Chapter Text
Dr. Ryland Grace is one fast motherfucker.
Jaime had heard in passing the man used to ride a bicycle daily for work, but it hadn’t been done out of sport and the exercise had mostly died once he joined the Project. When he thought about chasing down an out of commission scientist to save the world, he had honestly thought it would be over before the man even reached the door.
The burning of his knees laugh at his assumption.
He’s almost at the fence. Jaime isn’t that worried. Even if Dr. Grace reaches it, Jaime knows for a fact that for all the scientist is fast, his arms are shot, and he and the rest of the guards are close enough to catch up. And that’s without counting Anthony, who already radioed in he was coming from the other direction, so all bases covered.
Sure enough, there’s a cry as Anthony tackles Dr. Grace. The man struggles like a wild animal, and he nearly succeeds in bucking off Anthony before Jaime and the rest of the team join in. From the corner of his eye, he can see the medical doctor running towards them, his white lab coat stark against the gray-blue sky.
Dr. Grace. He cries, screams and begs them to let go, that he can’t do it, that he doesn’t want to die. The sound is harrowing and Jaime’s heart clenches with it, but it only makes his grip on the scientist’s arms tighten.
He can’t let go. Just like Dr. Grace, he also doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t have a lot of family or friends and he can’t call himself a virtuous man, but he knows that, objectively speaking, they are doing the right thing. Doing this means saving Earth, or at least offering it a better chance if literally anyone else is sent. Even if the man screams and begs, his face going red and white over how hard he is crying, sending him on that ship is their best chance for them all.
They have no choice.
The doctor reaches them, alongside Mr. Carl. Jaime has always found Mr. Carl terrifying. He’s serious and doesn’t smile, Jaime’s anxiety tends to rise by twenty notches when his jokes fail to make the other smile and until Dr. Grace arrived, Jaime believed The Mr. Carl was simply allergic to smiling.
How ironic has this day come to be.
Dr. Grace also sees Mr. Carl. He switches his focus on him, begging for help, that he can’t do it, that he’ll fail, that he doesn’t want to do it.
Don’t do it, don’t do it, please, don’t do it.
But Mr. Carl’s only response is, “You know who you are. You are going to do great.”
The doctor isn’t delicate with the syringe. Jaime feels his own arm going into numb sympathy at the sight. He has to pretend he doesn’t get goosebumps when Dr. Grace’s struggle starts to pitter out, instead signalling at the coming assistants to hurry with the gurney.
It’s when Dr. Grace is flipped onto his back, glasses forgotten by the side of his head and grass stains all over his front, that things go downhill.
It starts as a pressure in his ears. Everything goes muffled, like being thrown underwater. No amount of rubbing them releases it. The sky still shows the same clear blue with a bright rainbow he hadn’t noticed before, but no other clue as to the new pressure When Jaime looks at his companions, they’re all in various states of discomfort. Even Mr. Carl, who wears perpetual scowls, wears a heavy grimace.
Then everything goes high pitch. It’s sudden, brutal, and Jaime can’t even hear his companions’ cries of pain with the way his own body locks up in shock. It’s the way his ears rang when that explosion went off besides their squad on their last tour. Jaime lost two comrades that day and had been called “lucky” for not having lost his hearing that day.
Lucky. He doesn’t feel very lucky as he slumps on the ground, his whole body numb. Distantly, like watching a TV documentary, he sees Anthony and Sebastian drop like flies, unmoving. He can no longer see the doctor with the white coat. Are they dead? Is he dead? He can’t move. He doesn’t feel alive. Maybe he has died but his soul got stuck in his body. Will he stay like that forever? What about the others? Are the assistants with the gurney the same or are they all looking at this like through a glass wall?
Only Mr. Carl is on his feet. Jaime’s awe and terror of the man grows. Mr. Carl is struggling, yes, his body is swaying and he’s bracing two hands on his knees, breathing heavily, but he’s standing. He can move. How is he doing that? What makes him special from the rest of them? Mr. Carl crosses the short distance between with a couple of shaking steps before falling on his knees before Dr. Grace.
Dr. Grace, again. Jaime has a perfect view of the man, where he lies crumbled away. Only half of his face is visible, and Jaime doesn’t know whether it’s real or his half dead brain seeing things, but he swears Dr. Grace’s face looks relaxed. When the anesthetic was first administered and his entire body had gone limp, in his face and body still remained remnants of fear. But now he looks like he is having a pleasant dream.
Jaime feels like something is dragging a cube of ice down his spine.
Mr. Carl is saying something. He can see his lips moving, strange, like his words are slurring. He doesn’t know whether the words are directed at him or at Dr. Grace, making the words useless either way, until Mr. Carl reaches out a hand to Dr. Grace’s.
Tectonic and sound vibrations are very different. Some you feel more easily with your feet while others are only perceptible when you feel your heart starting beating out of sync. The first you feel is a warning of something coming, giving you a chance to run away and find safety. The second you feel when it’s already too late. But when you feel both? Jaime’s ears might have started bleeding. His heart feels like it might die on him any second now. His lungs will probably collapse soon after.
He cannot run when the earth splits open.
