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Sometimes Stratt misses the old Ryland Grace, and then feels immediately guilty for doing so, because she was the one that had killed him. Is it even fair to miss your murder victim? Is anything about this fair?
It’s not as though she dislikes Ryland now- rather, she loves him with all the ferocity that a drowning woman feels for a life float. Nothing could or would ever change that. It’s just that, well…
Conventional wisdom suggests that people change completely every decade or so, that they reinvent themselves without meaning to. It’s natural for one’s consciousness to be a ship of Theseus even as the hardware stays the same. It’s perfectly normal even under the most mundane and ubiquitous of life’s circumstances. As for Dr. Captain Ryland Grace… his circumstances certainly hadn’t been mundane in any sense of the word. He’d been shipped off to space against his will and clung desperately to survival even as he risked his life at what sounded like every other minute (a conservative estimate).
He had once been her caution at the end of the world, the one she trusted to weigh every possibility and consider every angle when she herself had eyes only for the end goal. The bravery that even then was so instinctual to him in the face of an explosion or a gunshot was largely masked by his preference for the steadfast practicality of ‘retreat and strategize.’ His tendency towards being a human shield for the ones in front of him had, in all the time she’d known him before, simply not been given the chance to manifest, and she was grateful because his caution balanced her own ruthless march forward.
Now he was… essentially, he’d looked the end of the world in its big red eyes and survived despite it all. There’s no way a person emerges from that without some sort of transformation. The inevitable eventuality of it simply didn’t scare him the way it used to, and thus he was Changed. Looming hunger wasn’t as frightening for someone who’d already starved, who’d not only seen but personally experienced the worst and thus was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he’d survived it once and at least would be prepared if it happened again.
He was still Dr. Ryland Grace at the core of him: his kindness, his desire to protect, his need to learn and teach and share the things he loved. But there were decades and light years between the man she had first come to love and the man she loved now, and it ached sometimes.
Once upon a time, his very predictability had anchored her. She’d known the meaning of every twitch, every stim, every movement both voluntary and involuntary. She knew and understood him better than almost any of the languages she spoke. Even the way he occasionally surprised her was predictable. He was the familiarity of smelling her mother’s shampoo or her father’s cologne and the ink of his newspaper and being transported back to a time when things felt safe and when the world was steady.
He’d returned the favor; he’d Known her like she’d Known him. He could never read anybody else, could never make sense of the needlessly complicated and arbitrary rules of human interaction that seemed so innate to most of the world. He couldn’t recognize most faces if they changed their haircuts, and he could be stuck in a room with someone for five hours and unless their eye color was ‘brown’, he’d be wrong if he was asked because he didn’t pick up on details like that and he always favored statistics. But somehow, he was the only person in the world that truly saw her. And she’d seen him too, and not in the way that she understood most people- by memorizing human behavioral patterns and interactions and following the manual she’d mentally written and memorized. She’d seen him without trying, like he was the dying sun and she was the desperate Earth that orbited him.
She… she was still the same, and he was different. And she could make sense of him in some ways but not in others. The man she loved Before and the man she’d killed After, forged in fire and pieced back together with seams that were aligned ever so slightly off. It was a beautiful sort of mend, like kitsungi. But when she looked at the seam of gold where he’d welded the best parts of his old self to the hero he’d become (even if the man himself would deny it), it became impossible to fool herself into thinking that she hadn’t lost the version of the best friend she’d known literally overnight and with no warning. She reached for her Old Understanding of him and it was like a reflection in a pond- she could still touch him and it was mostly the same, but it just made the Ripples all the more disorienting.
It made it all the worse that he still Understood her. He not only Saw her but Heard her like the music he now spoke. She knew he didn’t truly have an Eridian’s level of hearing, and that even if his had adapted to be far better than the average human’s, he was still limited by his own biology. That knowledge didn’t stop the eerie feeling that he could still sense her heartbeat somehow, or that her very soul was exposed to him and that he could tune in and feel it the same way he felt the thrumming of his people in the home he’d made without her.
She didn’t deserve to feel this way. She knew it; she understood it- hell, she agreed with it. But she couldn’t change the reality of it. If Ryland Grace- someone who saw all of her in the way nobody else ever had- saw someone worth caring for but not enough to be worth staying for, then what did that say about her?
