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“Bah,” Ilyukhina scoffs, “Americans.”
Grace gapes at her.
“No sense of fun,” she continues. “You're so–”
“Staid,” Stratt offers, while walking past the group huddled over the mess table.
Ilyukhina howls. “Staid! You got called staid by Stratt.”
Grace’s lopsided grin is bookended by cheeks staining bright red. “There’s worse things to be,” he says. “Worse company.”
The others are too busy laughing at him to see the slight shift in Stratt’s shoulders as she continues out of earshot.
-
“Please,” O’Conner says, “she likes you best.”
“She does not.”
The other researchers all snort. One of them mumbles, “a river in Egypt–” and another mumbles back at them, “or just oblivious.”
“She’ll have all our heads if we don't finish this,” he snaps, for lack of anything better to say.
“Yes,” the omnipresent Stratt says from the lab doorway. “A novel idea to increase efficiency, Dr. Grace.”
Everyone snaps to it.
-
“Carl! Carl, carl, carl, caaaarl.”
“No.”
“But I didn't even say what–”
“Doesn't matter. No.”
“Please.”
Carl crosses his arms and looks down at their special consultant: xenomicrobiology, who is currently hopping from one foot to the other. “Your last request landed you in the infirmary for three days.”
“Yeah, but I got that issue with the sealant degrading figured out so really a net wash, all things considered.”
“Unfortunately, I agree,” says their administrator, walking past with three aides and an airman escort and files and coffee and responsibility.
Grace bounces on his feet and points at Carl. “See! I told you. Look, it's just a few hours in an anti-grav room, what could go wrong.”
“So many things,” says one of the aides, before being promptly swatted by a folder with top secret stamped over it.
“Don't die,” Stratt says, still having not broken her stride. “At this point, that would be an inconvenience.”
As soon as he thinks she's out of earshot, Grace leans in and stage whispers to Carl. “Did you hear?! I got a promotion! I’m an inconvenience!”
-
“Want some company?” Grace asks, coming up onto the deck.
“No.”
“Pity,” he says. Still, he doesn't cross over to her, just trots to the other side of the little observation deck. He leans out over the railing and exhales, sagging down against it. He doesn't stay still, even beyond the movement of clothing and hair tumbling about in the wind.
The sky is clear and the stars are brilliant. However astrophage moves from star to star is fast: the impact of the stars dimming is new enough to not yet be noticeable to the human eye. Astronomical time flies past them, between them, and when Stratt turns to leave, she acknowledges Grace’s quiet goodnight with a soft echo.
-
Stratt getting shot (just a graze, “I’m fine!”) while off bullying this world government or that sends ripples through the project. The astronauts are fighting furious: ready and raring to go. The scientists are scared. Three airmen on her security detail are not invited to return to the carrier. The air feels colder even if it's not yet, not noticeably so.
She's fine, obviously, but a harried doctor joins the cadre of miscellaneous people who follow her around absolutely everywhere and, if possible, her jaw ratchets tighter and tauter and her eyes flash with a little more fury. Even if her words stay measured and considered and the pace of her steps do not slow, the whole ship still feels it.
-
“Sit. Over there. Don't talk to me.”
Grace blinks, but hops over to the corner of her office and settles on the floor. He glances up at her, twice, but she stays focused on a mountain of paperwork. Well, the aide that summoned him had said to bring work. So he props up some of the reports from other scientists that he supposedly oversees (why? how?) and starts slogging through them. They're not even all biological in nature, but they all intersect over astrophage. Physicists and astrochemists and applied mathematicians and materials specialists and that one creepy sociologist everyone mostly ignores…
It would be easier reading at his computer, with a dictionary at hand, but at this point their efforts are familiar enough that he can slog through them well enough. He fidgets while he reads: flipping pages back and forth to compare a conclusion to its support, tapping his pen against the floor or clicking his tongue whenever someone misses something so blatantly obvious that his eighth graders would’ve noticed it, and, generally, forgetting that he's sprawling on Eva Stratt’s office floor.
It's not the most comfortable spot he’s ever worked, but it's also not the worst. And it's quiet, except for himself and the quiet scratch of her pen and shuffle of her papers.
It's nice.
There's not been a lot of space for nice lately.
