Chapter Text
There was always something on fire in the Department of Molecular Biology, usually in the metaphorical sense (keyword: usually). Between the perpetually poorly calibrated analytical equipment, the perpetually overstuffed laboratory refrigerators, and everyone’s perpetually overdue manuscripts, chaos was simply the department’s natural state of being.
Today, though, the fire had absolutely nothing to do with science.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on who you asked—the Science Faculty Rumour Mill existed to spice things up even further, and today’s headline was impossible to ignore:
You.
Specifically, the rumour that you were finally attached.
God. Things were getting out of hand with this one.
Grace must’ve overheard ten separate conversations about it in the hour it took him to cycle to campus, inhale his bacon and eggs, and make it upstairs to the lab.
Ten.
Why? Because you’d been department-famous for years.
Faculty-famous, really. You were the PhD candidate professors pointed at as an example of what good research looked like, because you’d managed to publish every project you’d worked on since the summer of freshman year. You knew your way around your work so well that the undergrads sometimes thought you were a postdoc or an adjunct rather than just another TA, and postdocs occasionally approached you for research advice as if you were faculty. Faculty, meanwhile, sometimes threw you extra work that made it seem that they’d completely forgotten you were still technically a graduate student, somehow juggling a thesis, three social initiatives on the side, and God knows how many student club commitments while maintaining a near-perfect GPA.
And the cherry on top was that you were nice.
So whenever your name came up in conversation, people usually had something nice to say, which explained why half the faculty had apparently decided to celebrate your newfound relationship on your behalf.
Grace wondered if you’d made it to campus yet. More importantly, if you’d figured out you were today’s Breaking News story. He wondered how you’d feel about all… this.
I mean, you weren’t exactly a stranger to being the talk of the faculty, but just… not under this category of gossip, because as far as anyone knew, you’d always been single. Nobody had ever caught you on a date. Nobody had ever heard you mention a partner. There was always an alibi and proof that you weren’t attached, and besides, whenever anyone actually asked if you were looking for love, you always just smiled and shrugged.
“If God wills it, it’ll happen,” you’d said once over a beer at one of the lab’s yearly parties. “It’s not a must-have, really.”
Grace had never quite bought that entirely, because he’d caught you reading romance novels on your phone often enough. The fluffy ones, mind you. The ones that would’ve had aggressively pastel covers and illustrated couples looking happy together on the front if you’d bought them in paperback, and so it wasn’t exactly a stretch to conclude that you did hope to fall in love someday.
Problem was, you simply didn’t seem interested in allocating calendar space to finding it. Which… fair, because the couple of times Grace had accidentally glanced at your Google Calendar, he’d decided it looked less like a schedule and more like a pack of Skittles.
The other problem was that nobody ever seemed brave enough to ask.
Grace knew plenty of people—acquaintances, mostly; he only really counted Marissa as an actual friend—who’d admitted they liked you. But most of them had reached the same conclusion before they even made a move—that you were too intimidating.
He had always thought that was funny.
Because if they’d actually known you, they’d know you weren’t intimidating at all. You were the sort of person who put up lab safety memes so first-years would stop violating the most basic rules. You baked cookies for lab meetings. You always thanked the technicians by name. You’d somehow convinced half the lab to participate in a whole ritual of thanking the rickety HPLC before every run and leaving it “peace offerings” while it worked in hopes that it’d cooperate.
Most people never got to see that side of you, but Grace did, because that’s just the sort of thing that happened when two Molecular Biology PhD students shared a PI. Your research projects overlapped often enough that you were forever borrowing each other’s reagents, troubleshooting each other’s experiments, and rescuing one another’s samples whenever one refrigerator decided to stop working. You taught some of the same undergrad tutorials too, proofread each other’s lesson plans, manuscripts and grant applications, and occasionally spent entire nights and weekends in the lab together because biological work had very little respect for office hours in general.
Somewhere along the way, you became real.
Not that the real you was any less brilliant than the version everyone else admired, but rather, quite the opposite. You were humble through all the academic fame, never talking down to people or pretending you knew more than you did. You laughed off failed experiments, simply rolling your sleeves up for another week of sample preparation. You genuinely wanted the undergrads learnt something from their courses, and were the sort of TA they actually actively sought out after tutorials and practicals. And more than once, you’d wandered over to his bench and asked if he needed help before he could put down his ego to ask.
In short, you cared. A whole lot. About knowledge, about teaching, about people… about him.
And somewhere between the late nights, manuscript revisions, and shared frustrations…
Grace had started caring about you too.
Sometimes, when the two of you left the lab long after midnight, Grace would deliberately linger just long enough so he could leave with you and coincidentally end up cycling the same route home. His apartment block was only another minute or two away from yours anyway, so it wasn’t exactly a hassle—or weird—to make sure a coworker got home safely before continuing on. It was what any decent person would do, really.
Sometimes he’d buy two coffees without asking if you wanted one. Sometimes you’d do the same, and nobody ever kept score.
Honestly, he was a little surprised the rumour mill had never paired the two of you together. Then again, maybe everyone had decided the idea of someone like him making a move on you was so unlikely that it wasn’t worth discussing at all. And that’s probably for the best, really—he quite liked not being the subject of campus gossip, thank you very much.
