Chapter Text
You stood outside your office with your hands clasped neatly behind your back, staring down the corridor and trying very hard not to think about how ridiculous this assignment was.
Your posture wasn't intentional anymore. Years of training had drilled it into you until it became second nature. It was a stance that commanded respect before you even spoke, which had proven useful more times than you could count.
You had needed that respect.
No matter how many hours you had logged, how many simulations you had passed, or how many impossible situations you had trained for, there was always somebody who looked at you and saw your age before they saw your accomplishments.
You were young, surprisingly young for an astronaut. You were skilled and had been referred to as NASA'S future by many. The same people had also found it obscure that they would send sutch a young, smart and talented astronaut in to a suicide misson knowing you would never return.
The corridor around you remained quiet as scientists and engineers moved between offices carrying tablets, reports, and enough caffeine to power a small city. Nobody looked particularly happy. The end of the world tended to have that effect on people.
You checked your smartwatch. It was one of the most complex and modern technological achievements you were exposed to every day, and usually it was a lot. It calculated everything about your body and habits. It was basically a mini surveillance clock plugging your whole body up to a computer. The experts around you said it was crucial to get to know your body's mechanisms before they put you into a medical coma for the best results. You were happy as long as you woke up from the coma clear minded, if you even woke up at all.
He was five minutes late. Of course.
You sigh. The one afternoon Stratt assigned you up for something important and your trainee was already late.
Your eyes drifted toward the tablet tucked beneath your arm.
Dr. Ryland Grace.
Mission Specialist.
Astrophage Research Team.
Former Middle School Science Teacher.
Every time you read that final line you found yourself getting irrationally annoyed.
Not because he wasn't qualified. By all accounts, Grace was brilliant. One of the leading scientific minds on the entire project. Hell, he was even the one to first come in contact with the Astrophage.
But every time someone referred to him as a mission specialist, your brain immediately translated it into:
Teacher.
Humanity had gathered the greatest scientists, engineers and astronauts available.
And apparently one middle school science teacher.
You were still trying to understand how that had happened.
The door leading to the halway you were standing in opened and you automatically looked towards the door.
Dr. Ryland Grace stepped into the hallway carrying a messenger bag that looked one overloaded pocket away from catastrophic failure. A pair of reading glasses sat slightly crooked on his face while a stack of papers was tucked securely beneath one arm. He was muttering to himself as he walked, completely absorbed in whatever problem had occupied his attention before leaving the office.
"...no, because if the sample contamination happened after extraction, then the isotope ratio wouldn't—"
His eyes landed on you. The sentence immediately died.
"Oh!"
His expression brightened in recognition.
"Oh, that's you."
You raised an eyebrow.
"Dr. Grace?"
He quickly shifted his papers to one arm and held out his right hand.
"Ryland Grace."
You shook it as you introduced yourself.
His grip was firm, though his attention was already elsewhere. Namely, you.
"You are significantly younger than I expected." He chuckled awkwardly, casting a look at you as if you weren't supposed to be here.
There it was.
You'd heard some variation of that sentence your entire career. Usually it irritated you but this time it mostly sounded like genuine confusion.
"Thank you."
"I didn't mean that as a compliment."
"I know."
"No, seriously." He pointed directly at you. "You're young."
You looked down the hallway. Then back at him.
"That's generally how age works."
To your surprise, he immediately laughed. Not a polite chuckle, an actual laugh.
"Oh wow."
"What?" You ask, trying to keep your composure with a poker face.
"Okay, now I understand why people are intimidated by you."
"I'm not intimidating." You say as you shrug your shoulders.
"You absolutely are."
"I'm really not." The conversation had already taken longer than expected. Most of the scientists and doctors you have worked with are well… Special. Not really talkative and usually straight to the point. Grace was different.
"You have military posture."
You looked down on your body. You stood with a straight back. Shoulders square. Weight balanced evenly on your feet that were a shoulder width apart. Totally normal to you, and almost everyone around you, like second nature. But then you remembered he was American.
"I'm on the clock." You replied as you looked straight to Grace, he was a bit taller than you so you had to lift your head slightly to keep eye contact. Grace continued studying you like he was trying to solve a puzzle. Then his eyes widened slightly.
"Wait."
You immediately disliked that tone.
"What?"
"I've seen you before."
You frowned.
"I don't doubt it." You say with a hint of proudness to your tone.
"No, seriously."
He snapped his fingers.
"The yellow suits."
You blinked.
"The mission suits?"
"Yes!"
He pointed triumphantly.
"I knew I recognized you."
You started.
"You've seen me in mission briefings, I've also seen you there."
"I thought you were somebody's assistant."
The silence that followed could have frozen water.
