He had friends, at first. Or at least he had a crowd.

Everyone wanted to flock around the new whiz kid; the tiny dude who ended the big war; that kind of thing. He’d been fifteen at the time, and his damn brain had eyes greedier than its stomach, and apparently solving a math equation or two for some white-coat black-suit guys had actually meant the end of the world. Some thought experiment.

When he first showed up at college and all the frat boys cornered him, twice his size, seventy-percent muscle and thirty-percent sweat, Ambrose had been convinced he was going to get beat up. Instead they made him sit at their table like a trophy all for the low, low price of writing up all their assignments.

The girls loved him too. Thought he was adorable. They were all still taller than him, left him little cheek kisses all the time, and he even got to go to all their parties. 

He doesn’t remember the parties. Well, he remembers the world spinning, and being trapped between bodies, and throwing up a lot, and his professor’s pale face turning bright red when she found out why he hadn’t submitted his work the next day. 

But then they all either graduated, or got kicked out, or died fast and young, or whatever. And the war stopped being a thing people cared about, he stopped going to the parties, and soon he got just as tall as all the frat dudes and the sorority girls stopped finding him cute, and he just got more and more cynical, and the classes all came and went, and he… 

Stayed.

Hey, it’s all Uncle Sam’s cash down the drain, not his. The suits had offered to fork out for his tuition years ago as a consolation prize for, you know, the one-way ticket to Hell they’d guaranteed him. They hadn’t actually anticipated just how many degrees the “whiz kid” would make them pay for.

As far as Ambrose remains concerned, he’s going to stay at this institution, single-handedly churning through the government’s entire education budget, ‘til he either dies or they run out of qualifications to give him. His little revenge – sort of. It makes him feel better to pretend he’s making some kind of statement.

Right now he’s exhausted all the sciences and he’s onto English Literature. He hates English Lit. But you can’t kill anyone with Chaucer, except maybe if sheer boredom were the weapon of choice. Ambrose is kind of into pacifism lately, or would be if the hippies a few rooms over would stop smoking out the whole building.

As the one actually grown man in his twenties, he sticks out like a sore thumb in the sea of eighteen-year-olds. The golden rule is to just keep his head down and not look any of them in the eye, even that weird girl with the red hair that seems to be fucking everywhere this semester.

The upperclassmen know better by now, but sometimes the freshmen try to talk to him. Sometimes a few of them will even recognise him. He usually just stares or points, except for when they’re partying loud near his dorms and the pillow won’t muffle any of the fucking noise and that’s when he screams, and then the little brats scatter, and then he gets pulled into the Dean’s office again and they can’t really do anything to discipline him ‘cause he’s the government’s little pet so they just offer him a bigger room somewhere else and then maybe that’s the one he’ll be found dead in one day.

So yeah, no, he doesn’t really have any friends here. Unless you count some of the staff?

So, the idea had been to make him a professor somewhere, hopefully so he'd be nice and dependent on government funds and maybe open to a quiet word in the faculty lounge. 

This thing with getting apparently all the degrees is... weird... but, like, one scholarship every 4 years for 1 guy is if anything cheaper than tenure-track. Whatever. They've got bigger problems.

Look, they nearly had to sell off the, uh, special collection, taking in fucking Ambrose Deneith and letting him do basically what he wants was the smallest price to pay, they were on the verge of getting written off as cranks. Anyone who wants to question their academic cred can take it up with the father of the Bomb, and if he wants to publish zero research and spend his time racking up BAs that's not even in the worst half of faculty outcomes. 

Friend isn't exactly the word she'd use, no.

Being a nuclear physicist is not easy; being a female nuclear physicist is less easy; being a teenage female Jewish would-be nuclear physicist in Nazi Germany was in truth distinctly unpleasant. But you don't see her complaining. Never mind spending all her time blubbing over someone else using her research. If she wanted to worry about that sort of thing, she'd have been an applied physicist.

Anyway, she's letting Ambrose take some time to cool down. He's rather young, after all, almost as young as she was after she made her own breakthroughs.

Hm. All right, then. 

What happens if she arranges for there to be a party, and arranges for it to coincidentally take place near his dorms? What happens if she arranges for the drinks to be a little too strong and arranges to direct people out into the corridors and in his direction?

Oh he is going to fucking kill them.

At first he bangs on his door loud. “SHUT UP!”

He sits back down at his desk, trying to remember what part of his book he’d gotten up to. Was it the blind old man yet? Or was he back at the North Pole–?

They’re still going.

“This has to be a fucking joke–”

He shoots up and storms outside, not even bothering to pull on a shirt, and sure he looks crazy with just his suit pants on and his hair all a mess and his eyes all bloodshot but that usually just makes this more effective. 

Ambrose pushes roughly past a pair of teenagers making out just outside his door, and looks around wildly through the crowd trying to zero in on their leader.

“Guys– guys I’m trying to study–”

No one pays attention.

“C’mon, guys, it’s like three in the mornin’–”

Someone spills their drink on him and he sees red.

“Everyone shut the FUCK UP!”

The lights buzz and explode. The very building quakes.

West House is old, like all Miskatonic buildings, and in fact resisted the installation of electric lighting for a very long time. There are still old gas lights sitting sullenly on the walls.

In the sudden blackness, the students' startled cries are unsettling, and Ambrose is caught up and jostled in the stampede as students scatter to feel their way towards exits, before any of this can come to the attention of the Dean.

In moments, he's alone.

Not quite alone. 

There's a grating of rusted metal and a dull spark, and then a dim orange glow. 

She stands there still, smiling gently at him.

It’s just the two of them. Suspended in this strange sort of stalemate, in the barely-there light and the afterglow of great panic, when all had been so loud mere moments ago and now it is so still, where the world feels so liminal– 

They stand there.

Ambrose can account for his silence. He is too stunned to speak, too taken aback – but more than that. Some primal instinct keeps his voice at bay. The woman unsettles him, makes his heartbeat race, his throat dry. This was all her doing, wasn’t it? He recognises her; he has seen her face before, too many times before, but this is the first time he has properly looked. The realisation sinks in cold.

She’s been following him around for some time, hasn’t she? 

There is something about her, a satisfaction, borderline mania, like a spider nearing the end of a long waiting game.

The woman will not break the silence either, will she? She will reveal to him nothing, will grant him no reprieve. She seems perfectly content to just smile at him, as though this were all somehow the most normal thing in the world.

A question comes to mind. The wrong question most likely, considering the lights all just fucking exploded and the foundations shook as soon as he raised his voice – that had to have been a coincidence, right? – but like a burrowing parasite it forces its way into his thoughts and eats its path through to the front, and it takes its place as conqueror over all, the only challenge worth rising to since the math that ended the war, and the question is–

“Who are you?”

She tilts her head to one side. 

Interesting. The business with the lights has an obvious possible explanation - perhaps he'll try to play it off as a coincidence, or perhaps he doesn't know, or perhaps he simply doesn't care. 

She lets her gaze track appreciatively over his bare chest, once wiry, now gaunt and hollow from too little food and too much care. 

That look in the eye, that quick temper - those she knows very well indeed for shellshock. It's a simple matter to make it worse, of course, and she speculates that it might be possible to mend by similar principles, should that serve her purpose here. But something in the boy's stance, the way clothes hang off him... well, she guessed correctly. 

All this passes through her mind in a moment, and when he speaks she smiles widely, one hand still fiddling with the mechanism to make the light brighter. "Gloria," she says, her accent this time old, old New England, almost a little Southern. "From Gamma Delta. Why didn't you come out to join the party, Ambrose?"