Pretend To Be Nice (1)

Science! Girl & Chained Lightning #1: Christmas lights and other shock hazards.

Science! Girl & Chained Lightning is a spinoff of Radiance; both stories take place around 2013 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 not-quite-a-couple Dr. Marissa Cotlin and her favorite test subject Baz Grimes, who clearly adore each other but keep finding new and interesting ways to avoid getting the point across.

A note to the reader: this serial is written to a slightly higher rating than the rest of Radiance is. There will be mentions of sex and instances of violence, sensuality, and moderate language. It also contains some critical information for the main plot; however, it can still be skipped if you don’t mind getting the recaps alongside Christa later.

Previously, Baz and Marissa shared some cute moments, but were last seen fighting bitterly over how much he worries about her; four weeks later, they have yet to make up. This time, can they manage it?

<to Radiance #4 || Directory || to Science! Girl #2>

Marissa Cotlin didn’t care what anybody said. Christmas started on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and she had her entire childhood to prove it.

Thursday: Turkey, football, and washing every single dish in the house.

Friday: Coming home from shopping to wash at least half of the dishes all over again.

Saturday: Helping Mom haul the decorations in from the garage so her in-laws would take the hint and leave.

Sunday: Mexican hot chocolate and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The routine was crystallized into her bones, even though she hadn’t been home for a holiday in years (since the replacement of Dad with Craig, she was now the unwelcome in-laws) and rarely managed to scrape together more than five people for Friendsgiving. Of all people, Marissa thought she should be able to get a dinner party together, but once she was through undergrad it had somehow stopped working out. Her New York friends had been nerds and obsessives who could barely be counted on to know when it was Thursday; her DC friends were, for the most part, either too dysfunctional or too disassociated to care. This year, she hadn’t even bothered to try.

“That’s what you get when you take on pro-jects,” Marissa sang to herself, because her Christmas playlist had finished up at some point and the 8tracks autoplay had missed the memo that today was not the day for Paramore.¹ Now that it had her attention, she rolled up from the floor with a groan and went to find her phone so she could change it.

Over the last five years, having taken an internship that turned out to also be an opening for tech support, scientist wrangling, emergency first aid, and amateur social work, Marissa had found herself slowly adding to the start-of-Christmas routine. She still did her own decorating on the weekend, but around 6 AM on Monday she would turn her attention to the office. What had begun as a patchy little Charlie Brown tree in the first cubicle they’d called a waiting room was now a full-sized faux balsam fir for the lobby, with all the trimmings. Dr. Marcos would inevitably come in first thing and complain that Christmas wasn’t for another month, and everyone with super-strength or telekinesis would act offended that she’d put it up without them…but she’d see more smiles during December than the whole rest of the year. Even from Sebastian.

Marissa hesitated between playlists at the thought of—well, what could you call him? Just trying to pin it down was so uncomfortable that she’d come to do her best not to. He wasn’t exactly a colleague, although they did technically pay him to be a test subject. She supposed that at this point he was functionally their head of security, but he came and went like a cat you’d fed once without realizing it wanted to adopt you. Calling him a friend made the recurring ball of stress in her left calf cramp up. Calling him her crush was a mortifyingly adolescent way to put it, and not the kind of thing she ever wanted to do out loud by accident. Nope. No good options.

She picked something blindly and shoved her phone in her pocket on her way back to the box of string lights under the tree, humming along now to “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays”. She was about to get on the ladder to start at the top when the Bluetooth speaker beeped, demanding she check her texts.

Messages: Dumb Ass Grimes, PhD

Sebastian: tell me youre going to wait for somebody to help get that tree up this year.

Marissa: bite me

…it never failed. She always hit ‘send’ instead of ‘delete’ at the worst possible time. At the very least, she should have taken more than five seconds to text him back.

There was no fixing it now, so Marissa climbed up and ignored the subsequent beeping as she started tucking the lights into place. She had been trying to talk to Sebastian less often than usual this past month, hoping it would ease the urge to slap him across the face on the occasions that she did. No luck, of course. Not that she had slapped him—but, damn, hadn’t she wanted to.

