Author's Notes at the end
Chapter Two: Quickening
Boston, 2009
Beep.
At a quarter past five, the beta-particle transfer-gate modeling program crashed for the fourth time. Betty Ross, halfway through the third revision of a two-year old article on non-homologous end joining in knock-out toads, jumped at the sound. The jerk of her fist dragged the red pen in a wide swipe across the page. On the computer screen, the progress tracker staggered through a second revolution and froze.
Bloody hell. Betty snatched for the keyboard. "Oh, no, you don't-" She hammered at the escape key, brought up the C3 menu, cursed again and slammed her hand on the counter in disgust. "Damn you, you idiot piece of fifth rate knock-off electronic doorstop."
From across the lab, Toby called, "Proto-RACK crash again?"
"Yes, dammit. Fourth time today." Betty leaned back in the chair, rubbing at her eyes, one hand going by habit to the curve of her belly. The cursor blinked at her.
"Told you we should have paid for the STARK-PMP."
"No." Betty knotted one fist in her hair and did not snap at Toby. "I told you, if I'm spending half the project budget on one program, it's not going to be that tricked-out excuse for a megalomaniac's overpriced code-bloated first-generation vanity project."
"We could have signed with MIT, gotten the alma mater discount."
"Does no one in this facility hold to intellectual independence and integrity? Besides me, I mean?"
"Hmmm…" Toby's voice grew meditative. "As our budget got halved again this year, from the pittance they promised the year before, I'd say the answer is…no."
Betty groaned, dug at her eyes with the heels of her hands. Across the lab, Toby's chair creaked as he leaned upright again. "Besides, admit it. You just don't like that it has Stark's image as the background on every page."
"Among other things." Betty leaned forward again, dragged the keyboard back into place. The menu still didn't respond. "You worthless – Star Raider Games has a faster computer than I do, Toby."
"They probably paid more for it." He looked back around the corner of the cubicle. "Dr Golder, with the cyanide pump? They got a bad copy, too – said they never did get it working, had to shift to Mitrotrack."
"Mitrotrack is crap. And I'd have to re-run the prelim data, so the comparison would be valid." She sighed, began shutting the workstation down. "Toby, I'm calling it quits today." She shoved away from the counter and felt for her flats.
Toby rolled his chair all the way out into the aisle. "You want a ride?"
"No, I'll walk. I brought my running shoes, it'll be fine." She smiled at him, because his apartment was fifty minutes in the other direction, and Toby had never been anything but sweet to her.
She could not say the same of all of Held lab's staff. She couldn't blame them, either.
It was one thing to hire staff because of their names and connections, or because they earned points for the eternal corporate diversity competition. Or because they had connections, and were a woman in particle physics, and were one of the top up-and-coming bio-radiation researchers in the country.
It was something else entirely, when it turned out the connections were useless and all the promise was just that, promise, and not delivery.
And then that mess down in Harlem, last quarter…
Betty swapped her flats for trainers and tucked the flats into her backpack. She practiced breathing deeply up three floors in the elevator, out the security doors, across Fruit and through the long parking lot to Cambridge. It had rained just after lunch, and the air was damp and still cool. Betty shrugged her shoulders under the backpack's light weight and headed down Grove, head up, striding out, eyes flickering across the oncoming traffic.
Halfway home, she had relaxed enough to walk instead of stomp, and give more thought to Toby's suggestions for replacing the software. That led her to drag out her phone and bring up the cost comparisons they'd done last year, when the department head had finally authorized them to put together a new protein-modeling package. She went from head-up and arm-swinging to eyes down and oblivious, and walked half a block past Gardeners before realizing she'd missed her turn.
Tomorrow, she thought, and shut the phone off. Time for supper.
You know you'll never be nationally ranked, one of her old lab partners had said. Not obsessive enough. You'll stop. You'll shut things off. Not stay up all night running and re-running sims…
Betty had laughed. I've seen obsessive. I don't need it.
She didn't. She was doing just fine with brilliance and a large beaker of stubborn. She was. She had her father's name and eyes. She didn't need anything else of his.
After dinner, she stacked the dishes in the sink. The phone's message light blinked, a single malevolent eye. She sighed, filled a glass at the sink before clicking the play button. The machine hissed at her. Then her father's voice crackled through the speakers.
Betty, this is your father. Look, I know we already talked about this, but I really think you should go see one of the doctors on post. I'm concerned about the…the possibilities. If you're going to – if anything - I've talked to one of my friends, head of the maternity –
She pressed down on the delete button. Hard.
