Chapter Text
Spring 1998
The smallest moments are often the ones that change everything. In Emmrich’s case, it’s entering the world of research because he’s nineteen years old and needs a job.
Most of the labs on campus only compensate students in the form of course credits, and the ones that don’t are often woefully outside his field of knowledge. He’s majoring in corpse whispering, of course; the mage who scorns the area in which they’re naturally gifted is a fool. Declaring a dual major in chemistry was an act of either rebellion or fear. He still isn’t sure which. There’s nothing simple about chemistry, far from it. Sometimes, students leave the classroom in tears of frustration. Still, it’s a reprieve from pondering the near-inevitability of death.
In any event, he’s pawing through the vending machine coin return slots, looking for change other people might have left behind, when he sees the flyer. The professor is familiar in name only - a Dr. Kaiserling, who teaches upper-level courses - but it’s enough to prompt him to pull off one of the slips of paper and tuck it into his pocket.
Ten days later, he and the professor are sitting next to each other at a small round table in an otherwise nondescript room. Emmrich does his best not to fidget or glance around too much, or do anything that would betray the realization that he’s just crossed an invisible threshold from textbook science to something that feels much more real. Instead, he tries to focus on the eight-page document on the table in front of them. Its typeface is tiny, the words blurred from repeated photocopying, but Dr. Kaiserling clearly knows it by heart and has recited it to many a student, using a pen to indicate each bullet point.
“If something goes wrong or you make a mistake, tell me sooner rather than later. Reserve ten to eleven o’clock on Wednesdays for lab meetings. If you use the last of something, write it on the blackboard in the main room.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’ll be working on the bilingualism project,” Dr. Kaiserling explains as he slides the papers over to Emmrich, who signs on the dotted line. “I want to know whether the undead code-switch naturally if given free reign. Undergraduate students are involved in preparing samples for analysis and organizing lab materials and schedules. While you’re working here, you’re to keep your nails clipped short and make sure you have no open sores on your hands or arms. Wash your hands and disinfect your work station thoroughly before and after handling a person’s remains.”
“Oh!” The professor speaks so casually that Emmrich jerks in his seat, just a little. He’s observed the Watchers for years, known on an intellectual level that of course the skeletal workers didn’t assemble themselves. Still, he always assumed something as sacred as handling remains for research purposes would be done by scientists.
There’s a thump-click from the next room, and the sound of a young woman murmuring quietly to herself. This is a place for scientists, he realizes. He is a scientist.
Dr. Kaiserling’s eyes shine, and it’s clear he’s trying not to laugh. “Son,” he says, “is this too much for you?”
“No, Professor,” Emmrich says immediately. “I look forward to learning.”
In those first few weeks, it’s hard not to constantly marvel. What a difference there is between studying and studying. He’s labeling diagrams in Anatomy of the Departed, multiplying matrices in Finite Mathematics, spending hours in the library preparing abstracts for Techniques in Post-Mortem Dialogue, writing electron-pushing mechanisms for reactions in Elementary Organic Chemistry, and all of it is so disconnected from these moments here in the lab. This is reality, not an example in a textbook. This is the place where they discover things no one has ever discovered before.
He both wishes for more and fears it. Being an undergraduate research assistant here means assisting with scheduling, taking inventory of supplies, and fighting with an old label maker. His nails are clipped short, but there’s no opportunity for handling remains, which - mercifully - means no opportunity to make catastrophic errors.
But then, too, it’s hard to determine what’s considered catastrophic. In his chemistry lab last semester, damaging things was beyond uncomfortable for everyone. The professor would quiet the whole room at the sound of breaking glass. Then he’d quiz them on how to proceed, step by step, making a spectacle of the embarrassed student who wanted nothing more than to tidy up, pay for the damage, and be done with it.
In Dr. Kaiserling’s lab, it’s quite different. When one of the graduate students (Emmrich thinks his name is Michael) opens a cabinet and the sound is accompanied by a crash, Emmrich looks up with wide eyes. He’s not sure what he expects – a reprimand, an apology, but surely something worse than what happened in the classroom. Instead, Michael glances at him.
“Hand me those?” He points at a pair of work gloves lying on the table. Emmrich does.
“Anyone hurt?” the professor calls.
“Nah, it was empty.” He cleans it easily and strips off his gloves, then crosses to the board. Underneath the tall letters BREAKAGE, he chalks 1 phial (Michael) before pulling a second phial out of the cabinet, more carefully this time.
Well then. Attitudes are different here. Perhaps Emmrich should have anticipated that much.
What he didn’t anticipate is the way being part of a lab would feel like joining an exclusive club. There are the students who want to read the textbook, satisfy their degree requirements, and graduate, and there are the students who want to become the ones who create the textbook. Members of the second group have their own level of busy-ness and their own lingo. They’re the ones who stop to read the posters (left over from past academic conferences) on the walls in the lab, and they’re the ones who rush out the door calling, “Can’t go out tonight, I have a meeting with my PI.” Those people exist in a world entirely different from his.
So Emmrich thinks. Then he ends up doing just that with one of his roommates. He’s standing with one foot in the room and the other in the hallway, stammering an explanation that it means his principal investigator, that’s the professor who runs the lab -
“Look, go if you need to,” his roommate says, waving one hand vaguely. “Have fun?”
“Right. Shall we try tomorrow night for our outing instead?”
“Sure. The tickets'll still be on sale.”
He’s part of the club, but he still feels out of place, especially among the graduate students and postdocs who talk and laugh so fast and seem so much larger than life. There may only be a few years’ gap between them, but it feels like an insurmountable chasm. During lab meetings, Emmrich only speaks when he’s spoken to, and that’s to give updates on his work. The more senior students switch off explaining protocols and presenting preliminary results, in presentations full of fanciful diagrams and statistical methods hopelessly above anything he’s been taught, so he listens silently and hopes no one exposes him for the imposter he must be.
