#xpocket

[enby-mushroom]

XPOCKET MEUS AMADOS

[xpocketeer]

IX. Mingle Protocols and the Geometry of Holding Hands

The suitcase has been refit as a festival laboratory—Vertin’s manor stretched into a long, sunlit hall with parquet floors and an absurdly extended trestle table drowning in art supplies. It’s a controlled explosion of color and texture, with tissue-paper drifts like cloud cover, skeins of yarn coil like protein chains, and even pots of paint bead at the rim with surface tension ready to fail. Scissors (civilian scissors, mind you, not the righteous pair that belongs in Medicine Pocket’s hair) glint in jam jars beside rulers, glue sticks, and a box of googly eyes that leer like unblinking spectrometers.

Humans and Arcanists occupy the benches in noisy equilibrium. Lilya lounges at one end, flask tucked into a pocket like unlawful fuel; Sotheby perches in tulle with a hot glue gun, ceremonially treating it as a hearth wand; Eagle organizes badges with soldierly neatness; Regulus tells a story with her sunglasses on her head and her hands doing all the verbs. Druvis III, immaculate as she is, trims silk leaves with the fastidiousness of a wandwright shaping grain; Blonney and Jessica share a pair of shears and approximately one brain wavelength—whenever Jessica laughs, Blonney blushes, which sets the changeling laughing harder. Ezra presides somewhere in the middle—museum Director, mushroom princeling, cherub face, clipboard fierce—while Tooth Fairy distributes glitter with a jurisprudence that borders on terrifying. Matilda ferries brushes like syringes between stations. Mesmer Jr. feigns indifference and then steals a ribbon “for science.” John Titor, unsentimental, labels paper bags with hexadecimal initials that somehow still look primp.

And Oliver Fog is here, which ruins the otherwise acceptable chemical mixture. Tch.

Medicine Pocket clocks him instantly—top hat demoted for the day, but presence annoyingly solvent. He diffuses into any conversational gradient and, as if by natural law, redistributes himself toward Butterfly. Predictable. Damn it. X throws his head back at something Oliver murmurs; the sound arcs across the table like a soft spectral line, and Medicine Pocket’s stomach registers a trifling, stupid drop in pressure.

Focus, Starlight. Because that’s right, you ARE Starlight. Just… paint the pumpkin. Yeah. So. They seat themself between Vila and Windsong, which would be strategic even if it weren’t enjoyable. Vila, with squiggly hair crammed in a red scarf, reeks faintly of coastal pool salt and linseed oil, the scales along her forearms catching the light like fine inlays when she shakes a tube of orange. On the one hand, Windsong—tall, steady, dressed in pragmatic darks that make her shine—holds a yard of twine in her teeth while mapping out ley-line webbing on black cardstock with a carpenter’s pencil. Together they whisper in the comfortable, teasing way of a couple already traversing the same center. However, Medicine Pocket, romantically tone-deaf on the best of days, files the observation under “ambient mirth.” (Can’t be helped.)

“Pumpkin base coat,” Vila says, setting a clay gourd—hand-thrown, slightly lopsided—on a turntable improvised from an inverted cake tin. “Short strokes. No overworking. Let the underlayer breathe.”

Medicine Pocket dips a brush, loads it with cadmium orange, and promptly overworks a quadrant into streaky chaos. They set the brush down, rip off their glasses, and glower at the pigment like it’s a recalcitrant culture. “Why am I doing this?” they demand of physics in general. “I should be in a field running at thirty kilometers an hour or dismantling a whirler.”

“Both respectable hobbies,” Windsong comments, mouth curving. “But the legislation of a festival is no nugatory arithmetic. Humor the geopolitical study, maybe?”

“Yeah, no. I’m humoring nothing.” Medicine Pocket huffs, drags the brush again, and produces a moody tangerine smear. Out of habit, they catalogue their own irritability: touchstone jealous agitation, they once read about, olfactory triggers present (aftershave and espresso, two bays down), exacerbated by Fog Boy’s intrusion and the amorphous social experiment labeled “fun.” They cap the paint, uncap impatience, and recap desire to throw Oliver into a hedge.

“Your hand is pressing,” Vila murmurs with that thick accent of hers. Sound is like the tide at night. “Lighten. Let the brush do the transport.”

Medicine Pocket exhales, adjusts grip (closer to the ferrule, wrist loose), and the next pass lays down a clean swath of color. Controlled laminar flow. …Fine. They can do laminar.

A premeditated bump lands on their shoulder. “Uh-oh,” says a voice that is both a drawl and a hiss.

Medicine Pocket turns. A teal-haired woman has arrived with a smile that could pass inspection in aviation. Cue the sarcasm. Hissabeth. Her scarf’s pattern suggests orientations; her tool belt contains both calipers and convoluted wire. Draped across her shoulders like jewelry, a pair of slender serpents (albeit there are more than two) raises their heads in perfect stereoscopic curiosity—one sea-glass green, one dark-silvery as an oiled wrench. Their tongues taste the air, then Medicine Pocket’s sleeve, then the pumpkin.

“Please do not lick the experimental squash,” Medicine Pocket tsks without turning their scowl down.

The greenish snake flicks again, wickedly amused. The silver one coils fractionally tighter, as if offended by the notion of restraint.

Hissabeth laughs, unbothered. “My siblings. They’re material scientists,” she grouses. “Surface sampling. I’m Hissabeth.” She offers a hand that smells a bit of resin and oxidized aluminum. “Aerospace engineering, materials. You’re Medicine Pocket.”

“Unfortunately,” Medicine Pocket replies, shaking once, brisk. “Head of Biopharm now, which means people will blame me when glitter enters a cell culture.”

“Glitter has surprising tensile properties when cured,” Hissabeth says, then grins when she sees Medicine Pocket’s face. “Joking. Mostly.”

“Hey!” Kiperina calls from down-table, wheat-blonde hair in a neat plait, apprentice energy flickering like a satellite beacon. “If anyone needs stars, I can punch them out of foil. Windsong says the ley-lines like them.”

“They don’t like,” Windsong corrects calmly. “They resonate.”

“Resonate,” Kiperina echoes, enraptured, and resumes punching.

Across the bedlam, 37 is soliloquizing to John Titor’s labeler. “If we treat the ghost as a unit of probability mass,” she prattles, blue hair haloed by construction paper, “then its costume is a distribution over partitions of the integers. Ooh! What if I write ‘boo’ as a base-phi expansion?” She has already started. Her pencil moves in primes.

Medicine Pocket would normally enjoy 37’s patter the way one enjoys competent percussion. Today, their frequency filter is ruined by a single wrong-frequency oscillator: Oliver leaning to say something into their Butterfly’s ear. X’s mouth quirks; his hand sketches a half orbit in reply; the exchange is short, perfectly harmless, and exactly the sort of thing Medicine Pocket does not want to observe in the wild.

Fu…

No. They bite the inside of their cheek and reach automatically for the stress ball in their coat pocket. It squishes, promises solace through viscoelastic compliance, and they do not bite it because it is orange and sticky in here and the last thing they need is to be known as the scientist who ate paint.

“Your brushwork just improved,” Hissabeth notes, head tilted, serpents mirroring the angle. “Anger is a decent flow modifier.”

“I am not angry,” Medicine Pocket lies, painting a neat ring around the pumpkin’s stem with something that would make a therapist proud. “I am experiencing a transient catecholamine elevation in response to an external irritant.” They put down the brush and reach for a thin sable. “Besides, I have a perfect distraction: engineering.”

Hissabeth brightens. “The best flavor.”

Medicine Pocket taps the clay. “We’re going to have children wear these as lanterns. That demands mass, center of gravity, and attachment method considerations that so far I do not see in this… craftscape.”

Vila is smiling into her neckerchief. “Here comes the whiteboard math.”

“No whiteboard required.” Medicine Pocket sketches on scrap: a cross-section of the pumpkin, a thin annular rib, four equally spaced holes. “We run fishing line—no, wait, braided twine; friction is our friend—through quadrantal apertures, tie them to a crown ring, then one line to the handle. Or…” They look at Windsong. “Can you weave a ley-hush into the twine so excitable Arcanum doesn’t ring it into a metamorphosis?”

Windsong sets her pencil down, eyes soft and joyful. “A field detune? Of course.” She picks up the twine and, without theatrics, rasps a brief, precise pattern with her thumbnail—a stunted vibration that Medicine Pocket feels more than hears, like a stabilizer passing through aria. The twine solves in her hands as though it has decided to be obedient.

Hissabeth whistles. “We usually do dampers with viscoelastic gels. That’s… elegant.”

“It’s just air made polite,” Windsong states.

Medicine Pocket tries not to grin and caves, a little. “Good. Between ley hush and proper knots, none of my pumpkins will take flight.” They thread the twine, hands deft. “And if anyone suggests hot glue as a structural solution, I will sedate them for their own safety.”

“Noted,” Vila intones, dimples showing. She lifts a palette knife and, with a practiced whip, feathers the darker orange into the lighter until the gradient resembles a good sunset. “There. Acceptable?”

Medicine Pocket stares. “How did you—”

“Surface tension, flow, and a bit of sea-witchery,” Vila says serenely.

They are almost—almost—at peace when a shadow falls across the table. Fog Boy. His presence generates a readable change in local smugness. Medicine Pocket doesn’t bother to look up.

“Director Ezra,” Oliver says pleasantly to the air general vicinity, “the children near the east window may be over-glittering.”

Ezra materializes like a tiny, decisive executive. “Thank you, Mr. Fog. Tooth Fairy, can we regulate glitter density?”

“I prefer ‘jurisdicte,’” Tooth Fairy mentions, already on the case with a ladle. “This pot has quotas.”

“Beautiful,” Regulus murmurs, leaning back in her chair to watch the domestic hurricane with a pirate’s contentment. “Look at us. Arts and crafts like a proper after-school club from the end times.”

Sotheby fences a ribbon with her glue gun. “Art is the truest alchemy,” she declares, then catches Medicine Pocket’s eye and adds, “Yes, even yours, Doctor—though your art is mostly about making candy taste like tree bark.”

“Picrasma is not tree bark; it is a challenge to the palate,” Medicine Pocket drawls, which is true and also beside the current point. Their attention keeps magnetizing toward Butterfly, though, despite all detunes and dampers. X has rotated away from Oliver and fallen into conversation with Eagle and Sotheby. His hands sketch, his laughter arrives in warm packets, and Medicine Pocket’s ribcage behaves as if the lab has decided to test new actuators on it.

A cool whisper touches their ear. Vila, close enough to smell brine. “Want me to paint a very flattering skull on Mr. Fog’s hat?”

Medicine Pocket chokes on a laugh. “Tempting. But no. I will be civilized. Maybe.”

Hissabeth’s snakes (or siblings), apparently having elected themselves audience, tilt their heads to follow the angle of Medicine Pocket’s peek toward X. The emerald one’s pupils narrow; the grey one’s tail gives a single, sardonic twitch.

Hissabeth props a hip on the bench, amused. “So. You and him, the one with those eccentric eyes. That’s a data set.”

Medicine Pocket’s jaw works. “That is a controlled experiment.”

“Ah,” she says. “With good preliminary results?”

Medicine Pocket keeps their eyes on the brush. “Replicable.”

The grassy serpent emits an infinitesimal hiss that tastes like commentary. Hissabeth strokes its back. “Don’t mind Pierre. He editorializes.”

“Pierre?” Medicine Pocket asks, against their will, charmed.

“My brother,” Hissabeth supplies. “Another one is called Alexandre. They model loads.”

“Of course they do,” Medicine Pocket mutters. “Fine. Pierre, Alexandre, whoever else is in there, can file a peer review of my pumpkin once I attach the crown ring.”

Hissabeth grins and turns her attention properly to the task. “What’s your tether plan?”

“Two-point crown if the mass is low; four-point if the clay artisan got enthusiastic,” Medicine Pocket recites, tying a constrictor knot that would teach Scouts respect in the process. “Twine goes through here, see? And the resultant aim keeps the center of mass under the handle.”

“Elegant,” Windsong says again, watching with that quiet approval that makes Medicine Pocket feel, furiously, like they’ve been seen doing something nobly simple—lifting a kettle, straightening a frame—rather than tying a nontrivial knot with uncharacteristic tenderness.

Down-table, 37 has migrated to a group of younger Arcanists and is eagerly explaining that souls are just Markov chains with better marketing. Eagle listens with giant eyes, then announces she misses a friend who sounds like a pocketful of sky. Ezra kneels to Eagle’s level and promises they’ll send a letter through the Museum’s channels, truly a benefactor at work, halo and all.

Medicine Pocket’s chest does an annoying boggy expansion at the sight—Ezra is very good at gauging children; it is difficult not to love him for this. Then Butterfly laughs again, close enough now that a whiff of coffee/tea and something musky sneaks across the atmosphere like contraband, and the doughy buildup turns immediately into a territorial pressure wave.

“Medicine Pocket, you are painting the table,” Windsong tells them mildly.

Medicine Pocket looks down. They are indeed extending their sunset onto the wood with oblivious zeal. “I meant to,” they mutter, absolutely lying (once more), and correct their course. “Decorative patina. Archives chic.”

“Mm,” Vila hums, too kind to laugh, and passes them a damp cloth.

Hissabeth leans an elbow on the table, snakes (siblings—family?) slanted like antennae. “All right, tell me what’s wrong, or Pierre will begin hypothesis generation, and he has no indoor voice. Not yet.”

“There is nothing wrong,” Medicine Pocket answers, wiping the table with perhaps more force than necessary. “I am simply—” They search for language that isn’t ‘anxiously attached to the one person whose laugh rewires my day.’ “—understimulated by papier-mâché.”

Hissabeth’s smile is a blueprint of disbelief. “Uh-huh.”

Alexandre curls around her wrist, casual. Pierre, irreverent, reaches toward Medicine Pocket’s sleeve again; Medicine Pocket lifts their arm, and the serpent finds their wrist instead and rests there with surprising gentleness, cool and intent. The instinct to yank away runs into the equally strong instinct to preen. They do neither. They pretend this is fine. It is more than fine.

“See?” Hissabeth muses, pleased. “You’re a perch. Congratulations. People and reptiles find you structurally reliable.”

“Do not—” Medicine Pocket begins, then stops because X, conspiratorially the worst, is now walking the table’s length toward them, carrying two cups of something hot. His eyes find them with simple accuracy; his mouth quirks as if they share a joke (they do); he is luminous in the way that led to his ridiculous new pet name, and worse, he is lugging coffee that smells like he knew to bring a dark roast because he knows them.

X sets a cup by Medicine Pocket’s elbow and another by Vila’s, then taps two knuckles lightly on the table in greeting—perhaps a code that says here, that says hi, that says don’t start a fight with fog unless I can watch.

