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The first time it had happened they had been standing next to each other on the flight deck. Enjoying a short moment of comfortable silence.
The last few days had been particularly challenging for both of them. Filled with uncompromising, thick-headed politicians on her part and one unsatisfactory experiment result after another on his.
He had just made one of his painfully dry science jokes. She didn’t even have the energy to reward it with a polite smile.
But now he was grinning at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he tilted his head to the side, giving her an expectant look. As though he were waiting for her to shake her head in that familiar show of incredulous fondness.
She found herself staring into his eyes for just a second longer than she usually allowed herself to.
Anyone else wouldn’t have wasted a second thought on something so insignificant.
But she wasn’t anyone else.
To her, even small moments like this one felt like the filthiest form of self-indulgence.
Like failure.
Had she not spent months doing everything in her power to keep her distance from the people around her? Building walls upon walls of professional detachment?
Had she not reminded herself, time and time again, that getting close to anyone connected to this project was quite possibly the most dangerous and selfish thing she could do?
And yet here she stood, simply unable to tear her eyes away from this frustratingly captivating man.
The last rays of the setting sun shimmering in the blue of his eyes like sunlight on lapping waves.
In another, gentler life, meeting him might have turned her toward creation instead of destruction.
“Wenn du mich so ansiehst, erinnern mich deine Augen irgendwie immer ans Meer”
A beat of silence passes between them.
He blinks at her, his grin slowly fading, replaced by a confused furrow of his brows.
“Uh, what?” he asks, blinking once. Like he had missed a step in the conversation.
But she’s already turned away from him, her attention drawn out to the endless sea.
As if facing the waves was easier than facing him.
“I said the sea is very calm today” she replied smoothly, eyes briefly flicking back to his.
“Quite pretty wouldn’t you agree Dr. Grace?”
———————————————————————
Ryland Grace knew that he was by no means a stupid man. He had a doctorate to prove it after all.
But being American, with English as his native language, one that most people often seemingly defaulted to anyway, had made him rather lazy about learning other languages.
Besides, biology had always been far more interesting to him.
So what if he could only speak English? It wasn’t like that had ever been a big issue in the past. Even when his life had still been centered around academic discourse instead of a middle school teaching room. Back then others had usually tended to just switch to English as well.
But nowadays he was surrounded by people who casually spoke at least two languages, if not more. It didn’t necessarily make him feel stupid. Just a bit out of his depth sometimes.
Like right now.
Hearing Stratt speak another language besides English wasn’t anything new to him. Not by a long shot. He’d sat through way too many boring meetings to be even remotely fazed by her switching between languages like someone flipping through TV channels.
But he could probably count on one hand how often he had heard her speak her native tongue. Aside from exchanges with German speaking delegations, she almost seemed to avoid it.
It was something he had noticed fairly early on.
He had the somewhat annoying habit of having to occasionally talk to himself out loud to make sense of things. Growing up, he had often been judged and ridiculed by his peers for it, as if it were something abnormally odd.
Academia, as it turned out, was far more forgiving about that sort of thing. Apparently, it even qualified as normal behavior among scientists.
So it had come as a bit of a surprise to him that even someone as level-headed as Eva Stratt was apparently not immune to occasionally voicing her thoughts out loud in order to organize them.
Granted, that usually only happened when she was carrying three cups of coffee instead of her usual two, and when the bags under her eyes were even darker than usual.
What surprised him even more, however, was that she didn’t seem to talk to herself in her native language at all.
It had confused him at first, but after a while he just mentally filed it under "Stratt being Stratt".
Apart from talking to herself only in English, she also seemed to make it a point to solely use English in general. Whenever he was around at least.
Whether it was done to include him in conversations or simply to build common ground among the crew, he didn’t know. But he also didn’t care much. It just meant he could always follow along in conversations and never felt left out.
So hearing her speak her mother tongue in front of him, when she normally used it so rarely, was simply not something he was used to.
It always always struck him as strangely interesting though
He had never really thought of German as a particularly beautiful language to be honest. But then again, he didn’t think much of any language. They were just tools to him, means to an end really. Not this kind of grand artistic thing other people often tended to make them out to be.