It's not until she returns, much later, this time with a bevy of people following her, that he realizes she had managed to leave without him noticing. At her raised eyebrow (bemused, he thinks, not angry), he flies out of there as fast as he can possibly manage.
-
“What a wet blanket,” someone says, as their administrator exits the mess, meal in hand. “You think she could take one night off.”
“Positively frigid,” someone else hisses.
Grace frowns at them both.
“Food isn't even supposed to leave the mess,” the first one complains.
“Why don't you tell her that,” Grace snaps.
They both startle and turn towards him.
“Uhh–”
Just for that sheer piece of idiocy, Grace stands, picks up his plate of food, and stalks out of the mess. None of the attendants stop him.
-
“You do not need to defend me.”
Grace looks around the busy lab, somewhat startled. She’d come by for updates, but rarely ever lingered afterwards. And she certainly rarely addressed him so quietly while in public. Not knowing what to say, he just shrugs. She studies him for a moment, and he wonders if he’ll ever understand what the tiny wrinkle that forms over her left eye means. Eventually, he mutters, “well, obviously.”
The wrinkle deepens.
“But it's–” he flounders, “also nice? I like it. Having something easy to do.”
Her face is absolutely inscrutable and he would very much like to run away. Maybe his feet start attempting that, but there's a small problem of them not actually being on the ground, but hanging off a stool, and oh, no, now he’s in danger of falling off a stationary stool in front of–
Her hand on his shoulder steadies him and absolutely unsettles him. “Stop.”
“No,” he says, before thinking it through. “I don't want to.”
She definitely rolls her eyes, but at least she does not stay to belabor the point. She leaves him alone to recover some sort of balance.
-
One of the crew’s favorite pastimes is telling tall tales (“Stratt-tales!” DuBois coins, with a chuckle) about their administrator and seeing who they can get to fall for them. There's wild beasts and grandmasters and all manner of ridiculousness. Grace mostly ignores them, like he always does.
-
It always amazes him how lively the carrier manages to be at 3am. There's buzz going around that they’ve finally secured the land needed for the construction and launch facility and that they might be relocating sooner rather than later. Under Stratt’s lead, it always seems to be sooner rather than later.
Grace ignores the crew and escapes out onto the small observation deck and the low industrial hum of the late night. It's just that there's so many people around. He’s spent his entire professional career on his own or with children. Children demand different things than adults, and it's exhausting, sometimes, never having a moment alone. Maybe when they're finally on land, he’ll rate a private bunk.
Also, probably not.
He’s tired. The world is ending. His friends are going to die. So is he, obviously, but hopefully not so soon as Yao and his crew. They're so much the life of the party, especially Ilyukhina that it's just… hard.
Completely ignoring protocol, Grace flops down to the deck and sticks his feet out through the railing. They're running dark tonight, but the sky is clouded over. For being so far away from absolutely everything, the whole world seems close right now.
Too close. He’s not entirely sure he knows how to breathe anymore.
-
He fixes things. He solves problems. Somehow, he gets the creepy British sociologist to apologize to the terrifying Thai nuclear physicist without causing anyone further offense. The scientists start bringing him their problems, voluntarily, not just because he's supposed to review all findings as they pertain to astrophage. Almost everything pertains to astrophage these days.
It's too much. He’s a middle school science teacher, not… whatever this is.
He wants to go home.
-
“No,” she says, not that he’d expected any different.
“Just for a weekend?” He whines, even though he knows it's hopeless.
“Absolutely not.”
“I’d take Carl.”
“Come speak to Emile Martin,” she says, still focused on paperwork. “He appreciates detailed scientific explanations.” She looks up, then, and he can feel her scan him from his fidgety fingers to flyaway hair. “Perhaps by now you're trained enough to not cause a diplomatic incident.”
“That was one time!”
Her eyebrows raise. “The jets leave at 04:00.”
-
Okay, so traveling off the carrier is even more crazy and hectic than working on the carrier is. They land in Honolulu and are immediately shepherded from the smaller navy planes into a larger but still absolutely terrifyingly fast passenger jet. Sick to his stomach, Grace just stumbles after Stratt, half-delirious. It's ridiculous that she's just as put together, just as in control, immediately after disembarking the transport jets than she always is.
Then they're in the air again and he would very much like to not be here.
“You requested this,” she reminds him, a lilt of humor twisting up the corner of her mouth.
