Rating: PG-13
POV: 1st, Ryan's
Summary: I don't even know how to summarise this. Features lonely!scientist!Ryan, who discovers something he never thought possible on a normal day at work. Brendon-related shenanigans and minor angst ensue.
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All anyone needs to know about my job is that we look for answers, and we never find them.
I've been trying to find them in this cramped lab with the flickering strobe lights and the cracked ceiling for countless years now, actually, but every end I've reached has been a dead one and the success rate hasn't risen any since Jon joined me ten months ago.
We carry on still, though, because it's what we do. My social life - friends, family, love interests - they were all eaten up by the merciless workload long ago. I can't remember the last time I had a date; I don't think I have enough hours in the day for girlfriends or boyfriends. While normal 24-year-olds are out drinking away their inhibitions in bars full of ecstatic faces and thumping basslines, I'm working into the night with no company but Jon, some styrofoam coffee and dishes of bacteria.
Jon's still managing to somewhat cling onto his life. It won't last long.
People call me a workaholic, they ask me how I cope, whether I'm lonely. It is lonely, often so much it hurts, but it's our job. It's my entire life, too, apparently. We have to be dedicated, undeterred, persistent as fuck and 100% focused on the task at hand. Which is why I'm bemused, to say the least, when Jon waltzes into the cluttered lab an hour late one morning, holding a tiny petri dish with a non-descript spot of substance growing in the middle, and says, "We have to look at this." He smirks a little, playful, and corrects himself, "Well, really, you have to look at this."
He plonks the dish down on my desk amidst the broken test tubes and stacks of papers with considerably less care than should have been used.
"What? Why?" I blink at the dish dumbly.
"Pete said."
"Is it related to the study?" I ask excitedly.
"Nope."
"Then why?"
"Pete said."
"Oh."
"Yeah. No one knows what it is. Beckett was doing one of his lunatic experiments; one thing led to another and he blew his lab right up. Once he'd cleaned it all up, he got to this and it was just, sitting there." Jon shrugs and flops down in his chair at the other end of the room. "Pete thought if no one else could identify it, you'd be the best bet."
Despite myself, I feel a warm glow of pride at that. Pete - Dr. Wentz to most people outside the research facility - is our boss. In fact, he's everyone's boss, he's like, the highest you can get. The laboratories are allocated according to importance: his takes up almost the entirety of the top floor. (Ours consists of one measly portion of the basement.)
I sigh heavily. As flattered as I am, I never like to be distracted from whatever I was doing beforehand. "Okay, well, I'll give it a look later or something."
Later becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow melts into the next day as I push it further and further towards the back of my mind, like I tend to do with most things. It's only when Jon mentions it over a week later that I even remember it exists, somewhere buried beneath paperwork.
"I'm gonna call it a day," he says, shuffling papers around on his desk as he shrugs on his jacket. He has that excited tinge to his voice. "I have a date."
