Archive of Our Own

Every day, Marissa Diêm gets emails.

As the president of the United Educators of San Francisco, she actually gets hundreds of them. Hourly, even. Even more than back when she worked for the DoE. Her inbox is currently at three hundred and seven unread emails, and that's only on Microsoft Outlook. The TV is on, her laptop is on the coffee table, and Marissa is currently packing a bowl because holy shit fuck her life, fuck this timeline, fuck her old best friend and fuck Eva Stratt.

She tamps down the last of the weed, takes the biggest hit off her bong that her lungs can stand, and rubs behind her glasses with the pads of her fingertips. The screen of her laptop glows menacingly. For the eighth time in the past two minutes, her phone dings with a notification from the union officers' Slack.

Marissa doesn't move until the hit, well, hits, then takes a deep breath and opens a blank email addressed to every member of the board. 

Hi all,

If you haven't yet been made aware, it appears we have a bit of a situation on our hands regarding one of our members. Dr. Ryland Grace joined the union in 2013 and, as he is not technically deceased but rather what we would term "purposefully missing in action", still retains the rights and protections granted to him as a union member. Earlier this evening in a televised interview, former head of Project Hail Mary Eva Stratt revealed that Dr. Grace was forcibly added to the mission manifest and placed into a coma against his will. The implication is that this involved the use of physical force and chemical restraints. While there is no precedent on the books for being forcibly sent into space on a presumed suicide mission, this is obviously a clear violation of his personal and professional rights and demands at the very least a statement from the UESF. I'm proposing an emergency meeting of the board within the next twenty-four hours to discuss our response and examine how we as a collective bargaining organization can proceed. The rights of our members are paramount, and this cannot be allowed to pass without comment. Please respond to the Whentomeet linked below as promptly as possible. Your flexibility is greatly appreciated.

In solidarity,
Marissa Diêm
United Educators of San Francisco
President
she/her/hers

Three minutes after she hits send, her phone buzzes with a text from "Treasurer Irene Clark DO NOT ANSWER":

Oh this is going to SUCK for you lmao.

And then:

Poor baby.

And then:

I can help with that headache but you have to ask <3

Marissa reads the text a second time, removes her glasses, and screams for a very long time into the nearest throw pillow. "No," she growls into the fabric, "no, no, no, no, no–"

The phone buzzes again.

Nicely

A glance at her laptop screen reveals she now has three hundred and fifty unread emails. Marissa takes another hit off the bong, turns off the TV, and picks up her phone.

–

In the dreams, he can't see their face.

Not in a blank way; they're not nightmares. He's pretty sure. He knows each time, with the kind of steadfast logic that only comes with dreaming, that he won't remember this when he wakes up. Or at least not any of the important details. There's hair; they have a lot of it. A vague suggestion of a body. The voice is always the clearest thing.

Watching the return of the ArcLight Probe was one of the first things he remembered after waking up back on the Hail Mary, so it's the most common one. The beats are practically rote by this point: he's sitting on a concrete ledge of some kind, hand loosely gripped around his phone, sharing a pair of cheap Apple earbuds with someone else. They're shorter than him, and he has to lean down and to the side to keep his own earbud from falling out. Their hair whips around their face in the damp, chilly wind coming off the bay. They might be by the ocean? He's never been able to be sure.

The broadcast cuts to an interview with a scientist, and the person beside him scoffs. "Christ. Of course they got Jamie."

A feeling of familiarity and irritation curls in his gut. "Whatever."

"He looks like shit," they say, and the man on the screen doesn't- he actually looks really good, which causes another wave of anger that Ryland doesn't know what to do with, but then the person next to him turns to him. Their hair is still covering their face.

"Okay," they say, "Ry. Big brain time. Are we fucked?"

"Uh," he says. "I'm not- I'm not sure."

"Bullshit." He can't see their face. He knows he's being given A Look. "Yes you are. Don't give me that. What are we looking at?"

Ryland swallows. Somewhere in the back of his brain he's panicking, but it's the kind of panic you feel at airplane turbulence or when you ease off the gas just a little too slowly, and the car in front of you doesn't. "It's not great. You know what happened to the dinosaurs?"

"Please tell me an asteroid's not gonna show up in all this. I will hit my fucking limit."

He laughs. They're very good at doing this, he remembers, winging a wry joy out of objectively terrible situations. "No, no asteroid. I don't think. But when our planet doesn't get enough sunlight, and a pretty big chunk of the living things on it need that to survive…" He trails off. The person, he remembers, is also pretty clever. They might also be able to read his mind a little bit.

"Well if I get picked for the government apocalypse bunker, I'm taking you with me," they say so firmly that it can't be anything other than a joke. Ryland laughs again, the feeling intensifying when they press on, "I'm serious. I'll be like, 'Hey guys, this is my emotional support white boy that I need to have with me or I will start eating everyone wayyyy before that's necessary. As long as we have some Top Ramen and paper crafts that only depressed moms like doing, he'll be fine. He's house trained."

Ryland wipes at his eyes, the earbud dangling from his antitragus by a few millimeters of contact. "Jesus," he says, "Christmas."

The person next to him is grinning behind their hair, he thinks. Or rather, he feels. It's a smile that he somehow knows he would be able to feel on the back of his neck in a crowded room, pointing him towards the best place in the world to be. He misses it terribly, and he cannot remember a single detail of its shape.

"Pinky promise," they say, and hold out their hand. He reaches for it, the finger in question extended to wrap around their own. "Whatever happens, you're coming with me, motherfucker."

He wakes up before they make contact, face wet, hand burning like he's been sleeping on it wrong.

–

When Marissa yanks open the front door to her apartment, she's dimly aware she looks like shit. She's still half in her work clothes, hair pulled up and frizzing out and button down only fastened at the middle two, a stress zit starting to form right above a nerve on her forehead. Irene gives her a very obvious up-and-down that only makes her scowl harder.

"Aren't you gonna ask me to come inside?"

Marissa feels her right lower lid twitch once. "No."

Shrugging, Irene brushes past her into the front hallway. "You will."

