Chapter Text
Ryland Grace's soulmate thread has always gone straight up. Taut like a tightly strung violin string, one pluck away from breaking in a discordant explosion of sound.
As a child, he thought that meant his soulmate had already died, that they were in "Heaven", far away from his grasp, destined to be alone forever. As he got older, that idea didn't seem so daunting, so soul-crushing or world-destroying. He didn't really believe in "soulmates" or "fate," at least not in the traditional sense. He didn't think there was love out there for him; he never could get himself to fall in love with anyone, no matter how hard he tried. Failed relationship after failed relationship, that sense of dread and uncomfortability following him like the Grim Reaper after every date and first kiss.
So what if his soulmate thread reached up into the great beyond? He didn't want one anyway. He was perfectly fine living the rest of his life alone, content in his own existence and being. He loved his job; he loved his kids; his life was perfectly contented; he didn't need such things as "soulmates" complicating it.
His second soulmate thread appears the morning he sits in his favorite diner, enjoying his eggs and bacon, and reading an email about a strange line of IR light in their sky.
He wakes up in a strange room with wires attached to him and, stranger still, a robot prompting him with math equations. He knows them, of course. Of course, he knows them. What he doesn't know is who he is.
All he knows is that there are two red strings attached to his pinky. One is frayed, unraveling, the plies unspun and curling in on themselves instead of clinging to each other. It hurts to look at that one. It tugs something deep inside his chest; a sense of dread and mourning aching in the cavernous space where his heart sits. It's a sickening type of dread, one that breaks him out in cold sweat anew (he's been in a cold sweat since he woke up in this confusing and terrifying room, but that's neither here nor there). There's something he doesn't know, can't remember. It's important, it's life-altering; he just knows it. Looking at the broken string—and it is broken, severed in a way that feels unnatural—hurts. It feels like… betrayal.
The other string is unaltered. It's pristine, perfectly spun. Hefty in its plys, tightly bound. It's at no risk of unwinding and fraying. It's healthy, strong. He notes that it's lax, drooping to the ground like the severed string, but the feeling isn't as dismal. It doesn't feel dead; if anything, it feels more alive than he does.
Lax. That feels significant for some reason. There's something special about it being so limp and maneuverable. He wishes he knew what that reason was. He wishes he knew anything. He wishes he knew who he was, where he was, and what he was doing here. There are no answers in his room: only a pressing disembodied voice and two corpses.
Two corpses. It makes his stomach turn, and his eyes water. His heart aches for a completely different reason. He feels something deep for these bodies—a type of kinship.
He doesn't even know who they are.
The bodies have little red strings tied around their pinkies as well. These strings are taut, hard, firm lines that bring to mind a tightly strung piano wire. A garrote, ready to strangle him at any moment, cut into the delicate skin of his neck and kill.
He feels weary of them, guilty, almost. They aren't supposed to be like that; they should be lax, like his.
Why does he know that? What does that mean?
He looks away from the bodies, closes his eyes. It doesn't feel like enough, so he then covers his face, fingers pressed into his brow. He takes a deep breath, listening to it shudder in the space of the room.
Okay, he doesn't know who he is, or where he is, or who the used-to-be-people in the other beds are. What does he know?
He knows…
He looks at the string wrapped around his pinky again.
The Petrova line.
He remembers now.
He remembers sitting in that diner and watching a second thread appear on his right hand. He remembers the feelings that came along with it, the fear, the fascination, but mostly the fear. The trepidation he felt when he saw it appear, mixed with the wonder of reading about what would soon be known as the Petrova line.
He doesn't know the importance of the threads, what they're for, but he knows it's rare to have two. He knows it like he knows…well, there isn't much else he knows, other than that he was in a coma. Maybe? He's honestly not even sure of that. But no, it had to be a coma; this bone-deep tiredness and confusion wouldn't come from just regular unconsciousness. But why would he be in a coma? He feels around his head for any signs of head trauma and comes up empty. The rest of his body is free of any other scars or disfigurations that would hint at another type of accident.
