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The moment she turns away after the Soyuz launches, he is there.
He is right there, two paces behind her, where he always is, staring right at her.
She walks past him and he follows, silent as a ghost.
She is taken to court, naturally, and Ryland Grace sits on the defense table that she sits at and peers at the notes she's taken of her charges out of boredom. She's going to be imprisoned no matter what, but she might as well know what she's in for, even if some of them are ridiculous.
Defending herself is a pointless endeavor so she doesn't even try, but Dr. Grace mutters incessantly over the dubiousness of some of the crimes anyway.
"And what's this one— trespassing, that's ridiculous! They gave you the ship! And what's with this super biased judge? Can't we object to like, half of this?"
'You studied biology, not law,' she thinks at him, and he rolls his eyes and scoffs.
"I might as well have, after all those legal dramas Annie had us watching in the break room."
'Oh? Were you slacking off during work, Doctor?'
"Not during work," he says, scandalized. "We watched after hours, of course, and sometimes during lunch breaks. We knew how to kick back and relax, unlike you."
It's dangerous, she nearly rolls her eyes in the middle of the courtroom.
"I don't think you've set foot in that room a single time since it was built," he goes on. "Do you even know what's in there? Because the amount of alcohol we accumulated in the back cabinets was insane."
Of course she knows what's in there, she'd bought everything inside.
Still, she lets him ramble on, if only because he is more interesting than the prosecutors sending her to a cell.
"Oh," he remembers, "but there is this one charge…" His finger hovers over her papers, not really touching them. "Here! Third degree murder. Victims include Dr. Martin DuBois, Dr. Annie Shapiro, and fourteen research center staff. They could've included first degree too, don't you think?" he says casually. "For what you did to me."
She doesn't pay attention to the rest of the proceedings. Just lets his gaze rest heavily on her, full of blame.
"This is your sacrifice to make, remember?" he taunts her, even as she's coughing up water from having her head dunked into a bucket. She's kneeling, hands restrained behind her back, but she can still hear his voice above her.
The world is getting colder, and she is soaked to her bones.
"Is it cold, Stratt? I'm cold, too. I'm cold all the time, now."
Someone pushes her head down again. She sputters and tries not to breathe.
"It was your sacrifice to make," she can still hear his voice as clear as day. It's all just in her head, after all. "But it wasn't mine. I didn't choose to be sacrificed. I made my choice, and you didn't respect it," he spits, all venom.
'No, you didn't choose,' she thinks. 'I did.'
"I wasn't for you to sacrifice!" he shouts, louder than she's ever heard him. No— he was this loud when he asked for astrophage. He was this loud when he asked to not let him die.
'And the world wasn't for me to deface either, nor was the atmosphere for me to tarnish, but that didn't stop me, did it?' she thinks derisively. 'Who do you think I am?'
"You're a murderer," he says simply. "You're my murderer, and one day, I'll make you pay."
'I already am.'
"Hey, hey, Stratt. Don't you think it's crazy that you've been preparing me as the tertiary science specialist all this time? It's like you were jinxing it to happen! You sure you didn't plan for DuBois and Shapiro to die, just so you could send me to space? I wouldn't put it past you," he derides.
"You're a ghost," she whispers at the air. Her captors may think she is crazy by now, if they are monitoring her. She doesn't think they are, but she also doesn't care. "You're a ghost."
Dr. Grace raises an eyebrow at her. "Does that mean you think I'm dead? I'm supposed to have a few more years, aren't I?"
She swallows. She doesn't think he's dead, but— "The coma technology may have been faulty. Your conditions were not necessarily safe. Anything could have happened."
He sighs, all mocking disappointment. "Weren't you always one for hope? What happened to you?"
Life happened to me. Hope died when I sent it off to space.
He squats in front of her to make eye contact where she's kneeling on the ground. "Let's say I'm dead, then. Then you still killed me, Stratt. You murdered me," he reminds her, then smiles, grim, ugly, and horrible. "You're murdering me, Stratt," he mocks her. "You're murdering me. You're murdering me."
