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The wordless sounds that Robert made didn't manage to get Mimsy's attention, but saying her name did; she tried to make her eyes focus through the blur, listening carefully as he spoke. Words were safe. They made sense, just like rules - or she thought they did, anyway. These didn't make much sense at all.

"I...ah," she stammered, eyelids fluttering as he tightened his hold on her. It was difficult to process the question, and even more difficult to select which answer was correct, and nothing about their 'interaction' was making it any easier. There had to be a correct answer, inevitably. If she answered immediately, without considering everything at stake, she would choose answers. That was simple. But in this sort of circumstance, it somehow seemed like it might be a mistake to not choose the latter.

That all aside, how could someone want a person they already had? That was a strange redundancy. She frowned, and appeared to be thinking very hard, slowly piecing together portions of information she'd gathered, compounded with the ever-crucial context clues.

Then the words made sense again. That was an added level of complexity that she had failed to consider.

"I don't know. I cannot determine the correct response." She looked away from him and stared at an irrelevant spot on the floor. "I need answers. I need you to help me. You are the most capable, even if you have the tendency to precipitate exponentially more questions from each resolved answer. But, I..."

She shifted and continued to silently stare at the floor. This would have been a good time for another distraction, something to give her time to think, or a momentary escape, but she thought the last attempted distraction had possibly not worked in her favor, if it raised these kinds of inquiries.

"Is my response of permanent significance?" Very cautiously, she looked back towards him. "A 'one or the other, forever' sort of scenario? I am having incredible amounts of trouble with ultimately separating the two - unless my answer can be 'both'."

The lack of permanence was comforting, less stifling than the alternative. Mimsy hadn't liked the idea of something so time-consuming without the presence of questions. Thankfully, it wasn't actually at risk, and this could progress with relative normalcy. Almost according to plan.

She had already begun an attempt to orchestrate some kind of combined method with a fairly high probability of success when he tacked on the stipulation of 'not together'. Damn. The thoughts unwound themselves and she tried to tie them into new knots.

"I feel moderately safe in saying that I would like to have both, then," she replied, followed by a relieved little sigh now that she didn't need to be so guarded. This was already incredibly new territory for her, and each time she felt surprised by something felt like hitting a wall that she had to climb.

"However, for the sake of each of us, and for us together, I will make the suggestion of prioritizing answers. It will be beneficial to at least begin to minimize the list of questions before more are added to it. As I said, you do have a habit of prompting me to discover vast amounts of questions. I am sure that will continue to be the case."

The smile she gave him was small, but as fond as she could possibly manage, and she raised her hand to touch his cheek again.

"So it is best to save you for later, as you can see." They probably didn't exactly see eye-to-eye on that one, but she hoped it might sound more encouraging that way. "Do you remember what I asked, or should I ask again? Or were you referencing some other sorts of answers?"

There was never much doubt in her mind that Robert would not listen to her suggestion of handling the questions prior to anything else, but the little smile she'd been giving him looked much more pleased when he agreed. It twitched into a more neutral look of confusion as he pulled her backwards, accompanied by the same round eyes that a plucked-up cat might have. Normal motions and typical touches were doable by now, but things out of the ordinary still called upon the least survivable of the fight-or-flight-or-freeze prey response.

Eyes closed, she remembered to breathe, calming within the embrace. He wasn't going to hurt her. It did seem strange that he had situated them in a way that prevented them from looking at each other, but she couldn't complain. Conversation was much easier this way, just words and tones instead of a long checklist of observations to attend to. It was especially useful when she didn't feel like suppressing expressions, like the frown and furrowed brow that came in response to his admission of guilt.

Though it wasn't as if the questions were going to go away or change, so they were simple enough to repeat. She couldn't feel too annoyed.

"Between your first study session and now, I have noticed that you seem to indicate that you have difficulty concentrating when I am positioned in your lap. Maybe we could work on improving your concentration without detracting from your other senses too much." She turned her head just enough to glance at him out of the corner of her eye. "Or I could avoid sitting there, I suppose."

