Work Text:
one.
Halfway through a mid-day verbal update on the current situation in the lab, Ryland cuts himself off to ask, “Stratt. You okay?” For some reason, he sounds inordinately concerned. “You’re shivering pretty badly. Are you sick?”
Eva’s annoyed at the interruption for about two seconds - in fairness, the report she’s simultaneously working on is due in one hour and might decide the fate of grain exports out of Pakistan, so not the best time to break her focus - until she realises, belatedly, that she is shivering. That might explain why her handwriting’s taken a downturn in the last fifteen minutes. Eva sighs, dragging a hand down her face - she’d left her coat in her room, and the heating in her office has been abominable lately, which is pretty egregious considering that the entire ‘planet over-cooling’ problem hasn’t started to be a life-threatening problem yet. She’ll have to speak to the ship maintenance team about that.
In the meantime, Ryland just keeps looking at her with his typically earnest expression, clearly wanting to help and/or do something (is it a teacher thing, Eva wonders). She waves him off with a dismissive flick of her hand. “I’m fine. It’s just cold. Continue with your report on the viability of the sampler, please.”
She expects him to listen, to return to what he was saying, to follow her orders, because that’s sort of the point here, on her Vat - surrounded by people she hand-picked to take her lead, come together as a cohesive whole in order to make Project Hail Mary a success. She figured out a great deal about Doctor Ryland Grace long before she even stepped into Grover Cleveland and laid eyes on him for the first time; she thinks she’s gotten a sense of how he ticks, can predict what he’s going to do even before he does it. Like stepping back and obeying when she asks -
She does not predict him getting up from his chair and coming behind her table, removing his trusty white jacket and draping it around her shoulders in one unbroken move. “Here, just wear this. If you get any colder, your brain’s gonna slow down, and that probably won’t be great news for all your paperwork.”
Eva blinks, thrown. She tugs tentatively on one corner of the jacket, testing the fabric between her fingers - light, but insulating. “Oh,” she manages, feeling awkward, surprised, uncertain; all very foreign emotions that she’s not the biggest fan of. “Well - thank you, Doctor Grace. But how will you manage without - “
“Eh, I’ve got this,” he winks, gesturing to his thick, woollen, fox-emblazoned sweater. “And I’ll be out of here in a bit and back in the nice, warm lab, so. You can keep the jacket; just hand it back to me later.”
“All right.” She slips her arms into the sleeves and pulls it around her; it’s a size too big, but it still comfortably shields her from some of the chill. He continues talking about the sampler, she goes back to listening and writing her report, and she tries not to think about the warmth seeping slowly back into her bones.
two.
She knocks on the door to his quarters with some urgency, tapping her foot impatiently until he unlocks it. Ryland does a double-take when he opens it and sees her standing in the hall. “Christmas Eve, what - are you going somewhere? What’s with the fancy getup?”
“It is just a suit, Doctor Grace,” Eva says, terse - she doesn’t really have time for this; she has to be on the jet in twenty minutes. “I am here because it requires a matching tie, and I - for reasons perhaps obvious - do not have one in my closet. Would you happen to have a spare? Dark brown, light blue, or dark red only, please.”
“Uh, I have a few, if you want to come in and pick for yourself.” She takes the offer without hesitation, striding in with purpose and making a beeline to the drawer at which he gestures. Ryland hovers uncertainly as she picks through his small selection, holding a few options to her chest and reviewing which goes best with the crisp cream fabric. “Can I ask why you need a tie, or is that, like the whole suit thing, top-top-secret information?”
Eva rolls her eyes. “I have been invited to a private meeting with a potential investor in Bulgaria, whom I need to convince to part with her money for the sake of funding laboratory equipment,” she replies. “According to insider information, she is - partial to a woman in a proper suit and tie. I am hoping this ‘getup’, as you put it, will significantly increase our chances.”
Ryland blurts out, taken aback: “Wait. Are you going to Bulgaria to sleep with someone for money?”
If looks could kill, Eva has no doubt that Ryland Grace’s obituary would be printed in tomorrow’s newspapers (if they had anything like that on the ship). He shrinks meekly under her glare and holds up his hands. “Sorry, sorry, I was just surprised, I thought… I mean, it sort of sounded like… never mind,” he trails off lamely, as red as the tie she’s holding in her hand. Eva tries to tamp down the flickers of irritation rising in her chest - patience, she tells herself; he’s an American, which already means a higher baseline of idiocy, and then he is, specifically, Doctor Ryland Grace, with his strange, strange way of thinking (very beneficial for major scientific breakthroughs, not so much in social settings like this one). “Not that it is any of your business, but this has been couched as a perfectly professional circumstance,” she says through gritted teeth - and just to embarrass him a little bit, because the petty human part of her would enjoy that after his inappropriate outburst: “But I do what needs to be done for the sake of the mission, Doctor Grace. If a sexual encounter with one woman is key to saving the population of the entire world, I will engage, and I would hope most people with a conscience would do that too.”