She hangs her head and listens to his voice, emotionless and unfeeling, until someone yanks on her chains and rattles her from sleep.
A needle pierces the skin of her neck, again and again, and there is nothing careful about it. She is held down and restrained and forced to endure the pain with nothing to dull it.
'Say something,' she thinks, looking for a distraction. 'Anything at all.'
"Hmm, but what if I don't? I might just stay quiet and watch you suffer, for once. Why should I do what you tell me to, anyway? It's not like you listened to me when I asked for help."
He says that, but she knows he'll keep talking. He doesn't know how to shut up.
The white hot pain sears through her veins. It's all she can do to keep from screaming from it.
"You're going through this, but at least you're alive. At least you're awake to experience anything at all," he rants. "And what about me? What do I get? A few months in space, father away from home than anyone's ever been, with no way back? Heroin, nitrogen gas, or a gun?"
He laughs, and the sound of it sears into her brain, crueler than the tattoo.
"What do I get, Stratt?"
He is mostly cruel, but not always. Not as much as she deserves.
When she's being dragged around half-conscious by this prison guard or that, she'll sometimes hear him growling at them to "let go of her" or "stop messing with her head!"
But that's just her imagination.
Sometimes he wants her to hurt more, sometimes he wants her to hurt less, but it's all the same to her because he's not really there.
Someone injects her with something again, and she falls asleep to his screams.
She's flown somewhere new and put in a cell, another of many; another cold and empty.
She's been laced with… something. Her mind is muddled and strange.
"—hey, Stratt? Hello? Can you hear me?"
If she didn't know better, she'd almost think him concerned.
"Heh, drugged and thrown in a cell, huh? Nostalgic, don't you think? Remember a few weeks ago when you did that to me?"
She really can't tell if he's being mean or not.
"Hey, if you don't say something, I'm going to start thinking you're ignoring me," he jokes nervously. "Hey."
It's funny, everything else that was said to her over the past week or so on drugs was near incomprehensible to her, expect for him.
(She is loopy enough to forget that he is imaginary. She is mad enough to think he is real.)
'Dr. Grace,' she thinks.
"Oh thank God, you're okay."
'Does this look okay to you? Nevermind. Please inform Ilyukhina that the drugs we provided her are better than this. I was not nearly so bad at ensuring the quality of goods."
He scoffs. "Did you forget? I won't remember anything when I wake up. You made sure of that."
Oh, that's right. She did forget. Her bad.
She thunks her head against the frame of the bed and sighs. She is out of it enough that it doesn't hurt, though it's hard enough that it'll bruise later. She's on the floor, still, because the people who threw her in here didn't have the courtesy of lying her on the bed.
She can barely move.
"Stratt, I'm bored. Don't tell me this is what it's gonna be like for the next thirteen years? I'm so bored."
'It's only been a few weeks, maybe.'
"Exactly."
Wait. 'Why thirteen years?' She'll be in here for the rest of her life, probably. She even has a tattoo to show for it.
He looks at her like she's stupid. She's not, but she feels like it. Drugs.
"Because I'll be dead."
She closes her eyes against the nausea that brings and tries to breathe through it, even though she can't even feel her face.
"Did you forget that, too?"
No, she didn't forget. She didn't forget, but she didn't care for the reminder either.
She feels sick enough just existing.
She wonders why the hallucination in her mind has a time limit. He'll haunt her for the rest of her life, she's sure. Whether he's dead or alive in space won't change that. He's been dead to her since she put him on that ship, after all.
"I wonder if it'll be cold, death," he murmurs, more to himself than her. "I'm already cold, Stratt. I'm always cold."
She doesn't think she was on the drugs for long, but the withdrawal still hurts.
Dr. Grace is even more upset about it than she is, which is confusing because she still can't tell if he wants her to suffer or not.
"Stratt," he sighs, "Food's here. Eat. Your body won't recover if you don't."
'What do you care? I would've thought you preferred me dead.'
"I don't want anyone dead, most of all myself," he says, matter of fact. "I just want to curse you out, mostly."
