FEB 9–14, 2026
Castillo assigned the lab partnership on Monday. She did it the way she did most things, with the brief efficiency of someone who considered the social dimension of decisions only to the extent required to produce good outcomes.
"Hardy pairs and stress responses," she said, naming the project, "require two researchers with different methodological inclinations. I've assigned partners accordingly." She read the list. Twelve names, six pairs, delivered without commentary on her choices. He suspected she had thought carefully about each pairing. He also suspected she would not confirm this if asked.
His partner was Gwen Stacy.
He knew that name. He knew it the way anyone who had watched a Spider-Man film knew it. Not deeply, not with the specificity of someone who had read the comics, but with the cultural familiarity of a name that had appeared on cinema screens and in trailers and in the particular cultural osmosis of a person who had existed in the world for twenty-two years and paid reasonable attention to it.
Gwen Stacy. Blonde. Smart. Spider-Man's. Died in the films, the falling and the catching and the not catching. He'd watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on a laptop at seventeen and found it considerably sadder than he'd expected.
He processed this for about three seconds. He was in this universe, not watching it, and the four months he'd spent inside it had made one thing consistently clear: the films were not a reliable map.
He'd known the MCU version of this world the way you knew a photograph of a place you'd never visited, recognizable in the broad shapes and wrong in the specific light. The name Gwen Stacy meant something in the films. Here it meant only whoever she actually was, which was a thing he'd find out by working with her and not before.
Still. The name sat in his chest with a faint, specific weight for the two seconds it took her to raise her hand from across the room. Then he looked over and recognized the girl from the library — the one who'd angled her laptop, bought him water without ceremony, said good session with the particular accuracy of someone who had been further away than the room and was returning honestly.
She looked at him with a mild expression that said she'd already connected the same dots and arrived at a similar conclusion: this was a coincidence that neither of them had engineered and that both of them would have to navigate. The expression was not unwelcoming. It was just honest.
He filed the name recognition in the same private place he filed everything he knew about this city that he wasn't going to act on — not suppressed, just stored. Her name was Gwen Stacy. In this universe, that meant only what it meant: her. He'd work with that.
They met after class in the lab, which was less awkward than he'd expected because Gwen Stacy turned out to operate at a productive remove from awkward. She had apparently decided, between the assignment announcement and this meeting, that the best approach was to treat him as a colleague and the partnership as a working relationship rather than a social situation requiring management, which was exactly the approach he would have chosen.
She came in with her own notes, a position on the methodology, and the air of someone who had done the reading and had thoughts about it.
"You think the cell's response is primarily mechanical," she said, spreading her notes on the bench. "I think it's chemical first and mechanical second."
"I think they're concurrent," he said. "The mechanical response triggers the chemical cascade simultaneously rather than sequentially."
She considered this. She had a way of considering things that was still rather than fidgety. She went somewhere inside herself for a moment and came back with a conclusion rather than an incremental series of reactions. He found this efficient in the specific way of a person who processed the same way. "That's more interesting to prove," she said. "Harder, but more interesting."
"Which means we should try to prove it."
"Yeah." She picked up a pen and opened her notebook to a fresh page with the particular decisiveness of someone starting a thing rather than continuing one. "Let's do that."
They established a working rhythm in the first session and kept it across the following week. She was precise with measurements in a way that suggested she'd been trained somewhere that took precision seriously, and she had a habit of photographing the setup before each trial that he hadn't thought to do and adopted immediately.
He contributed the analytical framework, the distribution approach rather than the point approach, the same logic that had reoriented his stress propagation paper and she contributed a rigor of execution that was different from his own but not lesser.
They were better together than either of them would have been alone, which was not always the case with lab partnerships and which he noted without making a larger thing of it.
By Wednesday he had the bruise on his forearm mostly covered. By Thursday it had faded to the stage where long sleeves dealt with it adequately. Gwen noticed it on Wednesday and said nothing.
He noticed that she noticed and said nothing, and felt the specific relief of someone whose cover was holding without effort, which was the best kind of holding. He also felt something that was not quite gratitude and was more than mild appreciation. She had seen and chosen not to ask, which was a form of respect for the principle that people had things they didn't explain, and respecting that principle required restraint from people who were curious enough to push.
What he didn't register was the way she looked at him for a half-second longer than the reagent retrieval required before her eyes tracked away. Or the way, twenty minutes later, she asked a question about the data whose answer she already knew, just to hear him reason through it. These were small things, invisible to someone who wasn't looking, and he wasn't looking.
On Thursday which was Valentine's Day, which the university had acknowledged with a perfunctory banner in the student center. They worked late in the lab after the building had mostly emptied out. The particular quiet of a nearly empty science building at eight in the evening was one he'd gotten used to. The ventilation hum, the occasional sound from another floor, the specific atmosphere of a place that ran on intellectual energy and was resting between doses of it.
The work was going well. They had preliminary data suggesting the concurrent activation hypothesis was testable with their current setup, which was better than he'd expected in two weeks.
Gwen was in the middle of explaining a modification to the measurement protocol when she put down her pen and said, with the tone of someone who had been thinking about how to say something and had decided directness was the cleanest route: "You're not from here."
"No," he said.
"Me neither," she said, which was exactly what Yara had said on the first day of orientation, but with a different weight in it. Yara had meant the ordinary transplant experience, the not-yet-belonging of a new student in a new place.
Gwen meant something else. He could hear it underneath. Not just geography, but the specific freight of having left something that didn't translate into the standard narrative of someone who had moved from one city to another.
He looked at her. She was looking at her notes, which was how she said things she was slightly uncertain about saying — not avoiding his eye, just finding somewhere else to rest her gaze that didn't feel like a performance.
"It's weird," she said, "how you can be somewhere new and still feel like you're carrying the old place around. Like it's a second set of luggage you didn't pack."
"Yeah," he said. He meant it completely and could not explain the full extent of why. "I know exactly what you mean."
She looked up. They were both aware, briefly, that they were talking about something more specific than geography. Both using the metaphor of location to mean something that had no clean other language. Neither of them said so.
The lab's fluorescent hum filled the silence for a moment and then they both returned to the data, and the moment closed in the way of moments that don't need resolution to have meant something. It had meant something. He had registered it without cataloguing it, which was different from his usual approach and felt accurate.
What he did not notice, walking back to his bench, was that she watched him go for a moment before picking up her pen. The watching had nothing analytical in it. She picked up the pen and wrote the next data entry in the notebook and the moment was gone by the time he looked back.
Walking home through the February cold, he thought about the conversation in the unhurried way he sometimes thought about things, not analyzing, just turning them over.
She was carrying something. He had known it from the library, from the way she'd angled the laptop, from the practiced normalcy of her manner that was normalcy the way his own was normalcy, below the waterline, out of sight, with the practiced ease of someone who had learned that the weight was weight now, not an emergency, just the permanent condition of a particular kind of life.
He found, to his mild surprise, that he was glad she was his lab partner. He hadn't expected to be glad about something like that. Hadn't expected to be glad about most of the things this world had given him, starting with the water in the library and proceeding from there.
He was, and it was fine, and the city was dark and cold and lit at the edges with the particular gold of winter streetlights that he had, somewhere between October and February, stopped noticing as the background of someone else's place and started noticing as the background of his own.