Work Text:
Zoya Nazyalensky was a pragmatic woman. She was not an emotional one, or at least, she did not allow herself to be.
As a historian, she knew too much about the world to indulge in illusions. Human history was, more often than not, a record of cruelty: wars fought for pride, nations ruined by greed, families destroyed by love and hatred in equal measure. Survival, she had long ago concluded, required clear judgment. There was little room for irrationality.
She had learned that lesson long before she ever set foot in a university lecture hall.
As a child, she had seen firsthand how burdensome unchecked emotions could become. They had been the reason her parents had come together, and the reason they had fallen apart. Once, they had loved each other fiercely, the kind of love that seemed immovable when viewed through a child’s eyes. Then, slowly, it had begun to crack. Love had turned to bitterness, bitterness to anger, and eventually everything had collapsed.
Her father had left.
Her mother had remained, but only in the most literal sense. The woman who had once laughed easily and sung while she cooked had faded away, hollowed out by grief and poverty until there was very little of her left. What remained had grown hard, sharp-edged. Cruel.
Arranged marriages were uncommon in their time, relics of another age, but desperation had a way of reviving old evils. Crushed beneath debt and rage and the suffocating weight of her own loss, her mother had nearly sold Zoya to a wealthy businessman before she had even finished high school.
Zoya had understood then, with a clarity that still startled her when she looked back on it, that if she wanted autonomy, she would have to claim it herself.
So she left with little more than a bag of clothes, borrowed money, and a determination that bordered on stubbornness. Even at fifteen, she knew that leaving her mother behind was not an act of betrayal. The woman who had been her mother had disappeared long before Zoya walked out the door. She ran because staying would have meant surrendering her future to someone else's desperation.
And after that, she learned to rely on things that could not abandon her: facts, logic, evidence. History made sense in a way people rarely did. It followed patterns. Causes had consequences. Choices left traces.
Emotions, by contrast, were unpredictable things. They built people up only to tear them apart. It was safer not to trust them. Safer to remain practical. Rational. In control. For most of her life, Zoya had believed that was enough.
That did not mean she had never let people into her life.
For the first few years after running away, she had lived with her aunt, Liliyana. If anyone had earned Zoya's unwavering loyalty, it was her. Liliyana had been more of a mother than Zoya's own had managed to be in years. She had never been wealthy. Her apartment had been small, her furniture mismatched, and there had been months when every expense had to be carefully considered. But she had given Zoya something far more valuable than comfort.
She had believed in her.
She had made sure Zoya stayed in school. She had encouraged her curiosity and insisted that intelligence was worth cultivating even when the world seemed determined to reward everything else. More than anything, she had made sure Zoya had a future, one built on her own abilities rather than someone else's charity.
Zoya had never taken that for granted. She had studied harder than anyone else. She had earned every scholarship she could, worked every opportunity that came her way, and refused to be outperformed. Every achievement was another step away from the frightened fifteen-year-old who had arrived at her aunt's doorstep carrying little more than a backpack and the certainty that she could never go home again.
Nothing she had accomplished had been handed to her.
People did not put her in charge because of her family name or because she had influential connections waiting to open doors for her. She had neither. They trusted her with responsibility because she was competent. Because she made difficult decisions without hesitation. Because when something needed to be done, she did it, and she did it efficiently.
Zoya had friends, too.
There was Genya Safin, one of the brightest minds of her generation, already well known in scientific circles for her pioneering work in molecular cloning. They had met at university, though neither of them could have pinpointed the exact moment they became friends. It had begun with quiet nods across the library, then with sharing tables during exam season, and eventually with conversations that stretched so long they would be politely ushered out by the librarians after closing time. Their friendship had come easily after that.
Perhaps it was because they understood each other in ways few others could. Both had spent years fighting against assumptions made the moment they walked into a room. They were beautiful women, and the world had often decided that beauty was all they could possibly offer. Both had worked relentlessly to prove otherwise.
Then there was Alina Starkov, whom Zoya had met through Genya. Alina was two years younger, an orphan who had earned a scholarship through sheer determination and undeniable brilliance. She was... unusual. Quiet one moment, infuriatingly stubborn the next, with an uncanny habit of questioning assumptions simply because everyone else accepted them.
They had clashed almost immediately. Zoya had found her reckless. Alina had found her rigid. Neither assessment had been entirely wrong.
Over time, however, mutual irritation had given way to respect. Alina possessed an intellect that was impossible to ignore, and a persistence that bordered on impossible. She refused to abandon an idea simply because it seemed unattainable, a quality that had carried her further than almost anyone had expected. People did not become one of the world's foremost quantum optics scientists through luck alone. Alina certainly hadn't.
