“P is for Physics”, or, "Physicist, Soldier, Queen"
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Title: “P is for Physics”, or, "Physicist, Soldier, Queen" [AO3]
Fandoms: Chronicles of Narnia, Stargate: SG1
Wordcount: ~1,800
Rating: PG
Summary: Catherine is becoming the kind of person who can spearhead the Stargate program. Susan is looking somewhere new for her answers.
Notes/Disclaimers: Written for the Stargate Crossovers Alphabet Soup, run by sg_fignewton. This fic contains spoilers for C.S. Lewis’s “The Last Battle”, SG1’s “The Torment of Tantalus”, and the original Stargate movie. I own none of the above, and I’m making no money off this fic. Thanks as ever to my darling beta,
sophia_sol.
When Ernest dies, Catherine copes in the way she knows best: she keeps busy. There’s a funeral to plan, and his (quite small) estate to deal with, and when she writes the final thank-you-for-attending and finds herself with nothing to do she takes the wedding money and Ernest’s savings (“It should be yours, dear,” his tearful mother had said, “Ernest would have wanted it to be yours”) and enrols for courses at Lamar Community College.
She tries a bit of everything; they’ve no anthropology courses at all, no language courses worth bothering with, and so remembering Ernest she begins to take math, biology, physics. It's physics that captures her mind, in the end, although she can’t explain why even to herself. What they teach her is so painfully simple, but she thinks she can see something grander hidden within it, lurking behind the equations in her books.
At the end of her first term, she sends off an application to Cornell’s undergraduate physics program.
She picked Cornell more or less on a whim, because she likes that it has women’s dormitories and no denominational ties and, more importantly, it’s across the country, as far away from Colorado Springs and Ernest’s ghost as her limited funds will take her. And she gets in, even wins a scholarship, because there’s a war on and the boys in the trenches are in no position to be studying, and besides, her marks are excellent.
Father makes vague noises about being proud of her, but doesn’t she really think this is a little drastic? But Father’s mind has been a million miles away since Ernest’s accident, and in the end she leaves home with relatively little fuss.
And then the war is over, and suddenly the boys from the trenches have plenty of time to study. She doesn’t have the scientific background that most of the boys - men, now, really - have, and it only takes her a term to realise that she doesn’t even have the brains that all of them have. And that’s a bitter pill to swallow, to realise that her mind, which had always carried her so easily wherever she wished to go, would never be able to leap as lightly through numbers as her classmates' can.
But if they could run faster, she’d run harder. Late nights in the library, early mornings pacing the paths as her mind chews over some particularly hoary bit of math, and at the end of her first year she surprises them all by taking fifth in her class. Next year, she’s third. The year after, she slips to fourth, but she doesn’t mind ceding her place to smiling, round-faced Owen. The grade on her papers matters less than the knowledge in her head.
In her fourth year, Dr. Walter Morrison, who helped her fight her way through his class on special relativity and then began making pointed noises about graduate school, hears that her money is all but gone and promptly hires her on as an assistant. And so she finds herself in front of his first year Physics class, delivering a stern speech on academic integrity and walking them through the syllabus.
Automatically, she looks for and finds the rare few female faces in the crowd. Three this year, not a bad number, although she’s not certain they’ll all last out the term. Catherine hates to admit it, but there’s a certain type of girl that tends of succeed in these classes: quiet, bookish, with a hint of steel beneath their skin and something burning in their eyes, driving them onward. Tiny Doris Daugherty, with her dowdy clothes and grim-set jaw, fits the image perfectly. Doris will go far. Lillian Mullins has the bookish part down, but there’s no passion in her eyes, and Catherine mentally writes her off.
