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Ryland Grace and Eva Stratt sat on the uppermost deck of the aircraft carrier. Access was strictly regulated, thus they could be assured of their privacy as they passed a blunt back and forth in silence, eyes on Tau Ceti. Strictly speaking, weed was forbidden on the vat. Unofficially speaking, that meant it was everywhere. Eva could have put a stop to it, but she had bigger things to worry about, and it was nice to have the option to seize it as contraband and make personal use of it on a rare free night. She didn’t have those at all until an older, wiser, and immeasurably weirder version of Dr. Grace came back and streamlined preparations enough that she could occasionally carve out a few hours for her own mental health. Before the time travel, having him as her second was the only reason she could sleep at all, so actually having the ability to carve out a rare few hours of personal time after everything he’d already done for her seemed too much to ask. But he didn’t bother to ask what she thought she deserved, he just gave her everything he could. So she was here on a free night, and she took another inhale of the blunt before passing it back to him.
He took it wordlessly, not breaking his vigil on the cosmos and the potentially-sleeping family he feared was all alone within it. They’d just had officer laundry day, which meant that he was once again wearing Ilyukhina’s favorite flowered dress that was really only nominally hers anymore. It was cold, so he also had on a crocheted fox beanie, his ubiquitous yellow raincoat, and a stolen pair of Eva’s own woolen hose to keep his legs warm. He tapped his battered converse against the deck as his fingers scrunched the flowers on the dress, a stim he only ever exercised on this particular piece of clothing. Eva could only assume that the fabric held in its threads a story that had both already come to pass and never would.
“I don’t understand why you don’t hate me,” she said bluntly, but Grace heard the slightest wobble, a little broken thing that he doubted anyone who didn’t speak a language of literal song would have picked up on. But for him it was as obvious as adding an A-sharp with the third voicebox to indicate conditional probability.
He thought for a moment, taking his turn with the blunt, now nearly down to the roach. “I don’t think I know how to hate. Maybe situations, like the people I love here and the people I love at home being 16 thousand lightyears apart, or the taumoeba breaking through the xenonite all those years ago. But when it comes to people, I’ve never managed to catalyze hatred into anger; it’s a reaction that’s foreign to me. It feels like hatred, sometimes; 🎵knows I had anger issues in my youth, even if I think the situation was often justified.” He didn’t seem to take note of the irony that he looked like he was in his youth; he could pass as a humanities graduate student in Portland in his current body and get-up. Eva didn’t point it out either, paying rapt attention to his words.
“I think my anger is like a dying star; it hits with the full force of a supernova for a while, and it’s all I can think about, and then suddenly it’s gone. It’s too unstable to hold on to forever. I couldn’t even hate my own father despite everything he did to me. I couldn’t hate the astrophage or the taumoeba because they were just trying to survive too, ya know? It’s not their fault that their survival was incompatible with ours. I have hated systems and I’ve hated situations, but it’s just too hard to hate people, and it’s too complicated when you think about what it took to get them to that point. Besides,” and here he gave her a crooked half-smile, “I never needed to hate anyone once I met Rocky. He held all my grudges for me. A lot of my Eridian family did. All it took was a minor inconvenience that barely bothered me and suddenly it was like ‘Adrien hate biodome light engineers who misplaced stars in Orion’s belt. Rocky hate hate hate human film The Notebook for making Grace cry. Dr. House abhor hate hate hate abhor human male parent for marring Grace’s thorax with cured animal-skin pant tighten strip’. Honestly, when they had to take out my appendix, I think half the medical team had a conniption over the cognitive dissonance of whether they should hate the thing for trying to kill me or if that would be too close to hating part of me.” The memory seemed to amuse him even though it was surely tied up in a trauma so personal that Eva felt she was intruding just by listening.
He took out a half-empty, folded-over pack of skittles from one of his raincoat pockets and offered her one. Eva took it but didn’t eat it, instead rolling it between her fingers, the artificial dye leaving streaks of purple over the whorls and ridges of her fingerprints.
