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The dry mix was almost depleted, icing gone, eggs running low, and Mimsy still wouldn't sleep.

She had created what could only be described as a science nest in the corner of one of the labs, strewn with pages of strings of numbers connected by sticky icing, no less than half a dozen open books, and far too many uneaten desserts, all haphazardly set around her in a semicircle. The few who had bothered to question her had all been pacified by a cake or plate of cookies nudged in their direction, but most had either not noticed her or not cared to bother her at all.

As busy as she appeared at a glance, she couldn't focus to work on anything. All of the scrawling made substantially less sense than her work usually did, and while she was alone, she did an awful lot of staring into thin air. Svensyl might have been concerned, were this not his idea of fairly normal behavior, and the strange second whisper only urged her towards more cakes.

She had plenty of cakes. Too many cakes.

It was well into the night when the number of cakes in her general vicinity was in surplus of the number of cakes she arbitrarily decided were allowed in her general vicinity at the moment. Seeing so many cakes made her so frustrated that she wanted to burn down the entire island.

Instead, she stacked two cakes and a half dozen cookies and balanced them in her arms, intent on giving them away and getting them out of her sight. There was one reliable method of accomplishing this, so when she finally stopped and actually considered what she was doing, only to realize that she was standing just inside the infirmary...she really couldn't be surprised.

"Robert?" she called, sleepily teetering back and forth.

Though she had not been waiting for long, Mimsy still managed to become disoriented enough to be startled by the sound of breaking glass and her name spoken at a significant volume. The cakes hopped a quarter inch out of her arms, but were easily recovered - not that it mattered, when she thought about it. She would have gotten rid of them either way.

"Robert," she repeated on a slow exhale, nodding towards him. "I did not come here for a--please don't touch my--"

With a little sigh of relief when he finally pinpointed her reason for being here, she extended the cakes towards him, gaze downcast on the now lopsided stack. It bothered her to see it so imperfect, despite her lack of culinary specialization, and the flicker of insecurity over something so unsubstantial still dislocated her pride.

"I can't sleep." Only partially untrue. "I have a surplus of these as a result, and I recalled..."

She looked back up at him with tired eyes, skin more pale and yellowed than usual, stare full of fatigued confusion, and slowly shook her head.

"I am unsure what I was saying, but I think that you should have these. Please take them so I can return to work." She extended them further, her smile faint and patient.

Relieved of the cake delivery, Mimsy watched him set them down and open up one of the boxes with a persistently vacant expression, her thoughts wandering desperately in search of what she meant to do next. She continued to stare at him while he shoveled cake into his mouth and licked the remnants off of her hand, which would have been a mildly uncomfortable situation were she more conscious of what the situation was.

That discomfort might have increased in the next moment, when she found herself swaying to keep her balance in his bubble of personal space; instead, she just seemed confused, wondering what he was doing. He whispered and smelled like cake, and she started feeling dizzy. She wanted to sit under the table again. It felt much more stable there.

"Well, no. I don't even like baking, but--" His comments on her appearance and vocabulary were enough to catch her off guard, and she stayed silent until a noncommittal "mm" that escaped when she was pulled towards the gurney.

"Ow," she mumbled, pawing ineffectively at the air where she thought the hand with the pen light would be. She clenched her eyes shut to avoid the light until Robert mentioned Dakota - and elaborated - at which point they shot open and widened with an urgency. "No! I would never, not Dakota...I mean, truthfully I have not ever with any..."

His last claim had finally registered. Unfortunately, this was the single topic that her near-nonexistent understanding of led to an easy belief of claims that might be obvious fallacies to most.

"What a terrible burden that must be." Her voice was full of regretful sincerity as she pat him on the hand, thoughts landing on his questions again. Under normal circumstances, she would have little to no interest discussing the current topic, but speaking candidly about personal problems was not very high on the list of acceptable discussion points either. She found herself struggling to determine the best course of action, and if it meant getting out of here...

She studied his face. He made her feel sleepy.

"It happened when I was avoiding my room." Before she even finished her sentence, she was shaking her head; she quickly corrected herself to fix it. "I was avoiding Kostya. I made a mistake. I didn't want to talk about it. Then I didn't want to think about the...rest of it. And things I said. And what it means now. And what I think I wanted them to mean. I don't know. What was the question?"

She pushed her glasses up to press her palms against her eyes, took a deep breath, thought for a moment, shook her head again, and stifled a yawn.

"I don't want to want...I mean, I just want to work. On things that have answers."

Stressing. Mimsy held her breath and chewed her lip, considering the implications of the word. She never considered herself to be a high-stress person - really, she never considered herself to be 'stressed' at all. It concerned her. It made her feel out of control, and not having control over everything was not a situation she wanted to be in.

