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She’s your professor, and your mentor and you never expect to see her again. She says you have potential and that you’re going places, and she does stick around to see you go to those places, as much as you expected her not to. You’ve never known why she picked you, why out of all of the kids in your classes, why out of all of the grad students that were a little strange but very good at what they did, you are the one that she chooses to keep around. There’s a large part of you that just believes it’s because she is inherently a little strange too, though much less of a fire hazard than you are (at one point you say this and she just smiles and says “no one is as much of a fire hazard as you are.”) She doesn’t like people, this is something you learn very early on, but somehow she doesn’t include you within this, doesn’t view you as the same people that makes her look vaguely disappointed and uncomfortable on a regular basis. Maybe it’s because you can disappear into a corner of the lab for three days at a time, because sometimes you never sleep and sometimes she doesn’t see for twenty-four hours because all of that caffeine and naps on the table caught up to you. Maybe she just appreciates that when you do speak it’s a bit weird and offbeat and the sort of thing that would make anyone else blink and look at you in confusion. Maybe she just likes weird.
Abby is the first friend you ever make, and you don’t know how it works. You don’t have anything to draw on, no past experience, but she doesn’t seem to expect you to know, doesn’t tell you after x amount of time that you were supposed to do this and this and this, she just appreciates that you know her order from the Chinese and sometimes you can tell when she needs it, and those are the times where you specifically ask for extra wontons so she ends up with more than one. She lets you spend hours in the lab or sometimes even days out of the lab, and doesn’t ask where you’ve been when you roll in looking a little worse for wear, doesn’t ask why sometimes you turn up in the middle of the night and just sit in the lab halfheartedly throwing some wrenches around (she doesn’t even complain that you play music louder and louder on those nights). She just watches as you tinker and create and occasionally set fires, and she grins and claps and sometimes even gasps when you show her what you’ve managed to do. She never even asks why you’re here searching for ghosts, what your ghost story is, because she thinks that everyone has one, and hers is Erin.
Erin appears, and yes, she’s pretty and yes you flirt with her and when you think of who you want to tell that you might have met a girl, you just want to tell Dr Gorin, and you don’t want to tell her because you think she’ll be happy for you, you want to tell her so that she thinks of you as someone with a girlfriend, as someone other than that gawky twenty-two year old asleep on a table in her lab. You always wanted her to view you as more, to view you as someone worth her time, worth her time in a way that was not purely scientific, and you never got that far. She phones you, sometimes, to ask how you are, and you tell her about your latest breakthrough and she talks about how lecturing is and the two of you discuss something for a good hour, and somehow she hangs up again without having spoken about anything personal. You don’t think about the nights when you’d been drunk when she’d called, the nights where she’d phone at 7pm and you’d already be four beers down and you’d have to stagger out of the bar to lean against the outside wall so you can concentrate on hearing her distant voice. Those conversations were usually short, but you never remember exactly what you said. You remember department parties while you were doing your PhD, things you’d gotten invited to and gone to and drank more than you should have. Talking to Dr Gorin in dark corners while she smiled and drank too and sometimes wobbled a little, but never wobbled closer to you. There were no almosts, just maybes (and you accept that those maybes were probably just wishful thinking).
You love Patty right away, love the way that she tells you that you’re crazy, that you’re a walking health code violation, that you’re a constant liability. You love that she knows New York this well, you love that she reads constantly, and leaves books all over the lab that you occasionally pick up and attempt to read until your brain gets sidetracked. You don’t like reading when it doesn’t lead to new ideas, it feels like a waste to read solely for that fluttering feeling in your chest that the romances she pretends she doesn’t read give you. You’ve never got on well with people the way that you get on with these, and suddenly you understand everything your mum said about finding your niché, you just never thought that that would be fighting ghosts.
Somehow you don’t manage to tell any of them that she’s coming, can’t bring yourself to, not even when everyone asks what’s wrong, why you’ve been swinging between erratic outbursts and silence at a rate that they haven’t seen, that Abby hadn’t seen since that time that you almost told Dr Gorin that you were in love with her when she phoned while you’d been awake for 40 hours and had needed another caffeine boost. So she appears and she’s so tall and she’s so stern and maybe someone else might say that she’s a little harsh but you know that this is just what she’s like, that this is how she responds to anyone’s work, even her own. She stays for dinner, stays to see you in what is now your natural habitat, and somehow she gets on with everyone, she talks particle physics with Erin, and her and Abby and Patty gang up on you about how you could maybe set less things on fire, and you find yourself thinking that you’d like her to stay here. This is your family now, and there’s always been space for Dr Gorin with you. She listens and she learns and Abby gets excited about a new breakthrough, and you think that maybe your family could do with her expertise when they rewrite their book.
Patty tells you later that she likes her, and the others agree, and you’re glad about that because you really do want to maybe introduce the idea that she becomes a more permanent fixture. She stays at yours, because you never sleep in your bed anyway, and you lay on your sofa that you stole from somewhere at some point and you design something that might do even more damage to ghostly entities than the gun you gave Erin. She gets up at some point, gets a glass of water from your kitchen that you also never use like she’s always lived there, and her hair is messy and loose and the tshirt she’s wearing is too big and her pyjama bottoms a little too short and she tells you to go to sleep already and disappears back into your room. You don’t manage to say anything, but you laugh in a response in a way that makes her roll her eyes as she turns away, and you go back to not sleeping and trying to avoid laughing spontaneously at the thought that she is actually here.