All of that was to say, Zoya was not a loner. Far from it. She formed friendships. She valued loyalty. She cared deeply for the people she allowed into her life. But she never let herself disappear into those relationships. She never forgot herself, never allowed sentiment to cloud her judgment or soften the principles she had spent a lifetime building.
She was not the sort of woman ruled by her emotions.
There was only one exception: her garden.
Garden was perhaps too generous a word. It was a quiet corner of her apartment, filled with carefully tended pots lining shelves and windowsills, each one thriving under meticulous care. There were no winding paths or flowerbeds, only leaves reaching toward the light and blossoms that returned with the seasons.
Each plant represented someone.
Not everyone she knew, nor even everyone she liked. Only those who had changed her life in some lasting way. People she loved, admired, mourned, or simply believed deserved to be remembered.
Looking after those plants was the one ritual she allowed herself to perform without logic or practicality. She watered them with care, pruned dying leaves, repotted them when they outgrew their homes. It was an act of remembrance as much as an act of gardening.
And every time she stood before them, a familiar ache settled quietly beneath her ribs.
Some of the flowers belonged to people who were gone.
A gladiolus for Liliyana.
Yellow carnations for her mother.
And the most recent addition was a godetia for Nikolai.
Nikolai, of course, was not dead.
When she had first placed the pot among the others, it had felt almost like tempting fate. But there had been no other place for him. Not among the living, when he was farther away than any human being in history. Not among the dead, because no one could honestly say that he belonged there either. He existed somewhere in between.
Before the Beetles returned to Earth, there had been no way of knowing what had become of the Hail Mary. They had launched Nikolai into the darkness with a mission and a hope, then waited.
And waited.
He could have died before the ship ever reached its destination. He could have survived the journey only to perish later. He could have succeeded. He could have failed. There had been no answers, only silence.
For twenty-six years, silence had been all Zoya had known.
Twenty-six years of carrying the weight of every decision she had made as director of the Project. Twenty-six years of wondering whether the sacrifices had amounted to anything at all. Whether the compromises she had justified, the lives she had uprooted, the impossible choices she had signed her name beneath had ultimately served a purpose.
Whether Nikolai was still somewhere beyond the stars. Or whether she had truly lost him already.
The godetia never let her forget that.
It was a simple plant to care for under Earth’s current conditions. Godetias did not require excessive sunlight and preferred cooler temperatures, though not the brutal cold that lingered outside. Few things on Earth had adapted to those new conditions as of now. All in all, it was well suited for the controlled environment of her apartment. Under Zoya’s care, the flower was thriving.
She had always been good at keeping these things alive. Plants were easier than people. They did not lie. They did not leave without warning. They did not make promises they could not keep. If they were given the right conditions, they grew.
The godetia had no idea that it was standing in for someone who was light-years away. It did not know that every new leaf felt like a small reassurance, or that every bloom carried the weight of a question Zoya had been unable to answer for twenty-six years.
It simply grew, unaware of the meaning it held.
It knew nothing of what it represented. It did not know it had been chosen for Nikolai and his effortless charm, the infuriating ease with which he had found a place in her heart without ever asking permission. It did not know it stood for the quiet grace of his final sacrifice, made for the world they had both fought to save, and, in some small, selfish way, for her as well. It did not know it embodied the joy he had brought into her life at the bleakest possible time. That somehow, amid collapsing ecosystems, impossible deadlines, and the knowledge that humanity's future rested on increasingly desperate decisions, he had still found reasons to laugh. And, more astonishingly, reasons to make her laugh with him.
It did not know it also symbolized farewells. Not the kind born of anger or regret. The kind that acknowledged life's beauty precisely because it was fleeting, because every shared moment carried the certainty that one day it would become a memory. Perhaps that was why Zoya had chosen it. It was not a flower of mourning. It was a flower of gratitude. For what had been. For what could never be again. And for the privilege of having had it at all.
For a brief stretch of time, so brief it almost felt imagined now, Zoya had allowed herself to believe there could be something waiting for them after the launch. Not immediately. There would have been years of work ahead, years spent monitoring Earth and analyzing the data the Beetles returned with. But eventually...
They would still be colleagues. They would still argue over impossible problems and impossible deadlines. And perhaps, if neither of them lost their nerve, they might have become something more than that.
It had been a foolish thought.
Nikolai's fault, naturally.
He had been every bit as stubborn as she was, and infinitely more optimistic. He had a remarkable talent for making impossible things seem merely difficult. Improbable, as he’d liked to say. Somewhere between the teasing remarks, the knowing smiles, and conversations that lingered long after meetings had ended, he had managed to convince her that a future beyond survival was worth imagining. He had made her believe.
She hated him for that. Just a little.
