Chapter Text
from: [email protected]
reply-to: [email protected]
to: [email protected]
date: Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 9:34 AM
subject: Casterly’s First Annual Secret Santa Holiday Gift Exchange! Participation is mandatory!
- user has requested a read receipt. click here to send.
It’s that special time of year again! The holidays are approaching, and we are delighted to announce that this year Casterly Rock Enterprises will participate in a company-wide Secret Santa Gift Exchange!
Before you growl and grinch that this event is absolutely, completely non-negotiable, that it is mandatory in every sense of the word, and that failure to participate will result in disciplinary action up to and including termination, please be aware that we intend to make this utterly worth your while!
For four days only, company matching will apply to more than just your 401k. For every dollar you spend on your Secret Santee, Casterly will return three dollars to you. That’s right: spend five dollars on a gift for someone else and you will walk away with TEN for yourself! Simply expense your gifts with the code SANTA. Please be aware that there is a five dollar minimum and twenty dollar maximum per day, and be sure to include those itemized receipts!
We hope you will enjoy a full week of festivities the week of December 19th – December 23rd. Gift exchanges will take place on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. More details to follow!
The annual Casterly Christmas party will take place after closing on Friday, December 23rd on the fifth floor. Refreshments will be provided. We regret that legal has informed us that we cannot mandate attendance for this event, and hope that if you draw a member of the legal department as your Secret Santee you keep that in mind. On a completely unrelated note, it is still possible to buy coal in Fleabottom.
Let the fun begin! Ho, ho, ho!
P.S. We are looking for volunteers for tree decorating both in the main lobby and on the fifth floor. Please email me if you’re interested!
Sansa Stark
HR Officer
T: (555) 491-4523
F: (555) 491-4524
Casterly Rock Enterprises
3100 King’s Way
King’s Landing, CL 10001-3100
At 9:34 am, Sansa Stark clicked send with a heart full of holiday cheer and goodwill toward men. She was wholly unaware of the furor that would soon arise from her earnest desire that her coworkers share in the same peace and love that welled within her own breast during the Christmas season. If she had known, she might have hesitated.
Or perhaps not. “No pain, no gain,” was one of her mottos.
The email traveled along the Casterly network at the speed of electricity, and an instant later appeared in over two hundred inboxes. In each it nestled, fertile and waiting; a gift ready to be unwrapped.
For ten minutes, all was quiet. Sansa received fifteen read receipts. She wrote twenty-five names from the company roster onto small, white slips of paper.
Then Podrick Payne in the mailroom hit Reply-All. He kindly volunteered to help decorate the Christmas trees, and everyone in the company got to read about it. They also got to read Sharon from Marketing’s offer to pay Sansa one hundred dollars to get out of having to participate in Secret Santa. The first ineffectual request for people to stop using Reply-All hit the chain at 9:58 am.
Within an hour there was a party in every inbox. The memes began to fly just before lunchtime, and two friends from different departments obliviously carried on a spirited chat about Rodrik Harlaw's newest book. The demands for everyone to stop using Reply-All devolved into no-holds-barred, all caps rants.
At a quarter till noon, Sansa sat at her desk, holding a spoonful of yogurt in front of her mouth, entranced by her monitor. She almost always spent lunchtime in her cubicle, but normally she passed the time with a book. The fourth floor was the quietest of them all, for it housed the two most detested departments in the company: HR and IT. No one ever disturbed her quiet lunch.
All in all, the morning had been interesting, if not quite what she had hoped for. She was a little dismayed at the fighting, and disappointed at the bribery attempts, but ten people had offered to help decorate, and she had a new book for her reading list. Some joker from IT had posted Minor Mistake Marvin with burning presents in the microwave—even Sansa had to admit it was funny—but her spirits had been buoyed when a senior engineer from Development had posted Haters Gonna Hate in response.
The sound of a door slamming broke her out of her trance. The cubicles in HR were an awkward height, too low to hide behind but too high to see over properly without stretching her neck, and when she did so she felt a little thrill of alarm.
The Head of IT had just burst out of the stairwell.
Sandor Clegane was the tallest, ugliest man she had ever encountered. Half his face was covered with gruesome burn scars, and in her eight months at Casterly Sansa had heard a dozen different explanations for them. But however hard the rumor mill churned, the truth of the matter remained a mystery. As far as she knew, no one had ever summoned the bravery to ask him outright what had happened. Given his aggressive conversational style and general aura of scathing contempt, she doubted anyone ever would—or that he would answer.
Even now she could see the ever present earbuds firmly jammed into his ears. She suspected that he only wore them to avoid conversation.
He must have taken the morning off, she thought, noting the laptop bag slung across his long body. The implications of this filled her with chagrin; he was walking into work completely unaware of the storm waiting for him.