And Susan Pevensie… Susan Pevensie is a mystery, one that half her male students can’t seem to take their eyes off. Dr. Morrison has warned her about Susan in advance, in his clumsy but well-meaning way. Lost her family, he says. Terrible accident. Using the inheritance to put herself through school. Thought you two might have something in common, yes? And because Dr. Morrison has been kind to her, Catherine agrees to try to… she’s not sure what. Guide the girl? Comfort her? Deliver some kind of speech about pluck and integrity and oh, by the way, the pain will never go away, but I recommend studying until you’re so tired you can’t think about it even if you want to, that’s what always worked for me…
Her eyes drift back to Susan time and again as the class drags on. The girl meets no one’s gaze, but instead sits straight and proud, and takes meticulous notes. Catherine catches a glimpse of her tidy, well-formed handwriting, and thinks it belongs in a love letter, not a notebook of equations. When Susan speaks, it’s in a soft, accented voice, and her hair is pinned up in the latest style. There’s an uncertain look about her, with maybe just a hint of fear, as if she isn’t sure what she’s gotten herself into.
Catherine doesn’t know what to make of her.
Class is over, and her students are filing out, filling the air with bright excitement and complaints, murmured where they think she can’t hear, when Catherine realises Susan is standing here with arms wrapped tight around her textbooks.
“Can I help you?” Catherine asks, automatically.
Susan clutches the text to her chest, knuckles white with nerves. There’s a faint indent on her ring finger, where an engagement band might have sat. “I was wondering… I was wondering if you knew anything about the multiverse theory.”
“Parallel universes?” Catherine asks. “Are you looking for me to recommend some books, or do you just want my opinion?”
“Either,” says Susan. “Both. All of it.” And there, gleaming behind her eyes, is something hard and fierce. A haughtiness like a queen’s. A courage like a soldier’s.
“I’m heading back to my office,” says Catherine, after a moment, mentally placing Susan with grim-eyed Doris on her list of students worth watching. “Well. It’s more of a closet, but - we can talk there.”
It’s the first of many conversations, and soon Catherine finds herself at the limits of what she can teach the girl. Susan’s obsession is with other worlds, worlds so close one could reach out and very nearly touch them, and the intensity with which she pursues every new scrap of knowledge would put Catherine to shame if she didn’t know that Susan’s coursework suffered for it. She suspects that her own coursework, on the other hand, may be improving, the inevitable result of trading off the last of her leisure time for afternoons spent in the library with Susan, bouncing ideas off one another.
Catherine graduates, and those afternoons with Susan must have been worth something after all, because she’s second in her year, so close to taking first that it drives her to distraction wondering if just a little more work might have won her the number one spot. She’d have been worlds less frustrated to find herself resting comfortably at fifth or sixth, she confides to Susan, and the two of them celebrate - and commiserate - over drinks that night.
Catherine is amused to discover that with three glasses of wine in her, the infamously poised Susan Pevensie fully reverts to the vacant, wide-eyed flirt she’d sometimes lapsed into during that first term at Cornell. At five glasses of wine, the wide-eyed flirt gives way to a clever, sharp-tongued young lady who curses like a sailor and feels no apparent need to conceal her contempt for the intellect of those around her. The gaggle of young men who’d been drawn in by her fluttering disperse with all due haste.
At eight glasses, Susan grows quiet, gains a calm collection that Catherine isn’t used to seeing in drunks. She sips her wine with dignity, and continues sipping until, with very little fuss, she tips sideways and slides to the floor. Catherine hauls her home and puts her to bed, feeling protective and put-upon in equal measures. “We were queens, once,” Susan slurs, as Catherine pulls her shoes off. “They gave up on me, but I - I - God, Lucy, why did you have to go?”
Catherine wants to ask, the next morning, what Susan had meant - but she sees the shame and pain and pride in Susan’s eyes and has to look away, words unspoken. She goes home and works on her application for graduate studies instead; she wants to research wormhole theory with Dr Morrison. The idea is one she stumbles across during a long night in the library with Susan. The other woman scorns wormholes for not fitting her own strange rules of the right ways to reach another world, but the idea appeals to Catherine’s imagination, sinks its hold into her endless curiosity. Idle sketches begin to appear in the margins of her notebooks, and it will be nearly a year before she realises how much they resembled the stone ring Father had uncovered at Giza.