But every single time he heard her speak German it was different somehow. And he couldn’t help but wish she would do it more often.
Did that make him a hypocrite? Maybe. But he didn’t care.
Her voice changed whenever she slipped into German. It got softer somehow.
More than once he found himself pausing without really meaning to, just listening.
Getting lost in the way her voice almost gently wrapped around words he didn’t understand. And each time it left him with a frustrating urge to actually know what she was saying.
So he decided to do something about it.
………………………………………………………………….
The next time it happened, they were in his little makeshift lab.
She had entered under the pretense of informing him about an upcoming meeting that would require his input.
An email would have done the job just as sufficient. Plus it certainly wouldn’t have cost her the precious minutes it had taken to walk here.
But the truth of the matter was that she simply liked being here. Or maybe she just liked being around him.
His presence having an oddly calming effect on her. A realization she had no intention to inspect any closer at the moment. Or ever, if she could help it.
After entering, their eyes met briefly and she immediately caught the silent question in his expression.
It wasn’t exactly unusual for her to come down to his lab. Not anymore, at least.
Still, it happened just rarely enough for him to look mildly surprised every time she did.
She quickly raised a hand, silently asking him to give her a moment. She tapped away at her tablet, approving documents and sending off drafted emails before finally looking up at him again.
But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Evidently, he had decided the best use of his time was spinning on his chair in slow circles while staring at the ceiling and munching on his candy.
She tilted her head slightly to the left as she took him in, only to stiffen a moment later as she noticed the motion.
Because it wasn’t hers. It was his.
Some time ago, she had begrudgingly realized that he had the unfortunate habit of reminding her of a confused baby owl. Especially whenever he tried to make sense of something he didn’t understand. Tilting his head from side to side as if the movement itself might somehow help him make sense of things.
It was something so distinctly him that she even noticed when others began mirroring this specific mannerism after spending enough time around him. His habits seemed to spread to those around him with prolonged exposure. He had that effect on people quite frequently, whether he realized it or not.
But for some reason, she had apparently foolishly thought herself immune to the workings of human connection.
After all, why wouldn’t she? It had always been that way in the past. People simply didn’t reach her in that way. She had never been someone who particularly sought out the company of others.
Even during her ESA days, she had mostly kept to herself.
Of course, back then, no one had accused her of being a cold, heartless, robotic dictator for it.
Instead, she had just been met with polite smiles that didn’t quite reach the eyes of the people they belonged to and hushed comments about her country’s people simply being “like that.”
Of course, Eva knew what they meant by that. It didn’t make it any less nonsensical to her.
It wasn’t as if she exactly hated camaraderie either. But where others seemed to draw strength from being in the company of one another, she had always felt as though it was simply one more task on the endless to-do list that was her life
So it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone, least of all herself, that this hadn’t changed over the years. Not even on an aircraft carrier. A place where everyone inevitably had nowhere to turn but to each other.
But as she looked at the man who had somehow wormed his way into her thoughts more often than she was willing to admit, she thought, just for a moment, that she might start to understand why others enjoyed being in each other’s presence without there needing to be a specific reason for it.
It was different somehow. With him, it always was.
She straightened her back, shaking her head as if she could physically rid her mind of the thought.
She was about to clear her throat when he swiveled in his chair again, still staring at the ceiling. The fluorescent light caught in the blonde strands of his hair
“Ob seine Haare wirklich so weich sind wie sie aussehen?”
The words slipped from her lips before she could stop them. Her traitorous brain had clearly classified them as too small, too harmless to even register as something she needed to restrain.
———————————————————————
The sudden break of the familiar silence between them made him drop the Skittles that had been halfway on their journey to his mouth. Sending them scattering across the floor instead.
“Huh?” he asked dumbly, watching as a few of them bounced off his shirt and landed on the floor with soft clicks.
Stratt followed their descent as well. Tracking the hideously bright-colored candies, the corner of her mouth lifted ever so slightly. And as he looked up again to meet her eyes, he could have sworn there was a bemused glint in her usually detached gaze.
In the meantime his mind had practically done laps around a field. Desperately trying to remember his vocab session from the previous nights.
“I said, you know you aren’t supposed to eat in here” she said at last, meeting his eyes.