She stretched her arms out in front of her, stifled a yawn, and gave her previous comments enough time to sink in before she dropped her hands into her own lap and spoke again.

"I asked your assistance in forming associations between the concepts of each emotion and the physical feelings they produce. If I recall correctly, my specific questions asked which makes your stomach ache and which makes it difficult to breathe, though I did suggest that I intended to continue past just those two feelings." After she stopped her recap, she realized that it might need a bit more simplifying. She tried again. "I am essentially asking what it feels like to feel - which feeling in your mind causes which feeling in your body."

These kinds of things were much easier with Google constantly at her fingertips. At least she could trust him to both answer and not use the either the questions or the answers to retaliate against her at a later date. Those were both very important qualities in sources of information.

The last of the palm-sized moleskine notebooks that Mimsy carried everywhere with her had been filled up almost two months ago, and her inability to retrieve more of them was particularly painful at this moment. Robert made very clear, distinct connections, and she had confidence in her memory, but it always offered an extra sense of security to have the information stored within a secondary location.

As strong as memories could be, they were so easily manipulated here.

She had maintained a constant smile for the past minute or so, a substitution for literally patting herself on the back when her tease of a threat elicited the response she had been expecting. The longer he spoke of these details, however, the faster the smile faded.

"I had no initial intention of commenting on your answers, but..."

But ignoring unfavorable possibilities within her own reactions was nearly effortless when the focus was held on him. Forever, maybe. It had been irresponsible to personally involve herself in this portion of her research anyway, she told herself. She wasn't backing out, just being responsible. Yes.

"I understand the persistence of doubt, but there is no need to worry about the roots of those fears. I do not give up until all attempts to solve the problem have been exhausted. On subjects of importance, my mind is not changed in a moment or at a whim." Svensyl helpfully began to reference a very, very recent decision, and Mimsy spoke over him, idly patting one of the arms that wrapped around her.

"The other doubts, in reference to the amount of love that you feel," she continued, broken apart by a short laugh. "If it exceeded the 'allowed' amount, whatever that might be, I would have absolutely no way of knowing. I have nothing to compare it to, nor any desire to draw comparisons between two sets of data that have no correlation."

She crookedly shrugged, barely moving his head. "That aside, you and I are the only two people who can rightfully tell you that you are not 'supposed' to feel this way. You can feel as much as you would like to feel. I have no complaints."

This was another very good sign, after all.

"Hm."

Mimsy meant to say nothing more, to actually avoid commenting this time. The longer she sat, listening carefully to his voice and then the silence of the room, the more she knew that she needed to clarify before she could allow herself to move along. Sometimes it was not worth the effort, and other times found her in an unwilling mood, but she couldn't allow any incorrect beliefs about her work.

"I can see why you would be concerned, but that it not entirely true. Efforts intended for discovery so rarely reach completion. We find answers, and we use those answers to search further. Our understanding can always be worked on or built upon. I have been seeking the Higgs Boson for over a decade, for instance, and finding it will mark a beginning - not an end."

The thought of how different her approach towards finding that particle was now compared to her approach when she first began was humbling and somewhat disarming. Then again, she would never have considered her current avenue as anything other than complete insanity.

The idea that fear and love had anything to do with the secrets of the molecular universe sounded crazy even now.

Going down that rabbit hole of thought brought a risk of discouraging herself, so she tried something that had the potential to be encouraging instead. Her questions were as endless as her research.

"How can you be certain that you are feeling what you think you are feeling?" She was only repeating the remaining question that he previously missed, but she immediately began to regret it. Detaching herself from anything he said would be much more difficult with this set of answers. "How do you separate each of them? How do you determine if you are or are not experiencing a particular emotional reaction?"

The confidence in her tone dwindled into quiet words of uncertainty by the end of her last question. She closed her eyes and began to mentally recite memorized formulas until it would be too late to demand for him to not answer any of those.