“But you love life, and living. Surely you would hate the person who took that from you?” she pressed him, squishing the candy as she felt the blood recede from her fingertips due to the pressure.
“I love living, and I’m still scared to die, but I’ve done it once and I realized that there are some things even scarier than death. Losing people when I could have saved them is one of them. The first time, there were no people that I could have saved in time by going; 26 years would have been all or at least a significant portion of the lives of anyone I wanted to save. There was no face to the nameless billions. I wanted to do what I could on Earth to ease the pressure on the people I cared about in the meantime. And I was scared and there just wasn’t enough time. I didn’t think I could do it, either. I thought I’d be dying for nothing and wasting our Hail Mary on top of it. But that was 3 decades ago. I know better now.” His shoulders squared a little with the confidence he hadn’t learned on Earth. Nobody could or would build him up here. The Eridians, however, were literally and figuratively built differently, and they’d slowly, patiently, and meticulously infused confidence into every crevice of his squishy, porous body.
“I would have done it again; I had plans to do it again. The me I am now, too. The one that killed you and the one sitting here talking to you; we’re not different,” Eva confessed, the emotion bringing out her accent and softening the consonants at the end of each word.
“Eva, you were never the executioner, you were just the axe,” he told her, throwing an arm over her shoulder and ignoring how her breath hitched just slightly. He wondered how, for all her wisdom, she had never realized this. Or had maybe chosen to ignore it in the name of self-flagellation. It was all very Catholic of her. “And what a terrible thing to have to be.”
“It is,” she admitted, almost inaudibly.
“I know.” He reached for her hand. “I wish you’d forgive yourself for making the decisions that someone had to. I also wish you were coma-resistant; I’d pack you in my duffel and bring you along so you didn’t have to deal with all the idiots after launch.”
“Someone has to be the scapegoat, and I can’t let it be anyone else on my team. Everyone’s here because of me. I won’t let them face the consequences because of me.”
“You’re insane if you think I’m letting Earth put you in a jail cell once I’m gone, statement,” he told her firmly, Eridian grammar leaking into his English the way it tended to these days when he felt emotional. “Don’t you dare plead guilty for any of it, command. In fact, I’m leaving a video for launch day saying that if anyone even thinks about arresting you, I’m gonna turn the flipping ship around and let Ily loose on the Hague.”
“Dr. Grace,” Stratt admonished, but her lips were quirking up at the corners ever so slightly.
“I’m serious,” he told her. “Actually, I want a notarized document from every world government ever saying that they won’t prosecute you now or into the future for any actions that you took during the project or else I’m not sending the Beatles! You made me the commander, I can totally do that,” he told her, grinning incorrigibly. “You gotta promise me you won’t let them put you in jail.”
“You are insufferable,” she groaned.
“I know I’m still getting used to English again, but that didn’t sound anything like ‘I promise, Grace.’”
“I can’t just promise that; it’s not up to me.”
“Not even if it’s my last earthly wish?” He made pleading eyes at her, and she shoved him away from their cuddle but didn’t remove his arm from around her shoulder.
“I will push you into the ocean.”
“I’m a very good swimmer; it might even be refreshing- ow,” he suddenly interjected. “Did you just bite my hand?” he untangled the fingers of said extremity from her own, examining what was, indeed, a bite mark. “What the fridge was in that weed?”
“Nothing unusual,” she murmured, burying her face in his neck. “You were just being an idiot.”
“You just bit me on the hand, what makes you think I want you anywhere near my neck right now, you freaky little vampire?” he asked her, but made no move to push her off.
“Don’t worry, if I wanted to stack the deck on Shapiro and DuBois’s betting pool for ‘when the Director finally leaves a visible hickey on Grace during sexual congress,’ I’d just pinch you.”
