Chapter Text
Less than a year after they both graduated with their PhDs in Physics and Molecular Biology respectively, Marissa Hale opened her door to find her best friend standing on the step, looking about one strong gust of wind from keeling over.
“Um…” was all Marissa could say, because Ryland was supposed to be in Denmark right now, and she’d already had a particularly trying day, so she wasn’t really expecting visitors.
“The entire scientific community hates me, I’ve got a migraine and styes in both of my eyes, and I’m so jetlagged I think I’m starting to hallucinate.” Ryland said, staring very hard at a space somewhere over her left shoulder. “Could I lie down on your couch for a minute, please?”
Okay, yeah, his day had been worse, apparently.
Marissa pulled him into the house and guided him over to the couch before he could collapse. Ryland toppled over, pressed his face into one of the cushions, and screamed.
Marissa sat cautiously at the other end of the couch while Ryland straightened his glasses and rubbed harshly at his eyes. “What happened?”
He sighed, sounding so utterly defeated it made Marissa’s chest ache. “All the other scientists at the conference were being unimaginative idiots and I flipped out. Maybe cussed a little. Or a lot. Loudly. And also slightly called the world’s leading astrobiologist a staggering waste of carbon to his face. Also loudly.”
Marissa stared at him. “Why would you do that?”
Ryland stared back at her, although the effect was offput slightly by the fact that his eyes were, in fact, red and swollen with styes. “Because he was acting like a staggering waste of carbon. Everyone in that room was thinking it, I’m just the only one who had the balls to say it.”
“You mean you’re the only one insane enough to say it.”
“Same difference.”
Marissa let her head fall back against the couch cushions. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?”
Ryland just shrugged. “The other astrobiologists definitely thought so. Everyone wanted me out of the field anyway, I figured if I was going to be shunned I might as well make it memorable.”
“Oh, I’m sure you made it memorable, all right.” Unfortunately, this did seem like exactly the type of thing he’d do – Marissa wasn’t even surprised, really. This was all coming from the guy who used to take unidentified pills from strangers at parties so often that she had watched him correctly identify about ten different drugs, whilst hammered and in terrible lighting, and figure out which ones wouldn’t react badly with how drunk he was. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at him, but Ryland could be absolutely feral when he wanted to be.
But not right now, actually. Right now he kind of looked eerily calm. “Are you…okay?”
“I’m screaming on the inside, I’m just so tired right now that I don’t think I can actually express emotions on my face.”
Right, yes. The migraine and the jetlag so bad he was hallucinating. Marissa shook herself and spurred herself into action.
“I think I’ve still got some of your migraine pills from the last time you slept over. Triptan, right?”
Ryland seemed to physically slump with relief. “Yeah. You’re the best. Have I mentioned that you’re the best?”
“Only every time you see me.”
<><~><>
An hour later saw Marissa and Ryland back on the couch, armed with medication, blankets, Chinese takeout, an absurdly large tub of ice cream, and Legally Blonde playing on the TV.
Honestly, Marissa thought she probably needed this just as much as Ryland did. She hadn’t exactly had a great day either.
Hang on, had she actually told him about that?
She paused the TV and set down her takeout box. “Did I actually tell you that Ted and I broke up?”
Ryland’s eyebrows lifted to his hairline. “Really? About freaking time!”
Ted being Ryland’s former college roommate and Marissa’s former boyfriend. She turned to Ryland and explained, in great detail, how she caught Ted cheating on her and realised that she actually didn’t have to put up with him anymore. Ryland gasped and laughed at all the right moments, and pointed out how ironic it was that Ted cheated on her when he spent the entirety of grad school convinced that she and Ryland were sleeping together behind his back. Marissa then watched in real time as an idea began to form in Ryland’s head.
“You’ve fully kicked him out, right?”
Marissa nodded, feeling a flush of satisfaction. “Yeah, the house and literally everything in it is in my name since my parents helped me buy it. I cannot believe I just let him freeload off me for so long.” Visions of dirty dishes, socks and underwear all over the floor, and Ted screaming at his gaming setup flashed before her eyes and she shuddered.
Ryland shuddered too. “Yeah. Roommate from hell, I’m telling you, I forgot that sinks could be clean until I moved out. But anyway, does that mean he’s going to come and pick up his stuff?”
“I was planning on dumping it all on the front lawn, but yeah. He should be here in-” she checked the clock. “-about an hour.”
Ryland grinned mischievously. “Then I think we have an opportunity to do something really funny.”
<><~><>
“Shush, stop, you’re going to give it away!”
Ryland didn’t stop – actually, he just started laughing harder. Marissa couldn’t blame him, this was going to be hilarious.
Ted was supposed to arrive any minute, and Marissa was sure he’d actually be on time, since she’d threatened to smash his PlayStation with a rock if he was late. She and Ryland had dumped all of his stuff on the front lawn and were now waiting by the door.
Marissa ruffled a hand through Ryland’s hair once more for good measure and straightened his cardigan on her shoulders. “How do we look?”
“Suspiciously dishevelled.”
“Excellent.”
There was the sound of a car pulling up outside, and Marissa scrambled forwards to look out of the peep-hole in her door. Yep, there was Ted, climbing out of his friend’s car and staring in exasperation at the boxes on the lawn. She could hear him groaning and complaining even from inside the house as he started hauling them into the trunk.
