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Concentrating had become a daunting task, and today proved no different. For the past few days, Mimsy found herself stumbling over her work; she'd read the same line ten times over, and couldn't manage to keep her thoughts on track while writing notes on her own research. It was frustrating, but she was stubborn, and her determination kept her moving forward.

Or it had, until she indulged in the distraction of conversations on twitter. The feed had died down, and she had long since set her phone aside, but she did nothing but sit, eyes closed, lost in her thoughts.

There was a lot of mental sorting to be done, categorizing and exclusions and inclusions, and too many unanswered questions that she didn't even want to touch. She was getting none of her actual work accomplished, but this posed a bigger problem than an entire month of work at once.

When the phone chimed and she read the notification, she hesitated to respond. It meant welcoming more than just another distraction - but she couldn't put it off forever, and ignoring it was cowardly in a way that proved Song right.

So she replied, and made her way to the basement, pausing again before knocking. She told herself that it couldn't be bad. It was just a different kind of learning.

With a slow exhale, she raised her hand and knocked.

Waiting at the door felt strange, Mimsy noted, distinctly different from any of the other times she'd been standing just outside his room - location notwithstanding, of course. All previous occurrences had found her with questions or reasons, and though she had countless questions and a definitive reason this time, it didn't feel the same.

Was this what it felt like to approach something blindly, without any semblance of a plan?

He opened the door and stood there, welcoming her and inviting her in, and she could only blink and stare, responding with an almost inaudible 'ah'. This was another mistake, another result of over-confidence. She should have taken time to reconsider her plans, adjust the trajectory, reassess the hypothesis. But she hadn't. She lied to herself instead, again, and now just looking at him was disarming.

Svensyl giggled knowingly, and didn't share the joke (again).

She stepped inside without a word, glanced back into the hallway, then took the opportunity to delay the need to speak by looking at the room. It appeared that he had not located any of the rumored torture devices, unless he was hiding them somewhere.

"I don't know how to do this," she blurted out, the only thing that came to mind when she opened her mouth. No, wait. Back to the basics of interaction. She knew how to have a conversation. "Sorry - hello. It is nice to see you. How are you?"

That was why she was here? Mimsy froze, wondering if she had accidentally agreed to something without realizing it. But it wasn't too difficult to put two and two together this time - if he was referring to his physical state, he probably wanted to be comforted, and if America was to be believed, the chances were high that he would want the same thing to improve his mental state. Or was he referring to their other conversation?

No matter the reason, she felt underqualified.

"Oh. Of course." Her eyes lingered on the spot beside him, and she took one tentative step after the other until she reached the edge of the bed. It will be fine, she repeated, slowly settling into the place he offered to her, legs curled up at her side.

Receiving a sincere apology was an impressively rare event, and it had only served to add more layers of complexity to the problems that she was actively trying to solve. She wasn't used to him caring about her this much; it was an established fact that he did love and care about her, which was largely the reason she had chosen him. Apparently, she had incorrectly quantified the data. She was wrong, and everything was even more askew.

"Thank you. For apologizing, I mean. I appreciate your understanding, and..." Something finally clicked, and she stopped reciting typical conversational phrases to look up at him, eyes bright and hopeful. Was he really offering that kind of control without even needing to be coerced into it? This suddenly felt a lot less like she was drowning in confusion, and she clung to the clarity.

Rules made sense. Drawing lines and boundaries, determining cause and effect and the best 'cause' to exempt, checking her results against laws and models. This was something she could do, but it felt so...easy. Suspiciously easy.

"I get to decide what the rules are?" Her brows furrowed as she tried to place the reason for his offering. "Are there no standard rules for this? Nothing pre-established that comes along with that title? No rules that you have?"

She was beginning to look a bit too excited at the thought of all the possibilities.

One rule, and it was exclusivity. Mimsy wasn't sure how to approach it. Showing interest and flirting with false intentions were very simple methods to get things accomplished with certain types of people, as long as none of it progressed past the memorized bank of questions and actions. And there were other matters that might complicate this in the future, if she was entirely honest...

Mimsy stopped herself. Why was she giving this any amount of legitimate consideration? Of course she would want to be the exclusive contributor, and she definitely didn't want him to participate in any other experiments that might contaminate her data. There was one clear answer here. This was an experiment.

<Ooooh, is it, though?>

She clenched her teeth. I don't need those childish little jokes from you too, she bitterly retaliated, taking a deep breath to calm herself as much as she could.

"Okay. I accept your terms. You were right to trust me, and I hope that you can continue to trust me in the future." Especially with all of the comments about his heart - that was her favorite kind of metaphor, and she showed her appreciation by smiling and touching his cheek. "I assure you that I will never be careless with the handling of your heart."

(Not a metaphor.)

"Will I be allowed to request the addition of more rules as I see fit over time?" That would be an incredible perk. "I know that I want to mirror your rule. I want you to listen to me and my requests. I want time to work on my research, especially if the power returns."

