#because of this she’s more of an over glorified pack mule than anything

[feniverse-unfiltered]

Idk why it took me so long to think of this, but old west/cowboy Wolfwood with a temperamental black mare

[intangible-rice]

Red Right Hand

Just a small little offering for Caroline Appreciation Day, to make up for the fact that I didn’t participate last year. It’s a short little one-shot which is somewhat disjointed and where not much happens, but hopefully it’s at least mildly interesting. The title is a hastily chosen Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds lyric.

Caroline listens to the wind whistle through the trees in the distance, trying not to notice how similar its sound is to whispers. She tenses as she hears it approach, rushing in through the driver’s side window and whipping her graying hair all around. Her ears sting from the chill, but there isn’t much she can do to keep out the cold - she needs something to keep her awake, and the radio would be too conspicuous. 

She should have brought coffee, she thinks. If she’d had time to make some. If she had time to do anything besides worry nowadays. She stares up at the moon. Almost full, she thinks. Or was it full yesterday? Perhaps it’s waning. Waning. The word sticks in her head until she’s forced to look away, her face a mixture of anger and worry.

She stares at the dashboard instead, at the aging plastic coating, the worn stitching on the steering wheel. She aimlessly runs her finger along the rabbit’s foot keychain that hangs down from the ignition. It was just like Cave to buy a silly good-luck charm like this. Caroline tries to remember when exactly it was that he purchased it. Probably the time they’d detoured through Vegas, on the way back from some business trip or other, when they’d admired the glittering lights on the strip and marveled at the myriad forms of entertainment all around. They hadn’t spent very long there, but Caroline remembers her boss throwing a nickel or two into the slots. He’d probably swung by the gift shop afterwards, acquiring a kitschy trinket before getting back on the road and making offhanded comments as they passed the shotgun wedding chapels. Comments that Caroline now wishes she’d paid more attention to. 

A faint glow appears in the distance, soon distinguishing itself as two car headlights. The lights inch forward slowly, and Caroline sits up in the driver’s seat. A second later, they disappear completely. Caroline counts under her breath. “One... two... three... four...” Suddenly the headlights return, flickering on and off a few times before the horizon returns to darkness. “About time,” Caroline mutters as she twists the key at the end of the rabbit’s foot and does the same routine with her own headlights.

She shifts the car into gear and places her foot on the gas. “Easy does it,” she still inadvertently hears in her head, even though it’s been years since she’s needed Cave’s direction.

“You’re kidding, right?” she remembers her boss saying when she’d told him. “Whaddya mean you don’t know how to drive?”

The look of bewilderment on his face had been in stark contrast to Caroline’s own nonchalant reaction. She’d explained to him that it simply hadn’t seemed important for her to learn. Before working at Aperture, she could never have afforded a car, and luckily the town’s old bus routes hadn’t been changed from the days when miners used to take them to get out to work. Driving just hadn’t ever seemed necessary, especially since she left the facility so infrequently nowadays.

“But that’s ridiculous!” Cave had protested. “What if some emergency happens? Everybody evacuates and then you’re just gonna stand in the parking lot waiting on a timetable? You’ll be mantis meat in no time! Or what if you gotta get somewhere where there ain’t no bus?”

“Where am I going to go, sir?” Caroline asked, shrugging her shoulders. “I just don’t think it’s necessary.”

“Well dammit, I do!” Cave said, opening a drawer in his desk and grabbing ahold of the rabbit’s foot. “Clear off your calendar for the afternoon, because you’re gonna learn!”

Caroline was taken aback, but she knew there was no talking Cave Johnson out of an idea once he’d gotten it in his head. So before long, the two of them were in the parking lot, sitting in the same car Caroline was now inching down the remote woodland road into the darkness.

Caroline remembers not hearing a word of her boss’s instructions initially - she was too flustered by the whole scenario. Here she was, called on to do something she was completely unfamiliar with, and with absolutely no time to prepare. She’d always prided herself on how smoothly she handled everything in her job - even in a place where an experimental error could lead to any number of unbelievable mishaps, Caroline let nothing phase her. She was always prepared for anything; a feat that Cave marveled at as effortless, but that in reality took several rounds of careful study, organization and preparation. And that adept, collected exterior was about to come completely apart as soon as her boss realized she had no idea what to do with a simple little car.