He blinked at her. "No way" he thought to himself. Struggling to keep his face from splitting into a huge grin and betraying how both surprised and oddly pleased he felt at being proven right.
Because while he had initially decided to start learning German to just be able to understand her, he had actually ended up noticing something a few weeks ago. And ever the scientist, naturally ended up forming a hypothesis.
Night after night he had sat hunched over his dictionary like a man trying to crack classified government codes.
Trying to piece together the words from every moment he had caught Stratt muttering something under her breath. Or at least the ones he actually remembered, which, truth be told, usually weren’t many. And after a while, he started to notice a pattern.
Her translations for him rarely matched what she was actually saying.
Granted, his vocabulary was still embarrassingly limited. Blame his already severely limited free time for that.
Sometimes he was lucky if he even caught as much as a single word in the moment itself.
So he had started writing down whatever fragments he did manage to catch. Like field data collection. Strictly post-exposure only of course. Always waiting until she had left.
The thought of her potentially noticing, or worse, finding his little notebook, was one he kept a firm lid on.
But for now, he felt like he had just discovered water on Mars. His hypothesis had just been proven correct.
Because while he might not have understood everything Stratt had actually said, he was about 70% sure it definitely hadn’t been about him eating in the lab.
"Oh… sorry" Ryland said lamely, barely managing to suppress a triumphant grin.
He had definitely heard the word "Haare" and that didn’t seem like a word one would use while complaining about eating in a lab.
Probably.
He was fairly certain it meant “hair.”
Or did it have another meaning he just couldn’t remember?
He would definitely have to look that up later, he thought to himself. He suddenly realized that she was looking at him expectantly.
“Sorry, what?” he asked with a sheepish smile, trying for what he hoped looked like an apologetic expression. He was pretty sure he had just missed a question while he had been busy musing over German words for hair.
Stratt sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“When you’re done with your head being in the clouds, rejoin the rest of us. The French delegation arrives in two hours.”
………………………………………………………………….
Another time it happened was when he was sitting in the mess.
It was late at night, and he was more frustrated with his progress than ever. Lately, it felt like his learning curve had been flattened by an elephant sitting on it. Barely understanding what Stratt muttered under her breath, and by the time he went to look the words up later, half of them were already gone from his memory anyway.
On one of his admittedly very scarce shore visits, he had even bought a smaller Dictionary. Pocket-sized, so he could pull it out whenever he needed a word. All in an attempt to find a quicker way to translate the words he did actually manage to catch.
But lately, it felt like a lost cause.
He had always learned things better when he could connect them to other things. That was probably why science had always made so much sense to him. Nothing really just happened. Or at least, rarely. Usually, for a specific outcome to occur, a whole chain of things had to line up in a very specific order.
For others, his thoughts might always seem like a mess. Jumbled together and extremely disorganized. But to him, they had always been connected, clear as day. Built from interlinking and overlapping facts and criteria alike.
Language, though, worked on an entirely different system. One he had never really bothered to understand before.
He’d started learning German the only way that ever made sense to him. By connecting patterns, building links, treating it like a system to be decoded.
It worked for science. It didn’t work for this.
Language didn’t care about systems like science did. It slipped through the gaps no matter how tightly he tried to hold them together.
After enough nights of frustration, he had to accept that his approach didn’t work. The methods that worked everywhere else in his life simply didn’t apply here. No matter how he tried to force it.
He was failing and he knew it.
That realization had driven him out of his room and into the mess hall in the middle of the night. As if distance alone could get rid of the suffocating feeling of failure that seemed to permanently linger in his room these days.
He had ended up on one of the uncomfortably hard benches. His head buried in his crossed arms on the table. His face pressed firmly into them, like he could physically shut the world out if he just stayed still enough. He tried to clear his mind of it all. But every German word he had picked up over the past weeks kept surfacing anyway. Stubborn and unwanted, as if his brain had decided to replay them out of pure spite.
Suddenly, the image of a very specific shade of red popped into his mind.
“Rot” he mumbled to himself absentmindedly, but quickly shook his head with a displeased frown.
Red was too broad, too imprecise. The color he was thinking of belonged somewhere between warm summer fields and freshly picked strawberries.