He picks up the severed thread and twists it around in his fingers idly, thinking, urging himself to remember, remember anything else.
If he were in a coma, does that mean the others with him were also in comas? Why didn't they survive as he did? What complications were there that took their lives? Were they all sick? Why would you put sick people in a coma?
And why was there a robot? Where were the human doctors? Where were the other people? Is he…the only person?
That sounds terrible. The thought strikes him with such deep, soul-sucking fear. His breath hitches, coming out in short hiccups over and over. Quick in, quick out. He's hyperventilating, he realizes, but he doesn't know how to stop.
"It seems you are experiencing emotional distress. Please remain calm and take deep breaths," the disembodied voice says. It sounds robotic, programmed to say certain things in specific situations, not human. That lends more evidence to the whole "being the only person" theory. And isn't that just a kick in the pants?
He follows the computer's instructions to the best of his abilities, taking deep breaths and trying to keep them from catching in his throat and starting the hyperventilating anew. Eventually, he calms down, but the adrenaline crash hits him like a truck. He's tired, eyelids drooping, and his body feeling heavy. Remembering that one small thing and discovering that he's stuck in a room inhabited only by two mummies has worn him out. Well, that and the accompanying panic attack. He slumps against the wall, reluctant to get back in the bed and within range of the robot. This nice floor will do for now.
He closes his eyes and sees the imprint of two red strings on the back of his eyelids.
He's completely and totally unprepared for the appearance of a second soulmate thread.
Sure, it's not scientifically impossible, just exceedingly rare. Almost no one gets a second soulmate. No one gets so lucky as to get a second chance.
Is Grace getting a second chance?
No, that's nonsense. He doesn't even believe in soulmates, or fate, or whatever people want to call it to cope with the fact that there's some thread that ties them to someone they have a 50% chance of meeting.
A 50% chance of meeting, and he has two. He feels sick.
He hopes he never meets them, this new soulmate of his. He hopes they never walk into his life, hopes they never seek him out and find the twisted end of that unspooled line. He hopes they never have to face him and try to break down his walls. Walls he's meticulously built up over the years.
He likes his walls; he likes not having people to let down. That's not to say he has no friends; he has coworkers who invite him out, who want to be closer, but he doesn't let them. The only one he lets close is Marissa—you can't meet every week for dinner and drinks for years and still keep that person at arm's length—but that's it; he's given up on closer relationships. He's only stuck around with Marissa because he really likes her, and she knew him before he started to Cask of Amontillado himself. She'd met him in his grad school days and liked him enough to stick around this long, even after he burned his bridges in the world of academia, as he pivoted his life in a completely different direction and got his teaching license, through every failed relationship to the point where he decided to give up on romance entirely. That's not to say she doesn't still try to set him up every now and again. What kind of friend would she be if she didn't at least try to get him out there?
"It's not healthy to be so isolated. You need to get out more!"
He'll "get out more" the day the sun starts dying.
So, he's staunchly ignoring the existence of his new soulmate thread. Even when Marissa tentatively gushes over it at dinner, even when his students ask questions, even when he gets double-take looks on the street. He ignores it.
Deny, deny, deny.
He ignores and denies until he can't anymore.
He ignores and denies until the day she walks into his life.
"Knock knock," comes the omen from the doorway of his classroom. A witty reply is on the tip of his tongue, but as he tilts his head down from where he was looking at the Petrova Line made of tape on his solar system model, his words freeze.
Well, sugar honey iced tea.
He can tell she's as surprised as he is; no one really expects to meet their soulmate. Sure, there's a pretty good chance you will; in fact, it's such a good chance that most people hold out on it. They believe it's soulmate or bust. But there's the other percentage, like himself, that disregards such fantastic ideas and dates whoever they want—not that he's doing that either.
So, yes, it is quite shocking. But there it is, right in front of them, unspooled on the floor.
