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“Question.”
Higgs perks and looks back at Sam over his shoulder. Shadowed in a divot beneath a jutting cliff-face and the twilight sky creeping towards evening, his outline is tinged blue by the glow of his cuff-link display, idling as they wait to wait out the coming timefall. They’re a half-day away from any civilization and Higgs had sensed that the storm was something they didn’t want to get caught riding in — they’ll be cornered up here through the night.
“Shoot.”
“The name ‘Higgs’ — like, the physicist?”
Higgs quirks a brow and snickers. Sam shrugs. Maybe it’s an out-dated, out-of-place question when they’ve been together for months, why now — but why not? They’ve got time to kill, and he’ll take any distraction from the anxiety gnawing at his stomach with this delayed delivery.
“More the particle that was named after him. But yeah.”
“Why?”
Seeing Higgs’ expression flicker, Sam immediately moves to correct himself. To avoid that dark ghost of a road.
“I meant— where did it come from? How’d you learn about that stuff? Physics?”
Registering his meaning with a blink, Higgs hums and taps his fingers for a moment in thinking.
He starts, “When I was fourteen, I read–” then suddenly falters, mouth closing and pulling tight, brows furrowing. Sam can hear the deliberation in his drumming fingers, and his own interest beating with them. Then Higgs sharply snaps his wrist and the holo-display blinks away, tucks his fist under his chin, eyes cast down and lost to the rocky earth. Sam’s heart picks up, watching, feeling the familiar tension of something being cracked and crumbled to reveal new surfaces. Higgs begins again, softer.
“Momma. I never knew much about Momma. Daddy didn’t like talking about her — well, about Dad even less, my actual dad, so I didn’t know who my parents were, what they were like, what they did. Daddy only cared to tell me all the worst things. But one day, I was trying to spruce up the pigsty a bit when I came across a box, about armful size and dense, with her name on it. Feeling like I’d found the holiest of relics, I took and stashed it under my bed til Daddy passed out a few nights later.”
The memories are reliving themselves in Higgs’ eyes, and Sam’s curiosity’s leadened to dread. The ache in his chest urges him to shuffle over and chase them away, but he knows the unbreachable space he’s opened up, and silently kicks himself. Inadvertently bringing up Higgs’ parents and childhood wasn’t what he’d expected.
“It had a bunch of shit in it. But anyway, most of it was books and papers — and most of that was physics stuff. Research, textbooks, articles — some of them with her name on the cover. That’s how I found out that Momma was a physicist. Pretty damn hard to believe, considering my uncle, I’d figured she was like him, but no, not at all. She’d made a name for herself. Was a part of the world. Did important work.”
The quiet hangs for a long moment, only wavered by the thunder rumbling on the horizon.
“There wasn’t much to do locked down in that shithole bunker, so I spent a lot of time reading what was there, most of it a few times over. But, I could never understand any of the math, and Daddy sure as hell couldn’t teach me, so it was mostly a – conceptual understanding. Trying to read behind the lines and stitch something together. It was all kinda skewed, then, like making a picture out of pieces from fifty different puzzles, and having no idea what the picture is supposed to look like. So you make your own meaning out of the mess.”
Higgs’ hands finish vaguely mapping out his words, stilling and slowly curling. Sam shifts his legs and lets his back relax against the trike with a released breath. Everything is starting to lose its silhouette to the dark. Sam lightly startles when Higgs goes on.
“I didn’t take any of it when I left the bunker. Wish to god I had, especially her papers. Maybe I’d understand them better now, or could find someone to explain it to me. Just from what I could grasp at… she must’ve been the smartest person I’d ever met. My momma.”
With a glint of realization, Sam finally speaks, soft but eager.
“With the archives in the network, you could probably find her work, find out more about her. Hell, even find people who knew her.”
Higgs huffs, not looking at him.
“Yeah. Probably.”
Suddenly the heavens split open with a flash that makes Sam flinch. A downpour erupts, cascading in falls over the cliffside sheltering them. It’s drenching the earth a few inches from Higgs. A minute passes before he staggers up, settles himself at Sam’s side just before Sam says something.
“So anyway,” Higgs continues, knees drawn up and arched against the trike’s side, “Momma’s research was about the Higgs Boson more than anything else. First time someone asked me my name after I left the bunker, when I’d been thinking about Momma for days, ‘Higgs’ came to mind, and I stuck with it. It… fit just right, later on.”
Sam can sense the charged tension coiled in Higgs’ skin beside him — it snaps tighter for a moment when Sam breaches it with a touch to his arm, then relents and dissipates, drains off to the sea of unspoken understanding and gratitude they’ve collected between them. Sighing, Higgs lets his head loll to Sam’s shoulder and upturns his hand in an invitation that Sam accepts. The physical, emotional exhaustion hits Sam as Higgs grows heavy against him and he smells the sweat and dirt clinging to his hair. This last run, then they’re taking an extended break. He means it. Doing something for themselves, without the rest of the world’s time and needs constantly ticking over their heads. And tonight? They aren’t going anywhere anyhow. He can swallow down that anxiety and just be here tonight.
“Ever think about going by Peter again?” he asks despite himself. He feels Higgs frown.
“No. Peter died when… when I strangled the life from my uncle, and watched something from the other side rise from his corpse. Peter went with him. And if he didn’t… He sure as hell did after everything else.”
The rain washes down for hours, bringing up the conflicting smell of revitalized earth and rampant decay, with a hint of something unknowable.