Chapter Text
"Hi Grace!" Rocky chirped from his ball. "Surprise!"
Grace stared at him as if he saw a ghost, holding the door open and crouching at a weird angle.
"You're in a ball." He spoke, bewildered, then looked at Eva, who was folding up their blanket to prepare for moving the sleeping area back into the Hail Mary. "He's in a ball."
"So Rocky no die in Grace Eva atmosphere." Rocky explained. "I come up!"
Grace moved to the side as Rocky forced his way in, his face still the embodiment of shock.
"Foreign body detected." said the voice of the Hail Mary computer.
"Did you know about this?" He asked, his eyes glued to Eva.
"Of course." Eva confirmed. "I'm the Director. I know everything."
A loud crash followed, as Rocky's ball knocked over a drawer.
"I keep going this way!" He chirped excitedly.
"You should follow him." Eva advised. "Show him around, make sure he doesn't damage anything important."
Grace took a step towards her, as if to protest, but, upon hearing another crash, resigned and bolted towards their friend.
"Rocky!" He yelled.
"This room boring." Eva could hear him chirp from the so called "don't go crazy" room, and let out an amused laugh.
Slowly, she took the pillows and blankets back into the dormitory, where she placed them on Grace's bed. It was a strange perspective, to move back to that room where she had first awakened from her coma. It seemed… sterile, somehow. Void of the companionship she, Grace and Rocky had established in the tunnel. No warm wall to lean against. Clinical lights that reminded her of a hospital, instead of the warm glow of the ones Grace brought into tunnel when they first settled there. She wondered if Grace will still cuddle her here, or if he will prefer to sleep in his own bed. Rocky will probably pester him, so after a while he might. Still, even the thought of spending the night alone in her bed without his arms holding onto her, made her nauseous.
Suddenly, Eva heard a loud crash. Louder than before. And closer.
"Oh fiddlesticks-" she heard Grace say, his voice mortified.
"Apology, apology! Rocky new to ball."
A loud noise came from the lab, as if a glass object had shattered.
"No, no, no! Don't step on it- oh, you're stepping on it- "
This did not bode well, for sure. Slowly, Eva stood up and made her way into the lab. Hopefully none of the high-tech equipment was broken. She spent way too much time negotiating the price of each of those objects with stingy politicians who lived under the impression that they would be magically immune to an extinction event.
"What's going on?" She asked, frowning at the gray cabinet which now laid flat on the floor of the lab. "Did anything expensive break?"
Grace looked at her like a child caught red handed. Rocky did not look at her at all, given his lack of a face, but his carapace was tilted inwards and away from her, like a guilty dog.
"Uh… no equipment was harmed. That's the cabinet with our stuff. Like, our personal stuff." Grace explained. Eva frowned as she moved closer.
"I heard glass breaking, what could possibly-" She stopped. There was a broken piece of porcelain right by Rocky's ball. A piece of porcelain, and a purple bead. A purple bead she could recognize in her deepest slumber. Bile rose in her throat, and she wordlessly made her way towards Rocky's ball, to assess the full scale of the damage.
Right there, on the floor of the ship, lay the shattered porcelain box containing her favorite rosary, and the rosary itself, with four beads crushed under 170 kg of alien xenonite ball.
Her hands shook as she collected its remains from the ground.
"Eva, I-" Grace started, but she did not give him the chance to finish, as she silently made her way out of the lab, biting on her bottom lip to stop it from quivering.
Eight year old Eva Stratt bit through her lip in German class. She knew Ms Richter had it out for her, so this wasn't a surprise. The diagnosis on the paper, which Ms. Richter was now so carelessly waving around, came with its consequences, and from the moment her father had brought the Dutch child psychologist into their home to observe her, she understood what they will be.
Still, it was hard to stand being ridiculed in front of twenty six other students, when Eva could not defend herself in any meaningful way.
"Elective mutism." Ms Richter read from the sheet of paper. "Stratt's western father believes that choosing to be mute, like an imbecile, makes her special. That Stratt should be excused from answering questions in class, just because she prefers not to speak in front of us."
The taste of iron filled her mouth. Everyone was staring at her.
"How many of you have seen Stratt sing in the church choir?" Ms Richter asked, and each of the seven children from her parish raised their hands up. It was fine. They weren't Eva's friends. None of the twenty six children giving her hateful looks, were her friends. "If Stratt can choose to use her voice there, she should use it to answer questions in school too, no?"
That's not how it works! Eva wanted to scream, but her body, predictably, would not allow her. Instead, she swallowed the warm blood, before it could drip out of her mouth and stain her open notebook.
"The fact that a girl who can't even speak, has the best grades among all of you, shows me just how pathetic you all are!" Ms Richter yelled. "If Stratt prefers to stay mute, at least give her proof that she is no better than anyone here. Maybe then she will start acting normal."
