House of Cards RP

Work hours were officially over. Totally over. As in, she should be doing productive like eating or sleeping. Instead, she was walking (pacing, really) and crossing names off of lists. It was a list of every Five of Spades who still actively held the rank and hadn't retired, so it was a fairly long list, but it was separated into two columns: 'potential challenge' and 'terrible idea.' The ones who were crossed off of the list of potentials were rewritten in the territory of 'terrible idea,' and eventually she would present the list to Ethan. In the meantime, she needed to keep this challenging business under wraps, without even asking Katya, until the last minute.

But really, sorting this list and figuring it out was more important than eating and sleeping and communicating with people like normal people might be doing at this hour.

She had an English test tomorrow, and she was worried. At sixteen, what else was there to be worried about, really? She didn't have a girlfriend to be concerned with. Most of her friends were already in bed, or dealing with their respective significant others. But Karisa? Pff. Karisa was sitting at the bar inside MacKinnon's, feet swinging while she pored over textbooks and manuals and notes. She had goals, and that meant keeping her grades up. Even one bad test could be disastrous for her GPA.

But her Sprite was nearing empty and she'd need another round of fried batter crispies soon. And probably a break, but she might have to be forced to take one of those, even though she already had her head in her hands and a frown rather than her usual sunny grin.

Save her brain before it starts leaking out her ears please.

This whole experience was just. Stupid. He didn't even want to be involved in the wedding thing at all, but he had to be. Couldn't very well be the best man without showing up, right?

The problem was that it meant a party and a speech. And he wasn't good at either of those things, damn it, but it had to be done. So if he was sitting under a tree in the Clubs' garden, slush be damned, and if he was trying to make words work together in a coherent manner, it wasn't his fault.

It also wasn't really his fault that pretty words didn't work for him because he didn't have the fancy education that others had. He didn't even have the education that his uncle had. There was no way this was going to be good.

Hadyn Novak was not the King of Clubs, and yet when she'd walked into Elisha's office...that was precisely who she found. He was sat, neatly stacking folders on a side table in trays that were marked for specific department heads by name. To her surprise, Elisha's desk was visible, a lone stack of folders and a printed spreadsheet occupying it in what she could only imagine was yet more of Hadyn's handy work.

It was beyond bizarre in her mind.

But he'd offered her a quite smile before picking up the folders marked for her and asking if Elisha really needed to see the ones she was holding of if she could simply take care of it. And when she asked why he was asking? She got a shrug and a 'he's sick' in reply.

That was enough to cause her mouth to open and close a few times before she gave the Nine of Hearts a critical look. Couldn't Pete at least do this? Though, apparently, Hadyn had had Pete put the files into folders and label them- apparently to maintain that he wasn't actually 'nosing' around.

Which Leona was certain he was doing anyway. There was something so very un-Hearty about him, after all. Maybe it was the spreadsheets. Either way, she took her leave after a brief, surprisingly civil conversation and headed back through the Castle with care to avoid the twos that were working to secure chandeliers and paintings. And as loath as she was to admit it, she was a bit grateful that Hadyn had included in her files, summaries for each one- proof at least that he'd read them despite having Pete help. It would make working through them faster, though.

So maybe Elisha's Pretty Boy wasn't entirely a bad news bear after all.