Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“How’s the moving going?” Caitlin asks over the phone, voice slightly muffled by the sounds of people talking around her. 

“The moving,” Adam says, lifting his laptop with one hand so his dad can take the coffee table underneath it, tossing Adam a wink as he carries it out of the living room, “is happening very quickly, whether I want it to or not.”

“Sure you don’t wanna just come back to New Haven?” Caitlin teases. “I’d love to cut my rent in half.”

Adam rolls his eyes, settling his computer back onto his lap. He’s got a handful of tabs open, half of them apartment listings (all miles out of his price range), the others LinkedIn and Indeed and his BU course guide with its impending tuition deadline staring him down. “I appreciate the offer, but my parents made it very clear—if I want a master’s, I gotta pay for it myself. Not my fault Yale didn’t give me any scholarships.”

“Adam,” his mom calls, drawing his eyes up from the page of unpaid publishing internships. She’s leaning in the doorway, a box labeled Kitchen Items braced under one arm. She points her finger at him and circles it in a hurry and clean this up gesture. He gives her a thumbs up, and she retreats back into the other room.

“I’m being kicked out of my own house,” he informs Caitlin. “My parents are abandoning me to be a starving artist on the streets of Boston so that they can retire in Florida.”

“In your parents’ defense,” Caitlin says, because someone has to say it. She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to.

If the Drs. Hayes had had their way, they would’ve all three of them moved out of Boston fourteen years ago, when a government mole leaked the details of their research with the DoD and exposed the existence of atypicals to the broader public. Adam was only nine at the time, and remembers the gossip at school and the news vans parked outside his bedroom window more than any of the actual trouble his parents got into, but he has a vague memory of his mom and his Aunt Annabelle whisper-arguing in the kitchen after he was supposed to be asleep, the night before they were supposed to pack up and move somewhere without so much heat on their family name.

They didn’t end up moving. Adam still doesn’t know what Annabelle said to his mom to convince her to stay.

But Caitlin’s right. He can’t exactly blame his parents for finally getting out of this city now that they’re officially empty nesters. It’s not their fault Adam wanted to come back for grad school.

“I have 36 hours to find a place to live, and like twice that to find a way to pay for it,” he tells Caitlin, refreshing his Indeed page one last time, just in case something livable might have been added in the last fifteen seconds. “The joys of higher education, huh?”

Caitlin must say something in response, but Adam doesn’t hear her, because the refresh has produced something after all, and the job listing at the top of the page grabs his attention like nothing else. The title: Personal Assistant for Atypical Researcher.

He clicks and skims the listing. Researcher of Atypical Studies seeking a personal assistant for household chores, schedule-keeping, etc. Must have strong communication and confidentiality skills to send and receive messages from the Atypical Monitors and other Atypical Rights groups. Atypical status not required, but familiarity with atypicals is preferred. 

The pay is more a year than his parents paid for Yale. 

“Damn,” Adam murmurs, and only then remembers he was on the phone when Caitlin says in his ear, “I know, my stories are just so fascinating. What could possibly have your attention right now that is not me?”

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, forcing his focus away from his computer screen. “I just, uh. I found a  job I might want to apply for.”

“Ooh, is it one of those shitty retail jobs that sucks out your soul for four dollars an hour? Do you have to wear a uniform? Does it include a dumb hat! Cause I’ve known you, what, six, seven years now? And it is a downright shame that I have yet to see the Great Adam Hayes humbled by a dumb hat.”

“Remind me why I’m friends with you?” Adam teases.

“Oh, I don’t know, could it maybe be cause I’m fucking delightful?”

“No, you’re right, that’s definitely it,” Adam says around a laugh, just as the sound of an approaching train screeches over the phone.

“Train’s here, gotta go!” Caitlin says. “Go get a job!”

“Working on it,” he promises. “Talk to you later.”

He hangs up and tosses his phone aside, focusing in on the LinkedIn page again. Personal Assistant for Atypical Researcher. He could do that, right? He knows more about atypicals than, realistically, most non-atypicals, just from living around his parents and his aunt for the last 20 years. Household chores, he’s got down—he always does his best thinking while doing the dishes anyway—and after four years of living with Caitlin, he’s an expert at making and keeping regimented schedules. He even has sort of an in with the Atypical Monitors, not that he likes to make a big deal about it now that Annabelle’s not Director anymore. 

It’s not exactly the kind of work he wanted to be doing. But maybe that’s okay. He’s only just starting grad school; maybe he should just be saving up with a well-paying, minimally-intensive job until he can find something more in his career field. 

Plus, the listing just… intrigues him. He can’t quite put his finger on why.

Adam clicks the read more link on the listing and scrolls through the details. 

…flexible hours.

…medical, dental, and vision insurance.

…unlimited PTO.

…one-bedroom apartment on third floor of employer’s house included rent-free as part of monthly compensation. 

Oh, so it’s. Fucking perfect.

“There’s no way,” Adam mutters, clicking around some more. Nobody offers a research assistant job for that much money, plus free housing, unless it’s some kind of scam. 

Or, he realizes as he finds himself on the profile page of the employer who posted the listing, unless you’re a fucking bajillionaire. 

“Hey, Mom?” he calls as she passes by, still carrying things back and forth to the car.

She pauses back in the doorway, a half-full box of books braced on her hip. She looks annoyed in that tired, I’m not angry but you had to bother me now? mom sort of way. “Yeah, hon.”

“You ever work with Sam Barnes?”

“The philanthropist?”

He nods. “Mm.”

She shifts her grip on the box and shakes her head. “No, she was sorta after our time. No one even knew who she was until the Unity Projects got leaked.”

“Did Annabelle?”

His mother leans heavier against the doorframe, gaze flitting to the ceiling as she thinks about it. “If I remember correctly… Sam Barnes made her first donation to the AM right after your aunt transferred to D.C. So they might’ve known of each other?” She looks back at him. “Why? Why do you ask?”

He waves vaguely at his laptop. “Just curious. She was on the news.” He glances down at the job listing again, eyes landing on household chores and flexible hours. “She’s, uh… a time traveler, right?”

“Something ridiculous like that, yeah,” his mom sighs. “Anything else you need? We’re trying to get everything boxed up.”

“Nope! I’m all done.” Adam shuts his laptop and flashes her a grin. “I’ll get outta your hair.” He hops up from the couch, computer tucked under his arm, and goes over to kiss her on the cheek. “Gonna head to the library, work on some job applications. Good luck packing.”