“Caffeine delivery,” he croons, and the way he looks at Medicine Pocket is undeviating enough to do structural work. “Figured Medpoc runs on the high-octane stuff.”

Windsong’s brow tilts in interest at the name; Vila hides a smile in her scarf. Hissabeth’s ‘brothers’ become, ludicrously, more attentive.

Medicine Pocket tries to say thank-you like a normal biped and ends up producing something like, “Hn,” which at least does not betray the fact that their heart just misfired in a transfixed, dumb way. They sip. The coffee is dead-on: unsweetened, bitter, medicinal, perfect. They glance at him over the rim, and X—sly creature—doesn’t back away this time; he lets the microsecond of contact sit, warm as a shared beaker.

“Need any stars?” Kiperina calls, suddenly at their elbow, having teleported with a constellation of foil. “I made extra!”

“We’ll take a spiral arm,” Windsong allows, and Kiperina beams as if awarded a medal.

“537461726C69676874,” John Titor intones from the label station, AKA: Allocation of stellar mass complete. Then she mutters, “4F38473C7483D62,” which even without a decoder ring sounds suspiciously like Star + Light. X coughs to hide a grin. Mesmer Jr., two chairs down, fails to hide hers, too, and kicks X’s ankle in secret approval.

Huh. So he’s told people. Already. Great.

Well, Fog Boy has the decency to be elsewhere for the moment. Medicine Pocket’s shoulders loosen by one notch. They hook one of the foil stars on the yarn crown with almost indecent care and feel something in their chest resolve into a better resonance—minuscule, droll domestic joy, masked as aptitude.

“All right,” Hissabeth sings, tapping the table with a knuckle. “Truce? I stop asking leading questions; you admit that you’re not, in fact, under-stimulated by papier-mâché.”

“Fine,” Medicine Pocket accepts, which is concession enough to light a city. “Papier-mâché is tolerable when it leads to field deployment that involves children not concussing themselves.”

“Addendum,” Windsong murmurs, eyes amused. “Papier-mâché is tolerable when performed in a room where the air holds a constant solidity of one smile.”

Medicine Pocket refuses—stubbornly, magnificently—to look at X. They look at their pumpkin instead, and it looks back: astute, cemented, fetching its own tiny sun on a string.

“Budget Buster,” Ezra announces from the center like a toastmaster suddenly remembering a favorite program. “We need your Biopharm sign-off on any paint used on masks for the smaller kids.”

Medicine Pocket raises a hand without looking up. “If the label says ‘non-toxic,’ I still want the batch number. Bring me the pot; I will sniff it and threaten it until it cooperates.”

Ezra grins and salutes. “Science.”

“Science,” Tooth Fairy echoes, dusting someone for good behavior.

The room, improbably, coheres: talk eddies into competence; glitter obeys quotas; ley-lines drone in tune; snakes settle into bracelets; pumpkins dry; children giggle; adults remember how to build without burning down. Medicine Pocket paints the last ridge, ties the last knot, and for a full count of ten does not think of Oliver Fog at all.

Then, of course, Fog Boy laughs at something near the hearth, and the sound sparks a muscle twitch Medicine Pocket would like to see ethically retired. They set the pumpkin on the rack, gently (otherwise their effort will be for naught), wipe their hands, and lean into the platform like a Beagle into a starting block.

“Starlight?” X says quietly, close enough now that only Vila and Windsong hear the name.

“Mm?”

“Want to test the lantern in the garden?” He holds out a length of cord like an invitation and, under it, something that looks mincingly like a bid: Meet me outside. Field test. Also, I miss you. — Your constant

Medicine Pocket should say no on integrity. They grunt, “Obviously,” and stand. Hissabeth salutes with two fingers, while Pierre and Alexandre dip in tandem like naval flags. Vila and Windsong exchange a glance that reads as private satisfaction. Then, Regulus, noticing nothing and everything, kicks open the French doors with her boot and shouts, “Field trial!” as if calling a regatta.

They step into the garden’s late afternoon light with the small star-crowned lantern between them, and the laughter of the room follows like a barometer finally dropping into its proper groove.

˚⋆🔬🧪🥽⋆˚

The Lecture Hall is a cavern of concrete rationality, merely trying its best to masquerade as festive. Overhead fixtures squall at a respectable 60 Hz while lengths of crepe paper attempt a sine wave and fall, dutifully, into sagging cosines. Someone has rolled in a pair of chalkboards as ‘ambience’; someone else has taped black construction paper bats to the ventilation grilles, where they flutter like low-budget eigenmodes. Folding tables line the walls, one labeled DECORATIONS (open tubs of paint; sequins under Tooth Fairy’s martial law), one labeled ELECTRICAL (extension cords knotted like bad topology), one ambitiously titled CATERING PLAN where Druvis III is drafting a menu as if composing a spell, while Sotheby annotates with flourishes and Lilya writes “punch (lethal)” and then, under Matilda’s pointed stare, adds “(figuratively).”

It’s a busy blur—sonic, thermal, logistical—but Medicine Pocket’s head keeps collimating to a single bright source: the afterimage of Butterfly’s smile in Vertin’s garden an hour ago. A private replay, frame by frame, as if their optic nerve cached it in lossless glory.

Montage, involuntary: Ezra in a child-sized steward’s jacket, solemnly officiating a lantern trial while Avgust, face painted as a sleepy bolide, declares every result “nominal”; Balloon Party bouncing on her heels until Sonetto (soft voice, soldier’s spine) ties a ribbon to her wrist so the bouncing doesn’t translate into a suborbital launch. Vertin, hat brim shadowing her eyes, clapping once, precise, and queenly, when the ley-hushed yarn refuses to resonate and the little star-crowned pumpkin settles into its pendulum with satisfying damping. Windsong marking out invisible lines with two fingers and a murmur, adjusting field configuration like a maestro tuning a hall. Vila, giggling fubsy, dabbing a smudge of cadmium from Windsong’s cheek with the pad of a thumb; Medicine Pocket feigning ignorance of the intimacy but absolutely noticing. And X—Butterfly—running the grass in long, easy strides, lamp in hand, looking back with that look that landed somewhere just behind Medicine Pocket’s ribs and set up residence.

After the trial, the folded scrap passed palm to palm, against a ceramic cup, and twice as warm. That I miss you, and Your constant.

The words have been undulating in Medicine Pocket’s pocket like a low-carbon charm ever since. Constant. They taste it again: the notion that someone could be a fixed term in an equation that had, until now, been nothing but determinants, noise, and bite marks.

They are supposed to be supervising streamers. They are, instead, standing at the end of a ladder pretending to mind ladder safety while their mind sprints through definitions. Relationship. The morning’s derisible research sifts through like a carousel of typecasts. Lab partners, co-authors, entangled, matched samples, control & experimental. All twee. All approximations. The note burns through the approximations and leaves something hot and astonishing behind.

Constant… cons…tant.

Their eyes, traitors with excellent triangulation, find X across the hall with frightening ease. He’s by the A/V cabinet with Regulus and Mr. APPLe, talking microphone impedance and feedback kinks. And, of course, Fog Boy is there, posture artfully laid-back, umbrella wand tucked against his shoulder, offering some comment that makes X’s mouth tilt. The tilt is small. It is also intolerable.

Medicine Pocket hands the ladder to Lilya (“If it falls, I am not catching it; I am simply observing gravity”), shoulders through a flock of paper ghosts, bumps 37 gently out of a pile of streamers (“No, you cannot factor ‘boo’ into primes on crepe paper unless you also sweep”), and beelines.

“X—” they call, already within his event horizon.

“Oh, hey, Sta—” he begins, eyes brightening.

“Come with me for a second, will you?” Medicine Pocket doesn’t wait for consensus. They snag his wrist (glove to glove) and wheel him out of the cluster with the economy of a seasoned sward extraction. Regulus raises both brows, then, grinning, distracts Fog Boy with an urgent question about whether murk contraptions void fire codes. Mr. APPLe emits a gentlemanly hum that somehow reads as: carry on.

They clear the Lecture Hall and its decibel budget, slip into an auxiliary corridor where the walls echo in a sensible, empty way. Storage door on the left, fire map on the right, fluorescent buzz overhead. They stop when the world narrows to X’s face and the small stretch of space Medicine Pocket can control.

“You,” Medicine Pocket says, because the language centers have been temporarily replaced by a bellows.

“Y—yeah? Me?” X says, breath a little ragged from the pace, eyes trying to read the phase of this experiment.

“You are my boyfriend, aren’t you?”

Silence, the good kind—a vacuum before ignition.

X’s expression goes soft in the specific way that detonates Medicine Pocket’s composure. He blinks once, smile widening without irony. “Yes—”

They don’t let him finish. They rise on the balls of their boots and kiss him, hard enough to flatten doubt, careful enough not to bruise anything that matters. It’s physics first: contact, pressure, a clean seal; then chemistry, rapid and familiar now, the mouth’s remembered grammar clicking into place. X meets them with equal bearing—response immediate, generous, secure. His arms loop their waist with an inventor’s confidence, not possessive so much as fortifying—like he’s bracing a beloved gadgetry through a brief harmonic.

Beloved.

Heat ladders up Medicine Pocket’s spine; the kiss adjusts, deepens, finds that slow cadence they have somehow already formulated together. X’s hand maps the small of their back, notated in touch; their fingers climb his collar, thumb finding the tendon of his neck like a favorite citation. When he tilts his head, the fraction that opens him, they answer with a subdued sound they would deny under oath.

They break only when oxygen insists, foreheads resting together in a messy equipoise. Two bodies at steady-state with elevated heart rate, pupils dilated to the very brink of scandal.

“Okay,” X rasps, voice low, smile audible. “That was… a yes.”

Medicine Pocket huffs, which is laughter’s feral cousin. “Classify it,” they murmur, nipping at the corner of his mouth because restraint is a sometime thing. “Yes. Affirmative. Cloneable.”

“Peer-reviewed,” he rumbles, delighted, and steals another quick kiss because he can.

They lean back an inch and take him in properly, the slightly shorter boy: hair a little ruffled from the rush, cheeks pinked, eyes sparkling and unguarded. Butterfly, incandescent under very bad lighting. The urge to bite the stress ball, or anything, dissolves into an urge to press their grin against his again and again until the hallway complains.

Somehow they don’t. They keep their scientist voice, or something like it. “Protocol,” they murmur, breath better behaved now. “Operational definition. Boyfriends.”

X tries it on like a lab coat that already fits. “Boyfriends,” he echoes, soft and certain. Then, because he is the worst and the best, he adds, “Co-authors, constants of one another, matched samples… boyfriends.”

Medicine Pocket swallows; the word alights in their chest and builds a room. They nod once, solemn as a contract. “Good. Now I can kiss you in public and claim it’s compliance.”

“Compliance is very important,” he agrees, eyes dancing. A beat. “Starlight?”

“Hm.”

“Can I hold your hand back in there? While we hang streamers? Purely to balance the ladder?”

They should say something scathing. They say, “Obviously,” and hook two fingers through his like a secret handshake.

They turn together, respiration settling, and start back down the corridor. The Lecture Hall noise rises, a friendly roar. Twenty steps from the door, Medicine Pocket stops again, pivots, and drags him in by the lapel for one more kiss—quicker, cockier, one that promises future crimes.

“Data point,” they say against his mouth. “I miss you faster at close range.”

He laughs, helpless and happy. “Catastrophic proximity effect,” he says, and tucks the note from earlier—Your constant—deeper into his pocket like he’s sheathing a blade.

When they reenter, the hall clocks nothing and everything. Mesmer Jr., who knows far too much, lifts a brow and looks at their joined hands; John Titor issues a flat “4F4B” that does not require translation; Regulus whoops once in a register that makes Tooth Fairy dock her a glitter ration. Mr. APPLe inclines with courtly approval. Vertin’s mouth tilts—fractional, unreadable—and Sonetto, beside her, blushes for no declared reason. 37 waves a streamer while reciting Fibonacci; Eagle salutes with a construction-paper badge; Windsong and Vila share a glance like a quiet chord.

Oliver Fog watches, face arranged in that adroit poise of a man who can read weather and act like it’s climate. Perhaps he says something. Medicine Pocket does not dedicate any CPU cycles to parsing it.

X squeezes their hand—a tiddly, firm pulse—and Medicine Pocket squeezes back, a closed loop. Then, because the world still wants a party, they go hang the rest of the bats, alter the fog machine (to legal limits, regrettably), re-tension the streamer waves, and, every so often, steal a kiss masked as a field adjustment.

Operational definition established; experiment ongoing; results promising.

˚⋆🔬🧪🥽⋆˚

They end up on the mezzanine rail after some time, where Laplace opens like a cutaway diagram: floors stacked in tidy strata, carts clicking along guide-tracks, white coats migrating in flocks under the sodium smolder. Below, the Lecture Hall hums with almost-done prep; above, ductwork sings its low metallic lullaby. Medicine Pocket perches hip-to-rail, boots hooked on a crossbar, hands busy—twisting the corner of the streamer they ‘borrowed’ into a tight curlicue and then untwisting it again because stimulus control is a myth.

X sits shoulder-close, knees nearly touching, looking down through the atrium like a stargazer at a city map. His fingers rest on the rail; Medicine Pocket’s glove keeps almost finding them, and then counterfeiting it didn’t. Their pulse is still a little ridiculous from the hallway kiss and their newly blazoned status, service line elevated, hubbub floor happily decrepit.

“So,” X starts, intonation pitched to the mezzanine’s private acoustics. “Budget Buster. I knew it was you.”

Medicine Pocket blinks. “Knew what was me?”

“On LSCC,” he says, grin trying to hide but to no avail. “You were the one I was messaging last week.”

They squint, replaying. Forum header, black-on-slate. Budget Buster (beagle icon) terrorizing procurement threads. Next-Gen Gadget Developer (X’s stupid, handsome face), being dangerously cordial. They sniff. “So when you asked Budget Buster out for coffee, you thought you were asking me?”

“I did ask you,” he says, unapologetically pleased. “Beagle icon, and your handle is… well… fairly diagnostic. No offense.”

Medicine Pocket snorts. “Why would the truth offend me? I like busting budgets. I adore when experiments get fed like wolves. Speaking of feeding wolves—I should harass Bucket Head again. We need funds for the ley-line shunt, the fungal terrarium expansion, a field trip, ideally somewhere that lets me run. Open terrain! Preferably with a frisbee. Ohhh. Preferably with—”

“You’re so beautiful,” X says.

The sentence slams like a disinfected tool drop: halt, recalibrate. Medicine Pocket’s mouth stays open exactly one unflattering beat before their brain reboots. “Wait, what?”

“You are.” He’s not joking. He’s looking straight at them—heterochromia like two carefully tuned filters, both wide open. “I just… love listening to you talk. And watching your mouth move when you do.”

