[fic] Non Serviam
Title: Non Serviam
Characters: Jared Dunn, Bertram Gilfoyle, Dinesh Chugtai
Rating: PG
Warnings: show-level swearing
Word Count: 2,021 words
Summary: While Richard goes and meets with Gavin, the guys back at the house pour one out for Anton, have a rare sincere conversation, and contemplate next steps. 4x10 coda/addendum.
Notes: A quick self-indulgent thing that I threw together after watching the season finale one too many times. Unbeta'd, so all mistakes are mine and mine alone. Enjoy!
Read below, or on AO3.
The server room is cold without Anton-empty, now, and spacious. Far too spacious. And silent, like a tomb. Almost like the offices they’d populated during Barker’s brief tenure as CEO, after the clearance sale. But whatever somber feelings their former office space had stirred in Jared, it’s nothing compared to the cold sterility of an Anton-less garage.
It had taken a couple weeks to get used to falling asleep with all the humming fans and little flickering LEDs, the constant whirrs pulsing through Anton’s circuit boards; the silence now is oppressive by contrast, even with Jian-Yang and Dinesh’s muffled argument coming from the kitchen. Jared wonders how long it’ll take to get used to sleeping in his own bedroom again. Maybe the constant twinge of muscle cramping in his back will go away after a couple nights on a real mattress. That would certainly be a silver lining.
Still, he’ll miss the server room. He supposes he should call it a garage, technically, but a garage is for parking cars, and he doesn’t think anybody’s parked their cars in here since Erlich bought the place.
Speaking of which, Erlich should have checked in with them by now. Jared pulls out his phone to shoot him a quick text (Does he have international texting? Can he even get a signal way up in the Himalayas?) but when he unlocks his phone all he sees is the falsified Hooli-Con app glaring up at him.
Right.
Somehow, even after everything, he can’t bring himself to delete it.
He’s got half a bottle of Martinelli’s in his mini-fridge, leftover from the one night they thought they’d be rich-the one night of unbridled, carefree celebration before Keenan’s betrayal. The cider’s beyond flat by now, almost disgustingly syrupy, but somehow it seems fitting.
Bottoms up, he thinks glumly, and that’s when the door creaks open.
“Thought you moved back to your place,” Gilfoyle says, as tonelessly as ever. The air mattress bounces a little as he sinks down next to Jared, swigging directly from his bottle of Pappy van Winkle.
“I did,” Jared replies. “I just thought I’d come pay my respects. I can leave, if you’d like.”
Gilfoyle shrugs and clinks his bottle against Jared’s. “To Anton,” he mutters, pouring a bit of his bourbon onto the ground.
“To Anton,” echoes Jared, joining him.
They sit there in silent contemplation, each with his own beverage, staring at the empty room. Other than a couple shelves and crates that hadn’t fit into the U-Haul, some scattered wiring and electrical components that Jared can never seem to remember the names or functions of, and that giant photograph of Gavin Belson (turned, mercifully, to face the wall), there’s not much else to see.
“Can I ask you a question, Gilfoyle?” Jared says quietly.
“Why was I so attached to a stupid fucking machine that I built with my own two hands, that sat in here holding every goddamn byte of data and line of code that we worked our fucking asses off for?”
“Well, when you put it like that-”
“Have you ever built anything from scratch, Jared?” Gilfoyle asks.
“I set up a bird feeder once,” Jared says. “It was from a kit that I got for Christmas at one of my foster homes, but I assembled it myself and filled it with feed and climbed up the big tree in the front yard to hang it from one of the branches. A few days later, a mother bird built her nest on another branch right above it to lay her eggs. I never saw how many she laid; it was too high up to see from the ground and I didn’t want to disturb her-”
“For fuck’s sake,” Gilfoyle mutters, taking another swig.
“-Then one day I came back from school to a crow savaging the eggs,” Jared continues. “The mother bird was so helpless against it, and it just kept tearing and tearing and eating and eating. And then-she just flew away. And the crow finished eating and it flew away, and all the twigs and bits of egg just sort of-dripped down all over the bird feeder, like some grisly tree ornament gone awry.”
Gilfoyle snorts. Once upon a time, Jared would have found it mean-spirited. Now, though, he’s come to expect the callousness. Welcome it, even. It’s a testament to how far they’ve come, if nothing else.
The door swings open again. It’s Dinesh this time, nursing a bottle of-
“Are you drinking my fucking beer?”