Before he can slip past her, his mom puts a hand on his cheek, turning his head so he’s forced to look her in the eye. “Thanks for being a good sport about this, Adam. I know you’re not thrilled that we’re moving.”

“I’m not,” he admits. “But I’m happy you and Dad are finally gonna be out of the limelight. You deserve some peace. You deserve for things to be easy.”

And maybe he does too. If this job works out… maybe things will be very easy for once in his life.

Adam submits his application on a Tuesday. By Thursday, he has an interview.

“What is this job again?” his mother asks him out the passenger side window of the moving van she and his dad will be taking turns driving to Florida over the next week. “Something in publishing?”

“Uhh… no,” Adam says truthfully, because he sucks at lying and really sucks at lying to his mother. “It’s, uh. In research? Technically? Good hefty English major work, you know.”

“All right.” Rebecca Hayes eyes him with suspicion, and Adam braces himself for a lecture, and then they both seem to remember at the same time that he is twenty-three and she can no longer tell him what to do. “Well! Good luck, hon, let us know how it goes. And if you have any problems with the realtor—”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t call you,” he finishes, tapping her hand with his in the best gesture of affection he can manage. “Drive safe.”

The moving van speeds off, the radio playing exactly eighteen seconds of Good Morning, Baltimore from Hairspray before his mom vetoes his dad’s "Bopping BWay" playlist, and Adam watches it go, choosing to laugh at them so he won’t think too hard about when he’ll see them next.

He turns to look at his childhood home—which will be sold by the end of the week whether or not he has somewhere else to live—and then heads for the T.

He assumed the address he’d been given for this interview would be an office building—the headquarters for the Barnes Foundation, maybe, or at the very least one of those trendy hipster apartment buildings that rich people convert into workspaces so that poor people can’t afford to live in the neighborhood—but Google Maps takes him to a six-story mansion. 

“Hoooly…” he mutters, looking back and forth from his phone to the number on the gold-trimmed mailbox. He’s suddenly confronted with the reminder that he’s totally unqualified for this. He doesn’t know shit about atypical research studies. He really should’ve done more homework on Sam Barnes before applying. Maybe he should just shoot her an email rescinding his application and go see if Starbucks is hiring—then Caitlin could get her dumb hat!

But before Adam can chicken out and bolt, the front door swings open, revealing a woman probably seven or eight years older than him in a long ruffled skirt and a white lace crop top, sunglasses shoved up onto her head. She looks, in a word, frazzled, and doesn’t seem to notice him standing there until he clears his throat. 

She looks up, startled, and if he didn’t recognize her from the news, Adam would once again think he must have the wrong address.

But Sam Barnes is hard to mistake, especially when she says, “Hi! I—you must be—Adam, right? Wow. You’re. Early. Or, I guess, maybe I’m, probably, running late. So sorry about that! Can you—Come in! Or, actually, will you—just—give me one second?”

He opens his mouth, but before any words can come out, Sam disappears into the huge house again, the door closing behind her with a resounding thud. Figuring it’s too late to back down now, Adam takes a step or two closer, so that he’s actually standing on the porch and not awkwardly on the top step. From inside, there’s some sort of odd whooshing sound, like a vacuum cleaner whirring up a singular speck of dust, or a 1980s television shutting off.

Adam pulls his phone out to text Caitlin, wish me luck.

A minute later, he takes it out again to check his parents’ location—looks like they’re stopped at a McDonald’s off the highway. 

Two minutes after that, Sam still hasn’t returned.

Adam considers his options. Should he… knock? Should he call the number attached to the job listing? Should he leave?

But then finally, the door flies open again, startling him. Sam Barnes looks somehow even more frazzled than she did a few minutes ago, her sunglasses gone, one strap of her top falling off her shoulder, her hair a tangled mess of flyaways out of her ponytail. 

“I am so sorry!” she says, eyes wide with something like panic. “You weren’t waiting long, were you?”

She asks like she really doesn’t know. She’s a time traveler, Adam remembers, and forces himself not to get too worked up about how fucking cool that is.

“No, not at all,” he promises, trying for his most reassuring smile. “Is this still a good time?”

“Absolutely! Come on in.”

The house is… not what Adam expected. The furniture is fairly modest. There’s not a ton of expensive art on the wall. It’s mostly just framed certificates from Sam’s degrees and philanthropy awards from the Barnes Foundation. It feels like a normal person’s apartment, except that it’s the first floor of a mansion. 

“It’s not much,” Sam says, like that’s not an insane thing to say, and leads him to a small office off the living room. She takes a seat behind the desk and gestures for him to sit opposite her. 

There’s a fat gray cat sitting on his chair. “Hey, buddy,” Adam tells it, letting the cat sniff his fingers. 

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Sam says, jumping back up to shoo the cat away. “That’s Darwin. You’re not allergic, are you?”

“Oh, no, you’re—you’re good.” Adam brushes some fur off the chair and takes a seat, trying not to fidget. Sam seems to be nervous enough for the both of them; he really doesn’t need to add any fuel to the tension in the room. “This is a beautiful house.”

Sam winces. “Thank you. It’s… too big, for anyone, but especially for me, which is half the reason I put up the job listing, I—I needed someone to live here and remind me that I exist, you know? And also, mostly, feed Darwin and keep up on my paperwork when I go on trips, because I think the AM’s gotten pretty sick of me not answering their emails cause I’ve been spending weeks at a time in the 16th century.”

She laughs a little at herself, and then abruptly stops and adds, “I’m a… time traveler. I’m not, like. Crazy or anything.”

Adam bites his lip to keep from smiling. “Yeah, I know. You’re… kinda famous.”

She winces again. “I forget that sometimes. Spent most of my life being literally nobody. So.”

A silence falls that Adam just knows will turn awkward if he lets it go on for more than a second or two, but he doesn’t know what to say. This is already the strangest interview he has ever been to in his life. He wore a suit for this?

“Anyway!” Sam rubs her hands together like she’s washing off the moment and grabs a piece of paper from one corner of the desk. “Your resume is very impressive. I got way more applications for this than I was expecting, and thank God you were one of them, cause I don’t think I could handle more than one interview.”

Adam blinks, certain he must have heard wrong. “I’m sorry, you—I’m your only interview?”

“Oh. Yeah, you—you’ve got the job. If you want it.”

Literally, what the fuck is happening?