He ignores her in favor of curling up in one of the chairs and breathing through his mouth in the hopes that he won't lose any more of his nonexistent breakfast. It's not the most effective method.
Stratt just laughs at him and settles into her work.
-
Also, apparently, Stratt gets attacked off-base more often than not and it's only the semi-successful time they actually heard about back on the ship. Grace would be more concerned about this if he weren't currently screaming because someone just tried to stab him in the throat with a knife and only failed because Stratt stuck her now bloody forearm in the way.
Screaming seems a little more important right now.
-
He’s not entirely sure where they end up that night. Some bunker on some military complex somewhere. There's no cell service, no internet, and all of their aides and security is housed elsewhere on the grounds. They have six hours to sleep before– before whatever comes next. Honestly, he’s not entirely sure.
“Grace?”
He jolts to attention. “Yeah?”
“Might you do me a favor?”
He’s out of his bunk and stumbling into the common room of this bunker before he can ever think through how walking works, so somewhat inelegantly stumbles to a stop in front of his administrator. There was a… quaver? to her voice that he’s never quite heard before. “What’s– what's up?”
“Will you hold me?”
He absolutely short circuits. “Uh–”
Her chin starts retreating immediately, which is wrong.
“Yes,” he says, “yes, what– how–”
She deflates, somewhat, and Grace has the absurd thought that she seems smaller tonight than she ever deserves to be. So, he doesn't push when she spins on a dime and stalks to the little couch on the side wall of the Bunker's common room. Uncertain, he follows her.
It's somewhat of an awkward few heartbeats to figure out where to put legs and arms and chins. But he follows her lead and ends up on the couch with Eva Stratt sitting across his lap and her head dropped against his shoulder. Her eyes close. His one arm is wrapped around her shoulders and his other doesn't know what on earth to do with itself.
Her breathing is uncomfortably uneven. After a long while, she mumbles, “you do not need to be still.”
Grace exhales and drops his space hand to her ankle. All the excess energy that had built up within comes out in those fingers. He taps some sort of rhythm out against the linen of her pant leg. He lets his feet kick and ankles twist and toes twitch. It is much more comfortable to have some movement, even if Stratt is incredibly still against him.
It doesn't seem to bother her at all, though, that her perch keeps moving.
After a long while, she says, “I’m sorry,” and his brain shorts out again.
“Excuse me?”
Her head lifts from his shoulder and her eyes open. In the dim light of the bunker, they look… weighted. Heavy and sad. For all that he has always known her to carry the whole world on her shoulders, the emptiness of her expression feels different. “I should have more fully considered the risks of bringing you along in unsafe conditions.”
His freer hand finds her bandaged arm between them. He catches a loose edge of the bandage between his fingers and stutters out, “I should be thanking you.”
“You need not,” she says. “I would be…” she pauses and her nose wrinkles as she searches for the correct word. “Disgruntled should you manage to die on me now.”
“Wow,” he says, awed in so many ways. “Disgruntled! I’m moving up in this world.”
Her head drops back to his shoulder with a quiet huff, almost but not quite a laugh.
-
They manage some amount of sleep, tangled together on the couch. Grace awakens to the same dimly lit quiet and Stratt shuffling to her feet. “Wha–”
“Thank you, Dr. Grace,” she says, barely more than a whisper.
He blinks up at her, far too bleary to figure out how to navigate whatever conversation she’d decided to have at some unholy hour of the Canadian night.
“I want you to know that I dislike sex and would not welcome any overtures in that direction.”
Scratch that, he must still be asleep because there is absolutely no way Eva Stratt just said that to him. And no way that she seems to be standing in front of him, off-kilter, as if she is expecting some sort of response. “Oh,” he says, proud of the clarity of his diction for how befuddled he is. “That's good. Me neither. Cuddling is good, though. Goodnight.”
It's a pretty good dream, even if she laughs that quiet little laugh of hers and disappears into one of the private rooms.
-
The thing is, they're still in the middle of a visit with the Canadian prime minister and other various dignitaries that it was easier to bring to Quebec than arrange to meet them elsewhere.
Stratt is her incredibly efficient self and Grace manages to mostly not cause any diplomatic snafus. So he just follows Stratt around and tries to be invisible. Occasionally, someone will ask and question and she'll turn to him and seem completely unsurprised when a clear, coherent answer tumbles out of him without saying too much or too little or being too wildly technical.
