Chapter Text
"Your classification?"
The painted nails of the woman in front of him pause where they're cataloguing every aspect of his life into the Petrova Taskforce's medical records. Grace gets a good look at them as they still on the laptop, tracing the gold stars and blue swirls with his eyes. The nurse has a theme going—a space shuttle charm hangs from her necklace and he can spot her NASA socks peaking out from her plain work shoes. It's a little peak at her life outside of this; humanity's line of defense against Astrophage is a crew of normal people with patterned socks and laptop stickers that say 'not flat - we checked!'
It's a little hard to picture Eva Stratt doing anything else but standing between Grace and the small room's door. She's trapping him in what must have once been an office, forcing his interrogation under obnoxious fluorescent lights.
Interrogation is a strong word. This is nothing more than a job interview he was volun-told into attending; they're just doing an intake so they feel a little more confident about Grace's first contact with alien life.
Alien life that they've tasked a dang middle school teacher at identifying.
"Neutral," he lies, smooth and easy and rehearsed hundreds of times before.
An overly qualified middle school teacher who has the confidence and audacity to lie to the governments of the world—one small step for man, one giant leap for Grover Cleveland Middle.
Grace doesn't know when the lie about his biology began. He's been lying for so long that if it weren't for the constant upkeep of his act, he might believe it too.
It might have been when his college dorm-mate, a bio-engineering student who volunteered at the campus' medical center, had offered to spoof his paperwork for him. The Little had done it for himself and dozens of others who had dodged the system already—it was no big deal and Grace didn't have to pay a dime. The promise of hope for an easier future was enough to feel free then, so college-aged Grace had agreed to an alternative classification without a second thought.
Ryland Grace, Ph.D., aged 32 and declared Neutral in the beautiful, golden state of California.
The rest after that had been easy—a government ID with an N meant life went swimmingly. There weren't any doubts about his capabilities academically and he wasn't talked down to when he signed the lease for his first apartment. The drugs help a ton, too—even though he's on enough regression suppressing drugs to take out a Little from the Victorian ages. The pills and patches are in the legal gray zone, with no true consequences for tampering with over-the-counter options as long as you weren't dealing or poisoning others. Implants were a different story, but sourcing those is too much of a pain to outweigh the cost of the other options. Grace led a good life, albeit a medicated one.
Grace had a doctorate in molecular biology—he knew better than anyone that biology could be hacked. If the teacher spent the socially accepted duration of his life regressed, he wouldn't have gotten his doctorate. He'd tried the Caregiver thing—to which some poor soul learned that he is a very annoying, emotionally dysregulated Little—and it only served as a reason to focus on his research. He was a man getting a PhD and could babysit himself, thank you very much. Finding a better way to deal with the problem isn't a lie—it's adaptation, survival of the fittest.
He isn't stupid with it like he was with his… liberal use of Adderall in grad school. He puts a patch on every twelve hours and takes a 20mg pill once a day to keep his regression at bay, always perfectly timed to be disguised as a bathroom break. On alternating Saturdays, Grace tapers his dosage down so he can skip it on Sunday and get a drop in after thoroughly regression-proofing his apartment (read: making sure he was signed out of his Amazon account and stocking up on microwave meals). Pairing the round with a small dose of a hormone disperser to counteract any withdrawal symptoms means Grace is on top of it. The routine keeps his health stable and prevents all the drop disorders he sees on pamphlets at the doctor's office.
As a dodger, he is perfectly, unconventionally functional—even if that kinda-sorta makes him sound like an addict in denial. Whatever, addicts don't become published researchers.
"Well then," the woman's cheerful voice snaps Grace back from his internal spiral. "That makes things easier, doesn't it?"
Eva makes a noncommittal noise noise behind him, and the doctor swears he can feel her eyes burning holes into the back of his shirt. They've only been in each other's lives for a short while, but it seems that Stratt has spent most of it studying Grace like he's the most interesting bug she's ever seen. Grace figures that she could make a nature documentary out of her observations by now: 'one human Ryland Grace hesitates before offering his classification—does this offer insight to his true self, or is it perhaps the nervous nature of Homo sapiens as a whole?'
"Is there anything else you need before we start?" The director asks dryly.
'Dr. Grace fiddles with his backpack's strap for the third time in two minutes, hinting at something inside. Human beings are fond of carrying objects with them, with the earliest surviving evidence being a backpack made of a U-shaped hazel rod, two narrow wooden boards, and presumably a net to attach, discovered in 1991 and dated to the Copper Age. Next time on BBC Earth—'
"—Doctor Grace? I need to know if you have any allergies," the woman in front of him tucks a dark curl behind her ear, revealing a little star earring that matches the rest of her outfit.
Grace's hand, once again picking at the seam of his bag strap, retreats to rub at his nose, "Sorry—just ibuprofen."
