COLLEGE TIME IS HERE AGAIN (private for @respectedthreat

[seeamirage]

She is sitting at the table. Notes are strewn everywhere, covering everything. She's worn her pencils down to nubs. Ink and lead stain her hands. Her hair is haphazardly thrown up in a bun--but her unnaturally white roots are showing. Lucia has forgotten to dye her hair, forgotten to pay attention to the roots, and what's more is that she's so

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[respectedthreat]

[Somewhere inside of Buddy's mile-a-minute brain--he realized he was probably being a little ridiculous.

Before one of his so-called college "instructors" had pushed himself and Lucia together for that completely inane "group project," he had been perfectly content with being alone for every part of his day that didn't require him being surrounded by classmates. He even managed to finagle a solo dorm room, using his young age as the lynch pin to secure his (much needed) extra space. He didn't like other people. And quite honestly, other people made it painfully (sometimes literally) clear that they didn't much care for him, either.

And after their project was over, by all accounts, Lucia should have walked away and never talked to him ever again. He would have hardly batted an eye.

...but she didn't. She kind of...hung around. He'd be in the lab, and she'd show up, eager to learn more about what he was doing. And then they'd end up talking (well, usually he'd end up talking) for hours, which he was genuinely surprised about.

No

[seeamirage]

[That loud squeak you heard? That wasn't Lucia. That wasn't remotely Lucia. That clatter as the pens and stapler and binder fall to the floor off the table? That wasn't caused by Lucia, either.

She braces herself against her chair and looks at him with wide eyes, chest heaving. The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them.]

Have you ever heard of knocking?

[respectedthreat]

[He stops walking towards her for only the briefest of moments as he observes her spectacularly awkward display. Buddy raises an eyebrow and looks at her quizzically.]

Have you ever heard of locking your door?

[He shakes it off, and continues walking towards her, quickly grabbing a chair and pulling it up next to her and continuing his tirade and hand waving.] Didn't you hear me?
I figured it out! The Dirac Equation! See--[and now he's looking into her eyes, because this is the important part and look how smart he is, she should really be more excited than this, and if he wasn't so hyped up he might glare a little]--we'd already taken the uncertainty principle into account, and I'd been working the energy points of the quantum mechanical physical system to death, but
we weren't accounting for--[He puts both hands in front of his face, making a box]--the vacuum energy. The zero-point energy of all the fields in space!

[seeamirage]

[He's right--she is excited by this, as she registers what he's saying. Her glare disappears. Her face clears, and opens up, her eyes widening as they meet his.] The Dirac Equation-- elementary spin-½ particles--oh my God, that's brilliant!

[She scrambles for a piece of paper, writes out what she remembers of the equation from it, and turns back to him, even more of her hair falling out from the bun she had thrown it up into earlier, falling all over her green cardigan.

She looks at him, completely wide-eyed and captivated.]

Tell me everything.