'Do it, then.'
"It's not satisfying when you're agreeing to it," he complains. "Besides," he turns sheepish. "I try not to curse. Middle schoolers, and all."
Yeah, she knows. His go-to curses even aboard the aircraft carrier were darn it and what the fudge.
'Try it,' she invites. It should be entertaining, at least.
"Darn you."
'You can do better than that.'
The looks he gives her is somewhere between a glare and a pout. "Damn you, Stratt."
'Good work.'
She never thought she'd spend her prison days teaching hallucination Ryland Grace how to curse, but here they are.
"Hey, are you okay?!"
He worries over her as she crumples on the ground trying to leave the bed. She is still dizzy and in pain, but it doesn't matter.
What's more concerning is the weakened state of her body. She doesn't have enough nutrients or exercise here. She's been shipped from place to place the last few weeks, barely mobile and irregularly fed. The floor space of her cell not taken up by the bed is maybe three paces wide. She may soon atrophy here, if she is not careful.
"Here let me—"
He tries to grab her arm to haul her up, but his hand slips through nothingness.
"Ah, darn, forgot about that—"
'How does a hallucination forget that he doesn't exist?'
"Must be the fault of the hallucinator, then."
Touché.
He's becoming too real to her. It might be a problem.
They go through many years like that, unmoving and unchanging.
She speaks to no one else, but he is her constant companion.
It's almost laughable. She doesn't even know when or where it is— she lost track of time and place in those first few months, somewhere between the torture and the drugging and Grace screaming in her head— but she knows him and his face.
There are blankets in her cell, scratchy and uncomfortable, but thick enough to keep out the cold. She is not starved either. These are signs. She cannot be on the outside alive, but she is much too valuable to be dead. So she is kept suspended like this, without books or TV to know about the outside world, and without human contact so she cannot influence anyone to her bidding.
The world gets colder and colder, and the weather wherever she is is sometimes strange. She sits through torrential rains and bone-chilling blizzards within the confines of her cell. She can only hope that somewhere in the world, Leclerc is still fighting to keep the temperature stable; that her people are still fighting to keep the Earth alive.
And for a decade or so, Dr. Grace oscillates between being her right hand man and her murder victim.
Of course, those things are not mutually exclusive, and it's not like he ever forgets that he is both. Still, he seems to pick and choose when he decides to be cruel, and what times he will set it aside in favor of prattling more inane trivia.
Sometimes, she feels like one of his students, being subjected to a winding, babbling lecture about the atmospheric makeup of each planet in the solar system and it's ability to sustain of life. Another time, he talks about the evolutionary theories he has about astrophage and lifeforms on Earth. Nearly every other day, he has a science history fun fact.
For being a figment of her imagination, she didn't even know she knew half the things he was saying. Then again, it could all be made up. She wouldn't put it past her brain to come up with things he might say, just for the sake of hearing him say them.
"Stratt," he says. "What would you be doing, do you think, if it wasn't for this." He gestures widely at the space around them.
'Prison?'
"No, Astrophage. The Sun dying. The world going to shit."
She's proud of him. He can curse now. Her own bad influence, she imagines.
'Language,' she chides anyway, for the sake of it.
"Your fault," he pouts. "You and your ship of scientists and all the swearing you get up to onboard corrupted me. Now answer the question."
She has to think about it a little. She threw away many plans for herself to lead the Petrova Taskforce. She flushed many viable pathways down the drain to be where she is now. That was many years ago and she was a different person then, before saving the world became her life's cause.
'I don't know,' is a terrible answer, but a true one. 'I'd still be with the ESA, maybe. I worked there for a long time; maybe I'd have stuck it out. If I wanted something different with my life, I always thought I'd like to become a museum director.' She shrugs. It doesn't matter, now.
"Huh." He stares at her stunned, maybe a little slack-jawed. "That… suits you, actually. I could totally see it." He chuckles. "Gives Director Stratt a whole other angle."
She rolls her eyes. If he was real, she would have elbowed him in the ribs.