It surprises him, though. Or maybe he's just been learning by watching the best.
-
They're back on the boat with a date for when folks will begin transferring to Kazakhstan for the next stage of the project.
-
She calls him into her office again, but sets aside her work and gestures for him to sit down on the other side of the desk.
“If you would like to leave the project,” she says, without preamble, “now is about the only time I will be able to swing it before launch.”
He blinks at her. The foundation of his world falls out from beneath his feet. “What? No.”
“You miss San Francisco,” she says. “Your kids.”
“Yeah, but–” he spreads his hands out. He adjusts his glasses. “Did I do something wrong?”
She does not meet his gaze.
“You need me,” he says, and his voice cracks. “Right?”
“Everyone is replaceable,” she snaps, before shaking herself. Her palms smooth themselves flat against the surface of her desk.
“I said no,” he says, jumping to his feet.
Still, she does not look at him.
He paces the small length of her office. “Stratt,” he says, “do you want me to go?”
“You would be safer,” she says.
He freezes, aghast. “But– I’m just–”
Suddenly, she stands up too. Her chair scraps across the thin carpet. “Excuse me.”
Once again, he finds himself alone in her office without really any idea why or how or what to do next.
-
The astronauts throw a party to celebrate getting off the damn carrier soon. Eva Stratt sings a song. She points at him. She smiles. She runs away.
Grace thinks she might be even better at running away than he is.
-
“What happened to you?” Ilyukhina asks, one of their very last nights on the boat.
He’s as drunk as anyone is allowed to get in the carrier, which is not very.
“You are properly morose,” she says, swinging down to sit next to him and wrapping an arm around his shoulder. “Almost like a proper Russian.” He flinches beneath her grip and she removes her arm from around him. “Crossed in love, are you?”
He does not dignify that with a response.
She nudges her shoulder against his. “Come now, tell Mother Olesya all your troubles.”
“No,” he says, “thank you.”
“Suit yourself,” she says.
-
The best part about Baikonur is his private bunk. The second worst thing about Baikonur is that there manages to be even more people around. There is even more to do, more to manage, more to oversee. They have a launch window now, but also an entire spaceship to construct between now and then. They still have astrophage to breed, contingencies to test, problems to solve.
They are still racing against the end of the world.
The worst thing about Baikonur is that Eva Stratt's fingers tremble every time she looks at him.
It doesn't take a genius to assume that as soon as she notices this particular phenomenon, she will simply stop looking at him.
-
Really, though, there's so much to do, and she's busier than anyone. On the carrier, he had a decent idea of where he might find her on the bad nights, when neither of them could sleep. Here, he must wander, aimless, and has not encountered her once. It is too big. It is too easy to avoid someone.
-
All the best Stratt-tales get brought out and retold to this new, larger, captive audience. Grace listens to utter the ridiculous stories the crew have woven around their administrator.
She once defeated a lion in a wrestling match.
She beat Garry Kasparov at chess three times in a row.
She'd learned how to meditate from the Dalai Lama, which is why her face was like that.
She’d strong-armed the return of this stolen artifact to this heritage land (he heard that one several times, but it changed each time).
She’d done the impossible three times before breakfast and then again after lunch (obviously).
She’d stolen the moon and replaced it with a fancy screen, designed to perfectly mimic the pattern of the moon itself.
She’d been an Olympic snowboarder in her misguided youth.
“Snowboarding,” she says, interrupting another retelling. Something magical twinkles in her eye. “I should be insulted.”
The storyteller jumps and blushes and stammers.
Stratt waves away their apologies. “For smart people with access to all the world’s knowledge to not know it was the biathlon is simply insulting.” She catches Grace’s eye and quirks up one corner of her mouth upwards before spinning around and exiting the mess.
-
Her new office is bigger, grander, and certainly not built for her. It does not suit her, this display of ostentatiousness. Perhaps that is why she starts summoning him with much more frequency, only to have him work from this corner or that. Sometimes, rarely, he catches her studying him. Something inscrutable hides behind her eyes.
He tries not to worry too much. She’ll tell him. Probably. She usually does, eventually. It's just nice that she's looking at him without shivering again.
