"It's… ALIIIIIVE!" Lafontaine reared back with arms outstretched, a wild look in their wide eyes. The room was dark, save for a single white light piercing the darkness, flashing on and off. A sharp beeping, the smell of something burning, and the crackle of electricity mixed in the air, and Lafontaine feel like a real mad scientist, befitting of a cofounder of LaFerry Industries! Then, the breakroom light clicked on.

"Oh, calm down, Laf, you just finished microwaving your instant noodles." Perry stood in the doorway, nose crinkling as she snorted at her partner's antics. Then again, this was the same weirdo who once said, "We tape our flame throwers to our pulse rifles and make the weird submit!"

Could Perry really expect anything diff— "INSTANT NOODLES?!" Her eyes shot open as her own words sank in.

"Oh, great, here we go again!" Lafontaine sighed under their breath. They knew what was coming…

"Lafontaine!" Exactly as expected, "Team Mom" Perry launched into her patented "Mother In Lecture Form" spiel about health, self-care, nutrition, sleep, and exercise. It was all usual stuff one would expect from a boring, stupid, old, high school health class. Lafontaine shuddered at the mere memory. Not only had they been far beyond that level of "science" by the time they reached high school, the science wasn't even that good!

Their school focused primarily on abstinence-only sex and drug education with actual health and biology as a very minimal side-topic. The closest they got to real biology was puberty, but leave it to high school health to make it as awkward and forgettable as possible, especially for queer, trans, and/or nonbinary students like Lafontaine. As if coming out at that age wasn't hard enough, school added a whole other layer of complexity! Even Perry hated that class, her current lecture coming from her own personal experience as the friend group caretaker than any high school class.

"I know, Perry, I know," Lafontaine finally interrupted, raising their hands and sighing. "And I'm sorry. You know me, I just get so carried away sometimes! I don't do it on purpose! I just get lost in my work and… forget…"

On the one hand, this had been true about Lafontaine for their and Perry's entire lives. On the other, Perry would've said that that was all the more reason Lafontaine needed to work on it. This was a problem over two decades in the making!

Perry wasn't just reciting from the "Burnout 101: Literal and Metaphorical, How Not To" textbook (which was required reading for all new employees of LaFerry Industries), but she was still speaking truth. Lafontaine wasn't the only one who sometimes got so lost in their work that they forgot all else. Perry was guilty of the same thing more often than she cared to admit. The difference was that whenever she caught herself slipping back into bad habits, she did everything she could to fix them quickly.

I learned the hard way that you really can't pour from an empty cup. I wanted so badly to take care of everyone that I completely forgot to take care of myself, and it nearly ruined everything for all of us! First was Silas U, when Perry was slowly possessed by an ancient Sumerian goddess hellbent on bringing about the End Times so that she could open the Gates of Hell and reunite with the lover she lost eons ago. Rough semester, to say the least. Then there was five years later, Perry taking on an increasing number of administrative tasks for the Industry, resentment slowly piling up with all the endless paperwork.

After a "Luigi's Mansion" adventure with the rest of the Dimwit Squad, though, they all came out stronger because of it, and a lot of unspoken words were finally given the space to breathe and exist. Now, Lafontaine and Perry and their joint start-up were doing better than ever before. There was just the matter of Lafontaine unintentionally neglecting their biological needs in pursuit of their mental and emotional ones.

"C'mon, ya weirdo," Perry finally sighed and shook her head, elbowing Lafontaine gently. "You can tell me all about your day over dinner."

ooo

By the end of the night, Perry's head was swimming with letters and numbers from every language known to humanity. Of course, as one of the cofounders of LaFerry Industries, Perry knew a fair bit of STEM material, though it was still dwarfed in comparison to what Lafontaine knew. They were a bio major, after all. Perry had chosen German. Despite that, she was able to recognize a few of the non-English, non-German characters in Lafontaine's lab notebook. In particular, the letter Perry felt she saw the most was the lambda, a Greek letter that looked like an upside-down "y" and stood for a number of things across physics, chemistry, and the queer community.

In physics, it meant a complete exchange of energy, a span of time full of absolute activity. That was why it was chosen as a queer symbol, for the concept of endless motion and energy forward, an exchange of life and culture as queer individuals clashed and came together and bumped their way through the crazy thing they called life. There were even multiple queer advocacy groups that used the lambda as a symbol of their own, for example, Lambda Legal. How fitting it was, then, to see that character so often in Lafontaine's notes.

Though of course, she knew that Lafontaine hadn't chosen the symbol purely for its queer connotations. Lafontaine was a memester, yes, but science was their greatest love behind Perry and her home cooking. So as goofy as Lafontaine could get, the lambdas were there for a real reason. Lafontaine was careful, though, not to explain too much about the reason why. As Perry knew, the lambda was used in multiple scientific connotations. One was in measuring wavelength. Another was the radioactivity decay constant in nuclear physics.

If I want to avoid a nuclear meltdown, I probably shouldn't tell her that I'm experimenting with nuclear meltdowns… Lafontaine fought valiantly to keep an awkward, embarrassed smile off their face as they continued to explain their day's work to Perry as carefully as they could. Lucky them, as interested as Perry was in Lafontaine's progress, she was getting sleepy after all that cooking and eating. Her eyelids drooped and as soon as Lafontaine noticed, they sighed quietly in relief.

"C'mon, Perry," they chuckled quietly. "The meal was delicious, and I'm really grateful for you listening to me ramble about my day, but I think it's time we get to bed."

"The… dishes…?" Perry asked sleepily.

"We can get 'em in the morning," Lafontaine led Perry upstairs. Perry protested the entire way, too much of a neatfreak to be comfortable leaving plates in the sink overnight, but only a minute after Lafontaine tucked her into bed, she was already snoring. Lafontaine grinned as they slipped on their lab-grade soundproof headphones and then slipped into bed right beside Perry.