“Wait, who has ‘money’ on that?” he asked into her hair, tapping her shoulder to imitate the air quotes she couldn’t see with her face hidden in the curve of his neck. ‘Money’ on the Vat usually meant candy, cigarettes, alcohol, or, in one memorable case, Reddell being forced to dab every time someone spoke Mandarin (Grace’s idea. Yao helped by making sure to use much less English than usual that day).
“Lokken bets never; she’s still hoping to woo you,” Eva replied, starting to feel quite sleepy.
“Oh no way am I letting her win that one. I’ll wear a turtleneck tomorrow, will that be enough?”
“You know the answer to that,” she told him, readjusting and bringing her left hand up to the crook of his shoulder.
“Ow, you have claws like an Eridian, woman!”
______
Grace’s t-shirts didn’t show his collarbones very well, so he borrowed one of Eva’s blouses to make his ‘hickey’ stand out in stark relief. DuBois and Shapiro were looking at their pile of sugary winnings with an expression that suggested they were going to get kinky with them later and simultaneously ruining MnMs for him forever.
“Okay, so what’s the real story?” Ilyukhina asked, as soon as it was just the three of them prepping for zero-g training in the buoyancy pool.
“Eva’s mean fingers and insider trading. Wait, is it insider trading if it's just a betting pool?” Grace wondered.
“I don’t care what we call it; I’m so in on it. Let’s figure out how to get me more vodka,” Olesya replied.
_________
“Let me get this straight,” Stratt told the pilot, who was standing at attention in her office as though he hadn’t just made an utterly ridiculous request in lieu of making more productive use of his time. “You, who have yet to use and/or abuse the absurd ‘last earthly wish’ emotional manipulation tactic initiated by Ilyukhina, have now decided to do so for the first time. And what you are requesting is three t-shirts that contain the phrase “I’m getting shot into space and all I got was this lousy t-shirt?” in English, Russian, and Chinese?”
“Tie-dye t-shirts, but yes director, that is correct. Is that going to be an issue?” he asked her mildly, not breaking his military stance.
The director sighed deeply and prinched the bridge of her nose. “Not a problem at all,” she muttered through clenched teeth, already pulling up the tab for the store she’d used to order those ridiculous baseball caps Grace had insisted on.
___________
“Am I still the first person to have my appendix removed on an alien planet if you’re technically removing it now?” Grace asked as Stratt and Lamai led him to med-bay. Yao and Ilyukhina, experienced space-farers that they were, had already long-since parted with the extraneous organ, but they were still following behind, unwilling to abandon their captain. Carl, as both the head of his security detail and his friend, was not far behind.
“It’s all very Шаткое-валкое время-шремя,” Olesya said, making a so-so motion with her hand. Grace, who was quite familiar with the Russian dub of the Tenth Doctor’s seasons at this point, since it was Ilyukhina’s favorite thing to watch on Friday nights and she was good at claiming the TV in the officer’s lounge/bar for her own wishes, was quite familiar with what her native language’s version of ‘wibbly-wobbly timey wimey’ sounded like.
“The last time, your appendix was removed by an Eridian named after Earth’s most famous TV example of ‘should have lost his medical license years ago’,” Eva remarked dryly.
“Hey, don’t insult Dr. House! I named them because they are a brilliant diagnostician- they are actually very sweet and much less blunt than is typical for Eridians,” Grace protested, pouting.
“Ah, of course. My apologies,” Eva murmured. She was quite sure that this was the least of what Eridians- at least in the first timeline- would have hated her for, but she did her best to sound contrite nonetheless.
“As your friend, I can’t do the surgery myself, but I’ll be monitoring you when you come out of it. Doctors are used to people saying strange things while sedated, but I think it might freak even them out if you start speaking Eridian or something,” Lamai informed him.
“Fair deal. I mean, I can’t actually speak proper Eridian without my keyboard, but I’ve been told that I do speak simplified baby Eridian when I’m really out of it,” he replied.