But if Robert was right, she was sort of carrying that situation with her everywhere. Everything she touched, everything she thought about. She felt dizzy again...and remembered to breathe.

"No," she quietly insisted, looking away from him. "I guess. Maybe."

Somehow it felt more difficult to talk about the concept of stress than it had been to talk about the problems that it stemmed from. She let him do what he needed to in silence, watching his motions with half-lidded eyes that she struggled to keep open. It was so much easier to stay awake on her own.

There was a sour taste in her mouth as she considered how much easier almost everything was to do on her own, until she needed someone to do something she couldn't. Or wouldn't. She dug for an answer in her mind, whether it was necessity or preference or something in between, but could only think about going back to the table in the lab.

"Do you cope by...lying down?" Her tone was incredulous as she blinked at him behind glasses that were now carelessly askew.

Nodding while lying down was an impressively difficult task, Mimsy discovered. It was fortuitous, then, that she only wanted to nod to the first couple of things that he said. The last few earned slow shakes of her head, which were partially simpler, at least.

"No, that makes no sense, because..." She yawned. "Okay, maybe postponed, but..." Another yawn.

Robert assured her that she could talk to him about it later, but now that she'd finally stopped to lie down, she didn't have the energy to correct him. She didn't even make an effort to comment on his claim that he knew what he was talking about, nor did she analyze the situation to determine if that lack of effort came from exhaustion...or if it was because she agreed with him this time.

"'Gotta be' the best at relaxing?" She smiled, which split into a yawn. "I already am the best. The best at anything I try at all, because..."

Her eyelids slowly closed, and she visibly calmed in the next moment, her body sinking comfortably against her makeshift bed. Best at relaxing, she almost had a doctorate in relaxation math, which wasn't actually offered, but...was that something in her hair? It felt strange and unfamiliar and foreign, and she suspected that she might be hallucinating. There was a twitch of a bewildered expression across her face as she tried to reach up and swat it away, but she misjudged the apparent weight of her arm and just flopped her hand over it.

That's right. She was the best at relaxing and deterring imaginary whatevers.

There was a point that body overtook mind for the sake of preservation, and Mimsy had unquestionably reached that moment, every molecule insisting upon sleep. Her thoughts had wandered to the safety and stability of memorized information that would never leave her (barring injury or illness, of course): studied and recited delineation of the Milky Way. She counted the stars in galactic quadrant SQ1 that made up the Lepus constellation like others might count sheep, while Canis Major sang her praises from somewhere in SQ. Alpha Leporis, Beta Leporis, Epsilon Leporis, Mu--

With a sharp sting of familiarity, thoughts of the present began to seep in, drowning the stars in frustrated regret and denied inadequacy. She opened her eyes.

"Yes," she slowly responded, though she didn't quite remember being asked anything. It concerned her much less than it should have. After staring at the blurry figure that was presumably Robert for a few quiet moments, she closed her eyes again and took a deep breath.

Resting on the gurney had allowed for the energy previously spent keeping her upright to be redirected into more useful functions, like thinking clearly. She still wasn't quite there yet, but it was better than it had been, if only by a small margin. It might not have been the weariness that left her puzzled, stuck in a loop of thoughts that had no clear ending to them, but she would never readily admit that it was anything else.

"Eating me. Like a parasite?" As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized that he might not have been speaking literally. Still, there was something kind of like that, she guessed, if crowns that were cakes counted. Or Svensyl. Sometimes he felt like a parasite. Brows knit, she shifted and pulled her knees up towards her chest to curl up as best she could. This was a crossroads made of flimsy earth, and she knew that both achievable options led to unfavorable results.

"It's complex. Lots of...layers." She tried to demonstrate 'layers' with one hand, which resembled something closer to sloppily mocking karate, before dropping her hand back on top of the invasive species of hairnesting spacebug. Couldn't let it get adventurous. "Unsure how to start, of course."

There. Uncertainty instead of inability meant a small victory, and she wouldn't have to admit that she didn't know something, and she wouldn't have to...she yawned and glanced up at him again.

It was only now that Mimsy realized a flaw in her evasive loophole of the crossroads decision, and she wasn't sure when she would ever accept the fact that Robert was in no hurry to disengage from conversation like she was. It was a difficult thing to comprehend, why anyone would be that way, but she couldn't discount the existence of humans who were socially and functionally different than herself. Particularly considering the fact that she'd experienced being socially and functionally different not very long ago.

She stopped trying to settle into the gurney and kept her eyes closed, staying silent so long that she might have appeared to fall asleep. Instead, she was attempting to determine exactly what it was that he meant by 'first'. First this time? First ever? But with complex problems, she supposed she had to start at the first variable.