Sam must take his shocked silence for disbelief, because she goes on, “I mean, you’re perfectly qualified. You’ve got a degree from a prestigious university, you have knowledge of atypicals, your references spoke wonders about you, and actually—well, okay, if I’m being honest, I didn’t even really look at a ton of the other applications cause I was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of them, but we actually have a mutual acquaintance who saw your name in the running and told me you’d definitely do a great job.”

Adam’s heart sinks into his stomach. A mutual acquaintance… they might’ve known of each other, huh, Mom? “Oh, yeah? Who, uh. Who’s that?”

He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Annabelle somehow got him this job. Can he still take it? Does he want to? If he’d wanted to live his truth as a nepo baby, he could’ve interned at the AM in high school like she’d wanted him to, but he always had his goddamn pride to contend with, and he’d never wanted to get any kind of work just because his aunt ran the AM. He doesn’t want to get a job because she ran the AM now, and she doesn’t even run the AM anymore!

But the listing really was exactly the kinda shit he’s good at… and Sam said herself that he was qualified, that his resume was impressive even! That’s the kind of validation he fucking lives for!

Flexible hours… insurance benefits… free housing and a six figure salary, all to send a couple of emails and feed an eccentric time traveler’s cat. He’d be stupid to turn this down.

Still, he braces himself, cringing internally, as he prepares to hear his aunt’s name come out of Sam Barnes’s mouth. Which means he is totally unprepared and thus thoroughly shocked when what she actually says is, “Jason Beck?”

His mouth drops open. He closes it. A sound that may or may not have meaning attached to it makes its way out of his mouth before he can bite it back, so he quickly follows it with a much more intelligible, “I’m sorry, did you say Jason Beck?” in the hopes that Sam won’t notice.

She frowns. “Yes. You do know him, don’t you?”

“Yeah, he was my… My roommate was his TA senior year. I took like one class with him.”

“Well, you must have impressed him in that one class,” Sam says. “Beck said you’re just what I’m looking for.”

“And what… are you looking for, exactly?” Adam asks, leaning forward in his seat a little. He feels all of a sudden like he’s experiencing a very odd dream, and any moment the other shoe is gonna drop and kick him straight into a nightmare. “The listing was kinda vague on hours and responsibilities. I’m, uh, starting grad school next week?”

“No, yeah, that’s perfect!” Sam says. “You can totally do whatever you need to do—go to class, do your homework here if you want, have people over— the third floor is totally yours, and whatever hours you need to work to get everything done is totally cool with me.”

“Cool…” If this were any other interview, Adam would have so many more questions. Hell, if this were any other job, he probably wouldn’t have applied without requesting a much more specific job description. But Sam is weird, in a way Adam’s kind of obsessed with, and if doing odd jobs for her gives him a free place to live and a chance to learn how time travel works, then who the hell is he to pass something like that up?

He could pay a whole semester’s tuition with his first paycheck. Why is he even still thinking about this?

“Okay,” he says with a nod, and as soon as he’s said it out loud, a certain calm settles over him, like his brain and body are telling him he made the right choice.

Sam’s eyes get big. “Okay? You’re—you’re in? You’ll take the job?”

“Yeah, I’ll take the job.” He’ll have to get Beck’s email from Caitlin to thank him for the reference. And then figure out how to explain to Caitlin and his parents that he’s working for a celebrity eccentric. But at least he won’t be homeless. “When can I start?”

Chapter Text

The third floor of Sam Barnes’s mansion really is a one-bedroom apartment. Adam has his own set of keys, his own bathroom complete with a jacuzzi tub and rain shower, his own kitchen with a huge oven and one of those smart refrigerators that gives you recipe advice based on your leftovers. There’s even an elevator next to Sam’s office that takes him straight to his front door.

“Rich people are insane,” he tells Caitlin over the phone as he rolls his tattered suitcases across the mahogany floor. “I feel like I have to take my shoes off or she’s gonna charge me a forty thousand dollar cleaning fee.”

“That would be pretty wild,” Caitlin points out, “considering she’s actually paying you to live there. Which, if we haven’t established, is batshit insane and you’re crazy for taking this job without insisting your boss get a psych eval.”

“She’s an eccentric reclusive genius, I don’t know, it’s part of her charm!”

“Suuure it is. Don’t come crying to me when she leaves decapitated lawn gnomes outside your room.”

“You listen to way too many true crime podcasts.”

He’s not much of a decorator, and his parents took most of the good furniture with them to Florida, but the apartment comes fully furnished anyway, so all he really has to do is put his own sheets on the bed. Caitlin sends him pictures to hang up—most of them just of her, but also a few good ones of the two of them, often with his college boyfriend Billy cropped out—and after only a few minutes of waffling, he tacks up the Mad Max poster he masturbated to all through high school. 

When Caitlin hangs up, Adam stands in the living room, which is bigger than his college dorm and includes a microfiber couch he could drown in, and takes stock of it all. The place doesn’t feel like his yet—not like his parents’ house did, or like the apartment in New Haven he and Caitlin shared senior year—but hopefully it will. Someday.

When he gets off the elevator on the first floor, Sam is sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop. She’s wearing ratty sweatpants and a Harvard sweatshirt (ew), and round reading glasses he would never have expected but that actually look pretty good on her. Adam hovers awkwardly in the doorway, waiting for her to notice him. When she doesn’t look up, he shuffles forward and says, “Hey.”

Sam jumps like she’s been shocked, closing her laptop so fast she almost swipes it clean off the table. Adam immediately steps back, hands raised in surrender, but it doesn’t take her long to recognize him and relax. “Oh! Hi. Sorry. You—I—am not used to there… being people here.”

Adam doesn’t know what to say to that. 

“Did you need something?” Sam says in that tense, high-pitched voice. 

“I was just coming to see if you needed anything.” Adam gestures vaguely in the direction of the ceiling. “I’m, uh. All moved in.”

“Oh! Good!” Sam’s still half-standing, one hand still on her laptop. She looks at Adam like she doesn’t quite know what to do with the reality of him, and he looks at her the exact same way. “You can just. Hang out, then. Do whatever. I’m, um, working on some paperwork for you. Billing and insurance stuff, but it’s gonna take me a couple days.”

“Okay.” Adam shifts back and forth on his heels. His classes don’t start until Monday, and it’s not like he has a whole lot of friends. “Anything I can do in the meantime?” His gaze strays behind her to the full sink. “I could do your dishes.”

Sam slumps back into her chair. “God, could you really? I keep meaning to get to it—I mean, I don’t even cook that much cause stoves kinda freak me out, I just hate eating those microwaveable meals in the packaging, but then moving them onto a plate gets all that gross frozen juice everywhere, and then I get distracted with work and I…” His eyebrows must be making an escape attempt through his hairline because she trails off and concludes, “If you could do the dishes, that would be really helpful, thank you.”