-
“You are the lapdog, no? Her little pet? What a pitiful little bitch she must be in bed.”
Grace isn't quite sure he's ever thrown a punch before and he certainly doesn't know how to throw a good one. Really, he shouldn't be that surprised he ends up in the infirmary with a black eye and shattered thumb and more bruises than he’d like to count.
He gets back to work immediately, of course, and never sees that particular scientist again.
Part of him wants to go tell her she does not need to protect him, but the much bigger part of him is thrilled that she actually did.
Or maybe it was Carl. Carl could be scary when he wanted to be.
-
The three sharp knocks yank Grace awake. He stumbles to the door and pulls it open with a bit too much force. “What.”
Eva Stratt, once again small, stands in the hallway. Her omnipresent attachees are nowhere to be seen. “Will you–” she gestures down the hallway, and then the question fades and is replaced with a much more familiar sense of command. “Follow me.”
In the middle of the night, in his coat and hat and scarf thrown haphazardly over his pajamas, he follows his administrator down this hallway and around that corner and out this building and through that building until they reach–
“The gun range?”
Stratt nods at the lone attendant who was clearly expecting her and clearly deciding to be unsurprised by her guest. “It's therapeutic. Have you ever shot before?”
“N-no.”
If anything, her casual look becomes somewhat predatory. “Delightful. My Walther PPK, thank you, Piatek. Now, Dr. Grace–”
What follows might be the strangest few hours he’s ever experienced, but when she finally decides he's a good enough shot for a first lesson, the lines of her shoulders do not droop so far and she seems steadier within her own shoes.
Grace just feels tired. Also his shoulders hurt. And his forearms. And his hands. And his thighs. And his feet? And the backs of his ears? He’s not entirely sure how all of that happened.
-
“Wait,” he says, “was the biathlon thing real?”
“You did not look it up.”
“No, wait. Really?”
“Yes, Dr. Grace, really.”
He finds video of her, nineteen years old and victorious. It is the most magnificent thing.
-
Launch inches closer. There is more and more to do and less and less time to do it.
-
One night, she lets herself in without knocking and brushes the hair off his forehead to wake him. He blinks up at her, sees the unasked question, and rolls away. She clambers up next to him and wraps herself around him like some delightful ouroboros with too many knees and elbows.
He can feel her, choking on something that might be sobs, but she does not want to be acknowledged, so he merely catches one of her hands in his and goes back to sleep. She is gone before he wakes.
-
“Carl,” he says, one night in the lab when basically all the other scientists have fled for the night. “What are you going to do, after?”
His pseudo-personal security guard looks up from whatever he is doing… is that a Gameboy? “What do you mean after?”
“You know,” Grace insists. “After the launch. When we're waiting.”
“Oh,” says Carl. “Probably sleep.”
“Yeah,” Grace says. “Sleep sounds delightful.”
He doesn't remember what his bed in San Francisco felt like. Did he still have a bed there? Had he still been paying his mortgage? Huh.
Doesn't really matter. He has a problem to solve. The astronauts are just… not getting this, and maybe if he can figure out how to present it in a different light…
-
They're getting better. They have to be getting better. They will be good enough.
There are a few gray hairs emerging in Stratt’s hair. Grace tries not to get too distracted by them too frequently.
-
“You will… return to San Francisco?”
They're in her office. It's late. No one else is present. He’d been rambling about his training plans for DuBois in what little time they had before–
“Huh?”
“After launch?”
He has never, ever, heard her vocalize absolutely anything about what that happens between launch and the return of the probes.
“Transportation must be arranged,” she says, and it sounds almost defensive? Definitely wrong.
“But,” he says, uncertain, “what about–” he doesn't actually come up with anything. “Where will you be?”
She straight up flinches.
Grace jerks to attention. When she does not answer, he dares cross around her desk and kneel in front of her. “I’d want–”
Stratt leans away from him. “I will not be at my liberty.”
He’s not dumb, really. He’s her own personal genius, but sometimes even he can't quite interpret all of the jumps her mind makes. “What?”
Her teeth grind against each other and he can feel the ache of that in his very bones. “Do not consider me a factor in your decisions.”
