Chapter Text
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
A blinding pressure in my head. Muscles shrieking in agony. Thinking of nothing except how much it hurts, how much I want it to just stop.
Something slams into my side and my jaw crashes against a surface that sends a jarring impact through my skull.
Then… nothing…
The pressure in my head is gone almost as suddenly as it arrived, leaving behind an emptiness and a ringing in my ears. My limbs tingle, like they all went dead and are now coming back to life. I’m lying down, I think. There’s a pain in my arm and across my face from where I must have hit the ground, but I barely notice it. It’s a pinprick compared to what I just experienced.
I suck in a breath. The air is cool against my lungs. I gulp down more, desperate for oxygen, as if I’d just been drowning. Slowly, the frantic beat of my heart seems like it's no longer doing its best to force its way out of my chest. I take another breath, slower this time, feeling the calming breeze against my skin.
Wait, what?
There was something wrong. There was something really, really wrong. The Eridians had air circulation systems in my enclosure but they’d never managed a breeze, not like on Earth. If there’s an air current here, that means that there’s a breach, somehow, even though the air should be hot, not cold, and I should be about to be boiled alive-
I shove myself up onto my arm and force my eyes open.
Bad idea.
The world spins around me. Green grass and grey-blue sky going click, click, click. Tilting 90 degrees left before going back to their starting point, again, and again, and again, and-
I resist the urge to throw up, gripping the grass beneath me with all my strength and digging my nails into the soil. I needed to move, I needed to move, I needed to-
Grass?
“...Grace? Are you alright? Grace…”
But that was- that was-
Grass?
I resist the urge to throw up again, scrunching up my eyes and gritting my teeth together as my stomach rolls. Then, I force myself to turn, to look up.
Stratt stands half-crouched above me, phone in hand. At least, I think it’s her. It’s hard to tell with the way she keeps moving - right to left, right to left - as my head rings and my eyes struggle to focus. In any case the image I have of her in my mind has always been fuzzy, and has only grown fainter with time. Had I always struggled to remember faces, or had that come with the drugs she gave me?
Oh no. No no no no no.
My mind flares with panic, terror flooding through my veins. She’s going to kill me. She’s going to make me go to space. They’re going to hold me down and stick a needle in my neck and send me to the edge of the universe to die. No. No!
I manage to get one of my feet under me, try to push myself upwards, to scramble away before she gets me. I collapse to the ground, face smacking against the dirt. I can smell the grass again, I can smell the grass and they’re going to send me to sleep and the last thing I can see is the rainbow.
I push myself up again. I fall. The world spins and spins and spins. I throw up, my stomach rolling one too many times. I manage to collapse a few inches away from the puddle of vomit, lying in the grass with my hands over my head, breaths coming in sharp gasps, waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting-
I don’t know how long it takes for me to realise that nothing has happened. There’s no weight of a body on top of me, pushing me down, no sharp pain in my neck. The overwhelming dizziness I feel hasn’t made the edges of the world go grey and plunged me into unconsciousness.
Slowly, despite the buzzing in my veins and the pounding of my heart in my ears, I manage to turn my head towards the sky, towards where I think I last saw Stratt. She’s still there. If I try, if I really, really try, if I don’t move my head at all, I can focus on her without the world spinning.
She’s staring at me, a slight frown creasing her forehead.
Vaguely, it occurs to me that this is the strangest dream I’ve ever had. I can feel the wind in my hair, the grass beneath my skin, the pain in my elbow. But, maybe all dreams feel real when you’re in them, maybe they only stop being real when you wake up. And well, either I’m dreaming or the Eridians have put a new gas in my compound that I’m really not agreeing with. That, or I’m dying. They do say that your life flashes before you when you die. I just wish I wasn’t stuck in this part of it.
“Are you with me, Dr Grace?” Stratt asks. It certainly sounds like her.
I don’t trust myself to nod. Instead, I make what I hope is an affirmative sort of noise.
“Dr Grace.” She’s serious. Always serious. “We are not going to send you into space.”
I let out a choking laugh. “Will.”
“We are sending DuBois, he is our primary science expert. If something happens to him, we will send Shapiro instead. She is our backup. You are not.”
I do shake my head then, before having to steel myself against the lightheadedness that follows. “‘m the ter-shry.”
When I open my eyes again, Stratt’s tapping her fingers on her arm. “Who told you that?” her words are sharp against my ears.
I frown. “You did.”
“I remember all of the conversations we have had together, and I most certainly did not,” she lies.
“Did- after Sh’piro an’ DuBois died.”
“Shapiro and DuBois are both still alive.”
What? At once, hope flares through my chest. Again, I try to push myself up. Eventually, I lever myself into a half-sitting position, bracketing my elbows behind my back as I turn my head slowly, trying to take everything in while keeping the dizziness at bay.
We’re outside, in the same place we were when the explosion barrelled towards us, knocking us off our feet. This time though, there are other people surrounding us, all of them looking at me. I try and fail not to feel hemmed in.
“But, wha’ about the explosion?”
“What explosion?” Stratt is irritated now, but it doesn’t matter. Talking is getting easier.
“The quartermaster gave them one milligram of astrophage instead of one nanogram.”
She looks at me strangely, then considers her phone, before seeming to come to a decision. I can’t quite hear what she says when she presses it to her ear, but her expression is the one she has when something is going to happen, and it is going to happen now. To be fair, she has that expression quite a lot.
Then we wait. Stratt says nothing after hanging the phone up, and neither does anyone else. It would be more disconcerting if my body felt like it actually belonged to me. As it is, I slump forward so my head rests between my bent legs, supported by my hands, and focus on trying to feel more human.
I feel like I should probably be enjoying this dream-hallucination a bit more. Clearly, I’ve invented somewhere Shapiro and Dubois are still alive, Stratt doesn’t want to send me into space, and I can feel the wind in my hair and the dirt beneath my feet. This should be great.
If only I didn’t feel like the living embodiment of crap. Heck, I think I even felt better when I was dying of starvation before we reached Erid.
See, this is why I never did drugs back on Earth. Other people might have thought I was a coward, but really I was clearly right to be afraid of having a bad trip. Whatever’s been leaking into my atmosphere is really doing a number on me.
See kids, drugs aren’t cool.
Stratt’s phone rings, cutting through the blissful silence. There’s nothing to stop me from pressing my knees against my ears to block out the sound, so that’s what I do.
“Dr Grace… Dr Grace!”
I look up with a groan, forcing myself to stare at the person interrupting the peace I was desperately trying to find despite the way my body feels like it’s dying.
Stratt has an odd expression on her face. She looks almost as shaken as she did in the aftermath of the explosion.
“Dr Grace,” she asks me seriously, “how did you know the quartermaster had just given Dubois a thousand times more astrophage than he was allowed?”
I blink at her. What did she mean? Why wouldn’t I know? The explosion killed two of my friends, it led to me being forced into space!
“Dr Grace-” for Stratt, this almost seemed like it could be panic- “Ryland. How did you know?”
My mouth opens and closes. “But you were with me!?” I finally manage to settle on. This doesn’t make any sense. It didn’t happen like this. And she was with me for the explosion. She picked herself up and ran - actually ran - ahead of me. Why isn’t this right? Why doesn’t she remember?
She winces, before swallowing, making a gesture to someone behind me.
I don’t even manage to get to my feet before they grab me.