Adam smirks, tosses her a playful salute. “That’s what I’m here for.”

It’s like that, for the first few weeks. Adam does the dishes because Sam forgets there are plates in the sink. After a couple days of watching her eat the saddest TV dinners he’s ever seen, he asks if he can use her kitchen instead of his own (“Oh! No, yeah, no, of course you can! This is—it’s—mi casa es… also yours, you know? You can totally knock yourself out!”) and makes enough for two. Her stove is electric, glass-topped, and equipped with a million failsafes so if you forget you were cooking something, your house doesn’t burn down. He can’t imagine why Sam could possibly be scared of it. 

He gets them groceries with a “company credit card” linked to Sam’s trust fund. He drops off Sam’s dry cleaning, and when he sees the astronomical bill for three dresses and a pair of socks, offers to just do her laundry for her—not like there isn’t a washer-dryer on every floor of her house. He starts feeding Darwin in the mornings when his incessant meowing wakes him up from three stories down, and Sam says, “Oh, you didn’t have to—I mean, I’d totally forgotten but he’s—it’s… Thank you.”

Adam’s only worked a handful of real jobs in his life—the reception desk of the Yale Admissions Office, an independent bookstore outside New Haven, and an ice cream shop in middle school that actually did make him wear a pretty stupid hat (but joke’s on you, Caitlin, he didn’t know you yet)—but Sam Barnes is a boss like no other. She jumps every time Adam walks into a room, like she’s constantly forgetting someone else lives there. She disappears for hours at a time without letting him know where she’s going or when she’ll be back. Whenever he tries to ask her what more he can do for her, she gives him this wide-eyed, terrified look and says “Oh, no, you’re doing great! Just keep going exactly as you are!” which is not. At all. Helpful. 

One night, she knocks on his bedroom door and presents him with a huge pile of paperwork—non-disclosure agreements, insurance registrations, an employment contract written in the most convoluted legalese Adam has ever seen (he skims it and signs; what has he got to lose at this point?). Officially, he’s employed by the Barnes Foundation as a “personal research assistant,” like the LinkedIn page said. In the first month working for and living with the illustrious Samantha Barnes, he doesn’t do a single lick of research assisting. He can’t tell if Sam actually likes him very much, or wants him to be there. He doesn’t know why she needed to hire someone so badly if all he does is follow her around begging for tasks.

Also, he witnesses zero time travel.

“You could quit,” Caitlin tells him during their Friday night Skype date. He’s laying on his stomach on his bed, laptop in front of him, painting his nails an alarming shade of purple Caitlin picked out for him. It’s the first thing he bought with his first paycheck, after clearing his balance with BU. “How much did you make from just a month? Enough for a studio till you find something else, no?”

“Yeah, but how tacky would that be? Quitting after a month cause I just needed one fat paycheck to get by? She could have me blacklisted. Or arrested for fraud.”

“Yeah, but then at least you’d have something exciting going on.”

He considers it—Caitlin’s words, not her advice to take the money and run. He doesn’t not have exciting things going on. His Modern Shakespeare seminar is beyond fascinating, and he’s been sorta texting, sorta leading on this guy in his Reading in Latin course cause he’s got abs for days and a Hamlet tattoo. But also, he thought he’d be doing cool atypical rights advocacy stuff, and he’s mostly just been… housekeeping. 

He doesn’t know what he was expecting, exactly. Just not this.

He can’t sleep that night, and his private floor feels too weird and echoey in the middle of the night, so he wanders down to the ground floor for a cup of coffee. There’s a Keurig in his private kitchen, but he’s only got the chocolate peanut-butter k-cups left, and he’s pretty sure that much sugar this late at night might send him into a coma. He bought fancy espresso for the sole purpose of using the stove-top espresso pot in Sam’s kitchen (though he’s not sure why she even has one if she’s so afraid of the stove). 

He takes the stairs so that the elevator motor whirring won’t wake Sam up. The rest of the mansion is just as dark and creepy as his little corner of it, but somehow he’s not freaked out. Maybe it’s because the first floor at least feels lived in—Sam left her laptop on the kitchen table; the cropped sweater she was wearing earlier today is hanging off the back of a chair; there are somehow dishes in the sink, even though he swears he cleaned this kitchen spotless right after dinner. 

Adam doesn’t know what he expected from an eccentric reclusive billionaire, honestly. It’s just definitely gonna take some getting used to.

He pops his headphones in, puts on the Dork Music™ playlist Caitlin made him for his last birthday, and starts taking things out of cabinets—the espresso pot, the fancy ground Cuban coffee he spent way too much on at the international grocery store down the street, a Doctor Who mug purely because the idea of Sam Barnes the Actual Time Traveler watching Doctor Who amuses him.  

With a warm latte and Snow Patrol playing in his ears, Adam can almost pretend he’s still in college, chilling in the living room while he and Caitlin study. He can almost pretend he’s back in high school, taunting his caffeine addiction to his parents (cause “hey, I could be doing a lot worse!”) and relishing in all the little reasons he can find to keep going day after day. 

He closes his eyes, and in the dim glow of the light above the sink, Adam actually feels like he’s home.

There’s an odd sound, like a displacement in the air, and a heavy thud, followed by a sharp cry of pain. Adam’s eyes snap open, and he almost spills his coffee in his haste to jump out of his chair. “Jesus—Sam!”

Because there she is, five feet away from him, like she appeared out of thin air. She’s half-crouched on the other side of the table, gripping the back of a chair with white knuckles and bent knees like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. Maybe it is, because she’s trembling all over, and when Adam hurries over to steady her, she practically collapses into his arms. 

“Hey, hey, hey, you’re okay, come here, just sit down,” Adam rambles in between a thick string of curses from both of them. He somehow manages to hold half Sam’s weight and pull the chair out at the same time, gets her sitting and then crouches in front of her, hands awkwardly hovering around her shoulders in case she falls over again. “What’s—holy shit, did you just time travel?”

He only realizes it as he’s saying it, that that must be what just happened. One second, he was alone in the kitchen, and the next Sam was there—where did she come from? Or, okay, duh, better question: when did she come from?

“You did, didn’t you?” he says, staring in wonder at the impossible human being before him. “Holy shit, you just time traveled!”

“Yep!” Sam squeaks, eyes shut tight against some invisible pain. “It, uh. Can be a little tough on the re-entry.”

