#physics stuff

Personal info: Chazza/Lizzie, she/her, twenty-two, aroace, English

What are you up to? Ex-astrophysics student graduating with a BSc this summer, currently working part-time/learning to drive/decompressing from academia :)

Interests: Classic rock/metal/prog music (ft. major fixations on Rush and Steven Wilson), (astro)physics, ancient history, reading/writing

—

Black sands and rolling waves are no Elysian Fields. Perhaps that's what comes after.

Higgs will never know. His own field is…less than stable.

They stand in the aftermath of rain, he and her, air dense, tears brimming, heavy under gravity's pull. The masks are shed first and then the hoods. Gold falls to earth to be followed by discarded equipment—an odradek, a BB pod, and then time-proofed leather slips from narrow shoulders, armour undone, and Higgs stands bared to the skin.

In perfect symmetry, she stands opposite.

What was her name again?

"Kohlman," she answers, reading the question in his eyes. "And you are Higgs."

"Particle of God," he finishes, voice a whisper, and holds his breath as she draws near. "Will you pray to me?"

A blackened fingertip rises to sweep a gentle arc across his eyelid. In her other hand, a pen—Egyptian kohl brush or tattooist's tarred needle? Left hand, right hand? It doesn't matter. His face will be transformed.

"I'll pray that you fulfil your potential," she murmurs, and makes her first mark.

Lagrangian. Covariant.

Symbols carved into his brow. They move in space together. Change in time.

Mass coupling. Self coupling.

They couple. A doublet beneath the grey skies.

The particle of God and she knows him, inscribes his secrets on human skin still soft and susceptible to time and decay. Her lips brush his cheek, tasting black tears. "Is this what you wanted, Higgs?" A scratch of the pen at his throat. "To unite everything in mass extinction?"

"I'll give you mass, but I'm not the extinction."

"No, you're the seed." A lie told standing in the killing field. Her hand trails down his neck, moves to settle on the left side of his chest. (The right side, matching the chirality of his heart.) The sharp nib of the pen again begins to trace, smarting pain, blood springing to the surface. "We've already waited so long. Where's the black hole that will end us all? In here?"

Schwarzschild metric. Horizon radius. Tidal force.

She flattens her palm over the equations, feels his heartbeat underneath like the lap of waves on a far-off shore.

"I'll fix the UCA problem, but decay takes time," he answers, either with a snarl or a chuckle. It sounds the same. "No time on the beach except imaginary, and I've done plenty of imagining what I'll do."

Her hand lingers, his pulse counting out the seconds in a steady rhythm, timefall-impervious beneath the veil of his skin. "I thought you favoured the nuclear option? End everything in an instant?"

"That is my preferred solution." With a sigh, he lets his head fall forward, black-and-blood-smeared forehead coming to rest on her bare shoulder as she retrieves the cloak to drape him.

She touches his back, works at a knot between his scapulae. He’s growing tenser. "Come on, you're done. The tattoos will take."

"Not yet." He stays leaning on her several moments longer before straightening up, rejecting the hood she tries to pull over his head. "You might want to think about putting yours on, sweetheart."

Clear skies or no, it's wise to heed his words.

Kohlman tugs her own hood and armour back into place and watches as Higgs steps back, throwing out his arms as though in invitation as he turns his eyes to the heavens. There's no warning, nor thunder, nor blip even from the abandoned odradek as the first of the raindrops fall.

A hiss of steam on bare skin. The fall is a drizzle, almost a mist, but for the span of time her mind calls seconds and her biology would call days, she watches as the water trickles over Higgs' exposed face and chest and evaporates into nothing. The narrow streaks of red among the black wash away. Weeks of healing compressed into moments, and the fresh marks lose their redness, rough edges smooth over, leaving behind sharp symbols and glossy ink of which she's proud.

Higgs tilts his head forward and at last pulls up his hood as a shield. From beneath its peak she sees piercing blue eyes gaze out, narrow lips stretched in a grin across a face that will never recognise its twin in the mirror again.

Symmetric time flow and parity ought to exist in nature, yet her marks upon his forehead have turned him chiral; thoroughly broken the symmetry of both. He seems pleased.

The Higgs field is invariant under conformal transformations.