As it is, she just lets him spin hypotheticals around her life's what ifs and tries not to think about how if it wasn't for this, he would still be teaching, and alive.
"I think I'll have a hard time getting used to the team dynamics when I wake up," he muses. "I mean, Yao and Ilyukhina are great, obviously, but I won't remember them," he gesticulates. "And no offense, but Yao is the most serious and most quiet person I've ever met, aside from DuBois, and Ilyukhina is the loudest and craziest person I've met, aside from Hatch. I can just imagine it now— absolute chaos."
'It doesn't help that you're basically a rambling mad scientist, I imagine,' she thinks dryly. And for Grace to have that impression on a ship full of the best scientists in the world, that was saying something. 'Should make for an interesting combination, to say the least.'
"Mad scientist?! I'm literally just a middle school teacher."
'You're the world expert on astrophage biology. You spent nearly ninety hours a week holed up in your lab. I received numerous reports from your team of assistants that you'd neglect to eat and sleep in favor of your research. You're a mad scientist among mad scientists.'
"I literally don't want to hear any of that from you and your eight coffees a day," he scoffs.
'I will be glad when you do not have to remember all the coffee we drank, at least. Remember the week we sent the final ship blueprints to be built?'
Grace groans loudly. "Christ, that was awful. Yeah, I'd rather not remember that one, thanks."
She hums in agreement.
(Even without the coffee, she finds it hard to sleep.
When she lays in bed, him on the floor looking up at the sky, she remembers the last time she saw him— the real him— in his own cell, one she put him in, turning away from her in bed and saying, “Whatever lets you sleep at night.”)
"Hey, tell me more about your French amnesia drugs. What's recovery like? Is remembering painful?"
'It shouldn't be. The things around you will become triggers for you to remember things slowly. You'll regain most of your memory within weeks.'
"Within weeks, huh…" He looks her dead in the eye, face indecipherable. "Y'know, I think you'll be one of the first things I remember."
His anger never wanes, but it's like there's only so much time he can stay mad, being together all the time as they are.
If Eva really thinks about it, it might be because there's only so much recollection she can conjure of his anger when so many of her memories of him are of him being otherwise. When so many memories are of him being childish, and silly, and serious, and sincere.
He was mad at her a lot, sure, in a surface-level, lighthearted way. She pissed him off a lot. Still, he was never really angry at her except for at the very beginning, and at the very end.
"Look outside, Stratt." She doesn't. "It stopped raining, finally. We should enjoy the sky while it lasts."
'Go ahead, then.'
Her thoughts, her emotions, and her self of self have scabbed over a long time ago. She is in no state to enjoy anything. Least of all the sky.
Hasn't she looked up at enough skies in her lifetime?
"Wait!" He cranes his neck for a better view. "Is that a rainbow? Seriously? I don't think I've seen one from here before; this is the first time. It's beautiful!" He whistles, low. "Holy moly, Stratt, you should see it. This is what you get for not looking up. You miss all the good things."
He stares a bit longer at the sky in a daze, before he frowns.
"'Holy moly'?" he repeats. "Wow, 1950s much? Why do I talk like that? I'm not that old," he jokes.
She rolls her eyes. 'The perils of being a teacher,' she drones in her head. 'Believe me, it was a shock to all of us that you couldn't curse.'
His face shifts. He looks very, very confused. "I was a teacher?"
She blinks. 'Yes, of course you were.'
"Huh," he says, and looks like he can't believe it. "That's what I was doing before the project?"
'Yes?' She can't tell which of them is more bewildered. 'What else would you have been doing?'
"Huh," he says again. It's one of the weirdest interactions she's had with her hallucination since she imagined him into existence.
He frowns deeper, thinking hard. "How did we meet again?"
She blinks rapidly, out of her depth. Has no clue why the hallucination doesn't know, when she remembers it perfectly well.
'Am I going mad?' she thinks. 'Finally? Is that why you're being like this?'
He shrugs. "Maybe. But hey, you've been crazy since like, forever in my book. As far back as I can remember. Which— seriously, when did we meet? I don't even know why I was on the damn ship. It's not like I had some brilliant new breakthrough like Lokken or Bob. Hey, how'd I even become an astrophage specialist, anyway?"