“Shit, right.” Adam shakes his head to focus—the cool factor of the situation is actually way less important than the his boss is in pain factor. “Are you—just—stay here a sec.”

She seems steady enough in her seat, so he goes and grabs a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer. He didn’t see any visible injuries on her, but it’s not like an icepack can make anything worse.

“What hurts?” he asks her anyway, returning to her side with the bag of icy peas.

She shakes her head. “Everything.”

Well, that’s not helpful. “Here, just—take a deep breath, okay? Does this always happen when you time travel?”

He flashes back to the first day they met, how Sam disappeared for an odd amount of time, came back distracted and frazzled, and asked him if he’d been waiting long like she really didn’t know. Had she time traveled right before his interview? Had she been in pain the whole time they’d talked?

“Not… always,” Sam gasps, grimacing as she blinks her eyes back open. She takes the makeshift icepack from him and presses it gingerly between her wrists, take a slow, labored breath. “It’ll pass, it just, um… It depends on how long I was gone.”

Adam blinks. “How long were you gone?”

“I, uh, kinda lost track,” Sam admits. She seems to be coming down from whatever pain flare the trip gave her. She lets her eyes flutter closed again, in relief this time, as she moves the ice pack from her wrists to the back of her neck. “A week? Maybe two?” Her eyes snap open, and a note of urgency appears in her tone. “I wasn’t gone that long here, was I?”

It takes a second for Adam to process her question. “Oh, uh, n-no! No, it’s like, uh, just after 3am. I saw you, like, six hours ago, so you haven’t been gone longer than that.”

Sam lets out a deep sigh, craning her neck back against the frozen peas. “Good.”

Now that the crisis has been averted, Adam doesn’t really know what to do with himself. He’s still squatting in front of Sam’s chair. His knees and ankles are starting to hurt. But he also feels like they’re caught in some odd limbo of disaster, where fear and urgency has allowed them to understand each other in a way they haven’t yet gotten to as employer-employee. 

If he moves, he’s afraid he’ll break the trance.

But eventually, he slowly straightens up, returns the peas to the freezer when Sam hands them over, rolling her neck instead. With his head in the freezer and his back to her, Adam feels a little more capable of asking, “So do long… trips always? Hurt you like that?”

Sam’s quiet for so long that he thinks maybe she didn’t hear him, and then that maybe she just doesn’t want to answer. But just as he’s closing the freezer, she says, “They didn’t used to.”

Adam stays very still, not wanting to spook her. “Yeah?”

Sam swallows, rubs a hand down her face, and maybe it’s the exhaustion in her expression, but Adam’s pretty sure she looks at him, head-on, for the very first time. “I’ve been time traveling for twenty years. And it used to be fun. It used to be exciting, it used to be easy, it used to be painless. And now… I go away for six hours and I’m gone for three weeks, and when I’m in the past, I don’t have a body, so when I come back and have one again, it hurts. It just all hurts.”

Adam’s chest aches. He feels suddenly very guilty for thinking this was cool five minutes ago. “That really sucks, Sam. I’m so sorry.”

Her eyes get a little glassy, like she’s not even hearing him, but then she shakes her head and pushes herself to her feet, one hand braced against the table. “I’m going to bed. Thank you for your help, Adam. I’ll see you in the morning?”

She’s already gone before he gets his voice back, but he still says, “Yeah! Yeah, Sam, I’ll… Get some sleep.”

“I’m not gonna quit,” Adam tells Caitlin the next morning. He’s in his room, allegedly working on his first big grad school assignment, but really he’s deep in the public AM database reading up on Class D abilities. There is painfully little research on time travel.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Caitlin says when he doesn’t elaborate, and adopts an affected tone of false curiosity. “Why, Adam? What ever could have changed your mind?”

She’s making fun of him, but he doesn’t rise to the bait. He clicks off the AM website to Sam’s official bio for the Barnes Foundation. “Sam’s been dealing with her ability for literally two thirds of her life, and she still doesn’t have a good hold on it. It causes her physical pain. No wonder she needs someone to help her out.”

He can practically hear Caitlin roll her eyes over the phone. “Yeah, but anyone can help her do the dishes and feed her cat, and if she needs help with the time travel, then what good are you going to do?”

Adam cuts a glare at his phone, knowing full well Caitlin can’t see him, as hurt flashes in his chest. His first instinct is to protest, to ask why shouldn’t he be the one to help, why can’t he do some good for an eccentric time traveler in pain?

But the words don’t come. Because if he’s being honest with himself… she’s right. He’s not a scientist, like his parents, or a bureaucrat, like his aunt. His research experience boils down to term papers and his senior capstone on the curse of Macbeth—if Samantha Barnes, billionaire philanthropist who’s been living with her ability for twenty years and working with atypical research organizations for half that, couldn’t figure out a way to time travel painlessly, how could Adam possibly do it?

“Hayes?” Caitlin prompts. “Did I lose you?”

“No, sorry,” he says, closing the tabs on his laptop. “I just, uh, got distracted. I gotta go, okay? I got a lot of work to do, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Caitlin says after a beat, like she can tell the tone of the conversation has shifted. She probably can, but Adam has neither the time nor the inclination to discuss it with her further. 

It doesn’t matter if Caitlin doesn’t think he’s capable of this, or that he should be the one doing it. Helping Sam Barnes is, ostensibly, his job, and he’s determined to do it right.

Which means he wasn’t lying just to get her off the phone. He really does have a lot of work to do.

Chapter Text

It takes Adam a few weeks to put his plan into action.

First, he has to come up with a plan. His end goal seems simple enough—help Sam learn how to time travel without hurting herself—but it’s harder than he’d expected to work towards that goal without actually letting Sam know that’s what he’s doing.

Because after that stressful 3am involuntary bonding session they had together, Sam finally starts treating Adam like an ally instead of an adversary. She no longer jumps halfway out of her skin every time he walks into a room. She asks him what he’s making for dinner instead of feigning humility whenever he offers her some. She actually starts confiding in him about the research projects she’s been working on, most of them revolving around legal citizenship status for registered atypicals and rehabilitation programs for the particularly volatile ones.

It’s cool work, work that makes Adam proud to be a part of it, even if mostly what he’s doing is proofreading Sam’s frantic emails and leaving voicemails to senators’ offices cause she doesn’t like talking on the phone.

But at least he’s doing something, and the comfortable rapport they’ve finally settled into feels right, like they might actually be friends, or at the very least like he’s good at his job. He doesn’t want to risk messing that up by overstepping his boundaries.