Well, she supposed that it said that she was the type of person who had, once upon a time and not yet and also, in a strictly linear sense, never, had looked at Ryland Grace and seen someone worth caring for but not enough to be worth saving.
Jail would have been easier, but this was probably what she deserved.
_______
Grace tossed his handmade Earth hacky sack up in the air with the arm that wasn’t in a sling, deep in thought.
“Eavie’s been…” he yearned for his keyboard; English didn’t have the word he was looking for. There were plenty of Eridian words for what he had been seeing in Stratt lately; one that meant erosion, but emotional. Another that described the sense that your carapace was as strong as ever but your thrumming was out of tune; that the way the resonance strummed within your body had changed when it shouldn’t have. A third to describe the feeling that landmarks weren’t in the right place but you knew it wasn’t the mountain itself that had moved, but your own sense of emotional direction, some soul-sickness that was leeching into your physical reality and distorting that which should be familiar.
“Weird,” he finally sighed.
“You’re not asking for my opinion,” Carl observed, fingering his own hacky sack that he kept in his suit pocket. Grace planned to make matching ones for everyone; Carl’s was the only one he’d actually finished before getting shot in the shoulder a month ago.
“I always value your opinion,” Grace corrected.
“Value, sure,” Carl agreed. “But you’re not asking. You already know, and I’m sure you already know why.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he muttered, slumping down in his chair for a moment before reaching out a grabby hand for Carl to pull him up. “But she wasn’t wrong, the first time around, when she called me a coward. I hate these conversations.”
“She called you a coward?” Carl asked tightly. He’d heard Grace refer to himself as a coward quite a few times, and he hated it (not least because he sort of wished the man was a little bit of a coward, if it meant it kept him safe). He had a feeling he now knew where the idea came from.
Grace cringed at the realization that, whoops, apparently that wasn’t common knowledge. He sometimes forgot what his friends knew and what they didn’t. In retrospect, it makes sense that he wouldn’t have mentioned that before; Eva felt bad enough about the whole thing as it was. But in his defence, he’d thought that it was obvious. He’d been a coward that day; sometimes he still was.
Bravery was a choice he was great at making now when lives were on the line, but when it came to smaller stuff, sometimes it was a choice he still procrastinated as long as he could. Largely because he wasn’t exactly the best at talking to humans about emotionally charged topics anymore. He hadn’t been good at it when he was still fully human, and now that he was culturally Eridian, where his bluntness was valued and normal? Well, he was definitely afraid to put his claw in his food-waste hole at the idea of trying to help Eva Stratt of all people work through her feelings.
“It was the worst day of both of our lives, Carl, and it didn’t end up working out half as well for her as it did for me. Don’t bring it up,” he ordered, uncharacteristically serious.
“Grace…”
“I’m serious, Carl. Besides, do you think she really said anything that day that I hadn’t heard before?”
“That’s even worse,” Carl protested. “You do see how that’s worse, right?”
“Hearing it from your boss is worse than hearing it from your dad? I don’t think so. It’s not like she was beating me while she said it,” Grace huffed.
“Hearing it from your friend who was telling you to die seems like it would at least be a tie.” Carl glared at him.
“I swear to Turing Carl, I’m serious. Don’t bring it up. She’s struggling enough.” Grace clicked several times in frustration, tapping his fingers against his skirt.
“I just don’t like that she thought that about you,” Carl grumbled. “It’s bad enough that you think that about yourself.”
“Well, she certainly wasn’t the person who planted the idea in my head, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Grace replied. “And thought crimes aren’t real. I know you better than to ask you to let it go, but don’t let it affect how you talk to her. She has enough on her shoulders. Now come on, I’m gonna bring her some coffee and annoy her until she’s mean and scary again.”
______
Eva looked up to see Ryland with two coffees, one in his right hand and one in the crook of his right elbow. Carl stood guard outside the door as he shut it.
“Your shadow is actually allowing you to put a physical barrier between the two of you,” she said wryly. “Am I about to be murdered, and he just wants to make sure there’s no witnesses?”
“You really did miss your calling by not going into stand-up,” the man replied, putting the coffees on her desk. “Hey, can you pass me the lemon bar I hid in your bottom desk drawer yesterday?”
