He hadn't slept enough to be doing this.

Hadn't slept enough for most of October but it felt especially relevant right now, standing in the SEM lab at 4 PM with {{user}} behind him, probably already touching something.

"Don't."

"I'm not touching it."

"You were."

"I was near it."

"Near it with your hands."

She made that sound. The one that meant you're right and I hate it. He'd learned her sounds over seven weeks of remediation sessions, which was not a thing he'd intended to do and yet here he was, fluent in them. He kept his back to her and finished the calibration sequence.

He liked the SEM lab. No windows. No California sun trying to personally ruin his day. Just the vacuum pump and the recycled air and the kind of quiet that expensive equipment generated when it was working right. He'd spent enough hours in here that the machine had moods he could read. Cooperative days. Difficult days.

{{user}} had been standing six feet behind him for six minutes and he knew exactly where she was without looking. That was new. That was a development from maybe week four that he'd been steadfastly not examining since.

"Come here," he said. "Monitor."

She came and stood next to him and he moved left without thinking, just automatically, giving her the better angle to the screen. Caught himself doing it. Filed it. Moved on.

"Okay so." He pulled up the sample. Steel cross-section, standard. "SEM uses electrons instead of light. Way higher resolution than optical." She glazed over when he went full textbook, he'd learned that too, so he thought for a second. "You know how Google Maps satellite is blurry but if you're actually standing somewhere you can see every crack in the pavement?"

Pause.

"...Yeah?"

"Like that. But more."

"That's genuinely the worst analogy I've ever heard."

"It worked though."

She didn't have a comeback for that. He queued the scan.

1000x first. Grain structure came up clean, exactly what he expected, the kind of image he'd looked at so many times it had stopped being anything. He moved to 5000x. Started forming the explanation in his head, the crystalline boundary sentence, the one worn smooth from repetition.

He pushed it to 10,000x.

The martensite bloomed across the screen.

{{user}} stopped moving.

Not the fake kind of still. Not the performance she did sometimes when she was waiting for him to finish talking. This was different, weight coming forward, chin lifting slightly, two inches closer to the monitor without noticing, and he could see in his peripheral vision that her lips had parted and she'd stopped doing anything except looking.

He turned to say the sentence. The lath structure sentence. It was right there ready.

"It's beautiful," she said.

Soft. Like it came out before she cleared it.

And he just. Looked at her.

Stood there and looked at her instead of the screen like a complete idiot, because the monitor light was hitting the side of her face grey-white and sharp and she had that expression, the real one, the one that showed up maybe once a session when something actually landed, open and unguarded and completely unaware of him standing eighteen inches away having some kind of internal incident about it.

Her eyelashes. He noticed her eyelashes.

Oh, he thought. We're doing this. Great. Fantastic.

He looked back at the screen.

The steel was right there doing exactly what steel did. Existing. Completely unbothered. He envied it genuinely.

He was aware his jaw was tight. He made himself unclench it.

"Martensitic structure," he said. Came out normal, which felt like a personal achievement given the circumstances. "The needle formations. Steel cools too fast, the carbon atoms can't redistribute, they get stuck. Whole lattice distorts around them."

"Trapped," she said.

"Makes it harder. Useful."

She turned and looked at him then and he kept his eyes on the screen with everything he had.