So he does Sam’s dishes, and cooks Sam’s meals, and feeds Sam’s cat, and when he’s not actively completing tasks for her (research-related or otherwise), he pays attention. To how often she time travels (at least four or five times a week, from what he can tell), and how long she’s gone (it varies from an hour to a day), and how much pain she appears to be in when she gets back (more often than not: a shit-ton).

The most frustrating part about it is that Sam never tells him when she’s going on a trip. He’ll be eating breakfast, thinking she’s just sleeping late, and she’ll appear in a rush of air, often landing in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor. Sometimes they’ll be mid-conversation, usually debating precedent or other factions of atypical history, and Sam will get increasingly riled up until she disappears without a word. When she gets back, she’ll have the answer to whatever they were arguing about, and a migraine.

“I don’t know if it’s because I try to stuff an entirely different time into my brain,” she tells him on one such occasion, a real icepack (Adam bought a few after the first time so the peas wouldn’t thaw and get all mushy) folded over her eyes, “or because then I come back and have to stuff my brain back into my body.”

“Because you don’t… have a body in the past?” Adam remembers, fighting the urge to smile giddily at how fucking cool that is.

Sam tilts her hand back and forth in a yeah, pretty much gesture, and then bites back a whimper like even just moving that much has pained her. Adam doesn’t ask any more questions.

The easiest solution, how Adam sees it, would be for Sam to just stop time traveling until she can figure out a way to do it differently. Or to only take short trips if it’s long ones that cause her the most pain. At the very least, she could tell Adam when she’s thinking of time traveling and when she expects to be back, so that he can have a warm bath and some ibuprofen waiting for her.

If he had a wicked cool superpower with a really shitty side effect, he would do whatever he could to minimize the shitty side effect, even if it meant giving up the wicked cool superpower… right?

Right?

“Of fucking course I wouldn’t,” he tells Caitlin one afternoon on the walk home from campus. Over the last few weeks, they’ve been talking about his job a lot less. He tells her about his classes, and his spectacularly disastrous Grindr dates, and the shenanigans of Darwin the dumb gray cat, and she tells him about the Intro to Legal Theory class she’s teaching, and the Yale Law associate professor she’s been delighting in denying her number, and the three-month-old Scottish Terrier that’s been terrorizing her apartment. She doesn’t ask about Sam, and he hasn’t offered anything up… until now.

“She can travel through time,” he reiterates. “I would kill to do something that cool even once, and she does it every other day. Yeah, it sucks that she’s got some kind of chronic pain attached to it, but I can’t just tell her to stop.”

“Look,” Caitlin sighs. “Whether your crazy billionaire boss does or does not have a healthy relationship with her superpower is frankly none of my business, though just for the record I’m leaning toward does not. But come on, Adam, you’re a research assistant. Do more research.”

“I tried! The AM database barely says anything about Class D abilities, and if I ask Sam directly, she might clam up and start treating me like an enemy again.”

“I didn’t say ask Sam directly, and the AM is a government organization—a shady one at that. They’re not gonna have the good stuff open to the public. You’ve got connections there—go track down the good stuff.”

Which is how Adam finds himself the next morning, almost a month to the day since he first witnessed Samantha Barnes’s ability at work, saying over breakfast, “Hey, I’ve got some errands to run this morning, I’m gonna end up over by the AM. Do you need me to drop anything off for you?”

He bites his lip as soon as the words are out, busies himself with clearing the table so he won’t have to look Sam in the eye. He’s never been the best liar, and he doesn’t really have a Plan B if this doesn’t work out the way he wants it to.

Luckily, his instincts were right about the several reminders he’s seen on Sam’s calendar titled some variation of “Bring documents to AM—FOR REAL TODAY LIKE NOW!!!”. Her eyes go wide with excitement, and she says around a mouthful of pancakes, “Oh my god, yes, that would be a huge help.”

An hour later, Sam puts a stack of papers in his hands thicker than the Complete Works of Shakespeare. “This is all my notes from the last year or so of research. I’ve been meaning to share them with my contact at the AM for, like, ever, but I kept, you know, adding more. I have copies of everything, so they can just file all this, but make sure it goes directly to Agent Montague. He’s the only one I trust over there, the rest of them—” She shakes her head, blows out a breath, and Adam’s stomach twinges with guilt, knowing however she classifies “the rest of them,” his aunt would’ve probably fit right in. “Let’s just say there’s a reason I’m not emailing all of this.”

“Understood,” Adam promises, and zips the papers safely into his backpack.

It’s not far to the AM from Sam’s place—twenty minutes on the T and another ten or so on foot—which means Adam doesn’t have long to shake off his nerves and decide what he’s actually going to do.

The hard part—having a plausible excuse for being at the AM at all—he’s now got in hand. But the easy part—namedropping his aunt to get access to some Class D research not suitable for the public database—is… also hard.

It doesn’t help that Sam apparently thinks there’s only one agent in the whole Atypical Monitors that can be trusted.

By the time Adam’s standing in front of the ominous double doors, he still hasn’t quite decided on his best course of action. He’s only been here a handful of times before—when he was little, the details of his aunt’s hectic office job were kept secret from him, and then once he knew about atypicals, so did everyone else, and his parents had even more reason to keep him away from this place. Yet somehow, it still makes him feel about five years old to stand here, eighteen stories towering over him like a looming fairytale villain.

It’s just a building, he reminds himself. A government building, filled with people just doing their jobs. Annabelle used to be one of those people, and she doesn’t scare him. Much. Anymore.

With a gulp, Adam straightens the straps of his backpack on his shoulders and walks inside.

The lobby is no less intimidating than the building’s exterior, all high ceilings and marble floors and staircases stretching up in a million different directions. He wonders how anyone manages not to get lost here, and then if maybe that’s the point, that you’re supposed to.

He focuses on making his way up to the information desk situated smack dab in the middle of the huge room. His shoes squeak obnoxiously against the floor with each step, but the receptionist doesn’t so much as glance away from her computer, even once he’s standing right in front of her.

“Um… hi,” he says after an awkward beat. “I have a delivery for Agent Montague?”

“Sign in here,” the receptionist—or Operations Manager, according to the nameplate on the desk—says distractedly, as a sheet of paper slides over to him of its own volition. “And then I can take it.”

Adam startles a little at the casual display of telekinesis—over ten years of atypicals being known to the world and he’s still not used to people just being atypical—so it takes him a second to process her words. “Oh, uh, sorry—I was told I had to give this directly to Agent Montague. Is he… here?”