“Oh,” Medicine Pocket lets out, which is not a word so much as a small exhalation that forgot to be sharp. Heat climbs their neck. They want to bite the streamer.

X goes instantly scarlet, as if his own sentence sneaked up on him. “Sorry—was that—creepy? I’m sorry! I meant—uh—beautiful in the strictly subjective observer-effect sense and also—no—objectively—well, not objectively, that’s not how aesthetics—”

“Stop,” Medicine Pocket says, and it comes out gentle, to their horror. “Apology declined. Data accepted.” A beat. “Also, creepiness would require intention to unsettle. You are constitutionally incapable.”

He relaxes, the blush transmuting from alarm to warmth. “Good,” he says, breath leaving on a quiet laugh. “Because you short-circuit my Broca’s area on a regular basis.”

“That’s just because I’m efficient,” they reason, elated despite themselves. They twist the streamer again. “Anyway, if we’re declaring things: you smell like coffee, vanilla, lab soap, and a problem set I want to solve with my face.”

X’s laugh breaks free, bright enough to make a pair of interns on the ground floor look up, confused by gravity’s new sound. “Starlight,” he says, helpless and happy.

“Mm?”

“Tell me your favorites again,” he says. “I’m caching them. Properly. Redundancy across three systems.”

They tick them off, because lists calm the animal. “Color: purple. Food: pizza if I’m feral, rare steak if I’m civilized, anything Ezra bribes me with if I’m tired. Snack: ice cream. Texture: cold glassware. Sound: centrifuge at 10k when it stops rattling like a trash god. Place: the exact ten meters between our labs when it’s 3 a.m. and illegal to be that awake. You?”

“Color: black, then that exact gold your eyes do when you’re about to be insufferable.” He taps a finger once on the rail. “Food: noodles that come in bowls big enough to be irresponsible. Snack: coffee plus whatever you didn’t finish. Texture: your hair when the shears are pretending to be a pin. Sound: your laugh when you try not to let it happen.”

Medicine Pocket pretends to examine the atrium so he won’t see the smile they cannot not do. “Ridiculous Alphabet boy,” they mutter, which is a confession in their dialect.

X nudges their knee with his. “Budget Buster.”

“What.”

“When you replied to me on LSCC with a graph of ‘collaboration intensity vs. caffeine availability’ and labeled the steep region ‘danger zone,’ were you flirting?”

“I was modeling,” they say, prim. “Robustly. Any romance readouts were emergent properties.”

“Emergent,” he echoes, savoring it. “Right. Because then you logged off.”

“I logged off because some Next-Gen Gadget Developer was offering to ‘pilot test a bonded-pair protocol’ with anyone who could meet him at thirteen hundred.”

X cringes just enough to be adorable. “In my defense, I thought you’d recognize it and make fun of me in person.”

“I did recognize it,” they say. “I made fun of you in my head. It was excellent.”

He grins sideways. “Do it now.”

“Later,” they say. “When you’ve told me what you plan to wear to this stupid Halloween event.”

His eyes widen in mock solemnity. “A lab coat.”

“Coward.”

“Okay, but—hear me out—add a pair of cardboard wings and I can be a lepidopterist’s worst nightmare.”

“‘Butterfly’ is already taken,” they say, dry. “You can be… a Bunsen burner.”

“That’s just a tie with orange paper flames.”

“Exactly.” They poke his sleeve. “Then I can be an oxygen tank and people will understand combustion.”

“Or,” he says, lowering his voice like a conspirator, “you could be the catalyst.”

Their mouth does something treacherous. “I am already the catalyst.”

“True,” he says. “Also, the rate-limiting step.”

“Also true,” they concede, smug. “And you’re the constant. So, as your constant, I require you to attend the stupid event.”

“I already said yes,” he chirps.

“Say it again,” they insist, because they like the sound.

“I’m going,” he says, dutiful and delighted. “With you.”

“Correct,” they say. “We will arrive. We will loiter near the snacks. We will glare at mist machines operated by idiots.”

“We will rescue children from glitter,” he adds.

“And from Regulus’ punch,” they add. “And from your ‘bonded-pair protocol’ in public threads.”

He laughs again, softer. The mezzanine breathes around them, air handling a steady whisper, the Foundation’s blood pressure hissing along its veins. Below, The Timekeeper crosses the floor like a chroniker while Sonetto trails one step behind, coming up short not to look at her. Blonney hands Jessica a string of paper stars, causing Jessica to beam like she invented the night. Mr. APPLe instructs a small phalanx of interns on proper bow-tying technique. Windsong leans down to hear Vila and doesn’t lean back up for a while.

Medicine Pocket drops their head to the side until it rests, just for a second, against X’s shoulder. It is not their usual posture. It fits anyway.

“Budget Buster,” he murmurs, almost into their hair. “Thanks for… not logging off right now.”

“Next-Gen Gadget Menace,” they murmur back, tasting the new flavor of ownership. “Thanks for being statistically impossible.”

He slides his hand along the rail until it finds theirs and closes, easy as a clamp finding a lab stand. From this height, the Foundation looks almost tender—machinery and bodies, noise and will, all angling toward tomorrow.

“Come on,” X says after a minute, giving their fingers the slightest squeeze. “Catalyst, constant, co-whatever—we should help, or Lucy will deploy charts.”

“Threat accepted,” Medicine Pocket says, hopping down from the rail in one neat transfer of potential to kinetic. They pocket the streamer remnant like a trophy, turn, and offer a gloved hand.

X takes it. They descend the stairs side by side, already arguing about whether bats should align to the ventilation vector (they should) and whether pizza qualifies as a costume (it does not, unless one becomes pizza at the molecular level). They will hang lights, tape pumpkins, fine-tune haze to ‘barely legal,’ and when someone asks—blunt as gravity—if they’re coming to the party, they will say yes at the same time and not look at each other. Much.

Stupid Halloween event. Alright then. They’ll show up. They’ll do science to the snacks, ignore the cloud, and, when the music misbehaves, they’ll fix the signal chain and kiss backstage like professionals who finally named the thing they were already doing.

[xpocketeer]

VIII. Pet-Name Experiments and Starlight at Floor G

X lies on his side in the obfuscated hush of Laplace’s sleeping quarters, the industrial HVAC exhaling an even white-noise that makes the bunks feel like stacked incubators. A night-light over the door throws a diluted amber wedge across the room; dust motes drift like slow ions. Medicine Pocket is a breath away on the narrow lower bunk they’d half-claimed together, their shoulder bumping his with every small shift—annoyed at the lack of space and, paradoxically, unwilling to surrender even a centimeter of it. Territory, X thinks, and the thought makes something sweet and perilous expand behind his ribs.

They just kissed again (third contact in the logbook if he’s counting, which he is), and his mouth still remembers the exact boundary conditions of theirs: heat transfer, pressure gradient, that impossible fit that makes the rest of the universe laboriously blur. The fire-exit concrete was cold; their hands were not. He can still feel the way Medpoc’s fingers bracketed his jaw like a careful clamp, not tentative, not apologetic—purely certain. Certainty has a taste, apparently. It tastes like coffee and antiseptic and the feeblest trace of mint.

“Boyfriends,” he says into the low light, voice pitched to the space between them. “Or girlfriends. That’s what it’s called.”

“Huh?” Medicine Pocket’s answer is lazy, but he hears the alertness underneath, the live wire in their tone. “I am neither and either, so what are we?”

“…Uh.” He squints at the ceiling, at the underside of the top bunk with its historical collection of carved initials. “Girl-boyfriends?”

A fragile beat, then Medpoc huffs, then cackles, and the laugh hits full amplitude. They laugh so hard the mattress springs protest and the bunk frame rattles like a poorly damped torsion pendulum. For a precarious second, he thinks they will actually tumble off the edge and take him with them; he sets a steadying palm to their hip and the laughter doubles, dazzling and helpless. Territorial pup, his brain supplies, fond and stunned.

“Girl-boyfriends,” they wheeze, wiping at one eye with the heel of a hand. “Put that in a proposal to the Ethics Committee, Alphabet Boy.”

He grins, breathless. “I could do a literature review.”

“No doubt,” they snort, then shift onto their back, forearm draped over their eyes, dramatic as a silent film star. “Okay, you know what? We should research what we should address each other as. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he echoes, and files the promise like a flagged chameleonic in a neatly labeled folder: Relationship Nomenclature, v0.1.

“For now I’m a bit tired,” they add, and the bravado loosens into something ordinary and disarming. “Took care of Ezra and his new friend. Got busy and all that.”

“Ah.” He pictures Ezra’s neat gloves, his careful hands, the way Medpoc softens around the boy without admitting it. “All right then.”

Quiet unfurls, magnanimous and companionable. The top bunk presses a shadowed ceiling into proximity, and the industrial linen smells a little of detergent and lab air. Somewhere three beds down, a technician snores in short, repeatable bursts, like a metronome. X laces his fingers over his stomach to keep them from wandering, then gives up, rolls toward Medpoc on a thought—and startles because they roll at the same time. They end up face-to-face at scandalous, perfect range.

They’re so close he can read the dreary-light topography of Medicine Pocket’s features… The elegant negative space under the orbital ridge, the small bite mark on their lower lip that is very probably his fault, the highlight that climbs the bridge of their nose like a faint aurora. He’s noticed their beauty since before he knew their voice—back when “Medicine Pocket” was a rumor carried by air vents, a walking hypothesis swaddled in lab gossip. He’d assumed the reality would be more prosaic, that rumors always are. He was wrong. The reality is a person who awakens the exact same cognitive itch he gets from elegant machines: This works and I want to know why, and also I want to keep it running forever.

His gaze dips, treacherous, to their mouth. He means to be patient, to be a responsible scientist about the whole thing—document, replicate, peer review—but his body lists an urgent motion to… to proceed. He’s moving an inch closer when Medpoc beats him to it, fingers sliding into the hair behind his ear with almost irritable competence, palm curving his nape as if to say hold still, you’re mine, and then comes—the contact.

This kiss is different in geometry and in signal. Less startled spark, more sustained waveform. They part his lips with an intended curiosity that makes his thoughts blank to a clean slate; his hand finds their shoulder, then the narrow of their waist, regulating pressure like a careful technician. Heat pools under his thorax and then lower, lower… a warm, baffling ache that is 50% chemistry and 50% unnamed variable. He doesn’t have language for all of it yet, and perhaps he’ll build that later. For now, there is only the soft slide of wet tongue, hot puffs of breath, the small, involuntary sound one of them makes—oh, it was him, embarrassing—and the sense that he is being either short-circuited or completed, and maybe those are synonyms.

He breaks first, not because he wants to but because the physics of breathing remains stubborn. He draws in air like a man surfacing. Medicine Pocket’s pupils look blown in the night-light, their usual gold gone honey-dark. The expression they’re wearing is not the one they show colleagues, which makes X’s chest feel weirdly protective and wrecked at once. Fu—ck.

“M-Medpoc?” he tries, and then fails to append any useful noun. His vocabulary, usually a tidy drawer of labeled parts, is currently the state of a floor after an enthusiastic, troublesome experiment.

“Hm?” They sound… pleased and a bit hoarse. Their thumb has found a back-of-neck place that sends a diffident shiver down his spine every time it moves.

He wants to ask a dozen things—What are we now, really? Do I get to touch you like this tomorrow? Can I tell Mesmer we’re peer-reviewed?—but his body submits a different, hotter query that he is not prepared to voice. Awareness gathers bargain-basement, insistent. He drags in a steadying breath and stares eminently clearly at the curtain seam above their heads, willing the rest of him to behave.

“Sleepy?” Medpoc asks instead, like a mercy.

He blinks, grateful and mortified and fond. “Yes. Sleepy.” He is not, but he is also awfully obviously in need of a cooler head, and he suspects they know it. Their mouth tilts—smirk, kindness in costume.

“Same here.” They yawn, a paltry canine flash of teeth they would deny if confronted, surely. “Let’s sleep then. We have some very important research to conduct tomorrow anyway.”

He swallows a grin. “Right. Goodnight, Medpoc.”

“Night, X.”

They alight. He listens to the way their breathing decelerates, the way their body relaxes by significant increments, each muscle group off-lining in turn like a tidy lab shutdown. He keeps a respectful handspan between them and then cheats it smaller, letting his knuckles rest against the curve of their forearm. They do not move away. The HVAC whirr deepens; the ticker-snores two bunks down slip into phase with the slow pulse he can feel in his own wrist.

He gawks at the underside of the top bunk and thinks, with the baffled clarity of a man who has wandered into something precious and real, that he wants to be allowed this—kisses at fire-exits, coffees conjured between experiments, the sudden way Medicine Pocket’s scowl slackens when he says their name. He wishes for a label not because labels cage things… but because they uphold them, like a well-chosen bracket makes a contraption safe to run hands through. He wants permission, and also he wants to give it: touch me, push me, tell me when to stop, tell me when to try again.

Well, maybe the girlfriend-boyfriend thing is not the only experiment he needs to design. There’s something else, urgent and tender, that wants a protocol, safety rails, a glossary.

Tomorrow, he promises the ceiling, the night-light, the sleeping tyrant beside him. We’ll write it together. In the meantime, he lets his eyes close, inhales their antiseptic-mint-coffee scent, and lets the cozy machinery of Laplace measure out a long, clean interval of rest.

⋆. ⌬ ˚ ⚛ 🧪 𒉭 ⋆

X wakes to the ductile hydraulics sigh of the dormitory orifices and the gentler sound of fabric purring over fabric. Focus boots up in stages. Ambient ventilation at 48 Hz, distant clack of someone’s metal kit box, detergent-clean linen, and—three feet away—the pinpoint rustle of Medicine Pocket shrugging into their lab coat.

His eyes are gummy with sleep; the world has a bloom filter and darker vignette until he blinks hard. Medpoc’s hair is down (rare, gravity-loosed to mid-back) and he watches, stunned and silent, as they gather it by feel into that practiced chaos-knot, twist-twist, wedge, then slide the infamous surgical shears through like a hairpin forged by a mischievous god. The gesture is so faultless it might as well be a mechanical subroutine: initialize coil, set tension, insert blade, confirm stability. The scissors glint in the dorm’s pale dawn striplight. The whole operation lasts six seconds and blows up in X’s chest like a bijou, covert supernova.

They don’t turn until the very end. Then, without looking, Medpoc tilts their chin just so, winks, and X realizes his pretending-to-still-be-asleep act was never a secret. He becomes aware of his own state: hair an unphysically disordered vector field, a ribbon of drool cooling along his cheekbone, sleep-shirt skewed like a misaligned gasket. Heat spikes up his face, naturally. Happens a lot around Medicine Pocket.

“Well?” they quip, breezy menace. “Good morning to you. Get up. We have an assignment to do.”