It is, admittedly, a relief when your job consists entirely of encouraging middle schoolers to reach for their dreams and soothing meltdowns over past participles, to be able to tell someone to take a bath with their toaster and truly, really mean it. That's how this works: Marissa says the meanest thing her big eloquent English teacher brain can dream of, and Irene luxuriates in the smugness that comes with knowing the person calling you a "megacunt who is apparently addicted to hitting reply-all" will still beg you to fuck her within the next twenty minutes. It works. It really, really works for them. Marissa's blood pressure has never been worse, but her range of motion has never been better. 

Irene reaches the living room and appraises the closed laptop and the recently utilized bong on the coffee table. She raises her eyebrows and grins. "Wow, it's impressive you were able to send that good of an email, considering." Nodding at the half-finished bowl, she flops onto the couch in a single, frustratingly casual motion. "Is this indica, or sativa?"

"'Considering'," Marissa echoes flatly. Irene gives her a look.

"I'm giving you a compliment. You know, the usual response to that is 'thank you'."

A scoff leaps out of Marissa's mouth. "I'm not gonna do that."

Irene's eyes widen, and she settles back further into the couch. "Wow, you are on a tear tonight." There's a few strands of hair falling over her ear and down towards her collarbone, and Marissa gets the insane urge to walk over and tuck them back into place. Luckily, before she can do anything stupid and thoughtful like that, Irene keeps talking. "Are you gonna drop the attitude, or do I have to shove a couple fingers in you? That usually gets you a little nicer-"

"Get out of my fucking house," she says without thinking, the words coming out so genuinely heated that she feels herself cringe a moment later. Irene sits up a little straighter, eyes darting over Marissa's face like she's running a couple of plays and hating every outcome. Fucking mathematicians. 

After a long pause, Irene appears to decide on her next move. "You guys were friends, right?" she says carefully. "You and Grace?"

There's a lump making itself more and more known in Marissa's throat, and she swallows it down so forcibly that her jaw aches. "Yeah," she finally answers. "Yeah, we were friends." Her voice comes out rough, and she prays Irene chalks it up to smoke inhalation. The weed is absolutely demolishing her brain-to-mouth filter, and ideally that was going to result in Irene wringing some truly embarrassing dirty talk out of her, but apparently they're going down the route that makes Marissa want to cry and swear and ask aloud if she's a horrible, evil fucking person for sending a bitchy voicemail to a man who was kidnapped and drugged up and sent into space to die.

Irene nods. "Did he tell you he was going to-?"

"Uh, no- he randomly dropped off the face of the Earth and I sent him a lot of angry texts. And turns out he didn't even want to go, so. Egg on my face."

She tries for a casual shrug and fails so miserably that even Irene sends her a look of pity. That, more than anything else this evening, makes Marissa want to throw something.

"I'm sorry," Irene says quietly. 

Marissa scoffs again, even louder and maybe a bit theatrical. "No you're not."

Irene's mouth drops open, and she looks like she legitimately wants to smack her. Marissa kind of wishes she would- at least it would pull them out of whatever this horrifically weird heart-to-heart is that is currently causing her head to pound. "Am I not allowed to show, like, basic empathy here?" Irene asks. "Are you serious?"

Not knowing what to do with her hands, Marissa settles for crossing her arms over her chest. She can feel the pounding of her own heartbeat against the meat of her thumb. "You didn't come to my place on a school night to let me cry on your shoulder."

"If that's what you want to do-" Irene says, and oh God she might be genuinely trying to give Marissa an olive branch here. What the fuck. Keep that shit ten fucking miles away from her, and also set it on fire.

"It's not," she says quickly, and Irene's mouth snaps shut.

"Okay." She lets out a long exhale and looks up at Marissa with the kind of expression that they both normally reserve for difficult students. It really shouldn't do it for Marissa. It does. "Then what do you want?"

She sighs, massaging the corners of her eyes and definitely smudging her glasses in the process."I don't want to think about this right now." A moment where the aforementioned brain-to-mouth filter tries valiantly to remain intact, then crumbles. Marissa feels her face burn as she admits, "I don't want to think about anything at all, actually."

Irene looks at her almost kindly. Almost. "Hm." Then, she tilts her head upwards as an invitation. "Well. I can help with that."

–

"Your roommate thinks we're fucking," the blurry person says casually, and Ryland takes an entire gulp of chicken noodle soup down the wrong hatch.

"Sorry?" he manages after the chunks of "meat" and "carrots" have made their way out of his airway via coughing fit. The blurry person give him a smirk he can't see, hair falling across their face as they don't look up from their laptop.

"Yeah, Connor tried to pick a fight with me about it yesterday. He's, like, a hundred percent dead set on it. I think he's jealous. Or he's the one that wants to fuck you and hasn't examined that. Either way, he's having a shit time so I'm happy about it."

Ryland wipes at his mouth and furrows his brow so hard he can almost feel his upper lip touch the bottom of his nose. "Are you serious?"

"I know. I'm way out of your league." The blurry person is typing as they say all of this, fingers pounding the keys in a way that Ryland knows, without remembering how he knows it, is because they grew up with an old clunker of a PC whose keys wouldn't work without a tremendous amount of force. They spare him a glance. He doesn't see it. "Anyway, if he's weird to you in labs tomorrow, that's why."

"Thanks, uh, for the clarification," he says. "Is there a reason why he thinks we're having sex?"

"Probably because we spend a lot of time together, and you're a guy and I'm a girl and men and women can't be friends without the sex part getting in the way. Or whatever that movie you made me watch said."

"Hey," he protests, pointing a finger at their- her? Oh, right, her- screen and purposefully smudging it with a print. "You liked When Harry Met Sally. You cried at the end."

"No I fucking didn't. You're crazy. You're losing your mind and you should get your head checked."

"Stop gaslighting me and finish your paper," he tells her, pulling his finger down the screen to make the smudge worse. She smacks his hand away.

"Move your fucking- I am. And if you're gonna be such a bitch about it, you can help." Turning to him, she asks, "Would you say you're more of a kinesthetic, visual, or auditory learner?"

"Visual," he says, then frowns. "Does he really think we're sleeping together?"

