Chapter Text
It was a bad idea to begin with – a weird, long-shot type of experiment. Apparently at some point I was designated the Astrophage Specialist and now have to sign off on things. But I’d been going off four to five hours of sleep all week and I can admit I wasn’t making the best decisions.
Only now do I deeply understand how important it is to read the details of experiment pre-approval forms. Testing astrophage’s energy storage is one thing, but purposefully trying to exceed its energy storage limit is another thing. It’s a dangerous thing.
“How did this happen??” Stratt barks at me, holding pressure around the various shards of glass in my arm. She’d already tied a tourniquet above my elbow and now tries to keep the rest of the blood inside me, to little avail. Stratt turns to the driver of a golf cart I definitely don’t remember climbing into and tells them to drive faster.
“Uh…” I try to respond intelligently, explaining that the astrophage responded a bit more aggressively than expected. I want to tell her the team’s demo went wrong, the detonation was enough to shake the room and a good number of beakers and glass cabinets shattered and rained down on us. I want to tell her it was truly just a case of terrible timing that she’d had a meeting in the neighboring department building and came rushing over to find me catastrophically failing at my job.
But I can’t really get out any words right now. I can’t stop staring at the rivulets of blood – my blood – dripping down my forearm and off my fingers, making the back of this golf cart look like a crime scene. Stratt’s death grip on one of the wounds where the glass has already fallen out hurts like heck, but I figure she’s thinking more clearly than I am right now. Besides, it’s taking all my effort just to stay upright.
“Dr. Grace.” Stratt commands my attention. My eyelids flutter open. I’m not really even sure when they closed. “Keep your eyes on me. Understand?”
“Uh huh…” I blink heavily, almost succumbing again. I manage to stay awake though; it turns out my loyalty to Stratt overrides the deep need to sleep.
“Tell me how this happened.” She interrogates me without hesitation. “Recall every step from start to finish. Leave out no details.”
“I made…a mistake.” I gasp the words out, incredibly out of breath. I'm dizzy. Oh my god I’m so dizzy. And nauseous. I think I’m going to puke.
“Do not.” Stratt reaches into my mental monologue and responds to me as if I’ve been speaking aloud.
…have I?
The golf cart hits a curb (or something, I honestly don’t know) and it feels like all the shards of glass in my arm sink an inch deeper. Stratt’s hand bumps one and I can’t stop the deep whimper of pain that escapes me.
“This isn’t working.” Stratt complains and turns over her shoulder again, yelling at the driver. I’m not even sure if they’re speaking English. The entire world is just sounds and pain and smears of color and pain and there’s a lot of red–
“Dr. Grace.” This woman will not leave me alone.
I pry my eyes open again and realize I’ve dropped my head on her shoulder. More accurately, I’ve gone completely limp against her and she’s kind of, maybe holding me…? The nails that dig into my shoulder and forearm convey her true intentions – she’s the only thing keeping me from bouncing off the back of this golf cart. The driver is flooring it towards the nearest medical center and it doesn’t feel like we’re on the sidewalk anymore.
“What is your blood type?”
“O-Oh,” I manage, trying to match her level headedness at the moment. “Negt’v.”
Stratt nods. “Good. Can you tell me what happened in the lab? What caused the explosion?”
“A-astph’g,” the sounds fall out of my mouth instead of forming into an actual word like I intended. I feel like I’m blinking and seconds are passing as minutes. I think it’s raining, or I’m sweating, or maybe I’m crying?
The golf cart comes to a screeching halt and I jolt awake. Stratt stands up for the both of us. The world is still flying past me and I nearly topple over as we stumble to solid ground. Far more hands greet me before I can greet the pavement and suddenly I’m being pushed onto a bed. It’s weird that there’s a bed outside. My brain distantly recognizes the flash of white and baby blue uniforms and although I can't quite follow what's happening, I figure we’ve probably made it. The medical team has it handled from here.
“His blood type is O Negative.” I hear an ever familiar voice beside me, information pouring from her as quickly as the blood leaves my arm. “I tried to slow the bleeding with pressure and a tourniquet. The incident occurred between two and four minutes ago.”
I try to focus my gaze on Stratt one more time. She gave me a direct order to keep sight of her and I intend to follow it, darn it. My eyes catch hers and I try to smile reassuringly to prove I'm still functional. One of my arms, I can’t tell which, attempts to give a thumbs up before someone gently pushes it back down.
“Stay still, Dr. Grace.” A voice says, but it’s not Eva Stratt, so I can’t bring myself to care much. “We’ve got you, but keep your eyes open if you can.”
I…can’t.
************
I wake up cold and thirsty. My eyes feel glued shut but after a few attempts I get them open. Painfully bright light pierces my pupils and I immediately close them again, curling in on myself slightly.
“Ah, good.” A book closes beside me. No, not a book, a laptop. It’s a distinctly familiar sound.
Trying again, more slowly this time, I peek my eyes open. I’m in a medical stall. A fabric room separator surrounds the bed I’m laying in. Of all people, Eva Stratt sits beside me with her computer flat on her lap. That explains the familiar sound, I’ve heard her close that thing about a million times over.
“Where am I?” My voice is weak and it cracks as I ask. I blink a few times, noticing a bag of fluids on one side dripping into an IV and–ugh gross–a half empty bag of blood on the other. I wonder if that's my first or only transfusion. My shirt is gone, as are my pants. In their place is a hospital gown, which is humiliating to say the least. Thankfully, a thick sheet has been thrown over me and partially tucked in. “What’s goin’ on–?”
