Chapter Text
The news came to her through a thumb drive tucked into her hand by an unknown inmate and one word, "Beetles."
Fingernails dug into her palms as she made her way through the prison complex.
Eva Stratt was a smart woman. She knew she wouldn't be free when the beetles returned to Earth. She'd made a plan for that— a far too elaborate plan with steps she didn't get to oversee because she was the one in the cell.
Anyone else would have considered the fact that her team pulled it off to be a miracle— but compared to the beetles return, it was nearly mundane.
She didn't allow herself to so much as look at the drive until she was alone, tucked into her bed with her laptop during meal time.
She pulled the drive from her pocket and balled it into her fist. It took several deep, calming breaths before she built up the courage to open her hand.
The thumb drive was adorned with a duct tape label, her last name written in all too familiar handwriting.
It was instinct that brought her thumb to run across the letters.
It was the writing of a ghost. They were all long dead by now. They were all long dead to her the moment the Hail Mary launched. He'd been dead to her since the moment the needle stuck in his back.
She pushed the thoughts from her head and plugged in the drive.
However, it seemed the universe wasn't willing to give her a break. Ryland Grace's face was the first to appear in the logs. The sight of him brought a squeeze in her chest she hadn't felt in damn near 15 years.
It wasn't as if she had moved on from what she done— far from it in fact— she'd simply grown numb to the guilt of this particular atrocity. Or that's what she'd told herself all these years at least. But nothing she told herself could stop the guilt from creeping back in, fresh as ever complete with a wave of nausea. He looked so similar to when he had sat across from her in that office those years ago. It had been barely any time for him, in the time she'd been mourning him he had been young and alive. It was frankly almost startling to see him that way. She had accept what she'd done so long ago, she'd never considered what it would be like to see him on the tapes.
His hair was long. It almost curled at that length, waves framing his face and falling around his shoulders. It would be sweet if it weren't accompanied by his fear and confusion. A fear and confusion she was at the heart of.
The first clip was not very long. Just the Hail Mary filming as the first crew member came to. The computer's voice played over the speakers, asking him to record a video diary to which he responded with a slurred and raspy 'no' and a wave of his hand.
It wasn't ideal for him to be the first to awake. If the amnesia drug worked, he was spending God knows how long alone, wondering where he was and what he was meant to do. And if it didn't work… if it didn't work he would be of no use at all.
Stratt couldn't bear the thought of that.
She pulled her attention back to the screen. The next log was perhaps even more useless than the first. Again, only Dr. Grace was featured. His hair was still long. It wasn't pin straight at that length like it had been when she'd known him. It wasn't much, a small wave in its texture, but it stood out in the endearing way only learning something new about a close friend could.
He held up the catheter bag filled with vodka— a request of Ilyuhkina's for celebrating their victory before they ended their lives. The date in the corner showed it to be later in the day he'd awoken. He must have spent an entire day alone if he'd managed to get into the vodka stash without protest.
Stratt had never seen him drunk she realized. He hadn't even made it to tipsy at that final party on the vat— too busy working through it and convincing her to sing to drink more than half a beer. And drunk Grace was a mess. He swung wildly between happy-go-lucky and sobbing inconsolably. With no other entertainment, around he recorded himself a ridiculous amount.
There are videos of him dressed in the clothing of his crewmates, dancing, pretending to swim in the Mental Health Node, and throwing markers at a whiteboard from halfway up the ship.
"Space Grace, video diary. I know it seems like I'm not doing great but I really am," he opens one. He's slurring his words, clearly he's already had more than his fair share. That brings a small smile to her face, despite it all.
She should have found it funnier than she did. She should have been able to laugh at his shenanigans from before the others awoke and the real work began. Hell, she should have felt annoyance that he had wasted such a large portion of the logs with this. But instead she found herself trapped in a sickly melancholy. It was odd to learn new things about him now, long after his death. Never in their time in the taskforce had she wished to get wasted with the man. She wasn't particularly sure she wished to now, but god did she wish she had learned this first hand not through a screen when his dead body was rotting 11 lightyears away.
It was the next log that stopped her heart. A wild swing from the tone of what she'd viewed so far.
"I am the sole survivor," Grace declared. "I have no idea why I am part of this mission or what the hell I'm supposed to do up here. I don't even know why I'm recording these because I doubt I'll have reason to send them back to Earth, but I'm going to try. For my— friends? For Earth. I believed in myself at some point, right? I can't give up now."
