Holtzmann was drumming her fingers on the equipment quickly, over the knobs and valves as if they were part of the percussion set, the beat fast and difficult for even her fingers to keep up with. She moved quickly, anchored to her rolling chair, and slid backwards and across the massive machine, spinning around the table corners to approach it from all angles. Sometimes she was on her knees on the chair, leaning forward, sometimes she was slumped down, or half bent over trying to reach a specific bit while the chair rolled away beneath her and she pulled it back on impulse. Everything about her erratic movements was mechanical, making them completely unreasonable to the one person watching her. There was no way a human being could be so measured and so random, so precise and so careless, and still be effective in what they were doing.

Yet somehow, Jillian Holtzmann managed it. With a finesse, Erin Gilbert had to admit to herself as she watched the strange creature of science in her natural habitat, that was almost magical. There was music blaring, but the beat of Holtzmann's work did not seem to match it, despite how furiously loud it was. Whatever was in her brain was much louder. She rolled from one end of the long table to the other, spinning two angry looking tools like knives in her hands as she went, eyes never leaving the invention she was creating on the fly.

"Holtzmann?" Erin finally called, pushing away from the door's threshold and stepping into the work room. This had been declared Holtzmann's space, by general understanding of the entire team. That, and she'd set up her wild work room faster than anyone could have imagined, let alone tried to stop. She claimed two rooms, and knocked down the wall between them in her free time. She had the lab, yes, but that was communal space for them all, if they ever felt like willingly subjecting themselves to high doses of radiation. The build space was different, and it felt that way when Erin walked in. Like a sacred space. No, a church felt less hallowed than this, in its way. Holtzmann revered this place, and set up a wall around herself whenever she was inside it. They'd all learned to not bother her while she was there, since she did not speak to them anyway. Not if she was busy at work, or was simply not inclined to.

Thankfully, she did most of her work well into the night, when they had all gone home. For them, the work day had a finite stop. Consciousness had a resting point, where they could recharge with a simple thing like sleep. For Holtzmann, things came differently. Sleep was a luxury that came rarely, and there were always too many incredibly important things to get done so she could surprise the other girls with them in the morning. They always loved it when she had something new and exciting to show them.

They smiled. They called her crazy, but there was love in their eyes. In their tones.

"Holtz?"

She'd stopped rolling, seeming lost in a daze. She was staring at the machine, had been for a few solid minutes. Erin kept calling to her, but she was completely still. Erin moved toward her, carefully, stepping further into the lion's den. She did not want to scare her, but managed to walk up to her from around the table and gingerly, slowly, reached to put her hand on Holtzmann's shoulder.

"Holtzy?"

Movement. Holtzmann turned her head sharply toward Erin, just before she had a chance to put her hand on her shoulder. Erin jumped, which she immediately deemed to be silly considering she was the one attempting to startle someone out of a daze. However gentle and from a place of concern that startle was meant to be. Holtzmann turned the chair, swinging around sharply to face Erin, catching her hand by the wrist and drawing it down, away from her shoulder, then using it to pull herself closer to Erin. She grinned, and Erin breathed a sigh of relief. Disengaging herself from the hold, she took an awkward step back and shook her head, perplexed.

"I'm sorry to interrupt. You looked… pained? I don't know. Maybe it was silly. I-I'm sorry, I just… are you always here this late?"

"I'm always somewhere this late," Holtzmann said thoughtfully, pushing her chair sideways to get away from the proximity. She span it around as she slid, bumping into a wall before leaping out of the chair entirely and wobbling, a bit dizzy, back the way she'd come. She leaned on her machine, motioning her hand toward it. "This thing keeps me here, sometimes. Tonight, you'll notice. Astutely, as always." She nodded her head, a mock tip of the hat that was not quite as mocking as she wanted it to be.

Erin watched her, struggling, as usual, to understand.

"So… yes, then? All the time? Okay, well, I think you should get home. This would explain your increasingly erratic behavior. I mean. For you." Erin shook her head, motioning for Holtzmann to follow her toward the door. The nuclear engineer did not move, looking at her with a curious, vaguely amused expression on her face. When she smiled like that, thinly veiled delight in something only she really knew, her dimples showed. Behind her thick, yellow glassed goggles, her eyes were shining devilishly. "Have you eaten today?"

Holtz shook her head slowly, smile fading a little bit. Had she?

"What's so erratic about my behavior?" She asked, echoing Erin's tone. There was a little concern there, Holtzmann realized, as she spoke it back to herself. Erin looked sheepish, shrugging.

It was a tough question, really. Holtzmann's behavior was, at the best of times, erratic. That was what made her Holtzmann. It was why Abby adored her, and relied on her genius. It was why they trusted her, because she approached things without fear, without reserve, and without hesitance. She was unpredictable, which made her useful. There would never be another brain like hers, and even Patty had to respect the way it turned at odd intervals. Erin, too, found a place in her life for the oddity that was Holtzmann. Recently, however, things had shifted.

"Well, you're not," Erin said at length, on a sigh that indicated she would rather not be talking about it. She would have to kick herself later for bringing it up. There was no escaping now, and they both knew it. Erin tried, despite herself, turning toward the door and moving as if to escape through it. Holtzmann slid leisurely in front of her, leaning on the entryway and looking up at Erin with a smirk. She reached up and pushed the goggles from her eyes, making Erin wince. It was incredibly hard to look into Holtzmann clear, icy blue eyes and not think they already saw anything she was trying to hide.