Their threads slope off from their pinkies and down to the ground, where they lie in a pile, curling in on themselves and getting tangled at points, but undoubtedly leading to each other.
Grace's world tilts on its axis.
"Doctor Grace?" She asks, disregarding all the expected social norms that Grace had come to anticipate from someone who's just met their soulmate. Like, maybe excitement? Jubilation? Any hint of emotion or reaction at all?
Not here, nada, nilch, zero.
"Maybe," he answers evasively. There's no way she hasn't noticed; she has to have noticed. Why is she acting like she hasn't noticed?
"Eve Stratt with the Pretova Taskforce. I need your help." Well, at least he has her name now.
Her complete dismissal of the whole soulmate thread thing has left him thrown off and at a loss for words, so he oh-so-intelligently replies, "Me?"
"Did you write this?" She continues, pulling out a bound stack of papers from her bag and turning it to face him.
'An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibrations of Expectations for Evolutionary Models.'
His heart sinks. "Oh."
"I'm interested in this section here-"
"Uhhhh."
"Page thirty-one. 'The Goldilocks Zone is for Idiots: Why Everyone is Wrong About Life.'" She looks at him expectantly. Guess they're going to skip the whole "being soulmates" thing and jump right into his past. Sure, person he just met, bring up the paper that got him ousted from academia. That's cool. Are you sure there's nothing else you'd like to bring up first?
"That was a long time ago," is what he says instead of everything else that's on his mind, because what else can he do?
"Do you stand by what you wrote?" She tucks the paper back into her bag.
"I was fired for standing by what I wrote. Sorry, are we—are we just not going to talk about it?" Exasperation seeps into his tone.
"You were fired for calling the leading scholar in your field a 'staggering waste of carbon' at the UNESCO conference in Denmark." She says matter-of-factly. "And talk about what?"
He can't believe it; he actually can't believe it.
"Talk about the fact that we're soulmates!" He exclaims, waving his hand at the thread that lies between them, connecting them. Shoving it, glaringly, into his face, all his worst fears.
She shrugs and makes a face. "I don't see why that matters. It's not important for the task at hand."
Unbelievable, this woman. And this is his soulmate? He supposes this is what he gets—he never wanted a soulmate, and apparently, his doesn't want one either.
He pinches the bridge of his nose, pushing up his glasses in the process. "And what exactly is the task at hand?"
The following days are strange. He remembers things sparingly and at random. He remembers his name, which is good because it gets the robot to lay off him a little bit, and he now has a vague idea of how he could have gotten here. Well, perhaps even 'vague' is too generous a word. He knows he was recruited to work on the Petrova Taskforce; he knows he was the one to name Astrophage; he knows he abandoned his kids, too proud to pass up the opportunity, to come back to Stratt and learn more about Astrophage.
Oh yeah, speaking of Stratt.
He remembers what those red strings mean now. He remembers they're supposed to be soulmate threads. He remembers how his always went straight up, beyond what human eyes could ever hope to plainly see. He wonders, absently, if, when they looked to Tau Ceti, they saw his fate thread. If, when looking to humanity's last salvation, 11.9 light-years away, they saw the fateful thread that sent him here.
And that's right, he said fate thread, not soulmate thread. Oh no, that would be too kind of the universe. He was never meant to have a soulmate.
He was never meant to be loved.
That foul trick the cosmic beings played on him, having that second thread appear, having him believe, for a beautifully hesitating moment, that there was someone for him. That there was love out there for his poor soul.
And oh, how he tried with that love, how he chased after Stratt like a stray, mangy mutt, nipping at her heels to beg for acknowledgment, attention, affection. He doesn't remember much, but he remembers that, vaguely and nebulously. Deep down, he knows, knows he begged for love. He always has.
He thought the sting of rejection on Earth was bad? How foolish he was. It could never amount to the feelings that came with the realization that even that was a farce.
There was only one reason a thread ever severed.
Fate.
