He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Which is unusual for Dennis.
“The letters,” he says eventually. “They move around a bit. Like ball bearings. My eyes can’t keep them in lines right.”
He says it the way you say something you’ve never said out loud before. Carefully. Like it might not survive the air.
Emmet looks up from the desk.
He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look concerned. He looks the way Emmet always looks — present. Actually here.
“There’s a name for it,” he says. “A strange one. You probably don’t need it right now.”
He smooths his hand over the blueprint. Picks up his pen. Begins adding notes in careful block letters, even and unhurried. The kind of letters that stay in their lines.
“What you do need to know is that this doesn’t make you broken. It doesn’t make you stupid.”
He sets down the pen for a moment.
Reaches behind him without looking. Pulls a book from the shelf. Opens it to a page dense with words that have no business being as long as they are.
“Most people who look at your blueprint see what you see when you look at this.”
He holds it up.
“They don’t see the beauty. The engineering. The duct tape. They see something that makes no sense to them. And that’s why they’re nervous.”
“I never thought about it like that,” Dennis says quietly.
“Most people don’t.”
A pause.
Dennis looks at the floor. When he speaks again it costs him something.
“I don’t want to give you the weight of it. It’s like a wrecking ball, this thing. And not in a good way.” He doesn’t look up. “I don’t want to break our friendship with a horrid, heavy wrecking ball.”
Emmet is quiet for a moment.
“It’s not a wrecking ball for me,” he says. “It’s a spring. A pulley. Just the right length of duct tape that helps me understand the whole blueprint better.”
Dennis looks up then.
Emmet’s amber eyes are steady. Not performing kindness. Just — telling the truth.
“When the words are too heavy, come here. I have enough words for both of us and they take up no space at all. Nothing to me can mean everything to you. That’s not a burden. That’s just how it works between people.”
Dennis nods. Just once. Small.
“Right,” he says. He thinks for a long moment. Nods once to himself. Quieter, the second time. “Right.”
Emmet picks up his pen again.
“Now. I can think of a word. In case you ever need it. For when people mistake your particular kind of intelligence for its absence.”
“Yeah?”
“Defenestration.”
Dennis blinks.
“…that sounds like a broken thing.”
“It is, in a way. It’s the word for the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.”
“That’s not —” Dennis stops. “There’s a WORD for that?”
Emmet waits.
Watches the cogs turn.
“De… Defenestration.” Dennis says it slowly. “The first part sounds a bit like Dennis.”
“Yes,” says Emmet. “It does a bit.”
Dennis sits with that.
“I wish I knew a word like that. Just one word. A long one. That I can remember because it makes sense to me. For when people think I’m stupid.”
“You just learned one,” Emmet says quietly. “And you’ll remember it. Because it has so much you in it.”
He goes back to the blueprint. The block letters continue. Neat. Readable. Dennis’s ideas, translated without being diminished.
“Emmet.”
“Mm.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Emmet doesn’t look up.
“Because you’ve spent your whole life being the one who gets things wrong according to everyone else’s correct.”
He sets down the pen.
He looks at Dennis properly now. The amber eyes with a thousand years in them.
“But you weren’t getting things wrong.”
He picks up the blueprint.
“You were finding out what no book has yet been able to say.”
Dennis is very still.
The way he was still when he first heard defenestration.
The way something is still when it has just been handed a thing it didn’t know it needed.
“There will come a time,” Emmet says, “when someone needs to know what happens past the edge of what’s written. When the theory ends and the actual begins. When they need to know what really happens in a place where nobody’s calculations quite work.”
He sets the blueprint down between them.
“That knowledge is yours. Paid for ten times over through trial and error and George and Stockholm and Portugal and duct tape and things that probably should have killed you and didn’t.”
A pause.
“Probably?” says Dennis.
“Statistically,” says Emmet.
Dennis nods slowly. This seems reasonable to him.
“When that day comes,” Emmet continues, “Someone, maybe the world, will need you. Not as a kindness. Because you’re the only one who’s been there. You’re the only one who will have that exact answer for that exact thing.”
Dennis doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then —
“What goes on the form? For the patent.”
Emmet almost smiles.
Picks up his pen.
“Tell me about this fabulous thing you’ve designed.”