"Yes, I just told you. And yes, I also find it annoying and weird but whatever, he's still in denial that I dumped him because I'm gay. So have fun with that."

"Huh." Ryland looks down at his plastic cup of soup and contemplatively orbits a chunk of chicken with his spoon. "I mean. I'm straight. But I don't really, y'know. See you like that."

"Yeah, I know," she says breezily. "It's awesome. If you ever made a pass at me, I'd legit kill you, so thanks for not doing that."

"Anytime," he says. "Or, I mean- no time. Never."

She nods, the motion moving her hair to fall into her face again, and Ryland realizes that he never caught a glimpse of her features for the entire time it was turned towards him. He hadn't bothered to look. "Linda likes you, though."

He blinks. The chicken piece slips from the whirlpool he's been creating with his spoon. "Wh- Linda? From the linguistics program?"

"Yeah. She asked me if we were dating, and I said no, ha ha ha, and then she asked me if you liked girls and I said yeah, probably-"

"I like girls," says Ryland quickly, which he's almost ninety nine percent sure is correct. He dated Linda. Or- is going to date Linda. Will and will have dated Linda. The dream starts to feel blurry at the edges, like logic is straining to keep everything held together, and he shakes his head. The world ripples in its wake. "Um. That's cool."

"Do you think she's hot?" blurry woman asks. "I can tell her you think that."

"What is this, middle school?" he asks sarcastically. "I can ask out a woman, M-"

The dream breaks.

He feels his mouth saying her name, lips forming around the word and air leaving his body to express the sound, but a horrible blast of white noise suddenly comes from all directions and, like a sudden phase cancellation, blocks everything out. The world is entirely silent as only a space in the mind can be. He feels his own heartbeat in his ears, but can't hear it.

She's gone. The table is gone, the soup, the laptop, the chair; the white noise grows louder and louder until he can feel the vibrations of it in his entire body, like every part of it is straining for something that isn't fucking there, and he knows the answer to this question, it's on the tip of his tongue, but the harder he reaches the further he feels his consciousness tip forward until he's falling into the static, stomach swooping with the vertigo, and landing bolt upright somewhere else.

What did she tell you? asks the blurry woman's voice from nowhere. He's on his couch. Linda is standing in front of him, her face remembered, her stare peeling him like rotting wallpaper. His hands sweat.

"Ryland," she says quietly, like she's measuring out her oxygen for what's coming, "I'm gonna tell you something. And I'm gonna try and say this in a way you'll understand." She pauses for just a moment, tightening her jaw. "Wherever you go in life, you will probably be the smartest person in the room. And you're going to tell yourself that everyone is jealous, and that's why nobody likes you, and you're some kind of misunderstood genius. And I want you to know that no one is misunderstanding you. They just think you're an asshole. And they're right."

Uh, y'know, he tells the blurry woman, a few days and several drinks later, just your regular, run-of-the-mill, mean breakup stuff.

Well fuck her, she says firmly. Linda doesn't know what she's talking about.

Yeah, he says, yeah. I don't think she really knew me at all.

Sometimes I feel like I don't either, she says, and it's a joke, slurred a little on the consonants, but his brain is just sober enough to catch the bitter aftertaste. 

–

It's Irene, of course, who delivers the bad news.

"So the thing is," she says, five minutes into the Zoom meeting taking place during all of their lunches because of course that was going to be the only time everyone on the board was free. Marissa stabs a fork through her salad and prays that the two-shades-too-light concealer on her neck isn't showing up on camera. The sun has been coming back for a while, but she refuses to throw out a perfectly good tube. She's definitely turning into her mom. Whatever. "The thing is. We kind of need to play this carefully."

"What do you mean?" asks Scott, Zooming in from his classroom two doors down. Afterwards, he and Marissa will make a beeline for the playground and stand, arms crossed in tandem, while Marissa searches for creatively neutered swears to describe how much she does not want to pester Claire for the meeting notes, which will be a day late and missing several key details. She rubs behind her glasses and glances longingly at the door.

"What does everyone know about the Grace Foundation?" Irene begins, and Marissa feels that increasingly familiar swoop of guilt in the pit of her stomach. Leave it to Ry to have the time to set up an entire educational fund before he left, but not tell his best friend goodbye. At least, that had been her belief before last night. Now, as she remembers, the guilt turns quickly to suspicion.

"It's the scholarship fund that Dr. Grace founded before he left on the Hail Mary," says Claire, and everyone else on the call nods. "My school was able to renovate our chemistry lab because of him."

"We were able to send our USAP team to nationals last year when we got the grant," adds Scott. It's true. Marissa crowded into the hallways with the rest of the school and cheered them onto the bus herself, ignoring the bitter taste in the back of her mouth. 

"Yeah, it's fantastic," Irene continues. "And so there's just one tiny thing about it that kind of makes our position vis a vi the statement difficult: Dr. Grace didn't found the program."

The call goes dead silent for a full five seconds. Marissa has a sinking, horrible feeling she knows what Irene is building to and she wants to slam her laptop closed, sprint to her car, and hit the pen in her glove compartment so hard that she pulls a blinker. Then maybe park it in a garage somewhere and turn the exhaust on.

"I was prepping for the meeting and I swore to God I'd read the name Eva Stratt in our accounting somewhere before, so I went back through the union financial records and did a little digging." Irene sucks in a breath. "She was listed under the donation that the Grace Foundation made to our strike fund back in twenty twenty five. As well as every major grant and program from the Foundation since its inception." She pauses to let that sink in. "If we go after Stratt as a union, we run the risk of pissing off one of the biggest financial donors to San Francisco Public Schools. And we can't really afford to do that."

"Are you fudging serious?" Marissa blurts out, and is immediately grateful that she's talking to the only group of people who are able to move past the juvenile self-censorship that has basically rotted all of their brains.

Irene cracks a half-smile. "Extremely fudging serious."

"Should we even make a statement, then?" asks Claire, and Marissa does not know how this woman keeps getting elected.