“Strawberries… what’s the word for that again?” he mumbled to himself, sitting up.
He uncrossed his arms and pulled out the small dictionary from his pocket, quickly thumbing through the pages.
“Ah. Erdbeeren” he thought to himself tiredly.
Stifling a yawn, he placed the dictionary in front of him and reached for the notebook in his other pocket. Somewhere along the way, he had started not only write down the words she said, but also any new words he learned.
“Dr. Grace”
His eyes widened and he scrambled for the dictionary in front of him, suddenly very much awake.
His trembling fingers bumped its edge, sending it flying to the floor.
It landed with a loud thud. Great.
Out of options and terrified of her catching a glimpse of it, he felt like had no choice but to kick it under the desk.
Stratt watched his struggle as she approached the desk without much expression. Her gaze simply following the frantic sequence of movements with an unimpressed look. She came to a halt at the table and leaned against it, arms crossed.
“I hope that isn’t how you treat the equipment I get for you?” she comments dryly and is met with a nervous laugh.
“What? No! No…I just-. Uhm” he stammered, as his brain helpfully presented him with two options: pretend the dictionary under the table didn’t exist, or make everything worse by diving under it in full view of Stratt.
“What was that anyway?” she asked, already moving to peer under the table.
“Nothing!” Ryland yelped, immediately choosing option two. The bench scraped across the metal floor with an unholy noise as he dove under it, followed by a sharp groan when his knees made contact with the floor at full speed.
He gritted his teeth and shoved the dictionary into his pocket.
He started to emerge from under the Table again, only to promptly hit the back of his head against its edge hard.
Apparently, the situation could get worse and he seemed determined to prove it with every passing second. Good to know.
“Fudge!” he muttered, rubbing the back of his head as he stood up more slowly this time.
Just then he heard an odd sound and snapped his head toward where Stratt was standing.
“Are you laughing?!” he asked, incredulous.
She was looking at him with an expression he had only ever seen a handful of times. Eyes bright in a way he had definitely not been meant to see. Her hand covered her mouth, though the flash of her teeth still betrayed her.
She tried to compose herself, dropping her hand and returning to her usual stoic expression. It lasted about a second. A snort slipped out, and she covered her mouth again just as quickly.
“Ich glaube ich kenne niemanden, der so niedlich aussieht während er sich bis auf alle knochen blamiert,” she said, shaking her head while still chuckling to herself. It sounded almost fond to him.
His ears were burning, but he forced himself to meet her bemused gaze with a glare. One that was far less convincing than he intended it to be.
“Okay, seriously, could you stop doing that?”
That’s it, he was done. She’d spoken too fast again. Not a single word had registered. How was he supposed to look anything up if he couldn’t even hear it? And why did she keep doing that anyway?
He huffed, the frustration he felt plain to see on his face. Stratt tilted her head.
“Whatever do you mean, Dr. Grace?” she asked, perfectly neutral again.
Ryland exhaled sharply and dragged a hand down his face before gesturing wildly.
“You keep talking to me in German, and I never know what you’re saying.”
For a moment, something lit up in her eyes. But it was gone again before he could even try to place it.
………………………………………………………………….
A few months had passed since that night in the mess hall.
He’d eventually stopped wallowing in self pity and just forced himself to keep going. No other alternative, really.
Much to his bruised ego’s dismay, it had worked too. His German had improved a lot. His sleep schedule, however, had not survived the process. And apparently, someone had noticed. Or rather, someone very specific.
“Dr. Grace, you need to sleep.”
She didn’t even look up from her tablet as she walked into his lab. Her tone so flat it bordered on absurd. It was an incredibly Stratt thing to do. Expressing concern with all the emotional warmth one would have while delivering a maintenance report. He briefly considered introducing his forehead to the nearest wall just to see if that would earn a visible emotional response from her.
Probably not.
She ruled with an Iron Fist.
Demanding impossible levels of output from everyone around her.
Precision. Efficiency. Perfection.
At all times with no exceptions.
Every deadline met, every report delivered, every problem solved immediately.
Like failure simply wasn’t an acceptable variable in her equation.
And somehow, it still appeared to genuinely surprise her when people subjected to those expectations began to visibly deteriorate beneath them.
