Disclaimer:I do not own these people or concepts because, really?

Fic was written for smallfandomfest , with the prompt: watching Billy teach

Notes: Resources used: America's Horrible Histories: Prehistoric America by Elizabeth Levy; Evolutionary Paleobiology by James W. Valentine, David Jablonski, Douglas H. Erwin, and Jere H. Lipps; A kill curve for Phanerozoic marine species by David M. Raup; "Dinosaur Classification" by Robert Strauss.

Inspired by the opening lines of Forever Sounds Good by traveling_storm about Billy joining the IT herd.

Grant didn't see why kids these days complained about the food in the dining hall. He remembered his own experiences as an undergraduate with a special degree of revulsion, smothering the mystery meat in ketchup and ignoring the little crunchy bits in the soup. They sure weren't croutons, he knew that much, but he had trained himself into not thinking about it.

Now it was completely different; he grabbed a turkey on rye with pickles from the sandwich line and his day got just a little better. The student in front of him took a slice of apple dumpling and made a face. He thought it was pretty ungrateful of her and took a slice for himself.

Every Wednesday from 12:15 to 1:00, he ate at the same table and talked to any of his students who had questions or problems with his class. Some people chose to just stop by for a few minutes for last minute homework help while others plunked down their trays and ate lunch with him for the entire time. They didn't even have to talk about paleontology. Last week, Evzen Fort had brought along his friend Cheryl Logan, a prospective student who was interested in becoming a paleontology major, and they sat around talking about the possibility of Deinonychus hunting packs and who was going to win the Bowl Championship Series this year.

"Okay, the code just gets pasted in?"

"Not exactly." The student at the table in front of him jammed a few fries into his mouth and shoved his glasses higher on his nose with the back of his hand. He wrote something on the paper and his friends on either side craned over to see. "See, it's just an instance of the class. It's declared right here; Marty, look, it's for two different objects, two different instantiations."

"That's the thing, though," Marty said. "What the hell do you mean instance?"

"Okay." The guy with the glasses tapped his pencil for a moment and then shoved the lines of code to the side. "Let's pretend Amy's tray is a program." He pulled her tray closer. "That has some commands it wants to run a lot. Like, um…"

"Calculator," Amy volunteered uncertainly.

"Right! Great, calculator commands. Add, subtract, you guys know. And you want to use these to crunch your numbers. Now, let's pretend I'm a slacker programmer-"

"Who's pretending?" Marty asked innocently and got an elbow to the side.

"And don't want to write this code out," the guy went on. "I can go to this Calculator class." He lifted his tray. "And create an instance of that object, meaning I copy it." He put his tray on top of Amy's. "And I name that copy…Calculator1. So when I use the object Calculator1 in Amy's program, it's like I'm using the Calculator class. Furthermore," He lifted his tray and dropped it on top of Amy's again. "I can create as many objects as I want. There, I just created Calculator2."

"So kind of like the multiple Cylon copies on Battlestar," Amy said.

"Number Six is hot," Marty said instantly.

"Are you kidding? Number Eight is way hotter," Amy shot back. "Bill, come on. Back me up."

Bill took of his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "I'm not getting into Cylon arguments with you two again. Too many numbers."

"Oh, leave him alone." Marty raised an eyebrow meaningfully. "Anders doesn't a number." And got another elbow to the ribs.

Amy grinned. "Saw that coming. So, I have a question now. Instead of using objects, why can't you just write these commands as functions within the program and call them?"

"Well." Bill gestured. "Marty's tray is another program that uses the same commands. We can just copy and paste the Calculator class into his program folder and he can use it too, just like that, no hassle."

"That's…awesome, actually," Marty said grudgingly.

"Yeah. " He picked up a plate on his tray and waved it around. "And your Calculator class is going to have methods you can execute after you've declared an object so you can have specific commands within the class."

Marty sat back. "Okay, now you're just fuckin' with me."

And Bill laughed, a surprisingly bright sound. "No. No, that's the beauty of object oriented programming."

"It lets you be lazy?" Marty said warily.

Bill snapped his fingers. "Exactly. Or rather, it lets you be efficient. Actually, my old math professor used to say the two words are interchangeable."

Marty laughed. "Cool dude," he said approvingly. "Hey, thanks for explaining this."

"No problem. See you in class?"

"Sure." He rose and gathered up his and Amy's plates. "You coming snowboarding with us this weekend?"

"Hmm? Yeah. Yeah, I've just got to finish my database coding on Friday, and I should be free all weekend."