The floor plan of the HR department was open, and Sansa was able to watch him stride down the hallway toward the IT offices from a considerable distance. When he was gone—the IT department enjoyed the luxury of full floor to ceiling walls—she settled back down in her seat and spooned the forgotten yogurt into her mouth. I hope I didn’t cause him too much trouble.
Five minutes later, her hopes were dashed. Sandor Clegane’s roar of outrage was so loud she fancied the entire building could hear it. Sansa slouched in her chair, grimacing, thankful that walls and distance prevented her from hearing the words he was shouting.
After a minute or two, the diatribe faded away, and an ominous silence descended. Blushing, Sansa looked at her monitor. Her inbox suggested that there were seven new responses in her email chain. She reached for her mouse.
“STARK!”
Sansa started. Quickly, she bent and pulled her book out of her bag. She placed it on her desk and opened it to a random page. Her hands flew to her hair and she fluffed it a bit before smoothing the tan pencil skirt over her thighs.
Then she sat up straight and poked her head over the cubicle wall.
“Here,” she called.
Far across the room, Sandor Clegane’s searching gaze snapped onto her own, and her pulse began to beat a little faster. He’s very angry, she thought, watching him barrel toward her like a bull charging down a red flag.
It didn’t take him long to find his way through the cubicle maze, and in a few short moments he stood in the opening to her workspace, towering over her with fury in his eyes. One of his hands rested on the top of the cubicle divider, the fingers tap-tap-tapping his agitation.
“Stark,” he said, deliberately quiet, and the low volume of his voice was somehow more cutting than any shouting. Sansa sat a little straighter in her chair, and smiled up at him.
“Hi, Sandor. How are you?”
The look he gave her was equal parts disbelief and disgust, but he pounced on the opening anyway.
“I’m sorry to say that I’m not very well.” The technically polite words tumbled out of his mouth with dangerous menace. “To tell you the truth, I’m actually having a—” He paused, narrowed his eyes, and blew air sharply out of his nose. “A beast of a day. And do you know why, Miss Stark?”
Sansa offered him a contrite look. “I’m very sorry, Sandor. I didn’t know this would happen.”
“Twenty-seven tickets!” he barked, dropping the pretense at calm. “My fool team flapping about the office like drunken butterflies, doing nothing!”
He jabbed a long finger toward her. “Your mess! And you’re going to fix it.”
“Of course,” she said quickly. “I’ll do anything—”
Sandor stepped forward, and suddenly the cubicle felt tiny and crowded. Sansa sucked in a breath as he bent over her, but he only reached for her mouse and keyboard.
He clicked the button to compose a new email, immediately tabbed into the subject line, and wrote ‘How to unsubscribe from email threads.’ Another tab put him in the body, and he began typing with a rapidity and force that threatened to rattle her keyboard to pieces.
Sansa kept her eyes on the words appearing on her screen, but he was invading her personal space in a way that was very distracting. The drawstring of his hoodie brushed back and forth over her bare forearm, and his small movements allowed his clean, masculine scent to wash over her. She breathed him in, enjoying the moment, and didn’t bother to read what he had written until he finished and stepped back.
“Okay,” he said, all his anger wiped away by a teaching moment. “When you need to send an email to the entire company, just send it to yourself and BCC the ‘all’ group. This way they can’t Reply-All.”
Sansa obediently typed her own email address into the ‘to’ field, and ‘[email protected]’ into the ‘BCC’ field.
“That’s it,” he said. “Send it.”
She couldn’t help herself; she clicked into the body of the email, keyed “Ho, ho, ho!” on a new line at the end, then sent it.
When she looked up at him with an unrepentant smile, he shook his head at her. “You’re a menace, Stark,” he said absently, pulling his chiming phone out of his pocket. As he turned away, his gaze dropped for a bare instant to her collarbone, peeking out of her white blouse. If she hadn’t been watching him so closely, she would never have seen it.
“Thank you!” she called to his retreating back, but he didn’t respond.
Sansa leaned back in her chair. Well, that was a… start. She swiveled back and forth, thinking. I’m definitely on his radar today, that’s something. Sure, it’s because I completely pissed him off, but you can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs.
And the truth was that Sansa had a great interest in making that particular omelette.
In her mind, she replayed the appraising glance he had given her a few moments before. She thought it was very likely he hadn’t even been aware that he'd done it, but it was the first smidgen of personal interest he had ever shown in her, and she intended to seize the encouragement and run with it.
Sansa Stark considered herself a goal-oriented, driven person, and wasn’t afraid to put in the work to get what she wanted. A Secret Santa Gift Exchange was a project she might have shouldered in any case, for the pure enjoyment of spreading holiday cheer, but she couldn’t deny that this year certain additional perks were in play. The ability to choose her own Secret Santee, for example.
She twined a length of auburn hair around her index finger. He doesn’t know it, yet, but he’s about to have the best Christmas of his life.