But pressured perfection came at a cost.
Usually, that cost was sleep.
And on particularly bad days, he suspected it was his sanity as well.
“Yeah, well, you want results, don’t you?” he bites out, the sharpness in his tone unusual even to his own ears.
He decided to blame it on the horrifyingly small amount of sleep he’d managed to get over the past few weeks.
Between spending endless hours trapped in the lab and additionally frying his already overworked brain trying to make sense of an entirely different language, he had started to find himself running dangerously low on patience.
Sometimes he genuinely questioned why he was even doing this to himself.
What was the point?
But then he’d make some stupid science joke, and for the briefest moment her usual detached expression would fade away slowly. Replaced by something impossibly gentle as she looked at him.
Somehow, that always ended up being reason enough.
Right now though, that familiar detached expression of hers was actively contributing to his loss of sanity.
Especially since she didn’t look the least bit taken aback by his rather uncharacteristic outburst.
Of course not. It was Eva Stratt standing in front of him after all. The most powerful person in the world right now. The woman even politicians cowered before behind closed doors.
If anything, she looked more impassive than before, as if his entire emotional escalation had been filed under “irrelevant.”
Then, after a moment, she simply raised an eyebrow.
“I’d rather have a well-rested scientist than an emotional liability whose work is riddled with mistakes. Especially when said mistakes are solely brought on by an inability to take proper care of oneself” she stated simply.
Something about the measured tone in which she delivered the blow only managed to irritate his sleep deprived brain even further.
“Oh, like you’re one to talk?” he snapped back before he could stop himself. An unfamiliar defensiveness creeping in.
He was holed up in this lab for hours on end, staring at the same damn calculations, papers, and walls day after day.
So sue him if the idea of robotic perfection she demanded of herself, and therefore expected from everyone else, had dared to waver.
Even for just a few seconds, even a little, even once.
She didn’t back down from his steely tone though.
Of course she didn’t.
After all, it wasn’t as if this was simply one of his kids who’d forgotten his homework.
This was the head of the Project meant to save the entire world.
The woman who had high-ranking officials from nations across the world bending to her calculated will.
And if he was being honest with himself, that probably made her the closest thing to a de facto leader of the whole planet right now.
So obviously she didn’t even acknowledge the edge in his voice. Instead, she only met his glare with that unblinking stare he had come to recognize so well.
“Du siehst aus, als hätte man dich durch einen Fleischwolf gedreht.”
He snorted at her remark and rubbed his eyes. God, his head was killing him.
“Geez, thanks. You really know how to flatter a guy” he grumbled sarcastically, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes until pressure bloomed behind them. Trying to ease his splitting headache, but it only made it throb harder.
Just what he needed, the woman he’d been quietly crushing on for months basically telling him he looked like death warmed up.
He froze. His stomach dropped.
Fuck.
He wasn’t supposed to know that.
Or rather, from her perspective, he wasn’t supposed to understand her at all.
Except he did. After all that was kind of the whole point of it all. The endless studying, the late nights, the repetition until words stopped being just noise and started meaning something.
But she wasn’t supposed to know that.
Well… she was. Someday. Just not like this. Not like this.
Not.like.this.
In his head, it had always been different. Something that unfolded properly instead of just happening. Something that meant something when it happened.
A hundred versions of it. None of them like this.
He had a sudden, in his opinion very reasonable, urge to slam his head into the metal table hard enough to knock himself out. If his sleep-deprived brain wanted to mess with him like that what was stopping him from returning the favor?
It would, at the very least, save him from the conversation that was about to happen.
Yeah, right. As if there was any way out of this one.
He took a steadying breath, dragged his hands from his eyes and lifted his head.
Under any other circumstance, the sight that greeted him would have made him laugh.
Eva Stratt, the most powerful woman on the planet.
The woman who didn’t flinch, didn’t bend, didn’t lose control.
Everything and everyone around her always adjusting to her.
Not the other way around.
Never the other way around.
The woman who always had a sharp, immediate comeback for anything.
Untouchable. Uncompromising. Unyielding.
Right now that very same woman just stood there. Wide eyed. Mouth slightly open. Looking like she was one step away from running.