Eva's torn lip refused to stop bleeding until she got home, where she tearfully announced that she will never go back to school again. She did not have to tell her parents that her first day at school with a formal diagnosis, went badly. They knew. They also knew there was nothing they could possibly do about it. Moving schools was not an option, and Ms Richter had enough connections to the Stasi, to make her practically untouchable by angry parents.
"You don't have to go back to school tomorrow, liebling." Her mother told her at bedtime, after she had put her favorite boar bristle hairbrush away. "We won't force you. Papa will take you out for ice cream before work, if you want. It will be good for your lip."
And, because she was eight years old and didn't know any better, Eva agreed.
Sitting in the front passenger's seat in her father's car, was not something she did often. Like most children in her town, she mainly used the tram or bus to get places. The leather seats of Christophe Stratt's Ford smelled like her own piece of heaven, safety, and novelty all at the same time, especially with the strawberry ice cream in hand. What she liked most about the car, though, was the way the glass beads of the purple rosary, wrapped around the rear view mirror, reflected sunlight onto the white interior.
"Are you enjoying your ice cream, schatje?" Her father asked, as he drove. Eva nodded enthusiastically, still mesmerized by the purple rosary.
"Het is heerlijk." She told him, knowing how much it pleased him to hear her speak Dutch. She didn't notice that her father was driving in the opposite direction to his office, too mesmerized by the shiny purple beads of the rosary, until he finally stopped the car, and she realized they were parked right by her school.
"This… may seem like me betraying you, Eva." Christophe Stratt spoke, his voice calm, but his eyes full of sorrow. "But it's actually me believing in you."
Eva refused to meet his gaze. Her hands tightened around the now empty ice cream cone, making little crescent-shaped marks appear on the soft surface from the pressure of her nails.
"I don't want to force you to go, schatje." He explained. "But I want you to be brave when you grow up. Because you'll have to make difficult choices one day, like all of us, and when that happens, I want you to make the right ones. So… I am giving you this opportunity to practice being brave now, when you're little."
Eva didn't want to be brave. She wanted to never see Ms Richter again, and forget the hateful faces of all twenty six of her classmates.
"I love you so much-" Her father's voice quivered. "I love you so much, Eva. Mama loves you so much, too." Ah, so her mother knew. Did her parents plan this deception together? "You don't see it now, but we wouldn't put you in this situation, if we didn't know that you can go through it, and that it will give you strength."
Eva's eyes remained fixed on the rosary, as tears streamed silently down her face. When she willingly stood up, took her school bag from the trunk of the Ford, and headed towards the school entrance, feeling nothing but dread, she didn't know her father broke down sobbing. Only eight years later, during her confirmation, will he reveal to her that he never went to work that day, and instead, drove up to the Polish border to bring Eva's two cousins to her, to surround her with people who loved her.
"I will never forget how you looked at that rosary for courage." He would tell her, as he pressed the very same rosary into her palm.
She didn't have the heart to correct him that she was looking at it back then, because she thought the purple beads were pretty.
Grace found her in the "don't go crazy" room, with her knees pressed against her chest, staring at the recording of the inside of the church.
"Rocky is fixing your box." He said, his voice unnervingly gentle, as he sat down next to her. "For what it's worth, he's also really sorry about breaking your rosary."
Eva couldn't look at him, her eyes fixed on the people sitting in the pews in silent prayer, her fingers caressing the broken purple beads. When she first commissioned the video, she did not expect her cousins to take initiative, and somehow convince the crew to record the inside of her church. Or for them to join the recording, with their husbands and children, in a silent farewell. They must have sat in there for hours, just to give her a proper goodbye. It felt like watching her own funeral.
Her soulmate cleared his throat, making her flinch.
"That big Jesus on the wall is really nice. Love how… medieval it- I mean- he, looks. Really cool-"
"Doctor Grace." She tore her eyes away from the screen. "Please stop speaking. I don't allow myself a lot of purely selfish moments, please let me have this."
Grace settled into a very awkward, uncomfortable silence. His fingers were drumming against the floor, and his shoes were squeaking as he shifted his weight form leg to leg, effectively pulling Eva out of any attempt at productive thought.
She sighed.
You win, Ryland.
"Okay. Ask." Eva broke the horrible silence. Grace blinked.
"Pardon?"
"Ask." She repeated, immediately regretting her harsh tone. "You want to ask me something, and you are being very annoying about it. I'm upset, so I don't have the patience for that. By all means, ask away."
Grace hesitated.
"Are you… okay?"
"No." Came the obvious answer. "I don't typically permit myself to be sentimental, but I got this rosary from my father for my confirmation, and it's the only object I still own, that connects me to my late parents. So I am very much not okay."