“Simplified baby Eridian?” Carl asked.
“Yeah. So, baby Eridians usually can’t use more than two voice boxes at a time until they’re about ten Earth-years old, so they have simplified phrases and expressions to convey basic needs. I only have one voice box, but I managed to cobble something together. It’s a very simplistic system, really just a pidgin for the most basic needs in case I didn’t have my keyboard with me and there was an emergency and I didn’t have anyone nearby who understood spoken English. Most Eridians had learned it after the first couple of years, but it stuck around as sort of a comfort thing. Honestly, after a while it was more instinctual to use than English, since I stopped really thinking in English after the first decade on Erid. I mean, I’d still use it occasionally, if we were thrumming about something on the Earth-think machine, er… laptop,” he corrected himself when they looked at him in bemusement. “And the pebbles in my class loved Bill Nye and Hank Green videos, so I got some exposure, but it wasn’t like, a day-to-day thing. If it weren’t for the fact that I used it to watch movies before they started dubbing them in Eridian, and that the linguistics thrums had such an interest in talking with me about it, I probably would have had a way harder time adjusting back to using it. As it was, it was weird, but I managed not to code-switch out-loud. Of course, you still figured it out anyway…”
Eva hummed. It’s not easy to forget your first language as an adult, but if you’re not using it every day, it can definitely take a while to adjust back into native-like rhythm and syntax. Even now, she was aware that her German, on the rare occasions she got to use it, was a bit ‘stiff’ and ‘anglicized.’ It would only take a few days of immersion to return to normal, but that was after only a couple of years. Two decades would surely have a more marked effect. No wonder Grace had been far less talkative than usual the first week or so after he ‘came back.’
“Trust me, your linguistic oddities were the least glaring time-travel flag,” she informed him.
He wanted to argue that he wasn’t that obvious, but they had come to a highly unlikely conclusion remarkably quickly based on his behavior alone, so he didn’t really have a claw to stand on.
_________
As he warned them, he did start chirping, whistling, and clucking at them when he came round. He made an insistent little melody that none of them recognized while reaching out and making grabby hands, but with the four fingers on each hand clumped together in pairs, making a three-fingered ‘claw’ along with his thumb.
“Olesya?” Lamai turned to the Engineer, who along with Yao hadn’t left his side. Stratt had a meeting she couldn’t put off, so it was just the four of them. “You spend a lot of time asking him to teach you words on that keyboard of his- any idea what this one means?”
“He’s teaching me Rocky’s dialect of Eridian. I don’t know his little chirpy baby language.” She shrugged apologetically.
“He probably wants water,” Yao pointed out reasonably. “That’s what I wanted most after coming round from the procedure.”
Dr Lamai procured a glass of water and the chirping got more excited, a little single-note trill as he reached for the glass. Lamai helped him drink it.
The brush of human hands against his own seemed to make him a little more lucid. But instead of English, when he pushed away the half-empty glass, he came out with “Достаточно, спасибо.” Olesya snorted.
“Well, that was unexpected.”
“Well, you’ve been teaching him Russian,” Lamai pointed out. “You’d be surprised how many people come out of sedation speaking a foreign language, even if they don’t actually know that much of it. I’ve heard many sick and injured backpackers and tourists butchering basic Thai before I transitioned from surgery to research.”
“No tie,” Dr. Grace mumbled, finally in English. “No suit, Eavie. Grace hate hate hate suit.”
“You do not need to wear a suit, Doctor Grace,” Yao assured him. The man smiled brilliantly up at him from the hospital bed.
“How are you feeling, Grace?” Carl asked, but didn’t leave his corner of the room. It was the only place he could accurately assess all angles and weak points, security-wise.
“Carrrllllll!” Grace cheered, wiggling happily and then grunting as the movement caused a pain in his side. Dr. Lamai gently shushed him and rearranged the pillows. “You were right- I did do great!”