"There was a man in the trees," she mumbled, pausing to re-evaluate the statement. "It only appeared as a man, wasn't actually." She swallowed past the lump in her throat and tried for a while to think through the fog and whispers, reasoning that brain activity could keep her awake. It seemed to work well enough, when given enough time; though her body was still relaxed, she found herself able to think a little easier.

"I now understand that childhood development can be distorted when it lacks physical contact and care. When I saw the man--er, it, I..." She rubbed at her eyes. Without the recent flood of memories, she doubted she would have even been able to recall this information. She thought she liked it better that way. "At the time, I'd gone over a decade with no affection."

Why was she doing this? Because he'd asked? In spite of her improving grasp on her mental ability, she couldn't find a reason to stop, nor could she find one to keep speaking. The hand that had been placed on her stomach found its way to partially cover her face, muffling the rest of her words.

"Okay, fine. I don't know, Robert. I don't. Every time I think I've solved it, the answer doesn't come to me. I have no solution, no idea which layer is infected and needs to be excised, just pieces of information. Like..." As she began her list, she indicated a new point by tapping one finger on the spacebug each time. "An absence of involved caregiving. The brief presence of an affectionate creature in its stead. The things I did with curiosity for science that earned labels of psychotic, inhuman, monster. The lack of human connection. All facts that I was comfortable with until I came here."

She squeezed the spacebug, because she wanted something else to feel what she was feeling, especially since the option to not feel anything at all was not presenting itself.

"Accepting that I might have a friend took eleven months and two weeks. During the recent incident of mass amnesia...my first assumption was that such a level of attachment must have meant that we were together. I kissed his cheek. I held his hand." And through clenched teeth, because she didn't want to say it, but why the hell not at this point: "And once I discovered we weren't, I confronted the actual attraction I felt when I looked at Dwight by pleading with him to run away with me. I was unaware that I was capable of those sorts of feelings at all, but something inside me is. Something buried."

Frowning into her palm, she twisted to be able to comfortably curl herself into a tighter ball. The spacebug, however, was still firmly contained beneath her hand, continuing her efforts to prevent it from wandering.

"Those things must be at core of me. But I don't want those things. I want science and intelligence and academic immortality. They're simpler. They're all I understand. And anyway..." Another yawn, because all of those words had taken a lot of energy, which coated the next few words with slurred consonants. "Relationships with other humans are distractions from my work. Unsafe distractions, since all previously gathered data has found that it is statistically impossible for anything other than inhuman entities to care about me. I'd be foolish to waste energy on interactions that would mean I believed otherwise."

No fishing for compliments or martyring or self-deprecation intended. Just facts as she knew them, with no evidence of doubt in her tired tone.

There was absolutely no such thing as a spacebug.

It felt a bit ridiculous that everything in Mimsy's sleep-deprived state would begin to unravel at such an obvious realization, but there was something that kept her from admitting to herself that the return to reality was caused by something else entirely. She opened her eyes when he playfully pressed his fist against her cheek, and immediately brought her hand down to stare at the traitorous appendage that had been holding the invasive galactic creature, the shakiness of her fingers still visible through her impaired vision.

Had he not kissed her forehead before calling her an idiot, effectively distracting her from the first bit of words that followed, she might have been more furious than whatever unidentifiable emotion she was feeling at this moment. That was undoubtedly the result she would have chosen, if given the option, but she was stuck staring at her palm, mulling over what she had heard as she struggled against a sudden wave of anxious nausea.

His point had been fair and valid, which was something she absolutely never expected to acknowledge from Robert. There was still some verifying to be done (that would continue to prove that it was fair and valid), but the count of actions she'd avoided or actions she'd taken to avoid someone else was staggering. Yet that still wasn't really the problem.

She closed her fingers over the palm she'd been staring at and glanced at him instead; the nausea spiked, and she made the tiniest of whining noises. Why had she thought all of this was a good idea?

Spacebugs did exist, came the second realization, as a coping mechanism she didn't know she'd deployed, a refusal to believe. There was no feasible way that anything but it would pet her to comfort her...until Robert said he cared, at which point it became very obvious that it had been his hand all along. He said he cared 'a lot', even, and though 'a lot' was an unreliable unit of measurement, she knew its significance.

Much like she knew the significance of the fact that he had touched her hair, and she let him. She held his hand, and he let her.

These were the kinds of things that never happened.

"I...think I should leave," she murmured, voice strained and hoarse. When she tried to push herself off of the gurney, she found herself struggling to keep herself upright. This was going to be difficult.

Though he still would have been blurry, she refused to look at him, worried what she might see.