Chapter Text
The light of twenty nano flashes burns your eyes and you smile wider. Only a small fraction of postdoctoral applicants are accepted, and you made the cut. It wasn’t easy and everyone here knows it. The photographers finish and your group disperses, each person a star in their own right, some with more gravitational pull but all burning hot tonight.
It shouldn’t be this enjoyable. Tonight was advertised as celebrating the new additions, but the real purpose is fundraising with you and your fellows trotted around as a prime example of what great things new money can do. Yet you can’t help but bask in the atmosphere and congratulate yourself on years of hard work well spent.
This institution is one of the best. An expansive privately-funded research campus with an affiliated university. Known for attracting and retaining the world’s top minds, and a reputation for keeping them out of the hands of competitors, whatever the cost. The thought thrills you, that you share a commonality with this place already: a ruthless desire for excellence.
You meet guests: researchers and donors and other postdocs, smiling when they smile and tucking aside little personal details they don’t know they’ve given away for later use.
After about an hour of casual conversation you pluck a glass of champagne from a passing tray and climb stairs to the second level walkway. It’s cooler up here and you relish the feeling of being alone near a crowd. Leaning on the balustrade lets you close your eyes and listen to the murmur of voices below. You press your thigh against the vertical columns for stability and gently trace two fingers over the handrail’s cool marble, drinking in momentary sensations and letting your mind rest.
“Hello there.” Irish accent behind you, deep female voice. Smooth as cooling metal, recently poured and glowing from the fire.
You turn, still attentive to your purpose as token of a prosperous future. “Hello.”
She’s confident, tall, makes you feel like the room just got darker and you’re slipping on the fine line between shadow and light. Her fox-fur red hair is meticulous, smoothed back and drawing attention to the length and slope of her neck. Her style of dress is simply elegant, a white silk shirt under black suit jacket; the cut suits her but you wonder at the shirt, buttoned too high for the occasion, as if shoring herself up. She languidly swirls dark liquid in a glass between long fingers finishing in perfect nails. Time is a concept you once knew and oh god you don’t know how long you’ve been staring.
“You’re very tight-lipped for someone who couldn’t stop chatting everyone up earlier.”
Your attention snaps back. “I’ve been getting to know the other new researchers.”
“Oh? And now do you know them?” Directness. She looks straight at you but not mocking, although her tone could be mistaken for it. She’s not making small talk, she’s really asking.
A pause. She is honest, so you should be too. It’s refreshing in the superficial party atmosphere. You glance back down to the first floor and notice one of your fellow postdocs gesturing wildly while telling a story to a small but attentive audience, one man with a wine stain on his shirt holding the arm of a woman who is smiling only with her teeth.
“Yes. Jackson is here to make a name for himself, but he speaks too quickly and won’t listen to criticism. Roberts is a gossip who idolizes Dr. Winters. Dr. Winters doesn’t notice him, she’s too concerned by some trivial feud with Dr. Anderson. Preethi has creative solutions, but she is out of her element here. I hope she can settle in before the others scare her away.”
Glass suspended halfway to her mouth, meant to take a sip but forgotten. The woman exhales slowly and in an obscure fleeting fantasy you imagine stepping forward into it, like perfume. “My. You are observant. Fascinating.”
A waiter reaches the end of the landing, sees your exchange, darts eyes to the woman. He abruptly turns, body language that of serving a guest urgently needing his attention elsewhere, if only he could find one. The postdoc below must’ve finished his story because drunken laughter carries upstairs.
“And what do you make of me?” She slips one hand in her pocket and again gives you that direct gaze, not mocking. A challenge. You accept, opening yourself to her presence. Her eyes burn with a clarity of perception and a question, a hope. You see her seeing through you, sight past and pushing you away and pulling you closer, and what is there for a second is gone a blink later. So much and not enough and you shouldn’t keep her waiting but the words won’t come.
You catalog many things, none of which can be summed up in a sentence. Most alarming (charming) is raw power, but the power isn’t directed anywhere, wasted potential. She’s fraying at the edges, like a wire held under tension for a long period of time. A sharp blow would snap her. It’s… a kind of fatigue, but she hides it well. Her shoulder rests against the wall. To any passerby it would seem casual, but from the way her suit jacket wrinkles at the contact point you can tell she’s leaning more weight there than her posture suggests.
Why? There's a discordance between that tension and the way she’s speaking with you. You don’t understand why she’d feel the need to put up a front when you can see she’s full of competence. With a healthy dose of arrogance perhaps, but not unfounded. She knows her worth. She honors you with sincerity, and you’ve done nothing to deserve it. Nothing you can figure at least.
Is this how she meets all unknowns then? Your respect for her increases. To openly measure the intrinsic value of another person, that defies social convention and you admire her immensely for it.
And yet. There’s no one vying for her attention, not even that prick Jackson. Can’t they see? A terrible possibility floats up, buoyed by the indistinct buzz of a thousand voices you’re beginning to despise. They’ve written her off. Then why is she here? That’s a question you want answered. Or perhaps not, for dignity’s sake.
What do you make of me? Everything, in so many words. You want to tell her not to give in to whatever holds her at its mercy, and now that you’ve met her you feel stronger, fortified by her existence.
“Well?"
“I…I’d rather not say.”
“Oh come now, you’re so forthright about the others.”
“You’re not like the others.” Is it the champagne that makes you say this? You almost clap a hand over your mouth before you realize no, it’s her. She does this to you. Is doing this to you.
A low but genuine laugh. Her eyes are actually closed, her shoulders lose a fraction of their tension.
“Come work for me.”
Elegance, arrogance. You’re like a moth to the flame; is this a game for her? It doesn’t matter if so, you’d gladly burn a thousand times over just to hear her laugh again.
Still… she can’t be serious. “My field is Applied Physics. I’m already slated to work for Dr. Han. Do you work with Dr. Han?”
A stupid question. She wouldn’t work for anyone. That’s something you could’ve told her.
“Where are my manners. I am Doctor Moira O’Deorain. Geneticist. Facility B5. I’ll speak with Dr. Han. Be in my lab 8:00 am Monday morning. Unless you have any objections?”
A breath. “None.”
Tonight was more interesting that Moira had anticipated. She’d attended the gala to observe the charade, small people in expensive clothing hoping the lights and glitz and drink would make their mundane conversations more interesting. She really had intended to only observe.
In public she has no reason to hide, but learned long ago others did not react well to her particular brand of honesty. It’s just truth, she thinks, pure and simple. They are the ones who are different, unnatural. They have a thing in them trained, which she knew not in herself how to begin taming. She knew no other way to live, unshackled. Had given up searching for this in others, her work was enough. Would have to be enough. But at times when she hadn’t slept her mind would wander unchecked toward a form of perfection that looked uncannily like… well. No. She’s not perfect. She was a pawn.
Moira had not expected to find… well one doesn’t ever expect to be surprised. This new research partner. She’d been impulsive. It had been a long time since someone had intrigued her like that. Two years, in fact.