View From The Inside

by Hagar

Summary:

It's an illusion that's easy for outsiders to fall prey to.

She works with some of the smartest people in the world. Some of her coworkers collect PhDs like normal people collect shoes, or handbags. Some days, though – some days, it seems to Angela that she's the only person in the lab with a reasonable endowment of common sense. It's Angela's job to bring a sense of normalcy to the lab; it doesn't say so in her contract, and Camille is too wise to say it out loud, at least in those words, but they all know it.

Angela is Billy Gibbons' daughter, raised in a tour van, tucked in between a guitar case and an amplifier; she's a wandering free-spirit artist who prefers to keep her options open. It says something of her coworkers that she is their source of stability. It says quite a few things, actually, but Angela knows better than to say any of them aloud.

They all have their histories. Angela's is perhaps the most chaotic and colourful, but it's free of the rigid cold of Jack's early years; of the the neglect and sheer violence of Bren's childhood and teens, or Booth's for that matter (or Sweets: he never said anything, not to her, but she can read the scars in his eyes and, on the bad days, in the line of his shoulders); of the prejudice Camille had had to work against; and of the scarcity in Wendall's. Angela had never truly lacked in anything. (Sometimes, by choice, but her father was always there to have her back if she wanted him to.) She had never been expected to perform to any standard but her own.

When someone walks into the lab they see the scientists with their PhDs and their lab coats, with their neat language and blunt fingernails, and then they see the artist in her boho clothes and embroidered collar and no diploma higher than a BA to her name. The orderly scientists and the easygoing artist are an easy illusion for a random visitor to fall prey to.

Those of them who are on the inside know better.