And somehow, when Catherine isn’t paying attention, Susan becomes... not exactly what Catherine would call a friend. The younger woman is too strange, even by the standards of physicists, too fixated on her multiverse experiments, too aloof even in moments of emotion. But in time they become something more than just colleagues. Compatriots, perhaps - fellow citizens of the mad world in their heads. Two wild-eyed women with tragic pasts and pet theories, prone to dropping by each other’s homes at preposterous hours of the night, dignity dropping away in favour of debating physics with such gleeful volume that Catherine is surprised the neighbours don’t complain.
“Am I crazy?” Susan asks one day, as they sit on Catherine’s ancient sofa, sipping coffee.
“If you are, we all are,” Catherine replies, automatically flip.
Susan doesn’t seem to hear her. “It’s just that some days, I wonder... because when the accident happened, I lay down in bed, and I didn’t move for three days. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still just lying in a white room somewhere. The poor mad girl who couldn’t cope.”
This time, Catherine does her the courtesy of answering seriously. “Why? What makes you fear it?”
Susna laughs - a short, unhappy sound. “The things in my head, Catherine - the things I believe, they’re...”
Catherine thinks of Ernest. Of Father. Of her own mad wormhole theories, slowly taking shape in her mind and haunted, ever haunted, by the ring from Giza, dribs and drabs of overheard childhood conversations beginning to coalesce in her head to form something so grand she hardly dared think it. “I’m starting to wonder,” she says, after a long moment, “if ‘crazy’ is just another word for ‘genius’. If you’re wrong, they’ll say you were mad. But if you’re right...”
Susan smiles a funny smile, and then says, as if quoting someone, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either she’s lying, or she’s mad, or she’s telling the truth.”
“Who said that?” Catherine asks, curious.
“A very wise man,” Susan answers, and then stands. “Enough chit-chat, Cat. Time for us to get back to work.” crossposted from Dreamwidth |
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Title: “P is for Physics”, or, "Physicist, Soldier, Queen" [AO3]
Fandoms: Chronicles of Narnia, Stargate: SG1
Wordcount: ~1,800
Rating: PG
Summary: Catherine is becoming the kind of person who can spearhead the Stargate program. Susan is looking somewhere new for her answers.
Notes/Disclaimers: Written for the Stargate Crossovers Alphabet Soup, run by sg_fignewton. This fic contains spoilers for C.S. Lewis’s “The Last Battle”, SG1’s “The Torment of Tantalus”, and the original Stargate movie. I own none of the above, and I’m making no money off this fic. Thanks as ever to my darling beta,
sophia_sol.
When Ernest dies, Catherine copes in the way she knows best: she keeps busy. There’s a funeral to plan, and his (quite small) estate to deal with, and when she writes the final thank-you-for-attending and finds herself with nothing to do she takes the wedding money and Ernest’s savings (“It should be yours, dear,” his tearful mother had said, “Ernest would have wanted it to be yours”) and enrols for courses at Lamar Community College.
She tries a bit of everything; they’ve no anthropology courses at all, no language courses worth bothering with, and so remembering Ernest she begins to take math, biology, physics. It's physics that captures her mind, in the end, although she can’t explain why even to herself. What they teach her is so painfully simple, but she thinks she can see something grander hidden within it, lurking behind the equations in her books.
At the end of her first term, she sends off an application to Cornell’s undergraduate physics program.
She picked Cornell more or less on a whim, because she likes that it has women’s dormitories and no denominational ties and, more importantly, it’s across the country, as far away from Colorado Springs and Ernest’s ghost as her limited funds will take her. And she gets in, even wins a scholarship, because there’s a war on and the boys in the trenches are in no position to be studying, and besides, her marks are excellent.
Father makes vague noises about being proud of her, but doesn’t she really think this is a little drastic? But Father’s mind has been a million miles away since Ernest’s accident, and in the end she leaves home with relatively little fuss.