She isn’t surprised when she opens your fridge to find two beers and an out of date yoghurt, and at some point during that day while you were immersed in building the thing that you sketched last night she tells you that your fridge is a little more stocked (you kind of hope that you’ll get back and it’ll just have an added bottle of wine in it, because she may like to think that she’s responsible, but Dr Gorin remembers to eat about as often as you do). You’re not really sure what she does during the rest of the day, because she’s distracting but not as distracting as a new idea, as a new thing to build, but you look up and she’s helping Abby with something, or she’s talking to Patty, or her and Erin are intently squinting at a page of equations, and she fits. You’ve thought it a thousand times since she got here, and you know you’re going to keep thinking it. She works here, with you. With the team. Even though she’s already promised you all that there’s no way anyone’s getting her into some overalls anytime soon, regardless of how she doesn’t even try on a proton pack when it’s offered, citing her age as a reason to keep her out of the field (she’s too curious for this to last, you can tell by the way she looked at your equipment when you were explaining all of the ways in which you’d made them better, by the way that she looked when you got a call and Kevin answered the phone and she waited the same way that you all do to see if it’s a hoax or not).
She stays for another week, says something about having time off as a lecturer anyway, something about having a TA that takes all of her lectures, and Abby makes at least fourteen comments about how the team could really do with her on hand as a more permanent fixture. You’ve never been particularly good at suggesting things that you really want, not when you’re half certain that the person in question will say no, and so you don’t raise it with her. A month goes past, and she doesn’t leave, and you don’t raise it with her. She helps, and she becomes one of the team, and you know you need to ask because the others are invested now, they want her to stay, and this is more than just you and your ten year crush on the most intelligent woman you’ve ever met, this includes the people you love more than anyone in the whole world.
“If there’s something you want, just ask.” Dr Gorin says suddenly while the two of you are the only ones in your lab, and you were aimlessly fiddling with an element of your twin proton pistols. She’s wearing her ridiculous protective gloves, the ones she brought with her, and you swear she’s had the same ones since you were her student, and she’s looking at you in a way that’s slightly exasperated, like she’s tired of dancing around something, but you didn’t think you were.
“I, uh,” you stammer, and when you say it it’s quiet and all at once, like it always is, and you’re still looking down at your wrench. “I would, that is, the others would also like, if you would stay. Here. With us. On a more permanent basis.”
She smiles, a little, and raises her eyebrow. “I guess you weren’t listening that time you were half asleep on top of something dangerous but you insisted I should carry on.”
“What?” You’re taken aback, confused, and then you remember her murmuring at you one of those times you’d been up for forty hours but still persevered to finish this one last thing that always turned into at least three last things, but you don’t remember what she said.
“I told you I’d quit my job? And you said that you were very happy for me, and then told me I was welcome to your bed for the rest of my life?”
You stare at her for a few moments, clear your throat. “That does sound like something I would say.” She smirks at you and you frown for a moment. “Have I agreed to anything else while half asleep?”
“I said I felt terrible for stealing your bed and you told me that it was fine because you’d just lay on me. That was a few days ago.” She looks ridiculously smug and you gently rest your forehead on your proton pack.
“That also sounds like something I would say,” you murmur into the table, and she laughs. When you sit up she’s still smiling at you.
“Is there anything else you’d like to ask?” She eventually asks, when you go quiet and go back to poking one of your pistols.
“How amenable would you be to the laying on you?” She moved closer while your head was on the table, while you were looking down, and she moves quietly for someone that you know can be clumsy occasionally. Your feet aren’t up on the bench for once, and you swivel around on your chair to face her, your arm resting on the back, a smirk growing to match hers. You’re older and you’re more mature in the ways that matter and the both of you still love science and probably each other, and she came to see you, she stayed. You love her. You love the Ghostbusters. She’s one of you now, and you’re thankful.
“Depends on the context.” Is all she says and you kind of want to put your head back on the table, but you’re not a quitter and she's smirking at you like she's challenging you, the same as when she knows you're close to a breakthrough but approximately a thousand times more flirtatious.
“How about a gay context?” You offer, and she laughs.
“I would definitely be amenable to it in a gay context.” She laughs at your answering grin and steps even closer, touching your screw you pendant lightly, smiling as she cups your jaw and draws you out of your chair. She's so much taller than you that standing up basically didn't make a difference, and she has to lean very far down to kiss you, you on your tiptoes and smiling into the kiss, your arms wrapping around her waist.
You faintly hear Patty murmur “fuckin finally” from the doorway, and there's a muffled cheer approximately two minutes later, and you both break the kiss to laugh when Abby runs in and goes to high five both of you, winking at you while Rebecca’s back is turned. You all get takeout to celebrate and Abby gets her reasonable ratio of wontons to broth and you get to gaze at Dr Gorin and bask in the laughter of these people that are your family, even as Patty mocks you for how long it took for you to get it together and Erin warns Rebecca quietly that if she hurts you she'll come for her, however fond of her she might be. It’s like happiness squared, like you were as happy as you thought that you could ever be and now you're just this bit happier, this bit that you didn't think existed. You get interrupted by a call to bust some ghosts and suddenly you're experiencing happiness cubed and Dr Gorin's been convinced to come with you on the call because Abby told her that she was missing out because she hadn't seen you use your pistols yet. This is better than you ever thought it could be.