Chapter Text
“You’re gonna mess up your glasses if you let them hang off your face like that,” you say, peeking into Ryland Grace’s classroom. The Ziploc bag full of snicker-doodle cookies you’d baked last night held firmly in your hand.
“Didn’t see you there,” he says, looking over at you and ignoring the spot on his ceiling he was contentedly looking at.
“Probably because you’re not wearing your glasses,” you tease. Taking his sentence as an offer to enter his class. You hadn’t met him before, being relatively new this school year. But everyone else had warmed up to you, generally. You just hadn’t met him yet.
“Ah, I’m far-sighted.” He gestures to the ceiling. You look up, indulging him for a moment.
“Nice to meet you far-sighted.” He stares at you, a little stunned and flustered. You smile.
“I come baring cookies?” You say as a peace offering.
“I-uh,” he flubs, standing up to get you a chair. “You’re the English teacher, right?”
“Sure am,” you say and when the silence falls you speak again. “The cookies are snicker-doodle.”
You shake the bag like you’re jingling keys, he watches you with a smile as he brings you a chair and sets it beside his desk.
“They- well I hope you don’t have any allergies or dietary restrictions because they’re just normal cookies. No fancy flour or anything. An old recipe I work shopped in my teens after I read about the perfect snicker-doodles in a book once and I had to get it perfect it took months...”
You look to see Ryland smiling at you, you hurriedly put the cookies down on his desk.
“I’m gonna shut up now,”You mumble.
He fishes a cookie out of the bag. “Which book?”
“Some romance novel,” You say waving the thought off.
Ryland takes a bite out of the cookie and stares at it incredulously. “This is really good.”
You gesture to the bag on his desk. “Have as many as you want. I bake them every weekend. The kids practically beg me to bring them.”
“I can see why. You just put these out in the lounge?” He asks, taking another bite as he gestures to the label you’ve put on the Ziploc. You nod.
“The faculty beg me, too.” You say with a bit of a laugh.
“You have got to give me the recipe for these,” he says, grabbing another cookie. You grin, shaking your head.
“That’s not how this works, but I can teach you.” He looks up at you, blinking as he shoves half of the new cookie into his mouth. You hold back another laugh.
“Really?” He asks from behind a mouth of cookie. Eyes wide and ears tinted pink. It makes your heart tug towards him.
You nod, “Sure. Come by after school and we can find a way to find some time. I’m leaving in a week to take some time off.”
“Where’re you going?” He asks.
“The kids think I’m going to Hawaii but I’m just spending two weeks polishing this novel I’m writing.”
He gives you a grin. “Well you have to tell me about that.”
You look up at the clock above his desk and smile, standing quickly from your chair. “I’ll tell you about it while we bake those cookies, Dr. Grace.”
“It’s just mister Grace,” he says but you shoot him a smile over your shoulder, standing in the doorway.
“That PhD would say otherwise,” You say and he watches you walk out of his classroom.
_-~*
Grace was never quite sure what the series of numbers and ingredients were, why this small slip of paper was packed with his things, why there was seemingly an excerpt of a manuscript packed with his things or what it all meant.
Until now, until right now.
The stupid cookies. A few months after you’d officially started going out, you’d written the recipe down on the back of a note card you kept in your pocket at all times. You’d slipped it into his coat pocket as you’d walked out the door of his apartment and he knew when he found it the next day he was going to marry you.
That’s not how this works. But I can teach you.
He flips the note card around, finding the excerpt. Almost the exact words in the dedication of the manuscript. Your manuscript.
To Doctor Ryland Grace,
The bravest man I’ve ever met.
He rubs at the skin around his eyes, glasses hanging off his face in the exact same way you’d first found him. Lamenting what he’d have to do, what he’d wait to do. He should have just asked you when he had the chance and now all he had was that manuscript and this scrap of paper to remember you by.
“Alright, Rock. You win.”
_-~*
You hadn’t seen Dr. Ryland Grace in years. He walked out of your life shrouded in mystery and sub-plans that tried to keep his students engaged even though they were all wondering where their teacher went.
All you could tell them was you didn’t know.
You still didn’t know, but when you stopped by his apartment it was empty, when you went looking through his desk it was bare... Then his texts were less frequent... And then they stopped entirely.
A twice weekly cup of coffee and daily lunch-breaks together suddenly gone.
Your walk to work is cut short by an alert on your phone that makes your heart rate skyrocket from the sound. You yank you phone from your pocket and stare at the announcement.
Doctor Ryland Grace, Savior of the Universe.
Your fingers tremble as notifications after notification of news floods your phone. You click on the first article.
You don’t read through any of it, you just pause when you see Grace, a video of him. You breathing halts. You click play.
You feel the tears threaten to spill as Grace smiles at the camera. He’s been in space. He’s been saving us.
“I guess you were right about me,” he says with a smile, looking down at a slim slip of paper in his hands. Your heart that-thumping in your ears and chest the same way it did thirteen years ago. Your heart’s a jack-knife as you see the story boarding you’d done on the back of the note card the night you’d written out the recipe for him.
“I- I wasn’t sure what this was when I woke up. But I remember now...” He looks up at the camera, your heart slamming into your ribs repeatedly. He remembered the stupid cookies, he remembers you.
“It’ll be a nice taste of home if I can ever make them again...” He says with a small laugh.
The tears are slipping down now. In thirteen years you hadn’t been able to forget Grace. In thirteen years you’d kept the sweater he’d left at your place, the story ideas he’d given you, the memories closely wrapped up in your chest like a promise. You hadn’t moved on. You couldn’t.
Home. It’s a quiet word. A small word. A word that fits like a puzzle piece you didn’t know you were missing.
“Though it’s gonna take a couple of years. Can’t just replicate the perfect cookie the person you were gonna marry spent years perfecting.”
You laugh. Your heart swells in your chest. Marry you? Marry you and he knew you for a few months. You feel the tears dampening his sweater wrapped carefully around you. You rub at the water flowing down your face, trying to see through the tears to the screen.
He’s smiling that smile the rest of the faculty swore at happy hour that he reserved just for you. He traces the pad of his thumb over the pencil of your handwriting and you feel yourself smile. Of all the people in the world you got Ryland Grace, who never once failed to be brave around you. Who always took the chance, the leap, always made sure you had enough writing material even if he looked like an idiot doing it.
You got Ryland Grace, who after thirteen years and a coma that took his memory, based on what little of the article you’d skimmed, still looks at your writing like it’s the most precious thing in the world.
It had only been a few months and he decided he was going to marry you.
Then he stopped replying and stopped showing up for coffee and dates because he was busy saving the world.
He looks so happy, so tired, so at peace you can barely breathe through the tears and the laughter. Ryland Grace is okay. He’s better than okay, he’s finally realized he’s brave.
“As the Eridians say,” he rubs his balled fist up and down his clothed arm and you smile. Aliens. That man found aliens in space and he was still thinking about you.
You replicate the motion, grinning from ear to ear as Grace ends his final message to Earth.
“See you when I get home, F-”
He’s cut off by the editing, either by the government or by the news outlets. Who would let him finish? Then he’s speaking to the rest of the world, then he’ll see everyone when he gets home. A suicide mission that’s no longer a suicide. But you know
Far-sighted.
You laugh.
“See you when you get home.” You mutter.