He sits back on his heels and runs a hand through his hair. It knocks his glasses askew, because of course it does, but before he can reach out to secure them, her fingers jerk out and lift them from his ear. She settles them back in front of his eyes. It is quite possibly the softest touch he has ever experienced. “Eva, how can I not?”
Once again, she leaves him alone in her office.
Honestly, he’s kind of used to it, by now.
-
The world explodes out from under him.
-
He lost Stratt in the crisis, somehow, after the fire response team mobilized, after they're confirmed that both DuBois and Shapiro were in the blaze, well before they had a whole list of everyone who was. Grace could have been there. Would have been there, if he’d not been procrastinating by reporting directly to Stratt instead of sending one of the many junior staffers he’d had available to him. A junior staffer who was probably in the science lab, then.
But DuBois. Shapiro. For however many lives lost, it was those too that represented the now gaping, catastrophic hole in their last ditch effort.
A measuring error. A decimal mistake.
Name after name after name. His colleagues, his friends.
Where the fuck is Stratt?
-
“Dr. Grace,” Carl says, grim, “come with me.”
“Little busy here–”
“The administrator requests your presence.”
He is up and out of his seat and trotting after Carl immediately. They don't go to her office or the gun range or anywhere near the science lab or the rooftop he’d finally figured out was her go to insomnia destination or mess with the best coffee or anywhere that he’s actually anticipating. They have to get in a car and drive. Not far, not off the compound, but, really, still–
They stop at a small, low lying building in the far corner of the compound. He’s never been out here before. Guest houses, maybe? Not in use for anything.
“In there,” Carl says, without actually approaching the building.
It's odd, but honestly Grace is far too worried about all the cumulatively worrisome things that have happened in the last… two…? hours to really stop to consider why Carl is staying so far away and also why there doesn't seem to be anyone else around.
He bounds through the front door and stops. The place is clearly some sort of living space, but it's just as clearly been destroyed. A couch and chairs are overturned and splintered. Damp pottery shards and quickly wilting flowers are scattered across the entry way. And the unflappable Eva Stratt is attacking the wall with a fire poker.
“What,” he says, before he can stop it, because really this scene is the most incomprehensible thing he can imagine.
She whirls, poker brandished. “How dare you.”
“Uh–”
“I let myself want one thing. One thing as compensation for saving the entire fucking planet. One, little, inconsequential thing. And then I jinx it and it's gone and I won't ever get the only thing I ever really, truly–” The poker waves wildly about before she turns and resumes slamming into the wall with a not inconsiderable amount of force. Each word comes out staccato. “And you will make me force you.”
He steps into the room. “I don't understand.”
She shudders and the crash of the poker stops. “No, you wouldn't yet. You're too American to have realized yet.” The poker clatters out of her hands as they come up to cover her face. She keens, then, and it is the worst sound Grace has ever heard.
It only takes five steps to cross the room, spin her around, and wrap his arms around her shoulders. She doesn't unwind. Her hands stay pressed against her face, her arms tucked tight across her chest. Her whole body heaves with the force of her wails. Grace clutches her, because he doesn't know what else to do.
“Congratulations, Ryland Grace,” she says, muffled. “You’ve just been promoted to a fucking calamity.”
-
She has to explain it to him, there on the floor of the destroyed little guest house, far from the main compound. She explains it in between stutters and sobs, in between desperately clutching at his hair and trying to wrench herself out of his grasp.
They are out of time. What they need most is an expert in all things astrophage. They need the foremost expert in all things astrophage. It does not matter that he is not an astronaut. It does not matter that said expert is a coward. It does not matter that all he wants is to follow her, wherever, however, to make her laugh, to listen to her sing, to solve problems together, and wait in patience and purpose for the opportunity to– to–
save the entire fucking planet.
“I don't want to go,” he says, sobbing. “There must be an alternative.”
“There’s not. There's not. Not anymore. I tried,” she says, her voice hoarse and all her tears gone. “I tried to send you away and you wouldn't go. There's no one else.”
His whole body shudders. “I thought you didn't want me.”
Both her hands frame his face. “I do.”
He clutches at her wrists like they're lifelines. “But–”
“Please don't make me force you,” she says. “I could– I will– Ryland, please.”
He can't answer her. He can't. He’s the worst possible choice, except he knows he's not. Not any more.