"Uh yes, Claire, we absolutely have to," she snaps, setting her fork down on her desk with a loud clink. "This isn't just an arbitrary catfight we're trying to start here; a member of the union- and a pretty freaking high-profile one at that- had just about every single one of his rights violated by the government. All of the governments, actually. What kind of precedent does this set? That if someone is good enough at their field of study, you can pull them out of the classroom and strap them to a rocket and call it all for the greater good?"

No one else on the call is looking into their cameras, much less moving to respond. Marissa picks her fork back up and nervously twirls it between her fingers underneath the desk. "I mean. Those are just my thoughts."

"Should we put it to a vote?" Scott asks. "If everyone has their take?"

Everyone does. Marissa holds her tongue and bites down hard enough to taste the first pangs of blood as the "nays" have it. There's a strange roaring in her ears, blocking out any semblance of English trying to pass through to the language processors of her brain and making her hands feel oddly cold. Her screen goes still as the meeting ends. A minute later, there's a knock on her classroom door.

"Hey," says Scott, scratching at the side of his face and not meeting her eyes. "So that was kind of a clusterfudge."

Marissa gently shuts her laptop. "Do you know how long we have left before the bell?" she asks.

Scott checks his watch. "I think about twenty minutes." 

"Cool." Marissa stands, grabs her coat from where it hangs over the back of her chair, and throws it on. "Well. I hate my job. I hope everyone on the board blows up spontaneously, including you. And I'm gonna walk across the street and get a slushie." She looks up at him, pressing her lips together tightly and smiling really, really big. "Are you coming?"

Scott, because he is in the midst of an extremely messy divorce and knows when to not ask obviously probing questions, does not inquire as to if Marissa and Dr. Grace were friends. The answer has probably been made clear enough. Instead, he says "Well, if I don't explode on the way," and goes to get his coat.

–

You have [7] new voicemails from Marissa Diêm.

1.

Uh hey I just saw the news… uh… what the fuck? Like- no, sorry, seriously- what the fuck Ry? Like, you just decide out of the blue to go on a fucking suicide mission and don’t even tell me? I mean- yeah, I get it, saving the world and all that but I seriously had to find out my best friend is going to space to fucking die from CNN? CNN?! I just- fucking call me, okay? Jesus Christ.

So it’s officially been twenty four hours which means I now have carte blanch to be extremely fucking pissed at you. I know the launch is in a couple days and you probably have a billion things to do but I am just… just send me a text, okay? Or- five minutes, five minutes. [LONG PAUSE] You’re my best friend, dude. I wanna say goodbye.

3.

You’re seriously not even going to call me. Ry you better be in that fucking coma already because this is the meanest shit you’ve ever done, and one time you said my taste in women was so bad I would fuck Hitler’s wife. I don’t remember her name but that’s who you were talking about. I don’t… [PAUSE] Did I do something? Or say something? And you’re just not telling me and ghosting your best friend before you leave and I literally never see you again? [PAUSE] Do you hate me? [PAUSE] Ry, can you just send me a text telling me you don’t hate me? [LONG PAUSE] It doesn’t have to be true.

4.

Fuck you.

5.

You know they used that stupid headshot on your school ID, right? The one you hated because you look like you have a fry kitchen’s worth of grease in your hair and you were, like, super visibly hungover and hadn’t figured out yet that your fabric softener was giving you an allergic reaction? Yeah, that one. You look like a fucking skeez. “Savior of the world.” [LAUGHTER] Oh my God they’re gonna put it on your memorial poster board.

6.

[CRYING] [CRYING] [MUFFLED CRYING] Fuck you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you Ryland fuck you fuck you fuck you. Fuck.

7.

You know what, I’m gonna be real with you. I’m going to be absolutely straight up because you’re never going to hear this: I’m probably the only one blowing up your phone right now because you didn’t have any other fucking friends! No other friends, no girlfriend, no boyfriend, no bitches whatsoever; you don’t even have a fucking cat, Ryland! You had one friend. I was your only friend. [PAUSE] Or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was just someone you got a beer with because you didn’t want to drink alone. [PAUSE] [MUFFLED CRYING] [PAUSE] I’d tell you to fucking kill yourself dude but you’re already gonna do that, so. I hope it’s long and I hope it hurts and I hope you’re the only one left.

–

Half of adulthood is promising yourself tantalizing little rewards at the end of things that you deeply do not want to do, so Marissa tells herself that if she gets this fucking signature, she can spend the remainder of her lunch break tearing through the In-N-Out drive through and put away a double double before she has to be back in class.

The southern parking lot of Grover Cleveland Middle is nearly empty, far away as it is from the main doors, but she parks there because she knows that she'd just end up driving around to see the bike anyway. It's actually easy to miss, especially if your route towards the big double doors takes you nowhere near the single row of bike racks a few yards from the back entrance.

She holds the stack of papers encompassing the union budget for this year in one hand and slams the driver's side door shut, then lets her feet carry her without thinking too much. In the first few weeks after the launch, she heard about it but refused to go near it. Then there was the month where she visited nearly every day. Ever since the broadcast, it's been once a week. She's being very normal about it.

Ry's old bicycle has been kept from rusting for nearly twenty-nine years. It's an impressive feat, especially considering the fog. There's a bouquet of flowers that clearly took a hit from the autumn frost the night before, a few drawings and cards taped to the body of the bike, and one plunger-looking object that Marissa guesses is an abandoned prototype from the upcoming invention convention. 

What halts her in her tracks is the sign. It's a ragged piece of cardboard, obviously torn from a box in a hurry, scrawled over with bleeding black sharpie. 

MURDERED.

She feels her gut twist. A part of her wants to burst out laughing; it's so unbelievably dramatic, so hilariously gauche for a quiet, colorful memorial to a beloved teacher. She wonders if one of the students made it. The choice of words feels very adolescent.

Murdered. Well. He's supposedly still alive.

Supposedly. Except that he's dozens of light years away. Except that the best case scenario here is that her best friend is living out the rest of his days on an alien planet that she will never see, far enough across the vastness of space that she will never even hear from him again. She's seen all the logs; of course she has. She watched him rub the bottom of his forearm against the top, telling the world goodbye, and pulled her own arm close to her chest. He was signing off. A proper farewell this time.

