October 28th, 1891 — Ministry Break Room

Ford was tired. How had he managed to go out to dances as often as he had during the season? True, the Living and Dead Mixer had gone far later into the night than he'd anticipated (the Dead guests having very little appreciation for the concept of time in their current states), but it wasn't so much later than what he'd been used to when he was chaperoning Grace and Verity around everywhere that summer. Maybe what he was feeling today was less a specific reaction to being up the night before and more a collective weariness that had set in from this whole year. The Season was over, and that was a good thing, because Ford was just done with all of it. Not that the Season being over really relieved much of the pressure; now that Verity was courting they were going to just as many social events as she could find to fill her calendar, and when that resolved (if it did), it would only be a few short months of rest before they had to launch into the whole thing again, with Grace and Clementine (and maybe Verity, too — there was no real guarantee that a courtship meant anything, and he had a strange feeling about this one — he didn't trust it).

Luckily his workload was light this morning, and that was even considering that he'd been permitted to come in an hour later because of the ball the night before. Still, he was dragging his feet and felt he might benefit from — coffee, tea, something. He didn't even know exactly what, but suspected he'd find it in the break room. He walked down the hall on autopilot, found a cup and moved to pour — and spilled hot water all over his hand. Ford swore and dropped the cup, which shattered on the floor. The noise from the cup breaking startled him enough that he jumped and spilled more of the water from the kettle, part of which soaked his sleeve and the rest of which went soaring towards the nearest employee.

"Sorry, sorry," Ford said quickly. He put the kettle down before he could do any more damage and pulled out a handkerchief, pressing it up against the other man's now-wet jacket before he'd even had a chance to see who it was.

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He realized who it was that he'd spilled water on right as the man responded. Ford's cheeks colored red and his hand momentarily froze on the other man's jacket, still pressing the handkerchief up against the damp spot. The tone that Mr. Fisk responded in did little to lessen his mortification; he couldn't place it exactly, but it might have been teasing. He was not particularly interested in being teased by Mr. Fisk or at the very least, not this Mr. Fisk.

"I, ah —" he started, before realizing that his hand had lingered a few seconds too long on the other man's lapel. He hurriedly pulled his handkerchief back and shoved it, still damp, into his pocket. "I — sorry. I didn't see you. And I wouldn't have poured water on you even if I had," he mumbled, before realizing that was a bizarre and rather stupid thing to say. He was too tired for this conversation. He was too tired to be at work today in general, and he certainly wasn't going to weather this potential minefield of a conversation very well.

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Ford recognized the tone of Mr. Fisk's voice as reassuring, and felt another flush of embarrassment that he had been so obviously out of sorts that a near-stranger had assumed he needed reassuring. Perhaps it wasn't quite as much of a stretch from Mr. Fisk as from someone else, though — he had given Ford that whole secret note after having had an awkward interaction with him in a break room once, so clearly his bar for intervention in the lives of near-strangers was a little lower than the average person's.

"Yeah, ah, sorry," he said as he turned the damp handkerchief around in his pocket a few times. "Just something about me, I guess."

That was a weird joke to make, if one could even call it a joke at all. This interaction was just going from stilted and awkward to abysmal in very short order.

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That was a patently weird thing to say — it wasn't at all incorrect, it was just so forward that Ford at first wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. When he was satisfied that he had, he felt almost relieved that Fisk had called the situation out so plainly. Ford would never have thought to do it — too much ingrained etiquette lessons about proper avenues for small talk — but now that someone else had he recognized that this was the only possible way anything was ever going to improve.

"Starting over would be good, I think," he agreed. "If we can manage it."

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