Chapter Text
Grace’s lungs are burning. He isn't a soldier, he isn't an athlete, and he certainly isn't an astronaut. He is a junior-high science teacher, and right now, he is doing the only logical thing a person can do when they are about to be sent to their death: he is running.
The heavy slap of combat boots echoes behind him, accompanied by frantic shouts. It’s ridiculous that he’s even trying to run, really. They are trained for this; he isn't. But pure, unadulterated terror is a hell of a motivator. If they catch me, I die. He just needs to get away.
If he weren’t so busy running, the betrayal that lead him here would be sickening. He had worked beside her. He had trusted her. He thought they were kind-of friends. And in return, she had looked him dead in the eye and sentenced him to starve in the cold vacuum of another solar system.
His sneakers skid as a towering shadow suddenly cuts off the horizon. It’s chain-link, about ten feet high, and crowned with silver coils of barbed wire.
Grace slams into it, his fingers hooking desperately into the metal mesh. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He knows the exact layout of the campus. Why didn’t he take a different path? Why did his panicked brain just pick a straight line?
He spins around to bolt in the opposite direction, but there is no time.
A heavy mass collides with him. The energy drives every ounce of air from his lungs, sending him crashing into the ground. Pain flares in his cheek. Heavy hands are instantly everywhere, gripping his shoulders, pinning his knees, crushing his wrists against the ground.
He thrashes wildly, kicking and twisting against the weight. „No! Please! Please don’t!“ He doesn't care how pathetic it sounds. He doesn't care about his dignity. „Let me go!“
They don't. A knee digs mercilessly between his shoulder blades, pinning him flat. Then comes the sharp pinch of a needle sliding into the side of his neck.
Grace wrenches his head sideways, his vision already starting to swim as the sedative floods his bloodstream. A figure stands above him, looking down.
It’s Carl. He wants to sob.
„You know who you are,“ Carl says. His voice is perfectly flat. Just a soldier following orders to execute a friend. „You’ll do great“.
I’ll die! He wants to shout, but the darkness has already crept up to him. His muscles go slack against his will. They are actually doing this. I'm going to die.
He bolts upright.
Grace sucks in a ragged, desperate breath, his hands flying wildly to his neck to feel for the puncture. It’s smooth. His pulse hammers against his ribs like a trapped bird, his skin slick with cold sweat. He is still running in his mind, bracing for the dark. He fully expects to be strapped to a medical gurney, or worse, locked into a contour seat aboard the Hail Mary, already hurtling away from the sun.
Instead, his hands drop onto a mattress.
He blinks, his vision slowly blurring into focus. He awkwardly grabs at his bedside for his glasses. Sunlight cuts through the small porthole window. He is sitting in his own bunk, on Stratt’s Vat.
He drags a trembling hand down his face, dropping them down to his neck, where, just as before, he rubs the smooth skin.
Shakily, he swings his legs over the edge of the bunk, the cold metal floor grounding him. A shuddering sigh escapes him. It must’ve been a nightmare. A terrifying, hyper-realistic, stress-induced hallucination brought on by the proximity of the Hail Mary launch.
He doesn’t know why he’s so surprised by it.
It’s not time for the launch yet. It’s the day of the farewell party, he recalls. The final night on board. Just another week before DuBois, Ilyukhina, and Yáo blast off to Tau Ceti. The tension on the carrier has been suffocating for weeks; it’s only natural his subconscious finally cracked under the pressure.
(Stratt forcing him onto the ship. Running. The fence. Carl.
Stupid, it was a dream. Only a dream. He shouldn’t be so shaken by it.)
Grace shudders, forcing a hollow laugh that sounds pathetic even to his own ears. He’s loosing it.
Shaking his head, he gets up. He dresses in his usual sweater, splashing cold water on his face in the small basin. By the time he steps out into the corridors of the carrier, his heart rate has almost returned to a normal rhythm.
Then he walks into the mess hall.
„I'm telling you, the breeding cycle is perfectly stable at these temperatures,“ DuBois’s voice carries over the chatter in the room. He’s gesturing animatedly with a fork toward Shapiro, who is rolling her eyes over a cup of coffee.
Grace freezes on his way to the coffee machine. It’s all too familiar, down to the way Shapiro laughs as she says, „Stable doesn't mean safe, Martin. It's still a whole lot of TNT in a petri dish.“
The words leave her mouth exactly as Grace’s brain supplies them.
A cold prickle of unease dances down Grace’s spine. Déjà vu. It’s just déjà vu. A common neurological glitch where the brain misfiles short-term memory into long-term storage. A perfectly scientific explanation.
He forces his feet to move, grabbing a large cup of coffee with too much sugar and cream, as always. Normally, he’d find an empty space next to some of the researchers he knows better. Today, he’s still too shaken from his dream, and so he retreats to his lab.
The strange, creeping sensation doesn’t go away. Not when he notes down his latest calculations—staring at the exact same decimals he sort-of remembers writing in his dream—nor when Stratt briskly passes by the open door.
