Chapter Text
The first few people to get it were young sailors on the vat, insignificant in the grand scheme of the project, but Eva Stratt reacted like she had been told her entire science team had come down with the life-threatening plague.
“It is not a major deal as of now, but we thought you might want to be aware,” said the poor soul who was given the job of delivering the news.
“And everything is being done to contain this outbreak?” Stratt asked, standing behind her desk, hands gripping the edge of it so tightly that her knuckles had gone white.
“Um,” the young man- who to her looked no more than about 12- in front of her had not been expecting that question, or her larger reaction, he didn’t think it was such a big deal. “I mean, the sailors were given time off, so they can rest in their quarters,”
“And infect the rest of their bunkmates? Is this how seriously illness is taken on his ship, the ship under my command?” Stratt almost barked at the boy.
The boy flinched. “No, no ma’am,” he stuttered, “We will take more serious precautious going forward,”
“And the sick individuals will be quarantined to the medical wing until we are sure they will not spread this around the boat?”
The boy nodded quickly, no one on the vat told Stratt the word ‘no’ “Yes ma’am, right away ma’am,” he stood there for another few moments, eye’s wide as he stared at her.
“You are dismissed,” she said sharply, and waved the boy away, falling back into her chair and holding her face in her hands.
It was a stomach bug, a simple, twenty-four-hour stomach bug that for most was nothing more than a mild inconvenience. For her, she swore that her stomach twisted just at a simple thought of it.
“What’s with a little boy who just came out of here on the verge of tears?”
Stratt would have groaned at the voice if not for trying to appear much less panicked than she was. “Did you need something, Dr. Grace?” she said, rubbing her hands across her face one more time before looking up at him.
“Well, I did…” He started, “But you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Was that little boy a ghost?” he slid into a chair on the opposite side of her desk, setting a coffee down in front of her.
“No, that little boy was not a ghost,” Stratt picked up the coffee, drinking down several gulps and wishing it was something much stronger. She took a moment and adjusted in her seat, “He was bringing a medical update, it seems there has been a minor outbreak on the ship,”
“Something bad?” Grace asked, sipping as his own drink.
“A stomach flu, short-lived, from what we can tell at the moment,” she explained, “But they were making no effort to… contain it, there is no telling how many people may be infected at his point,”
Grace grimaced at the thought, but it could be worse, “At least it isn’t anything bad,”
Stratt would argue that any stomach bug- short-lived or not- was bad. “Any illness threatening to take out my entire ship is bad. It is even worse when a quick response could had prevented it!” her fist slammed against the table without her realizing.
Grace flinched at the noise, but was more shocked that anything at her reaction. Stratt never reacted, not to anything good, not to anything bad. She got angry when she needed to get angry, but usually only while her target was in the room, and Grace was certainly not her target- at least he shouldn’t have been.
“If everyone gets it, it would be bad but- I don’t think it would be the end of the world or anything,” Grace realized his mistake as soon as he said it.
“You do realize that this project is to prevent the end of the world? Correct? This isn’t just some fun science project to you? There are real people who are going to die because of this, and if I have a stomach bug sweeping through my crew for the next month you don’t think that might have an impact on what we’re going here?”
Grace raised his hands at his side in surrender. “Right, sorry, poor comparison on my part,”
Statt nodded once, standing from behind her desk to walk to a filing cabinet in the corner. “It was,”
“Is there something I can do to help? I'm not on the medical team or anything but- “
“Make sure your team washes their hands, keep a distance, alert someone immediately if you are experiencing any kind of symptoms,” she filled in for him, “A notice will go out ship wide soon with guidelines, I will instruct the medical team to type one up,”
“Yeah that- we can do that,” Grace nodded, “Are you sure there isn’t anything else? Just the stomach bug?”
“Are you implying that there might be another kind of illness floating around?” she turned and glared at him.
That, in fact, had not been what Grace was implying, his question had had much more to do with the fact Stratt looked somehow more focused and more distracted than he had ever seen her at once. Something was… off balance was the only way he could think to put it.