Her first attempt to move forward just resulted in revving the engine uselessly, until Cave informed her that she had to put the car in drive first. Flustered, she followed his instructions, and gave a small yelp of surprise when the car moved forward as soon as her foot was off the brake. By then, her face was beet red. She waited for the inevitable signal from her boss to scrap the whole idea and head inside. But surprisingly, Cave didn’t give up on her. He didn’t laugh or yell at what she herself viewed as gross incompetence. As they circled the parking lot over and over, he continued to give patient instructions, peppered by some tales from the driving lessons of his own youth, and an occasional grab of the steering wheel to demonstrate something. 

By the end of the whole thing, Caroline was calm, calmer than she’d ever expected to be from something that had seemed so daunting. Her boss smiled at her, and she felt proud - somehow prouder even than when she’d gotten the same sort of praise for finding a loophole in the test subject contracts, or pulling off the increasingly-miraculous task of balancing the budget each month.

“Atta girl,” Cave had said, smiling warmly at her. “Now, whaddya say we try taking a spin into town?”

That was the first time Caroline had left the facility in years, she reminisces as she pulls up alongside the car with darkened headlights. But certainly not the last. She’d only been confidently driving for a short time before Cave asked her for the first favor.

“Look, Caroline, this is good for everyone,” she remembers him arguing. “They’re about to be investigated, and there’s things they don’t want to fall into the wrong hands. You remember how that was - we had to destroy some of our best work to keep those idiots in Washington from shutting us down. Do you really want that to happen to another company?”

“Mr. Johnson, I just don’t know that -”

“They’ve got science to get rid of, and we’ve got science to do,” Cave reminded, characteristically cutting her off before she could get her protests out. “They’re not even gonna charge us for it, since we’re doing them a favor.”

Caroline hadn’t answered, knowing that she would just get shot down again if she tried to open her mouth.

“Caroline, I’ve seen the ledgers,” Cave reminded. “We’re never gonna get a better deal than this.”

She sighed.

“You wanna keep this company alive, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, Mr. Johnson,” she replied. “But how...” She paused, knowing her boss’s attitude towards what she was about to say. “How do we know it’s safe?”

If anyone else had asked that question, they’d be fumbling their way to the parking lot with a hastily-packed box of belongings within ten minutes, their boss shouting insults at them the whole way out. Caroline, however, could at least get her boss to swallow a little bit of his bravado - not a lot, but enough to cut through the charades to get to the truth.

“We don’t,” he answered her simply. “No different than half the things we’ve done in the past around here,” he added as a way of revealing his annoyance at her question.

“But it is different, Mr. Johnson,” Caroline had argued. “It’s different when we just barely made it out of a high-profile investigation by the skin of our teeth. When we’d be working with outsiders that we don’t know if we can trust. And when we’ll be taking things from them that we’re just gambling on being useful rather than being one test away from killing us all. And not to mention when the government’s probably still watching our every move.”

“That’s why I want you to do it,” Cave had said matter-of-factly. “I can’t go out there - you’re right, they’re probably watching me like a hawk. And I don’t trust anyone else around here with something this important. With you, I know it’ll go off without a hitch. And if something goes wrong, I know you’re smart enough to see that and get out of there.”

Caroline remembers thinking that his response was both too simplistic and too optimistic, but also that she could already feel her shoulders loosening. It should have taken more than this to sway her - a few carefully chosen words, a plea for science, and a small showing of gratitude shouldn’t have gotten her boss anywhere towards her agreeing to such a ridiculous idea. 

“Come on, can you imagine what would happen if I sent Greg out there?” Cave added, and as Caroline felt the hint of a smile creep across her face, she knew her chances of arguing any further were gone.

