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The fabric of her blouse itches. It was enough rare to see Eva Stratt out of a turtleneck for good reason, but the occasion had called for it. Galas and the like were anything but her style. If she could, she would do avoid attending them altogether, especially when they involved her doing nothing other than smiling politely at the other attendees.
Really, most formal events were a waste of time. They were meant for meaningless small talk with dignitaries and wealthy sponsors, then delivering or listening to a speech that could've been just as well shortened to a 15-minute video conference. If she were being honest, they were only ever a reason for rich people to pat themselves on the back for "saving the world". Their money was nothing without her to keep the project together, but still, she had to smile and nod and laugh at mediocre jokes to secure their funding.
Usually, she would at least bring Grace, if she had to go at all. But this time, she had attended alone, made it through the gala in one piece despite that, made it through the flight back, would make it to her room. She'd had the foresight to clear her calendar for the next eight hours, to allow herself a few hours of sleep, much more than her usual three to four. Granted, she didn't think she was getting any sleep at all if that horrible fabric wasn't coming off her skin anytime soon.
What had bothered her most of all was Grace's absence, though she hesitated to admit it. If she was attending, so was Grace, a noticeable pattern that did nothing to dispell the rumors, but he'd begged her for one day off months in advance to please, let him see his kids graduate. She had granted his wish, but cursed the inconvenient time slot their middle school graduation took up.
Seemingly, Grace had returned on time and was now approaching her, Ilyukhina in tow. She maintains her speed even with the two hurrying towards her. Anything to get out of the flickering fluorescent lights that feel like they will burn through her retinas any second now. As Grace comes closer, she can see that his brow is furrowed, and he looks hesitant to start this conversation with whatever bad news he bears— so she asks him directly.
"What seems to be the matter, Dr. Grace?" she questions, mentally preparing herself to focus on his voice when he inevitably struggles to spit it out. He fidgets with the sleeves of his fox cardigan, seemingly contemplating whether hiding behind Ilyukhina was a viable strategy.
"Uhm...so, there's been a bit of... an incident. One of the astrophage breeders malfunctioned, and well... we're behind schedule. Like, by 50 tons of astrophage, if we don't figure out how to fix it soon. We need to build more astrophage breeders, or we need to delay the launch." he forces out, stumbling over his words.
She stares at him, unblinking. Her heartbeat trips over itself.
"Look, I'm sorry, but it was out of our control."
"The.... the governments. They won't cooperate," she stutters. Fuck, since when did she stutter? The flickering lights of the room close in on her, obstructing her vision and doing nothing to help with the feeling of the blouse she still hadn't found the time to take off strangling her with its scratchy, cheap polyester fabric.
"We have a meeting with Morocco and Algeria in two days, they might be convinced to let us build some more astrophage farms. We've got this, okay?" Grace tries, putting a reassuring hand on her shoulder when he realizes she's overwhelmed. The searing, burning touch makes everything so much worse.
It's too much. Her vocal cords twist around each other and tie themselves up in complex knots, until all that escapes from her throat is a breathless wheeze, nothing even close to words in English or German or Dutch or any other language she speaks. She slaps away his hand. They're staring at her, both of them, with a disgusting amount of concern she can't bear any longer. They shouldn't be worrying about her, not right now, when there was so much at stake.
So, pathetically, she flees. She's never been a runner, has faced all her problems head-on, has debated numerous world governments and stood her ground. Now, without her words, without anything to defend herself with, she feels terribly vulnerable.
Stratt sprints past them and feels their eyes full of pity on her back, feels how they tear through the complex mask she had carefully maintained like it's made of wet paper, without even meaning to. She hurries past concerned onlookers, God, what must her team think? Even though she wants to rip her skin off more every second that passes, she takes a longer route to hide away from prying eyes.
She almost twists her ankle when one of the heels she'd forced herself into buckles and slips under her weight, but pushes onwards. She runs until she reaches her office, slams the door shut and hides under her desk, kicking off her shoes on the way there. She'd escaped the fluorescent lights, but everything else seemed to increase tenfold. It should be safe in her room, but it's not. Ilyukhina and Grace were no doubt looking for her, and she'd trapped herself in here.