She slides one of his brown ties around her neck, under the collar of her perfectly pressed dress shirt, keeps her glance on him out of the corner of her eye as she pulls it into a knot. His teeth sink into his bottom lip, his blush remains, and there’s an expression on his face she can’t exactly place. It raises an odd, unnameable feeling in her stomach, and before she can stop herself, she falls back on something he’s always doing, attempting a joke to lighten the tension. “What, you are jealous?”
The second the words come out of her mouth, she realises it is decidedly not a joke - not when his flush deepens and he looks away, unable to meet her eyes. Eva’s heart skips a beat, and doesn’t plummet into her shoes only because she refuses to allow it to. Oh. That is - a complication. One that, in hindsight, was perhaps not wholly unpredicted, and one that she definitely does not have the space to tackle right now. She straightens up, shifting her shoulders and going into ‘Director Stratt’ mode once more. “Thank you for the loan, Doctor Grace; I will return your tie as soon as I am able. Apologies for the disruption to your day.”
He’s unnaturally quiet as he walks her to the door and opens it to let her out; Eva’s barely turned away when she hears him say, soft, uncertain, and aching with something deeper, something that shouldn’t scare her as much as it does: “Eva?” The first time that he’s used her first name, the syllables rolling off his tongue so easily. “What if I am?”
Don’t be, is her instinctive reply. You can’t. We don’t have the luxury of time, or feelings, or wanting anything that doesn’t also serve the planet. The project comes first. The people come first. This is not a world where we can have the things we desire.
“We can talk about it another time,” she replies - calm and steady and gentle, because she’s long learned how to tell convincing lies; but Ryland exhales, and she knows that he can hear the untruth in it.
He still says: “Sure,” and lets her go.
three.
She’d left the party in the lounge precisely to be alone, so she should be annoyed to hear his voice calling up to her, rising above the patter of rain, but she isn’t. Somehow, he’s always an exception to all the rules that she’s set for herself. It’s dangerous. She should have done something about it a long time ago; she still could, she knows, but then she turns to look at him, standing at the base of the ladder leading up to the observation deck, and that certainty melts away. He’s clad in a yellow raincoat, his glasses spattered with droplets of rain, squinting through the lenses while waving another raincoat held in his hand. “Permission to come aboard, captain?”
“You’re already aboard,” she says; he takes the invitation for what is, climbing up to join her, and pushes the spare raincoat into her arms. “Thought I would find you here. Come on, put that on. You don’t want to catch a cold.”
Her lips twitch in amusement. “A scientist should know better than anyone that standing in the rain can’t give you a cold.”
“A scientist does know better than anyone that being cold and wet affects your immune system, and makes you more susceptible to picking up a rhinovirus, especially in a crowded, enclosed location, like the Vat,” he retorts. Eva inclines her head, giving him the point, and obligingly shrugs on the raincoat, ignoring his pleased smile when she does. He rests his arms on the railing beside her, looking out at the raindrops splashing into the sea around them. “You wanted to escape the party so badly you decided to come out and get drenched? I know Yao’s singing is terrible, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”
Eva shrugs. “Camaraderie helps the others do their job. Not so much me.”
“Why not?” He asks, genuine, painfully, aggravatingly earnest. “And what does that have to do with pulling your disappearing act?”
Eva looks down at her hands, folded over on the cold steel of the safety rail, and thinks about how she has asked everyone on the ship (and many more besides) to either give up their lives, or outright die, in service of the greater good. How they fear her, perhaps respect her, but inevitably resent her for the work that she signed up to do. She’d known from the moment that she agreed to lead the task force that it was one of the things she would have to sacrifice - connection, friendship, love. She couldn’t let that come in the way. She couldn’t run the risk of being torn between the wants of the one and the needs of the many.
(Life is just so fucking inconvenient.)
“Eva?” Ryland asks, softer, when she doesn’t respond; she can only just hear him over the torrent. “You said we could talk about it another time, back then. Months ago.”
I didn’t mean it, Eva doesn’t say. Instead, she replies, equally soft: “Yes.”
He faces her head-on. His blue eyes are blurry behind his water-stained glasses, but she can still read him clear as day. “Can’t we talk about it now?”
She pulls his raincoat tighter around her waist, looking at the deck, his shoes, the sea, anywhere but his face. “You cannot possibly believe this will end the way you want it to, Doctor Grace,” she says. “There is no - childish romance or contentment or happy ending on our cards. Especially not mine. Not when we need the project to come first.”
“Yes, I know.” His smile is sad but determined. “The project comes first.”
