Interacting for the first time in a long time with more than one person on a daily basis, Holtzmann begins to assemble a collection of careful observations that she thinks will be useful in the future.
For example: there are people, and then there is a person, and between the two there are very distinct differences.
It's fairly common to be people; in fact, almost all human beings are, in one form or another. People have brains that engage in thinking about something, limbs that flail or maybe even obey commands that have been recently thought. They eat when they've used up all their stored energy (or sometimes, careful monitoring reveals, before that point for enjoyment purposes), they cry when their minds receive signals of pain (usually physical, but sometimes emotional distress seems to inspire similar symptoms). They choose whether or not to brush their hair and if their socks should match in the morning (although, depending on things like laundry habits, this may be less of a choice and more of a sort of predetermined coincidence). They have a birth certificate and a driver's license and a profession that provides a means to continue eating and buying socks, but is usually separate from the people in the sense that they can exist without it.
A person, on the other hand, is somehow all of this and yet also something more. She might smile when she wakes up in the morning, hair still tousled from sleep, in anticipation of the potential excitement the day ahead might hold. She might use a special cookie cutter scavenged from a thrift store to cut her turkey and tomato sandwich into the shape of a ghost, or wear no socks because the idea of running barefoot makes her giggle after so many years in heels. A person probably has a big family who loves her and calls every week to check in, and she probably has other routines, like a specified day for grocery shopping and regularly scheduled haircuts, too. She almost certainly has a favorite movie, and wrinkles her nose at bad jokes (and also sometimes at funny but unquestionably distasteful ones) and can keep her desk organized because no spontaneous fires send her possessions into disarray every few days.
Dr. Jillian Holtzmann would very much like to be a person like this. Unfortunately, she frequently struggles even with the effort of being a people, and so the higher rank usually seems wholly out of reach.
For the most part her status doesn't bother her one way or the other. Sure, she forgets to eat if she's wrapped up in a project, because in the moment, a nuclear breakthrough seems infinitely more important despite how the shaking of her hands makes it difficult (and sometimes downright dangerous) to assemble the new parts. If she's sad, she tends to fail to cry, simply staring blankly at the grease stains on the wall (until an alarm sounds from somewhere amid the machinery and she has to run to stop a mostly-untested generator from combusting). She hasn't brushed her hair in weeks, because it somehow doesn't seem particularly important and it's easier to secure back from her face when it's tangled into something nest-like anyway.
But sometimes she notices a kind of happiness practically radiating from the others as they do the little things that are meaningless in the grand scheme of their survival and their work. She can't help but wonder if the real thing feels quite different, and consequently better, than her trademark medley of manic energy and random, yet mostly synthesized outbursts. She rather suspects it might, and she decides she wants to find out.
As a scientist, she resorts to theories and observations to isolate her potential shortcomings and develop a solution. She thinks harder about this problem than she has about most things in the past, because science is easy — science is, quite probably, what she is since she's not tied up being a person. But this problem is one she can't seem to follow through logically to the end.
Because the more she watches her peers (friends? family?), the more she comes to realize that the ways they differ from her are usually exemplified in the instances where they don't think, that a lack of planning and plotting leads to a kind of spontaneity that she only shallowly imitates in her dancing and flirtatious comebacks (which were often carefully designed the night before, shamelessly orchestrated by a practiced puppeteer).
Thinking like a scientist is what has gotten her this far, kept her from crumbling when things that don't follow patterns have deviated even from their loosely-projected courses. But now, it's starting to seem like extensive contemplation might be the very thing that stands in her way of completely assimilating into the group — stopping her from, for the first time in her life, truly belonging.
Sometimes, she feels like she might have more in common with the ghosts she hunts than the people she hunts them with. It's hard to pinpoint the exact source of this feeling — she certainly has a lot less pent-up frustration than most of the apparitions they take on, and if she could spew slime like that she wouldn't be wasting her time perfecting her ability to burp on command as a party trick. But the sense of isolation — the feeling of being forgotten but not yet gone — often rings true even with her new friends surrounding her. Maybe she's been ostracized for too long to take acceptance at face value.
She tries to decipher what the others truly think about her, but she's just bad at getting into other people's heads.
Eventually the magnitude of the thinking required for this problem becomes overwhelming even for esteemed thinker Jillian Holtzmann herself, so she does something that always feels safe despite the number of safety codes that go up in smoke at its start: she lights a fire. It's a big fire, hot enough to singe her eyebrows even from where she stands half a dozen feet away. She thinks that maybe she shouldn't have put in that old sample of chemicals, but quickly brushes off her misgivings. This is a (mostly) controlled environment, and so she trusts herself.
It's a dark evening, the cloud cover overhead heavy with the threat of rain. Holtz doesn't care — she's just glad the clouds aren't glowing green. Sometimes, when she closes her eyes, she can still see the supernatural fog from the fight in Times Square. Her fire is constructed in the middle of the roof, because standing close to the edge makes her uncomfortable — she doesn't like to see how far it is to the ground.
The acrid scent of toxic waste keeps her a little away from the fire, but she slowly decreases the distance between them until the sweat running off her skin makes her goggles slowly slide down her nose. She lets them drop from her face, gently unhooking them from behind her ears, and stares at the yellow lenses. In that moment, she can't help but think how different they look from Abby's professional, sensible glasses. Abby's are the kind of glasses you would wear to a business meeting, and to lunch with your friends at a classy restaurant afterwards. Hers are the kind you would wear to protect yourself from lightning as you bring Frankenstein's monster to life in a dark basement. Or something equally disagreeable, anyway.