She’d used to know what to do with him. In fact, she’d even had a plan once. Marissa still remembered meeting Sebastian Grimes for the first time, shoving aside paperwork on the other side of her rented desk to make enough space for him to sit down for the intake interview. His shoulders were stiff, but his electric-blue eyes were downturned and empty. The massive burn running down one side of his body, jutting up above his collar like the tip of an iceberg, hadn’t even hardened into a scar yet. He should have intimidated her; she found herself drawn to him, instead. He’d seemed so young. In hindsight, so was she. Twenty-five, a little ditzy, still cute, and honestly believing she could use this job just to supplement her stipend, just until she got the degree that would finally prove she knew what she was doing. She’d really thought she would be able to get on with her life and walk away from it all someday. In the meantime, all she could see was his pain, and she desperately wanted to help.

She had made a deal with herself: anything she might do that didn't raise her PI’s eyebrows was fair game, just so long as she could keep her emotional involvement to a minimum. And thank God, the man had come through there with the assist of the century. Marissa had probably spent more time feeling irritated with him than anything else. By rights, she should have stopped wanting to go out of her way for him a long time ago.

Still, she’d kept on doing her best. And why was that? Because of a fantasy that someday Sebastian might get serious enough to appreciate her? Because she liked his face and it hurt to see it sag into vacancy?

Might that not be, just possibly, an indication of some emotional involvement, Marissa?

She tugged on a snarl of lights and reflected bitterly that it didn’t matter much either way—not anymore, at least, if it ever had. This whole year had been one rocky downhill slope, so gentle at first that she hadn’t even noticed, let alone pieced together what it would mean. Baz’ flirtation with vigilantism, recruiting the new kid and then his sister when nobody else wanted to take his concerns seriously. A joke here or there about Marissa’s relative helplessness. The misfire of Formula 84, screwing up something in his pituitary that saw him growing half an inch and gaining twenty pounds of muscle before they got it straightened out. Those jokes merging into a running joke, which she wasn’t laughing at anymore. Chained Lightning. Chained Lightning’s fangirls, and an additional layer of smug cockiness that made her suspect he knew about them. The laws of electricity giving up on him altogether after the second dose of Formula 86. The shift from making light of her problems to the suggestion, and then the insistence, that she needed his help.

Marissa had never come close to giving Sebastian a normal life. Instead, she’d turned him into a custom-built superhero. He was everything she wanted in a man—but permanently out of reach. She wondered sometimes if he had any idea how easily he could turn her life inside-out, if he could only find it in himself to make the flirting believable.

But it wasn’t believable, and that was the problem.

She had started to reflect more and more often that creating an online alter-ego to run PR would have been a great idea if it were only Lady Radiance she was dealing with. Her fans were mostly decent about the whole thing, and Christa’s last career had given her an instinct for OPSEC that Sebastian (given his last career) had absolutely no excuse for lacking.

Christa, for example, would have waited until she was out of the costume to start an argument about acceptable distances to watch fights from. By the time Jacob had dropped the TMZ link in the group chat, dubbing Marissa “Science! Girl” in honor of her misidentification as a well-known pop-science Youtuber, the photo had already been on Tumblr for a week. She’d scrubbed her selfies in a panic on day one, but she might as well not have bothered; for once, nobody cared who Chained Lightning had been seen with. Random girls were per se irrelevant to most of his fans, who preferred to think he was gay. The rest took just enough time out of tearing each other to shreds to gang up and laugh at the OP for suggesting the woman in the picture as a person of interest. *That* one? And our boy? Um, sweetie, are you serious?

Marissa would have written them off—well, she would have tried, anyway—but she knew they had a point. She’d blinked and she was thirty, and so stressed out that she knew she looked older than that. She kept so busy being everyone’s mother hen that there was nothing left for herself. She did eat like a raccoon. Sometimes she woke up at two in the morning to find she’d passed out at her desk, and when she went for her last haircut, the stylist had tried to upsell her on dyeing over her grays. The irony, of course, was that Sebastian was one of the people she did it for, while all that time he’d been developing into some kind of scruffy electric demigod. No matter what angle she approached it from, she saw no way that she could ever be his equal again. And into all of this, drop his sudden switch from teasing her about things that didn’t matter to teasing her about that.