He is vertical before the sentence finishes. Obedience is not his usual operating mode; with them, it is reflex. He scrubs his cheek with the back of his wrist, attempts a finger-comb pass through his own mop (results: acceptable under field conditions), shrugs into his coat, tugs gloves from the nightstand drawer the dorm provides, and buttons on autopilot. There is an unusual buoyancy in his bones. It is equal parts post-kiss afterglow and the dangerous pleasure of proximity-as-default.

They ghost down the aisle of bunks together, careful not to kick an abandoned duffel. It feels illicit, ridiculous, like two grad students sneaking out of a clean room with pilfered wafers. Medpoc pushes the dorm door with their shoulder, X palms it closed, and they are nearly clear of the corridor when the trap springs.

“Oh. Look what we have here,” Mesmer Jr. drawls from the junction, leaning like punctuation against the vending alcove. Her curls are an early-morning halo; her eyebrow is a barometer spiking toward storm. “Researchers Medicine Pocket and X—both coming from the… sleeping quarters?”

X inhales. This is fine. He can do conflict resolution before caffeine. He opens his mouth to issue a bland nothing of a greeting—Good morning, Ms. Mesmer, we were just—when a second head pops into the frame at shoulder height, big blue eyes planet-round.

“Hi,” 37 announces to the hallway at large, high-bright as a bell. “You’re late for nine o’clock but early for nine o’clock if you round to the nearest prime. Thirty-seven is prime.” She beams as if she invented it.

“See?” Mesmer flicks two fingers. “Even the math gremlin agrees. Chronology is suspicious.”

A third presence skirts into the cluster with the square-shouldered neatness of a parade step. Short brown bob, green eyes clear as enamel, uniform pressed within an inch of its life. Eagle, one of the junior arcanists X and Mesmer Jr. helped settle last week. Merit badges line her sash with punctilious symmetry; her boots are shined to an inspection-grade gloss. She salutes on instinct, then seems to remember this isn’t a drill and lowers her hand, cheeks going soft pink.

“Morning,” she says, voice pitched to confident but landing on earnest. “Hooah!”

Medicine Pocket goes very still at Mesmer’s tone. He can feel the static rise in them through the air, like charge building on a Van de Graaff. Their eyes narrow to a notched aperture. Territoriality radiates off them in disciplined waves: do not touch, do not prod, do not hypothesize. X slides a wee step forward, a clement block in front of a live wire.

“Good morning,” he says mildly, as if the four of them did not just catch him and Medpoc exiting a bunk bay like two teenagers who forgot what doors are for. “We were heading to an assignment. Madam Lucy pinged us.” Technically true; Lucy pings everyone all the time. He is banking on the omnipresent request field as social Teflon.

“Mm.” Mesmer’s gaze slouches over them both, then takes a slow, lazy stroll down to the dorm door behind. “Together?” She makes the word long enough to hang laundry on.

“Together,” Medpoc repeats, but theirs comes out like a diagnostic beep that doubles as a warning tone. “Is there a problem, Mesmer, or are you just conducting hallway anthropology before breakfast?”

“Just gathering field notes,” Mesmer croons. “You know—patterns, anomalies, two researchers emerging in tandem from a space designed for—how do we say this?—horizontal rest.”

X clears his throat. “Horizontal rest is a misleading term,” he offers, straight-faced. “The bunks are at a standard 87.5 centimeters height; many practitioners nap at a 30-degree incline to reduce reflux. Orientation is variable.”

37 nods emphatically. “Orientation is variable,” she echoes, delighted, as if he has handed her a lemon drop of pure truth. “Also, two is a very small sample size. If you had ten people leaving two by two, the permutations would be—” She stops, going inward to calculate. “—ninety. Or forty-five, depending on whether order matters.”

“Order rarely matters around here,” Mesmer says, tilting her head toward him, “but narrative does. Which is why I’d love to hear yours.”

Medicine Pocket bares a fast flash of teeth—technically a smile, biologically a don’t. “My narrative is that you are blocking egress, and I have to go put needles in things.” They shift, just enough that their elbow brushes X’s sleeve, a contact that reads as casual to everyone else and to him like a tiny flag staked: mine.

Mesmer clocks it; he sees the spark behind her eyes. He also sees her decide not to press—yet. She darts her gaze to Eagle. “Private, you had something?”

Eagle rocks on her heels, more nervous than her salute suggested. “Um. I just wanted to ask if anyone’s seen Baby Blue.” The name lands in the air like a thrown marble. Round, shiny, a little out of place, and somehow exactly right. “She said she’d meet me after roll call yesterday, but I think she wandered. She does that. Like Alice in Wonderland,” Eagle adds, earnestness overflowing. “Except with stranger desserts.”

X softens. “I haven’t seen her today,” he tells her, and means it. Baby Blue’s sense of direction is quantum: any corridor might be a rabbit hole. “But Ezra’s in early, and he knows all the hidey-holes. We’ll check the greenhouse tunnels after our brief.”

“Thank you,” Eagle says, relief uncurling her shoulders. “She gets distracted by reflective surfaces. And clouds. And the idea of clouds.”

“Don’t we all,” Mesmer mutters.

“Clouds are water in suspended microdroplets,” 37 supplies helpfully, then adds, “and if you climb high enough, you can see the curvature—unless you can’t. Baby Blue says the sky is flat and the corners are soft, which is incorrect but poetically interesting.”

Medicine Pocket exhales through their nose, irritation and fondness in a fifty-fifty mix. “We will find your whimsical friend,” they tell Eagle, and the tone is brusque, but the promise is iron. “Ezra’s fungus box is bait enough.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Eagle says, then blinks, course-corrects. “Uh—sir. Uh—Researcher.”

“Dog,” Medpoc supplies dryly, and moves on before anyone can make it a thing.

Mesmer slides a look at X as Medpoc steps past. It is not unkind, not really, but it is the genre that holds a mirror. “Assignment, huh?”

“Assignment,” he confirms, holding her gaze. He includes, because he knows her, “And I’ll make sure you get the notes for Artificial Somnambulism therapy. New materials batch from aerospace; Hissabeth’s composites have an energy-damping profile that might help with your headset migraine issue.”

Her mouth twitches. “You’re still a good boy,” she commends, partly mocking, the least bit pleased.

“Boyfriend,” 37 says in the same tone people use for “eureka,” purely because the syllables collided behind her teeth and wanted out. “Girl-boyfriend? Alphabet variable.”

X coughs into his sleeve, heat knifing up his neck. Mesmer’s grin goes wide, vulpine. Medicine Pocket stops dead, spins around, and levels 37 with a look that would sterilize a countertop. “No more words out of you unless they are differential equations.”

37 beams, claps. “d/dx of arcsin x is one over square root of one minus x squared,” she reports, bouncing on her toes.

Medpoc blinks once, bemused despite themself. “Acceptable.”

Mesmer lets the moment sit, then lifts both palms in a mock-surrender X has seen exactly twice: once when Madam Lucy caught her sleeping in the cryo bay, and once when John Titor proved, with a printer log, that Mesmer Jr. had indeed printed a skull garland on Foundation stationery. “Fine, fine. I’ll let you two geniuses sprint to your vital rendezvous.” Her eyes diminish a micron as they pass him. “Don’t let them bite the Director,” she mutters under her breath.

“I heard that,” Medicine Pocket snaps without turning, and the snap has no teeth in it.

Eagle salutes again, smaller. “Bring Baby Blue,” she says, hopeful, “and I’ll bake you cookies. Scout’s honor.”

“Please do not involve ovens,” Mesmer and X say in unison, then glance at each other, matched smiles, embarrassed and warm.

They shake free at last, the corridor widening like a river around a boulder. Mesmer’s smirk finally quits irradiating their backs as she shepherds 37 and Eagle the opposite way—37 still reciting derivatives under her breath (“d/dx of x³ is 3x², therefore joy scales quadratically”), Eagle mumbling about those cookies that will absolutely require adult supervision. X falls into step beside Medpoc; their pace synchs without negotiation, two transducers settling to the same frequency.

“Assignment,” he utters at last, letting oddity carry the single word.

“Lucy wants a cross-check on Uluru safety protocols,” Medpoc grunts. “Spathodea’s convalescence parameters versus Ezra’s schedule. We’ll harass the Director’s Lab, then kidnap the fungus prince and go inventory the stadium seals.”

“Excellent,” X says—because it is. Work is the language they both speak when everything else threatens to go too bright. He risks a glance: the shears catch the light; the knot is already a little crooked, gravity intent on petty vandalism. He wants (absurdly) to fix it, to dapper the vector field with his hands. He files the impulse under Domestic Variables and lets himself grin.

They hit the elevator. Doors hiss. As the car roars to life, Medpoc’s knuckles brush his—on purpose—and stay there, a quiet closed circuit, until the carriage ticks past two floors. He looks down at their hands, glove to glove, field-rated, chemically resistant, and thinks co-authorship comes in many forms. Some of them kiss back. Some of them snarl at nosy colleagues. Some of them say dog and mean mine.

Ding.

They spill onto their floor, the corridor gleaming with the wonted institutional polish. Routine reasserts itself—labs in opposite directions, agendas splitting like a sample at a beam splitter. They turn to part—

—and X reaches, catches Medpoc’s wrist, and tugs them two harmless centimeters off balance. He leans in, slushy as a fine-tune tap, and kisses their cheek. Leather glove to wrist; warm mouth to warm skin; just long enough to be evidence.

“I’ll see you later,” he whispers, aiming for neutral and landing on fond.

“Yeah. See you, X.” Their mouth quirks, an unguarded smile that feels like getting away with something, and then they’re gone, coat tails cutting the air like punctuation.

The door to Mechanical seals behind him; the lab’s familiar respiration takes over. John Titor is in her perch, mug steaming, display tawny with code. X sets his clipboard down and realizes, with the disorienting clarity of a lens snapping into focus, that he already misses Medicine Pocket. It hits like a benign arrhythmia: exciting, wholesome, impossible to ignore. He catches himself smiling at a wrench.

It’s so absorbing that he doesn’t clock the doughy shift in pressure that precedes the Timekeeper until her hat’s shadow cuts across his bench. Vertin glides in with the inevitability of a stopwatch, and with her comes a woman X’s seen around the Foundation but never properly met: ash-blonde hair scarfed in red, sea-glass eyes, and along her forearms the subtle shimmer of gray-blue scales that pattern like mathematics. Under one arm, she carries a tidy bundle of art supplies—paper, brushes, a neat tin of pigments that smell slightly of salt and gum arabic.

“Researcher X,” Vertin says, precise as always. “We have Miss Vila here. She will be guiding the children in constructing elements for their Halloween costumes.”

X blinks. “Halloween costumes? Pardon?”

“Seasonal morale intervention,” Vertin replies. “Mixed cohort: human and Arcanist. It promotes prosocial bonding and reduces baseline anxiety by approximately eleven percent. You were informed.” A beat. “Perhaps not consciously.”

John Titor doesn’t bother with words; she leans back and sings out a string of hex that somehow still manages to sound smug: “34353420536C656570205468726573686F6C64.”

Heat rushes to X’s ears. He clears his throat. “I—may have had a late night. Field calibration,” he reckons, which is technically true if you define “field” as “Medpoc” and “calibration” as “kissing until the universe snapped to a pleasing resolution.”

Vila’s smile is tidal and kind. “We won’t hold it against you,” she rumbles, voice soft-edged, vowels carrying a submerged lilt. Up close, the scales along her temples catch the lab light like mica; beauty radiates off her with the indifferent ease of a natural law. “I’ve brought materials for papier-mâché, inks, and a safe adhesive I compounded myself—low VOC, skin-friendly. We’ll sketch concepts with the little ones first.”

“Art direction in a research facility,” X punctuates, delighted despite the mortification. “Finally, a problem set I can’t break by overtuning.”

Vertin checks something on an internal schedule only she can see. “Coordination team is as follows,” she recites. “Mesmer Jr.—somnambulism group liaison, since several children’s sleep cycles are anomalous. John Titor—logistics and numeracy activities. Hissabeth—materials for structural costume elements; her composites are light and resilient. Regulus—music and ambient sound; she insists on calling it ‘pirate radio, but wholesome.’ Medicine Pocket—bio-safe effects, paints, and monitoring of allergic response. And you, X—mechanical contraptions for costumes and a portable fog chiller that does not set off the alarms this time.”

(That last clause transports the prestige of history. X nods gravely.)

“Regulus?” he echoes, amused.

“Yes,” Vertin says. “She will also prevent Mr. APPLe from handing out contraband cider.”

John tilts her head, deadpan, and chirps another byte-string that even without translation reads as: I will not confiscate pirate cider; I will merely inventory it.

“We’ll meet in the suitcase after lunch,” Vertin continues. “Manor parlor. The children will choose teams and themes. Please arrive with at least one feasible design sketch each. X, I expect a working prototype by end of day. Medicine Pocket has already promised ‘safe glitter’ the other night, which I am choosing not to interrogate.”

Vila rests her supplies on an empty workstation with the neat efficiency of someone who has set out nets before dawn. “I’ll do a brief with the little ones on silhouettes,” she conveys. “No body shaming, no forced smiles, and costumes that let you run. We’re not staging a diorama; we’re staging agency.”

“Exemplary,” X notes, and means it. He glances at John. “We’ll need to check stock on the small harnesses and micro-fans. If I build a fog chiller in the backpack form factor, we can thread tubing through the seams—”

“—49206C9B65206C69676874207475696E67,” John finishes, which means, and actuate with a thumb valve, already typing.

Vertin’s hat cranes like a nod. “Lobby at thirteen hundred,” she says, then to Vila, “Thank you for volunteering,” and to X, a bracketed look that somehow imparts both authority and a swish of conspirator. “Sleep when you can.”

“Y-yes, Timekeeper,” X answers, acutely aware of the irony.

They’re nearly out the door when he remembers his manners and the children. “Miss Vila,” he calls gently. “Some of the juniors have… histories. Eagle mentioned her friend Baby Blue; she saunters. If you see a girl with flowing ginger hair, talking earnestly to reflective surfaces, please steer her toward us or Ezra.”

Vila’s eyes warm. “Of course,” she agrees. “Children lost in halls find me. It’s a thing water does—collects what’s adrift.”

Vertin and Vila vanish down the corridor, the savor of salt and paper trailing them, and the lab exhales back into its normal pressure.

X stands very still for a few seconds, grinning like an idiot at nothing. The cheek-kiss tingles under his skin. He can still feel the errorless yield of Medpoc’s wrist in his hand, the soft give before muscle remembered to be strong again. He turns to his bench, flips to a blank page, and begins sketching a backpack fogger with inline cooling coils and a quick-release safety. The pencil moves, and his head replays a smile, his chest doing that new, ridiculous constrict-and-bloom.

John slurps her tea. “596F75206C6F6F6B46966572656E746179,” she observes, which he decides to hear as You look different today.