I try to sit up further than the partially elevated back of the bed, but one look from Stratt tells me to stay exactly where I am.
“That is what you’re going to tell me.” She huffs in frustration. “Your little accident at the lab has already created a mountain of paperwork. I’m allowing you to give your statement first and will find a way to streamline the explanation from there. I'm sure in a few days I’ll be contacting you again for a follow-up on the injury report.”
I move my arm a bit and notice the heavy bandaging. It’s wrapped entirely up my right forearm, stopping at the elbow. My left wrist and most of my hand are also wrapped to the point where I feel like a lego minifigure. I can feel my pulse through my left thigh and realize there’s some gauze circling right above my knee. When I furrow my eyebrows, adhesive tugs at my hair and I imagine there’s a bandaid on my forehead. (Either that or Stratt’s put a sticky note on my face again.)
God, the glass did a number on me.
Oh right. The glass. The experiment. The explosion. The accident.
“It was…my fault.” I finally manage to answer her. The longer I’m awake, the more I feel like myself. I could still lean my head back and be asleep within ten seconds, but Stratt's here now and she's pissed. I'm not going to waste her time more than I already have. “I shouldn’t have…approved the experiment. Lab’s too small. Needed something like the reinforced testing chamber on the vat.”
“What was the experiment, Dr. Grace?” Stratt isn’t taking notes, she’s not typing, not involved in any other conversations. All her attention is on me and my grandiose failure.
“Measuring the limit of astrophage’s energy storage capacity.” I mutter like a scolded child. “Attempting to determine if we could increase the output.”
Stratt nods. “Possibly resulting in a faster ship.”
I shrug. “Faster…doesn’t really matter.” It wouldn’t make a difference even if we could figure out a way to get the Hail Mary to travel at the speed of light. A human couldn’t survive a long term trip like that, anyway. It’s more about–
“Efficiency.” I only have the strength to give her that one word, but she seems to piece it together.
The stone statue of a woman sits silently beside me, mulling it all over. “Okay. What went wrong?”
“Uh…” I try to recall the experiment, exactly. I remember being in the room, I remember reading over the team’s description and noticing the alterations they’d made to Dimitri’s process for exciting the astrophage like we do with the spin drives. They’d increased the initial exposure of IR light to condense the burst down to three and a half seconds.
That was…wrong. The most efficient rate of expulsion should take place over the course of four seconds, Dimitri showed me his math. Any additional IR light exposure to make the astrophage more excited breaks the mechanisms involved in handling the output. Once that happens, it can lead to further, uncontrollable IR light exposure and an even bigger expulsion of force.
Except I’d realized it all too late. And now I have to admit it all to the person in charge of the fate of the world. Stratt’s face remains neutral and unchanged as I meander my way through an explanation.
“The astrophage was exposed to too much IR light at once. It became…overreactive.” I leave out the random details floating around my head and just give Stratt the basics. “I should’ve noticed the discrepancy earlier on the report they submitted. It’s my fault.”
I’d watched the sample heat up far too quickly and barely had enough time to push the lab assistants back and down before the whole experiment exploded and shot plexiglass all over. The cabinet with glass doors, stocked full of beakers above me also decided to break and there was simply no way to avoid the shrapnel.
I must’ve been knocked down and out because the next thing I knew, Stratt's security detail was storming the room, finding me and my science team sprawled across the aftermath of the disaster. Stratt made a beeline for me, calling the medical team over her walkie. I’d faded in and out as she triaged the heck out of my arm and probably saved my life. Now she sits here, unbothered.
Saving lives is all in a day’s work for Eva Stratt, I suppose.
She has more paperwork now, and that’s on me. I’ll also have a ton of failure analyses and reports to file about this, too. I’ve definitely caused a whole lot of trouble for a whole lot of people who already don’t have a surplus of time. “I’m sorry.” I mutter, defeated and embarrassed. “Is everyone else okay?”
Stratt nods again, curtly. “Minor injuries, scrapes and bruises. One concussion, a few stitches.” She glares at me with something that’s…unreadable. “You’re the only one being admitted, and even then it’s just for observation. I expect you to return to your regular duties by noon tomorrow, though I’m assigning you stationary work to complete from your domicile.” She narrows her eyes at me. “A thorough report explaining the details of this incident will be among them.”
“Sure.” I throw up my hands dramatically and drop them back to the bed, not thinking of the various fresh wounds beneath the bandages. I wince and gasp slightly.
Stratt’s eye twitches. She stands in one swift movement and takes a step closer to me. “You’re crucial to this mission, Dr. Grace. Please see to it that an incident like this doesn’t occur again. We cannot suffer any delays to the timeline.”
I’m chilled to my core, but fight the instinct to shrink away from her gaze out of sheer spite. I’ve never responded well to another adult reprimanding me, I don’t care how high ranking they are. “Oh my bad.” Sarcasm drips from my tongue. “I had another lab explosion scheduled for Friday but I guess I’ll go ahead and cancel that.”
A cough-like laugh threatens to bubble out of her chest but she chokes it down and maintains her composure. Without another word, she turns on her heel, already reaching for the curtain. She stops with her fingers on the hem and turns to me once more before she leaves. Only now do I notice how her hand trembles, her eyes are glassy and her white shirt beneath a black blazer has been stained with blood and faded to rust.
How long had she been sitting here? She didn't even leave to change?
“I’m glad you’re alive, Dr. Grace.” Stratt offers with an exasperated sigh and leaves. I’m left in the wake of her, a small space that gets warmer the second she’s gone.
For a while I sit there in regret and embarrassment, wondering why I didn’t ask her if she was okay, too.