It’s a wound from within. From perfectly even earth covered in green grass, an abyss opens up. Rocks roll down, the fence is sucked into the unknown. Distant alarms start blaring, like bomb alerts, and the vibrations threaten to undo his body into nothingness. Someone screams behind him and he can’t see, are there more tears all around? Are they also in danger, is it just fear, what’s happening? He can’t move.
Vines, roots, flowers and other plants Jaime knows they have no business growing in Baikonur, pour from the tear on the ground before him. They are thicker than his own thighs, some with thorns sharp enough to decapitate his own head. They leave from the hole like tentacles, and Jaime thinks of the monster Scylla, who Odysseus once sacrificed six men for to ensure the safety of the rest of his crew. But the vines don’t each go after each man, intending to drag them to hell.
All of them go for Dr. Grace.
Jaime doesn’t even know what he should be feeling. Relief they aren’t going after him? Horror that they’re going after Dr. Grace, their one salvation? Something else entirely? It’s all a mess on his head, and he’s saved from thinking any deeper a shot rings out in the air.
Mr. Carl’s gun is out. Jaime has never seen Mr. Carl with a gun, not even on his belt, yet there’s one smoking on his hand as the gun shakes and another shot is fired.
The shot vine was the one closest to Dr. Grace’s face. Jaime had noticed in silent bewilderment how the thing had almost…cradled the doctor’s face, cupping one cheek like one would do with a hand. With the first gunshot, it reeled back, raising itself higher before turning toward Mr. Carl’s direction. Along that shot, the rest of the vines shot toward Dr. Grace, wrapping themselves around him. Mr. Carl’s gun was aiming toward them, trying to figure out when to shoot without hurting the man, when the injured vine slapped his hand with an arc of red, grabbed the gun and threw it away.
Ever been a witness for a staring contest between a human being and a plant? Jaime didn’t even know it was possible to have a staring contest with something that had no face, much less eyes, yet there was no other way to describe what he was seeing. Mr. Carl’s is full of emotions –desesperation, panic, fearlessness, so much more than he could register– more than probably anyone had ever seen from the man, yet his gaze never once wavers from the vine. The vine just stays eerily still, as it is waiting for something. It cocks to the side, like something with a head might do to express confusion, but not much else.
Even though the earth continues to shake, the high pitch noise finally recedes. Jaime gasps greedily as his heart finally calms down, no longer feeling so close to death. All around him, his comrades groan, and Jaime is able to gather the strength to move his head. Other than bleeding ears and unable to lift themselves, they’re alive. When he turns his head toward the side where the main building is, he can see slumped soldiers slowly gathering themselves up, their legs shaking as they use the walls for support. Taking a deeper breath, Jaime is able to sit up. It leaves him dizzy, his stomach clenching while his vision darkens.
With the pressure on their ears gone, leaving only the constant earth vibrations, the silence is broken like another gunshot by a whisper, “Mom…”
Jaime and the lone vine both turned to Dr. Grace. The man is still deep asleep, Jaime has never heard of people talking when being under anesthesia yet, the man still sleeps and the man talked. The other vines that had wrapped themselves around him before are now circling him like a pack of snakes, writhing, forming a protective barrier over the man. The lone vine ignores Mr. Carl, joining the others around Dr. Grace. It gently presses itself against him, over the shoulders, patting his sides, before lingering on the arm where the needle had been stabbed in.
It only passes for a moment, but Jaime swears he can sense emotions emanating from these vines, from the air, from the earth itself.
It feels very much like fury.
“Don’t take him!” Mr. Carl suddenly cries out. He’s still on his knees. The gun is too far away to reach, his hand still bleeding from where it was slapped away, the soldiers are all frozen far away from them. There’s no help coming. And yet… “He’s our only chance!”
The vines don’t care. Or if they do, they’re good at not showing it. They wrap themselves around Dr. Grace again, creating a cocoon with the smoother ones while the ones with thorns slap away anyone getting close. One soldier regains his courage enough to fire a shot, but the bullet is grabbed and Jaime sees how it drops to the ground, disappearing amongst the grass. The thorn vine throws itself at the soldier, breaking the earth beneath it, and Jaime turns away as screams start filling the air.
His new position gives him the perfect view as Dr. Grace is carefully taken into the tear. The wound on the ground starts groaning and Jaime watches in horror as it starts closing. He hears Mr. Carl shouts, probably trying to get closer, but the vibrations return, more like earthquakes this time, and anyone who was standing on their feet before are once again flat on the ground.
The vines are sucked back where they came from. One of them was covered in blood, looking like an entrail. Dr. Grace continues to sleep peacefully in his prison, like he is covered with his favorite childhood blanket and nothing is wrong with the world.
He is taken inside.
The hole closes behind his yellow coat.
The grass starts growing again over it. When they try digging the ground on their own, first with shovels and later with the most expensive construction equipment they could have brought as soon as possible, they’ll realize that no matter how much or how long they dig, no matter how many boulders they remove or new tools are brought in, they’ll find nothing. There will be no secret tunnel waiting for them to unearthen so that they can look and recover Dr. Grace from. The earth is as smooth as if nothing had happened at all.
The fence Dr. Grace had so desperately tried to reach is gone. The sides left are far away from each other, bent where it was ripped apart, the center opening up to a world beyond that may have promised freedom to a dying man.