He does. He feels it in the way his ideas click, in the way the lab light seems less anemic, in the way even Mesmer’s eventual teasing can’t dent this silly, steady pressure at the breastbone. The equation is unsightly and money for jam: add Medicine Pocket near criterion, and mercurials he thought he’d optimized suddenly have room to go stranger, and better.

Thirteen hundred can’t come fast enough.

⋆. ⌬ ˚ ⚛ 🧪 𒉭 ⋆

As it turns out, the clock doesn’t have to roll over to thirteen-hundred for Medicine Pocket to show up; when the door whispers open, a gust of pink-cheeked chaos steps through.

“Hi, X!” Medpoc chirps, all grin and motion, hands jammed in lab-coat pockets like they’re stowing contraband photons.

“Medpoc?” he echoes, halfway between hello and hypothesis.

“As promised, here I am. So, how’s about that research we talked about? Didn’t we say we’ll do it?” They bounce once on the heels of their boots; the scissors in their hair sparkle like a dangerous comet.

X stays frozen for approximately five seconds—long enough to appraise, enumerate, and tragically fail to process how beautiful they are when their blood is running a little fast: flushed zygomas, dilated pupils, the tiniest lift at the corner of a mouth that already ruined him once (twice) (thrice). John Titor, never one to tolerate inefficient loops, hip-checks his knee.

“3483877383F676C,” she deadpans around an apple.

X’s brain does the decryption hop. Your bonded pair is here.

Bonded— what. His ears warm; Mesmer Jr. emits a high-quality snicker from somewhere near the centrifuge. “They’ve probably kissed,” she stage-whispers, which is neither rigorous nor incorrect.

Medpoc blinks between the peanut gallery and X, puzzled and patient in the way a Bunsen flame is patient. “So? You good, X? Ignore these weirdos. Let’s just stick to the plan, yeah?”

“Right. Yes. Plan.” He recovers, finally relocating his tongue. “Here—take the chair. We’ll use my terminal.”

“Okay.” They flash fangs. His cardiac rhythm commits a small felony.

Mesmer and John drift away—Mesmer to “alphabetize” pipette tips (she won’t), John to hum hexadecimal lullabies to her IDM—leaving the bench quiet except for the cut-rate bzzt of equipment and the gloopy, molecular tone of Medpoc existing beside him. Heat radiates from their shoulder. Vanilla and antiseptic braid the atmosphere.

Vanilla?

“Did you just have ice cream?” X asks before his prefrontal can file a permit.

“Mhm.” They look smug about it. “My favorite.”

“Really?” He turns, too fast, then slows like a satellite easing into span of control.

“Yep. Why?”

“N—nothing,” he stammers, and it’s the worst lie he’s told all week. “It’s just… nice to finally know something about you that isn’t a performance metric.” He offers a small, helpless smile. “More intimate than… you, you know, defeating entropy on a Tuesday.”

That earns him another grin, and from this range, it’s essentially a controlled burn. He wants to kiss the findings out of it. He does not. Yet.

“Right, so,” they counter, tilting their head. “What’s yours?”

“Mine?”

“Favorite snack.”

“Oh.” He flutters a hand, stalls, deducts. “I’m not even sure. Pizza?”

“Pizza?” Medpoc repeats, tasting the syllables like a reagent. Approving. Teasing.

“Pizza,” he says again, surer now. “And coffee. Definitely coffee.”

“Acceptable,” they decree. “Favorite color is purple. Favorite food is also pizza. Favorite snack is—obviously—ice cream.” A beat. “Also, anything crunchy I can bite.”

“Duly recorded,” he voices, opening a fresh doc and, without thinking, titling it: NOMENCLATURE STUDY: RELATIONSHIP LABELS (ALPHA). He pretends not to notice how his hands are a little shaky on the keys. He pretends not to see how their knee has found his under the desk and apparently intends to stay.

“Methodology?” Medpoc asks, uncapping a pen and dragging his spare notepad into their gravity well.

“Exploratory,” X supplies, fighting a grin. “We’ll iterate terms, assess fit on a five-point Likert, capture qualitative notes, then converge on a label that maximizes clarity and… uh… heart-rate comfort.”

“Robust,” they utter, and their eyes sparkle in a way that makes the word do things. “Commence trial.”

He pulls up a blank field on the terminal. Types the first candidate, reads it aloud, then glances over because reading aloud to Medpoc is already a gratuitous pleasure.

“Lab partners,” he offers. “Classic, deadpan, secretly romantic.”

Medpoc writes in quick, efficient strokes—his name for their penmanship is feral-precise—then murmurs, “Pros: historically accurate. Cons: underpowered. Three out of five.”

“Agreed,” he says, entering 3/5. “Co-authors?”

Their mouth crooks. “Careful, co-author, that’s my beaker.”

He laughs, actually laughs, head tipping back. “Four out of five,” he declares.

“Four,” they echo, jotting. “Next.”

“Co-conspirators.”

“Applicable during supply raids,” they concede. “But implies crimes that are not yet scheduled.” Scribble. “Three.”

“Co-PIs,” he intones, savoring the absurdity. “Co–principal investigators.”

Medpoc does a subtle, delighted bounce that they would deny under oath. “Disgustingly academic. I love it. Four point five when wearing coats. Three point five in pajamas.”

He writes exactly that. “Okay—My Constant / My Variable.” His voice comes out softer; he clears his throat. “We can assign roles. I can be the constant. You—”

“—are the variable,” they finish, eyeing him over the pen like he’s a very interesting petri dish. “On spicy days, we swap.”

His face heats; he enters: CONSTANT (X) / VARIABLE (M). Swappable under acute conditions. “Control & Experimental?”

Medpoc taps the pen against their lower lip; he tries not to stare and fails. “Extremely us,” they pronounce. “But also asks for trouble at committee meetings. Four, with caution.”

“Bonded Pair,” he reads, and the lab feels very small for a second. “Chemistry pun. Low-key tender. Miss John Titor has used it to describe us once.”

Something like a static snow passes over their expression. They peer at his mouth. “Four point eight,” they say quietly. “Pending replication.”

His pulse climbs a tiny staircase. “Entangled. Quantum romance. Spooky action at close range.”

“Five as a threat,” they mumble. “Three point five in emails.”

“Arc-mates,” he tries. “Arcanist twist; feels canon-adjacent.”

“Four. Useful in the field.”

“Field partners?”

“Four,” they agree, already writing before he finishes the word.

“Matched Samples?”

“Nerdy and cute,” they admit. “Three point seven.”

“Coils & Core,” he says, unable to keep from smiling. “Gadget-core; X equals coils, Medpoc equals core—unless we flip.”

“Four when building. Two when sleeping,” they decide, jotting again. “Don’t snore wire.”

He grins into his sleeve. The cursor blinks patiently. Their knees remain charitably, consciously touching; an entire nervous system’s worth of receptors reports in with helpful noise. Somewhere behind them, discreet as dust, Mesmer pads close enough to read the screen, then wisely retreats. John Titor hovers, parses, whispers “436F6E7374616E74733A20352F35” like a benediction, and glides away. X and Medpoc do not notice. The bench becomes a little island of concentration, temperate and farcical.

“Try this,” Medpoc says suddenly, and takes the keyboard with the care of someone receiving a volatile sample. They type, slowly, like they know each letter is a lever.

my constant

They don’t say it. They just angle the screen so the words fill both their gazes. The letters are elementary. The meaning is not.

His throat closes in a polite, professional way and then opens again. He leans a centimeter closer, because somehow that helps with reading. “Say it,” he whispers before he can stop himself.

They glance at the open doorway, at the physics of an empty hall, at nothing, at him. Then—in a voice that would never pass a decibel audit—they try it on.

“My constant.”

The phrase lands in him like a neat injection: click, bloom, ache. The lab’s hum shifts register; the fluorescent ballast suddenly sounds like applause. His answering breath is too loud. He deserves it.

He swallows, nods, and returns it because experiments demand replication. “My constant.” The syllables feel ridiculous and perfect, like a formula that shouldn’t balance but does.

Medpoc’s cheeks pink in the charmingly unscientific way that makes X’s spreadsheets go blurry. They jot one more line on the notepad—Final selection (provisional): My Constant / My Constant—then underline it twice, the second line going a little crooked because their hand is not as steady as their reputation.

“Controls?” they manage, pretending this is about protocol and not about the new gravitational field that has formed between their chairs.

“Uh—boundary conditions,” he remarks, blinking back to the screen like a good researcher. “Kissing allowed under lab-safe circumstances, hugging at will, hand-holding during elevator rides, peer review required for… escalations.”

Medpoc snorts. “Pending IRB approval,” they murmur, as though the Institutional Romance Board meets after hours in the break room. Their knee presses a shade harder into his.

He logs the rule set, tags the doc, sets permissions to only them, and—not for the first time—wonders how a terminal can radiate so much heat. “Favorite flavors,” he says, supposing the transition is mundane and not seismic. “Ice cream: vanilla.”

“Correct,” they say, proud to have been correctly observed. “Color: purple.”

“Food: pizza,” he recites, then adds, “and coffee—for me.”

“Noted.” They scribble, then tilt the page toward him. Their penmanship is oddly gorgeous. Angles like latticework, loops like orbital paths. He can’t help himself. “Your handwriting is… beautiful.”

They make a face as if he’s accused them of sentiment. “It’s legible. Beauty is a rounding error.”

“It’s beautiful,” he repeats, because constants should be constants.

They look at him for a second longer than is safe for either of them, then duck their head. “Fine,” they grunt. “It’s acceptable.”

He grins, helpless, and re-reads the words on the screen until they etch somewhere permanent. Behind them, the lab returns to standard noise; in front of them, the future looks like a stack of shared notebooks and a list of labels that embarrass him in a way he finds increasingly addictive.

“Wanna grab something to eat?” he quips, not taking his eyes off them.

“After we file the abstract,” they mumble, not taking their eyes off him.

He documents it. They don’t move away. The cursor rests on a blinking line after My Constant, patient as a heart.

⋆. ⌬ ˚ ⚛ 🧪 𒉭 ⋆

Lunch arrives the way sudden weather does—one blink, the lab is a truncated, contented drone of fans and fluorescence, the next it’s the bright, echoing acoustics of the cafeteria, two trays clinking down onto a table like synchronized apparatus. Medpoc has negotiated their way into a plate that is eighty percent fries and twenty percent something green to mollify Sonetto’s ghostly dietetics; X has achieved a structural equilibrium of sandwich, soup, and a cup of coffee that smells like an old textbook in the sun.

They eat with the greed of organisms that have recently redefined a fluid. Grease shines on Medpoc’s lip; X watches it with the attention one usually reserves for supernovae. Between bites, they trade micro-notes: an idle comparison of starch crispness (“suboptimal but serviceable,” Medpoc rules), the observation that cafeteria spoons refract light like poor man’s spectrometers, a shared miniature eye-roll when Mr. APPLe floats past, declaiming something about the absolutism of decaf. It’s ordinary, and the ordinariness feels like a minor miracle—coexistence at worktop distance, now insulated by agreed-upon nomenclature and a permission structure that legalizes the impulse to brush a crumb from the corner of a mouth.

Halfway through the fries, Medpoc goes still in that way that means a thought has smacked into the back of their skull. “Ah, hell,” they say into their plate, perfectly clear around a mouthful. “We were supposed to meet the Hatted Cuckoo.”

X blinks. Then the calendar in his head cordially pings: Vertin, post-lunch, lobby, suitcase logistics. “Right,” he says, sheepish. “The meeting.”

“Completely forgot,” Medpoc admits, voice dropping into an aggrieved growl. “She cornered me last week about it—‘We’ll convene to discuss interdepartmental support for the Halloween event,’ and all I heard was ‘blah blah blah costume adhesives.’ Whole thing blurred out.”

He should let it go; he doesn’t. Curiosity is a reflex arc. “Why’d you forget?”

They frown at the question like it has insulted their mitochondria, roll a fry between two fingers, and then, with a put-upon exhale, just hand him the truth. “I… was… thinking about you.”

The sentence hits like a tidy voltage step: square wave, clean edges, amplitude high enough to make instruments jump. “Oh,” he breathes, and the “oh” is bigger inside than out. That should be the moment to say something brave. Instead, as if by tacit agreement, they allow the testimony to sit between them, unadapted and gleaming.

They clear their trays with military efficiency (two researchers committing the minimal set of operations required to avoid dish avalanches), and set a course for the lobby. The hallway is noon-bright, traffic in white coats moving with that familiar Laplace velocity: brisk, unpanicked, the speed of minds that wear out shoes. The elevator bank glints like a battery of polished utensils. X hits the button, while Medpoc rocks heel-to-toe as though their boots had springs secreted in the soles.

The doors usher them into a compact, acoustically intimate box. The car smells a little bit of metal, ozone, and the odor of some citrus cleaner. A digital display ticks down floors with clinical indifference.

They stand shoulder to shoulder, an arm’s breadth that is not really an arm’s breadth at all. X watches the number scroll: 12 → 11 → 10. The silence isn’t atmosphere, it’s a cell culture plate: warm, capable of growing new statements if provided a nutrient broth.

“Hey, Butterfly—” Medpoc says, exactly as—

“Starlight—” X tries, at the same time.

They both stop and blink at one another, caught in a copybook destructive interference of syllables.

“What did you just call me?” Medpoc narrows their eyes, not offended, merely intensely curious, which for them is indistinguishable from predatory.

“‘Starlight’?” he repeats, deciding to own it before it evaporates. “Suits you, don’t you agree?”

They tilt their head, scissors flashing. “I guess,” they allow, suspicious of compliments on a general principle. “Just baffling wherever you got that from.”

He shrugs, the honest sort that loosens a spine. “Not even sure. One day I’m happily niggling away in the lab, and the next… when the room’s dark and I look at you, you glow.” He winces at how earnest that sounded the instant it leaves his mouth, then sticks with it because physics hates backpedaling more than people do.

Medpoc stares, the kind of stare that could melt paint if it felt like it. “Huh,” they pronounce finally, endorsing an unorthodox gizmo. “Odd.”

“Possibly,” he concedes, then, lighter: “And what about ‘Butterfly’?”

They deadpan without missing a beat. “Dude, that’s, like, your whole theme.”

He laughs. “Right. Branded from the neck down.”

“From the coat embroidery down,” they correct, but there’s warmth under the razors. “What else you got in that pet-name gun?”

“Oh, endless foolishness,” he rumbles, pretending to consult a mental clipboard. “My constant when I want to cause trouble. Scissors when I want to be insufferable. Starlight when I forget to pretend I’m not sentimental.”

Their mouth twitches. “Scissors get you banned from the break room. ‘My constant’… mm.” They taste the phrase again, in a way that the elevator air had a shelf where such things can rest until needed. The number ticks from 8 to 7. He can feel the car’s cables whisper.