Yeah, she's gone mad.
She must have.
Very quickly, he starts to forget things. What he did for work was just the start. By the end of the week, he's half confused as to who Lokken even is, despite having regularly complained about her opinions on the panspermia theory nearly every other week before (yes, for the entire past decade; he was very obstinate about it). He doesn't recall her opinions on it anymore. He doesn't recall much.
He doesn't tell stories about his students or his university days anymore; he doesn't remember them. On a whim, she throws out the name of the scientist he insulted so badly he was kicked out of academia for it and Grace just asks, "Who?"
Weirdest of all, he starts to refer to himself in her mind and himself on the ship as separate entities.
She tries not to think about what that might mean about her own mental state; how it correlates to her increasing nightmares, her mind bracing herself for how it's probably been around thirteen years now, even though she doesn't know the exact date to be sure.
"What do you think he'll do when he remembers you killed him?" Grace asks. "Are you sure he won't sabotage the mission? He's not as good a person as you seem to think he is."
'He won't. He's just good enough not to.'
Grace sighs. "So much faith in a coward," he comments.
'I would rather have faith in a coward than in a fool. And Dr. Grace is no fool.'
"Dr. Grace is one of the pettiest people you know; are you sure about that?"
'Fairly.'
"You're setting yourself up for disaster, believing in him like this."
'I have to believe in him. If I don't, then there'd be no point of sending him out there.'
"Which you shouldn't have done, by the way," he tries to sway her, as he always does. "You should have let him stay on Earth and sent someone else. Maybe then, you wouldn't be so alone all the time."
She isn't alone. She has him.
"Anyway, let's enjoy his amnesia while it lasts, yeah? Because it won't. And when it ends, he'll hate you just as much as I do."
Somewhat unlikely. He'd have to hate her as much as she hates herself.
"But for now, I remember," he taunts. "I remember you killing us. There's no drug that will change that. You can make him forget, but not me."
"What did you do that was so bad you ended up here so long anyway?" he complains, because he forgot that, too.
He doesn't remember the Sahara or Antarctica. Good. He shouldn't have to.
'Abuse of power,' she responds.
He snorts. "How fitting. Yeah, I can see how that'd check out. Did you put other people in cells regularly too, or was that just me?"
'… Just you. I took more scientists out of prison, actually, to make then work for me.'
He whistles, somewhere between sardonic and impressed. "Crazy that you were able to do that. Who gave you so much power anyway?"
The same people who put her in here. 'You don't want to know.'
"So what if I was a coward?" He paces mindlessly, fruitlessly, in the little space her cell has. "Did it make my life worth less than anyone else's? Did being the best fit for the job mean that I wasn't allowed a choice? Was I sent to the gallows for the petty crime of being the most qualified?"
By now he's forgotten all positive memories.
Sometimes, he is just personality, a man she doesn't know, who doesn't know her.
What is a person but their memories, anyway?
It's this, Grace's soul, unfiltered.
He only has bad memories now. Memories of the explosion, of the cells, of being condemned to death.
He only remembers her as someone he hates.
"Who am I?"
He scrambles around fruitlessly, trapped, unable to get out. He's stuck here with her. He's stuck in her mind.
"Where am I? Why am I here?"
He stands on the bed to unsuccessfully reach his hand out of the high, barred window. When that gets him nowhere, he starts tracing invisible equations on the wall with his finger, calculating the absurd physics and logistics of any form of escape, before realizing that he can't touch anything, can't move anything, can't interact with anything, and screams in frustration. He exists outside of physics. He exists within her head. And yet, he can't get out.
"It's just another cell!" he laughs hysterically. "Another cell with no escape. I'm trapped. I'm trapped here waiting for death. I'm trapped here with no one but—"
He whirls around, turning on her.
