the bread is mine now!

“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.