“Perks of constants,” he drones, heart racing at a scientifically irresponsible rate, “include… this.” He turns, palm up—a field-safe glove presented like an oath—and opens his fingers. It’s both a question and a proposed treaty: shall we utilize the hand-holding we added to the standard operating procedure?

Medpoc looks down at his hand as though it’s an unusual but promising device. Then they set their gloved palm into his and curl. Contact closes like a helix, chatter pours across a synapse, something low-voltage and insistent buzzes into place. Their hands fit in that dumb, annoying way that convinces bad poets to waste good paper.

“Data supports,” they utter dryly, but he can hear the smile in it.

He squeezes gently; they squeeze back. The floor numbers don’t so much descend as dissolve.

“Further perks,” he risks, “include the right to demand post-lunch walks, shared umbrellas, and first refusal on jacket borrowing.”

“I don’t borrow,” they sniff, mock-offended. “I seize.”

“Duly amended,” he contends, grinning. “First refusal on jacket seizures.”

They make a sound that is not laughter but that occupies adjacent land. “And if I exercise seizure rights,” they say, gaze sliding sideways, “you’re obligated to call me Starlight in a tone that makes Mesmer gag.”

“Entirely willing,” he says, and discovers he means it so much it’s embarrassing.

The car whirrs through 4 → 3. The silence turns companionable again, shellacked by use. He studies the reflection of their joined hands in the brushed steel panel: two neat shapes, ordinary as ergonomics, outrageous as a theorem that shouldn’t resolve, but here we are. He can feel each pulse—his and theirs—arguing and then agreeing on a shared periodicity.

“So,” Medpoc says, likely idly, “do constants get corridor privileges?”

“Define privileges,” he says, which is how he says yes without spooking himself.

“Elevator kissing,” they reply, biochemically.

He inhales, laughs because the alternative is implosion, and tips his head toward them. “That’s… within scope,” he manages, voice a little thinner than its usual lab setting. “Pending local occupancy constraints.”

“Which are—” they begin.

—answered by the small chime that announces arrival. The car eases; the doors part with the sigh of a well-tuned valve.

And, oh.

Oliver Fog stands in the threshold like a probability you forgot to marginalize out—top hat at a conversational angle, umbrella balanced like a byway, expression courtly scribbled save for the infinitesimal lift at one corner of his mouth that always feels like it knows a joke before you do. He takes in exactly three things in the time it takes a photon to cross the car: joined hands, too-close distance, and the fact that X’s thumb is mid-sweep against Medpoc’s knuckles as if it has independent agency.

The lobby’s light spears around him, washing the elevator in a brighter spectrum. X feels his body do three things at once: flinch, settle, and tighten his grip.

“X,” Oliver says, smooth as a discoid flow. “Medicine Pocket.”

Medpoc’s posture doesn’t change so much as crystallize. Head cocked, smile subtle and toothy, eyes glinting gold and uncompromising. X feels the electricity in their hand increase by a measurable delta; he matches it without needing to think, constant to variable, variable to constant, the lab’s simplest circuit suddenly the most important machine in the building.

The doors, imperturbable gadgets that they are, linger open, the universe pausing on the threshold of the next datum.

[xpocketeer]

the “fell first but slow to realize” x “fell later but fast to realize” trope

xpocket edition: X fell first but slow to realize / Medpoc fell later but fast to realize

[xpocketeer]

sorry if this will pressure you but can you make more fics with xpocket?

I adore the ones you made since it canonically characterizes them and they hold a special place in my heart

if not, that's okay too, do know that I'm thankful you even created them.

have a nice year :)

hello!! hi!!! no need to say sorry, ur message isn't the pressure-inducing type. at all. LMAO. in fact, it made me smile reading it. so, i had a wonderful rest of the year back when u sent this. in 2024, yeah? and now it's 2025 (almost over) - and let me tell u, still going great lol. oh and! as for xpocket: i updated my xpocket science lab co-conspirators / co-authors canon divergent fic~ if u are still into it, hope u read the thing,, take care!

[xpocketeer]

VII. Stress-Ball Ballistics and Fire-Exit Kisses

They kissed.

The memory fizzles behind Medicine Pocket’s eyes with the homage of a high-speed 35mm: the soft press, the electrical return, the ridiculous, exquisite chemistry of it—dopamine spike, noradrenergic flare, tidy oxytocin bolus; a cascade any textbook would gloat to explicate and utterly unfit to survive. So that’s what it feels like to kiss X. No wonder organisms waste energy evolving for this. Brutally efficient selection pressure.

Also—damn it—they said it. Out loud. You’re addictive, Alphabet Boy. Brilliant. Publish in the Journal of Regrettable Declarations.

They grit their teeth, grope for the nearest object, and clamp down. The stress ball—polyurethane foam, mediocre Shore hardness—compresses with a wet squeal, viscoelastic cells collapsing under canine and premolar. Catharsis by hysteresis. Then they fling the soggy sphere.

It arcs. It almost brains Lucy.

The ball thwaps the projection screen and oozes down like a sorry comet. Lucy, mid-briefing at the far end of the makeshift long table (assembled dead center in Laplace’s museum hall), pauses with the unhurried definiteness of a turret. Conversation eddies and then hushes. The fossilized gyroscope in the adjacent glass case seems to judge.

Perfect. Bucket Head has line of sight.

“Researcher Medicine Pocket,” Lucy says, voice velvet over bearings. A vague uptick of her ocular LEDs, that human face—a robot’s raised brow. “We are now demonstrating projectile motion? Shall I retune the agenda from introductions to mechanics?”

“It was a calibration throw,” Medicine Pocket mutters, slouching, arms locked. “Testing drag coefficients.” Foam and regret linger on the tongue.

Across the table: X. Coat spotless, the big embroidered butterfly smug as sin, heterochromia like a prism split. He’s here. And he’s acting like last night didn’t bend spacetime—like nothing changed, like they didn’t melt each other’s frontal lobes in a quiet lab while a kid napped three meters away. He smiles when Lucy speaks. He takes notes. He nods to Mesmer. Business as usual. Meanwhile, Medicine Pocket’s limbic system is attempting interpretive dance inside their ribcage.

Lucy’s mouth tilts. “Noted. Kindly refrain from masticating museum assets.” She lets that land, then (because she can’t help herself), adds: “That includes stress balls, signage, and any future enrichment toys I requisition for you.”

A couple of restrained snickers skitter across the table. Mesmer Jr., for one, doesn’t look up from her folder, but her mouth curves. John Titor emits a low “4C4F4C” like a suppressed barcode laugh. Ulrich’s tank (gold, matte, menacing) tilts by a degree, which for him is a smothered cackle.

Medicine Pocket can feel heat pooling treacherously under the skin (vasodilation: rude). “Proceed, Lucy,” they demand, strangled. “Before I test your drag coefficient.”

Lucy moves on with imperial calm. “As I was saying: Laplace expands.” She gestures; the screen wipes to a clean deck. “Please welcome our new colleagues. Windsong. Ley Lines, Transnistrian origin.” A tall woman with wavy, flaxen hair inclines her head; she looks like she could shoulder a seismograph and a revolution. “Kiperina—astronaut, apprentice to Windsong, Ley-line topology.” The braided blonde at Windsong’s right bounces a little, scope still in her posture. “Hissabeth: Aerospace Engineering, materials emphasis. Pointer: Aerospace Engineering, structures.” Teal hair, crisp notes; yet another blonde, sharper pencil. The pair radiates delta-V.

“Most hail from space,” Lucy adds, “with the honorable exception of Windsong, who hails from geography.”

Urbane applause ripples; Medicine Pocket contributes two hygienic claps. Opposite them, 37 perches with their long seashell-blue hair, iridescent intensity, counting primes on her knuckles without being asked. Ezra, Director of this museum, despite looking like a cherub someone misplaced at a conference, sits with his legs not quite touching the floor, a mycology field guide peeking from his blazer. He gives Medicine Pocket a small, conspiratorial smile. Damn child knows too much.

“Appointments,” Lucy says, iris diaphragm of the projector clicking wider. Names and titles blossom in a serifed parade.

“Researcher Medicine Pocket,” she reads, and turns the warm gun of her gaze. “Head of the Biological Pharmaceuticals Department. Leader, Biological Team. Researcher Level II.”

Something pleased and feral scurries up Medicine Pocket’s spine and sits there, panting. Pride is a confounder, so they scowl. They manage: “Finally.”

“Ulrich—Co-Head, Research Department; Leader, Cryptography.” Tank Guy nods, a ripple of black ink sloshing inside like a decimal moved to just so. “Adler Hofmann—Substitute Director; Co-Head, Research.” Enigma lifts an eyebrow a micron: for him, applause. “Mesmer Jr.—Leader, Artificial Somnambulism Therapy; Researcher Level I; Therapist Level II.” Mesmer makes a lazy V with her fingers. “X—Leader, Mechanical Research Team; Researcher Level II.”

The clap this time is unambiguous. X ducks his head, startled honor bright as magnesium. Medicine Pocket claps three times despite themself and (curse it) X looks over. An ultra-fine, private smile: you okay? The question deposits in Medpoc’s chest like a syringe’s plunger: click, flood. They look away so hard their neck complains.

Lucy lets the noise settle. “Org chart syncs to your devices. Do not chew those either,” she says, almost playful, eyes flicking to Medicine Pocket. That’s the second call-out. Enough to leave teeth marks, not enough to bruise.

Windsong raises a hand, repose as ballast. “Ley-line variance has been destabilizing instruments along the south arcade. We’ll retune the field after mapping. Kiperina will lead a night pass.”

“Map away,” Ulrich drawls, voice filtered and sardonic through hull. “Cryptography would like its entropy back.”

Hissabeth taps a pen against a neat grid. “We’re logging fatigue cycles on airframe mockups for dream-state harnesses. Mesmer, I’ll need load tolerances for your therapy rigs.”

Mesmer’s smile is thin and pleased. “Send me your worst.”

“John,” Lucy says, “compile the integration constraints into hexadecimal for the archive.”

“496E2070726F6772657373,” John intones, deadpan, and resumes disassembling an orange with infallible neatness.

Medicine Pocket clears their throat before Lucy remembers any more ‘behavioral datasets.’ “Biopharm has three billets,” they say, brisk to cover the throb under their sternum. “I want a materials liaison who thinks past tensile strength, a wet-lab tech who doesn’t faint at blood, and a statistician who won’t talk to me about p-values like I’m a hedge fund. If Ley garbage hums my incubators, I’ll throw a centrifuge.”

Windsong’s mouth tips. “I’ll detune your nodes,” she says in a voice like wind over wire. “If the lines sing, we’ll make them whisper.”

Medicine Pocket points two fingers, approval like a click. Potential friend, the primitive brain notes, surprised.

Across the table, 37 has stopped counting and started talking—fast, bright, delighted. “Also thirty-seven isn’t just prime, it’s a hex-cycle sweet spot, did you know the repeating decimal of one over twenty-seven looks like a rotating symmetry if you tilt the paper and—”

“Thank you, 37,” Lucy says, gentle for a machine. “You will terrify our enemies and possibly our board.” 37 beams; Mesmer hides a grin in her teacup.

“Scope,” Lucy resumes. “Hissabeth, Pointer—coordinate with Mechanical on materials for the crawler platforms. X, do not design a device that pours tea unless it also wins a war.”

X turns a tragic shade of pink and presses his lips together to keep a smile prisoned. Medicine Pocket’s chest does something stupid and mammalian. They adopt a face like a closed autoclave and stare at the wood grain until the urge to chew something passes.

“Ezra,” Lucy says, “continue curation. Also, supervise any fungus that Medicine Pocket attempts to domesticate. Or eat. We will minimize spore incidents.”

Ezra sits taller, angelic and indefatigable. “Yes, Madam Lucy!”

A small, bashful hand goes up—this time, Kiperina. “Uh. Question for Head of Biopharm,” she says, reluctantly. “How tolerant are your incubators to micro-g jitter? If our field rigs live in your wing, we should share vibration budgets.”

Medicine Pocket blinks, impressed even with the day. “±0.02 g without phase slip if my staff remembers to lock casters. Which they forget. Often.” They cut a look at Trina, not present and therefore blamed in absentia. “Bring me your plot. We’ll make them play nice.”

“Done,” Windsong says for both of them. Efficient. Good.

Lucy plants metal fingertips on the table, and the museum seems to lean in with her. “Laplace remains a cathedral to rigor. We will aim it into the Storm.” Her gaze lands lightly—fondly?—on Medicine Pocket. “Head of Biological Pharmaceuticals, please also aim future projectiles away from priceless artifacts. The astrolabe predates your bite habit.”

Low, collective laughter. Kind, even. Medicine Pocket bares a disinclined, canine curve of teeth. “Get me something with better rebound,” they say.

“I have already placed a requisition for bite-resistant enrichment devices under Wellness,” Lucy replies, eyes glinting. “Motion carried.”

Regulus (inevitably) claps like a drum. “Bravissima. Now, someone show Space Crew the coffee that doesn’t taste like oxidized despair.”

“After closing remarks,” Lucy says. “Any further questions?”

Ezra’s hand again, earnest. “Does the Head of Biological Pharmaceuticals get a lab assistant?”

Four dozen heads swivel. Medicine Pocket feels the blush approach from a different zip code. “Maybe,” they hedge. “If the assistant can keep up and doesn’t lecture me about gloves.”

X coughs into his fist, smiling down at his notes, pretending to be Switzerland. “Mechanical can loan someone with… exteroception,” he says, then stops himself, face coloring in a way that detonates last night’s reel again in Medicine Pocket’s skull. He recovers: “—protocol.”

“Interdepartmental collaborations anticipated,” Lucy says, satisfied.

“Over my dead centrifuge,” Medicine Pocket mutters, but the room has re-phased into something almost congenial. Less grind, more mesh. They can breathe again.

Lucy raps the table once. “Welcome, new researchers. Congratulations, promoted staff. We’ll do a ten-minute cross-pollination interval—please mingle now while the agenda continues in parallel.” Her gaze clicks to Medicine Pocket. “And, Researcher Medicine Pocket—I appreciate your restraint.” A beat. “Minimal restraint remains acceptable.”

“Proceed,” Medicine Pocket snaps, because any other syllable might combust.

Badges chime; chairs half-scrape; the long table becomes a living circuit—clusters forming, breaking, recombining as nameplates and disciplines trade charge. Side screens keep sliding through org diagrams and timelines, Lucy narrating in a ground-level, even thread for those still listening. At intervals, micro-conversations bloom: Ley-lines with cryptography, aerospace with somnambulism, mycology with biopharm.

Medicine Pocket stands too fast, pockets the disgraced stress ball like contraband, and lectures their own nervous system: awkwardness is a transient artifact of a reinforced loop; plot its decay, starve its inputs. They will not watch X getting along with new members, such as Hissabeth and Kiperina, sketching invisible mechanisms as if nothing…important occurred last night. Absolutely not.

