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~ The Bright Clear Line ~
Once Grace frees himself from the tubes, he notices the other people in the room. One is a corpse, a dried-out husk that must have died at some early point in their journey.
The other is still alive, peacefully comatose.
He cautiously approaches, and reaches out to gently brush back the long waves of hair obscuring his crewmate's face.
Upon seeing who it is, a memory hits him like a Mack truck full of thunderbolts.
A guard unlocks the door and Stratt enters his cell. The guard closes and locks the door behind her.
Grace is sitting on the edge of his bed, but he stands to face her.
Before he even has a chance to ask what she wants from him now, she tells him that two separate freak accidents have taken out the commanders of both Team A and Team B.
And he remembers - his self inside the memory remembers - the explosion that took out Dubois and Shapiro. Stratt had been more strict about keeping the members of the main and backup teams apart after that, but apparently it had not been enough to prevent further misfortune from striking.
As his vision blurs with tears, he also remembers the way Stratt slapped him across the face for crying over Dubois and Shapiro's deaths, and he half-expects her to do the same now. But she doesn't.
Stratt's expression softens upon seeing his reaction, and she steps forward to wrap him in a hug. He just stands there for a few stunned seconds before tentatively returning the embrace.
Tears pour down his face. He idly wonders if Stratt can feel them dripping into her hair.
Then his thoughts turn to the reason she came here.
"Who's going to be the mission commander now?" he asks.
"I am." Stratt is still holding onto him, and her arms tighten around him as she says it. "We assembled a C Team after the explosion, but we don't have enough time to prepare them for the mission the way the A Team and B Team were prepared. I'm not confident the C Team commander could complete the mission successfully. So I'm going."
She's not confident that the C Team scientist could complete the mission successfully, either. That's why she has Grace locked in this cell.
He pulls her closer, holding her tightly against him, and whispers into her hair, "I'll be there. I'll be right there with you. We're going to save the sun and the Earth."
"And the rest of the stars while we're at it?"
"And the rest of the stars while we're at it."
She hadn't said it in as many words, but he remembers that the look on her face as she told him about the commanders dying made him think that she thought the mission had a high chance of failure at that point, even if Stratt herself went as the mission commander. That was what had finally convinced Grace to put aside his fear of his own life ending and accept his position as the crew's scientist.
Now he is awake and functionally alone aboard the Hail Mary, trying not to go stir-crazy during the weeks left until the spaceship reaches its destination.
At the optimal time, just one week before they reach their destination, Stratt emerges from her coma.
The first thing Grace does when he sees that she's up and about is drop everything he's holding. The second thing he does is wrap her in a hug.
"I'm glad you're awake," he says.
They cling to each other for a few long moments, before Stratt pulls away.
"Where's Ilyukhina?" she asks.
There aren't many places on the ship that their other crewmate could be.
She can tell by the look on his face before he answers that the third member of their crew did not make it. Grace explains what he found when he woke up, and how he disposed of Ilyukhina's remains.
"I was starting to worry that you wouldn't wake up, either," Grace says, his lashes sparkling with unshed tears behind the lenses of his glasses. "With everything that's happened, it's kind of starting to feel like almost everyone who signed up to be on this crew is doomed to meet an untimely death. After what happened with Shapiro and Dubois, and then the mission commanders..."
He trails off at the pinched expression on Stratt's face at the mention of how they lost the other crew members.
"I lied to you about that, actually," she says. "The A and B Team commanders are still alive. I just thought that telling you they died and I was going to be the mission commander would be the best way to get you to actually agree to come of your own free will."
~end~