Because the moment she allowed herself to hope, everything fell apart. The explosion. The desperate restructuring of the mission. The impossible decision that ended with Nikolai becoming the man who would board the Hail Mary.
After that, Zoya did everything she could to create distance between them during those final days before launch. She buried herself in schedules, briefings, and logistics. She kept every conversation focused on the mission. Every interaction professional. Every glance deliberately brief. She refused to acknowledge whatever it was that had begun to grow between them. Because giving it a name would have made it real. And if it were real, then saying goodbye would have become infinitely more painful than either of them could afford. So she chose distance instead.
It was easier to be the Project Director sending humanity's last hope into space than it was to be the woman watching the man she loved walk toward a ship he was never meant to return from.
She could admit that now, only after the mission had been confirmed a success. Only after the Beetles had returned to Earth. Three of the four, at least.
The moment the first signals confirmed they had entered the Solar System, Zoya had been called back to the Project without hesitation. Twenty-six years had passed, governments had changed, departments had been restructured, entire careers had begun and ended, but in that moment none of it mattered.
She had built the mission. She would oversee its conclusion.
The recovery operation had lasted for days. Every component was catalogued before the Beetles were opened under sterile conditions. Every sample was documented. Every storage drive was copied and verified.
Each Beetle had carried the same payload. Five terabytes of logs, reports, recordings, and technical documentation. Physical samples of the alien microorganism that would save Earth. Detailed instructions for cultivating and distributing it safely.
And one final item – a gift in the form of a small humanoid sculpture made from a metal unknown to Earth. From Nikolai. The sole survivor of the Hail Mary. He had done all of it by himself.
The thought still left Zoya struggling to comprehend its scale. Decades isolated farther from Earth than any human being had ever traveled, solving impossible problems one after another, somehow succeeding where failure had meant extinction. He had saved eight billion people. Then he had carefully packaged everything humanity would need to understand how.
There was only one problem.
The journey home had not been kind to the data. They had always known corruption was a possibility. Years of exposure to radiation and the unimaginable distance between Tau Ceti and Earth had made it almost inevitable. That was precisely why four Beetles had been launched instead of one. Redundancy.
Between the three that had returned, they managed to reconstruct the overwhelming majority of Nikolai's files. Damaged sectors from one drive were recovered from another. Missing logs were pieced together from duplicate copies. Hours of painstaking work slowly reassembled the record of humanity's most important mission.
Most of it.
Not all.
Some files remained stubbornly incomplete, fragments that refused to fit together no matter how many times the recovery teams tried. Missing pieces that left behind gaps in an otherwise nearly perfect record of the mission.
Zoya had found herself staring at those corrupted files more often than she cared to admit. It was highly unlikely they contained anything essential. Nikolai had been meticulous. Everything Earth needed to know, every instruction, every observation, every piece of information required to understand what he had accomplished, had been documented and backed up multiple times.
There was also the simple fact that the missing files were recordings. Most likely, they were nothing more than Nikolai finishing his logs properly. The recovered recordings ended abruptly, cutting off at a very specific point, leaving the impression that something had been said afterward. Something intended to be the conclusion.
Humans liked endings. They liked things neatly finished. Stories with final chapters. Conversations with proper goodbyes.
Whatever those were, Zoya would not find out. She only knew one thing for certain: they were not his last words. Or, at least, they had never been intended to be.
Because Nikolai had not truly been alone. Somehow, against all odds, Nikolai had been the first human to prove the existence of intelligent alien life. Of course he had.
Scientists around the world had been losing their minds ever since that discovery. Entire fields of research had shifted overnight. Papers were being written, conferences were being organized, and every expert with even a passing interest in xenobiology, linguistics, or extraterrestrial intelligence was trying to understand the implications.
Humanity was no longer alone in the universe.
And Nikolai Lantsov had managed to somehow turn the situation into a friendship. Zoya could not say she was surprised. It was, perhaps, the most Nikolai thing imaginable. The man had a talent for finding connection where none should have existed. He had always possessed an absurd ability to make people trust him, even when they had every reason not to. He had done it with her, after all.
Apparently, distance, species, and an entire biological divide had not been enough to stop him. Even millions of kilometers away from Earth, Nikolai had still managed to charm his way into someone’s life. And, somehow, he had found a best friend there too.
A friend who had made sacrifices for him. Because the little alien had given Nikolai something no human being could have offered.
A chance to come home.
It had shared some of its own fuel with him. A resource that belonged to its own journey, its own survival, its own future. And yet, somehow, it had chosen to give part of it away so that Nikolai could return to Earth.
So that he could return home.
To Zoya.
The thought was almost too much, like Nikolai himself.