I believed in myself at some point. How long would it take for him to realize that wasn't true? She wasn't sure if her hope he never did came from a place of compassion or selfishness.
She felt sick. It was cruel enough she sent him to die for humanity's sake— it felt almost evil knowing he'd done so completely and utterly alone. She had prepared for every possible outcome. Hell, she'd had Grace lined up in her head for the very unlikely event they lost the entire science team. And still she'd never imagined it would come to this. Ryland Grace alone further from Earth than any human had ever been.
He didn't have Ilyukhina's endless optimism and jokes nor did he have Yao to keep him grounded. She'd sent him because she knew he'd work well with the other astronauts. She knew they'd figure it out together.
But he had been alone.
Panic squeezed her throat. What if he hadn't found a solution? What if he sent back the beetles only to prove he tried? Maybe remembered what she'd done and sent them back to prove he hadn't had it in him after all.
No, he hadn't been cruel. She'd known him well enough to know that despite her hope, it would end in him being forced on that ship. She knew him well enough that she knew he wouldn't seek revenge.
She shut the laptop, removing the drive and hiding it back in her pocket. The Earth would survive an extra day before Grace's solution was set in motion. If he'd found one at all.
Stratt's sleep was fitful and fleeting. The night was spent in a sad attempt to outrun the nightmares she'd thought herself long free from before the brutal reminders in the logs.
It was stupid. She regretted nothing. If Earth survived this, it would be because of her. It would be specifically because she'd chosen to send Ryland Grace on the Hail Mary. And even if Earth was destroyed she could say she'd done all she could.
She retrieved her laptop as soon as she was alert enough to move. Her roommate was leaving for breakfast, that would give her the time to make progress. She'd skip every meal if she had to.
It was harder to start the logs knowing what waited for her. It had been hard to send him as well, but she had done it. It was important. She would do any hard thing if it could ensure the survival of humanity.
The Hail Mary was set to automatically record when the ship reached Tau Ceti. They figured it would allow the crew to document any immediate observations or discoveries without needing to pull their attention away from the star to start the log.
As should have been expected the first logs in her queue for the day were repetitive. He had yet to reach Tau Ceti and begin his true mission and the isolation was clearly getting to him. He recorded logs simply for the hell of it. He wasn't drunk this time, making them less chaotic than before. He simply documented what he ate in a day, talks with the ship (that he had dubbed Mary) and with the first aid robot (known now as Armando), and showed off the functions of the ship as a whole.
She still found him endearing after all these years, he could still make her smile no matter how serious the situation. He was still so himself, despite not knowing what that meant.
Upon arrival at Tau Ceti and the loss of his gravity, Grace panicked. He screamed and cried and did everything but record his observations. Stratt doubted he even knew he was being recorded.
She closed her eyes— feeling wrong for seeing him this way. This was atonement. She needed to know how much he suffered up there. And yet it still felt like she was punishing him more than herself.
Eventually his panic did end. When Stratt reopened her eyes, he was looking through the Petrova scope.
"It's Tau Ceti," he observed.
He has to remind himself because you gave him a drug that didn't allow him to remember how or why he was there. Stratt's mind provided unhelpfully.
"You have a Petrova Line," Grace continued. "But you're not dimming. Why?"
He stared at the Petrova scope a bit longer, muttering to himself.
"Blip-A detected," the computer called out.
"What's a Blip-A?"
The computer simply repeated itself.
Again Stratt couldn't help but feel endeared by the man. Of course he would treat the computer like a crewmate— it was sweet if she didn't think about it too hard.
Grace moved to look at some read-outs on a nearby screen, before quickly deciding to float out of view to the window instead.
He floated back into view nearly as quickly. "No, no, no, nope, no. Let's go, Mary!" He began in panic.
The log cut there as in his rush to the pilot's seat, he hit the button to end the recording.
Stratt's brows knit together in confusion. What could possibly illicit such a reaction?
Her mind drifted back to that awful Valentine's Day when the project had been changed so completely.
He'd said he wasn't brave. He'd said that many times over the course of the project. She'd not believed him once.
Maybe he was right about that. Maybe he was at least a bit of a coward.
She had no reason to believe he had failed the mission. She still believed in him despite the evidence before her. But if he had succeeded, he had done so afraid despite all the efforts taken to allow him to forget his fears. Whatever fear she had struck in him was too deeply ingrained to be flushed out.