With the fundamental basics out of the way, her smile widened with curious amusement; time to test how far these rules could stretch.

"I want you to wear your glasses," she whispered, raising her eyebrows with her best look of 'please'.

He asked about her and the glasses, and Mimsy didn't explain; she just continued to smile at him, waiting, and watched as he actually retrieved them and put them on. Every time she set down a hypothesized boundary, he let her walk a mile past it. Again and again and again. This was a consistent trend now. It was incredible that she was so concerned about her data being ruined or tampered with, when her data was incorrect in the first place.

She just kept smiling until it broke into a laugh. All of her theories were inaccurate. She was wrong. Everything she thought she knew about this was wrong.

But there were rules now, and she had new information to build upon. This could be salvaged. This was still a beneficial experiment, and there was no need to panic and let it self-destruct. The importance of his compliance was that he had complied, and it allowed her the position of streamlining this significantly. All unnecessary tangents could be eliminated, and this would be just like every other project.

Except none of her other projects made her feel so strange when she looked at them. No specimen or colleague had ever made her pulse race just by looking at her.

"While I will not discourage you from acts of passionate violence..." She reached to pet his hair, and gently curled her fingers into it. "I have no interest in every man who is wearing glasses. Just you."

This was an experiment.

"But yes. Better." They were a visible indicator of her success. That was all. She rewarded him with a kiss that lingered longer than any kiss she had given him, with an uncertain gasp of an inhale when she pulled away.

This was just an experiment.

Even if the rush of endorphins and the difficulty breathing were working with combined efforts to deter her from continuing to believe that.

It had taken only a kiss to lose her hold on that clarity, and Mimsy felt lost again, with an even greater number of feelings that she didn't understand: responses to his touch, to the subtleties of his motions, her thoughts shrouded in a calm fog of contentment, encouraging her to seek more, and as she pressed forward to comply...

She stopped.

"Wait," she murmured against him, opening one eye as she moved just far enough to see his face, leaning into his hands.

"What are you feeling right now?" Both eyes were wide and staring with intrigue by then, though the rest of her remained almost entirely still, not wanting to alter anything. "Or in the moment directly preceding this moment, technically."

At first, she'd seemed almost excited, as if her reason for halting everything offered great potential. The longer she spoke, the more anxious she appeared. Was this even the way to ask these sorts of questions? But how was she supposed to know if she didn't ask?

"I mean...well. What feelings are you physically experiencing? Then what do they equate to? Happiness? Fear? Joy? Love?"

She didn't continue past 'love', knowing that there was probably no advantage of excessively pretending that it wasn't the majority of the reason she was asking in the first place. As badly as she wanted to know, for the benefit of having solid connections instead of more flimsy estimations, for the sake of tying anchors to that clarity instead of losing it, there was still an increasing amount of hesitation in her voice.

That was not the answer Mimsy expected. It wasn't even on the short list of options she'd so hopefully presented, in fact. Her stare was wide-eyed as she attempted to process that information, mentally creating an entirely new classification of emotions that she'd happened to somehow overlook. It was much easier to avoid questioning denial again if she grouped it in with the embarrassing amount of other mistakes that had slowly begun to come to light.

Still, it was an answer - if she'd specified, or limited the responses, she might not have gotten an answer at all. This was good.

She took another deep breath.

It was just another point of data. It was a solid answer. This was good. Just because he was feeling that didn't mean that she was, anyway. If anything, this made a very solid argument against her feeling anything of the sort; she was sure that she had felt desire before, when something that she was attempting to gain or succeed at was within her grasp, and this was nothing like that.

"Okay," she breathed out, putting one hand on his leg to balance herself. "I see. But how do you know which feeling is which? How do you differentiate between them? You said that the feeling of love was a prerequisite to the feeling of desire that my touch achieves - what do you feel now that differs from what you feel..."

Her hand squeezed his leg as she tilted herself just far enough to kiss the corner of his mouth, and returned to its resting position when she sat back again.

"...now?"

But instead of allowing him time to respond this time, she let her impatience push past the importance of taking each necessary step one by one, and hurriedly returned to inquiries. There was an urgency in her tone, and she couldn't manage to stay still, nervously fidgeting in his lap as she spoke.

"Just...tell me what they all feel like. Which makes your stomach ache? Which makes it difficult to breathe? Et cetera, ad infinitum. I assume you get the point." Then it was anxiety, not impatience, that made her elaborate. "The point is not that I don't know how to do this, in spite of my prior remarks. I don't know how to do this, but the point is to make associations with concrete definitions of emotions, and..."

It felt painfully obvious that she was making herself sound ridiculous, so she tried another kiss as a distraction. Though it was meant as a distraction for him, that little soothing rush that came with it did manage to calm her nerves. She tried not to think about it.