Of course he had found someone willing to make an impossible sacrifice for him. Of course, after spending years believing that she had sent him away to his death, she discovered that he had not been alone at all. He had found a friend in the middle of the universe. And that friend had cared enough to help bring him back.
Zoya had spent twenty-six years living with the possibility that Nikolai was gone. She had built an entire life around the quiet grief of never knowing. And another around the certainty that eventually, there was no other outcome. One way or another, he would die in space.
But Nikolai had always been impossible.
Even light-years away, he had somehow managed to leave a path home behind him. And someone else had helped him walk it.
The thought that Nikolai could come home had threatened to unravel her. Naturally, Zoya had responded the only way she knew how. She had thrown herself into her work.
There was no room for uncertainty when there was still a planet to save. No room to sit with the impossible possibility that Nikolai was alive, that he was somewhere out there, making his way back to them. So she focused on what she could control. She worked tirelessly to ensure that the hope Nikolai had sent back to Earth would be enough. She would make certain it succeeded. She owed him that much.
But in her garden, Zoya allowed herself something she rarely permitted.
Hope.
She allowed herself to believe that Nikolai would return. That the godetia was not a memorial. That it was waiting for him.
Zoya tended to his plant with a diligence usually reserved for her work.
Every morning, before she so much as glanced at the day's reports, she checked on it. She tested the soil with her fingertips, inspected every leaf for signs of stress, adjusted its watering schedule when necessary, and made certain the temperature around it remained consistent.
Nothing was left to chance.
It was the only plant she moved throughout the day. The diminished sunlight that reached Earth's surface was precious now, and she tracked it through the apartment almost unconsciously. As the pale light shifted from one window to another, the godetia shifted with it, always placed where it could catch just enough of the weak rays to flourish without scorching its delicate petals.
It was, objectively, unnecessary. The plant would have survived perfectly well with far less attention.
Zoya knew that.
She also knew she would move it again tomorrow.
And the day after that.
It was a ritual she never questioned, one performed with the same quiet consistency as breathing. There was no practical reason for it anymore. No logical explanation. Only hope, disguised as routine.
The routine continued for years.
One year.
Five.
Twelve.
The godetia continued to flourish. It grew, it bloomed, it returned each season with quiet persistence. And Zoya continued to hope.
At first, hope had been something gentle. Something almost impossible to admit. A small, private belief she kept hidden behind logic and professionalism. She had not allowed herself to say Nikolai will return out loud, but she had acted as if it were true. The plant was proof of that.
Eventually, however, hope changed. It became an ache. A constant, quiet weight that settled somewhere beneath her ribs. Because Nikolai should have returned by now.
The Hail Mary could not travel as quickly as the Beetles. Zoya understood that. She understood the limitations of the ship, the distance it had crossed, the fact that it carried something far more fragile than any machine. It carried a human being.
But even accounting for that, it should not have taken this long. It should not have taken nearly thirty years since the Beetles arrived.
The Sun had returned to its normal luminosity. The planet had begun to heal. The crisis that had consumed the majority of Zoya’s adult life had become history, something future generations would study in textbooks. The Project was over. Humanity had survived. And Zoya had retired. She was old now.
The thought still felt strange. She had spent so much of her life being defined by what she could accomplish, by how much she could endure, that she had never considered what would happen when there was nothing left to fight for.
Now her days were quieter. Slower. She had time to sit with memories she had spent decades avoiding. Time to notice the empty space beside her. Time to look at the godetia and wonder how long a person was supposed to wait before accepting that waiting had become mourning. Because Nikolai was still nowhere to be seen.
Had she been a stronger woman, she would have accepted that something had happened. She would have looked at the facts, the way she had spent her entire life doing, and reached the only logical conclusion.
Something had gone wrong.
Maybe the fuel had not been enough. Maybe the journey had taken too much from him. Maybe supplies had run out. Maybe the Hail Mary had failed in some way no one on Earth could have anticipated. Maybe isolation had taken what even Nikolai’s stubbornness could not withstand. Maybe the missing pieces of his logs contained the answer. Maybe they had always held the exact moment when everything had gone wrong.
But Zoya did not know. She could not know. And that was the cruelest part.
Yet she still hoped.
Nikolai had done that to her, the bastard. He had taken a woman who had spent her entire life protecting herself from impossible things and somehow convinced her to believe in one. He had made hope feel natural. Made waiting feel reasonable. Made the idea of miracles seem less absurd than the idea of letting him go.
And Zoya feared she would never stop.
She feared that no matter how many years passed, no matter how old she became, no matter how much logic told her otherwise, she would still look toward the sky. She would still listen for news. She would still tend to the godetia.
She would still believe that somewhere beyond the stars, Nikolai was finding his way home.