"You. It's your fault. You're the reason for everything," he hisses. "It's your fault, it's your fault, it's your fault, it's your fault, it's—"
There was nothing I made you do that I wouldn't have done myself, she despairs, not for him to hear, just to herself. I would have gone if I could. If I thought there would be anything to be gained from that. But I didn't have the gene. I didn't have the gene.
And so she lets him blame her for everything, knowing that deep down, this is her way of blaming herself.
He remembers nearly nothing now. He is a personality without knowledge. Still, he cannot forget the way he died. He will not forget that she is his murderer.
It is a memory he holds onto with a grip of vicious steel. And he never fails to remind her.
"I hate you." He sits, arms wrapped around his knees tucked to his chest, against the wall. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you." He doesn't even remember her anymore, but he remembers this.
He doesn't remember who she is, he doesn't even remember himself. But still, he remembers she killed him.
"You had me held down like a dog," he says, vicious and cruel. "Caged me and drugged me, like I was yours to own and toss away. Did you ever think of me, Stratt? Did you ever think I'd haunt you like this?"
She did. She knew from the moment she chose him to go that he'd haunt her for the rest of her life.
"This is Hell! I'm in here, and he's up there, and we're both in different versions of Hell." He laughs, deranged and insane with it. "Are you in Hell too, yet? Are you here too, Stratt?"
Yes. Thirteen years in prison isn't Hell, but this vision of him now is.
He grins, wicked and sharp. "Am I Hell, Stratt?"
Yes.
"Good."
God, she prays for his soul; the only time she is selfish enough to pray for one person instead of the world. If You are still looking out for the real him, the real Grace, please do not let him meet me again. Free him from the cruelties I inflicted upon him. Free him from the stain of my existence.
She once told him that he was going to Tau Ceti and Hell was coming to Earth. She can only hope that beyond death as well, Ryland Grace will be granted a spot in Heaven, far away from where she will be.
"Oh, that's how we met," he whispers, so, so quietly, one day, after weeks of this insanity.
He's looking up, towards the stars that she has not seen in years. They're right there, outside her barred window, but she refuses to look.
"It's time," he says. Because she doesn't know the date, she thinks he means, it's time for them to wake up. It's time for them to begin their mission.
Maybe he means it's time for them to die. Maybe their mission is over. Maybe the beetles are on their way back. Maybe they've failed.
Instead he says, "It's time for me to go."
Her blood goes cold.
'What?'
Her head snaps up, moving quicker than she has in a long time to look at him. He's not there, of course, he's just in her head. But…
Her heart drops.
For a moment, he's more real than her memories can conjure, looking out the window towards the sky.
She'd forgotten some parts of him, she realizes. His hair was not that neat, and his eyes not so ocean blue. But he's here now, a little disheveled, a little more grounded, exactly as he was. And then, he's looking right at her.
"He's remembering," the ghost tells her. "He's remembering everything now."
He's looking at her, and she can't tell if he's condemning her or memorizing her face, like this, hollow and pallid. If maybe he's just memorizing her.
"He's going to remember you, and what you did, and he's going to know you. Will know what you've done. And guess what's the worst part?" He grins, cruel and mocking and just the slightest bit sad. "He's going to love you anyway. Just as I have this whole time."
She takes a breath and feels like she's dying.
It's not real, it's just her imagination, it's not real, he's not real.
Still, the line of his mouth, not quite a smile, is unbelievably tender when he looks at her. She's never seen this face on him, of that she is certain. She's never seen this him in her life.
It's just her imagination.
"I'll miss you," he says. "But I'm going to remember you now. I'll remember who you are, and so will he."
'No, wait—' she reaches her hand out for him, even though she knows she cannot touch.
"Goodbye, Eva Stratt. I condemn you to remember me."
In the next blink he is gone, and she would weep the thought that she'll never see him again outside her dreams, if not for the fact that she lost her ability to cry over a decade ago when she gave up her humanity to save it.
In the shadow where he was, there might be a beam of rainbow, but she is not looking, so she cannot know for sure.
(It needs no condemnation. She'll remember him for the rest of her life.)
She's counting down the days until she can meet him again.
Even though she knows she is not going to where he is.