Work Text:
When Astrid first enters the lab, she can't even believe that anyone will ever be able to work in it again. It's worse than a mess, it's worse even than the garage that one year her dad decided to re-organize everything and stopped half-way through. It reminds her of nothing so much as mysterious storerooms attached to basement labs during her college career; a place where unlabelled chemicals, obsolete equipment, and copies of lab reports go to die.
But Dr. Bishop, no matter how strange he is, knows where things are and soon enough she starts to get his eclectic half-remembered organizing system (or what he has of one, now); it's worse than the garage when she was twelve, yes, but she was the one who had to get in there for her allowance and clean it up. She knows it can be done.
The garage was a lot less likely to give her cancer, though. (And her dad is at least twice as sane as Dr. Bishop.)
--
The lab becomes more familiar, somehow, as Astrid cleans it. She can still trip over instruments she doesn't even recognize if she's not careful, but she's getting used to stepping over them instead. It's like a pirate's lair, or an alchemical lab, except without all of the smoke and beer. A lot more LSD, though, probably.
Astrid worries about that, but Dr. Bishop has been doing it for years, and Peter doesn't seem to think it's a bad idea. (She thinks it's a bad idea, but they're both adults. They're not her responsibility, as long as Walter doesn't destroy any lab equipment while he's enjoying himself.)
But she still likes it when she can leave, and return to the proper daylight where the smell of whatever the latest problem is dissipates and she doesn't need to spend hours listening to Tchaikovsky to help an insane man remember what, exactly, he did all of those years ago.
--
It takes Astrid nearly a year to realize that her world has gone mad; she's been up to her elbows in grime this whole time, but she normalizes things. It's the only way to really deal with life, to treat it as if it's sane. She's sitting in her apartment, on the phone with her sister, and realizes that she just told her about the mutant rat infestation of Boston in '83 that Walter was so adamant about this afternoon.
"Your boss is a little crazy, isn't he?" her sister asks, with a half-laugh. "Mutant rats; were they ninjas, too?"
"I don't think so," Astrid replies, cheerfully, "but you never know."
When the phone conversation is over a few minutes later, Astrid covers her face with her hands and starts to laugh. The mutant rats had seemed like basically normal small talk, when Walter brought them up, and then devolved into an annoyance as the afternoon wore on.
Yeah, her boss is a little crazy. But so is her life.
--
When the thieves break into the lab, and knock her out, the pain when she wakes up is matched by a quiet sorrow once Olivia is gone. It's an invasion, into her space and into her life; they came into the lab and they took things and they made a mess. This is her space, and Walter's space, and it's wrong that someone else could turn it upside down.
Astid puts her hands on her hips and turns in a circle, observing the room. She takes a steadying breath. The lab's a mess.
She'll clean it up; that's what she does.