Dr. Kaiserling, at least, doesn’t make him feel like this. Emmrich and the other two undergraduate research assistants sit down with him weekly for professional development, which turns out to be a series of lessons in how to join the club. They go over how to read a research article and how to turn a resume into a CV. Most weeks there are assignments, but homework should be much less painful when one can put it on one’s timecard.
Operative words: should be.
Inside of six weeks, he calls on Laura, who’s spent many hours at the next desk proofreading instructional documents for the Mourn Watch. She’s a senior, and he’s sure she’d know better than him on their latest piece of homework. In a quiet moment when Kaiserling is out, Emmrich taps her on the shoulder.
“Does it strike you as odd?” he asks. “Being asked to write one’s own obituary?”
She grins, shaking her head. “I’ve done it before, for a class. I’m just gonna turn in the same one I did then. Don’t tell him that.”
Emmrich pays close attention to the corner of a manilla folder. “Was it difficult to write?”
“I mean, it was sad,” she says flippantly. “Mostly, I just didn’t know what to put for my age, like how old I’d be when I died. I ended up putting eighty-seven. That’s how old my grandpa was.”
He nods faintly, unable to feel his hands. “So this is common practice?”
“Well, you’ll have to do it when you take Psychology of Bereavement.” Laura combs her fingers through her hair. “It’s something about making you see the whole person, not just specimens or remains. You know?”
“I suppose,” he says, wishing he didn’t.
When they debrief on that assignment as a group, the conversation is mercifully light on the matters of their own deaths. It’s as Laura said. The focus is on respect for personhood, and remembering that the samples they examine here, in this clean and clinical environment, were once alive: wild, messy, and free. It all makes sense, which is little consolation on the nights he wakes halfway through a dream, choked by fear.
He’s written essays about how to prepare a body after death - has been forewarned he’ll be demonstrating as much, during the final exam for Anatomy of the Departed. But that’s always in the context of it being the rules; it’s sterile and academic and bears no connection to the living. This is both better and more terrifying.
As summer approaches, people start talking about their plans. This exclusive club is, by and large, children of the wealthy. It’s not hard to figure out why: students who don’t have to work have more time for maintaining a stellar GPA, and networking, and all the things they’re told to do if they want to go straight to the top. Conference travel takes money, which the school’s grants don’t come close to covering even for the students who are fortunate enough to receive them.
When he steps into the dorms, he’s stepping back into the familiar world. In the lab, people throw pitying expressions his way when he admits international travel isn’t on his list of summer plans. Here, he doesn’t get strange looks for knowing exactly how often a person can sell plasma.
And yet, his PI never makes him feel inadequate. Emmrich’s lab duties have gone from remaking tattered labels to verifying the integrity and quality of data collection across projects. It feels essential, scut work though people may consider it.
So he remains straddling the two worlds, trying to come away with the best of both of them. The lab knows an insatiable hunger for knowledge. The other students in the dorm know the enjoyment of youth. That enjoyment may often translate to doing ridiculous things, but he isn’t complaining. It’s difficult to argue with the opportunity to participate in something like creating makeshift go-karts out of rolling office chairs, to name one of the ideas that comes out of a slightly drunken conversation in the common room. (They’re caught, of course, and a campus-wide announcement is made about not removing furniture from the building.)
There are late-night conversations, and there are rituals. Namely, the Friday nights spent browsing the video rental store, spending almost as much time on the choosing as the watching. The weekends spent fueled by pizza and soda, absorbed in Goldeneye and Tekken. This is what he wants to remember when he looks back.
At the end of the semester, Dr. Kaiserling’s lab celebrates with a picnic on the lawn, apparently a multi-year tradition. It feels strange to be sitting on his knees eating sandwiches with people who are frighteningly intelligent, but only for about five minutes. One of the graduate students is thrilled for a chance to pass on advice, and Emmrich picks her brain for a good half hour. By the time that conversation dwindles, he slides easily into the wider group, and they’re all swapping jokes and jockeying for who gets to choose the next song to play over the speakers. People are just people, and divides can be broken down.
When the chatter begins to lull, Dr. Kaiserling turns the music down. People quiet instantly.
“Now. We’ve got another tradition to uphold. Laura?”
She bounces to her feet and accepts the box he’s holding out.
“I’ve been looking forward to this all year,” she says seriously, making several of them laugh. The rest are craning their necks to get a look as she opens the flaps: it’s a small cake with her name on it in yellow icing.
“As you should!” Dr. Kaiserling says cheerfully. He grins at the remaining students. “That’s how we do things around here. You finish your degree, you get a cake. Flavor of choice.”
“What'd you pick?” Michael asks.
"Lemon," says Laura.
“We had three cakes last year,” Tracy announces, drawing smiles and nods from the group. “The lab felt really empty afterwards.”
“Here, now,” the professor says, reaching for an instant camera. “We’ll take one of you with the cake alone, and then a whole group picture.”
So they do, and there’s high-fives and congratulations all around. They’re all sent off with well-wishes. Only a small group stays on over the summer, but the rest are told they’re more than welcome back next year.
Emmrich falls asleep that night smiling.
He’s the last of his friend group to turn twenty. In the days after their last final exam, they meet at the mall to say a final and collective goodbye to their teenage years. Over salty pretzels and frothy smoothies, they joke about feeling old, then pile into the photo booth and pull silly faces.
(A year closer to death. He won’t think about that, just now.)