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The thought strikes you as you’re standing in Isaac’s room, helping him sort himself into his professor’s robe, the one he still fidgets in no matter how long he’s taught at the university, no matter how much he’s proven to be worthy of what the garment means.
Isaac staring quietly at you with his cherry-blossom eyes, sharp and smart; you’re fixing up his tie from below. The tuft of brown hair he tugs at when he’s nervous frames the side of his face. His adorable face: partly seeming crafted, created into perfection, the curve of his jaw, the set of his eyebrows; and partly born of the universe, the little freckles on the tops of his cheeks, the way he smiles a little lopsidedly if you look close enough—
You come to the realization that next to Isaac, you are awfully—almost embarrassingly—plain.
You try not to focus on it too much, but it takes over all rational thought without much grace. Staring at yourself in front of the mirror at the la thermae, you spend a few extra minutes cringing at your reflection. Unlike him, you weren’t exactly one that would be called a “natural beauty.” Sure, your features are a little different from what is to be expected from a 19th century Frenchwoman—and you like to think that’s a plus—but you were otherwise… pretty normal, and at best nondescript. Definitely, not the kind of face one remembers, not the one that lingers in one’s memory after having seen it in passing. You could make up for it with your clothes, as Le Comte is as generous as it gets when it comes to providing for you the most in-fashion of clothing, but there’s only so much that fabric can do, too. In this century… dressing sharp is average.
And your smarts won’t necessarily save you either. You weren’t an idiot—or at least you like to think so—but you were far from a genius, nothing as extraordinary as the rest of the mansion residents are, at least. (Or maybe just for now. Who knows?) Sure, maybe you know just a smidgen more than the rest of them about the new technologies that are to develop in the next hundred years—you can only imagine what it would be like having a conversation with Jean about smart home appliances—but beyond that, you were hardly a master of anything. For sure you’ve got your niche interests and knowledge, but—
After that, you’re not really anyone special.
Your heart twinges at the mere thought of it.
You are nothing but just painfully average.
And Isaac is brilliance personified.
It is a three-step process.
Well, it’s a never-ending process, really, in your head, knowing you will spend much of your life compensating, but for now, you decide on three specific things you feel like you can improve yourself on, for Isaac’s sake.
You make a bee-line to the kitchen the next morning, right on time for breakfast.
After you and Isaac got together, you started to spend more and more time with him instead of working all your hours at the mansion with Sebastian. The butler didn’t mind, of course, and neither did Le Comte. Breakfast duty was one of the things you usually now missed, in preference of staying in bed with Isaac a little longer. The kitchen is Sebastian’s domain anyway; you really preferred just working as a sort of sous chef, or really just an extra pair of hands.
So when you approached him to ask him for a favor, to give you some tips and tricks on cooking better, he looked you up and down with a calculating gaze you could feel pass right through you.
Sebastian is skilled with both spices and knives. That, matched with his little schtick of being a disciplinarian, you’d really rather not, but—
“For Sir Isaac, perhaps?” he asks, turning around to spare you his gaze.
You pout in indignation. “A-and if it is?”
“No need for embarrassment, it’s a good effort.”
He hands you a little notebook to write your newly-learned recipes in. Phase one, check.
The next is a little more complicated.
Isaac isn’t the most graceful dancer in the mansion, and he will always say how he doesn’t enjoy it, but you’ve caught his expression on the days you went out on a ball night with him for this event or that. You know that he has—if not enjoyment—a fascination for the dancing, at the very least. What better way to make him enjoy it a little bit more than getting better at it? Surely, the experience would be a lot smoother if you weren’t constantly tripping over your feet the entire time.
And sure, both of you have had some dance practice experience with each other, but—
“It’ll be my pleasure, ma cherie,” Le Comte says, that ever-knowing smile painted on his face. You know with that expression that he wants to tease; wants to force you to admit that you’re doing it for your lover. But even if he doesn’t, the flush rises to your cheeks undeniably, anyway.
