Chapter Text
A quiet 20 Minute drive later and Grace was standing in a generic-looking business-park building. He was led down a hallway to a set of double doors, opening to show what Grace doesn’t doubt is the most extensive biology lab money could buy on short notice. He was overwhelmed his excitement to use high spec equipment again after so many years of going without. Back on Erid, his old Hail Mary lab had broken down overtime, and the Eridians hadn’t been able to fix most if any of his sight-based instruments, lacking the sensory organs necessary to recreate or perform maintenance on, let alone tolerance to the atmosphere they functioned within.
Stratt enters behind him, the entourage of FBI agents closing the lab doors and leaving the two of them alone outside the lab containment unit. She steps forward next to him, and side eyes Grace whose attention was fixated on the lab, taking note of the doctor’s wide eyes as he scans across the lab equipment. Organising the necessary equipment had been challenging when the Petrova taskforce was yet to build its own science team to consult on the matter, so Stratt had found herself feeling quite pleased to realise that not only was the biology lab up to Grace’s standards for the operation, but that he seemed genuinely awestruck at the equipment. Admittedly, she was also finding herself comforted to finally elicit a predictable reaction from the scientist.
“This is your new lab.” She stated, drawing grace from his revery. He turned his head towards her as if surprised she was there, but hesitated to break eye contact with the lab, until finally turning his full attention to her when she didn’t continue to speak.
“Is good.” He returns his attention back to the lab and repeats himself “good.”
“You will be tasked with analysing the samples from the Arclight probe. Until then you are to get accommodated with your lab, and document anything you may need to be added or altered to the existing equipment to fulfil your task with utmost precision and timing.”
“Yes.” Grace nodded, immediately moving towards the decontamination suits.
Stratt hesitated, unsure what to make of his agreement. In the time she has worked with authorities, militaries and civilians, she had only encountered one group of people who did not ask questions when issued orders, and Grace was certainly no military soldier. He hadn’t even taken the initiative to ask what she wanted him to do, and she had to take the lead and tell him instead. Grace never even asked why a molecular biologist such as himself had been chosen for this instead of any number of NASA cosmachemists or astrobiologists, let alone one that had been all but discredited from his specialty. She would expect this deference from military personnel who were drilled to be doers and not thinkers— but a scientist? Perhaps her assumption that he was inquisitive and driven to such a degree that he trusted her direction in light of the opportunity she presented him was instead indifference to the situation entirely.
“Dr Grace,” she called out to him, intending to ask if he had any questions for her before thinking better of it, “good luck.”
Grace looked back at her and grinned a wide toothy smile, glasses tilted at an angle on his face, and set his shoulders back, making a barely audible chuffing sound through his nose before grabbing the nearest yellow hazmat suite.
A week later, it was the 23rd and Grace was standing in his lab about to unseal the specimen responsible for earth’s first contact with extraterrestrial life. It was housed in a cylindrical metal container, and all things considered it was underwhelming to look at. This is the container that will become the best and worst thing to ever happen to him. This is the point where his life changes irrevocably: he becomes the leading specialist on a world-ending single cell organism.
He wonders for a moment if he could live with himself if he were to botch this and pretend all his research is inconclusive. Act like he’s so incapable that in a world-class lab he’s unable to do something so simple as ‘poke it with a stick’. Who would become this timeline’s leading expert? Dr Lokken? He cringed, imagining how smug she would be to have proved him wrong.
To his left outside the containment unit Stratt watched with a multi-national entourage of important figureheads, all standing in an observation room watching intently as Grace opened all 7 latches on the specimen container in slow succession. Its hissed open as it depressurised to the slight change in atmospheric pressure and revealed the small clear bubble containing a small spot of black dots, barely detectable to the human eye if not for how many were clustered together.
“No radiation detected” Stratt said through the intercom.
He ignored her, figuring this was said for the benefit of their audience more than Dr Ryland ‘Guineapig’ Grace, and moved over to his workstation to get to work. He ran through his initial testing, noting down his findings rather than speaking aloud and the onlookers followed his every movement as if they could blink and miss his grand discovery and confirmation of alien life. He found this not only ridiculous, but an obvious sign that either they had never seen a researcher work before or were miraculously patient and didn’t mind that scientific process took time.
Any self-respecting scientist wouldn’t confirm anything with this degree of importance without double and triple checking results were reproducible. Then again, did you need to reproduce seeing the recognisable structure of a cell? With the top-of-the-line microscopes all fitted with live feed cameras, probably not, which is likely why he’d had an easy time of it last go around: all those 37 different camera angles Stratt had mention come in handy. God, why did he have to remember the amount of camera angles and not, like, what day she showed up. That’s bull-puckey.
He was loading up a new slide and caught a glimpse of the impatience of some of the representatives behind Stratt and groaned to himself.
“Good or fast?” Grace spoke into the comms, keeping his eyes on the microscope while he spoke to make a point about his efficiency not being the problem here.
Stratt leaned in to speak directly “What do you mean? Have you discovered anything? Is it alive?”
“Want good results? reproductable. correct. Slow.” Grace looked up from his slide, pointedly raising an eyebrow in her direction, and emphatically waved his hands at his work. “Or want fast? unreliable. Question.”