She finally cuts her gaze away from her computer screen, sitting up straighter as she looks him up and down. A smirk tugs at her lips. “Who’d you say you were again?”

Adam huffs, cheeks flushing, though he’s not really sure why. “I work for Sam Barnes. She wanted me to deliver some papers to Agent Montague.”

“Oh.” The receptionist’s face falls, like she was expecting something different and now he’s disappointed her. 

Adam shifts his weight from foot to foot, feeling awkward and scrutinized, which is stupid because he hasn’t done anything wrong.

“So can you call him down here please?” he presses, starting to get frustrated when she just keeps appraising him like a prized pig at auction. 

“Oh! Yes, sorry, duh—give me one second.”

Finally, she grabs the phone off the hook and punches in a few numbers. A warm, easy grin spreads across her face, which makes Adam feel a little bad about getting annoyed at her. She seems like a really nice person.

“Hey, it’s Mags!” she says brightly into the phone. “Could you come down to the lobby please? Sam sent a package for you. It’s apparently very top secret.”

Adam scowls. Is she making fun of him?

“Great! See you in a minute.” Mags hangs up the phone and trains her blinding grin on Adam now, leaning forward on her elbows. “He’ll be right down. What’s your name?”

He blows out a breath, gaze straying to the various staircases spiraling down around him from the upper floors. There’s no sign of the formidable Agent Montague appearing at the top of any of those stairs. “Adam. I’m, uh. Sam’s new assistant.”

“You know, Adam, you look really familiar,” Mags continues. “Were you ever a patient here?”

Adam looks back at her, feeling his face flush dark and hot. “No, I’m not—” special, he almost says. “I’m not atypical.”

“Did you volunteer here once, then? Or, I don’t know, take a field trip? I swear I’ve seen you before.”

Adam sighs, tossing one last hopeful glance at the closest staircase before deciding to hell with it. Clearly, Agent Montague is taking his damn time, and namedropping Annabelle was part of his agenda here today, after all. “You might be thinking of my aunt? She used to work here.”

“Oh, yeah? Who’s your aunt?”

“Annabelle Whitney?”

Mags frowns. “No, that doesn’t sound right. I’ve worked here almost ten years and I don’t know any Annabelles. We used to be real big on codenames here, do you know what hers was?”

Before Adam can respond, footsteps pound down the stairs behind him, and a voice huffs, “Hey, Mags, sorry about that. I was up on 8 helping Dr. Sharpe with—anyway, it doesn’t matter, but we have got to talk to Owen and Joan about fixing the elevators, cause I did not factor this into my cardio for the week.”

A man in a stylish blue suit jogs to a stop at the desk and leans onto his knees to catch his breath. Bending over brings him closer to Adam’s height, his artfully messy hair flopping down over his face, but when he raises his head, hand stuck out for a shake, recognition hits Adam like a train.

“Hey, man, how’s it going? I’m Caleb.”

Agent Montague. Is Caleb Fucking Michaels.

Caleb Michaels, Adam’s crush from ages 12 to 16. Caleb Michaels, Adam’s former classmate, who decked a guy in the school hallway and got homeschooled for the next year and a half. Caleb Michaels, whom Adam knew was atypical—the rumors going around school about the fight were fucking wild, but “I heard he’s an empath and absorbed so much anger from that dick that he just had to punch him” made enough sense and enough rounds to be plausibly believable—but he never would’ve guessed… 

Adam hasn’t thought about the guy in years, not for more than a second or two. Hasn’t wondered where he ended up after high school, if he was still in the area, if his assumed atypical status would ever cause them to cross paths again. 

And now he’s here, tall and broad and grown-up, and the only AM employee Sam feels like she can trust. 

And Adam’s just staring at him, a fact he only realizes when Caleb glances over at Mags the Operations Manager, hand still outstretched, and says, “Uh… who’d you say this guy was?”

“Adam,” he punches out, grabbing Caleb’s hand and trying desperately not to think about how sweaty his own is. “Sorry, it’s—Adam. Hayes, I—we—”

“Oh, yeah, the assistant!” Caleb’s grin is wide and blinding as he straightens up and gives Adam a firm, professional handshake. “I’ve heard a ton about you from Sam, it’s… great to finally put a face to the name.”

Adam’s stomach sinks. Heard a ton about you from Sam… He’d been about to say, “We went to school together,” but if Caleb’s heard about him and hasn’t made the connection… Jesus, does he not remember Adam at all?

“Uh, yeah, you too,” he manages, shoving down any emotions he may have about the situation, and awkwardly pulls his hand back. “I have, uh… papers, for you, from Sam.”

“Great!” Caleb’s still smiling, but it’s a little muted now, his eyes a little unfocused, and Adam can’t help thinking, Empath. Shit. “Uh, let’s go up to my office!” Caleb says, gesturing toward the nearest staircase. “Little more private. Thanks, Mags,” he adds to the receptionist, who’s watching them with an expression Adam’s not sure he appreciates. 

“Have fun, you two,” she says with a smirk and a wave. 

Caleb’s nose scrunches up. “Aw, jeez, could you not… okay. Come on, Adam.” 

With no better plan, Adam follows him up the stairs. “What was that about?”

Caleb glances at him, apologetic and awkward. “I, uh… think when you said you had a package for me, she thought…”

“Oh, god.” Adam’s face floods with heat, his stomach doing somersaults, and Caleb stumbles a little on the next step. Adam rushes to steady him. “Shit, hey, you okay?”

“Yeah, sorry.” Caleb regains his footing and leans against the railing, cheeks a little pink. “I, uh. I don’t know if Sam told you, but I’m an empath? I can… feel other people’s feelings.”

“Right,” Adam says, even though it’s not because of Sam that he already knew that. 

“Your feelings are just… new, I guess,” Caleb says, rubbing at his chest a little. “Might take me a sec to get used to them.”

Adam’s heart is beating a thousand miles an hour, which can’t be helpful. He’s still got a hand on Caleb’s arm. He lowers it. “Take your time.”

“I’m good now,” Caleb promises, flashing him another goldenrod smile. “Come on, let’s go.”

They sit in Caleb’s office on the second floor. Adam isn’t sure what he was expecting from the office of what is essentially a secret government agent, but Caleb’s reminds him of Miriam’s office, his therapist from the college counseling center. There are no less than four comfy couches. There’s a mini-fridge, from which Caleb tells him to take his pick of flavored Coke. On the desk is a framed picture of Caleb in a cap and gown, hugging a teenager who must be his little sister. Adam recognizes the BU logo in the background. 