Which… brought him back to today’s gossip.
Grace hated to admit it, but he was dying to know. Who was this mysterious Mr. Right who’d apparently swept you off your feet? He, for once, desperately wanted someone to include him in the gossip, and it was most definitely, entirely unrelated to the thoroughly inconvenient crush he’d somehow developed over the past couple years of actually getting to know you.
Anyway, it wasn’t like it mattered. The crush.
Grace wasn’t planning to do anything about it either. Again, it wasn’t because you intimidated him, but because he simply had a PhD to finish and dreams to pursue, and he’d never really understood why everyone else seemed so eager to complicate already stressful lives by dating.
In fact, ever since things with Linda had imploded after barely three months, he’d been fairly certain the whole romance thing just wasn’t for him. She’d said his “head was in the clouds,” which, honestly, still didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Outside of spending time with her and occasionally being dragged to parties, all he’d really done was spend unhealthy amounts of time in the lab. If anything, he felt about as grounded as it was physically possible to be—ankle-deep in buffer solutions and elbow-deep in grant applications, rooted to the big wet mess that was cell work.
Or maybe “your head’s in the clouds” had simply been a nicer way of saying “I realised I don’t actually like you very much.” Either way, he’d realised afterwards that he’d never really loved her enough to care which one it was, so it had probably been for the best that they’d parted ways.
So… yeah. No-romancing-for-Ryland-Grace was clearly the way to go in the foreseeable future. Best to avoid any unnecessary implosions when there was already a new safety incident report waiting to be written every other undergrad practical.
Besides, if you’d finally found someone who made you happy, then good!
He just hoped the guy deserved you.
And as though the universe had impeccable timing, the two undergraduates working on their summer project a couple of benches in front of him picked that exact moment to pipe up about the topic.
“I wonder who it is. Apparently the person who saw them didn’t manage to get a good look at his face.”
“Any guesses?”
“Hmm. Let’s see. Firstly, I don’t think she’d date someone outside the faculty.”
“Why not?”
“I mean—when would she even meet someone? And like, how? As far as I know, no one has ever swiped onto her profile, so it has to be someone she’s met IRL.”
“…Fair.”
They fell into brief silence, and then—
“OH!”
Grace fumbled— Aaand his entire box of freshly opened pipette tips went skidding off the bench.
Jesus.
Christ.
The two girls looked over with matching looks of guilt, and Grace was fairly sure one of them muttered a very soft, very unhelpful “yiiiiikes” as he ducked out of view to pick everything up with as much dignity as he could salvage.
“What if he’s that TA from Computational Biology?”—The culprit behind all the sad, wasted plastic now filling Grace’s waste bin carried on—“I think she’s been talking to him a lot lately for part of her manuscript.”
“Um. Who?”
“The Tuesday afternoon TA? For last semester’s Intro to Computational Biology.”
“Oh.”
The conversation dissolved into a very long silence as all three of them became deeply invested in their pipetting, and then, “…Oh my God,” one of them blurted.
“What?”
“I know who you’re talking about now, and I hope the fuck not.”
“Why not? He seems like quite a catch. Hotter than anyone in Molecular Biology, at least.”
“Yeah, but my friend was in that class, and apparently he, um, hit on her?”
“UH. Ew?”
There was another round of quieter whispering before one of them finally turned and looked over at him again.
“Hey, Grace?”
“Hm?” he said. He placed a finger at the well he’d stopped at for his own pipetting and looked up, trying very hard to look like he hadn’t been invested in their entire conversation the whole time.
“You know anything about this? Everyone’s dying to know who the guy is.”
Grace laughed.
“Honestly? I only heard the rumour this morning,” he said, pointedly leaving out the fact that he was—very, very much—dying to know too. The two of them groaned instantly, somehow looking more disappointed than when he’d given them a poor tutorial participation score last semester.
“Come on! You work with her all the time. You should do all of us a favour and get some insider info!”
Yeah… no.
That was probably going to be difficult. You were coworkers more than friends, and you’d always been a fairly private person around him.
“Ask her how her weekend was or something.”
“Too obvious. Might as well just ask her directly.”
“But that’s so weird—”
Before any one of them could contribute another spectacularly terrible suggestion, the laboratory door opened, and you walked into the lab. The conversation fizzled out, and the two girls fumbled so hastily to get back to their pipetting that Grace had to disguise his laugh as a cough.
You greeted everyone with your usual smile before reaching for your lab coat from the hook beside his. Distracted, Grace watched you as you moved, only to realise a moment later that somewhere along the way, he’d moved his finger from his 96-well plate and completely lost track of which well he’d stopped at.
…Fuck.
As you slipped your lab coat on, your phone screen lit up. You glanced at it, smiled, typed out a quick reply, and tucked it back into your pocket. Then you pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and started your morning, just like you always did. Yet through it all—from collecting your samples and equipment, spraying everything down with ethanol, settling into the chair at the biosafety cabinet, and starting to pipette—the smile never quite left your face.
You looked… radiantly, unmistakably happy. Grace had never seen you glow quite like that before, and…
Wow, it looked really good on you.
Whoever this mystery man was, he really must’ve been something, and Grace hoped—more than anything—that he would be good to you.