There seemed to be some bickering between the representatives and Stratt, before Stratt turned back to the mic, “Both.”
Grace made a low grumbling sound in his chest, harshly clicking his tongue in the back of his throat in annoyance before electing to ignore the ridiculous answer. Knowing his comms were permanently on and that they would hear him, he muttered beneath his breath “Ask A or B and get C. Bunch of pebbles.”
“Have you discovered anything, Dr Grace?” Stratt pushes, ignoring his nonsensical comment, and Grace glances back to notice the restlessness in the room behind her as uniformed officials start bickering amongst themselves, all stiff upper lips, slanted eyebrows and hands waving about.
“Yes.” He admits, crossing his own arms and leaning against the counter besides him.
“Are they alive?”
“Need more time.” He responds, knowing that concluding that Astrophage was Astrophage would not only be suspicious, but an impossible conclusion to draw with anything less than guesswork and irresponsible scientific process. At the sound of this, most of the room behind Stratt starts to file out over the next hour. Pretty soon after that it was past sunrise and he’d been working for the last 8 or so hrs straight retracing his steps on every test he could think to run.
He stepped out of the containment unit through decontamination, ignoring Stratt calling him back over the intercom and made a beeline for the toilet out in the hallway. On his way back to the main room, he stopped off at the snack table near the main doors (He’d insisted it was necessary while he worked, remembering the weeks of snack-less torture the last time around) and sat down with a coffee and a breakfast bar, closing his eyes and slumping in his chair as he savoured the small respite.
Grace could hear the sharp click-clack of Stratt’s shoes against the linoleum flooring, echoing down the hall as she approaches from the observation room exit with a short urgent gate. He remembered she had very little patience for giving her undivided attention anywhere that she wasn’t actively involved in, no doubt tortured more by her own inaction than in the lack of confirmation from Grace. He could also imagine the only thing worse than being inactive and waiting on someone else to finish their work, was knowing that person wasn’t doing their work at all, even when taking a break is normal for anyone who isn’t Eva ‘Workaholic’ Stratt.
“What are you doing? We’re not done. You need to confirm if the dots are alive or not.”
“Yes.” Grace conceded, inclining his head and stilling his body as she observed him. His hair was stuck to his forehead from uninterrupted hours spend in the hazmat suit and the tiredness had him slumped in his seat out of sheer relief to not be standing anymore. Stratt had also noticed that where she expected hesitancy or shaking from the strain of such a workload, his body language was still and controlled. This was not the posture of someone throwing in the towel, but Stratt knew better than to think his work ethic was as harsh as hers.
“Then get back in there. You don’t get to go home until you can tell me if those dots are alive.”
“I will.” He agreed, taking a long sip of coffee, and humming in affirmation, “Not finished.”
Stratt relaxed slightly, turning to grab herself a cup of coffee and sat next to him, mulling over his commitment. Perhaps she misread him.
Grace’s file suggested a volatile wreck— a man of impulse and little resolve. A man who was as brilliant as he was avoidant of challenge. Someone who had potential but no drive to reach it. She had recruited him wanting to drive him to that excellence; offer him funding, a lab, the chance to reinstate his name and become the molecular astrobiologist. That was the opportunity that was being offered here: to be the first and by default the authority on non-theoretical extraterrestrial life.
But in front of her was a man who was resolute and deferential. He is both driven and aimless, and that is something she doesn’t know how to work with. She can steer him, yes, but she can’t understand him as he is now. What is possibly driving this? It could be curiosity as it is with most scientists, but he’s barely spoken to her or asked any questions, and when he does, he seems to have forgotten how to speak.
She’d noticed the frustration in his brows mixed by the anxious tightness surrounding his eyes— all his micro expressions indicate that this is a man struggling to communicate his thoughts. Working internationally, she had seen similar expressions in political figures communicating across boarders in languages unfamiliar to them. The only difference was that Grace was an American citizen struggling to speak English.
Based on his file, American English is his primary and only language, and yet here he is. The only explanations are grim, but possible: brain damage that has attacked the speech centre of the brain, or that his file is simply incorrect. She’d initial thought the man was autistic or a shut-in before she’d shot that idea down. His medical record has nothing in the way of an explanation and his employment record has no evidence of any problems with speech. Dr Ryland Grace is an enigma and a valuable one at that, and despite the obvious flaw in that he seems to be communicationally challenged, Stratt can’t even entertain the idea of letting him go. Not when his skillset is so unique.
“Is hard, yes, but need,” Grace downed the rest of his drink, taking off his glasses to polish them with the edge of his shirt before returning them to his nose, “If nothing found, will end… 2 days. Then sleep.”
“2 days?” Stratt squinted her eyes at him uncomprehendingly, for once at a loss of words faced with such a ridiculous statement.
“Uh…” He backtracked, looking caught off guard as he started finger counting right in front of her, “10 hours. Mean 10 hours.”
Stratt scoffed and Grace found himself laughing, clutching his chest, “you thought—"
“You said.” Stratt countered.
Grace laughed more openly, and Stratt couldn’t help but break out into a small barely noticeable smile at the absurdity of it all. Grace noticed it and deigned to ignore it. Moments that made Stratt smile were precious, and he felt for the first time like this go-around might actually be enjoyable.