Grace looked absolutely mortified, as if he had stepped on a hive of wasps, his hand hovering awkwardly in the air, like he could not decide whether it was appropriate to embrace her or not. Eva didn't blame him for his reaction. She never allowed herself to be truly vulnerable around him, and she could guess he probably did not remember much of what she told him about her life prior to the Petrova Taskforce, which was still not a lot.
"Is there anything else you wanted to know?" She asked, after a few more awkward seconds of silence.
"I…" he swallowed, and Eva felt his arm finally settling down on her shoulder, as if to give her both space, and companionship at the same time. "On the box, there was something written in a language that didn't look very German-"
"It was written in Polish." She calmly interrupted his train of thought, her voice slightly softer now. Grace seemed to relax at the change of tone, and gave her a small smile, which warmed her heart.
"How many languages do you know, exactly?" He asked.
"Twelve." Well, fourteen counting Latin and Esperanto.
Grace's eyes widened again, and his grip on her arm tightened.
"Wha- that's insane!"
"Not really." Eva felt herself relax even more, and let her head rest on his shoulder. "I know German from my mother, Dutch from my father, Polish from my cousins… and the rest is from all the language tutors my parents hired, to keep me socially stimulated as a child." And Latin and Esperanto as a personal curiosity during university.
"Holy moly!" Grace beamed. "You must have been a child prodigy- oh my God!"
Eva let out a soft chuckle.
"I had selective mutism in 1980's East Germany, that typically disqualified a person from being treated like any kind of prodigy."
She could feel Grace's arms pulling her in closer.
"In one of my foster homes, I shared a room with a guy who had selective mutism." He confessed. "He was cool. Kept stealing my candy, but he was nice, and he taught me how to play poker."
This was… new. Grace rarely talked about his childhood, though she knew he suspected that she was at least partially aware that he was in foster care from birth, until he eventually aged out. And she was- she had a whole file on that. But it felt good, somehow, to hear about it form him directly, especially when he was giving her such vulnerable information in an attempt to comfort her.
"I'm glad you had a friend." She murmured, and Grace tensed up slightly, but made no attempt to move away.
"Ah- n-no, I don't think he considered us friends, you know?" He explained. "We only knew each other for a few months, before I was moved to a group home, so it's not like… I mean, we didn't really… I don't really think I had proper friends until university."
Well, that makes two of us.
"You have proper friends now." Eva assured him. "You were well-liked on the Vat. And you made friends with an alien, which is quite an achievement."
"Hey, Rocky was easy to make friends with. You're the real achievement. And honor." He chuckled, then buried his face in her hair, and inhaled. "Eva, there's something I've been meaning to-"
The sound of a small claw tapping against xenonite, interrupted him. Thank God for that, Eva thought, as whatever Grace needed to tell her, would probably ruin the moment, and she was not yet prepared to end this.
"Speak of the devil." Grace muttered against her hair, but thankfully didn't pull away. "Come on in, buddy!"
When Rocky rolled into the room in his ball, he looked like the epitome of guilt. His carapace was hanging low, arms shrinking themselves inwards, as if he was trying to make himself smaller. It took a while to get him to stop apologizing, and Eva had to assure him at least six times that she was not angry, just sad, that human cuddles helped, and that the fixed box he gave her, was beautiful.
"It reminds me of kintsugi." She told him. "It's a human art form, where you repair broken pottery with gold."
"Eva like box repair texture, question?" Rocky asked, excitement bleeding into his chirps. "Rocky can fix broken beads, too, if Eva want. Or make new beads. Eva want new beads, question?"
"Hey, pal, slow down, don't overwhelm her." Grace warned, tightening his grip on her protectively. It felt so nice to be taken care of like this. Having two people- or, well, one person, and one alien- jumping around her, trying to guarantee her comfort, was not a bad change at all.
"Replacing the beads isn't such a bad idea." Eva said. She would miss the purple glass, but she would live if four out of fifty nine beads looked slightly different. "You can choose your favorite texture, if you want. Surprise me."
Rocky squealed in excitement.
"Yes, yes! Surprise Eva! Rocky give Eva best beads while Grace bring things from tunnel in ship!"
"Wait, what? When did I volunteer for that?" Grace asked, and for a second, Eva wasn't sure if he was being genuine in his bewilderment, or not.
"Grace no need volunteer. Rocky volunteer Grace." Rocky announced.
"Hey, I don't answer to you, buddy, my boss is sitting right here." Grace squeezed Eva's shoulder again. "If you want to volunteer me for something, you gotta get her approval first. And if you want her approval, you need to schedule a meeting. And she's very busy, so you need to ask her head scientist to put it in her calendar."
Rocky let out a high-pitched laugh, and Eva felt herself smile at the sound.
"Grace put Rocky meeting request in Eva calendar, question?"
"Let me think about it…" He paused for dramatic effect. "…Request for meeting, denied!"