“No, I just wanted to see if there was anything else going on in general, I'm not worried about this stomach bug thing,”
“Well, I am happy for you on that front Dr. Grace, now if you don’t mind, I have work I need to get back to if you do not feel the need to talk about this any longer,”
“Not a problem with me,” He jumped up from his seat, “I’ll leave you to it,”
He had come to her office with real questions and concerns, but they could wait- it didn’t seem like the best time to discuss much of anything. Her attention was clearly elsewhere.
------
Three days after she had been brought news about the initial cases, it became clear that the outbreak had been in no way contained, and as the day went on, she received more and more emails from different teams, informing her that half of them were out sick.
It started with the lower ranks, but very quickly started sweeping its way through the entire ship.
Stratt very, very, seriously considered flying off the vat and staying in a hotel for the foreseeable future. It was not unheard of for her to be gone for a few days at a time, she was sure that she could come up with some kind of excuse for why she had to go, she could perhaps even find some event she had previous declined to attend.
It took all her willpower to not actually do it.
Instead, she locked herself in her office, gave strict instructions to her security that no one was to come in without her very explicit permission, and she was not planning on giving that out to anyone.
She took most of her meetings digitally, even those on different parts of the ship forced to take meetings from whatever quiet space they could find.
She claimed that it was to limit the spread of the virus- which it was- but there was more behind her intentions than that.
She had limited her trips out into the rest of the ship to three a day. Two coffee runs and a trip to the mess hall for a small meal to be eaten back in her office, other than that she was in her office or in her living quarters, when she was moving between the two, she did not pause for anything.
------
On the fifth day after receiving the news she stopped going out at all. She was delivered coffee once, enough cups to get her through the day which were disinfected thoroughly before they ever got anywhere close to her mouth.
And as for meals- yeah, she wasn’t eating. She kept a couple of snacks in her office that she picked at when she could, but meals were not being delivered, she was not leaving to go and get them.
She would live. It was just entire the virus had made its way through most people and she felt it safe to go back out into the world.
She just had to make it a couple of weeks at the absolute most. She could make it a couple of weeks.
------
Day seven. Practically the entire science team was down. Grace was down, sick as a dog- she assumed at least- and the progress on Astrophage research was halted.
Grace. The person who had been in her office just a week before, was sick.
Stratt swore she could already feel bile rising in her throat.
Her chest tightened and she step up her steps towards her living quarters until she was nearly at a jog.
The moment she reached the door she scanned herself in and dove so quickly into the room that a witness would have thought she was being chased.
With her movements frantic and disoriented it took her a moment to pull her sweater over her head, the fabric around her neck suffocating. She tossed her sweater aside leaving her in just her tank-top as she sunk to the floor so that her back was leaned against the side of her bed.
She ran her palms across the scratchy carpet on either side of her, the heat from the friction somewhat grounding- at least that’s what she hoped it was going to be.
“You aren’t sick,” she whispered to herself, her voice coming out rougher than she had expected. “You’re not going to get sick,”
She rocked back and forth just a little as she sat, trying desperately to get her racing heart to calm. She knew how this went, if she got to panicked, she would start feeling bad, which would only lead to more and more panic and then-
She stopped the thought there. It was not important, not helpful.
Outside her door her heard footsteps and curled further in on herself, wrapping her arms tightly around her body as her breathing picked up.
What if whoever was walking by was sick? What if they had touched her doorknob or a part of the wall that she might touch? What if their quarters were nearby and they had been touching the same things for week.
“You’re not sick. You’re not sick, You’re not sick, not sick, not sick not sick… “
------
Day ten, she pulled on a pair of pants and found that they were loose around her waist. It was a result of the fact that it had been nearly a week since she had eaten a fool meal, and even longer since she had eaten the three required for a person a day.
She sighed, perching on the edge of her bed. This had happened before, mostly in her childhood and teenage years, where she would get herself so worked up about an illness that she could not eat- for fear of throwing it all back up-
Since the beginning of the project, it had never been so bad. Of course, the thought was always there, that she might get sick, and each time the thought presented itself she would have a brief moment of panic before calming herself down.
