'And spite's as good a reason to take his power'
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Almost twenty years ago, Logan Roy had an affair with Elizabeth Ronan's mother, one that ended in her divorce and a number of rather unsavoury news s...
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|| CHAPTER 21 – Spontaneous Oblivion ||
(Season 3 Ep 3 – 'The Disruption')
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After another night spent keeping agonising vigil over her father's bedside, sleep deprivation had plunged Elizabeth into a sort of dissociative state.
The damning evidence she had to attest to this, was that when Shiv had gone to Logan's office for a Waystar strategy meet, she had found herself wandering down to ATN's floor and into Greg's office.
She trawled her mind for the thoughts that had led her to this wildly uncharacteristic behaviour and came up with nothing. It was a little bit eery, as if she was living the pre-cursor to some great disaster and that the CCTV footage of her riding down in the elevator would be used in a documentary on her disappearance.
That is what watching her father edge closer to death felt like, she realised: disappearing. She was experiencing an uncontrollable, inevitable slipping.
Part of her thought, no- part of her wished, that the moment her dad's heart stopped beating, that she'd simply vanish. Nothing dramatic or violent, more like the inverse of spontaneous combustion.
A spontaneous oblivion.
Arthur Ronan died and then his daughter was gone. That sounded about right.
Had she been in a state to employ some logic to the situation, Elizabeth might have entertained the idea that her odd trip down a few floors, had something to do with checking on Greg to make sure he had a lawyer of his own and wasn't instead being suffocated by Logan's legal team, who were boa constrictors in human form.
But she just didn't have the energy to reconcile her emotional state with worrying about Gregory Hirsch, so once she'd entered his office, she hadn't asked about the state of his legal counsel.
After a brief conversation that had felt forced to them both, the two of them had lapsed into a companionable silence. Greg was making a show of reading documents that she doubted were of much import—umming and ahing for dramatic effect—while she snooped around his office with her eyes.
At a glance, the room was entirely what you'd expect from a relatively low-level male employee at a large-scale company: dark wooden furniture, generic framed posters on the wall, all relating to ATN or ATN-adjacent projects and manila files organised in semi-neat stacks.
What gave Greg away as someone massively out of his depth and in a place that he had never expected to be—and probably didn't want to be either—was the slinky positioned on his desk like a metallic, crawling caterpillar and the Magic 8 Ball displayed proudly on top of an ornate box that was intended to hold expensive cigars.
Seeing him in his office was like watching a little boy try on his dad's best suit, only to be swallowed up in all the fabric.
Elizabeth remembered the first time she'd spoken to Greg, during that horrible baseball game on Logan's birthday and how he'd told her that he was hoping his uncle would get him back on the Brightstar training programme after he'd been kicked off for vomiting in the mascot costume. She suspected that had he been successful, Greg would have gone on to be much more content at Parks and Cruises than he ever could be at ATN.