Grant took a bite of his forgotten sandwich. Wow, he'd actually followed some of that, and he and technology shared a unique hatred for each other. He checked his watch. 12:20 and no students. He wiped off the extra mayonnaise with a paper napkin, took a last gulp of his milk, and stood up.

"Hi," he said, and the guy looked up as he walked over. "I'm Alan Grant."

"Dr. Grant. Yeah, I've heard about you. Paleontology, right?" They shook hands. "Billy Brennan."

"Nice to meet you. You mind if I sit down?"

"Huh? Oh, no. No." He cleared his books off the table and stacked them to one side.

"Thanks." He furtively checked out the book spines. Digital Logic Design, Java Libraries, well, Jesus. "I uh, couldn't help overhear. You're a computer science major?"

"Computer Engineering, second year," Billy said. "I like the hardware side of it too- almost went in for Electrical."

"Interesting. The paleontology department is working with some computer…stuff."

"Stuff," Billy agreed, smiling.

"And something has gone wrong with the fossil detection equipment. I don't really want to bother Professor Wilkins."

"Trust me, you don't want to bother Wilkins. He's got this research thing going on right now…" Billy waved a hand. "It's complicated."

"You think you could find anyone interested in checking out our stuff?"

"Sure. I wouldn't mind stopping by, actually. I mean, I am only a second year, but I've taken some three hundred level classes. At the least, I could figure out who you should talk to."

"Thanks. I appreciate this. Just leave a message on my office phone when you're free."

"Dr. Grant?"

He turned around. "Dolores. Taking care of something for the dig. Excuse me, Mr. Brennan." He went back to his abandoned lunch. "Sorry, did you have a question?"

She put down her backpack and sighed. "I don't know a good way to memorize these superorders." She got out her homework. "Like plesiosaur. How do I know where to start-"

"Plesiosaur." Billy was about to leave, but stopped by the table when he heard her voice. "That's uh… that's a familiar one, right? It was um, aquatic. So it would be one of the flipper ones. Optery-something. There's like, two of them. Bird and lizard. Ichthy and…saur? Man, three years of Greek down the drain."

Grant was looking at him with a strange expression. "Ichthyopterygia and Sauropterygia. Very good, Mr. Brennan. Are you taking a paleontology class for an elective?"

Billy grinned at him. "I read Michael Crichton."

"Hmm."Grant took a bite of the apple dumpling and winced as he got a mouthful of cold doughy filling. Okay, so maybe the dining hall wasn't completely above a little schadenfreude.

---

Billy Brennan showed up early and met him in front of the lab. He gestured. "Can't get in."

"Sorry," Grant said and swiped his card next to the door, which beeped. The lock clicked.

The lab was a mess. The floor was dusty and all sorts of projects and machinery were crammed on plastic fold up tables wherever there was space.

There was a decrepit looking computer and next to it, something that looked like a jackhammer leaning up against a box of dirt.

"Here's the computer that's linked to the thumper." He gestured. "Have a seat."

"Thanks." Billy sat down gingerly with his eyes glued to the screen. "Is this program open source?"

"What?"

"Open source. It means people can change the code and aha-" He pulled up a screen. "It is. Sweet. Is this the interface?"

He would have to ask Billy to filter out techno babble. "The what?"

"The screen you use to operate…whatever this is."

"It's a thumper." He picked up the thing that looked like a jackhammer and shoved it into the box of dirt. "It uses radar to scan a section of the earth and-"

A picture of the dummy fossil in the box showed up on the screen. "-Shoot back an image of what might be down there," Billy said slowly. "Saves you the trouble of digging."

Grant was impressed. Kid was old for his age. "Yes."

"Kind of like in Tremors."

Okay, maybe not that old. "Except with sonar waves and not seismic, yes."

"Well, yeah." Billy's attention was still focused on the computer screen. "As long as I'm not Rhonda."

Grant hmmed. "Okay, now here's the problem. Try zooming in on the fossil."

It was instantaneous. A box popped up saying the program had experienced a technical problem and had to shut down.

Billy did not seem fazed. "Huh. Interesting. It's when you zoom in. Could it be the bounds?" He went back to the open source window and cackled a little. "C! This thing is coded in C!"

"Is that…bad?" He didn't see how Billy could read that code the way he was scrolling through it.

"No! No, that's good. This was my first programming language. The electron microscope down in the bio lab is coded in C; the comp sci majors could go down there and reprogram it if we wanted."

"Really?"