And then the war is over, and suddenly the boys from the trenches have plenty of time to study. She doesn’t have the scientific background that most of the boys - men, now, really - have, and it only takes her a term to realise that she doesn’t even have the brains that all of them have. And that’s a bitter pill to swallow, to realise that her mind, which had always carried her so easily wherever she wished to go, would never be able to leap as lightly through numbers as her classmates' can.
But if they could run faster, she’d run harder. Late nights in the library, early mornings pacing the paths as her mind chews over some particularly hoary bit of math, and at the end of her first year she surprises them all by taking fifth in her class. Next year, she’s third. The year after, she slips to fourth, but she doesn’t mind ceding her place to smiling, round-faced Owen. The grade on her papers matters less than the knowledge in her head.
In her fourth year, Dr. Walter Morrison, who helped her fight her way through his class on special relativity and then began making pointed noises about graduate school, hears that her money is all but gone and promptly hires her on as an assistant. And so she finds herself in front of his first year Physics class, delivering a stern speech on academic integrity and walking them through the syllabus.
Automatically, she looks for and finds the rare few female faces in the crowd. Three this year, not a bad number, although she’s not certain they’ll all last out the term. Catherine hates to admit it, but there’s a certain type of girl that tends of succeed in these classes: quiet, bookish, with a hint of steel beneath their skin and something burning in their eyes, driving them onward. Tiny Doris Daugherty, with her dowdy clothes and grim-set jaw, fits the image perfectly. Doris will go far. Lillian Mullins has the bookish part down, but there’s no passion in her eyes, and Catherine mentally writes her off.
And Susan Pevensie… Susan Pevensie is a mystery, one that half her male students can’t seem to take their eyes off. Dr. Morrison has warned her about Susan in advance, in his clumsy but well-meaning way. Lost her family, he says. Terrible accident. Using the inheritance to put herself through school. Thought you two might have something in common, yes? And because Dr. Morrison has been kind to her, Catherine agrees to try to… she’s not sure what. Guide the girl? Comfort her? Deliver some kind of speech about pluck and integrity and oh, by the way, the pain will never go away, but I recommend studying until you’re so tired you can’t think about it even if you want to, that’s what always worked for me…
Her eyes drift back to Susan time and again as the class drags on. The girl meets no one’s gaze, but instead sits straight and proud, and takes meticulous notes. Catherine catches a glimpse of her tidy, well-formed handwriting, and thinks it belongs in a love letter, not a notebook of equations. When Susan speaks, it’s in a soft, accented voice, and her hair is pinned up in the latest style. There’s an uncertain look about her, with maybe just a hint of fear, as if she isn’t sure what she’s gotten herself into.
Catherine doesn’t know what to make of her.
Class is over, and her students are filing out, filling the air with bright excitement and complaints, murmured where they think she can’t hear, when Catherine realises Susan is standing here with arms wrapped tight around her textbooks.
“Can I help you?” Catherine asks, automatically.
Susan clutches the text to her chest, knuckles white with nerves. There’s a faint indent on her ring finger, where an engagement band might have sat. “I was wondering… I was wondering if you knew anything about the multiverse theory.”
“Parallel universes?” Catherine asks. “Are you looking for me to recommend some books, or do you just want my opinion?”
“Either,” says Susan. “Both. All of it.” And there, gleaming behind her eyes, is something hard and fierce. A haughtiness like a queen’s. A courage like a soldier’s.
“I’m heading back to my office,” says Catherine, after a moment, mentally placing Susan with grim-eyed Doris on her list of students worth watching. “Well. It’s more of a closet, but - we can talk there.”
It’s the first of many conversations, and soon Catherine finds herself at the limits of what she can teach the girl. Susan’s obsession is with other worlds, worlds so close one could reach out and very nearly touch them, and the intensity with which she pursues every new scrap of knowledge would put Catherine to shame if she didn’t know that Susan’s coursework suffered for it. She suspects that her own coursework, on the other hand, may be improving, the inevitable result of trading off the last of her leisure time for afternoons spent in the library with Susan, bouncing ideas off one another.