I will not scream. I will not weep. I will not scream.
She thought of her mother, in Okinawa and Stuttgart and Las Cruces, carrying on alone, while Colonel and then General Ross thundered his way up the chain of command, pushing for greater autonomy, more funds, more attention, while his wife ran the house and raised his daughter all but alone.
General Ross's soldiers had said, You're your father's girl…but until she turned fourteen and two months and twelve days, and stood holding her father's hand in a graveyard of white stones, it had been Betty's mother who had raised her and taught her and led her towards adulthood.
In the cemetery, staring at the coffin as it slowly went into the earth, she had held her father's hand longer than she had ever held it before, or since. Colonel Ross had looked at the girl beside him and – as efficiently as possible – had sent her away. Alone.
Betty stood in the kitchen, her breath coming in great gasps, her hands pressed to her mouth.
My mother survived this. My mother did this. My mother made this work. I am my father's girl, but I am my mother's daughter. My mother did this.
When she stopped crying, she washed her face, blew her nose, and swept up the broken glass. The envelope from the clinic was where she had left it beside her personal computer in the office nook. She tucked the thumb drive into her pocket, collected her phone and purse, and headed to the T, and the Red Line to Alewife.
At Mechamega Games she took a seat, waiting patiently for one of the non-gaming computers to open up. She kept her head down, plain scarf tucked up around her jaw, feeling the stares of the other customers slide across her skin. It had been a month since she had been here last. No one spoke to her, no one said, have I seen you before? The attendant was a new one – pimpled and greasy-haired, as had been the one before, but female now – and silently took the cash Betty pushed across the table before handing over an anonymous access card without meeting Betty's eyes.
At the open terminal, Betty tugged the chair's seat down before lowering herself gingerly and sitting back with a sigh.
She opened hugeandchartreuse dot blogspot dotcom without looking over her shoulder. The visitor log at the bottom of the blog still read 187, the same as it had last week. She slipped the thumb drive out of her purse and into the port before opening a new entry. The image took its own time uploading. In preview, the photo looked grainy, indistinct. There was no mistaking what the image was – a quarter circle of white on black, full of liquid hypoechoic space and rounded angles approaching bone density – but the features were difficult to make out. The identification square was blacked out, empty. No name, not yet.
A line from an old song tickled at her memory – what's your momma's name, child…
Betty sighed, hit post.
She put her hands on the edge of the desk to push herself away and stand up, but stopped in mid-motion. Instead, she reduced the blogspot screen and opened up Science Digest in a different window. She had paid for half an hour of computer time, might as well use it all. Sometimes Bruce was online, sometimes not.
She had paged through two different – and conflicting – articles on the latest influenza scare before the screen blinked. Comments flickered to 1, then 2.
Beautiful
Betty pressed her fingers over her mouth.
The second comment read only F?
She laughed shakily, realizing that she'd forgotten to add what the technician had told her. She opened the entry for editing and added a line of text. Girl. No issues.
The reply was almost instantaneous. Beautiful. LU.
Me, too.
The timer in the upper left ticked steadily down. When it read two minutes remaining, the counter flickered again.
I'm sorry. Wish…
She shook her head, swallowing hard, and thought damn you Bruce…
Jaw clenched, fingers stiff and angry, she typed, I'm not. No regrets. LU. B safe. Hit send.
She had no regrets, no second guesses. None. Not for the new job, the new town, not for leaving the university system. Not for opening the door in the middle of the night, when she had known who stood on the other side, and what could come of it.
The timer spun down. Your session has expired. Do you want to buy more time?
She breathed in, breathed out, pushed away and stood. One hand touched the mouse, clicked no. The other hovered in an arc over her belly. Then she collected her purse, turned, and walked out.
Not away. Out, and up the road, toward the taxi stand, and the next thing.
[end]
Title: Learning Lilith, Claiming Kali - Chapter Two: Quickening
Summary: Biological implications of being a hetero-normative homozygous-X hero – fluff, chocolate, heartache, and blood.
Characters: Betty Ross. Movieverse canon relationships.
Author's Notes: Set in movieverse, post-The Incredible Hulk (2008), but draws heavily from characterization in Aug Lee's Hulk (2003). (The author is well aware that there may be no more than three people on the North American continent who prefer the Aug Lee version. The author is okay with this.) The Held lab at Mass General, the MTA, and all internet cafes and gaming establishments in the greater Boston area are used fictitiously. Thanks to Flora and Kernie for beta.
Disclaimer: Not mine; they were broken when I found them.