-
Not any more. He’s managed a team of scientists of all different disciplines and communication styles. He can think outside the box but knows when to come back inside the lines, now. He's learned from the best communicator, best facilitator, best leader he’d ever seen.
The best choice was DuBois: brilliant, eager to go. The next best choice was Shapiro: brilliant, just as willing to go.
He has months of tutelage from the very best in understanding and wielding one's own strength, in knowing the unlimited bounds of one's own capacity. He’s had so long now a firm, steady, supportive belief in his ability to solve all of the problems thrown at them.
The third best choice is the disaster, who spent the entire duration of the project accidentally becoming… this.
He understands astrophage better than anyone else.
Still.
-
“I can't,” he says, into her hair. He can feel every sharp edge of her start to tense, but he does not let go. “I can't go the entire planet. I can't– ask me, Eva. Ask me to go just for you.”
“You have no sense of collectivism,” she chides, softly, toothlessly. She burrows in tighter against him. “Ryland Grace, will you go to Tau Ceti and send back whatever magnificent, incredible things you will find there? Will you go, even knowing that I– that I love you? That it tears me apart to ask you this?”
“Well, you did take a knife for me once,” he says, choking over something between a sob and a laugh. “I suppose I must return the favor.” He kisses her, then, just for comfort, just because he can, just because it will be enough to carry him forward into the great void.
-
For all that they have so much to do, Stratt practically hovers, as much as she can manage. She watches while Yao and Ilyukhina give him a crash course on whatever they possibly can in a thirty six hour window. She watches as he packs. He really does not have much, not really. His sweater. A little crochet ball of the planet. Letters and drawings from his one time students.
She makes decisions for him, to reduce some of the weight of the emergency. With trembling fingers, she packs away her Walther PPK and enough rounds to fill the magazine. She tracks down a hula dancer bobble head, a poster displaying the chemical compound of coffee, a small storage device of audio files she makes him promise not to listen to until arrival at Tau Ceti. Other little things too, here and there. Some of them might have no meaning. Some might have too much.
She exercises an extreme indulgence of demanding remarkably fast courier service from a specific storage unit in Eastern Germany and packing the most ostentatious piece of herself she can think to add. It barely arrives in time.
-
And then it's the last night and she cannot stay away. He's awake, of course, sitting propped against his bed with his head in his hands. She eases herself down beside him, but does not reach out to touch him until he holds open a hand to her. She clutches at it. “Do you– do you want me here?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want– anything you want– anything I can give you–”
He flops his head to the side, glasses on the floor in front of them, and cocks a mad little grin at her. “Heard you stole the moon. Is it really made of cheese?”
“I appropriated a moon rock,” she huffs, “as the chief administrator of the ESA it really–”
“Hang on,” Grace interrupts, “...how many of the Stratt-tales are actually true?”
“They are all wild exaggerations,” She insists. “I visited Tibet occasionally when I was school-aged. I happened to know a cousin of Daria Tarasova who once invited me on a visit.”
“Eva, did you beat Garry Kasparov in chess?”
“No, I did not.”
“Did you play him?”
“Yes.”
Ryland Grace, astronaut extraordinaire, dissolves into furious, frantic giggles.
-
They lay down in his bed together. She curls herself around him and holds on as tight as she dares.
“I do love you,” he says, in the dark of the night. “At least, I think I do. I don't really know. It's never– it's never been like this before.”
She hums, thoughtful. “Oh?”
“Everyone else has– wanted… stuff. Wanted sex or groundedness or– I don't know. Wanted me to be not me. You just… made me better.”
“I did not.”
“Eva,” he says, “you have.”
“I’m sorry,” she says and presses a quick, cold kiss to the back of his shoulder.
He turns in her arms and shuffles his face in under hers. “Don't implode over this.”
“Don't give me orders.”
“Ah, I really think I’ve earned at least a few orders.”
“No.”
He whines at her.
She laughs. “Go to sleep.”
“But I want to hear what happened with the lion.”
“...I dislike zoos.”
He jolts half upright, knocking their chins against each other as he did. “Explain, now. That's an order.”
“...fine.”
-
They launch without issue. They go to sleep. Waiting for Dr. Ryland Grace to cross the vast distance to Tau Ceti is a dusty Olympic gold medal and several voice clips of Eva Stratt singing.
And, also, the mystery of saving the entire fucking planet.
That too.