"Not? You said I was."

"No, I mean. We can have this discussion when we're walking. We'll get something to eat. Come on, aren't you tired of this lab?"

"A date and a dissection of my behavior? You do know how to charm a girl," Holtzmann winked, straightening and then spinning on her heels. She missed her turn off, going for a second spin, before she moved forward at last. Erin felt like she was being freed from a cage, hurrying forward lest Holtzmann block the way out again.

"No, not a date," she said firmly, "And not a dissection! I just mean that you're usually impossible to guess at, but lately… you're quiet. You haven't lit anything on fire. At least not on purpose. You haven't put anything in Patty's proton pack in a while. I guess, well… you haven't been laughing."

They'd made it to the front door, all the lights off, their things gathered, coats on, before the conversation arrested Holtzmann's progress. She looked at Erin in confusion, as if she had not noticed the shift in her own mood until Erin pointed it out.

"I'm sorry," she said, honestly, that unsure, almost hurt look not leaving her face.

Erin felt panic rising in her throat. The last thing she ever wanted to do was upset anyone: confrontation was just not her thing. She worked very hard, in fact, to try and be agreeable with everyone. All of her young life was spent hiding, pretending she was not the weirdo everyone wanted to tell her she was. Teased her about being. She learned a very hard lesson that she had no idea how to cope with, being ostracized for believing in something no one else could even consider real. Her belief in ghosts made her a loser. Her seeing one, and believing she had seen it, made her a target. Constant bullying taught her how to avoid those that would cause trouble, and how to shut down the fights before they started. Demure, quiet, never struggling, never fighting back. Hiding within herself and accepting the truth others forced onto her. That was how she survived, well into her adult life. It wasn't until Abby came back into her life, as haphazard and unwanted as it had been, that she realized how much of her time she wasted.

Old habits died pretty hard. And sometimes, they had afterlifes.

"No, I… I didn't mean anything by it. I'm sorry, let's just… let's just drop it, okay? Yeah, okay, we'll just go get some food and get you to bed. You need to sleep, that's all I mean."

Holtzmann watched her for a long, tense moment, then laughed and grabbed Erin by the arm and gave her a tug. She smiled at her until Erin relented and smiled back, feeling forgiven, though there was still a tense air around them that neither wanted to comment on. It relaxed as they left the firehouse, locking up behind them. Holtzmann was leaning on Erin's arm, her own hooked in the bend of Erin's elbow, as the two walked. Erin did not mind it, only feeling vaguely uncomfortable instead of feeling terribly so. It was an improvement, as far as either of them were concerned.

"Nothing's going to be open, you know," Holtzmann chirped, keeping her eyes ahead of her. Erin looked at her sharply, then moved the arm Holtz was clinging to so she could check her watch. It was three in the morning. "Café Jillian is always open, of course. Expensive, but if it's the only choice…"

"You cook?"

"You can be the judge of that. This way."

Holtzmann tugged her down a turn with a jarring pull, making her stumble. She laughed as she went, though, knowing better than to resist too much. She had no idea how she'd managed to lose track of time so profoundly. It had only been eleven or so when she started watching Holtzmann in the work room, she was fairly certain. Their conversation had not taken that long, there was no way it could be three in the morning already. Midnight, at best, by her reasoning. Somewhere, she managed to lose three hours.

"Wait, you walk to work?"

"When I'm not running," Holtzmann replied leisurely, "how do you think I keep this girlish figure? Not from eating things that are good for me, I'll tell you that."

The walk was not as short as Erin wanted it to be, though she was expecting to be taken to an apartment complex. Instead, they arrived at a small street in a decidedly quiet and normal part of town. Holtzmann's house was easy to spot, no matter how hard the white picket fence tried to blend it in with the ones on either side. It was a dark, ugly purple color, for one, that looked like a California raisin costume had been melted down and thrown at the building. The corpse barely made enough paint to cover the whole thing, it seemed, leaving lighter blotches in some areas, and darker ones where the sun did not directly hit it. The grass was green and neatly kept, but once Holtzmann opened the door that feeling of neatness was gone. While the outside was only half life her, the inside was very clearly Jillian Holtzmann.

Abby once told Erin that Holtzmann was like bottled lightning. She was powerful, wild and beautiful, but she was destructive and dangerous for all that. The inside of her home reflected that, looking like a very calculated mess that was likely as difficult to sort through and process as any of the math Holtzmann used to build her machines with. Even more so, maybe, as this was the theory of her life, and how she conducted herself in the day to day. A person alone was at their most honest, and here, in the safety of her home, Holtzmann could let all of her idiosyncrasies sing. There was nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. No reason to temper herself, like being in public often told her to.

Again, Erin felt out of place. She was entering an even more sacred space than the work room before, though at least this time she had an invitation. Holtzmann closed the door behind her, locking it while looking back over her shoulder and making a dangerous face at Erin. There was no real threat there, of course, and Erin rolled her eyes. Holtzmann, undeterred, danced over and offered to take Erin's coat, peeling it from her shoulders and hanging it up by tossing it over the back of the sofa. She took her own coat off and did the same thing.

"Dining room is through there, I'll have something ready in a jif. If it's edible or not will be anyone's guess, but I'll let you test it first."