Before she even realizes what she's doing, Marissa shoves the budget packet into her purse and closes the distance in a few quick strides. She snatches the sign up from where it had been propped up against the bike and holds it. Her hands shake. She feels astonishingly, worryingly calm. She wonders what a legitimate nervous breakdown feels like, and if she's currently about to experience one.

Murdered. He didn't want to go. He might have said goodbye, if he had. He might have called her. He might have told her he loved her just as dearly as she had loved him, in that deep and simple way that everyone tried to make so fucking complicated. He was her best friend. Why wasn't that enough? Why did there have to be something more for her to grieve him? He might have given her something, anything at all to hold onto. He might, he might, he might.

In that moment, she almost hates him. How dare he make her carry this grief for the rest of her life, twisted and shameful like a drinking problem spun out of control and gone terminal. She knows now that there is no possibility he heard any of her voicemails. He slipped into that coma not knowing how precisely the loss of him would wreck her shit. She changed careers. Changed her language. She has spent the last twenty nine years attempting to lure his ghost back into her life and hating it for rattling the walls.

She doesn't realize there's a hand on her shoulder until it starts shaking her. It's warm; recognizable. She flinches when Irene spins her around, but doesn't fight back.

"Hey- oh shit." Irene's face goes blank as she takes in whatever creative expression of desolation Marissa is making right now. "Are you okay?" She notices the cardboard. "What's this?"

Irene tries to take it from her, but Marissa discovers she has dug her fingernails into the pulp. Embarrassedly, she gives it up. Irene reads the word on the sign and goes stone faced. "Oh for the love of- this better not have been one of the kids."

"Probably," Marissa tries to say, then realizes her throat is too dry to form the word. She clears her throat and succeeds on the second attempt.

"This is- I'm sorry. I know it's a memorial for everyone, but we try to be pretty mindful about what gets left." Irene folds the sign in half. "I'll throw it away when I go back in."

She turns to walk inside, then stops after a few seconds when she realizes Marissa isn't following. Marissa can't stop staring at the cardboard in Irene's hand. 

"Okay," says Irene, reversing course and taking a few steps back to stand next to the memorial, "at the risk of getting my head bitten off again… are you good?"

Marissa swallows. "I mean. They're not wrong."

Irene blinks. "What?"

"Whoever wrote that sign. He's pretty much dead to us anyway." None of the bouquets of flowers have irises in them, she realizes, which were Ry's favorite. Iris douglasiana. He loved the color purple, and how they always raced to spring up after a wildfire. There's nothing but bunches of roses and carnations and one very hip bundle of lavender. "Did you know his favorite flower was irises?"

"I didn't," says Irene carefully. Marissa shrugs.

"For the longest fudging time, I would visit here and there would be all these bouquets of forget-me-nots. I guess someone started the trend because they thought they were being cute, or meaningful, or whatever, and then other people went along with it, but it was just tons and tons of those flowers all over the bike. Which is crazy because he didn't even like those. Forget-me-nots and baby's breath; he hated the smell of them- he said they smelled like actual manure. And it was kind of hilarious." She spreads a hand and gestures at the bicycle. "This big memorial to him, and he would have literally turned up his nose."

Irene doesn't say anything for a moment. She looks at the bike, then Marissa, then down at the cardboard sign in her hand. A wind whips across the parking lot, rattling the bike against the metal rack. The air smells dusty and cool with dead leaves and, always, the faintest hint of the ocean.

"Do you have a pen?" Irene asks suddenly. Marissa frowns at her.

"What?"

"A pen. Or a Sharpie. Something."

Wordlessly, too confused to argue, Marissa fishes around in her purse and comes up with a pencil, a stray lip liner, and a black Sharpie. She hands the latter to Irene, who unfolds the cardboard, uncaps the pen, and starts to draw.

It takes a few seconds for Marissa to realize what she's doing, the sign at an odd angle and balanced flat between Irene's free fingers. Long black lines curve over the damp cardboard, spreading in every direction up at the top before tapering down into two slender strokes towards the bottom. Her chest does something funny when she makes the connection, watching as a blossoming iris takes shape.

Irene caps the pen, hands it back to Marissa, and wedges the cardboard in between the bell and one of the handlebars. She steps back to appraise her work, then casts a side eye at Marissa. "I mean. I'm not an artist, but-"

"It's beautiful," Marissa says. Irene goes a little pink as she continues, "It's really good."

"It's- y'know. I'm good at plants."

Marissa twirls the pen between her fingers. Irene is still looking at her. "Thank you," she says, and the strange, painful but warm thing moving around in her chest propels her to ask, "Do you have other stuff? Like, drawings and paintings and- can I see it?"

Irene smiles. It's not one Marissa has ever seen on her before; her lips barely curl up at the edges but her eyes sparkle, laugh lines creasing deep in the corners. "Kind of Georgia O'Keefe of you."

"Fuck off."

"Hey, the kids might hear." 

Marissa shuffles sideways a bit and bumps Irene's shoulder with her own. She overshoots her hip a little bit and pitches slightly, but Irene leans in and catches her with her side. "Woah, tiger." Then, still smiling, she sets Marissa upright. "Yeah. You can see them."

–

He dreams about every Thursday they ever spent at that bar. The way the beer was always a little lukewarm, and the steaks in desperate need of A1 sauce no matter what, and the stained glass lamps above each table. The way she ate with her knife and fork European style. He loved giving her shit for it; it didn't even matter and it was objectively the smartest way to eat. 

And he dreams about the time they drove up PCH to her sister's wedding after she bullied him into coming along as a plus one, letting him pick the music the whole drive there and begrudgingly singing along to the musical numbers he queued up just to annoy her, revealing that she did in fact know all the words to "A Little Priest" and didn't have a half bad singing voice to boot, yelling fudging cannibal puns at the top of their lungs as the Pacific flew by on the driver's side in a blue so bright it almost hurt to look at.

And he dreams about the night she confessed she was scared she didn't know how to love someone who loved her back just as much, that all she could do was pour it into the laps of people who stood and stepped back and smiled blithely, and in hindsight what he should have said was that's freaking crazy, I love you and you're my best friend in the whole world, but the words felt so big and terrifying in his mouth that he could only press his lips together to hold it shut, cracked skin on the edges splitting a little, because Ryland has been for so many years of his life a horrible, mortifying coward. 