“Okay, now.”
Marissa opened the door and leant smugly against it, and grinned when she felt Ryland wrap his arms firmly around her waist. They both had messed-up hair, his glasses sat crooked on his face, and she was wearing his cardigan and a t-shirt he’d leant to her a while ago and she’d never given back.
Ted looked at them, looked away, looked back, and his face turned so red Marissa swore she could fry an egg on it. Ryland, little shit that he was, waved cheerily before he pulled her back into the house and shut the door.
Where they both immediately broke down in hysterical laughter.
“Did – did you see the look on his face?” Marissa wheezed, leaning against the door to steady herself.
Ryland nodded through a fit of cackles, already having collapsed to the floor. “Oh my god, he looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. I didn’t know people could even go that red!”
It was all Marissa could do to hold herself together and not join him on the floor, frantically wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes and trying to take slow breaths that got aborted into more giggling every time she and Ryland locked eyes.
She looked down at her best friend, in hysterics on her hallway floor because of a prank they pulled on her stupid ex-boyfriend, and how he had insisted on helping her dump Ted’s stuff outside even though he still had the jetlag and the (albeit medicated) migraine. She thought about how he’d had a horrible past couple of days, and she was the first person he came to with it, and how she’d just instinctively known how to help.
Marissa had never had a lot of friends before she met Ryland, her nerdy physicist tendencies and terrible taste in men (and women) tending to drive everyone else away. But then she did meet Ryland, who had even nerdier astrobiologist tendencies and no taste in men or women to speak of, and found herself fitting into the space by his side as if she was always meant to be there. Really, meeting Ryland was the only good thing Ted had ever done for her. He may have been wrong about them sleeping together, but Ryland was still the one she was eating takeout and watching chick-flicks with, not Ted, so he could suck it, for all she cared.
She hauled Ryland to his feet and pulled him back into the living room, where Legally Blonde and slightly-melted ice-cream awaited.
Maybe today didn’t have to be so trying after all.
<><~><>
“What am I going to do, Mary?”
It was spoken almost to quietly to hear, but Marissa struggled upright and turned on a lamp anyway.
Their crisis-prompted hangout had slowly but surely turned into a sleepover, and now it was about two in the morning and she and Ryland were dozing off in their blanket nest on the couch.
Or rather, Marissa had been dozing off. Ryland, apparently, not so much. And he only called her Mary when he was either hammered or extremely upset, and she was fairly certain it wasn’t the first one. In retrospect, maybe she should have gotten him drunk; she certainly should have known that her best friend was far too familiar with spiralling when he was supposed to be sleeping.
Marissa squinted at Ryland past the glare of the lamp. It cast odd shadows on his face, making him look gaunt and frail and about a decade older than he was. He was staring at his hands, knotted up in the blanket.
“I’ve probably been fired. I mean, I haven’t actually checked my emails yet, but it’d be a miracle if they still kept me on, and even if they did, no other scientist is ever going to take me seriously again. I’ve never even tried to do anything that wasn’t science-related before, I’m not good at anything else.” He made a sound, and Marissa wasn’t quite sure if it was supposed to be a laugh or a sob, but it ended up sounding scratchy and painful either way.
They sat there in silence for a while. Cars honked outside. Ryland stared off into space, looking more miserable than it should have been possible for one person to look.
Then, a memory came to Marissa, and an idea along with it – a vivid flash of Ryland standing in front of a cheap, ink-stained whiteboard in his and Ted’s room, pen in hand, glasses dangling off one ear, explaining relativity to her better than any of her lecturers could ever dream to do.
She leant back against the cushions and raised an eyebrow at him. “You could be a teacher.”
“Ha-ha. I’m being serious.”
“So am I. I mean, sure, the pay’s not great, and you’d have to do a TA course or something before you could be an actual teacher, but I think you’d be good at it. You’ve got a knack for explaining complicated things in a simple way; heck, I never would have made it through college without your help.” She grinned, hit his arm, and he offered a wan approximation of a smile in return.
“Your lecturers were all shit. What would I even teach?”
Marissa stared at him. “Fine art. Science, obviously. Elementary kids are gross and highschoolers make out in the corridor, so I reckon you should go for middle school. I remember learning all the fun science stuff in middle, anyway.”
Ryland blinked like he was actually considering it. “Middle school… yeah. Yeah, I could probably handle middle schoolers.”
“You’ve already survived Olivia, I don’t know how much more feral a twelve-year-old can get.”
Olivia being Marissa’s younger cousin, who Ryland met at a wedding that she brought him to because Ted was out on a weekend away with his friends. Olivia had been throwing a full-on tantrum about not having all the attention on her, and Ryland had immediately managed to ply her with fun science facts and a refusal to baby her like her parents did. It had been truly impressive, and Marissa had thought, even back then, that he’d be good working with children.
Ryland smiled, a full, sunny one like the ones he used to shine her way back in college. Marissa hadn’t even realised up until now how much that smile had been dimming lately, the energy sucked from it like a dying star. Maybe it was a good thing that he got kicked out of academia after all.
“Science teacher.” Ryland said, more to himself than to her, still smiling. “Yeah. I can do that.”