COLLEGE TIME IS HERE AGAIN (private for @respectedthreat
She is sitting at the table. Notes are strewn everywhere, covering everything. She's worn her pencils down to nubs. Ink and lead stain her hands. Her hair is haphazardly thrown up in a bun--but her unnaturally white roots are showing. Lucia has forgotten to dye her hair, forgotten to pay attention to the roots, and what's more is that she's so
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Before one of his so-called college "instructors" had pushed himself and Lucia together for that completely inane "group project," he had been perfectly content with being alone for every part of his day that didn't require him being surrounded by classmates. He even managed to finagle a solo dorm room, using his young age as the lynch pin to secure his (much needed) extra space. He didn't like other people. And quite honestly, other people made it painfully (sometimes literally) clear that they didn't much care for him, either.
And after their project was over, by all accounts, Lucia should have walked away and never talked to him ever again. He would have hardly batted an eye.
...but she didn't. She kind of...hung around. He'd be in the lab, and she'd show up, eager to learn more about what he was doing. And then they'd end up talking (well, usually he'd end up talking) for hours, which he was genuinely surprised about.
No one liked to listen to him talk.
After six months of the closest thing Buddy himself would ever have dared to call a friendship--and he didn't ever call it that, because the word sounded foreign in his voice and his mouth fumbled to even begin to say it aloud--he had grown...comfortable. With her, with their conversations, with sharing his ideas.
It was an odd feeling.
And then a week ago, she had kissed him.
And then subsequently ignored him since then.
His brain could hardly wrap around any of that, but one thing he knew for sure is that he wasn't happy. Why would she ignore him? He assumed she was embarrassed for what happened, which he could understand in a way--Buddy had no misgivings when it came to his attraction level. He knew what he was like, what he looked like. But that was no excuse to stop being his only willing audience member!
Denial, thy name is Buddy Pine.
And now he was outside her door. He had walked with a purpose from his dorm room to hers, far too excited about his most recent breakthrough to be worried about these annoying, social interactions and dramatics. He burst through the door, launching into his explanation before he even checked if she was in her room.]
It was the gamma matrices! [He's gesturing wildly, smiling brighter than she'd seen in quite a while.] This whole time, I was obsessing over the plane waves solutions, and we were overlooking the most important part--the Dirac Equation! How ridiculous is that?
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She braces herself against her chair and looks at him with wide eyes, chest heaving. The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them.]
Have you ever heard of knocking?
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Have you ever heard of locking your door?
[He shakes it off, and continues walking towards her, quickly grabbing a chair and pulling it up next to her and continuing his tirade and hand waving.] Didn't you hear me?
I figured it out! The Dirac Equation! See--[and now he's looking into her eyes, because this is the important part and look how smart he is, she should really be more excited than this, and if he wasn't so hyped up he might glare a little]--we'd already taken the uncertainty principle into account, and I'd been working the energy points of the quantum mechanical physical system to death, but
we weren't accounting for--[He puts both hands in front of his face, making a box]--the vacuum energy. The zero-point energy of all the fields in space!
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[She scrambles for a piece of paper, writes out what she remembers of the equation from it, and turns back to him, even more of her hair falling out from the bun she had thrown it up into earlier, falling all over her green cardigan.
She looks at him, completely wide-eyed and captivated.]
Tell me everything.
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Huh.
That was weird.
It's like his chest tightened, like all at once his stomach and his lungs decided to tie themselves into a confusing knot. He hadn't ever felt anything like it before, and while it was vaguely disconcerting it wasn't exactly ...unpleasant. Or unwelcome. His train of thought is interrupted as she locks eyes with him and gives him that look--a look he's never received before he met her, and now he was receiving more often than not when they were together--and his chest does the aforementioned tangle-dance again.
Did it have something to do with her?
He registers that she's stopped talking, and he starts to fill the silence with his own words.] So--the Standard Model for vacuum energy. There's the electromagnetic field, other gauge fields, fermionic fields, the Higgs field. And they make up vacuum energy, and it's not empty space, like I wanted to think--it's literally the ground state of the fields. The Dirac equation popped into my head and that reminded me of fermionic fields, which led to me seeing how I was confusing myself--and it's so simple!
[And she's still looking at him, and the tightening is still there, and it's not going away. Buddy was starting to get the feeling that it wouldn't go away unless he did...something. Something. But he had absolutely no clue what that something was, and he was trying to make a mental note to do some research on this because he had better not be getting sick, and--had her eyes always been that green?]
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[She stares at her paperwork for a moment, and then crosses everything out. No, no, no. Everything she'd been thinking of had been turned upside down.
Her hair is getting in her eyes. She feverishly swats it out of the way and the bun gives up. As her hair falls down, she begins to twist the ends of it around her left hand, writing with her right.
She turns back to him, incensed, beaming, green eyes positively sparkling. All previous anxieties are gone in the face of mathematics!] This is amazing, you're completely right! This is exactly what we were missing!
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Yeah, I know, I think we--[She beams at him. His breath catches and he doesn't know why. A side effect of this oncoming sickness, maybe? Ugh, he hated being sick. Some people were good at being sick, but Buddy was not one of them, and he just absolutely despised the idea and--this feeling wasn't going away, it was getting stronger and he felt really hot, way hotter than he should because it was Autumn for God's sake, and he just had to do something and she was looking at him, all buzzing excitement and admiration and--
--he abruptly moved forward and kissed her.