In the next log, Grace was alone in a tunnel Stratt was more than certain her team had not built. It was dark, lit by various jerry-rigged lights that Grace had presumably dragged along with him to wherever this was. He was in his EVA suit, staring at what looked like a glass wall at the end of said tunnel.
This must have been the Blip-A the Hail Mary had mentioned. There were endless possibilities out there in the vastness of space, she could very easily be wrong in her theory but until proven wrong she would hold onto the logic she could find.
"What're you watching?" The voice of her bunkmate snapped Stratt back to reality. She closed her laptop quick as physically possible.
"Nothing that concerns you."
The woman raises a skeptical eyebrow, climbing the ladder to Stratt's bunk and leaning into her space. "Your not Earth's dictator anymore. I'm not afraid of you, and you're not going to shoo me away."
Stratt rolled her eyes as she tucked her laptop in its place under her pillow. "Something from a friend."
Her roommate scoffed. "You have friends?"
"A former friend," Stratt corrected. Grace wasn't her friend any more. He never truly had been and what he was now was dead.
"And why is it so secret?"
"Because it is not anyone's business." This was why she had been attempting to avoid watching the tapes with anyone present, everyone here was lonely and bored. They would waste her all too valuable time.
Her roommate rolled her eyes and climbed back down on the floor. "Whatever, enjoy your homemade porn," she snarked.
It took significant effort to hold her tongue. What did it matter in the end what this woman thought she was watching? It was going to save all of their lives. Arguing would only waste time.
It wasn't until dinner that Stratt was alone again and able to restart the logs. Her mind spent the day unhelpfully theorizing what Grace could possibly have been seeing on the other side of that glass.
Would it hurt him? Had he been stupid enough to put himself and all of humanity in grave danger? Or was this the key to saving them all?
The questions were useless, asking them would get her no closer— only watching those logs could show her how to save Earth.
By the time she booted up her laptop, she was near insane with curiosity.
It was the same view she left on. That unknown tunnel and a suited up Grace staring into the black on the other side of the glass.
"Oh my— this is new," Grace declared. He called out through the glass, as if there was something on the other side he could speak to.
Maybe there was. They'd found Astrophage, would it be so shocking for there to be intelligent life out there?
The angle Grace had set the camera up at did not give a clear view of what was on the other side of the glass and it was too far away to hear the conversation well— if there were a conversation in the first place. She could make out an oddly shaped shadow but that was all. Perhaps they should have focused more training on how to properly record a log entry.
Something there spooked Grace causing him to scream and swing the wrench in his hand wildly before apologizing and stepping back up to the glass.
He talked to the creature more, tapping against the glass in what must have been a way they'd found to communicate in the time missing from the logs. Only he would have the patience for that. It was a tragedy only he survived, but maybe the best outcome was for it to be only him rather than only Yao or Ilyukhina.
The amount of things he would be celebrated for were only growing. He had named Astrophage, he had been the first Human to meet intelligent alien life, and soon he would save Earth.
On her screen Grace turned towards the camera, seeing something tucked up against the wall of the tunnel. He walked over to it, picked it up and opened the alien package. Whatever it was was hidden from view by his body as he continued the conversation.
"Take my helmet off?" he asked loudly, sounding as scandalized as one would expect. He's smarter than to abide by the request, his voice lowered again but his gesture made his refusal clear.
Good, she hadn't erased all the sense from his head.
He spoke to the alien on the other side of the glass a bit longer before backing away.
"And I'm sorry about the whole helmet thing, unfortunately I need oxygen to breathe," he called back.
She could hear the trilling call of whatever was on the other side. It was trying to tell Grace something.
"This is oxygen!" He called out in realization, holding up two connected rings— the object from the package.
"Still, don't think I can do it thought." He begun to gather the equipment he had brought with him before stopping in hesitation.
His hand drifted up towards the latch for his helmet.
Anxiety welled up in Stratt. He couldn't have died here if she had received these logs, given that he was alone. Unless whatever was on the other side of the glass had found a way to send them back…
She forced her eyes to stay open. Even if it were his death she was about to witness, she needed to know. For the sake of humanity.
Grace did not die just as the more logical side of Stratt's mind had predicted. In fact, he took the helmet off and took in a huge gulp of air. He could breathe with ease, the alien had manufactured oxygen for him.