“Fuck you, Gilfoyle,” Dinesh snaps. He takes a long, slow swig while flipping Gilfoyle the bird.
Jared watches them stare each other down for a moment, gauging whether he needs to intervene yet again, but then Gilfoyle deflates with a muttered “whatever” and a roll of the (still cat-contact-lensed) eyes.
“Figured I’d find you guys here,” Dinesh says, seating himself on Gilfoyle’s other side. “Jian-Yang’s been chain smoking all fucking day since getting back from the airport. And blasting fucking Chinese pop ballads. No wonder Erlich wanted to fucking kill him all the fucking time.”
“Where is Erlich, anyway?” Gilfoyle asks. “You guys ever hear from him?”
Jared and Dinesh both shake their heads. Gilfoyle shrugs again. They lapse into another comfortable silence, sipping their drinks.
“So where will you two go from here?” Jared asks.
Gilfoyle and Dinesh exchange a look.
“I go where the money goes,” Dinesh says. “And right now, as big of a fucking prick as Richard is, the money’s with him and his new internet.”
“I told you when we were working with Gavin Belson,” says Gilfoyle, “I hate to see good tech go to waste. Richard’s a lying sack of shit with piss-poor management skills, but he’s still a brilliant programmer.”
“I mean,” Dinesh adds, “As long as-” He trails off, looking embarrassed, and takes a hasty swig of his beer.
“As long as what?” Jared asks.
“As long as you keep him in check,” Gilfoyle finishes.
“He fired me,” Jared says. “You were both there.”
“And then he hired you back,” Dinesh says.
Gilfoyle grunts in agreement. “We were perfectly happy leaving him out in the cold until you called us. Totally worth it, though, to watch Melcher lose his shit. Again,” he adds with a smirk.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Dinesh says. “About Richard sleeping with Melcher’s fiancee? I mean, like, before Melcher started beating the shit out of him.”
“Oh-yeah. Yeah, he told me what happened. He didn’t want it known, though, for obvious reasons. Not that it matters now, I suppose. Cat’s out of the bag.”
“Right. Point is,” says Gilfoyle. “Richard trusts you, Jared.”
Dinesh nods. “And so do we.”
“Richard went to go meet Gavin at Josefina’s,” Gilfoyle says. “I’d bet half my shares in Pied Piper that Gavin’s offering him another acquisition, and I’d bet the other half that Richard’s gonna turn him down. It’s only a matter of time before the space saver app takes off-I mean really takes off-and we’re on track to make servers, including Hooli’s box business, completely obsolete. And with the new, decentralized internet, well. It’s a brave new fucking world.”
Dinesh smirks. “What Gilfoyle is trying to say, but can’t because he’s an arrogant dick, is that even though we’re on board, we can’t do this without you. Me, and Gilfoyle, and especially Richard. We need you, Jared.”
“That’s very kind of you to say,” Jared says, “but it’s been a long couple of days and I should head back to my place. My squatter didn’t exactly leave the place spotless when he left, so I still have a lot of cleaning to do.”
He leans over to drop his now-empty Martinelli’s bottle into the recycling bin, then pulls himself to his feet. It feels like a longer walk than usual to the garage door opener, despite the fact that he now has a direct and open route where he doesn’t have to worry about bumping into shelves or knocking some rigging out of configuration and thereby, to quote Gilfoyle, “skullfucking the entire company.” The door opens with that familiar creak and long groan, and Jared finds himself already missing the sound.
The sun has set over Palo Alto, the sky a light-polluted haze of dull greys. Richard should be back from his meeting with Gavin soon, and Jared would very much like to have some more space to think things over before getting back to work. Suddenly he feels very tired.
“I, uh, I’ll see you two tomorrow,” he says with a half-hearted wave, digging in his pocket for his car keys.
Dinesh and Gilfoyle exchange another look.
“Hey, Jared,” Dinesh calls. “Jian-Yang’s already moved all his shit into the master bedroom. We’re gonna have to start looking for someone to take his old room soon.”
“Erlich still owns the place, so there’s no rent to pay, but even without Anton eating up all the power, Jian-Yang’s stupid smart fridge is gonna piss all over the electric bill,” Gilfoyle adds. “And we’re not exactly rich yet.”
“That’s true,” says Dinesh, “but it’s a lot of hassle to look for people and schedule showings-”
“-and we’ve got a fuckload of work to do on Pied Piper.”
“And even if we do find someone, they could be, like, a serial killer or something-”
“-which, fascinating though it may be to share a living space with someone so uninhibited in his or her hobbies, poses a very real threat to the productivity of the company. Not to mention all the potential legal bullshit that comes with housing a murderer.”