He had nodded in the moment and said yeah, that sounds really tough. I'm sorry. And he doesn't remember her face but he remembers knowing by her expression that that was exactly the wrong thing to say.

–

The planet 40 Eridani a b is approximately sixteen point three light years away. She checked. It’s actually a very popular Google search these days.

There's an article about the planet she's saved on her phone, scanning semi-compulsively over the familiar paragraphs whenever she's bored and/or anxious, of which she is both right now. She could probably recite the facts by heart: mass of 8.47 Me, orbital period of 42.245 days, density of 5710 kg/m^2, average surface temperature of 210 degrees Celsius. Sixteen point three light years away. 9.582128e+13 miles. It's a hell of a road trip.

The woman who sits down next to her on the bench at the edge of the pier is very discreet. Her face is lined, hair mostly grey and wrapped in a shawl with a hat on top for good measure. She doesn't look at Marissa for a moment, and Marissa realizes she will be expected to speak first.

"Wow," she starts without planning exactly what's going to come out of her mouth, "this is so Cold War." Silence. Okay. "The city's probably pretty different since the last time you were here-"

"I'm not interested in small talk for this," says Eva Stratt. "Please tell me why you are trying to destroy the reputation of a very successful charitable organization, and what you need from me to stop doing that."

You killed my best friend, you killed my best fucking friend, Marissa thinks. He's not dead, but he might as well be. The ocean is very cold today; choppy and dangerous. Her palms itch.

"We're not trying to go after the Grace Foundation," she says as calmly as she can manage. "Our issue as a union is with you. You were the acting head of Project Hail Mary and the decision to force Dr. Grace onto the crew ultimately came down to you. You violated the fundamental rights of a member of our union. Do you understand how that could set a very dangerous precedent?"

"That wasn't a factor in my decision at the time," Stratt answers. "And the fact that we are both here, alive, and presumably well-fed should be argument enough in the validity of making an exception."

Marissa bites the inside of her cheek. Technically- technically she's going rogue here. The board made a decision, and as president she's supposed to honor it and carry it through. But she wants- Marissa doesn't know what she wants. To talk to the woman who sent her best friend off to die. To ask what he was like, in this world she barely even knew about. To punch her in the face.

"It's not about whether it was an exception," she argues. "I reached out because it's important that we as a collective bargaining organization make it clear that you can't just kidnap one of our members away from his position without his consent-"

"He consented," Stratt interrupts her. "To joining the project. Dr. Grace was offered the chance to leave, following his discovery of astrophage's genetic makeup, and he asked to stay." She shifts on the bench, folding her hands. "I understand it's easier to villainize me in a scenario where every moment of Dr. Grace's involvement was against his will, but that wasn't the case. He was- is, a scientist. I offered him the chance to conduct experiments and research that weren't possible anywhere else, in any other situation. He took it. You can be dissatisfied with the facts, but they are what they are."

She eyes Marissa contemplatively, in a way that makes her skin crawl. "Okay," Marissa snaps, "sure, whatever. Then we can narrow it down to the instance where you did kidnap him, and world-saving success aside, that's a rights abuse."

Stratt stares at her after she finishes, and Marissa realizes she's expecting further argument. "Yeah," she adds arbitrarily, "so. Do you have, like- anything to say to that?"

"This is a personal issue, isn't it," Stratt says. It's not a question, and Marissa feels her face flush scarlet at being caught.

"Yeah, sure, he and I were close. But I'm also here as a representative-"

"No you're not." Her mouth snaps shut, vision flaring red. Stratt continues, "You're incredibly transparent, actually. I'm not going to tell you this is a waste of my time; you already know that. I'm not interested in an apology tour, either."

Marissa can feel her pulse rising, the climbing thump of her heartbeat pounding against the back of her head. "I-" Fuck. "We, owe him this. He's a member of our union, and if this level of disgustingly severe rights violation can be prevented from happening again-"

"I'm not here to assuage your guilt," Stratt says dismissively.

"Well maybe you could use a little!" Marissa grips the underside of the bench and feels her nails dig into the soft, damp wood. "Just because he's presumably alive doesn't negate the fact you sent him up there to die; you don't get to stop calling something a suicide mission when somebody else decided his life was worth saving."

"Dr. Diêm," Stratt says, and she says it correctly, which is a surprise, "what you don't know could fill a book. Maybe even ten. So I suggest you stop screaming at the mirror and calling it negotiation".

"Fuck you," snarls Marissa, nose burning from the effort it takes not to let the tears crowding her eyes fall. "He was my best friend."

Stratt raises both eyebrows and gives her a frosty once-over. "Really," she says flatly. "He never mentioned you."

It's because all the air goes straight out of Marissa's lungs that she doesn't register her face becoming suddenly very wet. For a moment, she genuinely wonders if it's possible to choke to death because of something like this; a terrifying combination of the wind being knocked out of her and too many sobs shoving their way towards the back of her throat to get a breath in. Her body can't decide whether to take in air to get back some oxygen or expel it to let the noises out and so it does neither, leaving her frozen in place with her mouth open like a fish drowning on dry land, blisteringly hot tears racing down her cheeks that are flushed with the effort to breathe. Finally, something crackling and horrible like a wounded animal makes its way out of her chest and Stratt visibly flinches back in alarm.

"Oh," she says, "um. Okay. Ah. No- no thank you."

It is this insane display of social awkwardness that effectively breaks the damn, and Marissa doubles over in some weird, uncomfortable sort of cry-laugh that makes it even harder to breathe, her body folded in two and her lungs compressed against the tops of her thighs, but never in a million years would she have expected that response and this argument isn't going the way she rehearsed in the shower at all and it's awful- it's so, unbelievably inconvenient- to realize that there is a human person sitting next to her. She wheezes, and phlegm bubbles in her throat.

