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Office Faux Pas

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Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

_ _

"Oh, the show! You just wouldn't believe it!"

Squawking, the flamingo flapped her wings, head bobbing back and forth with her black-tipped beak drawing the eye to follow it. Although her colleague was sitting across the desk, glasses balanced on her longer muzzle, she paid no note to her concentration as she flailed and gestured to make her story seem all the more interesting. At least, Amethyst supposed that that was what she was trying to do, because the mare simply couldn't fathom why Jasmine had to go on and on bout her bloody kids so much!

The grey-furred badger sitting across the room looked more kindly on the talk and smiled, folding her paws kindly as she sat back in her chair to listen.

"Funny that you had so many there, what with all this snow," she commented. "I wouldn't have thought the schools would have re-opened at all, what with all this ice now too."

"Oh,Lisa, it freezes my feathers! And you know that the other parents were slagging off the school for opening at all! When we had such a show to put on!"

She drew herself up as if the other parents had, very personally, affronted her. Amethyst blinked at the calculator and deleted what she'd been working on. The numbers had gone from her head with all the shouting. Pursing her lips, she pinched one ear closed and tried again.

"AND did you know that Johhnie got to be a narrator? A narrator!"

Amethyst tried not to react, but her eyes narrowed all the same. There it went again: her concentration. What little of it that was left those days.

"He looked adorable, but the other one - oh no, we pretended he wasn't ours!"

Jasmine barked a laugh that echoed off the walls of the small office and Amethyst winced, resisting the urge to rub her ears. It wouldn't do any good.

"Oh, and why's that? What did the little one do?"

Please, no, Amethyst thought, sending up a prayer to any listening gods. Don't ask her more questions, Lisa, for the love of all that is good and holy in this world, don't get her to talk more...

_ _

Clearly, the gods were not listening.

"He was messing about, doing everything he wasn't supposed to! Got the words mixed up to!" Jasmine covered her beak with a wing, the long feathers that extended down over the backs of her hands demurely fluttering. "I can't believe he's like that when we've gone and raised them both just the same!"

Maybe because he has you as a mother.

_ _

Amethyst smirked to herself, but her work still wasn't getting done. Sighing quietly, she stared at the screen and wondered if there was any suitably polite way to ask them to keep the noise down. Not really, as a newer hire. Then again, Jasmine was a newer hire than her... And older. Shouldn't she have known a little better as to how office norms operated?

Apparently not.

"And you wouldn't bee-leave the parents that are saying they won't take their cubs and fledglings in to school with the weather like it is! Says it's too dangerous! Well, I got in alright and so did that dog, Mary, and she's got a full litter on the way!"

Jasmine shook her head and clacked the edges of her beak together as Lisa made a sympathetic noise, the badger clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

"If a dog swollen up like that with yet _another_litter, surely those with only one or two can get in? I managed! And look how far I have to go!"

The mare paused. Jasmine had mentioned where she lived before. Was the other side of the rather small town really all that great a distance? She pressed her lips together. It would only incite drama if she made the point, if she even remembered that correctly.

Oblivious, the flamingo stood and shuffled out of her coat, which she had not even taken a moment to remove since entering her place of work.

"They think that a little snow and ice means they can't go out. I mean, I don't like it here as much as in Germany, driving in the snow that's here, but I have to go out, you know? I have to make sure they get to school, get their education, you know?"

Unsure if Jasmine knew, Amethyst coughed into the palm of her paw and switched to a different spreadsheet. Perhaps that one would be a little easier to concentrate on with all the racket. For, although the conversation was mundane, it seemed that Jasmine was still intent on raising her voice as if she was shouting across a blustery football pitch. It was strange to think that such a big voice could come from a skinny-necked flamingo.

"I don't know what they think here, a little snow and everyone is slithhhhering around," she chattered, drawing out the word into an odd screech. "But I got in and I don't know why they can't get in too, if they walk or drive. And slag off the school! They need to stop slagging off the school for being open! Facebook! All of it's on Facebook!"

Stumbling to an abrupt halt in her flow of words, Jasmine clasped her winged hands to her chest and rocked back and forth, all of a sudden become misty-eyed with tears that threatened to spill over. Amethyst stared. Should she offer her a tissue? What on earth could be wrong?

"Oh, but to see them performing... They grow up so fast, I don't know what I'm going to do without them! To have a family... It's the most, very most, wonderful thing!"

Tearing up, she honked her beak into a tissue that seemed to appear from nowhere, clearing heaven knew what from her 'nares. Lisa murmured softly and that seemed to placate the flamingo, flapping her wings and gusting up paperwork from the desk in her motherly upset.

Amethyst sighed. It was nice that Jasmine was so excited about what the young birds were up to and wanted to share, but she had hardly been in the office for one whole minute before rabbiting on about how cute they'd been in their little performance! And how one had acted up but the other had been the angel. And they had had to reshuffle who was doing what because of "so, so many" simply not turning up, because, well...there was rather a lot of ice on the road. And the equine certainly sympathised with anyone who had not wanted to set hoof on

Truth be told, she knew too much about the damn flamingos fledglings than she really cared to know!

Trying to block out the rolling, driving noise, she leaned in towards the computer screen. Would anyone notice if she put her headphones in? They weren't technically allowed...

"Amethyst!"

She jerked back to reality, snapping from her work and sitting up straight as if she'd been caught doing something she shouldn't have been.

"Huh? What?"

Jasmine tittered, feathers fluffing up.

"Always with your nose in the laptop! I said, shouldn't you be thinking about having little ones soon too? Only one at a time, just like me, so you've got to be getting on with it, you know!"

The mare stared blankly, working her jaw as if that would allow the words that should have flooded out in instant reaction to leap, so bidden, from her tongue. Most of all, why would something like that ever possibly be anything to do with her business/

And so Jasmine rattled on, stream after stream of supposedly worldly knowledge rolling from her beak.

"Your body won't stay looking like that forever, you know, and that boyfriend of yours better be making a commitment if he wants to keep you! What is he, a wolf?" Jasmine snorted and flipped her wing dismissively. "Should have gone and got yourself a stallion! Much prettier babies!"

And that was that. Lisa nodded sagely, the badger resting her paws on her large, round stomach - although her figure was not from the growth of any kind of young inside her - and Jasmine prattled on and on about how Amethyst was leaving it far too late and really should be moving on with her life. Why, if she had foals - even hybrid foals - she wouldn't have to come in to work. And wouldn't that be something nice! Not to have to work! Why, Jasmine was even thinking about persuading her husband to let her have another egg, just so she could have that very luxury!

The mare opened and closed her mouth several times, attempting to interject and...failing miserable. There was no way to cut in and so she turned her back on the flamingo, Amethyst concentrating, or at least trying to concentrate, on the work she'd been paid to do.

Why did it matter what she did with her own bloody body when she was paid to work?

Perhaps the flamingo should have been the one to take a lesson from her.