“Roommates aside, the Palo Alto housing market is more competitive than SAT prep at a private school. I bet a nice, one-bedroom condo in a convenient location would sell in no time.”
“Would make the seller a shitton of money, too.”
“Right, and driving to and from your workplace every day is pretty bad for the environment.”
“And gas prices are going up again.”
“And taking the bus or biking seems pretty inconven-”
Jared holds up a hand. “I get it,” he says with a smile. “Thanks for the invite, guys. I, uh. I’ll let you know soon.”
He surveys the empty garage one more time as Dinesh and Gilfoyle return to the house. The garage door squeaks shut, Pied Piper logo gleaming bright from the light of the streetlamps. Jared starts up his car and pulls out of the driveway. It still stings, to be sure, Richard’s betrayal and near-immediate outreach and apology. Jared doesn’t doubt the sincerity of it for a second, but it still gives him pause. Forgiveness was easy when they all thought they’d be dead in the water in just a matter of minutes. They would see Pied Piper through to the bitter end, and part ways as amicably as they could manage, under those circumstances; that had been the plan, and he had accepted it. Now that they’re very much alive and seemingly thriving, though-now Jared’s not so sure.
But if what Gilfoyle says is true, that Pied Piper will only grow from here to one day overtake Hooli as the new tech giant in the Valley, well. They’ve all of them now seen what Richard is capable of, both the good and the bad. But the three of them-Dinesh, Gilfoyle, and himself-perhaps they together can somehow save Richard from becoming Gavin 2.0.
Jared smiles to himself as he pulls into his designated parking spot behind his condo, remembering that hazy, sleep-deprived night they’d spent on the dick-jerking algorithm that gave rise to middle-out-remembers the cables he’d hauled from the garage as Gilfoyle tore holes through drywall and Dinesh and Erlich kept their viral livestream afloat. He remembers the roller-coaster tumult of his first (and last) Pied Piper board meeting; the revelations of Peter Gregory’s storage unit; the dread, then ecstasy, then alarm as they assembled in Melcher’s office that very morning, very much ready to go down as a team, only to discover their unlikely salvation via smart fridge.
Brave new world, indeed.
Characters: Jared Dunn, Bertram Gilfoyle, Dinesh Chugtai
Rating: PG
Warnings: show-level swearing
Word Count: 2,021 words
Summary: While Richard goes and meets with Gavin, the guys back at the house pour one out for Anton, have a rare sincere conversation, and contemplate next steps. 4x10 coda/addendum.
Notes: A quick self-indulgent thing that I threw together after watching the season finale one too many times. Unbeta'd, so all mistakes are mine and mine alone. Enjoy!
Read below, or on AO3.
The server room is cold without Anton-empty, now, and spacious. Far too spacious. And silent, like a tomb. Almost like the offices they’d populated during Barker’s brief tenure as CEO, after the clearance sale. But whatever somber feelings their former office space had stirred in Jared, it’s nothing compared to the cold sterility of an Anton-less garage.
It had taken a couple weeks to get used to falling asleep with all the humming fans and little flickering LEDs, the constant whirrs pulsing through Anton’s circuit boards; the silence now is oppressive by contrast, even with Jian-Yang and Dinesh’s muffled argument coming from the kitchen. Jared wonders how long it’ll take to get used to sleeping in his own bedroom again. Maybe the constant twinge of muscle cramping in his back will go away after a couple nights on a real mattress. That would certainly be a silver lining.
Still, he’ll miss the server room. He supposes he should call it a garage, technically, but a garage is for parking cars, and he doesn’t think anybody’s parked their cars in here since Erlich bought the place.
Speaking of which, Erlich should have checked in with them by now. Jared pulls out his phone to shoot him a quick text (Does he have international texting? Can he even get a signal way up in the Himalayas?) but when he unlocks his phone all he sees is the falsified Hooli-Con app glaring up at him.
Right.
Somehow, even after everything, he can’t bring himself to delete it.
He’s got half a bottle of Martinelli’s in his mini-fridge, leftover from the one night they thought they’d be rich-the one night of unbridled, carefree celebration before Keenan’s betrayal. The cider’s beyond flat by now, almost disgustingly syrupy, but somehow it seems fitting.
Bottoms up, he thinks glumly, and that’s when the door creaks open.
