Work Text:
There is a feeling associated with this job, something carnal and vicious.
In her early years, being devoured by the work and people that came with it was nothing short of thrilling. It is a simple pleasure, to be wanted, to satisfy. If only the time wasn’t cut short. Now, she has been half-eaten and cast aside to rot.
First, it was the funeral. It was dropping cold, wet soil over her dead boss’s casket, and thinking about how he used to kiss the backs of her thighs. After that, it was veering off the road and nearly allowing herself to hit a telephone pole, imagining what a blissful tragedy it would be if she died just hours after him.
She accepts the three days off that HR offers to her out of pity. She drinks gin in her bathtub. She sleeps until 3 pm. She cuts herself messy bangs and gets them fixed the next day at a salon where the cold metal of the scissors against her skin makes her tremble.
It’s a complex — aching for work yet avoiding it as if she will die before even stepping inside the elevator.
By the following Monday, she’s made arrangements for her own office. It’s on the same floor, in a little corner with purple carpeting. She hates purple, really, but would rather spend the rest of her life surrounded by it rather than surrounded by pieces of him.
She takes the tape recorder, though. Tells herself that she can listen to the messages for inspiration, but ends up throwing the machine in the dumpster before the end of the week. She keeps the tapes because she is admittedly obsessed with the way he wrote her name on the labels of their shared messages.
For the first few weeks, it feels a lot like sweeping dirt underneath a rug. The last thing Caroline would do is confess that she is freefalling into an abyss; her drinking is getting worse and she’s started smoking again and she’s lying to herself every day when she thinks I am no longer grieving, I am no longer grieving, I am no longer grieving.
It truly is satisfying to have expedited those five stages of grief, to have gone through them all in a weekend rather than a year. No one takes her seriously without Cave looming over them, but Caroline can at least feel proud of the fact that she is not some quivering, red-eyed mess when she is firing them all.
She had cried more when she was working alongside him then after he’d been put in the ground. Something could be said about that, but she sure as hell isn’t going to say it.
She allows herself one good sob in her car, pulling over to throw up on the side of the road, and then continues shredding his papers and calling their clients to say that he’s passed away. They give their condolences and ask who is brave enough to replace him. She never tells them that it’s her.
There is nothing noticeable about the way she ages. She wears more white than ever before, a wholly unconscious rebellion against the death that now plagues her. There is no use in going home because he will not be there. She develops the habit of lingering in the observation rooms like a ghost, watching the sanitation team hose the blood off the test chamber floors.
Their portrait still hangs in his office. The image of her younger self, immortalized in oils, taunts her into cutting her hair again, and she shears it all off in her bathroom one night until it rests at her chin. She weeps over the sink, the scissors in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, but she believes that it is out of relief of finally, finally having escaped from Cave Johnson’s grasp.
Looking in the mirror becomes easier, after that. Her sense of self returns, and she embraces the power, ignoring the dark underbelly. She listens to piano concertos in her office and smokes indoors. She trades the skirts and dresses for trousers and dark lipstick. The ones that had looked down on her are now looking up, and she feels as though she towers over them, their fates resting in her palms like baby birds.
Caroline never visits his grave. There isn’t any urge to do so. After a while, every good memory of him is tarnished with the damage that he has left behind. In between tests, she cleans up after him, fixes his mistakes, like she is still his secretary. She imagines that the idea would satisfy him.
In the months that lead up to her death, there is a quiet unrest in the halls of her facility, even more than usual. And Caroline knows that she will die here. She has known it her whole life, in a way. But she does not give up as he did. She fights until the end, leaves them with ordered files, and more money then they’ve had in a decade.
Because what an honor it is, to die for science.
The brilliant glow of their colossal machine’s optic tells her that she will never be forgotten. That together, they will conquer.