But with the virus making its way through the entire boat, it was impossible to relax for even a single moment, to try and get something in her body without worrying about it coming back out.
It couldn’t last for much longer, that was the only thing that she could cell herself to get through the day. One day at a time, she wasn’t sick until she was sick, it would be over soon enough.
It had to be over soon.
------
Day eleven.
She sat in her office behind her desk, working on some kind of report and trying to ignore the rolling of her stomach. She wasn’t sick- she wasn’t, it was hunger, or the fact that she was constantly thinking about being sick.
But she wasn’t sick.
Without warning, the door to her office swung violently open, and there stood Ryland Grace, holding himself up against the doorknob. “Oh, thank god,” he said, “I thought you were dead,”
“Dr. Grace,” Stratt said with what was supposed to be an air of warning, but it only came out panicked. “You are sick,”
He was sick, and he was in her office, touching her door, walking into the room.
She leapt up from her chair, walking backwards until she could move back no further, having pinned herself up against the wall.
“I'm not sick,” Grace shook his head, walking further into the room- Stratt held back a whimper- “I mean, I was sick, really sick, but I'm much better now. They weren’t lying about the twenty-four-hour things,”
“I am going to ask you- “Stratt started, but was gasping to hard to get the words out in one go, “I am going to ask you to leave my office, return to the medical quarantine,”
“Quarantine? I'm not sick anymore, I am released from isolation. Besides, they gave up on trying to put everyone in the medical wing weeks ago,” he said with a shrug, but was beginning to grow concerned at Stratt’s reaction. She had been freaked out enough when she found out the illness was on the boat at all, but he was better, he wasn’t bringing it into her office or anything.
Stratt swallowed back a bit of bile, gasps growing more frantic. “They don’t- they aren’t quarantining them anymore?”
“No, not anymore, there were too- Stratt I think you need to sit down,” he said, taking a step towards her, prepared to catch her should she suddenly collapse- which she looked on the verge of doing.
“Do not come near me!” she shouted the moment he started to move, and Grace flinched backwards. “Do- do not,”
“Okay, okay, sorry. I didn’t mean to invade your space,” he took a step backwards to make sure that he was not crowding her at all. “What’s going on?”
“You are, you are sick. You are going to get me sick!” she finally shouted, sliding down the wall until she was sitting on the ground.
“I'm not- Stratt I'm better, I promise. I’ve been better for a few days now. The only reason I'm in here is because no one has seen you in days, no one has had a meeting with you. We thought maybe you got sick and no one knew,”
“I am not sick,” she said between the gasps, “I am not going to get sick. I am doing everything I can and I am not going to get sick!”
Grace was a little tempted to call the medical team anyway, something was going on, even if it wasn’t the stomach flu. Whatever his next move was going to be though was halted as Stratt held her hands over her eyes and he got a glimpse at her knuckles. “Stratt your hands!”
He took a few steps forward, crouching down a few feet away from her as she continued to hyperventilate. She did not shout for him to go away, which gave him a pretty good idea of how present in the moment she was.
Her knuckles were bright red, cracked and swollen, and her left hand was bleeding.
Years ago, Grace had had a student, a young girl whose mom had died of cancer who had become such a germaphobe that there were medically approved accommodations to try and help her get through the school day. Her hands often looked a whole lot like Stratt’s from excessive handwashing.
Grace was suddenly confident that he knew what he was dealing with. “Stratt,” he said gently, “I'm right here, nothing bad is going to happen if you get sick,” he wasn’t sure that he could even hear her, but he could think of nothing else to say. He moved away from Stratt, leaning against the side of her desk. He was there for her, but not crowding.
Stratt shook her head, muttering something to herself for what felt like several long minutes before she looked up at him, eyes wide with something past panic, they were filled with utter terror.
Grace knew what was coming, and it was far too late to stop it.