“Thought you moved back to your place,” Gilfoyle says, as tonelessly as ever. The air mattress bounces a little as he sinks down next to Jared, swigging directly from his bottle of Pappy van Winkle.
“I did,” Jared replies. “I just thought I’d come pay my respects. I can leave, if you’d like.”
Gilfoyle shrugs and clinks his bottle against Jared’s. “To Anton,” he mutters, pouring a bit of his bourbon onto the ground.
“To Anton,” echoes Jared, joining him.
They sit there in silent contemplation, each with his own beverage, staring at the empty room. Other than a couple shelves and crates that hadn’t fit into the U-Haul, some scattered wiring and electrical components that Jared can never seem to remember the names or functions of, and that giant photograph of Gavin Belson (turned, mercifully, to face the wall), there’s not much else to see.
“Can I ask you a question, Gilfoyle?” Jared says quietly.
“Why was I so attached to a stupid fucking machine that I built with my own two hands, that sat in here holding every goddamn byte of data and line of code that we worked our fucking asses off for?”
“Well, when you put it like that-”
“Have you ever built anything from scratch, Jared?” Gilfoyle asks.
“I set up a bird feeder once,” Jared says. “It was from a kit that I got for Christmas at one of my foster homes, but I assembled it myself and filled it with feed and climbed up the big tree in the front yard to hang it from one of the branches. A few days later, a mother bird built her nest on another branch right above it to lay her eggs. I never saw how many she laid; it was too high up to see from the ground and I didn’t want to disturb her-”
“For fuck’s sake,” Gilfoyle mutters, taking another swig.
“-Then one day I came back from school to a crow savaging the eggs,” Jared continues. “The mother bird was so helpless against it, and it just kept tearing and tearing and eating and eating. And then-she just flew away. And the crow finished eating and it flew away, and all the twigs and bits of egg just sort of-dripped down all over the bird feeder, like some grisly tree ornament gone awry.”
Gilfoyle snorts. Once upon a time, Jared would have found it mean-spirited. Now, though, he’s come to expect the callousness. Welcome it, even. It’s a testament to how far they’ve come, if nothing else.
The door swings open again. It’s Dinesh this time, nursing a bottle of-
“Are you drinking my fucking beer?”
“Fuck you, Gilfoyle,” Dinesh snaps. He takes a long, slow swig while flipping Gilfoyle the bird.
Jared watches them stare each other down for a moment, gauging whether he needs to intervene yet again, but then Gilfoyle deflates with a muttered “whatever” and a roll of the (still cat-contact-lensed) eyes.
“Figured I’d find you guys here,” Dinesh says, seating himself on Gilfoyle’s other side. “Jian-Yang’s been chain smoking all fucking day since getting back from the airport. And blasting fucking Chinese pop ballads. No wonder Erlich wanted to fucking kill him all the fucking time.”
“Where is Erlich, anyway?” Gilfoyle asks. “You guys ever hear from him?”
Jared and Dinesh both shake their heads. Gilfoyle shrugs again. They lapse into another comfortable silence, sipping their drinks.
“So where will you two go from here?” Jared asks.
Gilfoyle and Dinesh exchange a look.
“I go where the money goes,” Dinesh says. “And right now, as big of a fucking prick as Richard is, the money’s with him and his new internet.”
“I told you when we were working with Gavin Belson,” says Gilfoyle, “I hate to see good tech go to waste. Richard’s a lying sack of shit with piss-poor management skills, but he’s still a brilliant programmer.”
“I mean,” Dinesh adds, “As long as-” He trails off, looking embarrassed, and takes a hasty swig of his beer.
“As long as what?” Jared asks.
“As long as you keep him in check,” Gilfoyle finishes.
“He fired me,” Jared says. “You were both there.”
“And then he hired you back,” Dinesh says.
Gilfoyle grunts in agreement. “We were perfectly happy leaving him out in the cold until you called us. Totally worth it, though, to watch Melcher lose his shit. Again,” he adds with a smirk.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Dinesh says. “About Richard sleeping with Melcher’s fiancee? I mean, like, before Melcher started beating the shit out of him.”
“Oh-yeah. Yeah, he told me what happened. He didn’t want it known, though, for obvious reasons. Not that it matters now, I suppose. Cat’s out of the bag.”
“Right. Point is,” says Gilfoyle. “Richard trusts you, Jared.”
Dinesh nods. “And so do we.”