"Jesus- Christmas," she says, because no other explicative will do than Ry's favorite, and it's clear that Stratt is familiar because a look of terrible recognition flashes across her face. "Oh my God. Holy shit. You are the worst person I've ever met, honest." She's fully combined the crying and laughing now, aware that she definitely sounds hysterical. "Ooooooh my God, I hope he was able to get a couple actual swears in before you put him on that rocket. He could be really legitimately creative when he turned the teacher brain off." Another wheeze. "One time- oh my God, one time this parent came in and tried to argue their kid should have permission to leave class for the evolution unit, and when we got drinks that night he called her-" Marissa takes in a deep breath for the next line, "proof that some people really are using only ten percent of their brains, and she would bitch about circles if the Bible mentioned squares". Another breath. "Uh, that was the clever part. And then he said 'Oh my God lady, kill yourself for real and make my day,' at the top of his lungs in a very crowded bar, and everybody turned to look at him and he was so embarrassed that he literally- he literally hid under his cardigan." She swipes at her eyes, chest and cheeks aching. "Like a turtle. Like a literal fucking turtle. But the suicide baiting was probably my bad influence."

Chancing a look at Stratt, Marissa sees her nodding slowly. Her face is observant but distant, thrown by the outburst but not the emotions behind it. "Clearly."

"Yeah, well," Marissa says hoarsely, "sorry to break it to you, but he wasn't an island. I know that probably helped you sleep at night."

"It didn't," Stratt says quickly, quick enough that Marissa sees the truth in it. She finds herself on the receiving end of a careful glance. "Were the two of you…?"

"Wh- oh my God, no," Marissa laughs, and now her stomach is starting to hurt as well. "I mean, people kind of assumed, y'know- 'men and women can't be friends because the sex part gets in the way'- but I'm like, super gay and he didn't…" she trails off. "I dunno. There was one ex he had, but he never really seemed eager to get back out there. This sounds," she says, thinking aloud, "kind of weird, but I think the kids were enough. Like, that was his life. You'd hear about the whole 'disgraced former astrobiologist' thing and the UNESCO incident and kind of expect him to be really cynical about how things ended up, but I think he genuinely believed becoming a teacher was the best thing that ever happened to him. Like, he'd somehow stumbled bass-ackwards into the thing he was actually meant to do with his life." She shrugs. "He fucking loved those kids, man." 

"I know," says Stratt. 

"Yeah. I bet that's how you got him, initially. 'Ooooh Dr. Grace, think of the children'." Stratt's tight-lipped scowl tells her she's right on the money. "Ha. Well, you're good at your job, I'll give you that. He saved all of us"

Marissa flops back on the bench, taking in a big lungful of air and not hiding the slight sob that accompanies the exhale. After a moment, Stratt leans back too. Marissa feels herself being watched, scrutinized, judged more than definitely, but she stares up at the rapidly darkening sky above the harbor and searches for the first few stars of the evening.

"He might not remember you yet," Stratt says finally, and Marissa scoffs before she parses the final word. "When we had him in holding just before the launch, he threatened to sabotage the mission. It was a bluff, obviously, but one I couldn't afford to leave to chance. So we- I. Dosed him with an interrogational drug meant to cause short-term amnesia. Hopefully he'll remember everything, but…" she doesn't look at Marissa. "There's always the possibility of a few gaps."

Marissa doesn't know what to do with the chill that douses her body like the sea spray in January. She doesn't know what to do with any of this, really. Her voice stops working again, clogged and frozen stupid. It doesn't thaw for several minutes. Beside her, Stratt adjusts the sleeves of her coat.

It's poetic, really. Twenty years of friendship; twenty years of bitching about nothing and borrowing each other's books and stealing each other's pens and that time Marissa mixed white rum with those little Walmart flavored lemonades and threw up on and off for five hours in the dead of night, Ry holding her hair back the whole time and making the kind of gentle, sympathetic noises that no one at the moment would have imagined him capable of, because they were twenty-five and kind of geniuses and it was still two months before he would blow up his life. And that time when both of his parents died at once, a car crash that would propel him to sell his own car in a fit of grief and fear and never again express a desire to get behind the wheel of a vehicle, and in hindsight Marissa thinks that she never saw him cry, not once, not even at the funeral where she gripped his hand so hard it went white as the California sun bleached the dirt of his parents' graves before anyone could grab a shovel. Surface level love and scheduled beers and twenty years of it. That's all there is. This is all that she has of him. He was her best friend in the whole world and she never saw him cry and he probably doesn't even fucking remember her.

"Well," she says after remembering how to use the fucking language she teaches five days a week, "he definitely didn’t remember me when he sent the beetles back, or he'd have started that log to you with, 'Please strangle yourself, because I won't be home to do it'."

Stratt's laughter is a sharp, dry bark that pings every corner of the empty pier and scatters in the face of the waves. Marissa tilts her head back and lets the sky fill her vision, and pretends one of the little white dots she can see is where her friend is now. 

"There's gonna be a probe sent to Erid, isn't there?" she says, because it's technically a question but really it's not. Stratt nods. "Okay. Then I am going to offer you a deal, and you're gonna take it because we are a union, and you fucked with one of our own, and we don't take kindly to that no matter how much money you try and throw at our kids." 

Stratt gives her an utterly reproachful side-eye, but Marissa keeps going. "I want to put a message on that probe. I don't care if you guys know what it is; I'm not gonna send him my nudes or some shit. But I want no word count limit and I want a guarantee it'll be on there." She meets Stratt's gaze head-on. "Give me that, and we won't make a statement."

"Am I speaking to the union, or to you?" Stratt asks. Marissa gives her a thin smile.

"You asked me to negotiate. I'm negotiating."

It's really not. It's showing her hand. It's letting the enemy know exactly where to poke if Stratt wants the biggest bruise, a bruise she's already pressed her finger directly on once so far. It is a nakedly selfish and sentimental play and Stratt knows that she knows that this is not how things are supposed to go. They're having a clandestine meeting on the pier for Pete's sake; this is not a boilerplate situation.

But maybe that's the point. 

Marissa threads her fingers together and sets them on her lap and looks out at the choppy waves. "Maybe you don't feel guilty," she says finally, "I guess. You were right. He saved the world. But in that case, I think he deserves to know that there's someone who didn't want him to die."