He watches her go, his stomach tying itself into a painful, suffocating knot. Don't trust her, a frantic voice screams in his head. She'll get you killed. You can't trust her. Yet, the instinct to follow her, to update her on his findings like they are a team, is so deeply ingrained after four years that he actually takes a step into the corridor before stopping himself. He knows her. He respects her. The idea that she could look at him and casually sign his death warrant feels absurd. It’s a sickening contradiction that churns his gut through lunch and dinner.
It’s all exactly as he dreamt. Every conversation, every minor delay. It’s impossible, but—he aggressively shakes the thought off, tapping his pen against his clipboard. It isn't so unlikely to dream of a day this familiar. After four years on the Vat, routine is practically ingrained in his bones.
Evening comes all too soon. The farewell party is in full swing, loud and jarringly identical to his memory. Unable to stand the noise, he slips outside to the flight deck.
Stratt is already there, looking out over the water. He approaches her, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
„Permission to come aboard?“ he asks, like an idiot.
The conversation that follows is perfectly, agonizingly familiar, and yet he cherishes every moment of it. It’s so rare, for her to give away anything about herself. He could never be that cool and mysterious.
Then she tells him about the Youth choir, and he thinks he’ll be sick. He excuses himself soon after, escaping back inside to the relative safety of his paperwork. This is a dream. Just a stress dream, he tells himself, gripping the edge of the bar. Nothing more.
She steps up to the microphone minutes later. Her voice is clear and truly beautiful, carrying over the sudden hush of the crowd. Sign of the Times. She looks out across the room, and for a terrifying second, her eyes lock onto his.
Grace stops breathing. He searches her gaze for a hint of warmth, for the mutual respect they’ve built over the years. But looking at her now, all he feels is a cold, primal terror. The lyrics sound like a death sentence. Run, his brain supplies. Stop. Don't trust her. You can't trust her. Run.
I don't want to die.
He flees the room a moment after she steps down. He makes it back to his bunk just in time to empty his stomach into the small basin, gagging until there is nothing left but bitter bile and tears prickling the corners of his eyes.
They dock the following day. The days in Baikonur slide by in a blur. Here, it’s almost easy to convince himself that the panic that day on the Vat really was just a crack in his psyche. The tension is just getting to him. He is safe.
Until he isn’t.
He is standing besides Stratt. She’s smiling at him as he asks „What are you doing for the next 20 years?“. Then the world erupts into flames.
Grace freezes. His blood instantly turns to ice. A heartbeat later, alarms begin to shriek across the Cosmodrome. He’s running before he even realizes it, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps, praying to a god he doesn't believe in that it's just a coincidence. An equipment malfunction. Nothing to do with his dream or the tests DuBois was running.
But deep down, he already knows the truth. It’s useless to run toward the fire. There will be nothing to save.
Hours later, the confirmation ripples through the shocked personnel. DuBois and Shapiro were inside running the final volatility tests. They are dead.
Grace sits in the hallway outside the main offices, staring blankly at the laminate floor. He knows exactly what Stratt is going to do next. He is the backup. The only one left with the coma-resistance gene who has the knowledge required. The nightmare wasn't a nightmare; it was a preview.
He is completely, utterly done for. She is going to call him into a meeting. He’ll tell her no in her office. She is going to look at him with those dead, pragmatic eyes and sentence him to a slow death in another solar system.
When the summons comes, he still goes. Perhaps it’s the part of him that trusts her so intrinsically, the part of him that desperately wants to believe she sees him as a human being and not just a spare part. Perhaps it’s even the knowledge that he’d never make it far if he ran. He walks into the room with Komorov, Yáo, and Ilyukhina, his hands sweating, his heart begging for a different outcome.
It happens exactly as he dreamt. She tells him he is the third choice. He has three hours to decide. Three hours later, he is standing in her office and tells her he can’t. He knows she hates him for it. He thinks he hates himself more for being a coward. He knows he should just go. But he— he can’t.
„I'm sorry“ he says. His voice shakes. He looks at her, silently pleading for understanding, for mercy. Please. You know me. We're a team.
Her expression isn’t the same as it was in his dream. Perhaps that’s a good sign. Or maybe it isn’t, and he’s just projecting pain into her gaze where there’s none.
„I'm trying to make you understand what I'm about to do next,“ she tells him, and he knows. Oh, god, he knows. It shatters something fundamental inside his chest.
And then he is running again.
The heavy slap of his own boots echoes on the paths of the Cosmodrome. The guards are shouting behind him. He doesn't stop. If he stops, he dies.
The chain-link fence looms ahead, towering and inescapable. The sick realization hits him a fraction of a second before the heavy, solid mass of a body collides with him, driving the air from his lungs.
He hits the ground hard, the impact rattling his teeth. Hands instantly pin his wrists, crushing him against the asphalt.
„No! Please! Please don’t!" he screams, thrashing wildly against the floor, the exact same pathetic pleas tearing from his throat. He doesn't care. He just wants to live.
A knee digs brutally into his spine. The icy pinch of the needle slides into his neck.
Grace goes limp, his vision swimming as the sedative floods his brain. A face swims into view above him. Carl. An apathetic executioner carrying out Stratt's final order.
„You know who you are,“ Carl says softly.
The world fades to black.
He bolts upright in his cot, gasping for air, the low hum of an aircraft carrier vibrating through the metal floorboards.
Oh, fudge.