Work Text:
She sees him, sometimes, on the edge of consciousness when she’s falling asleep or waking up, and Grace is laughing, laughing, as if joy is something to be experienced instead of a memory.
Even in this place between dreams and reality, she shivers in her jacket, Earth’s unnatural cold reversed in truth but too late for her mind, which argues with him.
“Separation is a natural state,” she says. “Separation from others, each with a specialization to complete a task, is how we accomplish things.”
And this man whose videos prove he took on the role of not only a scientist but also a pilot, finding an engineer and learning to communicate with him, argues back: “Cooperation is a natural state. We help each other with tasks or we all die. You recruited me, remember?”
She remembers.
A teacher who talked to her like she was a child. And the child buried deep inside her listened, peeking out to sing a bit of karaoke, then to almost-but-not-quite pray for him—just him—as the years passed.
“Separation is a natural state,” she insists to the man she sent away to save the world.
But he’s gone again. Morning light streams in through her window.
Perhaps she’ll see him at another dusk or dawn. It’s obvious that he comes to her at these in-between times to prove his point that cooperation, by blurring roles or tasks, is like the blurring of day into night or night into day, sharp delineations gone.
Perhaps, when she dies, the sharpest of all delineations, there will be a final end to the arguments.
Or perhaps her life force, the scientifically proven almost-but-not-quite sense of a soul, will leave the planet she saved and he saved, and he’ll be waiting for her … somewhere … with two coffees.