She didn’t know if there was a way for this to hurt more, but if there was, she could trust him to find it.

Behind the music, a car door shut out in the parking lot. Marissa pulled her phone back out to check that text, clenching her jaw and inhaling slowly, because it was still too early for Lautaro to be here.

Messages: Dumbass Grimes, PhD

Sebastian: alrighty then.

Fine. She probably deserved this.

Marissa made sure she was off the ladder by the time Sebastian walked in, facing pointedly away as she crouched down to fiddle with the lowest branches. Something that felt like a ball of paper bounced sharply off the back of her head. “And now you’re dead. Don’t turn your back on a door like that.”

“I knew it was you,” she said without turning around.

“Was it, huh? Or was it my evil twin from Dimension X?”

She closed her eyes and bit the insides of her cheeks so she wouldn’t smile, because she was trying to be mad at him, and the jerk didn’t deserve it. “Definitely you. There’s always a tell with extradimensional evil twins.”

“Like what?” Sebastian had come up next to her, his footsteps as heavy as ever. She supposed he must have adjusted since those first few times of sneaking up without meaning to. She’d been a lot jumpier then. It was funny now to think that her first impression had been of a man considerate to the point of deference.

Rather than leave him there standing over her, Marissa opened her eyes again and stood up. “Like…is one of those for me?”

“Well,” he said, checking the labels on the coffee cups in their cardboard carrier, “I was gonna drink ’em both and make you watch. I guess I could share, since you asked.”

“I dunno. You sharing anything sounds like a real evil twin move.” Marissa accepted the cup and took a careful sip that she nearly choked on. It was her high-maintenance-girlfriend-level coffee order, two or three modifications north of a secret menu item that nobody had even been trained on in two years. The one so annoying that she tipped 100% and only ordered it when she was alone, so she didn’t ruin her image. She drank again slowly, just to check. “...how.”

Sebastian smiled softly, for once, over his cup. “The girl knows you, so I just asked for whatever you usually get.” 

“Oh. Um, thanks.” 

“No problem.” The conversation could have been perfect if he’d stopped right there, but his mouth quirked, and her heart sank. “But she does think I’m your boyfriend now.”

That. That was exactly what she meant. Dangling the thing she wanted most in the world right over her head, knowing she couldn’t jump high enough to take it. If Sebastian had even once spoken seriously to her under a smile, maybe Marissa could have disregarded the smirk now crinkling up one side of his stupid handsome face. Maybe then she could have believed that it was fondness in his eyes, and not her flailing heart making up what it wanted to see…but she knew from experience what lay on the other side of falling for any of his lines. He was just waiting for her to blush, or get angry, or summon something wittily deflating in reply.

It was bait. That was all. 

Marissa took all her gathering rage and shoved it away, forcing the best air of indifference she could manage—anything to avoid giving him what he wanted. “So?”

“Heh. Could do worse, I guess,” he said, still smiling.

“What—you, or me?”

There was no right answer. Maybe Sebastian knew that, because he just laughed quietly and turned to look at the tree, ringed by darkened mini-bulbs. “You did test those before you put ’em on, right?”

“…no,” she admitted. The universe could never have just given her this one thing. Of course, with him checking behind her, she’d forgotten the most critical step.

Sebastian set his coffee down on one of the low tables and went to examine the outlet before plugging the lights in. The second he did, Marissa wanted to kick herself. Two long stretches were flashing, and the steady one in between them had several bulbs out. Being distracted, she’d missed covering a whole chunk of one side. And something was wrong with the wires, because the top three feet of the tree weren’t lit up at all.

She stepped forward to start taking the setup apart. “I’ll—"

“Don’t you dare,” Sebastian said, already pulling over the box of spare bits and bulbs. “I’ll fix them. Go find something useful to do.”