"And what happens if you take it?"
"My throat swells up," Grace replies like he has at every doctor's appointment over the course of his entire life. "I haven't had any since I was like six, but I'd rather not test it, y'know?"
It's a lighthearted joke Grace makes every time he does this and it never earns a laugh. He doesn't know why he still says it.
"No other medications?" She types and talks at the same time—this is just as routine for her as it is for him.
The script continues, "I don't react well to opioids—Oxycontin, hydrocodone, the works; my blood pressure tanks."
If there's one thing Grace has learned since he was a kid sneaking around his strict Grandmother, it's that all good lies are packaged with a bit of truth. He was allergic to ibuprofen, but his intolerance to opioids was manufactured by the obscene amount of suppressants in his body—the two were not to mix, ever. The fib kept them from learning about the scientist's dodged classification and prevented him from having a seizure after getting stuck with a syringe full of inducer or suppressant.
The nurse nods and her nails click satisfyingly on the keys as she adds it to the list, "How'd you figure that out?"
"Someone hit my bike when I was in college," Grace starts and drums his fingers on his leg. "Broke my arm in two places, they gave me morphine at the hospital, and y'know."
He's saying y'know a lot. That's probably suspicious.
A hand gestures down at his body to say 'it wasn't a fun time' without words. She understands and laughs a little—Stratt gives him nothing and might as well not be in the room for his dramatics—before closing her laptop.
"He's all set then," she spins around in her chair to face the pair, tossing a business card at Grace. "There's some lockers by the decontamination area—pick any of 'em that aren't used. Call me if you need anything. And oh—break a leg, doctor."
Stratt ushers her newly recruited scientist and his bag before he can thank the nurse. He's interacted with more people in the last six hours than he has in years (if you don't count awkward conversations with parents at the science fair, that is). They're bound to cross paths again at some point in all of this, he's sure.
It isn't until the director has led him through several hallways and into a decontamination area that looks straight out of Cloverfield that the biologist realizes he never caught the nurse's name.
"Are you sure all of this is necessary?" Grace's voice is muffled by the inflated hazmat suit separating him from the sterile lab. It's big and awkward, and he feels a little like one of those characters his students draw on the whiteboard during free time. His voice fogs the vinyl window around his face and Christ alive, this thing is going to get extremely uncomfortable once he's been in it for more than an hour.
"You'll be fine," Stratt says confidently.
Grace bites back some sarcastic comment along the lines of 'that's easy for you to say,' as to not have his first step back into the scientific community to be just as humiliating as his last.
Stratt and her pack of what Grace assumes are international diplomats stand in a viewing room, several barriers between them and humanity's first contact with alien life. He's keenly aware of the amount of eyes watching him—and what's probably hundreds more if the cameras recording his every move are anything to go by—and looks around at the lab.
The lab is a grad student's wet dream; the equipment in the cleanroom has at least a quarter of a million dollars worth of instruments that Grace is sure have never been used.
And there, in the middle of it all, stands a metal cart holding the biggest discovery since humans got the first crystallographic image of the double helix.
The container has fourteen latches on it, all requiring most of Grace's forearm strength to pull open. The system to keep the cylinder closed has his hindbrain expecting some kind of evil tentacle when he finally cracks the thing open. Instead, Grace is met with an empty sphere—no thrilling music plays, and no movie monster mounts his face. Astrophage, it seems, is just as natural as he is.
"You may begin," a Dutch accent sounds out from the intercom.
He responds with a little thumbs up, grabs the sphere, and gets to work.
It turns out that Astrophage, naturally, is as stubborn as Grace is.
Two whole days of experiments with him working in 12 hour shifts and he made almost no progress. X-Rays, gamma rays—nothing gets through the little buggers! He's more confident in what Astrophage is not than he'd be at referencing the dichotomous key on the wall of his classroom with the stuff.
Half the officials around Stratt are either napping or typing away at laptops as he works as the director's guinea pig. He gets it—the excitement of it all wore off pretty quickly for him too. Grace spots one of them with a French copy of The Odyssey and he really can't blame the man for wanting something more entertaining.
He gets breaks, but those are prioritized for basic nutrition, hydration, and bathroom runs. Between the chaos of writing down everything he's doing, answering to Stratt, and trying to get enough calories in his body, he ends up doubling the amount of patches on his torso. There's just not enough time to sneak off to the bathroom to replace the suppressants; he shifts the self-imposed medication schedule by nearly six hours to make time for it all. That means waking up in the middle of the night so he doesn't miss a dose—Grace's sleep quality is at an all time low.
His saving grace is that the tiny room (also a converted office) they gave him to sleep in had a proper air mattress instead of a cot. It's private and the door has no windows and locks from the inside. Ryland assumes he's getting this luxury treatment because they need him alert to overwork, but the scientist is just grateful that no one can walk in and see him sleeping with a stuffed Goose and a thumb in his mouth.