Carl’s smile faltered a little bit. “When is he, exactly?” He asked Dr. Lamai.
“It’s hard to say,” she sighed. “I’ve never done post-op care for a time-traveller before.”
“That you know of,” Ilyukhina corrected, ever the conspiracy theorist. Lamai refused to dignify that with a response.
“Rocky Grace save stars!” Grace continued, oblivious. “Predator amoeba off to Earth in Beatles!” He gave weak jazz hands before wincing again.
“Rocky do open-heart surgery on Grace, question?” He asked. “Grace trust Rocky, but thought was for emergency, statement. Beriberi that bad already, question? How long till Erid, question? Grace really try try try no leave Rocky alone, afraid to fail.” His lip wobbled.
“I hate this,” Ilyukhina muttered. “I really, really hate this.” She leant down to Grace. “Gracie, Лисёнок, you are on Earth,” she told him softly. “Rocky is waiting for you in the stars. You’re safe. We just took out your appendix so it wouldn’t cause any problems in space.”
“Yes Rekha, there’s a lot more information about Curie’s life in the appendix of your textbook,” Grace answered with a non-sequitor, tears temporarily forgotten. “Unfortunatley, the lesson today has to focus mainly on radiation and not the history of Madame Curie’s life, but she’s a fascinating person and I’m happy to give you extra credit if you’d like to do a short report about it.”
Yao reeled from his shift from the early ‘Hail Mary accent’ back into structured ‘teacher English'. The human brain was such a fascinating thing, and he had a feeling that if there was a visual map of the current electrical signals in Dr. Grace’s confused, post-anesthesia brain, it would look like a ping-pong ball being tossed around a wind tunnel.
“If we broke him, Stratt going to kill us,” Ilyukhina said, working her lower lip between her teeth.
“The doctors, maybe, but not us,” Yao assured her. “Also, Stratt was already going to kill us, after a manner of speaking. The only reason it’s not a suicide mission anymore is because of Dr. Grace and the Eridians.”
“Potato tomato; I’m now very attached to my life and would like to not have ended by scary German woman who’s mad that we broke her scientist,” Olesya huffed.
“Why am I killing you this time?” Eva asked, eyes glued to her tablet as she entered the medbay. “And does it fall under reasons that I could justify with my diplomatic immunity? I don’t particularly care either way, but Dr. Grace would be rather upset if I were to be sent to jail.” Her voice was dry and humorless, but Grace clearly thought the joke was funny regardless, because he started laughing and then clutched his side.
“Eavie’s no good at killing people,” he told them proudly, as if it were imparting some deep wisdom. “She’s too nice- didn’t even finish the job with me.” Eva visibly flinched back, and he frowned.
“What, noooooo, don’t be sad, command,” he whined. “It’s funny, get it? Cuz I’m not dead?”
She pasted on a sardonic smile for his sake. “Ah yes, you are the height of comedy,” she told him.
“Are you sad because there’s something you’re not good at?” he asked her, cocking his head. “Because I’m sure you could be good at murder if you really tried.”
“My perfectionist tendencies are not the problem here,” she replied, “but I appreciate your encouragement.”
“You don’t even need to do murder- you’ve got Carl,” Grace continued, currently medically incapable of picking up on her sarcasm. Carl gave a thumbs up. Grace returned it with a thumbs down and a bright smile.
“The world’s foremost molecular biologist, everyone,” Yao declared, gesturing to the medical bed.
“Hey, do you guys wanna hear a joke?” he asked them.
“Do we?” Ilyukhina asked dubiously.
“Yeah, totally- just bring me my keyboard. It doesn’t make sense in English.”
“Gracie, we don’t speak Eridian,” the engineer reminded him. He frowned at her.
“Pffft, skill issue,” he mumbled, blowing a raspberry.
Middle school insults should not be so effective coming from a grown man. Ilyukhina decided to double her efforts with Eridianskiy regardless.