She's struck by the sudden urge to try to be more like Abby. It has to be easier — after all, Abby's the reason they're all together, so she's clearly good at connecting with people and not freaking them out. Even Erin talks to Abby exponentially more than she talks to Holtz, having made her office space on the first floor next to Abby's desk and only venturing upstairs to Holtz's lab if she has something important to ask her. That stings more than she'd ever admit, and she may be bad at communication, but she's well aware that her lack of vocalization means that the situation not likely to change in the near future. This plan could help.
Holtz thinks she could do it. She could separate her job and her personality, she could make an effort to partake in things other than experiments, she could bond with the others over something more than a passion for discovery and the concealed pain of not being believed. Her fist moves over the fire, almost on its own, glasses dangling helplessly from her grip. She doesn't even need them, really. Her vision usually fine.
She's humming something, but she can't remember what it's from, or maybe she doesn't want to. It's sad, though. She doesn't like it.
She looks up to blink moisture out of her eye — from the humidity — and finds herself face to face with Erin, who has suddenly materialized beside her elbow. She flinches, almost dropping her glasses without proper ceremony, but catches them with her fingertips.
Erin rests her hand lightly on Holtz's lower back, blinking down at her questioningly, but she doesn't say anything. For a second heat flashes through Holtz's veins at the thought that Erin understands her enough to offer this silent support, and not to interrogate her about her actions. She quickly suppresses it, though. Erin's probably just too used to the weirdness to even bother asking at this point.
"Hey Gilbert," Holtz says, then clears her throat when her voice comes out strange and shaky. She blames the chemical fumes. "What's up?"
"It's chilly out here," Erin says gently. "Well, not right here, because you've apparently made another fire, but … wait …" She sniffs delicately. "Is that carbon disulfide?"
"Mebbe," Holtz mumbles, standing up and shoving her glasses back on her face. In her thick-soled combat boots she'd found at Goodwill, she's almost eye-level with the physicist's nose. She takes an unconscious step back, and Erin grabs her by the elbows and leads her away from the fire, casting an anxious glance at the flames. But she doesn't say anything about the burning chemicals, either, just stares at Holtz with a contemplative look on her face. Holtz stares back. It's a little unnerving, and a part of her wonders who will give in first. Her money would be on Erin, if she had money and someone to bet against.
Sure enough, she's only just begun to mentally run through possible ways to continue the conversation when Erin breaks the silence. "Anyway," she says, giving in to her compulsion to fill the awkward lull with rambling, "I was just coming to see if you wanted to come with us to get sandwiches or something. If you're not working on anything important. Or going somewhere else. Or meeting someone."
Erin clearly has delusions of grandeur regarding the state of Holtz's social life.
"Eat with you. Like, in public?" Holtz attempts to clarify, because they haven't been out since she tried (loudly) to convince the bartender to let her disassemble the jukebox and reprogram it to play Meat Loaf, and she wants to give them a chance to change their minds about their invitation. She may put on an oblivious face most of the time, but she knows she can be hard to handle. But Erin just laughs.
"Yes, Holtzmann. If you can bear to be away from your lab for a few hours." Holtz glances up at her nervously — does it really seem like she cares more about her work than her friends? — but Erin is smiling gently in the way she usually does when she's joking, and so Holtz lets out a chuckle.
"I think that's doable." Holtz grabs a bag of soil they'd collected earlier that week (they'd shoveled it from an old stockbroker's grave as a control for a test), dumping it over the fire to put it out. The smell of ash and, strangely enough, oranges, washes over them for a moment, and then the wind whisks it away.
"Patty's bringing the car around," Erin tells her, "because, you know, we weren't sure if you would come. But we were gonna leave now, so …"
"I'll just grab a jacket?" Erin was right — it really is chilly out without the warmth of the fire to counteract the wind. She starts down the stairs, leaving Erin staring over the smoldering remains of the fire, chewing her lip. She's probably thinking about how to make it less dangerous before they leave the building. It's one of the things she's grown to love about Erin — her constant awareness of pesky things like safety and consequences.
"Grab your notes on the new inhibitor, too," Erin calls after her when she's already halfway down the stairs. "Abby wants to compare theories about why it isn't holding power. I know you've been working on it when you forget to go home at night — maybe we can help you figure it out." Her voice is warm, the kind of sound a smiling person makes, and Holtz can feel the affection in it.
And then she freezes with her foot halfway to the next step and blinks, because in her sudden identity crisis she'd forgotten all of the reasons they turned to science in the first place. The way it brought them together. The way it allowed them to discover things. The way it helps them save people.
She smiles, continuing her descent with renewed enthusiasm and bringing her fingertips up to brush against the frames of her glasses to assure herself they're still there. For today, the scientist can stay. She just needs to adjust her hypothesis.
Or maybe, she needs to stop overthinking how her thinking impacts the things she thinks about. That part of her, the scientist that questions the good things — that's the one that needs to go.
The rest of this is going to be moments where the other three do something that goes against Holtzy's hypotheses, hopefully helping her gently lay to rest the parts of her that overthink things and agonize over thought of having friends so she can get the love she deserves. If you want to see how a certain scenario plays out shoot me a comment!
Much love,
KnightNight7203