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Eva Stratt had never understood relationships.
The idea of being someone's… anything made her skin crawl, the urge to run taking hold of her body. It felt suffocating. It felt like being kept, tied down. She was herself, and she did not need to be… tethered to anyone else. She had found that to her, relationships were tedious. Everyone always expected something of you, and she was someone who valued efficiency in her actions and so much seemed so trivial. Even simple friendship was sometimes almost too much to bear. Sure, she wanted to be social; enjoyed good company and sharing a connection with others. But only briefly. She never liked letting it go much further, always holding people at a certain distance.
She was always dissembling. Certain people got specific parts of her, and only those parts. Nobody ever got everything, and she always cut loose and pulled away if she felt like someone was getting too close.
Eventually, most people had stopped trying to get anything from her.
She had especially never understood the concept of love. Whether it was loving someone, or being in love. In her mind to love someone is to give something up, to give it away. This she'd learned as she watched her parent's marriage go stale, watching friends move on.
Love meant tying yourself to someone in a way that you couldn't take back.
She never felt it for anyone. Sure, she cared a great deal about certain people, and there was a general distant love for all of humanity, for people as a concept, fascinating and wonderful and strange as they were, but she never quite loved anyone in specific. Sometimes she liked them well enough, or tolerated them at best, but she never felt the urge to be around them more than she needed to. Never felt the need to talk to them, or to really know them and let them know her in return. People were always passing through, and she never tried to follow them.
And in her mind she had everyone she had to interact with sorted on a list, and the higher you were on it the more she was willing to tolerate you, the more she liked you. And she'd move people up or down it depending how much she liked them that day, week, month.
Nobody ever exceeded the list, and nobody ever stayed at the top forever.
There was always something or another about a person that meant she could never truly like, or even love them. They were often at their core fundamentally incompatible with her in some way. She could overlook it, sure, but it would still be there, and it would mean they could never truly be anything. Because why waste your time if it will never work out?
And she was never one to pretend to like anyone more than she did. Eva always acted the way she felt, and if you were low on the list, this meant she didn't like you and was more distant, less giving. You always knew exactly where you stood with her.
She never blamed them for it, of course. It was simply a matter of where to invest her time and energy.
So love was just a thing that didn't apply to her. And she was fine with that.
Privately she wondered if that meant she was fucked up, broken in a way that no one else seemed to be. But when the daylight hit she always remembered that she was just fine with the way she was, and boxed those thoughts away.
So she continued her strange and solitary existence, working her way up and up until the day the world started ending.
And then she met Ryland Grace.
Somehow he managed to worm his way past her defenses in a mere few months. He fit himself into the gaps and spaces where she had not quite shored everything off—and by the time she'd realised, she'd gotten used to him being there and extricating him would be more trouble than it was worth.
Something about him was easy for her to love. He slowly but surely climbed his way up her list before surpassing it altogether, getting his own spot in her head.
The one, and only, exception. The first, and last.
She found herself watching and remembering him, saving every detail she could for him in her head. She wanted to be around him even when she didn't need to be; wanted to talk to him about whatever he wanted, even if it wasn't important at all to the project. Wanted to know more about him always. He was interesting to her, something a rare few could achieve.
Most of all, she found herself wanting to be something to him.
And the urge to run was there, of course; it would probably always be a part of her, but it was much, much smaller than it was for everyone else. His friendship with her made her feel… hm. She doesn't know. Might never know, really. It didn't feel quantifiable. It simply was.
She does know that she wants him around her as much as possible, wants him to be hers in some capacity and for herself to belong to him in some way. Not romantically, of course, and certainly not sexually. Just… not with any kind of label, laden with expectations and implications and a structure she could not—and did not want to, anyway—fit into.
She didnt want him only platonically either, although being platonic was not diminishing of their relationship in any way, and would be more than enough for them if they wanted. But it felt like something that existed outside those lines. It was something… special.
She liked having him in her office while she worked late into the night. She liked talking to him, listening to his random thoughts. Liked letting him know her, care about her—liked letting him bring her two coffees, and a smile and a worry for her health.
It almost seemed too good to be true, and she started looking for the inevitable fault that split them. But despite all her searching and testing, she found none. Nothing he did moved him down the list, not even at his worst. Apparently, she liked him enough that the traits and flaws that ordinarily she would hate in other people were merely a part of him, insignificant in the face of everything else.
(Even at the end, refusing to go, she still loves him anyway. It's a flaw she doesn't like, of course, and that does make her a bit more sour on him—likes him a little less, but that doesn't change the love. The part of her that loves him is bigger than the part of her that resents him.)
(After she sends him on the Hail Mary she feels like she's missing a limb. She finds herself wandering the halls and listening to his favourite songs on repeat. She'll look to her left when something he'd find funny would happen, and would be disappointed and sad every time. Seeing Twizzlers in the store reminds her of him.
She replays their last conversation again and again, trying to see if there was something better she could have said. Every time she comes up with the same results. It feels like pressing a finger into a bruise when she thinks about him.
It's almost poetic, she thinks wryly. The first person I love, and I have to send him away.
Maybe to love him was to doom him. Maybe her hands are tainted, and she was always going to kill him. Who knows. Was it always going to end this way?)
When she cleans out his desk at the lab, she finds a little fox figurine in one of the drawers. She puts it in her pocket and shuts the drawer, turns the lights off and leaves the room.