending themselves, it’s usually their arms and hands that get hurt, right? Because they do something like this.” Loosely, he raised his own arms in front him to demonstrate, with his right arm blocking his face and his left a little lower, before gesturing to the sheer amount of text on the page. Though he was confident in his knowledge, he still paused for confirmation before continuing, “So they didn’t have to write all this down—” and, more importantly, make Ber have to read it “—when a sentence about self-defense would have worked just as well.”

Woodwick’s answer, as they often did, made Ber inclined to run a hand down his face, though this time was a little unusual in that he actually indulged the urge and that the captain himself wasn’t the target of the soldier’s exasperation. These concepts weren’t even that hard to grasp, yet Ber was the one to suffer for their incompetence. He shook his head. Whatever. It wasn’t as if that was a particularly new occurrence. As a soldier at the bottom of the metaphorical totem pole, he considered himself intimately familiar with how easily shit rolled downhill.

The captain’s less-than-complimentary description of his assistant, however, had him glancing at Woodwick. “Why is he your assistant, sir?” He dared to ask, somewhat surprised that the other man would settle for working closely with someone so evidently mediocre. “Your other one was more…” His voice trailed off while he searched for a compliment for Aveline that didn’t immediately disparage Gerard. Although Ber had barely interacted with the former assistant, and even then only through work, he distinctly recalled telling her to send someone to collect Long’s body. Despite paling considerably, she’d done so successfully. Woodwick made it sound like Gerard would faint at the thought, which wasn’t particularly useful given the frequency with which dead bodies appeared.

If Ber had a coin for every time he’d encountered death in the past couple seasons, he’d have two and a half coins – technically, he hadn’t been conscious to deal with Wilson Barr - which wasn’t a lot, but it was weird that it happened thrice.

Perhaps that was why Ber was a soldier, albeit one on staff duty, and not an assistant. If this was the kind of work that Gerard dealt with on a daily basis, he thought he preferred the bodies. Woodwick’s mind seemed to be running a long a similar path, for he issued a warning that had grim amusement flickering through the younger man. He didn’t quite scoff, but some skepticism appeared in the form of a breath leaving his nose. Since the ball, any aspirations toward leadership roles – of which there had been very few, if any, anyway – had been soundly supplanted by aspirations toward simply keeping his job.

And if they were interested in new leadership, he felt rather confident that the Nevermerean soldier who had stood up for his Dresmondi friend was not the kind of person they were looking for.

“Good to know, sir,” Ber said instead. If he ever reached Woodwick’s rank – hah, yeah right – he would hire more than one assistant so they could all do his paperwork for him and let him stick to the actual interesting work.

A pause. “Do you have to deal with nobles a lot, sir?” The question came with the reserved resignation of one who already suspected the answer would be the unpleasant one. “About what?” On some level, Ber had known that those in charge of the military, like the captain commander, would have to spend their days managing the nobles who had to stick their nose into everything on top of actually important work, but he hadn’t known that particular headache spilled down to the lower ranking officers as well. Though, on second thought, Woodwick had been promoted to the second-most powerful position in the military, hadn’t he. Ber wrinkled his nose in distaste. Ugh.

He would have at least three assistants, Ber decided. One, like Gerard, who could handle meeting with the nobility, because apparently that was something leaders in the military, other than the captain commander, also had to do. Two others who could do the paperwork.

After all, what was the point of leadership if one didn’t use it to delegate the unpleasant tasks to those beneath them? The military had taught him that.

All the same, he did not deny Woodwick’s observation that Ber was less than thrilled with his assigned task for the day, nor could he blame anyone who had decided to find an alternative job. Before he could think on it any more, however, another knock sounded on the door, and Ber turned to see the servant returning with a tray of refreshments and sandwiches. Although he found himself torn between wanting to stretch out the respite as long as possible while also escaping this office as soon as possible, he didn’t have to be told twice to take a sandwich and begin eating rather quickly more out of habit than making up his mind. For a moment, he eyed the tea but decided that sharing a pot of tea with Woodwick felt too strange given the way that activity was so strongly associated with Temperance, Thom, and Melody. Water would do instead.

After pouring himself a glass and taking a sip, Ber glanced toward the piles of paperwork that the captain had shifted to the side. "That's all that's left?" He asked dubiously, as if there wasn't still far too much for his liking.

Even as distaste flickered across his expression at the thought, Ber nodded at Woodwick’s explanation for meeting - or perhaps more accurately, avoiding meeting - with nobility in order to keep them updated so they could properly judge the actions of people who actually knew what they were doing. He would have a fourth assistant, he decided. A spare, in case one of the other three was out sick like Gerard was today. At least that monstrous stack of papers was all that was left. Maybe he would get lucky, and they would all be something easy to decipher.

Given the inclination of both men toward silence, the soldier had expected that precedent to continue through the end of their lunch when he stopped asking Woodwick questions. The captain, it seemed, had other ideas, and with a self-conscious flush climbing up the back of his neck, Ber froze at the inquiry. Vulnerability did not rest easily on Ber’s shoulders, and the man sitting across from him had caught him rather vulnerable indeed. Thought he might not have been able to make Woodwick forget what understanding he had gleaned during that unfortunate conversation, the soldier had every intention of never speaking of it again. After all, it would be very difficult to forget that the mortifying ordeal had ever occurred if he kept talking about it.

Ber took a long sip of water and cleared his throat. “Uh, good, sir.” Not only was it undoubtedly the answer that Woodwick wanted to hear, it was the one that seemed the most likely to being this particular line of questioning to a very quick end. There was even some truth to it: he had found Woodwick’s method for working through the paranoid hyper awareness infuriatingly useful.