Marissa scowled silently and withdrew to the stack of storage bins waiting on the other wall, taking her coffee with her. The cardboard box on top had been sitting on her desk for a few weeks now, the sign taped to its side now a familiar November companion: Bring in a holiday ornament if you want it up! Write your initials on it if you want it back! ~ DR. MANAGEMENT ❤ The additions would inevitably keep coming until December 24 or so, but she liked to have a good stock to start with. Looking in, she spotted Christa’s first, a midcentury starburst design wrapped up in paper because the glitter was no longer staying on so well. Marissa unwrapped it carefully and eyed the tree for a minute before deciding on a spot. If Sebastian minded her stepping around him to get to it, he didn’t complain, so she went ahead and started in on the rest of the box.

She always got a pretty wide selection of dark humor—a glass salamander from Emily the reluctant amphibian, for example. There were also quite a few X-Men this year, and two or three Supermen in Santa hats. Some of them were honestly nice, though, like Anton’s “2 Years Sober” and the “Baby’s 1st X-Mas” framed ultrasound that Jamil had proudly pushed into her hands just last week—and she loved the contribution from the ad-hoc Wednesday support group: a whole string of tiny Christmas sweaters with their initials knitted in.

“You know, I think this is why I do what I do,” Marissa said, holding up one of the sweater ornaments.

“Hmm?”

She waved the sweater back and forth to see if it would divert Sebastian’s attention from the bulb he was replacing. “Seeing people get better, even if we don’t have a cure yet. It makes everything else worth it.”

He glanced up with a look that suddenly melted away what was left of her frustration with him. Why? How? “You make a difference to a lot of people, Rissa,” he said, eyes on his work again.

That was just completely unfair. Marissa stumbled over a response, choked on the heartbeat in her throat, and changed the subject. “…how’re the lights coming?”

“Oh, fine. I’m not sure about these, though.” He shifted a step higher on the ladder and tugged at the darkened strands by way of illustration—Marissa supposed one benefit of being Chained Lightning was that he didn’t have to unplug things while troubleshooting—before starting to investigate. “Could be a blown fuse, or…aha. Nah, you’ve got a break in the wirin’.”

She crossed her arms, trying not to show her disappointment. “So they’ll need replacing?”

Sebastian popped open a section of plastic insulation with a pocketknife and tugged out the frayed wire ends. “Nope,” he said. “Give me five minutes and you should be good.”

“Thanks,” Marissa said, smiling.

He smiled back sincerely and, surely without meaning to, nearly took the legs out from under her. “’Course.”

He wasn’t allowed to be charming like that. As a last resort to get her face under control, Marissa slowly edged out of his line of sight and buried herself in adding ornaments to the other side of the tree. She would have stayed back there for longer, but the rest of the lights flickered on, and she heard the snap of electrical tape and a lazy tap against the side of the ladder to discharge any remaining current. “How’s it look?” Sebastian asked.

Marissa stepped back and adjusted two strands to cover the spot she’d missed. “It’s perfect.”

He stepped down and pulled something out of his pocket. “Great. Here.” She put her hands out instinctively and caught a small, shallow square box. “You can put it up,” he said. “Y’know. If it looks okay.”

That didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but Marissa split the tape with her thumbnail and lifted the lid anyway, breaking into a grin. “I love it,” she said. With the thin ribbon between her fingers, a metal lightning bolt stamped with a chainmail pattern twisted slowly back and forth, catching colors from the lights. “So you’re leaning into this?”

Sebastian ran one hand through his hair, leaving it to fall back static-wispy across his forehead. “Yeah, uh…might’s well.”

It clicked for her that he looked nervous.

“The paperwork’s probably gonna hit your desk today,” he said. “I'm droppin’ out of the study.”

If Marissa hadn’t managed to physically bite her tongue in surprise, she didn't know what she’d have said to that. Of course she should have seen this coming. It was the logical conclusion that she’d all but come to herself already: he was comfortable enough with his powers that he no longer felt the need to get rid of them. He didn’t need their help anymore. He didn’t need her.

She’d always known that nothing was permanent, that even if she did catch him, someday he would leave—but she had never prepared.