He didn't have a soulmate thread; he had a fate thread. He had two, in fact, but that's not important at the moment. What's important is him wallowing in his feelings with a bag of Ilyukhina's vodka and staring at the severed thread.
He takes a small sip from the straw and relishes the burn as it trails down his throat. Vodka on an empty stomach isn't a good idea; he's most certainly getting much drunker than he should be when he's the sole inhabitant of a spaceship hurtling toward a foreign sun. Gosh, at his age, he's going to have the worst hangover whenever it is he goes to sleep after this, and some killer acid reflux to top it off. Gotta love getting older.
Anyways, he's drinking his feelings because he's remembered what a severed thread means, and what that means for him. It means that the world wasn't giving him a second chance with that stupid second string; it was rubbing it in his face that he would never have anyone to ever truly love him.
Fate thread, what a joke.
The severed thread is sitting in his lap, tangled up with itself as it untwists more and more as the days pass and he toys with it. Once a thread is broken, it acts more like a typical piece of string; it's prone to fraying and tangling, no longer magically floating through impossible barriers and instead catching on. Every. Single. Thing. It's very annoying, and honestly just rude. Grace doesn't need the constant reminder that he meant nothing to Stratt. That every moment of connection was a smoke screen for the truth.
Though he supposes he shouldn't be too hard on her, it's not like she knew either. She wouldn't have known until he was launched into space, presumably. He wishes he could remember what that was like, seeing Earth from the ISS, from the window of whatever shuttle launched them up into orbit. He wonders if the thread broke then, or after he was put into a coma. It's an interesting line of thought and threatens to distract him from his goal of getting drunk as a skunk and weltering.
He tugs at the string, feeling it pull on his pinky in a way that's familiar, but he can't remember why. It's annoying how much he half-remembers, or doesn't remember at all. He wishes he remembered everything, but something deep down tells him that wouldn't be a good thing either. So he's stuck, knowing mostly nothing and hoping that eventually, something comes back to him.
What has come back to him is abysmal, to say the least. He remembers being young, the way he used to stare at the sky, watching his thread and hoping that someday, whoever was up there, would come back down to Earth for him. That the fact that they were destined to be together would be enough to break the laws of nature and bring them to him. It never happened, and as he grew older, he gave up. Then he got his thread to Stratt, and he had that mixture of hope and fear. He thought he was getting another shot at it all, another crack at the normal life that everyone else had.
Too bad that shot at life was light-years away. And not even possible on top of everything else.
Once he remembered what the little red threads meant, he knew that his was wrong. He knew it shouldn't be broken like that. It shouldn't be broken if it was a soulmate thread; those never broke, not even after divorce or death or whatever may break soulmates apart.
The only thing that could break a soulmate thread was if it wasn't a soulmate thread at all. The only threads that broke were fate threads. An exceedingly rare and not highly studied phenomenon, fate threads were sometimes tied to other people, giving them the appearance of soulmate threads—like his and Stratt's—but most often they were tied to objects or places. The people who had these fate threads sometimes had soulmate threads as well, but it wasn't the majority. No, the people who had fate threads were loners, enigmas to society, people on the outside of the world. They were chosen because they had nothing and no one to lose.
You couldn't outrun it; there was no way to avoid fate. You would always fall into that destined moment, no matter what you did. It was fate, after all. It was predetermined, inescapable, kismet.
He was never going to escape Stratt; he would never not work with Astrophage, he would never, in all realms and possibilities, walk away when given the chance. He would always end up here. It was his fate.
And that fateful moment, his time working with Stratt, was over, and so the thread was severed. This was a suicide mission. The moment he was sent up into the stratosphere, there was no coming back; there was no seeing Stratt again, so there was no more them. There were no more moments together, nothing to accomplish, so the thread broke. It broke and left him alone here, stuck in space with nothing and no one else. No one but himself, two corpses, and his remaining thread, which was sure to break as soon as he could figure out why Tau Ceti wasn't dimming and how to save Earth from total extinction.