Rocky let out a loud chirp in mock annoyance
"On what grounds, question!?"
"On the grounds of Director Eva Stratt being sad because of us, so we shouldn't bother her with meetings until she feels better."
If Eva had much choice, she would stay in the moment, letting them continue their little banter over her, enjoying the touch of her soulmate and the sight of her family onscreen. But, as the rosary in her hand reminded her, she had to make the right choice. And that was to pull away from Grace's soft embrace, get up, and turn the video of her church off.
"We should get to work." She explained to Grace, as gently as she could. "The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get the samples."
The look of disappointment he gave her, followed her all the way to the tunnel.
Late nights in Stratt's office were Ryland's favorite. She seemed less guarded then, somehow. Softer. Still focused on her work, but less dictator-y, and more like an actual real human person. Maybe it was because in the evenings, she had fewer calls with annoying people, and was mostly focused on arranging schedules and responding to emails. Either way, Ryland liked late-night Stratt. Times like these were when he most longed to tell her about their soulbond, while simultaneously being most afraid of her reaction. These moments were precious. He didn't want to ruin them.
"Hey, why do I have a bunch of centrifuge stuff on my schedule next week? Isn't that Lokken's job?" He asked her, from his new favorite place on her couch. Stratt didn't even spare him a glance, and kept writing something on her tablet, the cold blue light making her uncovered soulmark look silver.
"Doctor Lokken won't be here next week, so I will have you take over some of her responsibilities, so we don't fall behind." She explained calmly.
Ryland first blinked in confusion, then gently caressed his matching soulmark.
"Why won't Lokken be here? You don't typically give people more than eight hours off, much less a week."
Stratt lowered her tablet. There was something oddly gentle in her eyes, more so than usually, even at night.
"Her mother in law passed away. I got the call from the hospital in Geneva at noon."
Oh, fudge. There will definitely not be a soulmate double date with the Lokkens now. It would be weird to tell her under these circumstances.
"Wait, the hospital called you, not the daughter of the dead lady?"
"It's in the safety protocol, Doctor Grace. I can't have hospitals contacting my scientists and distracting them."
"So you decide what information is worth passing down?"
"Exactly."
Welcome back, dictator Stratt. It was lovely to have a normal soulmate for approximately three seconds.
Ryland closed his own schedule for the week, and opened hers- just out of curiosity. Immediately, his screen was assaulted with a bunch of colorful boxes representing meetings and things to do, most scheduled on top of one another. Stratt liked her calendar to be color coded, with different countries and languages being represented by different colors. Three black ones stood out, though.
"What are 'storage unit keys' and 'moving company arrange' doing on your calendar?" He asked, suspicious. "Are you kidnapping more people? Please don't hold anyone hostage in a storage unit-"
"It's for Doctor Lokken and Mrs. Lokken." Stratt interrupted him, and he could sense a hint of amusement in her voice. "Speaking from personal experience, packing up a loved one's living space after they passed, is one of the hardest, most time consuming parts of grief. A week is the maximum I can give them, so I rented a moving company to help them do that, as well as a storage unit, so they don't bring any distracting sentimental objects here."
Personal experience. Oh.
He never really thought about her having a family before, or what her childhood looked like. How old was she when she was left packing up someone's home? Did she love that person? Did she cry? Ryland tried to imagine Stratt packing up an apartment, color coding everything and sorting it into boxes of different size based on efficiency. She didn't seem like the type of person to be overly emotional, even at a funeral.
"My parents." He heard Stratt explain, and he realized that he must have zoned out while staring at her, which she must have interpreted as curiosity on his part. "I was nineteen, they died in a car crash."
Her voice was as neutral, as if she was talking about the weather, and not sharing deeply personal information. And Ryland had absolutely no clue what to do with this kind of personal information about her. Should he change the topic? Tell her how sorry he is for her? Offer some vulnerable information about himself, which she no doubt would already know, given her great internet stalking abilities? Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead as he contemplated his options, until Stratt made the choice for him.
"Get back to work, Doctor Grace. Your time will be better spent arranging Doctor Komorov's schedule for next week, than staring at me." She then looked at the clock on the wall. "Or alternatively, you can go back to your room and go to bed."
Ryland blinked. Was she… giving him an out? Without straight up dismissing him? What has gotten into this woman? Either way, he would not take the bait, as her couch was certainly more comfortable and sated his stupid soulbond hormones more, than his makeshift floor bed. And on the couch, he had a clear view of his soulmate's pretty red hair and blue eyes.
"Nah, I'm good." He gave her a thumbs up, to reiterate his point. "You have an early meeting in three hours anyways, I'll arrange Dimitri's schedule."
A hint of softness flashed in Stratt's eyes, before she turned her eyes back onto her tablet.
"Suit yourself."