Stratt claws at the buttons on her blouse, tries to tear open the fabric and scratches the skin around the collar with nails that are filed to entirely too-sharp points. Her ears are ringing, and she's torn between slamming her hands over them and getting rid of the grating overwhelm of noise all around her, or freeing her from the scratchy fabric. When a seam brushes her side, her decision is solidified in a moment, and she grabs the collar again.
The red nail polish she applies for the gala matches the blood that appears when she scratches too deep, and she growls in frustration when her eyes don't focus on the buttons through the tears, when her hands don't want to stop shaking and thread open the blouse. The white fabric is freckled with little dots of blood, but shows no signs of yielding to her struggle.
Her head bangs against the wall underneath her desk, once, twice, three times until the pain makes her dizzy in a way that stops her from feeling that awful, scratchy polyester. Stratt forces herself to cover her ears with her hands, keeping them away from her skin and anything they could scratch. She doesn't trust herself right now, and even on her head, they still painfully twist and pull at her hair to ground her.
The ringing in her ears quiets gradually. The overwhelming sounds are now muffled, the tick of her clock and the hum of her laptop charging and the whirr of her blessed American AC system. It doesn't block out the sound of her door slowly unlocking, though.
"Stratt? You in here?" Ilyukhina calls softly, like she's scared of frightening a scared animal further. Stratt looks up, and Ilyukhina meets her eyes with a gasp. The astronaut crosses the room in moments, settling down on the floor next to her in a crouch and reaching out towards her. Stratt fights the urge to shout at her to leave, but flinches back so hard her shoulder hits the side of her desk. As if her reputation wasn't ruined already.
"извини, sorry, sorry," Ilyukhina hastily exclaims, backing away a few inches. "I did not mean to frighten you." Stratt's hands have returned to picking at the collar of her blouse with renewed urgency. Damn them.
"You are hurting yourself, stop that! Let me help, yes?" she tries, slowly approaching Stratt and extending her hands towards her collar. She takes Stratt's hands in hers, waiting for her to release the death grip she had on the fabric, then sets them down to the side. Ilyukhina pops open the first blood-stained button within seconds, but she grumbles about it anyway. " Блять, the blood is making it slippery."
Russian comes much easier to Ilyukhina under pressure, and usually Stratt would have no problem understanding her in either language, but the fog in her brain makes it difficult. She feels like someone stuffed cotton in her head. In most situations, she could have hissed at anyone else to leave her alone and they would, but Ilyukhina wouldn't have listened even if she had the words to tell her to leave.
Stratt forces herself to stay calm while Ilyukhina opens her blouse, button by button, until she can rip it off her body and fling it away from her. She curls back into herself, a shaking mess with tear stains drying on her face and blood dripping down her chest. The door opens again, and Ilyukhina is quick to shush her when she tenses up.
"It's just Grace, don't worry. He checked your office first, we split up to find you. I'm sure you do not mind him seeing you without shirt, yes?"
No, she thinks, but doesn't dare look up at him, in the state both of them have seen her in, her shirt is the least of her concerns. At least she didn't have to rip off her bra, too.
Stratt opens her eyes to find him sitting cross-legged before her, and she feels her mascara sticking to her lashes as she blinks. It must have run down her tear-stained face as well.
"What happened?" he almost coos at her, and frustration bubbles in her chest. She wasn't one of his middle schoolers, damnit. But she wasn't ready to force words out of her throat and choke on them before they left her mouth, so she keeps quiet, fresh tears welling up in her eyes at the frustration, despite attempts to blink them back. Ilyukhina speaks up instead.
"She couldn't get her blouse open, so I helped. Calmed down a bit now."
Stratt's hands were fidgeting with her ring now, not tearing her skin open, but even so, "calm" was a gross overstatement, if her shaking body was any indication.
"Okay," he sighs, "okay. Stratt, can I touch you?"
She hesitates, before slowly nodding her head. He carefully wraps his arms around her, waiting for her to uncurl from her secure little ball and curl back up into his equally secure hold. It takes her a minute, but he's patient and waits for her.