His remaining thread had to be another fate thread; it's not like there was anyone out here. There were no people besides the bodies of his crewmates, whom he, for the life of him, still couldn't remember, but he started to cry every time he looked at them or their soulmate threads. The threads that he was so sure must have been lax and easy on Earth, and were now as tightly strung as his used to be. Their place was on Earth, with their people, and his place was here, amongst the stars. Fate had brought him here, and once again, he was at its whims and desires. He and his remaining thread would be here until the heat death of the universe, long after he died, long after the fate of Earth was brought to fruition.
He would always be here. But maybe, if he did this right, that second thread would break as well, and he would have done it right; he would have fulfilled his destiny, proven fate right once again.
He thinks maybe he can live with that.
Life on Stratt's Vat is… interesting, to say the least. Everywhere he goes with Stratt, following her around like a lost puppy, people stare at them. How could they not? The thread that connects them may drag on the ground, tangling and snagging as a result of their tumultuous relationship, but it's still there. It's there when Grace opens his eyes in the morning and when he rests his head at night. Worst of all, he thinks, is that Stratt has yet to really address it. Past her first acknowledgement, she hasn't brought it up again, and Grace certainly isn't going to be the one to open the door to that conversation.
But he wants to. It shocks him how much he finds himself wanting to open his mouth when they're alone and ask about it. To ask what she thinks about it, what she thinks about soulmates, what she thinks about him. The last part is the most daunting. He's not even sure how he feels about Stratt to properly answer that question if it were asked back. He respects her, that's for sure. He admires her stoicism, even if it can be a bit grating at times. He understands it; he understands why she has to be the way she is. They're in the early stages of the end of the world, which would turn anyone into a solid outline of a person.
They're so different, the two of them. He feels it in every interaction. Years of teaching middle schoolers have softened his edges. He's no longer that excitable, occasionally hot-headed twenty-something-year-old who has ideas of grandeur and a grudge against the world. No longer has something to prove.
Actually, that's not true. This project has taught him that he does still have something to prove. He's not entirely sure what that is yet, but he feels a drive within himself that he hasn't felt in many years. He's not entirely sure how to feel about that either, though. He loves his kids, he loves teaching, and his life was fulfilling even without being the lead scientist on the Petrova Taskforce.
The point is, he and Stratt are different. Where she's confident and commanding, he's hesitant and suggestive. People stiffen under her presence; they go lax under his. She is a hound on the trail of prey; he is the skittish, hunted fox. They're polar opposites.
But deep down, he doesn't think that's true. They're more alike than people think. They're more alike than he wants to admit, and that scares him.
For all her unflappable bravado, Grace thinks she's scared, just like he is.
This is all but confirmed when he's called away from his Astrophage breeder prototype because Stratt wants to see him. He finds her in one of the meeting rooms, papers strewn on the table, and a lowball glass sitting next to her.
"What are we drinking?" He asks, shooting for some levity, but he can sense how tense the situation is. The bags under her eyes signal to him that this isn't the time for jokes; he's never seen her this worked up or tired.
"Have a seat," she says quietly, gesturing to the chair next to her, and he takes the invitation, no matter how intimate it feels. She slides the glass into his reach and nods to it, inviting him to drink if he wants. He does not.
"I have a difficult decision to make." The declaration sits heavily in the air of the room.
"How can I help?"
She tops off her drink and takes a swallow. She explains the situation: how small the crew compartment of the Hail Mary is going to be, how being in such a small space for even seventy-one days pushed men to fistfights every day, and then attempted murder. How our crew will be in that cramped space for much longer, with the knowledge that in the end they're going to die anyway. Would they kill each other before they even got to Tau Ceti? Would they kill themselves on the way? There's only one solution: induced comas.
That narrowed down the candidate pool greatly, by a percentage that Stratt wasn't happy with. One in every seven thousand people has the coma-resistance gene, which is still a million people out of the world's total population, but Stratt doesn't see it that way. She sees it as her pool of eight billion being cut down to 0.0142% of its former glory. He gets it, he really does, but he also knows she's already made her decision.