Grace's smile slowly disappeared when he realized that he had just insulted you, one of the most qualified people working on the mission.
"Oh." He winced. "That sounded worse out loud."
"You thought I was an assistant?" You scoff, furrowing your eyebrows.
"To be fair, everyone in those suits looks vaguely important." Grace keeps rambling on trying to save the situation.
You continued staring.
"And also," he added quickly, "you look way too young to be one of the astronauts."
There it was again. The age thing. Grace shook his head.
"No, because this is genuinely confusing." He gestured vaguely at you.
"How old are you?"
You told him your age and his eyes widened immediately.
"You're kidding."
"No."
He looked up at the ceiling.
Then back at you.
Then up at the ceiling again.
"I'm pretty sure at your age I was eating instant noodles three meals a day and accidentally setting laboratory equipment on fire."
"You set laboratory equipment on fire?"
"Once."
A pause.
"Twice."
Another pause.
"Okay, more than twice."
You couldn't stop the tiny smile threatening to appear.
Grace noticed instantly.
"Aha!"
You immediately wiped it away. "Aha what?"
"You almost smiled." His grin widened.
"I didn't."
"You absolutely did."
You ignored him. Unfortunately that didn't stop him.
"You know what the weirdest part is?" He continued.
You already regretted accepting this assignment from Stratt.
"What?" You sigh.
"The fact that I'm apparently supposed to let you teach me things."
You frowned.
"The simulator orientation?"
"Exactly. It's going to feel like you're one of my 6th graders teaching me." He threw both hands into the air.
"And?" You asked him. You two had already wasted enough time in the corridor, but he sure was entertaining.
"I have multiple degrees."
"So do I."
"And somehow you're the authority figure."
"That's because I'm the pilot for today's session."
You started walking, Grace followed shortly after. It reminded you of all the times you had seen Grace follow Stratt around like a little dog around base.
"And because I'll be the co-pilot on the mission." You continued as you took calibrated steps towards one of the hangars.
Grace followed immediately, still looking mildly offended.
"See? That's exactly what I mean."
"What?"
"It feels wrong. I'm never even going to be in that ship when it launches."
"You never know what can happen." You say as you look back to Grace, making sure he's still following. "Just so you know Stratt did this for team building purposes."
"So you're not here on your own accord?" Grace asked. "Damn..." He replied with a disappointed tone as you smiled with your back towards him. He was funny, you could at least give him that.
The simulator session hadn't even started and somehow you already knew this was going to be a very long afternoon.
The walk across the hangar should have taken five minutes.
With Grace it took closer to fifteen.
Mostly because Ryland Grace seemed physically incapable of observing something without stopping and commenting on it.
Parts of the Hail Mary were scattered around the facility around you, some parts stretching upward through multiple levels of scaffolding and maintenance platforms. Massive support beams disappeared into the ceiling while engineers worked along the hull like ants climbing a skyscraper. The entire hangar vibrated with activity.
Grace spent most of the walk looking everywhere except where he was going.
"Do you ever think about how insane this is?"
"Sometimes. I have gotten used to it."
"How."
"I work here."
"That's not an answer."
"It is."
"It isn't."
He pointed upward.
"That is a spaceship."
You looked at the ship and pointed towards the ceiling.
"Yes."
"A spaceship."
"I've flown a spaceship before."
"We built a spaceship." He says again, most likely ignoring your input.
"We did." You nod as you're growing impatient. All of this has probably taken over half an hour.
"A real one."
You rubbed your temple.
"Ryland."
"No, because seriously. Think about it. Humanity looked at an extinction-level crisis and collectively decided, 'You know what? Let's build the most expensive object in history and launch people at another star.'"
You glanced over. He was smiling and you could almost feel the excitement radiating from him. He genuinely thought the achievement itself was incredible, and little did he know that he was going to be a part of the crew.
He was right, it was impressive.
The simulator occupied an enormous section of the training complex.
The room itself was dimly lit, illuminated primarily by instrument panels and monitor screens. The replica cockpit sat elevated on a hydraulic platform in the center of the room, surrounded by observation stations and diagnostic equipment. Every switch, display, and control surface had been recreated exactly.
The moment Ryland saw it, he stopped walking.
His mouth literally fell open.
"Oh, that is cool." He could barely contain his excitement.
"It's a training simulator not a toy." You reminded him.
"It's a spaceship."
"It's a simulator."
"It's a simulator pretending to be a spaceship."
You pinched the bridge of your nose. Taking a deep breath preparing yourself for a long session in the simulator.