Le Comte leads the dance confidently as he always does, laughing politely every time you step on his feet. The music sways the both of you. He compliments you on how well you’ve unraveled Isaac to be a little more confident. Says maybe you should teach him as well; you answer that learning together is one of the most fun things to do with your beloved. Phase two, check.
And lastly…
You go to the library, the shelves ordered in a way you’ve long memorized, and pull out an old copy of a book you would not have dared read cover to cover if you were still in the present. …or future. In the 21st century. You’ve gotten permission from Le Comte to use it as you please, and you’ve gone ahead and sharpened the few pencils you’ve found laying around. The book is heavy and daunting, and it doesn’t look friendly at all, but you carry the volume anyway, heading off to your room with an unmatchable determination.
For Isaac, you tell yourself, I have to be worthy of Isaac.
Isaac doesn’t know when it started, but he’s definitely noticed that you’ve been a little busier lately. Always spending time in the kitchen, always excusing yourself out of his room to do “a chore” when usually you’d rather be spending time with him doing… well, even nothing, really. It makes him suspicious—the familiar gnawing of insecurity inside his chest—but he doesn’t not trust you, so he does not bring it up whenever the two of you talk, does not make it obvious that he knows something is up.
He does keep his eyes peeled though.
Catches you in the middle of the night in the kitchen, gathering the ingredients together for what you’ll bring as lunch the next day; a little notebook with scribbles in your hand as you’re measuring this and that, laying them out on the counter neatly. Spots you in the library in between the bookshelves, crouched, and running your fingers gently over the books’ delicate spines. Hears from the ever-gossipy Arthur that you’ve been spending afternoons in Le Comte’s room being tutored for dancing—that makes him just a tiny bit jealous.
But it doesn’t click.
At least, not until he catches you in your bedroom, head curled forward onto your arms on the desk, a new copy of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica serving as your rather uncomfortable pillow. There’s the tiniest sound of your snoring. A pencil has rolled off of your desk onto the floor, and he can catch the vaguest of scribbling on the book’s pages, little notes in your neat handwriting.
His heart squeezes in his chest near painfully.
He can be oblivious, but not tonight. He knows that if you really wanted to learn about physics, you would have asked him—the way you’re always grasping curiously at the world, the way that leaves him floored. And he would have taught you, poured hours in the evenings going over laws and theories until you were satisfied.
But this isn’t about physics.
He brushes off the stray lock of hair that had fallen over your face, tucking it behind your ear. Isaac knows just how much you mean to him, is fully aware of the space you occupy in his heart, even if sometimes even he is surprised by it. But his anxieties bite at the corner of his mind whenever he thinks about the opposite; about you; about how you feel for him; about the unevenness. His third law of motion asserts that when two objects interact, they apply forces to each other of equal, opposite magnitude—but does that apply to things like these? If they do, and if you are always giving and giving and giving so much—how ever will he give back?
When you’re giving him the universe, what else can he provide in return?
Isaac is not good with his words, not in the way he wishes he were. His head is always all computations and mechanisms, all science and never the kind of lovely things he knows are always in yours. He knows he is doomed for the rest of his life searching for the right words to tell you the things he feels.
Tonight, he’ll spend the next few hours watching you sleep, patching words together like a one-year-old still trying to learn how to use language to tell you that you do not need to be anything more. You can have two left feet forever and he will still dance with you. You can burn everything you make him and he will still eat it with much delight. And physics and math can stop making sense forever and he will still know you.
That he loves you.
You are enough and have always been enough. And sure, his life may have fallen off-center, not the boring, static equilibrium now that he’s with you—but the world has always been in some sort of chaos. That, he knows. That, science knows. And he’d gladly be in chaos if it means he gets to spend his life with you.
When you wake up, he’ll tell you. For now, there is only the resulting, opposite force of you loving him with all you can do—one he collapses into a small forehead kiss, lifting you up in his arms, carrying you off to his bed.