Archive of Our Own ^beta

A LITTLE WHILE AGO
"Ted, you saved us!" Phil exclaimed, his wide eyes moist with emotion.

"Our honor and title would have been lost forever," Lem affirmed, pushing up his glasses and beaming gratefully at his hero. Ted really should be everybody's hero. Lem had done a lot of research the year he'd chosen to dress as Ted for Halloween — even his mother had approved that costume — and he knew all about the excellent choices Ted made on a daily basis. Plus, he could really rock that weekend stubble and still be smooth as a baby's bottom at work.

The twinkling lights of the Christmas tree in the hallway cast the planes of Ted's clean-shaven face in an angelic glow, but to Lem he looked less like a seraph and more like one of the wise men.

"How did you figure it all out?" Lem asked reverently though mootly; Ted knew everything.

"And does Veronica think less of us now?" Phil inquired desperately, cutting straight to the heart of the matter.

"That's not possible," Ted said, then clarified when Phil failed to perk up. "Veronica is always proud to have you on her team."

"But Patricia and Bhamba are on her team too," Lem objected.

"But you two are the crowning jewel of the R&D labs at Veridian, the double helix that ties this place together —"

"That's not really accur—"

"Don't worry about anything," Ted interrupted back and Lem obediently buttoned his lip. Looking at Phil slumped over, he remembered he had to stretch if he was going to perform at his best. He nudged his friend and started his warm-up, knowing Phil would inevitably turn his moves into jazzercise fodder. "And don't blame Patricia or Bhamba for their part in all of this. I know everything that went down. And more importantly, Veronica knows why everything happened."

Veronica's omniscience was well-established by now, so Lem let all of the betrayals and shocks go and simply moved into another set of deep lunges.

EARLIER THAN THAT
"Perfidy!" Lem gasped. He'd been slipping a few sheets of Word-a-Day toilet paper (a gift from Phil, who was truly the salt to his pepper) into his lab coat's pockets so he didn't have to rely on the illogically situated toilet-roll dispenser, and without the anxiety over reaching what was hygienically necessary cluttering his brain, his vocabulary had grown by leaps and bounds.

"That was our project!" Phil was equally aghast. "Not Bhamba's. OURS."

"How dare anyone use the Malleyumball against its creators?" Lem asked, not at all rhetorically. Veronica had asked them to create a metal that could bounce like rubber and be edible and they had knocked the finished product out of the park on all three counts, Ted had said, using one of his mysterious sports metaphors.

"Bhamba was slicing one up right in front of me!" Phil shrieked. "I saw it with my own eyes!"

"I know that's a thing people say," Lem said, momentarily diverted, "but do you think Veronica would ever ask us to find an alternative? Seeing with someone else's eyes?"

"Ooh, can you imagine? The tests we could run! Does the color of an individual's eyes affect how that individual sees colors?"

"You could try it out with Ted and I could do Veronica!" Lem burst out before remembering the step his enthusiasm had leapt over. "But first we'd do each other, of course."

"Of course we would," Phil assured him, laying a hand over his. "We always do."

"Because we are responsible scientists." That nudged him back to thinking of those who weren't. "What was Bhamba carving up a Malleyumball with?"

"Oh, you know only the Malleyumball is ductile enough to shape a blade that is capable of cutting through another Malleyumball. Remember we told Sheila in Marketing to emphasize the reflexive tensile strength?"

"And she didn't know how to spell 'malleable' or what it meant, so she made it sound like a gumball when she could have called it the Van der Baal in honor of the intermolecular force that allows it to exist? Every moment of that interaction has been burned into my brain," Lem assured Phil darkly. "But why was Bhamba mutilating the balls in the first place?"

"This," Phil said, "is where we need Ted." They shuffled into the elevator together and hit the button that would take them to their beacon of sanity.

Ted heard them out with a pair of frown lines deepening between his big brown eyes the longer they talked. "Fellas," he finally said, after they'd all nodded at each other to affirm that they were done talking and that everything they'd said was true, "I agree it's sketchy, but is it wrong? Maybe Bhamba was just looking for a snack before the Christmas party."

"Jerome did say he found the flavor to be piquant," Phil said immediately, deferring to Ted's theory.

"Only after he rolled it in hot sauce," Lem rebutted. "And Wallace said the texture was too . . . mesh-like to swallow easily. Plus, you told me Bhamba was cackling and humming to himself as he carved away! Like it's Halloween and not Christmas!"

"Cackling and humming does not sound ideal," Ted agreed, and Lem basked in their being on the same side.

"And he had a pair of Patricia's heels on the table next to him," Phil added, capitulating again.

"And Patricia will tell you anything you want to know," Lem said, driving the point home to Ted.

"Alright, I'm off to lean on Patricia," Ted said, standing and buttoning his suit jacket. "In a platonic and non-threatening way. And maybe sell her some festive wrapping paper."

RIGHT NOW
"Can — you — believe — that —" Lem gasped out, hips flexing so furiously that he ran out of breath.

"They — thought — they — could — do — this?" Phil finished, flailing his arms in his signature move. The crowd gathered around them, having leaned in to watch Lem's hips, prudently took a step back to avoid being punched.

"Cheat — at — this," Lem corrected, easing into body-rolls and getting his breath back; the audience let out a fervent whoo of appreciation for the moves. Patricia and Bhamba were nowhere to be seen, so smack could be talked. "Bhamba clearly couldn't distinguish between a biomimetic substance and a non-Newtonian fluid!"

"He wouldn't know a Maxwell fluid if he tried to take a bite out of one!" Phil crowed, locking his fingers together and making an elbow-to-elbow wave. Some of the rowdier members of the crowd tried to do the same, forgetting they were holding drinks. "He thought we'd invented Flubber!"

Humpty waving, Lem picked up the conversational thread. "Bhamba could put all the Malleyumball or Flubber he wanted on his and Patricia's shoes for added bounce, but it still wouldn't give them moves like ours."

"Or the title of Veridian's best dancers," Phil agreed, popping and locking to rapturous applause.

"It was so short-sighted of Pete and Kathleen to put Bhamba up to it so that they could — swoop — in," Lem panted, having returned to his vigorous pelvic thrusting, always a crowd-pleaser. That he could see Pete and Kathleen, sour-faced in their coordinated dancing outfits of red and green and gold, standing at the fringes of said crowd was just a bonus.

"Veronica and Ted would never let that happen," Phil said, spinning on one spot with all the confidence in the world, evidently not realizing his words were lost to the Doppler effect, but Lem knew what Phil was saying anyway. Phil stopped spinning and they moved smoothly into their big finish, the Kid 'n Play. When they clasped hands and hopped in a semicircle, they both could see Ted raising his glass to them and Veronica next to him, smiling in their general direction before raising a triumphant eyebrow at Kathleen, who was doing her best to support a quivering Pete.

"We're so lucky," he said to Phil just as Phil was saying the same to him, and they moonwalked over to Ted and Veronica together.