Geekery fic

Title: Birds of a Feather
Author: Evan Nicholas

Summary: Geekery attracts geekery.
Rating: Snark and kissing. That's it.
Disclaimer: Who, me? Surely you jest.

A/n: Response to Prompt#01, because I couldn't resist it.





---


Slow nights are the worst. The absolute worst.

"Methyl oxide is two words," Hodges points out.

"I thought we agreed that hyphenated words were okay."

"Hyphenated, yes. Totally separate, no."

Hodges and Archie stare each other down, then Archie sighs and scoops up his tiles again, leaving Hodges' O-X-I-D-E on its own. "Fine," he grouses, "fine.... but if we're being finicky here, then I want to challenge your Klingon spelling."

"What? It's phonetic-"

"It's not a phonetic language," Archie tells him, "and Greg has a dictionary in his locker. Let me go get it."

Slow nights are the worst because they inevitably end up playing Scrabble.


---


Neither of them wants to process that, it's too disgusting to contemplate.

"Rock, paper, scissors?" Greg asks.

Hodges shudders, then sighs, then nods. "On three."

"One," they say together. "Two. Three."

Hodges paper is up against an odd shape involving both of Greg's hands and bending at least one knuckle the wrong way. "What the hell is that?"

"The cellular structure of a bacteria they use in bio-pulping," Greg says with a grin. "It eats paper. You lose."


---


"What's his combination again?"

Jacqui pokes her head out of the locker room to make sure the coast is still clear, then comes back inside to stand next to Ronnie. "02-07-34," she rattles off from memory.

He twiddles the lock and it pops open. "How do you remember it?" he asks, manipulating the ballistics dummy into Bobby's locker.

"February 7, 1834," she says, and leans against the door to hold it closed while Ronnie gets the lock through the catch again. "Mendeleyev's birthday."

"Whose?"

"The guy who invented the periodic table of the elements."

"Oh." With a snick, the lock is shut, and they stand back to admire their handiwork. "I should have known that."


---


"Come on," Greg whines. "It's Thanksgiving! You gotta be festive."

"I will not have that travesty of grade school arts and crafts in my lab. Go away, Greg."

He sighs. "Come on, Jacqui," he wheedles. "I'm making one for everybody."

She eyes him. "A turkey made out of an inflated latex glove is not my idea of festive, Greg."

"I talked Nick into using your seasonal green fingerprint powder last St. Patty's Day," he points out.

She sighs, and holds out her hand. "Fine," she says, "but we are even."

He grins. "I love you."

"Fuck off."


---


The "all-tech" page brings everyone to Archie's lab at around the same time.

"Check it out," he says when his audience is gathered around. He taps his keyboard and the screen goes dark, and then it begins to fill with different atomic models falling from the top.

"It's chemistry Tetris," Archie says. "You only clear a line if you make a real chemical compound."

"Ooh," Hodges says, "get that oxygen over to the left there."

"No, rotate it," Jacqui says. "You need a covalent bond if you're going to-"

"One at a time," Archie says. "Please."


---


Bobby is practically drooling in the corner of the coffee room when Archie and Jacqui wander in. He doesn't lift his eyes from his magazine, doesn't even seem to notice them coming in.

"Porn?" Archie asks.

"Ha," Jacqui says, reaching for the coffee pot. "Guns & Ammo."


---


"It's bullshit."

"It's not," Ronnie says. "I swear. It's scientific. Go on, try it out."

Hodges' skepticism is plainly evident in the arch of his eyebrow, but he picks up the pen and scrawls his signature anyway, because all his machines are tied up in tests and he's got a few minutes to kill.

"Okay," Ronnie says, scans it in and projects it onto the wall opposite them. "See here, the loop of your G? That demonstrates a problem with authority figures. And the tail of your S? You're conflicted about your mother. I bet you were breastfed."

Hodges snorts. "You're a closet Freudian," he says.

"And you're a closet Jungian."

He feels his temper flare, but he damps it down. "Now, let's not get vicious here," Hodges says, his words flattened by the clench of his jaw.

"It's your D," Ronnie says with a smirk. "It gives you away."


---


"Oh, come on baby, you can do better than that..."

Greg and Bobby stand with their heads in the door to Archie's lab.

"Porn?" Bobby asks.

"Online Pong," Greg tells him.


---


"Okay," Bobby says, "listen up. Nick is distracting Greg, but I don't know how long we've got. We need birthday suggestions for him. Pronto."

"An LotR theme party," Archie says.

"We did that for Jacqui," Bobby says. "Gotta be something original."

"Come as your favourite virus?" Hodges says. "A prize for the best costume."

"If we're going to do that," Archie says, "we have to decide whether to allow bacteria and fungi, too. Viruses don't look that different, one from the other."

"We could have a cake shaped like the bubonic plague," Bobby says. "Black icing and everything."

"Can I come as Death?" Ronnie says. "I've already got a scythe."


---


"...and then over here, you'd have a storage space for backup ammo. If you had the rear defended strongly enough, you could even set up a production line out here, right, and not have to worry about your supply lines being cut."

Bobby considered the sketch on the pad in front of him. "Maybe," he concedes, "but you'd need a lot of people to make that work."

"That's just logistics," Hodges says with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Well... Strength of materials, too," Bobby says. "Over here, where you've got turrets and this tower? I just don't think you could get that kind of tensile strength from snow."

"And ice," Hodges said. "If you built it up slowly, freezing it in layers-"

"Naw," Bobby contends, "I just don't think water is going to give you what you need."

"Hm." Hodges doodles some more, sketches a molecule and starts to tweak at its layout. "We could dope it with silicone, maybe, at the foundation stage..."

"Maybe," Bobby says, "but then is it still really a snow fort?"


---


"Pssst."

"What?"

"C'mere."

Greg raises an eyebrow, but sets down his pipette and follows Archie into a seldom-used lab full of dusty boxes. "What?"

"I'm conducting an experiment," Archie tells him with a grin.

"Oh? What kind of experiment?"

"In behaviour modification." He steps close to Greg and leans deep into his personal space. "My hypothesis is that if I kiss you often enough at work, you'll jump me as soon as we get home in the morning."

"Mmm," Greg says, enjoying the quick kiss. "Interesting theory. Needs more testing, though.

"Mmm."


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