“Richard went to go meet Gavin at Josefina’s,” Gilfoyle says. “I’d bet half my shares in Pied Piper that Gavin’s offering him another acquisition, and I’d bet the other half that Richard’s gonna turn him down. It’s only a matter of time before the space saver app takes off-I mean really takes off-and we’re on track to make servers, including Hooli’s box business, completely obsolete. And with the new, decentralized internet, well. It’s a brave new fucking world.”
Dinesh smirks. “What Gilfoyle is trying to say, but can’t because he’s an arrogant dick, is that even though we’re on board, we can’t do this without you. Me, and Gilfoyle, and especially Richard. We need you, Jared.”
“That’s very kind of you to say,” Jared says, “but it’s been a long couple of days and I should head back to my place. My squatter didn’t exactly leave the place spotless when he left, so I still have a lot of cleaning to do.”
He leans over to drop his now-empty Martinelli’s bottle into the recycling bin, then pulls himself to his feet. It feels like a longer walk than usual to the garage door opener, despite the fact that he now has a direct and open route where he doesn’t have to worry about bumping into shelves or knocking some rigging out of configuration and thereby, to quote Gilfoyle, “skullfucking the entire company.” The door opens with that familiar creak and long groan, and Jared finds himself already missing the sound.
The sun has set over Palo Alto, the sky a light-polluted haze of dull greys. Richard should be back from his meeting with Gavin soon, and Jared would very much like to have some more space to think things over before getting back to work. Suddenly he feels very tired.
“I, uh, I’ll see you two tomorrow,” he says with a half-hearted wave, digging in his pocket for his car keys.
Dinesh and Gilfoyle exchange another look.
“Hey, Jared,” Dinesh calls. “Jian-Yang’s already moved all his shit into the master bedroom. We’re gonna have to start looking for someone to take his old room soon.”
“Erlich still owns the place, so there’s no rent to pay, but even without Anton eating up all the power, Jian-Yang’s stupid smart fridge is gonna piss all over the electric bill,” Gilfoyle adds. “And we’re not exactly rich yet.”
“That’s true,” says Dinesh, “but it’s a lot of hassle to look for people and schedule showings-”
“-and we’ve got a fuckload of work to do on Pied Piper.”
“And even if we do find someone, they could be, like, a serial killer or something-”
“-which, fascinating though it may be to share a living space with someone so uninhibited in his or her hobbies, poses a very real threat to the productivity of the company. Not to mention all the potential legal bullshit that comes with housing a murderer.”
“Roommates aside, the Palo Alto housing market is more competitive than SAT prep at a private school. I bet a nice, one-bedroom condo in a convenient location would sell in no time.”
“Would make the seller a shitton of money, too.”
“Right, and driving to and from your workplace every day is pretty bad for the environment.”
“And gas prices are going up again.”
“And taking the bus or biking seems pretty inconven-”
Jared holds up a hand. “I get it,” he says with a smile. “Thanks for the invite, guys. I, uh. I’ll let you know soon.”
He surveys the empty garage one more time as Dinesh and Gilfoyle return to the house. The garage door squeaks shut, Pied Piper logo gleaming bright from the light of the streetlamps. Jared starts up his car and pulls out of the driveway. It still stings, to be sure, Richard’s betrayal and near-immediate outreach and apology. Jared doesn’t doubt the sincerity of it for a second, but it still gives him pause. Forgiveness was easy when they all thought they’d be dead in the water in just a matter of minutes. They would see Pied Piper through to the bitter end, and part ways as amicably as they could manage, under those circumstances; that had been the plan, and he had accepted it. Now that they’re very much alive and seemingly thriving, though-now Jared’s not so sure.
But if what Gilfoyle says is true, that Pied Piper will only grow from here to one day overtake Hooli as the new tech giant in the Valley, well. They’ve all of them now seen what Richard is capable of, both the good and the bad. But the three of them-Dinesh, Gilfoyle, and himself-perhaps they together can somehow save Richard from becoming Gavin 2.0.
Jared smiles to himself as he pulls into his designated parking spot behind his condo, remembering that hazy, sleep-deprived night they’d spent on the dick-jerking algorithm that gave rise to middle-out-remembers the cables he’d hauled from the garage as Gilfoyle tore holes through drywall and Dinesh and Erlich kept their viral livestream afloat. He remembers the roller-coaster tumult of his first (and last) Pied Piper board meeting; the revelations of Peter Gregory’s storage unit; the dread, then ecstasy, then alarm as they assembled in Melcher’s office that very morning, very much ready to go down as a team, only to discover their unlikely salvation via smart fridge.
Brave new world, indeed.