“Why?” she said, forcing her voice into something calmer than she felt. She was sure her face didn’t match it. “Sebastian, you always said you just wanted your old life back. There has to be something that’ll work on you, and we can find it. We will…”

He was shaking his head gently, shifting closer. The smile was back. Nothing about this added up. “I like this life better,” he said.

Sebastian reached across her for the bolt still dangling, forgotten, from her hand. The closeness on top of everything else held her still; her eyes tracked his splaying fingers, her face felt a sudden warmth as his shoulder approached her cheek. She glanced back towards his face and found him looking directly at her, turning—

Marissa jerked back from the shock before she had processed anything about it. That came all in quick succession—a split-second tingling in her thumb, her own reflexive “Ow,” then the noise of the ornament hitting the floor.

In the background, Sebastian spit one of the most creatively profane things she'd heard from him in a while and smacked the ladder again before reaching back for her hand. “Let me see it,” he said.

“No, it’s fine—”

“Let me see.”

Marissa surrendered her hand and kept looking down as he pushed back the sleeve of her sweater, turning her arm over to check it. Competing desires screamed at each other in her head, and she hated herself for all of them. “It’s fine,” she said dizzily, setting her other hand on his wrist. “It was static. Normal stuff.”

She flinched as he pressed at the edge of a two-day-old burn on her palm. “You’re burnt.” Sebastian sounded like he was trying to talk around broken glass. When she looked up, his face was white and taut.

“Yeah. I’m an idiot who forgot the burner was on,” she said, feeling her face get hotter. “What about it?”

“I just thought—” His finger hovered above it. “You’re sure you’re not—I didn’t hurt you.”

Marissa pushed his hand away. She didn’t know if she could take any more of this without breaking down one way or another. “I said so already. You’re not pushing current at me, are you?”

“No,” he said.

“Not running high voltage?”

“No—”

“Then of course you didn’t hurt me, dipshit,” Marissa snapped. She couldn’t see why they were having this conversation. She knew Sebastian inside and out—literally, she was one of three people in this world who knew about the complex mutations on his myelin sheathing and the “heart murmur” you just had to tune out of the ECG. If she’d thought he could have hurt her, she wouldn’t even have been in the room. “What’s your problem? It’s not your job to worry about me.”

“Not this again,” Sebastian said, stepping back as she pulled her sleeve back down. “If anyone has a problem, it’s you. What d’you have to be so defensive for?”

She folded her arms tightly across her stomach, biting back everything she really wanted to say because there wasn’t any point. “None of your business.”

He was walking away, moving behind her so she was no longer between him and the door. “Oh, so there is a reason, but you’re just not tellin’ me.”

“Of course there’s…what, did you think I just enjoy getting worked up over nothing?” Marissa said, her lip curling as she turned to follow him over her shoulder. “I hate this. I used to like hanging out with you.”

Sebastian half turned back, hands in his pockets. “Used to, huh?”

“Yeah.” Which one of them was more responsible for ruining what had once passed for a friendship? Hard to say. Probably her. That didn’t mean she wasn’t angry with him about it too. “You know, before you started—hovering.”

“All right,” he said, pulling a tight, ironic smile. “Forget about it, then. I’ll see you around.”

When he was gone, Marissa picked up the nearby coffee moodily and got one swallow down before realizing it was Sebastian’s. He’d fixed it the way he liked it, for once.

He must have been in a good mood. Happy to be done with all this, she supposed.

The front door slid open again, and Dr. Marcos came in, already pulling his hat and scarf off, about to be lost somewhere between here and his office door if she didn’t intervene. “Marissa, good morning…”

“Morning.” She forced a smile, suddenly aware of Michael Bublé in the background, taunting her with wintry joys that had evaporated from the room. “I know, it’s barely Advent.”

He shook his head as he walked past her. “Today I won’t complain. You look like you need it.”

<to Radiance #4 || Directory || to Science! Girl #2>

Thanks for reading! Tune in next week to see how I dig them out of this one... Science! Girl is posting weeklyish through the beginning of October, when we’ll wrap it up and return to Lady Radiance’s rather more serious problems.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can show it by leaving a like or comment, sharing this post, or just continuing to read. :) Everyone’s welcome in the fan club!

1. “That’s What You Get” (2007)