Stratt was engrossed now. The kind of attentiveness that has one leaning forward in their seat as they watch.
The next log opens with Grace sitting at his desk back on the ship, the camera is set above his head leaving him looking up at her over the rim of his glasses. "So, I met an alien," he declares.
Stratt laughed a little at the matter-of-fact introduction to such a discovery. It was so very Grace. He'd always attempted to make himself seem as nonchalant as possible, announcing every big break through like it was nothing. He never truly pulled it off. Stratt could always see the pride and excitement bubbling under the surface, same as she could now.
"I'm calling him Rocky and we're learning to communicate."
He's duct taping together a battery pack, a laptop, and a tablet for reasons Stratt cannot begin to infer.
"We have enough to order at restaurants, we have about 250 words," he says turning his laptop around to show the translator he's managed to create. There are sound waves of the aliens noises on one side and the correlating words on the other— it's utterly brilliant.
"My atmosphere would kill him, and his me— but I like to keep a wall up in my relationships anyway."
Stratt laughs again at that, her mind drifting back to that last party on the vat, when he'd snuck out to visit her on the deck. Grace could never handle silence. She'd learned that about him on the first day they'd met when he'd spent the entire car ride asking every question possible about information she could not freely give. And when he ran out of questions, the conversation turned to stories of his classroom and how the worries his students had expressed that day were proved real. That night, he'd said he'd always wanted to be mysterious. It was the only thing she'd known him to fail at. He was correct in his assessment he talked to much to be mysterious. Overshared too much at the first slightly awkward lull to keep a wall up as well.
"He's an mechanic, I think. He uses a metal form of xenon, he can make anything. Look at this!" Grace reaches for the camera, pulling it off the stand. The camera lurched and spun as was usual in the logs thus far— Grace was many things, a videographer was not one of them. Eventually it settles, Grace holding it in his hand and pointing it towards himself. "I'm calling it xenonite," he tells the log proudly, holding up the metal.
He puts it down somewhere off camera and pulls out what seems to be a xenonite model of the Hail Mary. It is impressive. The details are intricate, seeming almost as if the metal had been woven together.
"And if I can't understand what he's saying, which is most of the time, he puts on a puppet show for me and my tiny brain. And you know what? I don't mind it."
Grace returns the camera to its stand, babbling as he goes. "He's kind of growing on me. At least he's not growing in me— you know? Which was a concern for a while." He laughs at his own joke. "His crew died as well, we're both alone up here," he continues, seriously. "And his sun is dying too, so maybe we can help each other."
Stratt's heart warms and breaks all at once at those words. She never considered there could be other worlds out there going through the same crisis. But then again, it meant Grace was not alone up there. It meant he had someone to keep him company, he didn't spend his final days slowly going insane from isolation, and he had another mind to help him solve this all.
"So I have a new roommate now," Grace proclaims from her laptop speakers. He sounds annoyed. Which is a little absurd considering he should have shared the ship with two others but she supposed one alien was rather different than two Humans.
Grace continues to rant about his noisy, bossy, alien friend for many minutes— implying problems Stratt can't begin to conceptualize. He sounds affectionate despite his annoyance. He can't even admit how lonely he was, how grateful he is for constant company. Just like him, to attempt to be stronger than he really is— except when pushed to the extreme…
His annoyance is as endearing as she remembers it being. Some of the only fun she'd had over the course of the project had been lightly ribbing Grace. At the time, she hadn't realized how much she'd been able to let her guard down around him. How he'd been the only one who she'd been able to let her guard down around. She was almost just Eva with him. She'd never get that again.
She watched until her eyes grew heavy. The sound of his voice, jumping between the excitement of introducing Rocky to Human knowledge and his newest annoying habit lulling her into a calm sleep. God, she'd missed his voice. She missed those late nights on the vat in her office as they sat attempting to work out the endless list of snags the project had encountered.
He'd had the worst habit of talking to himself. If it had been anyone else it would have driven Stratt utterly insane, but it was Grace. Despite her best efforts she couldn't keep her walls all the way up with him. It was hard to push someone away when they were the one person who checked in on you and cared about your well-being.
In her dreams, she was back in that office. He was telling her she needed sleep, that she would work herself to death. And she protested that she would sleep if he would. The argument ended the way it always had, with them both working until the sun rose.