One hand went to the side of her face and the other balanced himself on her chair as he leaned over. It wasn't the type of kiss you see in the movies--and it wasn't the type of kiss he'd rolled his eyes at in his comic books--it was young, and fumbling, and absolutely the kiss of a boy who had never kissed anyone or even thought about kissing anyone ever before.
He broke it off and sat back in his seat, wholly confused about what the hell he just did. One feeling he was well acquainted with was embarrassment, and another was rejection, and he felt them looming their ugly heads and grinning. So he supposed the smart thing to do was to keep talking.]
The spontaneous symmetry is dead-on, it's exactly what we were missing. I figure we need to lay out a few more equations, like the formula for the energy of a single energy radiator. The vibrating atomic unit, while also paying attention to the frequency and the constants: Planck's and Boltzmann's, respectively.
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What?
Lucia's brain has stopped making equations. Lucia's brain has stopped doing anything, period. Her mouth, slightly open and vaguely wet from kissing, opens and closes once before she swallows, and slowly licks her lips.]
Um.
[Slowly, her tan skin begins to color, and a flush rises all the way from her neck to the highs of her cheekbones until she knows for certain she's as red as a tomato, but can't. move. a muscle.]
Um.
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Oh fuck.
That confusing, uplifting feeling was long gone, replaced by bitter, familiar rejection. What was he thinking? Of course she wouldn't have wanted him to do that, she had avoided him nonstop since the first time and he still didn't get it, and why did he ever come over here in the first place?
He had never felt more like a teenager than he did at that moment.
And now she'd never talk to him again, and now he was going to lose the only person that had ever given a shit about anything he cared about, and hadn't been cruel or taunting, and maybe was even his friend.
Buddy pointedly turned away from her and focused on the paper on the desk in front of him, hoping upon hope that she couldn't anything he was feeling. If he focused on their common interest, on cool, unfeeling academics--maybe they could pretend it never happened.]
I--[He cleared his throat.]--I think lying these out would be easy, now that we're on the right track. [STARING AT THE PAPER FOREVER and tapping his finger against the equations she drew out.] Ideally, I'd like to start building some tech to explore this vacuum space, and I'm fairly positive I have part of it usable and built already, from another experimental unit I was messing with.
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He'd kissed her. Her. He, had kissed, her.
Slowly, although he doesn't see it, with his eyes on the paper, Lucia begins to smile. And the smile grows wider and wider until it's a grin. The flush is still there, but she's almost giddy now, and laughs, quietly.]
Hey. Buddy.
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He studied the equation even still. Maybe he could keep talking? But he couldn't find the words to fill the void, he was far too busy berating himself. Not only for his actions, but for getting close to someone in the first place. Once he was a hero--once he was rich, powerful, famous and Super--he'd have all the time in the world to make friends, and they'd be falling at his feet, and everything would be perfect.
But none of that helped him at this exact second. So he sighed, almost inaudibly, and slowly raised his eyes to her.]
...I know. I wasn't--[He paused and his eyes finally reached hers. He couldn't find the words, so he figured he'd just respond normally, if not a bit more down-trodden than his usual bravado allowed.]--yeah?
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Stop talking.
[And with that, she leaned forward, grabbed the left string of his hoodie, and pulled him forward into a kiss.
Not an experienced kind of kiss, but a sweet, soft, kiss nonetheless, and the message behind it was clear. She broke it off eventually--to breathe, of course--with a grin as wide as the Mississippi.]
And stop worrying so much.
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His hands stayed limp and useless at his sides as she kissed him softly, so soft and he didn't think that a thing could ever exist that was as soft as her lips. Buddy was fully and completely dumbstruck, and by the time he realized he should probably be doing something as well--like kissing back or, you know, anything--she pulled away.
She smiled at him and it was like a punch in the gut, if a punch in the gut could actually feel good--and this guy had suffered enough punches in the gut to know that they never felt good, and WHY WAS HE THINKING ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW.
Buddy opened his mouth to say something.
And then closed it.
And then opened it again.
...and then closed it. He was sure he could say something charming here, if he could only find his voice.]
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She turns super pale and stares at her feet and wills herself to magically sink into the cheap dorm room carpet.]
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He mentally chided himself. If he was going to rule the world in the palm of his hand one day, surely he could muster the courage to kiss a girl.
Buddy gets closer and places his hand under her chin, bringing her head up so she looks at him--and when she does, he's smirking, all arrogance and swagger and challenge--and then he moves in to kiss her again.
He's still no Casanova, by any stretch of the imagination--he had never done this before, and truthfully had never really intended to, because it was a basely human gesture and absolutely wreaked of dependence, but he was effectively shutting out that part of his psyche at the moment. His kiss wasn't forceful, but it was powerful, counteracting her feather-light kiss from earlier. As he pulls away, he realizes that somehow a hand has snaked it's way into her hair.
It would be a habit that he'd never be able to break.]
You know--[There's that smile again. Letting his ego do the talking always led to positive results.]--if you wanted me to shut up this badly, I'd have recommended you take these sort of extreme measures a long time ago.
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Forgive me. [Sarcasm, but it's teasing. For the first time, he can see her relaxed, see what she's like when she's--happy. Undeniably, giddily happy. Her voice is kind, sincere, sweet, and just a little bit goading.]
Next time, I'll remember to do that. [She raises an eyebrow.] Unless this is a one-time thing.
[She doesn't think it is.]
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