Marissa hears a small noise next to her; more of an audible intake of air than anything else. She doesn't look. She knows there will suddenly be nothing there if she does.

One life for billions, she thinks, and then, before she can stop herself and only because she's already standing to leave, the words come out: "Did you ever see him cry?"

Real silence this time. It's answer enough. "Cool," she says. "Well. That makes one of us."

Marissa leaves. There's nothing else to say. She takes a page out of Ry's book one last time and doesn't look back.

By the time she gets home, there's a new email in her inbox. 

–

Ry,

Son of a bitch, I'm glad you're not dead. Contrary to whatever dossier you might have received, you did have at least one genuine friend and she's pretty fucking glad you aren't a corpse in space somewhere. If you haven't remembered yet then that's fine, I'm hoping you'll get there by the time you finish reading this, but I wanted to start with the most important thing right off the bat.

My name is Marissa. I was your friend. Your best friend, actually. We met in grad school about twenty years before the Hail Mary launched, after I dated your roommate, realized I for sure wasn't into guys, and came out to you of all people while crying so hard I got snot on both our pants. You sort of have to be friends with the first person you come out to, and- I'm gonna say this kindly- nobody else was really knocking down your door anyway.

We got steaks and beers every week and I was there the first time you finally tried sweet potato fries and never looked back. The scar you have on your left elbow is because one time we got crazy, crazy drunk and I tried to ride on the handlebars of your bike and tipped us both over, and you got a shard of glass stuck in almost to the bone because you still had a bottle of peach schnapps in your jacket pocket. Oh, and I still don't know your middle name because you have the most apocalyptic case of avoidant attachment style I have ever seen in my fucking life. If those logs that leaked on Reddit a few years back are anything to go by, you got over it. Which is great. Maybe you also forgot to have an allergy to emotional intimacy; lucky for that alien of yours. 

I want you to know that I'm proud of you. You made another friend! Good job! And hey, thanks for saving all of our asses in the process! But also, it makes me glad to know you did a bunch of really crazy and scary shit and didn't have to do it alone. I'm not mad that apparently you were always capable of opening yourself up more and being vulnerable and fucking letting somebody into your life for once, and apparently I wasn't enough for that. Fine. I left you enough angry voicemails twenty nine years ago; I'm not repeating the mistake of saying a bunch of things I'll regret later. Maybe you just needed some really extenuating circumstances. It wouldn't be entirely out of character for nothing short of the threat of total planetary extinction to get you to be a little vulnerable. I've spent enough time holding a grudge against you, and all it got me was some kind of embarrassing life choices.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that you were and are my best friend and I loved you more than, apparently, you were ready to live with. I get it. It's a big responsibility. Having someone who loves you means you're responsible to them- you don't get to make stupid decisions and luxuriate in the silence of not getting yelled at, which you deserved every time I did, to be so so clear. But I love you. There's still nobody else who has known me for as long as you have. You're my guy, and I probably would have hidden you in my house while the world burned. Maybe that makes me a terrible person, but it's true. I loved you a lot, Ry. And I wish you had wanted it.

I don't really know what else to say. I'm never going to see you again. There's not even a "probably" in there- I'm in my fifties and you're sixteen point three light years away. I checked. So this will be the last thing I ever get to say to you. 

I love you. You were loved. I miss you. I didn't want you to die.

Your friend,

Marissa

–

He says, for the second time in the past twenty years, "Fuck."

The contents of the probe were easy to transfer onto the scrapped computers from Mary that line almost an entire wall of his house- it was translating them into Eridian braille that was the real pain in the butt. The tablet in Grace's hands contains the entire contents, including a text file simply labeled, "From Rissy". The second word had sent his stomach plummeting into his shoes for a reason he couldn't explain, a headache sparking almost instantly behind his left eye. His finger had shook as he tapped the file to open it. Then he'd started reading, and the headache got worse.

Dimly, he registers Rocky pressing closer to his side on the couch, laying one leg gently across the top of his thigh. "Grace?"

He can't swallow past the lump in his throat. Marissa. Marissa, Marissa, Marissa, his best friend, his kindest critic, her miles of long dark hair falling over his neck and down his chest as she leaned her head on his shoulder, stiff and tense to keep himself from shaking as the sun beat down on the second worst day of his life. Not calling her on the third worst day, when the hotel room in Denmark had felt so small it was in danger of crushing his lungs, and it took him hours after the adrenaline came down to remember how to breathe. Not telling her on the worst day what he was being asked to do, because he still believed he'd be given a choice. All thoughts of anyone forgotten as he ran for his life, nothing except animal terror.

He's had a lot of time to think about it. His cowardice. His general predilection towards disappointment. The blows sting a little less whenever they come; whenever a nightmare makes one moment feel particularly fresh. He was perfectly ready to let the world down and that, well, that takes some getting used to. 

This isn't the world, but it might as well be. One life against billions, but the shame cuts through like a stab to the neck.

"Grace?" Rocky asks again, sounding more worried. "Hey. What does it say? Is it bad? Can I see?"

There's nothing left to say on his end. Doing the math, she's probably already dead. Marissa Diêm, his friend; Marissa Diêm, who wanted him to know that he would have been missed, is light years away and certainly gone and will never know that he remembers her. He holds on to the moment, the sense of recognition and familiarity and love that he kept behind walls that never needed to exist; a bullet in his foot that bounced off the bone. I remember you, he thinks fiercely. I remember you. Tears threaten to fall and for her, he lets them.

"Um," he croaks out finally, and Rocky puts another hand on his thigh. "No- no, bud, I'm good. I'm okay. It's a good letter. Um."

He puts the tablet down and strokes one hand across the top of Rocky's carapace, the exosuit panels warm and glossy beneath his palm. My name is Marissa. I was your friend. I loved you a lot, Ry. And I wish you had wanted it.

This, like so many other things, he will have to live with.

He swipes at his eyes with his free hand and clears his throat. "Hey," Grace says, shuffling the details into order. There's still time left in the day to get started. It might even be a Thursday. "Did I ever tell you about my best friend back on Earth?"