Words were important. Each of them held their own significance, and the method in which they were constructed into sentences was even more noteworthy.

That weight of importance was why the word 'when' ensnared Mimsy's thoughts. When. Not 'if'. Had it always been that way? She couldn't remember lingering on that particular word before, but she had been so distracted by unpredictable thoughts that her memory was somewhat cloudy.

"Yeah," she confirmed, eyes closed more tightly now. "Yes. That is precisely what will happen."

He was in the middle of his story when her eyes quickly opened again, startled by a resonance she found in his words. It was as if her mind made a connection that it wasn't sharing with her, and she stared into the air in front of her without blinking.

"What made it seem so wrong?" She felt dizzy, and closed her eyes again. "I agree, for what it is worth. You have an exceptional emotional capacity and understanding."

The request to try again might have made her laugh if she didn't feel so sick. She wondered if he typically considered their conversations to be some kind of oral quiz.

"You may elaborate if you would like to. There is no obligation. Your recollection was enlightening." Allowing herself to plead for an answer more focused in facts and logic would look weak, she thought, as if she were incapable of any human empathy at all. Clerise called her a robot on many occasions, and most others might have thought it, but she had the ability to at least pretend now. A lot of people were deterred by someone they could not connect with in a meaningful sense; pretending was the most efficient way to gain answers.

And she really needed an answer right now. More accurately, countless answers to questions she didn't even want to ask.

She asked one anyway.

"What do you feel about the way I feel?" It was the safest of all of the questions, as indicated by that 'when' he'd used. He was a tool of emotional measurement, and she patiently awaited the reading, her hands tightly clasped in front of her.

A small, uneven smile crept across Mimsy's lips as he spoke about his mother. Perfect. Memories of her own mother were riddled with missing pieces, which led her to believe the absent events were of little importance anyway. She couldn't equate perfection with something that was so irrelevant. All she could possibly say about her mother was that she existed.

The way he thought of his mother complicated the puzzle he presented even further - if he thought she was perfect, his choice of women to love did not fit into that idea of perfection in the slightest. Her conversations about emotions had become more frequent now, but for entirely different reasons, and expressing her feelings was an endeavor that was more trouble than it was worth.

And it was hard to say what she felt when she didn't know what she was feeling.

The kiss found her lost in her thoughts, trapped somewhere between two halves of an equation that failed to properly balance. Her reflexive reaction, before her mind could catch up, was an 'mm' and a stuttered breath, and she blinked several times as she attempted to focus too, which was led astray when he pressed his hands against her.

"Sad because it was impossible," she repeated, words encircled with wonder. She logically knew that he had been sad before, but it was difficult to imagine. Of course, everything was difficult to imagine or think about now, as distracted as she was. Svensyl spoke only in Jabberwocky gibberish, hoping to enforce or increase that level of distraction.

It worked, in a roundabout way.

"Have you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'? You remind me, ah..." She stared at her hands, avoiding looking at him, and picked at a fingernail. "Perhaps I should just quote it."

The dull clicking sound of fingernail against fingernail filled the silence as she stopped speaking, almost long enough to imply that she didn't intend to quote it at all. Though she did begin to speak, she didn't stop the nervous habit.

"'I can't believe that!' said Alice.
'Can't you?' the Queen said, in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'
Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half and hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"

When she finished, she fell silent again. The picking stopped, and she finally looked at him, reaching to tap his nose with the tip of her finger.

"I know that you explained that you feel lucky now instead of the sadness, but...even if you do feel as if any of this is impossible, it is okay to believe impossible things. Knowing that there was benefit in believing the impossible is why I am a scientist - I want to prove them, so everyone can believe in it. So it can be possible." She smiled, eyes bright in the way that only happened when she spoke about science, and turned to give him a soft, chaste kiss, a reward of praise and encouragement.