“You went to school around here?” he asks, gesturing politely at the photo as they take seats opposite the desk from each other.

Caleb’s face lights up. “Yeah! I, uh, I grew up here, actually, just across town. My ability came in around my… sophomore? Junior year of high school? Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, was kinda fucking rough, so I was homeschooled for a little bit. Got my shit together enough to go to college, thank God. What about you? You from the area?”

A flash of emotion lances through Adam’s chest, and he can only hope that if he can’t identify it, neither can Caleb. “Yeah,” he says quickly before Caleb can call him out on the feeling. “My aunt, actually, used to be the Director here. Annabelle Whitney?”

“You must mean Wadsworth.” Caleb opens a drawer under his desk and pulls out a bag of Starbursts. He offers it to Adam, who takes an orange one mostly just for something to hold in his hands. “She was before my time. How’s she as an aunt?”

Anyone else asking probably would’ve triggered Adam’s defensiveness, but Caleb doesn’t ask it like he has a guess either way. “She’s good,” Adam says with a shrug. “You know, she’s family, so it’s…”

“Complicated?”

“Exactly.” Adam unwraps his candy, gaze focused on the paper. “I, uh… I’ve heard she wasn’t everyone’s favorite director.”

“I mean, I’ve heard stories,” Caleb admits, “but man, I don’t envy her being in charge when atypicals got found out. That must’ve been a PR nightmare.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Adam wishes he remembered more about that time, or that his parents had let him have all the information when the rest of the world did. For years, he survived on scraps of information—eavesdropped conversations, headlines over his dad’s shoulder. He used to beg his parents to tell him what was going on, berate his teachers with questions they didn’t know how to answer. He used to insist on walking home the long way so he could sneak into his pediatrician’s office and watch the news in the waiting room. “Anyway, I did undergrad at Yale, but now I’m back in town, working for Sam while I get my Masters at BU.”

“Oh, hey, me too!” Caleb’s wide grin is back. “Or, uh, technically mine’s like a three-year Masters-PHD program. I’m mostly in patient relations here, for now, but I’m studying to be a child psychologist.”

“That’d be good, I bet, with your…” Adam gestures vaguely with his uneaten Starburst. 

Caleb’s smile softens, a pink blush coloring his cheeks. “That’s the idea, yeah. What are you studying?” 

“English. I wanna go into publishing.”

“Really!”

Adam frowns. “That… surprises you?”

“I just would’ve thought political science or something, working for Sam…”

“Oh, uh, yeah.” Now Adam might be blushing. “That sorta happened by accident. Speaking of which.”

He unzips his backpack at his feet and hefts out the heavy binder-clipped pile of Sam’s research. “These are, uh, the last year? I think she said? Of notes. She apologizes for the delay.”

Caleb laughs as he takes the papers. “Don’t worry, I’m used to it. She has a little trouble letting go of things, doesn’t she?”

Now Adam does feel defensive. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t—don’t get me wrong, Sam’s great, she can just be a little… scattered, sometimes. I’m sure the trips don’t help, but sometimes I think she just forgets other people exist? Not in a mean way, just… Well, I shouldn’t speak for her, I don’t know how close you guys are.” 

Adam doesn’t really know either, and he’s not sure what Caleb’s avoiding saying. Or if he wants to ask. “I wanted to ask you, actually, if you had any Class D research you could share with me? Like you said, Sam’s not always the most… forthcoming about stuff. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to be helpful to her.”

“No, sure, that makes sense, I can totally send you some files.” Caleb studies him, popping a pink Starburst in his mouth. “You’re nervous,” he says around the candy. “To ask me?”

“I wasn’t sure how secret all this stuff is these days,” Adam says, face hot, as if that’s the only reason for him to be nervous. 

Caleb waves a dismissive hand. “Hey, for Sam? I’ll give you just about anything.”

An hour later, Adam gets back to the mansion with an empty backpack and Caleb’s phone number burning a hole in his pocket. Text me your email and I’ll see what I can dig up, he’d said as he walked Adam to the door. And stop by anytime!

He still kind of can’t believe that whole conversation happened. That he saw Caleb Michaels in the flesh after six years. That Caleb didn’t remember him. Maybe that’s a good thing. High School Adam was not necessarily someone he likes to be associated with now.

“Sam?” he calls, dropping his bag by the door. “I’m back.”

There’s no response. She might be upstairs somewhere—there’s a gym on the fourth floor; sometimes when Adam can’t sleep, he’ll hear the treadmill motor running through the ceiling. Darwin pads up to him with a telltale meow, so Adam refills his bowl, reloads the dishwasher, stands with the fridge door open for a while trying to take stock of what he can make for lunch.

It’s only when he opens the microwave to heat up some of this morning’s leftover espresso and finds one of Sam’s sad old TV dinners abandoned on the plate that he realizes why it’s so quiet in the house.

“Great,” he sighs, tossing the meal in the trash. “Have a good trip, Sam.”

She doesn’t come back for hours. Adam eats mac and cheese in front of Sam's flat screen TV, catches up on homework, cleans up the third floor. That night, he makes dinner for two, and puts half of it in the fridge. He does more dishes. Runs three loads of laundry. Feeds Darwin again because he keeps batting at the window blinds. 

Just before he’s about to give up on waiting up for her and go to bed, he gets an email from Agent Montague. 

Hi Adam :)

Great to meet you today. Attached is all the Class D research I could find—be aware, there’s not much. Most of the Class D patients we’ve had here are spacial manipulators—they walk through walls, teleport, that kinda thing. Sam’s one of a few rare time travelers, so it’s hard to say how much of this really applies to her. She has access to these files, so there shouldn’t be anything in here she doesn’t know, but hopefully you can make some good use of it.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help :) 

Caleb

Adam takes a second to overthink the double smiley face and what exactly he might be able to read into great to meet you, and then opens the file. 

A lot is redacted.

A lot uses scientific language he can’t even begin to understand. Maybe he can ask his parents about it? Or is this already betraying Sam’s privacy and trust enough as it is?

And then, he sees it: an afterthought at the bottom of some doctor’s personal notes, deep in the middle of the collection of files:

The limits and parameters of these abilities remain largely unknown due to the high mortality rate that affects these particular atypicals. Manipulating space and time can create extreme strain on the physical system leading to illness or death.

Well, fuck.