"You know what you're going to do," he announces gently, shuffling the papers he's been looking through.
She shoots him a look.
"You know the decision you're going to make; you just need someone to reassure you, to tell you what you already know." He says it softly, reassuringly. "You're scared." He doesn't say. "I'd be scared too."
If she's scared about this, she's scared about other things too. Maybe she's as terrified as he is about having a soulmate, about being tied to someone in the middle of all this. How do they make it work? Do they make it work? Do they even try, or do they just keep existing in this limbo where they don't acknowledge it and pointedly ignore all the questioning looks they get from everyone they encounter? Grace isn't sure how many more questions he can field from Dimitri before he loses it.
If she can be vulnerable, if her own, minute way, he can be too.
"I actually wanted to talk to you about something, too." He clears his throat and tries very hard not to dwell on the way his voice shakes ever so slightly. Hopefully, Stratt doesn't notice; he's embarrassed enough as it is.
She raises an eyebrow at him, his wordless cue to continue. "I wanted to talk to you about the whole-" he pauses, dreading the words that are about to come out of his mouth, hands fidgeting on the table, prying apart a paperclip. "Soulmate…thing."
Grace watches as her brows level out, and her gaze dulls to one of unimpressed dismissiveness. "There's nothing to talk about." Her voice is as sure as ever, but Grace thinks there's maybe a hint of nervousness in her tone. He grasps onto it like a child fishing for a runaway balloon.
"Yeah, ok, but the thing is, there is something to talk about." He waits for her to respond in any sort of way. She, of course, does not. "Look, I can't take the looks anymore, and I can only avoid so many questions from Dimitri before he really presses and I'm forced to tell him something." He makes hesitant eye contact with her, fighting the burning urge to look away. "So, I guess it's up to you and this conversation to decide what I tell him."
"I don't enjoy being blackmailed, Dr. Grace." She says, leaning back in her seat and leveling him with a look icy enough to send them into an instant ice age without the assistance of their dying sun.
"I'm not blackmailing you," he scoffs, suddenly boisterous with his intense annoyance at her avoidance of the topic. "I don't have anything to hold over you. I'm simply asking you to acknowledge, in some way, any way, that you and I have a thread connecting us. That, for some greater cosmic reason, the world has decided to tie us together. That we're soulmates."
She does not reply.
Grace sighs, putting his face in his hands, fingers slipping under his glasses to rub at his eyes. "I never wanted a soulmate," he starts quietly, voice muffled by his hands. "I'm sure you've noticed by now, but my other thread goes straight up. There's not- for the longest time, there was nothing for me, on Earth. I stopped believing in soulmates and fate a long time ago; I'm not sure I ever really believed. But still, I tried; I looked for it in other people, even though I knew none of them were my soulmate. I didn't care; I just wanted to see if I could make a connection. But I couldn't. Not with anyone. Everything fell flat; nothing clicked. So I gave up." He'd pulled his hands away from his face at some point during his speech, so his voice is clear and full, teetering on the edge of some unknown emotion.
"But then, another thread appeared, and I thought that maybe I was getting something like a second chance or some other cosmic bull-puckey." He looks at her; she looks back at him, and there's a softness to her eyes, in the way the corners of her lips sit. He thinks that maybe he's getting through to her. Getting through to her by spilling his heart out to her, when he thinks she wouldn't care if he lived today or died tomorrow, if he wasn't so useful to her.
He takes a deep breath. "And you know what? That scared the absolute crap out of me. It scared me so bad that I wished I would never meet the person on the other end of that thread. So I get it, if you don't want this. If this is your greatest fear, like it is mine. I wouldn't wa
nt me as a soulmate either." His voice is choked; he's trying his hardest to push down his emotions, but he can't quite manage it. He feels like a fool, revealing all this, laying his cards on the table the moment he's been dealt the hand.