"I apologize that my response has been so tangential. Yes, you answered my question. Knowing how you feel provides a substantial amount of insight. " She stretched again, and with care to keep his arms in place around her, she turned to lay sideways against him, legs curled up towards her chest. "And I am glad that you believe in some impossible things. You have from the beginning, you know. Maybe not six before breakfast, but your unwavering certainty that I could feel or comprehend these concepts, the certainty that allowed this to begin...that was impossible. Despite everything, not even I believed in that one."

Truthfully, she still didn't. It wasn't a lack of proof or reasoning or capability to believe that prevented her. At this point in the project, she had a fair amount of evidence, both objective and subjective, and she still had faith in concepts that made no rational sense. Just not that one.

She was too far in to quit now, and she'd focused too hard on puzzles, on the rush of delight when things went her way, on strange new experiences instead of assessing her position. And now that she was here, at a point where she could believe another impossible thing, she found that she didn't know if she actually wanted to understand and personally experience love. There were other methods of proving her humanity, and surely other possibilities for examining the transfer of matter between emotions and the physical manifestations. She failed to prepare, took the metaphorical plunge too soon, and now she was trapped again in a web she'd helped create.

Now she wanted to get out, but she couldn't help believing that one impossible thing she wanted to ignore. He could tell that she felt something, and so could she, in spite of both fighting against it and an inability to label that something. She wanted to get out, and knowing that she couldn't just run away and hide, there was only one other immediate option to free herself.

She drew a long breath and shut her eyes.

"I feel love for you," she choked out, face pressed against him, eyes brimming with tears that soaked into the fabric of his clothing. "And I don't know how to do this."

It was still hard to say, even if she suspected that she knew what she was feeling.

Wrong? Mimsy frowned and held very still, lest she be tempted to shove or bite or elbow him with an irrationally angry response to being wrong. That was not an association that she liked, even if it was meant to be positive.

"Noooo," she mumbled in a tiny little voice. Almost petulant, like a moody teenager. "I..."

I didn't mean to was the wrong thing to say, and admitting it was an accident was not any more encouraging, she assumed. This was exactly why she said she didn't know how to do this - none of this made any sense, and words had to be even more carefully chosen. At her current rate of thinking before speaking, adding more stipulations would inevitably bring more awkward pauses, which would probably not be the 'right' thing either.

Did she know how to do any of this right? All she had were generalizations and assumptions based on the handful of things she knew about friendship. The carefully laid plans did not extend this far, and there was no confidence to feel when she had to walk down blank paths of blank pages. His story made her think that words didn't necessarily bring a feeling of love, but her words had done just that.

Taking the risk to say what she'd said might have freed her, but the world she stepped into was different than the one she knew. Everything felt backwards: it was comforting to be wrong, and an inability to definitively replicate a result was not a bad thing, and knowing that she meant something to someone was not appalling.

<Aliiiice,> Svensyl sang, teasing, and it only made it worse. Worse because he wasn't supposed to make things make sense, but every comment and insight the senseless Jabberwocky made had been right in this context. What was she doing? Was this all somehow meant to happen? Had he called to her because he could tell? He stopped responding, leaving her alone with thoughts of Alice and backwards worlds.

"Okay," she began, taking as deep a shaky breath as she could with his arms so tightly around her. She had chosen the right thing. She was technically not stuck anymore. Maybe it was like drinking that little bottle with the paper label around its neck - it just felt like the wrong option, but saying it had been the correct option, and things would balance out soon. As long as she didn't think too hard about the fact that she was gleaning serious life advice from a children's book, she could possibly make it through this.

"Okay. I am your impossible thing that makes you feel loved, and you believe in me, but I need...ah...assistance, for you to guide me through this, which means more questions and more explanations, occasionally requiring greater detail than you might be used to. And not through to an end, necessarily, but...through the things that I have trouble understan--oh, wait. Why are you crying?"

It was possible that she should have asked that first. She might have opted to pat him on the head or shoulder or some other generally comforting motion to 'fix' it, were her ability to move not somewhat compromised.