"Oh come on, Да пошёл, she didn't let me do that!" Ilyukhina jokes. Stratt smiles, just a little, into Grace's chest as he pulls her up into his embrace and out from under the desk. He fishes his earth bean bag out from his pockets and presses it into her hands. It's warm, like him, but not burning like the lava he claims it to be.
" 'm gonna get blood on you," she mumbles, and he sighs.
"It's the fact you're bleeding at all that worries me. You can stain my "Chemistry puns are Na-mazing" shirt, don't worry about that."
"I'll get washcloth from your bathroom, Stratt?" Ilyukhina announces, asking for permission to enter silently. "Blood on you cannot be good, and your makeup is running." She's giving her a bit more time to calm down with Grace, and Stratt is grateful for it.
"So, what happened?" Grace asks again, and she hesitates.
"I don't know... I couldn't get out of the blouse— there's a reason I usually pass on formal events. Itchy fabric. Polyester." She doesn't have the energy to string together longer sentences.
"Meltdown, then? Can't say I haven't had them myself, especially recently...but eh, you probably have all my medical information and diagnoses anyway, somehow. Still, you scared us running off like that, and you scratched yourself pretty deep." he hums, drawing little circles on her back to soothe her further.
She tenses."I don't tend to. The fabric had been irritating me all day, and I couldn't open the button while I was already panicking. The news just... tipped me over the edge," she explains. "But I'm fine now." she insists, pushing herself up to sit down next to him.
Ilyukhina returns soon after, wielding a washcloth and a box of makeup wipes. Stratt is silent as she dabs away the drying blood carefully, and pointedly does not flinch at the feeling of a makeup wipe touching her face. Ilyukhina doesn't address it.
"Long day, huh? Well, you always have long days, but today you talk to the billionaires. Would make anyone lose their mind." she rambles, helping Stratt pull one of her turtlenecks over her head.
Stratt only hums in response. She spins the not-lava ball in her hand. God, was she losing all of the carefully crafted masking skills she possessed?
"Speaking of long days," Grace chimes in, "have you eaten or slept at all since I left?"
She shakes her head. "No time."
"Surely there was time for a sandwich somewhere? Or the food at the gala?" he protests.
"Unidentifiable appetizers, nothing that would have helped. And no, I don't have time to get my food from the cafeteria. You come to my office with food twice a day, do you not?" she argues back.
"Am I the only reason you haven't starved to death?"
"Precisely," she replies, and Grace throws his hands up in exasperation. He pulls a granola bar out of his jeans pocket and hands it to her, and Stratt takes it dutifully, contemplating how unfair men's pockets were. Earth ball, granola bar... she wouldn't be surprised if he fished the missing tons of astrophage out of his pocket next.
"Do you want to have dinner? I could bring you tray from the cafeteria." Ilyukhina offers, but chewing the granola bar is exhausting her already.
"No, I'm fine. I don't think I can stomach anything more right now," she admits, feeling a little queasy from eating after over a day without any food, save her two cups of black espresso.
"Ah, but you must go to sleep soon then, and have breakfast when you wake up!" Ilyukhina insists, and that deal sounds a little more bearable to Stratt. When had she started making deals about her health with her subordinates?
"I'll bring you something tomorrow, before our first meeting of the day. Any preference? Except for coffee, that is."
"Toast would be preferable, with butter."
"Aye-aye, captain!" he teases, and she pinches her brow.
"Anything else you two need...?"
"Take care of yourself, Stratt," he replies, his tone much more serious than when he had been joking around before. "We can leave you alone for now, you're probably exhausted, but please, don't let it get to this point if you can avoid it."
"Yes. Do not do this again. Ask us for help, and we will do our best." Ilyukhina scolds, turning back towards her from where she'd been approaching the door.
Instead of telling them off, Stratt nods. "I will."
Grace takes one last, lingering look at her, in what she now realizes is not sympathy but mutual understanding, before he steps out of the door as well. Stratt waits for it to close behind him before collapsing onto her bed and closing her eyes.