It's just enough to be rested and fed enough to do his job. Grace just has to silence the Little part of him that yearns for the backpack, now sitting in the lockers, and its contents.
Stratt remaining attentive is the only thing stopping Grace from tearing the hazmat suit's Teflon barrier and letting argon slowly suffocate him. She's always looking at him like that, like her appointed scientist is a case she can't seem to crack.
She mainly asks questions that he doesn't know the answer to. It's enough to drive anyone insane, really, but it's better than silence. They turned down his request for earbuds.
"How do they reproduce?"
'When one space dot loves another space dot very much,' is the blond's best guess.
"Why did they go to Venus?"
He doesn't know that either.
"Are they alive?"
Grace, after days of working through almost all the equipment in the lab, has enough. He takes a nanosyringe and stabs his control Astrophage in the face. He hopes it hurts.
The observation room is silent on the radio as Stratt watches his every move with rapt attention. He gives her a side glance before he looks into the ocular lens and she's clearly on the edge of her seat; Stratt's brow is furrowed as she leans closely to the glass.
Blue eyes stare at the magnified chamber slide and widen at what's before him. He pulls back and looks at the computer next to him—all illusions of another reality are sent completely out the window. This is real, this is first contact, and Grace feels like he's going to have a panic attack at the scale of it all. The patches on the nape of his neck itch as his mind races—literally anyone else more qualified should be looking at this right now. Bringing his hand to his head to scratch just results in his hand hitting the PPE with a quiet thud.
It's a cell.
A tiny, alien cell.
"Everybody wake up, it's a cell!"
The director startles awake everyone around her at the revelation. The radio channel explodes as dozens of questions in languages Grace can't understand come flooding in. Grace rocks on his heels anxiously and tries to convert some of the panicked energy into focus as he takes some of the Astrophage goop and loads it into the spectroscope.
"What's it made of?" Stratt's voice comes out clear above the talking in the background. She sounds almost excited as Grace feels about this—he wonders if she feels like throwing up a little too. The tone makes something prideful well in his chest. Maybe she was right to have faith in him—maybe his thesis was worth something after all.
"Well we're about to find out," Grace starts in the voice he uses when his students are all really hyped for an experiment. He hopes it isn't condescending and waits for the machine to let out a quiet beep. He reads off the display, "Carbon, nitrogen, hydro…"
He dully wonders if the pop his jaw lets out from the strength he strains it picks up on the microphone. Grace blinks at the screen like the thousand dollar LCD display is going to change, and he almost has the nerve to run it again.
"Doctor Grace?" The radio clicks on. "What happened?"
"The ratio of hydrogen to oxygen is two to one."
A beat and then, "Oh."
Yeah—oh.
Astrophage is made up almost entirely of water.
Every scientific paper that Grace has ever written is now proven to be wrong. There's no more theories or what-ifs—in front of him is the alien life that he spent years theorizing could be made of something beyond their comprehension.
And that life is made of water.
A laugh punches it's way out of him—he should have seen this coming. Astrophage maintains it's internal temperature at 96.415 degrees Celsius regardless of what is happening externally. That's classic water-based activity—it was likely absorbing excess heat from the Sun and using that internal energy to maintain homeostasis. The inverse probably produced the infrared frequency of the Petrova Line.
They toot to scoot, basically.
Grace wants to kick himself and stab the little microbe in front of him a few more times for good measure. He has been proven wrong in what be the most historically grand way possible.
His laugh becomes a strangled, choking sound. Grace probably sounds like he's going insane, worse than he did at the UNESCO conference, but he can't bring himself to care.
The itching crescendos, the stupid adhesive gel on his neck, shoulders, and arms not doing enough to cool his heating skin. His throat feels restricted and breathing becomes a minimal task as his brain fights blindly—frustration, desperately trying to find a way out of a dark tunnel that Grace has sealed the exit of. The familiar feeling of a drop trying to drag him down turns his agony into anger.
Rage is an emotion that Grace can afford to let escape, one that he can work with.
Grace grabs the closest thing to him—a yellow container with the CDC logo that thankfully has nothing in it—and throws it with a yell. It's as satisfying as it is childish.
Several more boxes and bins become victims of his wrath, all of which he puts back in their original place with a little more force than necessary. The last thing he wants to do is have the mess he left behind in a history book—'Doctor Ryland Grace, the first scientist to make contact with alien life who was not only made a massive fool of, but was an asshole to the minimum-wage janitors at the lab as well.'
The exhaustion slams into him like a drunk driver as several others in full PPE clean him off in the sanitation shower. The process is more thorough this time as a blur of people ask him questions about how he's feeling, if anything in the room changed from when he first stepped in it, or if he was having any symptoms. Grace feels sick from being burnt out, tired, and probably some kind of suppressant withdrawal, but he keeps that to himself. He's fine.