Stratt tucks her hair behind her ear, leaning forward until she's in the sightline of Grace's hunched form. "You are not my worst fear, Dr. Grace. I'm scared of much worse things than you. There are many more daunting things out there than a simple man." Her words are gentle, verging on kind, like what she's just said will set all right within Grace.
A simple man.
A simple man. That's all he was to her.
That's all he would ever be.
"Right." Is all he can say in response, his mind replaying the words over and over—a simple man.
Maybe he was being too harsh, focusing on the wrong part of what she said. She said he's not her worst fear, and, granted, she wasn't really his worst fear either. The sun dying and killing them all was his worst fear. His worst fear was that his students would be plunged into a world where the crops failed, where they would succumb to starvation, to war. Because there would be war. There was always war. There was no way all the world's empires would work together. Once the Hail Mary was launched, it would be every man for himself while they all waited to see if their screwball plan had worked. He would be forced to live through the same reality, but who cares? He cares about his kids.
Perhaps he was being a bit hyperbolic previously. Having a soulmate wasn't his worst fear, and it wasn't Stratt's either. They both had much more formidable things to face than a silly red string. Who cared that the universe thought they were destined to be together in a deep, all-knowing way? The universe was collapsing in on itself—metaphorically, of course—there wasn't time to worry about such silly things as soulmates. He knows this, but then why is the dismissal so upsetting? Why does it tug at the heartstrings he didn't know he had and twist something larger than he thought could ever exist in his chest? He thought he had given up such grandiosities long ago, or never had them at all. It was peculiar to come face to face with them in such a way. It was as curious as it was unsettling. He wanted to sit and dissect the feelings, put them under the microscope, figure out how they worked, as he did with Astrophage. But he was also terrified of them, of sitting with them for a moment longer than he had to. He'd rather just let them pass him by, a drifting thought he could shake off as easily as the passing ponder of what the mess hall would serve for dinner. They scared him, just as the thought of having a soulmate scared him. What an interesting paradox, to be terrified of having a soulmate but also be crushed by the dismissal of one.
Well, maybe it wasn't entirely a dismissal; she said it in such a way, in such a tone that he's never heard from her before. Maybe it was a kindness. Maybe she was telling him that he wasn't the doomed, terrible thing he thinks he is. Maybe he can be someone's…something. He doesn't have to be her soulmate, not in the traditional way, but he can be someone to her. Someone useful, someone to talk to, to rely on.
He can do that; he can be that for her. He can be a good human. A simple man.
"Well, I'm glad you're not scared of me." He says, softer than it should be, docile and relenting. He'll let her mold him into what she'll accept.
Stratt gives a smile, a short, small quirk of her lips that Grace can't decide is genuine or patronizing.
After a beat, she gathers the papers in front of her and reaches across to take Grace's papers as well. She's closed herself off again; the conversation is over. Grace takes it as his cue to leave, standing from his chair and making his way towards the door.
One last glance back shows Stratt typing away on her laptop, right back to the work, right back to holding the fate of the world in her hands. He leaves without a goodbye.
Things change after that.
Stratt becomes almost…softer. Warmer. She isn't personable by any means, but she isn't overtly hostile either. She taps him on the back when walking by; she's gentler in her commands of where to go and what to do. She even, at one point, smiles at one of his jokes. It was a small, hidden thing, but he saw it.
Every bridge of the gap between the two of them is a monumental step forward in Grace's eyes. No matter how small, how unassuming and dismissible, he takes it. He thinks this is just swell, and the best he could ever get from someone who's stuck with him as a soulmate. It doesn't hurt as much as it did initially. He understands now that this is just the way of things. Things were always going to end up like this if he ever got a soulmate, and he finally did.
His soulmate would always be as distant and closed off as he was; that's what would make them soulmates. It makes sense, honestly. Who else would tolerate his skittish behavior, his refusal to get close and form meaningful connections, other than someone who was exactly the same?
This is how it would be, and that's fine. He can deal with it. He won't hope for anything more.
He wouldn't deserve it anyway.