They last exactly six seconds.

They turn, fix their scowl to “indiscriminate hazard,” and angle toward the periphery—Windsong in their sights, a towering isobar of composure worth befriending—anything to keep their mouth off museum property and their brain off the one variable in Laplace that refuses to fit a model.

⋆₊ ⊹★ 🧪⭑⋆｡˚

The mingle window ends; Lucy closes her remarks, and the meeting formally adjourns. Chairs finally screech in zealous, badges chirp confirmations, subcommittees shear into tidy vortices of chatter.

Medicine Pocket yawns for the ninth time—logged, lamentable. The hinge-click of their jaw sends solvent-bright fatigue down the belly. Zero REM last night; the cortex insisted on replaying an event with the obstinacy of a broken oscilloscope: mouth on mouth, shock voltage, the droll, perfect coupling coefficient of lips.

They bite their lower lip now, annoyed at the reflex. Is Alphabet Boy similarly voltage-sick? Tripping over his sodium channels? Glymphatic system petitioning for mercy because kissing has colonized his working memory like a runaway process?

They chance a look. Across the hall, post-adjournment, X is now folded into a more intricate conversation with the space faction itself, with the ease of a well-lubricated bearing. Hands grid arcs and levers; hysterics arrive in puny, spasmodic eruptions; he sketches ascents in the air as if annular inclination were a tame bird. Kiperina beams; Hissabeth’s pen races, snakes on her, hissing and blabbering all the same.

No visible arrhythmia. No smallish flinch. Not an air-hungry swallow in sight to betray a similarly unruly tegmental incurvate.

Of course. He’s probably experienced. On the other hand, Medicine Pocket’s first kiss is not yet twenty-four hours old and has somehow reprogrammed celerity initiation. Perfect.

An ugly hypothesis elbows forward—very suddenly: Has he kissed others? The… Fog Boy? Their stomach answers with a dwarfish, corrosive twist—jealousy, a nauseant reagent they detest. It tastes like oxidized copper. They squeeze down on it, roll their eyes at themself, and haul their gaze away from X’s animated compass perspective and those infuriating dimples.

Enough. Sleep is a ripper; rumination is rust. They avert from the museum, past the credenzas of chronometers and sextants, past Lucy’s lingering halo of amusement, and head for the elevators. Someone offers a “Congratulations, Head of Bio-Pharm”; they answer with a grunt that could be gratitude or a threat (threat), then step into the elevator and stab 16 with unnecessary (necessary) force.

The sleep quarters. Communal. Undesirable. The doors open onto a corridor of sound-damp panels and standardized serenity, the air conditioned to within an inch of upset. They are mildly disgusted that they’re choosing a bunk here when they have a private bolt-hole curated by Bucket Head herself. But their assigned room is a behavioral trap—the place where thoughts of Alphabet Boy bounce off the walls with sublime fidelity. They need oblivion, not a resonance chamber.

Inside: a reticulum of bunks welded like ship racks, linen bleached into humility, a throb of HVAC as methodical as a sundial. “At least it’s a controlled environment,” they reason under their breath, claiming a corner cot with the persistence of a dog stealing a chair.

Regimen first, or the body will file a complaint.

They shoulder through the adjacent comfort room. Fluorescents buzz, tile shines. The scissors leave their post, plucked from the knot at the back of their head with the adroit zip of a surgeon unseating a clamp. Their hair falls, platinum curtain down the spine, static whispering. They stare at the mirror. A face stares back: light-toned, serrated, pupils still a shade dilated; a mouth that remembers pressure as if it were specifics; an off-balance, traitorous rubescent across the zygomatic arches.

“How does he see this?” they ask the reflection, as though the dielectric might clap back. “Unsentimentally interesting? Sloppy appealing? Or just… inane?” The mirror is politic.

Lab coat off. The avoirdupois leaves their shoulders, and with it the institutional exoskeleton. Underneath, they don a rustic gray shirt, soft from too many washes, then a pair of plaid boxer shorts that qualify as anti-ceremony. The ensemble appears to be a failed hypothesis in human presentation. They snort at their own reflection, then snag a towel and scrub the day from their face with brusque, serialized strokes. Hands rinse. A peek at the clock ticks a rebuke. Done.

Back in the dormitory proper, they pocket the scissors (habit) and apparate to their chosen bunk. Boots off, one whump then another. They fold the lab coat with the care they never grant paper, slide it under the mattress edge, and lie down with the gracelessness of a felled tree. Whatever.

The ceiling consists only of acoustic foam and a faint seam where the two panels meet. Their mind tries one last seditious loop—X’s mouth, the line he made afterward, that look—but sleep finally brings a blunt contraption. The autonomic takes command. Breath finds its parasympathetic frequency. Muscles unspool, one fascicle at a time.

For once, the brain obeys. They go under fast, like induction, sheared hair fanned across the pillow, a new title folded under the mattress, and a kiss still ringing somewhere in the deeper layers, waiting for the next time someone dares to peg it.

⋆₊ ⊹★ 🧪⭑⋆｡˚

A week or so is an eternity when your hypothalamus system won’t stop filing FOIA requests on a solo evocation.

That moment they shared with X is as good as history, one for the books. Medicine Pocket has tried to starve the helix, but the flashbulb keeps kindling—high-speed replay of lip contact, the abstinent conductivity step, that ridiculous, elegant cascade you could draft on a whiteboard: dopamine crest, noradrenergic flare, parasympathetic stutter, a neat little LTP imprint that laughs at extinction trials. They did, moreover, say a thing with their actual mouth: that the boy was compelling. Who admits to something like that and then vanishes into their own schedule like a cowardly particle? Apparently, them.

So they keep moving. Fieldwork with Ezra (who works like a honeycomb and smiles like an apology), logistics for the Uluru revival, two nights sleeping on lab benches, three injections of their own questionable clarity tonic, and an industrious habit of swerving whenever the corridor ahead smells a wee bit of espresso and clean soap. Cafeteria: hear him before the threshold—light shoes, mannerly titter—pivot, elevator, fifth floor detour, chew the inside of the cheek to drown the olfactory recall. Library: that same frangible aftershave note around the stacks—press forearm to nose, reverse course, pretend the book you needed never existed. The heart tugs on its leash; the brain yanks back and mumbles about stimulus control. Drag, drag, drag.

Today: Lucy’s director’s lab. High ceilings, light like distilled water, everything forensic to make your worst impulses stand at attention. On the main island, a project blooms in components: reinforced mouthguards, elastic wrist wraps whose fibers glitter with Arcanum-reactive threads, a baseplate for a portable “sacred flame” monitor that refuses to stop tripping thermal protection. The Uluru Games are waking up—rite plus risk, history braided to physiology—and Laplace gets to be both chaperone and paramedic.

Ulrich is already there, a tank for a head, glass walls humming to a degree, the ink-dark mass within sloshing like sarcasm with surface tension. Exclamation points, dots, ellipses, dots. Enigma (Adler, if you want the personnel file, or simply to piss him off) stands opposite, forearms scuddy, expression that professional shade of unimpressed that doubles as praise around here. Medicine Pocket shoulders in, drops a tray of vials that clink like chimes, and refuses to greet either of them because greetings might open the door to small talk and small talk might let a certain letter of the alphabet into the room.

“Biopharm shows at last,” Ulrich deadpans, the speaker grill on his hull giving the irony a warm metallic grain. “We were about to add a fourth failure mode just to feel your presence.”

“Add a fifth,” Medicine Pocket says, snapping on gloves. “Failure to understand what you’re doing without me.”

Enigma chucks in a glance at the stanchion. “Your ‘sacred-flame’ sensor saturates at eighty-seven Celsius in mock trials. Did you intentionally regulate for soup?”

“It’s a damn flame, Adler,” they bite, tearing open a foil pouch already to swap in a different thermistor. “Try believing in heat. The initial spec came from a priest-ghost with strong opinions about ‘living fire’ and no opinions about Kelvin.”

“Living fire,” Ulrich repeats, as if taste-testing a phrase and finding it under-salted. “And our athlete.”

“Spathodea,” Enigma states, the name landing carefully. “Brown hair, sea-blue eyes, fists like a timepiece. Sunny as a summer day and faster than an angry postulation.”

“Boxer,” Medicine Pocket mutters, pleased despite themselves. “She wraps her hands like she means it. Ezra says she runs stairs when the world sleeps. Good resting HR, neat orthostatic response, calcium handling like a show-off. We keep her joints intact, we keep her brain inside the skull, we keep the pain scale below melodrama.”

Enigma’s mouth tilts—Adler for I approve, grudgingly. “Hence your toys.”

“They’re tools,” Medicine Pocket corrects, setting the mouthguard into a cradle. “Polymer blend reinforced with a piezo layer to log impact vectors. If she takes a right cross, I want to know whether her occlusion bore the load or her brainstem. The wraps have microfilament weft that fluoresces under strain; real-time readout will tell us before ligaments reach their personal apocalypse.”

Ulrich hums. “And if she insists on the apocalypse.”

“Then we—” Medicine Pocket pulls a face, reaches for a fine-tip iron, and plows on a lead, practically about performing an exorcism— “—convince her that living to fight tomorrow is the more interesting experiment. Painkillers on board, but we bias toward peripheral modulation. No fogging the cortex. The Games are a multiplex, we won’t make it an opiate haze.”

“Spoken like a Head of Biological Pharmaceuticals,” Ulrich says, dry as a scrubland. “Congratulations on your promotion, by the way. We would have brought flowers, but the last bouquet you received ended up hematocrit.”

“It deserved it,” they say, checking continuity. “The hydrangeas were smug.”

Enigma sets a small pelican case on the worktop, flips it open. Inside, there are three glossy coins the size of thumbnails. “Prototypes from Cryptography. For the Games perimeter. We suspect ley-line turbulence generates a low-frequency drift in keyed incantations. These hold a counter-temporal checksum. If the field starts sliding, they squeal.”

Ulrich’s tank leans, as if smell-testing. “We call them canaries.”

“Ugly canaries,” Medicine Pocket interjects, approvingly. “Good. Put them around the ring. If the ancient magic starts singing off-key, we pull the plug before anybody’s soul decides to go free-range.”

“Lucy approved the plug?” Enigma asks.

“Bucket Head approved the concept of the plug,” Medicine Pocket retorts. “Actual authorization is a state function dependent on her mood, the coffee machine, the number of things I haven’t bitten today.”

Enigma runs a fingertip along a schematic, eyes hooded. “You’ve been very… quiet this week.”

“Lie,” Medicine Pocket denies, immediate. “You just can’t hear me over your own ennui.”

“Hmm.” Enigma’s voice is all silk and no friction. “Curious phenomena cluster. Novel projects. Novel staff. Novel titles. And then a sudden decrease in uttered insults per hour, accompanied by an increase in completed checklists. Ulrich, would you consider that a meaningful correlation?”

Ulrich makes a contemplative blorp. “Could be a pre-seizure calm. Could be guilt. Could be love.”

Medicine Pocket nearly drops the iron. “Could be you both shut up.”

Enigma doesn’t smile; his boredom purely acquires an extra decimal of exactitude. “We’re modeling inputs, not reading diaries. Though if I were to guess, I’d say a certain someone from the adjacent lab has driven your system into avoidance yo-yoing. Alphabet, for instance. After all—”

“Do not say his letter like a crossword clue,” Medicine Pocket warns, solder smoke curling. A warning.

“—after all,” Enigma continues mildly, “our newest mechanical lead does have a way of increasing throughput in his collaborators. Or decreasing speech in them. Either seems… statistically present.”

Ulrich’s tank lights a lazy pulse, amusement traveling like a jellyfish. “I observed Biopharm turning on their heel in a hallway yesterday with no apparent predator in sight. Unless one counts the faint trace of high-end coffee.”

Medicine Pocket stares at the board, declines to concede an iota. “Fieldwork,” they grit, terse. “Uluru prep. Ezra and I took soil cores near the stadium, eighty centimeters down. The mycelial mat is a gossip network; it told him three secrets and a joke.”

“Did it tell you to bolt when you heard a certain voice?” Ulrich inquires, mock-consulting a textbook.

“They’re confounding adaptables,” Medicine Pocket growls. “Smell, sound, stupid human memory. I have a job. We have a job. Sacred flame, athletic liability, reagent shortages, Lucy’s insufferable dashboards. Jeez.” They set the mouthguard down too hard, take a breath that is almost a swear, then choose competence instead. “Where are we on the headgear?”

Enigma slides over a rig: sleek shell, foam lattice, a halo of tiny sensing nodes like a crown for a very practical ruler. “Accelerometers in triad. Gyros with redundancy. PPG at the temple; SpO₂ on the ear. We’ll catch microconcussions before they stand up and announce themselves.”

Medicine Pocket’s hands move before their brain can find a reason to sabotage them: re-seating a connector, nudging a cable run with forceps, taping down a sensor line as tenderly as if it were a pulse. “Good. What about the flame monitor? If the sacred fire does its temperamental act, I want the meter to step up, not melt.”

“Lucy’s requisition arrived,” Ulrich says, gesturing with the elegant drift of a discretion he’s borrowing for effect. “Heat shields. Ceramic composite. Also, two new fans that claim to ‘whisper.’”

“They’ll scream like the rest once the dust finds them,” Medicine Pocket mutters, but they take the box, carve it open, and slot the shield in with brutal postponement. The readout sustains, numbers marching left to right like they’ve decided life is tolerable after all. “There. See? We can do civilization.”

Enigma folds his arms. “We should brief Spathodea before fitting. She trusts cheer and clarity. Ezra seems to translate both.”

“Ezra translates anything into patience,” Medicine Pocket drones, and the admission slides out before they can fake a cough. “She thinks he’s a girl, by the way. Calls him ‘Miss’ when she’s sleepy. Even Bunny Bunny and that other one, Desert Flannel. Either he hasn’t corrected them, or he refuses to when the kid’s heart rate spikes. Adaptive lying—medically indicated.”

Ulrich’s speaker softens. “She’s confined?”

“Infirmary, sure, confined? No,” Medicine Pocket shakes their head. “Just observation for a day to bring the nerves down and rehydrate a child who forgets water is not merely for plants. Ezra’s in there with a book about glowing mushrooms and a cup of broth that smells like honesty.” They strip their gloves, toss them into the burn bin. “I’m going now. You two can stay here and court each other with spreadsheets.”

Clear of throats erupt; Medicine Pocket ignores it. Then, “Bring her the wraps,” Enigma says, tapping the labeled box. “And the canary coins. We’ll install stadium perimeter tomorrow.”

Ulrich lowers his hull fractionally in a motion that reads, somehow, like a bow. “If the flame sings off-key, call. I prefer rescue to autopsy.”