A pause. "Not…not that we have, or anything."

"Of course."

"Cause that would be completely against the honor code."

"Completely," Grant agreed and Billy shot him a bright clandestine smile. He couldn't help smiling back, but Billy had already turned back to the program.

"Where's the zoom code? Okay. Okay, locating point- let's expand our pixels from there. Alright! There's your problem- this is fixable!"

"Really?" He crowded near the computer screen, suddenly feeling like one of Billy's friends at the dining hall.

"Yeah. I was right- it's the bounds. Jeez, how did that get messed up? Let me just adjust this so you don't get that out of bounds error." He typed something rapidly and then restarted the program. It pulled the fossil up on the screen and when he zoomed in, the Procompsognathus skull was replaced by a magnified image of its eye socket.

"Huh." A few taps of the keys, and the kid had fixed it. "So, this wasn't a virus or a bug or whatever they're called."

Billy laughed. "No, it wasn't a virus. A virus doesn't…" And then, perhaps realizing his explanations would be wasted, "The image processing is pretty straightforward. I had to something like this for a class freshman year."

"Oh. Um…so you could fix this thing again if something went-" He waved his hands around.

"Exactly like that," Billy agreed. "Sure, let me know if you have any other problems. I'm going to be here all semester."

"Okay. Uh, the thing is, we were going to haul this thing out to Choteau this summer and try it out-"

"-My god, it is like Tremors," Billy interjected.

"-And I was wondering if you'd be interested in coming along."

He looked surprised. "What? Me?"

"Yeah. This equipment is brand new. So is the software. We don't have anyone who knows how to fix it if something goes wrong."

His eyebrows furrowed. "Um, that's…a really cool opportunity, but I'm…not totally familiar with the software, and I don't know what other equipment you would be using. I'd need to look through their manuals."

"Sure, I can get them to you."

"And maybe come back here and mess around with the software."

"I'll see if I can get you access to the lab."

"I would…" he looked unsure. "I don't know if my schedule-"

"Yes." He was an idiot. "Yes, of course. I understand you have other commitments."

Billy looked thoughtful and then shrugged. "I'm not dismissing the possibility. I mean, not like I can rock climb all summer. And I've always wanted to see a dig up close. Could I get back to you by next week?"

"Next week? Yes, take your time."

"And I'll see if anyone else is interested. Somebody," Billy pronounced in a tone that clearly said he thought it was Grant. "Messed up the software already. If I can't make it, I can make sure you at least have a back up guy."

"Thank you, Mr. Brennan." They shook hands. "I appreciate you taking the time. And who knows, maybe we can bring you to our side and make a paleontology major out of you."

Billy laughed. "Lofty goal, Dr. Grant. Lofty."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unlike most other times when his young symposium audience would have been yawning and resting their faces in their propped up arms, they were sitting up and hanging onto his every word. Grant tried to convince himself it was because he had picked more exciting material and not because Billy had redone his PowerPoint and broke up his lecture during intervals with a relevant visual. Grant had said it candy-coated the presentation. Billy had only laughed.

"I'm sure most of you have heard the theory that a meteor struck the earth and caused the dinosaur extinction." Many of the high schoolers in the symposium audience were nodding, and Grant took a sip of his water before continuing.

"The Alvarez team found a piece of evidence to support this theory in the 1970s when they found deposits of iridium, an element common in meteors, in layers of rock all over the world. This iridium was laid down circa 65 million years ago, about the time of the dinosaur extinction. They hypothesized that a massive meteor could have dispersed this much iridium and so began to search for a crater as evidence of this incident. They found such a crater called Chicxulub in the waters between Texas and Mexico. Samples from the crater confirmed the crater was created 65 million years ago."

Out of the corner of his eye, Grant could see Billy tapping at the laptop keys, and the audience's attention was on the overhead screen, which was running Billy's simulation. A meteor crashed into a tiny spinning Earth and created a huge crater; a cloud of dust from the descent and impact rose up and covered the globe. The ridiculously loud sound effects made the teachers wince and gained little whispers of approval from the students.

Not to be outdone, Grant added, "But this wasn't the beginning and end of it. Picture, if you can, the effects such an impact would have. This meteor, this meteor, put out the energy of one hundred teratons of TNT. It must have looked like a second sun to the dinosaurs as it burned in the atmosphere. The earth must have shaken- pieces of the meteor incinerated everything they touched. Megatsunamis thousands of feet high slammed into the coasts. The air would have been filled with ash and smoke, blotting out the sun. Plants would have died, causing a ripple effect in the dinosaur food chain. Herbivores would have been directly affected and perished first, creating a scarcity of food for the carnivores. If the theory of cold-blooded dinosaurs is correct, many would have frozen to death."

