Transparency || Peter Ballard X Reader

Chapter One

At 12 o'clock sharp every afternoon, I take my position behind the one-sided glass in the Rainbow Room. While there are security cameras, they are nowhere near precise enough to retrieve every detail needed for a thorough report. The cameras can't pick up emotion, facial expression, body language. It would be a scientific faux-pas to not have somebody studying the children in person.

For the three hours everyone was congregated in the room, I am sat behind the two-way glass panel. It is a very small room, barren aside from a white desk, white chair, and aluminum floor lamp. The lamp was necessary because the room was too small to fit a lighting panel in the ceiling. Behind the desk, there was only enough room for one person to fit comfortably.

One thing is for sure, the room was not built with the person's comfort in mind.

I have my typewriter in front of me, along with a gridded notebook and pen. Even the top-of-the-line typewriters are accident prone, so sometimes a quick shift to pen and paper is necessary. Beside my writing tools lies the communication device that nobody ever calls me on.

You become fairly forgettable when your only purpose is to analyze. A lot of the time, I feel like nothing more than a ghost in the walls.

On the other side of the glass, all of the children are attending to their own individual projects. Our set of twins are seated on the floor, racing plastic toy cars alongside each other. I can't help but smile as the girl twin gets a triumphant look on her face as her car takes the lead.

I used to find myself with a nasty case of jealousy when I would watch the caretakers interact with the kids. My friend Alec would always get to pat the kids on the back when they accomplished something. He was allowed to give them affirming words when the child was struggling with a new task. All I can do is write down how the child's body hunched over in defeat.

Yes, I was sometimes jealous. So sue me.

Both twins stood off of their hunches and went to retrieve the cars from the bottom of a lounge set. I loved watching them play, there was never any malice in their competition. That was the case for most of the friend groups. Friendly competition was always promoted when it was play time.

It takes effort to not focus on one child too much. Unless I had concerns for their safety, there was no just cause for me to put too much effort into their analysis.

Dr. Brenner had been upset with me before over this exact thing. I had suspected a group of older kids of intimidation, so a majority of my papers that week had followed their smirks when another superhuman was upset. They thrived off of watching the humiliation of their peers, and I felt a need to make notes on their actions, as well as the body language of who I suspected to be their victims.

Dr. Brenner pulled me aside the evening after I submitted the reports to tell me that they were too negative. My job was not to intervene in the personal emotions, but to gauge the success. I had made the deadly mistake of treating these children as anything other than machines.

But I stopped being jealous when I realized the best part of being a ghost; I can stare at anything I please. There was no surveillance in this room, being one of the only rooms in the entire establishment to lack a rectangular camera. When I realized that I could ogle at Peter as much at any time, my afternoon duty was suddenly the only place I wanted to be.

Sometimes I feel like he knows. Somehow, someway he is able to stare through the "mirror" and see my heated face as I watch him saunter around the room. It would be a fate worse than death if he ever knew how I blushed when he would gently smile at one of the children.

Obviously, I never let my crush take away from my job performance. I still diligently wrote my reports, now always up to Dr. Brenner's standards. No information was sacrificed in favor of my raunchy staring.