Outstanding Items

There's a checklist on my desk that nobody made me write.

I made it myself, maybe three weeks after the Invincible War. I needed something to do with my hands during the hours when the facility was quiet. The team was out. Brit and Black Samson doing threat assessment. Bulletproof running perimeter work. Shapesmith — Shapesmith was doing something in the east wing I had been asked not to ask about.

So I made a list.

Outstanding items for inactive team members.

It's a strange kind of work, closing out a person. Not legally, not officially — GDA handles the formal records. But there's a layer underneath that that nobody talks about. Equipment in lockers. Access credentials that still ping the system when someone inadvertently types the wrong badge number. Recurring supply orders that keep processing. Rex had standing orders in the system for a specific brand of energy drink and a protein bar nobody else in the facility would touch. For two months after the Invincible War, a case of each showed up at the loading dock every Tuesday.

I cancelled the subscription on a Tuesday morning while the case was still sitting there on the dock.

I don't know why I waited that long.

Shrinking Rae's locker still has a jacket in it. She's not dead — she's in medical recovery, the long kind, the kind that doesn't have a timeline. Her file is marked inactive but not closed. The jacket is a gray zip-up with her callsign written on the inside collar in permanent marker. She did that herself because someone kept taking it by mistake. I see it whenever I do facility rounds. I keep meaning to box it and send it to her, and I keep not doing it, because sending it would mean acknowledging she's not coming back to get it herself.

The checklist has been half-finished for a long time.

Today I finished two more items. I removed Rex's Tuesday delivery. I updated the briefing room display to remove names from the seating chart that don't have seats anymore.

The display now shows four positions instead of twelve. It looks like an error. People who don't know us might assume it's a beta build or a test. I'm leaving it that way because it's accurate, and because the people who walk into that room every morning already know what it means.

I still have items left on the list. They don't get easier with time, exactly. They just become familiar enough that you can do them.

That's not the same thing as okay. But it's the thing you have while you wait for okay.