His audience actually laughed, and Grant turned around to see what the hell Billy was doing.

Ah, it was the food chain animation; Billy had really put a lot of work into this and had bounced into his office grinning and presented it to him with a flourish. It had been the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen, and he'd instantly demanded a copy for his teaching materials. God, he knew it was exactly what he wanted for his fundraising tour this year, but though he'd understood the mathematics behind it, he hadn't understood how to work the program- he'd need Billy for that. Eventually, he'd threatened to bring his touch-of-death to the precious laptop, and Billy had caved, agreed to come along, and good-naturedly muttered something about the paleontology department eating up all his summers.

The program was a woodland scene simulating the grass-Protoceratops-Velociraptor food chain. At the moment, the Velociraptor population was dying with little x's forming over their eyes like Looney Tunes characters. Grant actually found himself smiling; these were just about the only raptors that didn't give him the chills. Even the ones in the museums were frightening now, locked in their final death poses.

He bent down to the mike. "Well since Mr. Brennan has your undivided attention, maybe he'd like to explain what his program does. Billy?"

Billy looked at him for a moment, flustered, but then picked up the spare mike on the table beside him. "Sure, um, let's go through a trial. He restarted the program and typed in the pop up window. "I'm typing in the amount of grass I want growing in a certain cycle. A cycle can be anything, an hour, a day." Tiny bushes were popping up on the forest floor. "Cool, now let's add the next part of the food chain."

He typed in another number and a herd of Protoceratops came into the picture, moving around left and right in a random pattern. Whenever one of them was near a bush, the bush disappeared.

"Okay, let's check this out." He froze the program and pointed to the screen.

"Each dinosaur starts out with a certain number of calories, and each time they move a step to the left or right, they're penalized a certain amount of calories. If a dinosaur eats a bush like that one just did, it gains the amount of calories that bush provides. If the Protoceratops calorie count goes below zero, it dies."

He unfroze the simulation. The plants were getting scarce. A few seconds later, a Protoceratops got x's over its eyes, stopped moving, and sank into the ground. At the same time, two Protoceratops passed each other and a new dinosaur appeared nearby. Billy froze the program again.

"Reproduction is the other part of the program. If a healthy male dinosaur mates with a healthy female dinosaur, they have a fifty percent chance of producing offspring. Healthy is defined as having a calorie count less than zero. In order to reproduce, the dinosaurs must be within three steps of each other. If you're wondering how we know the dinosaur genders and calorie levels well…I'll just put it simply and say the data is assigned at random to the dinosaur when it is created."

Unlike Grant, Billy refrained from the technical rants, though it was obvious how much it pained him this time. Instead, he typed into another pop up window. "Let's make it interesting and add the velociraptors. All the same rules apply. If you're confused, think of the Protoceratops as the grass and the velociraptors as the herbivores."

The program went on with quantities of grass fluctuating and Protoceratops dying and reproducing, controlling the status of the velociraptors.

Grant even saw the teachers getting interested and trying to hide it. "Actually, this brings up the second part of the dinosaur extinction- the kill curve. We don't have to wipe out the entire species for it to go extinct, we only have to cripple the population so there aren't enough for them to reproduce, and the species eventually dies out. That's called the kill curve."

Billy was typing again and suddenly all the grass disappeared. Slowly, the Protoceratops started to die either from starvation or attack. Eventually, everything in the simulation was gone.

Someone raised a hand. Grant gestured. "Yes, down in front."

She pointed to the projector screen. "Why aren't those two raptors reproducing?"

There were two raptors left in the corner, both very much alive circling around each other within one step. Billy frowned, froze the program, and checked the raptor specs in the debugging window.

"They can't mate," he said finally, expanded the data window, and highlighted a cell with his mouse. "They're both male." His mouth quirked. "Kill curve."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It had been a long day. It had been a long hot bastard of a day, and he was driving back from yet another fundraising tour trying to raise some money for this dig, because godammit, some days it felt like this dig was all he had.

That last audience had left a bad taste in his mouth. 'Paleontology becoming obsolete.' Bullshit. Bullshit, because he hadn't gone through almost twenty years of rushed gorgeous dissertations, argumentative bad-coffee conferences, and squeaky mikes in countless lecture hall for nothing. He wished he could have clicked to the next slide and seen a picture or a cartoon to break up his long lengthy PowerPoint. He wished he could have heard the audience gasp and know it was another one of Billy's animations running in the background. Something to keep those people on the ropes.