Catherine graduates, and those afternoons with Susan must have been worth something after all, because she’s second in her year, so close to taking first that it drives her to distraction wondering if just a little more work might have won her the number one spot. She’d have been worlds less frustrated to find herself resting comfortably at fifth or sixth, she confides to Susan, and the two of them celebrate - and commiserate - over drinks that night.
Catherine is amused to discover that with three glasses of wine in her, the infamously poised Susan Pevensie fully reverts to the vacant, wide-eyed flirt she’d sometimes lapsed into during that first term at Cornell. At five glasses of wine, the wide-eyed flirt gives way to a clever, sharp-tongued young lady who curses like a sailor and feels no apparent need to conceal her contempt for the intellect of those around her. The gaggle of young men who’d been drawn in by her fluttering disperse with all due haste.
At eight glasses, Susan grows quiet, gains a calm collection that Catherine isn’t used to seeing in drunks. She sips her wine with dignity, and continues sipping until, with very little fuss, she tips sideways and slides to the floor. Catherine hauls her home and puts her to bed, feeling protective and put-upon in equal measures. “We were queens, once,” Susan slurs, as Catherine pulls her shoes off. “They gave up on me, but I - I - God, Lucy, why did you have to go?”
Catherine wants to ask, the next morning, what Susan had meant - but she sees the shame and pain and pride in Susan’s eyes and has to look away, words unspoken. She goes home and works on her application for graduate studies instead; she wants to research wormhole theory with Dr Morrison. The idea is one she stumbles across during a long night in the library with Susan. The other woman scorns wormholes for not fitting her own strange rules of the right ways to reach another world, but the idea appeals to Catherine’s imagination, sinks its hold into her endless curiosity. Idle sketches begin to appear in the margins of her notebooks, and it will be nearly a year before she realises how much they resembled the stone ring Father had uncovered at Giza.
And somehow, when Catherine isn’t paying attention, Susan becomes... not exactly what Catherine would call a friend. The younger woman is too strange, even by the standards of physicists, too fixated on her multiverse experiments, too aloof even in moments of emotion. But in time they become something more than just colleagues. Compatriots, perhaps - fellow citizens of the mad world in their heads. Two wild-eyed women with tragic pasts and pet theories, prone to dropping by each other’s homes at preposterous hours of the night, dignity dropping away in favour of debating physics with such gleeful volume that Catherine is surprised the neighbours don’t complain.
“Am I crazy?” Susan asks one day, as they sit on Catherine’s ancient sofa, sipping coffee.
“If you are, we all are,” Catherine replies, automatically flip.
Susan doesn’t seem to hear her. “It’s just that some days, I wonder... because when the accident happened, I lay down in bed, and I didn’t move for three days. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still just lying in a white room somewhere. The poor mad girl who couldn’t cope.”
This time, Catherine does her the courtesy of answering seriously. “Why? What makes you fear it?”
Susna laughs - a short, unhappy sound. “The things in my head, Catherine - the things I believe, they’re...”
Catherine thinks of Ernest. Of Father. Of her own mad wormhole theories, slowly taking shape in her mind and haunted, ever haunted, by the ring from Giza, dribs and drabs of overheard childhood conversations beginning to coalesce in her head to form something so grand she hardly dared think it. “I’m starting to wonder,” she says, after a long moment, “if ‘crazy’ is just another word for ‘genius’. If you’re wrong, they’ll say you were mad. But if you’re right...”
Susan smiles a funny smile, and then says, as if quoting someone, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either she’s lying, or she’s mad, or she’s telling the truth.”
“Who said that?” Catherine asks, curious.
“A very wise man,” Susan answers, and then stands. “Enough chit-chat, Cat. Time for us to get back to work.” crossposted from Dreamwidth |
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