She wishes he really believed that, and she wishes she was better able to lock away her heart, deny her most human impulses, but the bitter truth is that they are what gave her the courage to sacrifice herself for the work, to willingly consign herself to an endless suffering so that eight billion people might be saved from it. It means that when he steps into her space and presses his mouth to hers, she doesn’t pull away. She lets Ryland Grace kiss her for the first time amidst pouring rain, like the worst, most ironic cliche in the world, and falls straight into the Hell of her own making.
four.
She spends their last night (before his life / her world ends) in his bed, like she has for weeks, a habit into which they fell far too easily. She’s called to a last-minute meeting at five in the morning, not having enough time to slip back to her own room and change. He lends her one of his shirts instead - a simple black top with a smiling brain cell sewn over the heart, the most acceptable option out of his absurd collection full of science pun-based designs. It’s mostly covered by her coat, which means no one can tell - no one but her, striding around the launch facility carrying that bit of him with her. It smells faintly like him, the scent of cedar and hints of citrus, that she’s become eminently familiar with from the hours she’s spent in his arms (and if that improves her mood that morning, nobody has to know).
She’s still wearing it when he meets her by the gate outside the Research Centre, holding two coffees in his hands. When he smiles at her and asks about her plans for the next twenty years, quietly confident that he’ll be a part of them, in some way or another. When the explosion shatters the fragile peace, the shockwave sending her stumbling; when he reaches out to grab her, instinctively shield her from the blast (the last time he gets to hold her before she forces him to go). When she looks at him crying in her office, begging for his life, for the future that he wanted so badly for them, and sends him out to die.
five.
She takes charge of packing his suitcase. She loads it with all of his items, and with a sparse handful of Polaroids Carl had taken of him in happier, more optimistic times. Carl watches her slip all of them inside before zipping it up and asks, cautious: “You’re not going to keep even one?”
“No.” She doesn’t have any pictures of her own, not of him alone nor of both of them together, and she knows it means that she’s going to start forgetting what he looks like, eventually - what he looked like smiling so softly at her, or sleeping peacefully by her side, or kissing her in the dim light of his bedroom when they allowed themselves that selfishness. She knows the last memory that will fade is of him face down in the grass, dying at her hand. It will haunt her until her last breath, and it will be exactly what she deserves.
Still human, though, and still weak in the worst of ways, she decides, on impulse, to keep one thing. She leaves his room with two filled suitcases and his black beanie tucked into her coat pocket. It’s common, unobtrusive enough that nobody will give it a second glance, or ask her questions about it that she won’t be able to answer. They’ll never know that it’s his, just like they’ll never know she killed him, that he went against his will, that he never wanted to be a hero, that he just wanted to be with her, and she made the choice for him.
She wears it everywhere for the next sixteen years. It features in all of the pictures they snap of her, splashed across newspapers, when they drag her into a kangaroo court to stand on trial for crimes against humanity. She bargains to keep it when they lock her in a jail cell (pays her prices to do so, all of which are worth it). She takes it with her when she escapes and makes it onto her icebreaker; it keeps her ears warm (her heart too, sometimes) on the cold, cold ocean.
She’s wearing it when they pick up the Hail Mary’s signal re-entering communicable space, sixteen years later.
She’s wearing it when she wakes up to the breaking news broadcast throughout the world, screaming hope and celebration and awe. Every single one focusing on the saviour of all of humanity, making it back, against all odds, to Earth.
She’s wearing it when he sends her a message that makes it way across continents, passed from person to proxy to platform until it falls straight into her hands on her ship - come and find me.
She’s wearing it when she meets him outside the abandoned shell of Grover Cleveland Middle, where she walked into (and changed, defined, ruined) his life, and sees him in the flesh for the first time in sixteen years. Alive, alive, alive. His smile is the same. She stands in front of him and waits for him to tell her that he remembered. That he hates her with all of his heart. Waits to see what penance he will demand for taking his life, what she will willingly give and give and give, even if (especially if) it kills her.
She’s wearing it when he wraps his arms around her and says, I missed you. I forgive you. I’m home.
plus one.
One cold night, Eva jolts awake from a nightmare - far too real, far too close to home. In it, he never came back. He did exactly as she imagined he would - found the solution, saved their star, and died, all alone, far, far away from the people for whom he gave his life. He died remembering the exact circumstances behind her betrayal, and he never forgave her for it. He never came back to her, and he died grateful that it was the case.
Eva inhales deep. She buries her face against his neck and breathes in cedar, citrus. She focuses on his arm around her waist, warm and strong; the thin cotton of his shirt rolling over her arms, her stomach; his still-too-big jacket pulled around her, a constant accompaniment when she sleeps; the ring he slid onto her finger two years ago, promising a future, however uncertain, stretching out further than the eye could see.
Just a dream, Eva tells herself, and rejoins her husband in peaceful, blessed sleep. The work continues when they wake, still so much to do - but then, they have already given up so much for others, after all. For just a few more hours - for once - they (their happiness, their contentment, their love) can come first.