But Dolores had come down with the flu, and computer scientist that he was, Billy had all the skills of a decent temporary dig assistant. He had been the tech guy at the dig for years, and had a genuine interest in working alongside the other paleontology majors. He'd soaked up enough knowledge working with the tools and helping with the excavating that even Grant had been surprised. Whenever Grant jokingly brought up coming to their side again, Billy laughed it off and pursued his computer science masters degree with a single minded determination that made Grant think Billy had once wanted to be a paleontologist, had wanted it more than anything.

When Grant pulled up to the dig, he half expected Billy to be out there and got it on the first try.

Billy was lying in the dirt, curled around the bones of a partially excavated velociraptor like a lover. Cheryl Logan was beside him with his hand guiding hers. Billy's mouth moved. Smooth. Rough. Smooth. Rough. And both their faces were intent, almost feral in their concentration.

That. That was why paleontology was never going to be obsolete. Because as long as there was dirt and there were people alive to lay in it, there would always be someone crouching beside you, gently taking your hand and showing you the difference between rock and bone.

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"Inheritance. What is inheritance?" Professor Brennan paced the lecture room floor with his hands clasped behind his back. His tie was crooked and flapped as he turned sharply and gestured at the display he had set up on the table. "Inheritance is nothing more than genetics. We're going into biology, people. We're going into business management. We're going into frigging mass production." He spread his hands out. "Am I right? Am I right?"

The class laughed in agreement. Professor Brennan spun around to his table and stopped a setup with pictures. "Who knows who this is?"

The hall was silent. Professor Brennan gestured. "Oh, come on." When no one answered, he sighed, ran a hand through his hair and said, "You guys have no lives, you know that?"

Another murmur of laughter. Brennan gestured. "This is Kevin Delaney, snowboarding god. He designed these awesome asymmetrical racing boards that did better in national and international competitions than…oh forget it, but don't blame me if there's some hot mechanical engineer you want to pick up and they start talking about this." He rolled his eyes dramatically and pointed at someone in the back. "Michaelson! This is Kevin Delaney and this is a picture of his father. Do you see any similarities?"

"Um…" Michaelson shrugged. "They have the same last name."

People started laughing, but Brennan waved at them to be quiet. "Good! He inherited his first name from his dad. Perfect. What else? Tokugawa?"

"He…" she decided to just go with it. "He has the same nose."

"Good, same weird nose. So he's inherited certain traits from his dad. But they don't look alike, right? Why? He has some independent characteristics…"

The door slammed open and Dr. Grant walked in. Some kids turned to look and Brennan stopped for a moment but then just nodded to him and went back to his lecture.

"So let's say Kevin's dad was a class with methods Last Name and Nose. Kevin could be a class that inherited these from class Dad. You try to get the last name from the Kevin class, you get Delaney from the Dad class. But Kevin can have his own methods special to him, let's say one called Gnarly Snowboarding Prowess- I like that one."

The class had run late, of course Billy's class had run late, because these kids worshipped him, couldn't get enough of him, and always kept asking questions. Grant usually showed up after class to shepherd Billy out of class and down the hall before the students could start trailing behind and engage him in conversation. Some of the bolder ones still tried, but most of them were too scared of Dr. Grant, a skill he'd only honed further from a life in academia. He had even begun to show up at office hours and physically drag Billy away, because there was work time and there was personal time, and Billy sometimes didn't have the heart to separate them.

But for the moment, Grant enjoyed invading this little pocket of Billy's personal world for a while. He sat back in the lecture chair, avoided the annoying tiny desk, and just listened because this was what had brought them together for the first time. Objects and lunch trays. The simple concise language of the machine. Elegant. Exacting.

"-And they aren't something from your philosophy class either- Dr. Grant."

He started. "Hmm?"

"The keyword difference for what we will call the base class?"

And by god, there was evil behind that polite smile. "I, uh…I don't…"

A hand shot up in the front row. Billy pointed. "Yes, Renford."

"The keyword abstract."

Billy nodded. "Yes. They keyword abstra-" He checked his watch. "Whoa! Sorry, people, I must have run over. Get out of here- see you next week." Then, over the clamor of zippered backpacks and snapping binders, "And don't forget to bring in a copy of your abstract and concrete classes on Monday! People will be called on- don't let yourself be That Guy!"