Grace just wants to go home.
It turns out that once the questioning is over, Ryland Grace is no longer the most important person in their cooling world. He slips away into the chaos of Stratt's staff packing up the lab, quickly making a beeline for the exit. There's only a few wrong turns before the blond gets spit out into a parking lot. His bicycle and helmet on the rack is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
He doesn't know how he manages to hold it together on the way to the bus, or the thirty minute bus ride, or the further ten minute long bike ride from the bus stop to his apartment. His eyes are stinging as he climbs the three flights of stairs because of course the building's elevator is out of service when Grace is already at his limit.
The cramping in his stomach and splitting headache get worse as he approaches home, but he just grits his teeth and bares it—just a little while longer, five more minutes, four, three, two.
The front door gets slammed a little too hard to be considerate to his neighbors, and Ryland is finally home. No disinfectant in his nose, no more people watching and taking notes, and no bright overhead lighting. Just the quiet hum of the radiator and the smell of vanilla fabric freshener. His beaten Converse are kicked off at the door with a content hum as he blissfully stops tensing his shoulders.
It's exactly how he left it. The yellow blanket is still on the couch, completely unaware of the chaos outside the painted green walls. Grace's matching yellow jacket gets tossed on top of it, adding to the mess that is his couch.
The call of the shower is stronger than the urge to wrap himself up in the fleece, so the man's mix matched socks carry him across the scuffed hardwood. It's like he's a puppet come alive, each limb not quite knowing how to work with the others yet.
Ryland stares at himself in the bathroom mirror and it's like he's watching himself through eyes that aren't his. He tilts his head, dissociated and exhausted, studying the heavy eye bags and clammy skin in front of him. The man in the mirror follows his movements exactly—three days of overdosing hadn't been kind to either of them.
He looks like complete crap; he wonders if this is what Eva Stratt sees. If this was the scientist he had to recruit, Ryland would study himself like a bug too.
Shaky hands crack open the medicine cabinet chase two dispersers with sink water. The bitter white tab wasn't enough to cause a drop, but it should be sufficient to curb the headache and stomachache. The taste always makes him gag—that being both the terrible San Francisco tap water and the chalky off-label pills.
He closes the cabinet, takes a pitiful glance at his reflection, and begins the timely process of taking off the patches. The little adhesive plasters greet him when he peels his shirt off and Grace grimaces at the red, irritated skin underneath each one.
It's two minutes in between removals and there are eight across his body. Reckless and stupid of him, but Grace has always told his students that if it's stupid and works, it isn't stupid.
It's routine and easy to grab his tweezers and pull each one off. He's done the exact movements with gloved hands for years—he follows the current of muscle memory until the task comes to a screeching halt when he goes to lay out a fresh patch before his shower.
The little caddy is empty. Grace and the metal container have a staring contest for a second as his brain connects the dots. There's nothing there—no patches and the empty pill bottle from before he left is at the bottom of the trash-bin next to the toilet.
Oh no.
His breath doesn't get a chance to pick up before he remembers there's a few extras in his bag. They're expertly hidden in a thermos in the middle compartment, nestled between his chewy necklace, plush, and laptop. Completely able to work as a backup before he got more—Grace is scheduled for a drop in a few days anyway, so he doesn't need a lot.
He blinks a little as he tries to remember if he put the blue bag on his bed or by the front door. Panic rises when the teacher realizes he can't remember if he even brought it home at all.
Ryland nearly slides into the couch as his socks skid into the main room. His eyes stare at the front door, taking note of his keys, jacket, shoes and—
He recounts everything again and again and again. Wanting really, really hard doesn't stop a panicked hiccup from rising from his chest, doesn't change what's in front of him.
The backpack, full of his things in all of their damning glory, is in his locker at the lab. The lab that they're currently tearing down. The only thing keeping him calm is that the bag has a lock—three digits and thousands of combinations stood between anyone opening it. This does nothing to soothe Ryland's increasingly fuzzy brain. Goose was locked in that bag—a thought that already sends the Little part of him spiraling on a bad day—and she was far away from home. It's dark in there and she's stuck next to the gross medicine where it's scary.
Grace fumbles for his phone and moves to the couch so fast he skids across the hardwood floor. With shaking fingers, he goes into his coat pocket and takes out the business card.
"It's gonna be okay," he whispers. Ryland repeats it over and over, petting his forearm up and down, up and down with the small piece of paper.
It takes more concentration than necessary to input the nurse's phone number into the messenger app. The blond crosses his fingers that he isn't texting an office phone as his terrible WiFi takes forever to send the message through. The quick text he sends about his missing things comes back blue, blessedly, and the woman begins typing a response almost immediately.
"It's gonna be okay," because there's no one else to say it to him.