“Funny,” Medicine Pocket utters, snatching the boxes. “I prefer neither. Try to keep your tank out of doorways now, I like my elbows unbroken.”

And with that, they turn to go. Enigma lets the silence hold just long enough to function as a prod. “Medicine Pocket.”

“What,” they snap without turning.

“Your avoidance,” he says, tone composed as graphite. “It’s an unstable strategy. In cryptography we call it a transposition—letters out of order until the message is unreadable. Sometimes the quickest way to regain legibility is to set them in line and read out loud.”

Ulrich makes a small approving noise. “Even I understood that one.”

Medicine Pocket’s shoulders creep up toward their ears. “Thank you for the lecture, Professor Cipher,” they say, aiming for scathing and hitting somewhere nearer to tired. “I’ll add it to my bedtime story. Right after ‘Don’t get punched in the cerebellum.’”

They push out into the corridor where the air tastes like coolant and policy. The boxes are balmy against their palms, and the hallway is long and white and much too honest. Two interns pass with a gurney and a sense of doom, then a drone sprints by with syringes like little silver birds. Medicine Pocket counts their steps because counting is a leash.

Lifts. Mirror-bright doors. For one feral second, they picture pressing a different floor—the one where a certain lab hums next to a sign that says KEEP OUT in a language their teeth know by heart. They picture walking in, the smell of tea and affix, the bewildered gladness on his face. They imagine the thing they said and the way he answered with his mouth instead of grammar.

They jab the button for the infirmary.

Hospital wing. Slushy lighting, soundless machines expelling meaningful sighs. On the second door to the right, a little paper star dangles on tape because Ezra cannot help himself—he believes in labeling reality with gentleness. Inside, Spathodea is a spill of brown hair on a pillow, aqua eyes bright even under drudgery. She sits cross-legged, pugilist turned patient, which is to say: impatient. Her right hand is already half-wrapped because she started without permission. Ezra occupies a chair like a tiny, lily-white sentinel, mustard gloves on, hat on the hook, a mycology text open to a luminous plate. He looks up first, and his smile is automatic and annoyingly medicinal.

“Medpoc,” he says softly, like the word is a cup of cozy water. “You’re just in time.”

“Of course I am,” they answer, setting the boxes down with ceremonial thumps. “I bring presents and a low tolerance for heroics.”

Spathodea beams. “Hi, Doc! Miss Ezra said you’d come back.”

Medicine Pocket’s mouth twitches. They flick a glance at Ezra; he shrugs infinitesimally—not the fight to pick today. Well, alright. Medicine Pocket pops the first lid, spreads the wraps like a magician showing both hands. “Rules: you let me fit these, you don’t argue with the mouthguard, and you drink whatever that broth is. If you complain about taste, I will add mushrooms and make it pedagogical.”

Spathodea giggles. Ezra glows—not literally, but close. The monitor by the bed throws back a gentle tide of numbers: HR steady, SpO₂ excellent, BP slightly cocky, the sort that needs a bedtime. Medicine Pocket’s world narrows to useful radii: measure, trim, fit, explain, praise. The girl is brave, the kid is kind, the gear is good. The Games are a prospect; the work is a counter-spell. It helps.

Only once does the week intrude: a breath, a pocket of quiet when Ezra leans forward to blow on the broth and Spathodea leans into the steam and Medicine Pocket, traitor to their own edicts, thinks of aftershave and laughter and a lab bench and the sound one makes when one decides to be brave with one’s mouth.

They tape the last edge down, check the strain sensor LEDs—clean green across the knuckles, warm amber at the wrist. “There,” they say, and it comes out forgiving than they meant. “When you punch, the wrap tells me the truth even if you don’t.”

Spathodea flexes, awed. “It glows.”

“It reports,” Medicine Pocket amends, because hiding love in pedantry is a time-honored tradition. “And if you overdo it, it tattles.”

Ezra laughs—bells in a library. “She’ll behave. Right, Miss Spathodea?”

The girl salutes with a wrapped fist. “Right, Miss Ezra.”

Medicine Pocket snorts, defeated by the universe’s appetite for comedy. “Drink,” they order, nodding at the cup. “Tomorrow we fit the headgear. Day after, we make a sacred flame behave like an adult. If either of you decides to be brave in a way that endangers neurons, I will file paperwork so dense it will bend light.”

They turn to the door, because staying feels like a dare they are not ready to accept. Ezra’s voice follows, inaudible but pointed. “Medpoc?”

They half-glance back. “What.”

“Thank you,” he says. “For coming even when you’re… busy.”

A beat too long. “I’m not busy,” they lie. “I’m working.”

In the corridor again, the hospital smell is replaced by the lab’s cleaner astringency. Medicine Pocket presses the elevator call and watches the digital floor count strolling toward them. One week and some days of dodging, one mouthful of honesty, a stadium waking up like a dragon being courteous about it. They inhale, hold, exhale—a consummated little square that calms dogs and surgeons alike.

The doors open. The variable persists. The model doesn’t converge. Fine. Tomorrow they’ll try a new algorithm. Tonight, they’ll sleep in a room that doesn’t evoke memories of him and hope the brain forgets how to swerve before the heart forgets how to run.

⋆₊ ⊹★ 🧪⭑⋆｡˚

Medicine Pocket is five minutes from surrendering to bed when the cursor on their workstation seduces them into one last bad decision. They tab away from datasets and open the LSCC intranet—Laplace Scientific Computing Center, cathedral of anonymous bravado and very public mistakes. The forum loads with its beige bureaucracy: a search bar that promises answers it cannot possibly deliver, a “Hot Topics” rail arguing about poisonous basement mushrooms (again), and a queue of threads begging for attention like starving ferrets.

They log in as they always do: Budget Buster, pixelated dog icon exposing comic fangs. The handle pre-dates the candy fiasco; the icon is aspirational. Somewhere out there, the other regulars—Substantial Intelligence, Tabletop Cleanup Master, the ever-pious [DM Disabled]—are already gnawing the day’s bait.

A Tender Invitation post sits up top:

[Tender Invitation] Charging Station Installation in Timekeeper’s Suitcase To ensure Madam Lucy’s comfortable retirement, the Timekeeper has tasked me to revamp the charging station in her suitcase…

“Comfortable retirement,” Medicine Pocket mutters, clicking through. “She’s a robot, not a beagle on a porch swing.”

They scroll to the replies and find a familiar signature:

Next-Gen Gadget Developer: Complete circuit diagram of the suitcase?! Ahem, the Timekeeper should have appointed someone more suited to this task, not putting it out to tender!

The avatar is X’s face, open and unguarded, as if the camera apologized after taking it. Of course, he uses a real portrait. Of course, he signs his work with a friendly target.

Medicine Pocket’s heart does that unhelpful hop it learned last week. They set their jaw and reply before prudence can chew through the leash.

Budget Buster: It’s not a chewing cardboard box we’re talking about, my munchy-crunchy friend. Also, the suitcase runs non-Euclidean fault lines; a complete diagram is a metaphysical joke.

X answers within seconds—he’s either already online or the site pings him like Pavlov.

Next-Gen Gadget Developer: I agree about the topology. I’m thinking a leg-mounted umbrella stand for the Equilibrium Umbrella would reduce the footprint. And yes, we’re talking active stabilization, not prayer. Anyone want to co-design?

Co-design. Medicine Pocket’s molars grind. He solicits collaboration like it’s a public good. Which, fine, academic praxis, open science, blah blah. But something petty and mammalian crawls out from under their gut anyway: What about us? The laboratory hours, the jokes, the spoon, the kiss. Not sacred? Not even… rare?

They answer too fast, fingers going at a clip that would make Trina scold about typos.

Budget Buster: Sounds like a toy. Stick to chopsticks. Leave the non-Euclidics to the grownups.

A beat. The page ticks. X replies, unfailingly nice, unforgivably nice.

Next-Gen Gadget Developer: I respect the grownups! If you’re serious about the topology critique, DM me specs? (Forum DMs are disabled, I know.) We could meet. Coffee? I’m collecting ideas for the mechanical team.

Meet. Coffee. Mechanical team. Medicine Pocket’s spine floods with fuzz. He doesn’t know he’s talking to them; that much is obvious. He’s just… networking. But the sentence lands like a pebble in a dog bowl: too loud for its size.

They stab back:

Budget Buster: Coffee is a solvent for cowardice. File a proper request through LSCC. Also, your umbrella concept needs a torque-limiting clutch, or it’ll break ankles.

And then, because staying means saying something they’ll want to eat later, they click Log out with finality.

Silence avalanches. The lab recovers its usual noises—fans ventilating, a bioreactor cooling two rooms away, the soft nocturne of Laplace after hours. On the workbench, the Laplace communicator blinks a patient amber, the way it did the night X called and the world decided it had more states than “before” and “after.” One press and they could demand explanations. What are we? Why did you act like last week was a lab safety drill and not… They push air out through their nose instead, pocket the device, and head for the staff washrooms before sentiment wins.

The corridor is midnight-clean, the type of sterile hush that turns footsteps into Morse. They shoulder the bathroom door and throw the latch. Routine saves them from thinking: tap on, cold first to shock the sullen capillaries awake; antiseptic soap, two pumps; face splash until skin spicules; toothbrush out of coat pocket (yes, they carry it), paste, brace. They scrub like a disgruntled chemist decontaminating glassware—merely transitory, structured strokes, no indulgent circles. A face in the mirror looks back, with hair unpinned, platinum and soil waterfall without the snips; eyes ringed in the day’s fuel, lips that did something they will not stop replaying. They lift the scissors, slide them back through the knot until the mass sits the way strangers recognize them. Armor on. Dog back in its crate.

They step into the hall—and collide with the exact Gizmo Guy they have been avoiding all week.

Warm fabric, a shoulder, a scent: black tea breathed through clean wool, and underneath it the cool bite of aftershave he’s too young to pull off and somehow does. The communicator in their pocket chirps as it knocks their hip, all while their balance goes weird. A hand steadies their elbow with reflexes they have cataloged in other contexts.

“Medpoc—” “X,” they say together, friction-lit. They both stop, as if a third party has ordered freeze.

Medicine Pocket primes a barb, ticked-off—Why are you loitering in hallways like a cognizant parasol stand?—but X’s hand closes around their wrist, gentle and non-negotiable, a clasp more question than command. He tugs, not far, just enough to swivel them into the adjacent service corridor that dead-ends at a fire door. The world narrows: concrete, red EXIT letters, a humming pipe, the sound of their breath doing dumb arithmetic.

“Where are you taking me?” Medicine Pocket demands, because questions keep the adrenaline honest.

“Here,” he says, scanning the corridor like he expects the concept of witnesses to materialize. His eyes are bright in the ugly light, heterochromia burning like a calibration scatterplot. “No one comes by after eleven. I checked.”

So he did. So he thought about where before he thought about what to say. It would be adorable if it weren’t doing homicide on their heart rate. They open their mouth to make something safe and caustic—and X moves.

He lifts one palm, not to their bottom lip but to their left cheek, a snug bracket that short-circuits the clever part of their brain. He leans in, slow enough to veto. “Wait—again?” Medicine Pocket blurts, hand flying up to his chest, stopping him a centimeter early. “Really? And then what?”

“And then—” He swallows, rallying, the bravado of planning meeting the sheer cliff of saying. “And then we do it again. And again.”

They raise a brow, not moving their hand from his chest. “That’s it? Then we both walk away and log this under what? Anomalous lab behavior? Pretend nothing’s happening? Because I’m not—” the word punches like a confession they didn’t sign, “—I’m not built for pretending, X.”

“No,” he says, fast, honest. “I don’t want that. I want… more.” The word hangs there like a kaleidoscope without units, and he gives a helpless half-laugh at his own lack of jargon. “I didn’t know how to ask you.”

“How to ask me what?” They tilt their chin, trying not to notice how careful his hand is on their face, like they’re breakable; they loathe and love it. “And anyway—how come you keep kissing me like you’ve got reps? Is there a training manual I missed?”

His ears pink. He manages a crooked, treacherously charming smile, a flash of confidence that looks like it knows how to take a machine apart and put it back together better. “I don’t,” he says, voice low and maddeningly composed. “You’re the only experience I have.”

The blush ignites in Medicine Pocket’s traitor skin before they can finesse a reply. They hear themself scoff to buy time. “Then how come—”

“How come?” He steps the missing centimeter, and now the hand at their cheek slides to the hinge of their jaw, thumb feather-light. “Are you saying I kiss good?”

The question is illegal. It unlocks a laugh that cheats them, and the last functional defense skitters under the fire door and leaves the building. “Shut up,” they whisper, which is an invitation.

He doesn’t waste it. The kiss that follows is not the tentative, stunned physics experiment of last week; it’s a solved equation. He draws them in by the waist with a pressure that says I learned your center of mass, aligns his mouth with theirs like he’s docking two clean parts, and takes. The flow’s tenacious and dead set, a voltage curve that rises, holds, rises again. They rise with it, which is the horrible, beautiful truth. Their hands find his lab coat, then his shoulders, then the back of his neck where heat lives; he makes a sound into their mouth that registers somewhere between pleased and mine and every catecholamine they own throws confetti.

He leads; they let him. He angles, and the world rotates obediently; he tastes like tea and the sweet afterburn of coffee; when his teeth barely catch their lower lip, precision of a cut too pristine to sting, they gasp, and he swallows it, smug and unbelievably considerate. The corridor becomes a tunneling microscope—nothing exists except contact and the information it gives. They learn he likes it when their fingers slide under his collar; he comprehends they go weak if he presses them briefly to the wall and steals their balance along with their breath. There is nothing analytic about it, and yet they are taking notes with their whole body.

When he finally eases back, it’s stately, like the cool-down on delicate instrumentation. They’re both breathing hard in the quiet, foreheads almost touching, laboratory oxygen suddenly insufficient for mammalian needs. Medicine Pocket’s lips quiver, swollen in a way that will ruin their poker face for an hour; X’s are wrecked too, rosy and shining, eyes dark with that dangerous clarity the good experiments award you.

He licks his lower lip (curse him), and the motion kicks their pulse again. He smiles, shy triumph dismantling the earlier swagger, and asks, voice a little wrecked, “This means we’re something now, right?”

The exit sign buzzes. A pipe ticks. Medicine Pocket’s answer queues on their tongue like a parameter they know will change everything the instant they declare it.

Something. Shouldn’t there be an authenticated word for it?

[unchartedandunkown]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 重返未来：1999 | Reverse: 1999 (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Medicine Pocket/X (Reverse: 1999) Characters: Medicine Pocket (Reverse: 1999), X (Reverse: 1999) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Sick Fic, not for the faint of heart (aka ppl who don’t like butterflies (I’m serious)), sorry for medpoc’s dog tendencies and X’s....existence Summary:

Medicine Pocket unwillingly has a patient foisted onto them.

[alchemyware]

xpocket shitpost