The two of you jumped into the complex flight simulator. He sat at the main pilots seat and you sat on your assigned seat, as the co-pilot. You didn't quite like it that someone so much more underquantified than you sat at the main seat. But you had to shake that jealousy off, this was just training and in an hour he would exit the simulator to hopefully never come back. You showed and explained the basic buttons and leavers and what certain displays meant and how to use them.
Grace looked like he was a child who just entered a candy store. You saw how his eyes widened and twinkled in the dim light of the cockpit. But this excitement also made him more chatty, which you thought would be impossible considering that the past twenty minutes had just consisted of his yapping.
What surprised you wasn't that Grace talked. He had proven himself quite chatty after the first few seconds of meeting him. It was even more surprising that he never stopped.
Not once.
Not for a single second.
Every answer from you generated three more questions from him.
Every explanation became a discussion.
Every procedure became a debate.
At one point you spent twenty minutes explaining emergency maneuvering systems only for him to somehow connect the conversation to fire drills at the school he worked at since he has "done emergency drills before". You just had to shake your head and explain that a school being on fire was not the same problem as a spaceship 11.9 light years away from earth would cause for humanity.
That later escalated to him assuming that all astronauts, like you, were annoying because they could never see the small picture of things. You scoffed and defended yourself by saying that all scientists must be stupid because of how many questions with obvious answers he was asking you.
but the truth was that the questions he asked weren't stupid.
Not even close.
They were insightful and thoughtful. Sometimes he made you think more than you would like to admit.
He asked you the kind of questions that forced you to explain not just what a system did, but why it existed in the first place.
And annoyingly, he understood everything almost immediately.
"You got all that?" You said as you unclipped the seatbelt around you.
You stared at him.
He looked up from his notebook.
"What?"
"I explained that once."
"Yeah."
"And you understood it?"
"Well, hopefully."
"Most people don't. I barely even did it my first time to be honest." It really took a lot of courage to admit that. You were usually not the one to admit any sort of weakness.
Grace shrugged.
"I teach middle school."
You blinked, surprised by his nonchalant answer. Ryland Grace was anything BUT nonchalant.
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"If you can explain cellular respiration to a room full of thirteen-year-olds after lunch, you can learn pretty much anything."
You hated how much sense that made. You remembered your peers in middle school and how slow they were to understand stuff. You had always been an overachiever, but hell, that's why you're here trying to save humanity from extinction.
By the time the simulator powered down and the two of you had made your way out of it, evening had settled over the facility. The training lights outside the observation windows cast long reflections across the cockpit glass while most of the daytime staff had already gone home. Neither of you had anything scheduled afterward. No briefings. No evaluations. No work waiting for you.
For the first time all day, you realized neither of you had been in a hurry. At some point the lesson had stopped feeling like work. The two of you had spent the last hour talking about everything except the simulator.
Teaching.
Flying.
Favorite movies.
Terrible cafeteria food.
The conversation had somehow drifted so far from the original lesson that you couldn't remember where it had started.
Ryland climbed the last steps of the latter and stretched.
"That was amazing." He smiled and you could not help but smile back. Fuck, why did you do that? You quickly composed yourself.
"This was just the surface." You reminded him.
"It was an amazing surface. Besides learning is easy when you have such an amazing teacher"
You rolled your eyes trying to play it off, but the complement made something in your stomach flutter.
He grinned, then glanced at the scheduling board mounted near the exit.
His expression immediately changed.
"Oh."
"What?"
"We're both free tomorrow."
You followed his gaze that went from the whiteboard towards your face with such excitement in his eyes that made it so much harder for you to say no. You shook your head in response, trying to shake off these strange feelings. Besides, Grace was probably the one you should definitely not fall for. What if the rumors between him and Stratt were true? I mean he is skilled, but how could a middle school teacher climb the career ladder all the way up here in some days beside, you know, compromises?
Unfortunately, he was right. The entire afternoon sat empty on both schedules. Another smile slowly appeared on Rylands face and you immediately knew what was coming.
"No." You blatantly replied
"I haven't even asked."
"You don't need to."
"I do."
"You don't."
He pointed toward the simulator.
"Same time tomorrow?" He smiled
You should have said no.
You really should have.
Instead you found yourself looking back toward the simulator, already thinking about the conversations you'd left unfinished.
Which was concerning.
Very concerning.
Ryland's smile widened.
"You hesitated."
"I didn't."
"You absolutely did."
You sigh.
"One hour."
"Excellent."
"Only one hour."
"We'll see."
You laughed before you could stop yourself.
And somehow that seemed to make him happier than getting permission for another session.
By the time the two of you left the simulator part of the hangar together, continuing arguing about whether astronauts or scientists were more annoying, it no longer felt like an assignment.
It felt suspiciously close to the beginning of a friendship.