A/N: So. A year since I've posted on this site. Yikes. But the season four finale moved me with all its Artie and Claudia daddy/daughter angsting and it seems a criminal shame that there isn't more Claudia fic on here, so... This is set in an indetermate future a couple decades down the line and makes a few assumptions, but nothing that will tax you too much.
Sometimes at night, the particular kind of deep, dark night of swimming through a problem with no dawn in sight, her office starts to smell different. The Warehouse has moods and this one is private and peculiar. The plasticky, hot circuitboard smell of an overtaxed computer falls away into the softer scent of old papers and piles of books-honestly, old man, so inefficient-and stale pastries and old sweaters and him, and her heart breaks a little all over again.
The Warehouse knows. Knows that when Claudia says "my office," she is always saying "Artie's office." Knows that sometimes she's still quaking in her boots when she stands before her agents. Knows that she's still learning what everybody always does: That you still feel like your young dumb self when you're the age and stature that the Colossuses of your youth once were.
She can't find a replacement for him (she tells herself, even though she knows it's going to be Myka because duh). So she keeps doing his job because as long as she's doing it, she knows it's his and she's just filling in.
She pushes away from the computer, and looks around a room full of ghosts. She stands and walks, fingertips barely brushing the tabletop. She gets it now, why he never wanted to modernise, even though he wasn't half bad at hacking for all that. She swore she'd never be that way but now she's snapping at the new kids wanting to get rid of her keyboards. It isn't sense; it's sentimentality. It doesn't feel like work without the clatter of keys. Damn whippersnappers. Get off my lawn.
She reaches the wall and turns, leans her back into it as she wraps her arms around herself until it's the only thing holding her up. When she closes her eyes, the illusion is complete. This is his place again.
She can stop aging anytime she wants, but she's going to let it go for a little while longer, get that cool silver streak in her hair. Nature's highlights.
She's tired. Her bones hurt. She misses Artie pathetically, the wounds still raw because she doesn't have the time to sit down and sew them up properly and always ripping open again when the Warehouse goes and makes her go and stare at her own grief when she's too exhaused to resist.
"Oh, baby... Why d'ya gotta do this to me?" she mumbles to the walls.
"Ma'am?" Her eyes fly open to see the second to newest recruit, the one with the curly hair and the dark secret, tablet in hand.
"What? Nothing! I was... remembering something. Nevermind. What?"
"I just... We have the coordinates of the next suspected target, so..."
"So what are you standing here telling me for? That's why God invented email. Get going, padawan!"
"I've been here almost a year," Rita counters sulkily.
"Then get with the program, kid."
Rita gapes for an instant, then turns on her heel. Claudia knows she should be a better surrogate mother figure, but she feels brusque and busy when the new guys come to bother her, her mind always elsewhere. If anything, she barely manages to be an absent father. She should be glad that the kid told her where she was going, but she feels peevish and unsettled, at herself more than anything else.
"Drive safe," she calls out belatedly, and Rita turns her head a little but doesn't respond.
Claudia sinks into her chair again. She wanders what used to torment Artie when he sat in here alone.
Jinks pops in to give her a pointed look. She waves him away, but her expression goes contrite.
"Come back safe," she tells him.
"Always."
"Lie."
It's trench humor, but they smirk at each other anyway before he hurries off.
She can't quite connect the dots onscreen, something missing between the symptoms and the cause. Too disparate, like it's...
Damn it, like it's more than one artifact. Since when are people getting their grubby mitts on two needles in the haystack at once? Her fingers flutter as she searches the database with fewer specifics, the melted walls and the stunned euphoria clearly separate effects now that she's thinking.
She gets multiple matches, manages to narrow it down to a range of seven different artifacts and she'll have to trust them from there. She attaches the relevant files in an APB to her agents, then wanders away from the computer. There's nothing she can do while they're in transport. The alarm on her incoming messages is loud enough to wake the dead, anyway. Occasionally problematic, that.
She flops onto the couch. She should go back home or brush her teeth or something. Maybe she will, in a minute. She tries to hold onto that thought.
The inside of her head is really big, filled with the Warehouse. Nothing specific, not like the database, but full of its moods, its whims and its needs. If clears her mind and finds her center, she can watch the colors of it flit behind her eyelids like the aurora borealis. It's peaceful now, pleased with its current crew, and the part of her that's still just her hates that, because it's never really going to be right again, not to her.
Just before she falls asleep, she hears the piano playing, faint and far away. And she wants to get up but her limbs are too heavy and her stupid husband that happens to be a mystical building is trying to make her feel better and it hurts and the thing that hurts most of all is that it might be working because each time her buttons get pressed it hurts a little less and she doesn't even know what it would be like not to hurt at all and the woman she'll be when she gets over this is so far away from who she is now that it scares her and, and-
fin.