As Grant made his way to the stage, he suspected he had been today's That Guy. Renford was trying to talk to Billy about some last minute homework but fled as soon as she saw Grant coming.

"And turn in an electronic copy!" Billy yelled after her, and then turned back to him and grinned, that huge dopey ridiculously endearing grin. "Hey, Alan."

---

"That was a new low for you."

They walked side by side to the old pickup truck in the faculty parking lot, and Billy's smart briefcase bumped against his companionably. "I don't know what you mean, Alan."

He snorted. "'Don't know what you mean'- abstract class? What is that, some kind of art movement?"

Billy laughed. "Better be. Might have to come up with a joke about that for next week."

He waited till Billy shut the passenger side door before leaning over to kiss him. It was a little casual like a 'hello' but a little lingering like a 'glad to see you.'

The university knew about them and, to some extent, were too politically correct to do anything about it, but Grant knew they didn't want to try their luck, so the mostly empty faculty parking lot was a good as it got as far as romantic campus locations were concerned. To his dismay, Wanda down in the political science department, whose parking spot was right next to his, thought they were cute.

"Mm," Billy kissed the side of his mouth before pulling back and putting on his seat belt. "Agh, thank god it's Friday. I have so many papers to put off till Sunday."

"Yeah." He reversed out of the spot. "I'm kind of hungry too."

"What about that sandwich I made you?"

"The one with the stringy stuff?" He narrowly made it out of the intersection at the turn signal. "Yeah right."

"It's alfalfa sprouts! It's good for you!"

"It's not natural; I don't know what you're feeding me," Grant said stubbornly, and Billy laughed.

"I had a feeling you wouldn't like it, so I made this economy size lasagna yesterday-"

"-Is that what that was?"

"Al-an."

Their flat was a smallish affair about ten minutes from campus. It was walking distance to the nearest grocery store and, to Billy's delight, relatively close to a hiking trail that wound around and back into sparse wilderness on their end of town. They still went up there on the weekends whenever they had time which, they would readily admit, they didn't seem to have much of these days.

"Wonder if we have any mail," Billy said, trailing behind him, and stopped to check. 'Grant & Brennan,' it said on the box, and Billy had stopped him from adding 'to whom it may concern,' at the bottom.

Billy dropped his briefcase and jacket on the couch when they came in and headed to the kitchen while rolling up his sleeves. "I just have to reheat it. Shouldn't take long."

"Mmhm." He clicked on the television in the spare cramped living room to catch the tail end of the news. Debt, scandal, fraud. So the world was going to shit, what else was new?

-commemorate the lives lost that tragic day in San Diego, after which the company InGen went public with its experiments into the cloning and development of prehistoric organisms, specifically dinosaurs.

But there was still an old pair of crutches behind the door in their room and more gauze than they would ever need again in the medicine cabinet, because when Billy had torn his stitches once after getting out of the hospital, Grant had flipped out, bought about a hundred rolls of gauze and yelled at him to go see the doctor, no he didn't care that it was one in the morning.

Billy had never given away the gauze and donated the crutches to Goodwill because he was forgetful and put things off if they weren't emergencies. Grant had never done anything because he needed to be reminded, someone had to remember all this had actually happened, and the list of candidates that had survived Isla Sorna was short.

The lives lost, and dammit, he couldn't watch this anymore. He clicked off the television and couldn't remember where he dropped the remote.

"Billy?"

"Yeah, Alan, dinner's in the oven. If you want to start cutting up the carrots, that would be great-"

"-Billy, come here."

He came out of the kitchen with a dowel in his hand. "Alan, what's up?"

And Grant pulled him into a crushing hug, pressing a poorly-aimed kiss into his hair. Billy squeezed him back, one arm still awkwardly holding the soup dowel, and Grant exhaled, his hands fisting in the back of Billy's shirt, still feeling the ridges of his scars.

You had to be the jealous bastard, gather what was precious close to you, and say mine, mine, mine to anyone who would listen. Because this was it.

You had to appreciate what you had because goddamn it, the world was open source- anyone could come by and change it, and you didn't know what was going to happen, when it was all going to be over.

And maybe that was the best lesson Billy had ever taught anybody.

()-

If we had tried to reprogram the electron microscope (which, yes, was in C#) Dr. Lindeman would have had our heads and failed us, even though we were no longer in her class. Note how failing school takes precedence over dying.

Some of the coding Billy does was actually part of our computer science class, so I can't take all the credit.