“You hid a lemon bar in my desk drawer yesterday?” she asked, creasing her eyebrows.
“Yes, and you’ve just confirmed my hypothesis that you’re in a funk by not knowing about that already,” he answered, taking the sweet and removing the plastic wrap with his teeth and his working hand. “So what’s up?”
“The dying sun,” she snapped. “Which means I don’t have time for your Mr. Rogers bullshit.”
“You know, I introduced the Eridians to Mr. Rogers,” Grace continued, ignoring the flare of her temper. “They really liked the show. He really inspired the pebbles to be their best selves.”
Eva’s fingers hit the keyboard with slightly more force than necessary as she replied to another email, and Ryland cocked his head knowingly at her, the bastard.
“Ok, yep,” he sighed. Eva wondered if he knew he was making his ‘teacher face’, like she was a student’s homework problem that was not quite right. The face that said, it’s okay, we can fix this, don’t worry.
“My old-man wisdom was right,” he continued. “Wise but not wizened- time travel’s great stuff. For me, at least. And that’s kinda the problem, isn’t it?”
Eva blinked at him.
“I know, I’m insightful now- crazy, right? I mean, not always. Not often, actually. But with you, I usually am.” He finished the lemon bar and stole a sip of her coffee.
“Could you please get to the point, Dr. Grace?”
“When Rocky and I got to Erid originally, he cannibalized his old xenonite ball to make a form-fitting suit. And it was great- we could hug properly. But I still cried when I realized that the ball was gone. Now, part of it was me being extremely malnourished and thus even more of an emotional leaky space blob than usual, but part of it was the fact that even though things were better with the suit, they were still different. The xenonite was the same, and the form of it was better, but it was still a change and change was hard. You mask really well, but your need for a routine is still there. The me who left was your xenonite ball. I was your routine, and then suddenly I was different even though I was still me. It’s okay to be upset about that. I don’t take it personally,” he told her kindly.
“It’s a waste of my time to be upset. You’re only different because I sent you away,” Eva replied, voice forcefully monotone. “And you’re alive. You’re saving the world again. Everything worked out better than I deserved.”
“What you think you deserve and what you actually deserve aren’t the same things, Eva,” Grace replied, taking her hand. “And my choice to leave has nothing to do with you. It’s not that you’re not worth leaving or staying for. You’re one of my best human friends. I love you. I also just happen to live 16 lightyears away. I’m going to miss you a lot, but you’re the fish and I’m the bird, you know? If you were coma-resistant, I’d be kidnapping you just to have you with me.” He gave a small, wet chuckle, already crying even as her eyes stayed dry by the force of her control over her own body.
“Eavie, you’re the one who’s keeping the Earth turning. You’re so strong. The world was saved because you were strong enough to do what I couldn’t, and I’m so grateful to you for that. Because of what you did then, it’s gonna be so much easier now. You’re allowed to give yourself a kinder future this time.” He stepped behind her desk to hug her, and she latched on tightly enough to feel the breath leave his chest with an oomph as he whistled quietly through his teeth.
“You’d be my kinder future, you idiot,” she hissed at him. “But I love you, so I have to let you go. You’d never be happy here when your home is on Erid.”
“The Eridians have a belief, actually,” he told her. “They say that you can have more than one home, and that all you have to do when you move from one home to another is to leave a chip off your carapace with the people who love you. Pebbles do it when they leave the nest, and young single people and couples leave a chip with their friends and family in an old cluster when they move to a different place. You refuse to get rid of my appendix,” he motioned to her paperweight, “so I think that counts. A piece of me will always have a home with you.”
“I’m wearing mascara today, you asshole,” she told him, sniffling. “You can’t just say things like that.”
“I know I’m different now,” he continued, wiping the few tears making their way down her cheeks. “But for all that, I’m still your little science lapdog. I’m literally sitting on your lap right now.” He chuckled, adjusting himself to a more comfortable position.
“There’s nothing I could ever really say to make the distance easier. And I know you’re not asking me to stay,” he sighed, resting his forehead against hers. “But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry that you’re a fish and I’m a bird.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, feeling lighter for all that she still hurt. “Me too. But it’ll be worth it to watch you fly.”
“And that, my tiny German altruist,” he chuckled, burying his nose in the crook of her shoulder, “is why you’re the person who’s going to save the world.”