8.75 - Happy Together
Radiance #8.75: Welcome home, anyway. I made noodles.
Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.
Science! Girl & Chained Lightning is a spinoff of Radiance; both stories take place around 2014 in a world where atypical abilities have become increasingly common, with the storyline following a group of minor-league superheroes based in Washington, DC. This one is all about belligerent couple Dr. Marissa Cotlin and her (former) favorite test subject Baz Grimes.
Because having a schedule was just too good to be true, I didn’t realize I needed this piece to exist until…just a few days ago. Please enjoy a little air pocket of relief in the great big sea of everything going horribly wrong.1
<#8 // To #8.5 || Directory || #9, Part One>
The door opened and closed, and Marissa’s eyes flew open from a sleep she hadn’t realized she was falling into. Everything hit at once: the pain from sitting too long on the hard kitchen stool, an indescribably disgusting burning smell, the taste of acid crawling up her throat and sudden scream of the smoke alarm…the noise cut off as Sebastian reached up and smacked it with a loud zap. He was already pulling the smoldering potholder off a forgotten stove burner with the other hand.
“Hi,” she said, pausing to cough as she tried to swallow back the acid. “Sorry.”
“Hi.” He turned the burner off and dropped the mess into a pot in the sink that she’d also forgotten about. Baby brain. Mal had warned her, and she hadn’t listened. “Didn’t think you’d be here.”
Marissa slumped forward onto the breakfast bar, dismayed to find the new position wasn’t any more comfortable. “What, was I going to run out on you?”
“You still got your own place.”
“I never really liked it,” she said. “It didn’t feel like home.” The condo had mostly been a place to stare at another screen until she fell asleep, but she had good memories here, in his house. Their house? She wouldn’t have thought of it like that before, but here she was trying to figure out where she could fit a crib. Unbelievable. Three months ago, she didn’t even know what the bedroom looked like.
Sebastian had paused with his hand raised to hang his keys on the hook beside the coffee maker. He looked just as drained as she felt. “That’s fair,” he said. “I don’t mind. Just I would’ve let you know I was comin’ home tonight.”
She offered a transparently put-on smile and her best effort at gesturing towards the stove without pulling her hands out of her sweater sleeves. “Welcome home, anyway. I made noodles.”
He looked like he was about to lose some kind of battle with himself, and it made Marissa wonder what was wrong, because she wasn’t used to being able to push his buttons so easily.
Wait, no, she knew what was wrong: everything. Everything was wrong.
“…just noodles,” he said.
“Yep.”
Sebastian leaned through the lingering haze above the sink and grimaced silently for a full two seconds before seeming to give up on that idea. “You been here by yourself all week?”
“Just since yesterday,” she said. “I mean, I’ve been working most of the time. But Dad stayed for a couple of days…then Clare said she’d keep an eye on me until you got out. And my sister was in town for some conference, so I wasn’t, you know, actually by myself.”
He nodded. “You mean Mallory, or, uh…”
“Morgan, the younger one.” Marissa propped up her chin on her fists. “We were at her wedding.”
“I was distracted,” he said, smiling slightly. “She’s doin’ all right?”
“Yeah, she’s good. Though she seemed concerned that the baby thing might literally be contagious.”
She’d liked seeing Morgan again. Rather than bother reading her into even a fraction of what was going on, Marissa had just let it be a few hours out of the day where she could try to forget the accumulated insanity of the last couple of weeks. Aside from what she physically couldn’t put down, of course.
That part wasn’t all bad. She’d always been an ‘artificial wombs when’ kind of girl, but now that the initial shock had worn off, she was happy knowing there was somebody she had tabs on. Because it seemed like a bad idea to get too close to much in the way of Weird Science for the next few months, ‘working’ this week had mainly meant sitting in her office and training her computer model on the necessary context for thawing out Christa up at Dr. Lee’s. Meanwhile, as she understood it, Sebastian had been shuffled through various states of observation, hospitalization, and interrogation; this was the first she was even seeing of him again. Thinking about the baby, though terrifying, had been a small but real comfort.
Baz hadn’t commented, seemingly intent on peeling some medical tape residue off one of his wrists. He went to walk past her, and she reached out and ran a hand up his arm. “Hey. I missed you.”
He stopped and put his arms around her to pick her up, pulling her up to his level and into a warm, solid embrace; she relaxed into it until she was draped over his shoulders, closing her eyes against the intruding light. He smelled wrong, like antiseptic and bad ventilation, but they would fix that. There were still some things she could fix. “I missed you, too,” he said quietly. “Both’a you.”
Marissa let out the rest of her breath in a shaky sigh, shifting again to curl her arms around his neck. She hadn’t known that she wanted that validation so badly. “Are you happy?” she said.
He kissed her cheek, leaving the skin tingling. “Course I am.”
“You could act like it,” she muttered through a spreading smile.
“Nah,” he said. “That’s your job.” She could hear a smile in his voice too, though, and instead of protesting for her dignity and independence, she let him turn the lights off and carry her to bed.
It took a couple of hours, but Sebastian told her everything, or as close to everything as she was going to get. He started with today—regulatory and classification problems, how seriously he’d been wondering if they were going to let him walk back out of there, a quick joke about the Second Amendment to cover it up. Gradually, as they lay together in the soft close darkness, he worked his way back through the medical and technical implications. There wasn’t much of that she didn’t know already, but she’d wanted to hear it from him, and she’d known he would leave gaps in the reports. He always did. She was just glad he still trusted her, because she didn’t know how he expected her to look out for him otherwise.
When he ran out of words, halfway through his version of the events underground, Marissa rolled over and turned a lamp on. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Baz seemed to think about deflecting, but then simply said, “Thanks.”
“He can’t have you,” she said as she came back to tuck her chin behind his shoulder. “You’re mine.”
He laughed a little, pushing her hair back so he could kiss her. “I don’t think the bad guys are gonna see it that way.”
“I was afraid of that.” Marissa sighed. “You’re going to have to go beat it into their heads, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, probably so.”
“Hmm.” She lay still again for a minute, soaking in the feeling of his hot skin and the spiraling pressure of his fingers on her back. “Well…as long as I get you back.”
“Always,” he said, in a tone that made her think she might never be afraid of anything again.
<#8 // To #8.5 || Directory || #9, Part One>
Thanks for reading! I hope this has been a pleasant break from the drama and turmoil. Radiance will be back tomorrow with Lion-Hearted Girl, Part Two.
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That's romance on my level. Two people who care for each other and share their days.
Romance doesn't always have to involve heated sex with elves. 😏
This is so sweet! I love them. Even when they’re both (but mostly Baz, if we’re being real) punks.