Ethan was still sitting at his desk pouring through past research to see if there was something, he could find that he really wanted to investigate. But it was hard, the more people that conducted research the less it seemed there was to research unless you had uncommon ideas. The best place to begin looking was always an interaction between things and the subject with the most interactions that wasn’t complete and relatively young was the microbiome. It was a massive hurdle for a single pair like Ethan and Carmen to overcome, but with some ingenuity, it could give them the entertainment they were seeking. Now that Ethan had decided the subject, he wanted to work on, he needed to know where to start and what was already known about the subject, meanwhile, he needed to get Carmen familiar with the techniques used in microbiome research. 

Carmen returned to 521 and entered through the office’s door which was closed but unlocked. She hadn’t noticed it yesterday or this morning, but she could tell today that the air in the office smelled like him. The scent was a bit intoxicating for her at these concentrations, it made her want to get close enough to touch him. When Carmen returned Ethan called her over to sit in one of the two chairs in front of his desk. She was a little worried about getting closer to the source of the scent, but soon enough her nose was used to it and forgot about it allowing her to focus on what Ethan was going to say.

Ethan told her what he thought would be a good subject to study. Carmen thought that his idea was great and would be fun to explore. From that day on room 521 was conducting experiments exploring the microbiome. Carmen had a huge swath of new techniques to learn which were complicated and when confusing, Ethan stepped into the lab every once in a while, to explain them to her. When the bare minimum of samples and techniques and materials had been acquired Carmen completed her first experiment successfully by herself at the end of the pairs’ first month together. Carmen was more than happy with her theorist. Together they made a lot of progress, having gone through other peoples’ experiments successfully slowly adding Ethan’s twists to them. 

It wasn’t long before Carmen had developed feelings for Ethan. Her first clue was that she couldn’t wait to see him every day, before looking forward to doing her experiments and getting results. The second was whenever he was close to her, her heart raced. But what sold it to her was that it bothered her when she couldn’t get Ethan to talk to her about anything other than work. After failing repeatedly she grew cold towards him. 

Eventually, Carmen was able to warm up to other researchers on their floor that she met while using the genome sequencers and began eating lunch with them leading her to develop her social life. She, unfortunately, couldn’t shake her feelings for Ethan, but she was at a loss for what to do. It was common for theorist-research pairs to become partners in their personal lives because they worked closely every day. Carmen wasn’t in a rush to find a relationship, so she decided to just leave what she had with Ethan as it was, it wasn’t like she would be able to talk to him about something like this, anyway. Surprisingly, her work wasn’t affected by her dejection. 

Ethan’s work was starting to slow down. He had noticed that for a couple of weeks now that Carmen no longer asked him about how his weekends were or if he did anything for fun. She was spending more time for lunch, although not more than was allotted, and didn’t express any emotion and sighed quite a bit. Before when she did something correctly her face would light up and it would make him feel proud. Now instead he feels nothing and going to work was starting to stress him out because he thought this change had to be because of him, but he couldn’t figure out what he had done wrong and he couldn’t bring himself to ask Carmen. Ethan was convinced that this weekend when he meets his friends, he needed to ask them for advice.