And that’s how she’d ended up repeatedly doing one of the most dangerous jobs she could ever think of, driving out in the middle of the night to receive god-knows-what from god-knows-who under the cover of silence and darkness. For the last decade or so she’d served as a glorified mule for anyone who needed to unload something quick with no questions asked. It was a familiar routine by now, though not one that she ever grew more comfortable with.

But tonight is different. Tonight, Caroline isn’t just taking something off someone’s hands. She’s also giving something in return.

“You got it?” a voice asks as she steps out of the car. The figure asking is cloaked in the night’s shadows, but Caroline can see enough to know that it’s tall, broadly built, and not alone - two other shadows bookend it on either side, no less muscular. Caroline tells herself not to let it phase her - some contacts have brought backup before. The chances of them wanting to hurt her are far less than of them being equally uneasy about meeting a stranger in the dead of night to hand over something volatile and incriminating. Caroline finds herself wondering why backup was never discussed as an option on her end.

“You first,” she replies to the figure, trying to keep herself from rolling her eyes at how ridiculously cliched this entire interaction is.

The two backup shadows move to one end of their car, opening the trunk and grunting as they extract a large metal container. They remove the lid, and signal Caroline to approach. She moves slowly in the dark, careful not to trip on an unseen branch or rock. She hopes the effect looks more dramatic to an outsider, and less like what it actually is, the deliberate and guarded movements of a woman with aging eyes.

She leans over slightly to peer into the container, and there they are - dozens of gray, lumpy, pitted, and wholly unremarkable rocks. Caroline nods. “Good,” she says, as if it actually is. As if this ridiculous box of contraband is actually the goldmine her boss thinks it is. As if staking the future of the company on foreign sediment is a positive thing.

“And you?” one of the keepers of the rocks asks impatiently.

Caroline straightens and turns around. The walk back to her car is even slower, but this time it’s not because of the dark. It’s because she can’t help but think that she’s signing Aperture’s death warrant.

She opens the driver’s side door, reaches across, and pulls out a briefcase.

She had fought harder on this one. Harder than most things she’d fought for over the years at Aperture, in fact. Unlike Cave’s many other crazy ideas, this one lacked any arguable redeeming qualities. Taking in unknown and potentially dangerous waste and experimental leftovers was bad, but at least they weren’t paying for any of it, and could argue that it might end up producing some good data for the company. But this - this was spending $70 million - money that they simply did not have and never would have again - to purchase a substance with no technical market value, and no known scientific worth. Selling and buying it constituted a litany of federal crimes. It was enough to earn them another government investigation. All because Cave Johnson thought that moon rocks might be fun to play around with. All in the name of throwing science at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Caroline wasn’t sure what it was exactly that had finally caused her to give up. Maybe it was seeing her boss so desperate, so broken, so out of ideas and so willing to latch on to the most outlandish one that came his way. Maybe it was knowing that there was nothing left for Aperture regardless - if nothing else, this would just kick the liquidation process into higher gear. Or maybe it was just that - she’d given up. Thirty years as the voice of reason was exhausting - especially when no one listened anyway, and when a silver tongue and a little admiration could erase any protest. Thirty years of picking up the pieces when all of the things he’d persuaded her to agree to had gone wrong. Thirty years of watching scientific achievement and progress slip through their fingers.

Caroline had fought so hard for the company for so long. Most of what had happened within it over the years was a direct result of her doing, her fighting, her fixing. Why reduce that level of involvement now, she thought as she handed the briefcase over. Now, when it was all so close to ending? Why not have the honor of putting the final nail into the coffin?

“This thing’s pretty heavy,” one of the shadow-cloaked figures says as he and another carry the container over to Caroline’s car. “You gonna be able to handle this?”

“I’ll manage,” Caroline replies stoically as she opens the trunk for them. 

And she will. As long as there are some shreds of the company remaining. As long as they still have experiments to run with their new $70 million purchase. 

She turns on the engine and drives away, leaving her contacts from god knows what corner of the black market to fade into the distance.

Only the moonlight surrounds her now. She runs her fingers over the rabbit’s foot as she drives, trying not to notice the ethereal orb above. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Mr. Johnson,” she mutters under her breath as she continues on into the night.