Chapter Text
Carl tells people three days after the launch, and Eva Stratt’s whole world comes crashing down.
She didn’t expect an FBI man to crack so quickly. But then, Grace has a way of getting under people’s skin, and defenses. Had, she reminds herself viciously. Had a way. He’s gone. Not dead yet, not technically, but dead to her.
“You’re murdering me!”
She walks into a conference room at Baikonur and knows what’s happened the moment everyone turns to face her. Hatch, LeClerc and Lamai look horrified. Lokken and Komorov look stunned. Redell looks like he didn’t know she had it in her. Carl is just looking at the floor.
“I take it you’ve all been told,” she says, voice sounding cold and distant even to her. She’s heard people call her a sociopath before. Maybe she is one. People who’ve just murdered their only friend usually feel something other than anger about it, right?
“Stratt, how could you,” Lokken says hollowly.
She doesn’t answer. Instead she looks to the American handler with pure, icy rage building in her chest. “Mr. Steves, you are confined to quarters.”
She doesn’t know if she has the authority to do that, actually. She’s not sure where her authority even comes from anymore, now that the Hail Mary has left orbit. But the man squares his shoulders and finally meets her eyes. “You can throw me off the Project for all I care. But they cared about Grace. They deserved to know.”
“Fine. Pack your bags. You leave for the United States tomorrow morning.”
He nods, just once, and walks past her out the door. Stratt turns to the room as a whole. They’re all still staring at her. “Jesus Christ,” Hatch whispers. “You mean it’s true?” Redell lets out a low whistle.
The anger is blinding. It’s giving her a migraine. What right do they have to judge her. What right do they have to call her to account for whatever actions she’s taken, when she and she alone has held the world on her shoulders.
I was saving you. I was saving all of you.
She turns on her heels and walks out. Damn them all to lowest circle of hell. Traitors, every last one.
She finds that Carl has taken her threat seriously and is packing his bags when she reaches his quarters. He looks up at her briefly as she walks in and shuts the door behind her, acid in his eyes, and then goes back to packing. “Don’t tell me you didn’t do ethically questionable things at the Bureau,” she says coldly. Carl shoves more clothes in the bag.
“Maybe. Maybe I did. But never to a teacher.”
“Melnikov told me what you said to him. You told him he knew who he was.” It’s a terrible thing, to see a man that large and that stoic flinch, but Stratt is merciless. “You were fine with it three days ago. Why the sudden pangs of conscience?”
“Y’know, Grace was right. Our friends are dead, and you don’t give a damn. What the hell is wrong with you.”
She scoffs. Her heart is ice. Her heart is stone. Grace was a coward and she did him a goddamn favor, putting him on that ship where he wouldn’t have to see his precious schoolchildren starve. She doesn’t regret what she did for a minute.
She doesn’t realize she’s said this last bit out loud until Carl says shortly, “Yeah, keep telling yourself that,” and slings his bag over his shoulder. He picks up something off the desk and looks at it for a moment, and then folds it and puts it in his pocket; Stratt catches a glimpse of pink construction paper and recalls that Carl’s oldest daughter was among the world’s students she had hastily invited to send wellwishes with Grace into space, but that her letter hadn’t arrived in time. It must have just been delivered.
The letters. The quilt. The coffee. She remembers it all like watching someone else do it, someone grieving, someone she sedated and imprisoned in that ship along with Grace and sent on her way at liftoff. Had that really been her?
She’s angry. So angry. She needs to stay angry. Stratt isn’t sure what will happen if she stops being furious with Grace for longer than a moment, but she knows it won’t be good.
Carl breaks her out of her spiraling thoughts by shoving past her towards the door, before he stops and looks back, one large hand on the handle. “Be real with me, Director. I know you heard the rumors. Did you ever actually care about him?”
His dark eyes are burning into hers. And suddenly she can’t fit her mouth around the words. How, she wonders, to explain the way she watched for Grace’s snark and sarcasm to peek out from the schoolteacher goofiness like it was a treasure she could catch hold of, the treacherous fondness in her chest that grew night after night of doing paperwork together into the witching hours, the strange flutter in her stomach when he gave her that look in the impromptu karaoke bar.
How to explain the desperation when she realized he was her only solution. The rage when he abandoned her to make the call herself. The realization that he had never really been at her side, that she was and would always be carrying this impossible burden alone.
“Of course,” she says woodenly. It sounds like she’s lying, trying to placate him. Maybe she is.
After all, if she’d cared about Grace enough, she wouldn’t have done this.
Carl watches her another moment, and then straightens his bag, jaw jutted out. “Yeah. Me too.” He shoves the door open into the hall with his shoulder. “Poor bastard deserved better friends.”