Chapter Text
A commotion passed around her, a flurry of people, half of whom she didn’t recognise.
She checked her watch. 12 minutes until she had to get on that call with the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; they had some issue or other with their plan regarding mission control. She hadn’t read the email too closely; it had come while she was explaining their next 10 objectives to the various European liaisons so that they didn’t try to pull her away from the project under the accusation of embezzling or something equally idiotic.
She waved at the nearest man in a suit. He was probably someone unimportant.
“Coffee,” she demanded.
“Of course, Ms Stratt.”
She watched the horizon. She hadn’t slept, again. If not for the situation, she didn’t doubt somebody would have loved to study her body’s functioning, conditioned now, as it was, to running on the maximum amount of caffeine safe to consume and 3, maybe 4 hours of sleep a night. It was going to tank her cardiovascular health and probably contribute to some sped up neurodegeneration down the line. A fair price, one she could accept, for the safety of the world. And if the plan didn’t work, well, it did not matter what happened to her body.
Most things were like that, these days. Either she could take care of it later, assured that the sacrifice was worth it—for the world, for humanity—or it wouldn’t have mattered either way. Such a worldview should have made everything easier, but just because she knew it logically didn’t mean that the sacrifice didn’t hurt. Physically, perhaps, yes, but mentally as well. She had become proficient at pushing it away, at clearing her mind with the checklist on her phone. That, at least, was easy; she never ran out of things to do.
“Coffee.”
She took it from his hand, nodded in thanks. Another glance at her watch—7 minutes.
She walked towards the edge of the carrier, peered towards the deep water. It was cold and windy on the deck. It reminded her of trips she used to take with her parents to Norway, where she would watch the cool ocean, wrapped up in winter clothes despite it being the middle of July. Those trips didn’t happen too often, only on special occasions. The year she was born, her parents had gone there; it was also where they’d had their honeymoon.
They had wanted to go this year as well, when they heard of her promotion. It hurt, to shut them down, but Eva had too important things on her mind. They understood.
Then she bombed Antarctica. They stopped calling, after that. She couldn’t blame them, even if she thought it unreasonable.
5 minutes. Time passed too slowly, lazy like the waves around the vessel.
She was out of breath, despite standing still. She put her fingers to her neck, found her own pulse. Blood hit the wall of the artery, vibrated through her fingers, with too high of an intensity. Concerningly high pressure. It was no wonder she could hardly push away a headache.
She slid her fingers around the lid of her to-go cup, considering. Then, she took a sip. No time to worry about that, not now.
4 minutes.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around slowly.
Dr. Lokken stared at her with her face set in annoyance.
“You have to talk to Grace,” she never called him doctor when he wasn’t around. Eva could appreciate that she was consistent in her beliefs, even if it was childish and petty.
“And why would I do that?” she took another sip of the coffee. It was too bitter. She used to take it with oat milk and brown sugar and vanilla syrup, have a moment by her window to sit and drink and watch the world or read a chapter of whatever classic she was trying to get through at that moment. It had been The Master and Margarita in its original Russian, at the time that she got the news. It still sat in her apartment, open on chapter 3 and flat on the windowsill, as she had left it.
“He’s going to get himself killed in the lab today. I don’t know what is up with him, but he’s worse than normal.”
Eva hummed. She looked at her watch. 3 minutes.
“Perhaps he’ll get it under control until evening,” she said.
Dr. Lokken rolled her eyes at her.
“You may not be the one that has to put out his fires right now, but you wait too long, and this will be your problem.”
Eva didn’t like Dr. Lokken too much. They were too similar, perhaps, both too intense in many ways. It demanded respect, which Eva readily gave, but that did nothing to stop the annoyance she often felt with the other woman. Even if she had a point; even when she was right.
“I’ll speak with him when I have time, which will be in the evening.” The watch said she had 30 seconds. She turned on her heel and began speedwalking to her office. She could hear Dr. Lokken fall into stride right behind her. “Does that satisfy you?”
“Barely,” she heard Dr. Lokken say. “But I expected nothing less.”
They parted ways. Eva mulled over it and considered her schedule; by the time she was free, she doubted the man would still be at the laboratory. It wouldn’t hurt to check, she supposed. She wouldn’t get any sleep in until perhaps 4 am, in any case ; if she wasn’t busy doing this, her mind still wouldn’t let her rest, not until she could consider her Outlook inbox fairly cleared and the Excel expenses spreadsheet and contract and acquisition drafts complete enough. She had promised Dimitri to look through another document about his spin drive tonight, despite the fact that her understanding of the subject remained minimal. If Grace was functional enough, she would be able to ask for his help, once she found him.
She put the activity in her calendar as Meeting with Dr. Grace, coloured light blue for ‘uncertain’.
By then, she was calling into Teams and apologising for her 2 minutes of tardiness.
Dr. Grace was on the couch in her office, leaning over the backrest. He’d settled like that when she led him inside, when she turned away to make tea but really to try and figure out what to do now.
She didn’t think she would find him. Didn’t think that Dr. Lokken would be this on point. When she saw him, when he eventually left the lab, she had to resist the instinctual urge to check his forehead for a fever. He was shaky, unsteady, like he was sick. But his skin was its normal colour; he didn’t cough or sneeze or faint. Only shook, even as she led him by the hand.
She hazarded a glance over her shoulder, watched as his eyes traced over her movements, blinking softly, tiredly. He looked exhausted, nearly as much as she felt, despite the fact that she doubted he got as little sleep as her.
He almost caught her eyes. She looked back at her hands.
It was strange. She was unsettled, though she would never admit to it. She hadn’t been alone with anybody in a room, not in this way, not without a clear, dry, technical objective, since the world began to end. It was meeting after meeting and then solitary in her room or her office, the sound of laptop keys being pressed on too hard by her fingers her only company. She had never been one to enjoy the company of others too often; never was she this isolated, though. Only a few months, and it already felt as though moving with another person, in that dance that people termed easy conversation, was no small feat.
She pretended the teabag and boiling water were the most interesting things in the world, as she tried to figure out a plan for what to do.
She knew Dr. Grace from paperwork, from research. She knew what everybody thought of him, down to his only friend Marissa, whom she had called pretending to have been his one-night-stand. He was loud, he was passionate, he wasn’t a risk taker. He had lived in the same bachelor’s apartment since he started working at Grover Middle. Him and Marissa had been going to dinner to the same restaurant for too many years to count. He didn’t do well with change. His father was dead; his mother worked at a nuclear research facility somewhere in Ohio. She said she hadn’t spoken to him since he was sixteen; Eva couldn’t get a read on whether she was regretful of that or completely indifferent to her son’s existence. He didn’t have any other family, any more friends. She had only gotten words like prepared, nice, creative, conscientious from his coworkers at the school; pure fillers for when you were talking about somebody whose main contribution to your life was restocking tea at the teacher’s lounge and making sure “that problematic kid” was a bit calmer during your class.
It all told her nothing of this. Of the man who sat silently on her couch, who had asked if he could help her make tea like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to speak.
She hadn’t meant to make him overstimulated during the day; she forgot, as she often did, that she wasn’t the baseline for how society at large experienced the world. It was a reality of high inefficiency, but she had made herself accept it long ago—her mind was not the mind of everybody, and though it caused frustration and made her make mistakes, there was nothing to be done but live with it. She had forgotten again, now she was fixing it.
She’d expected him to talk, though. To be as he usually was; full of rambling and bad science jokes that would fill the silence and hopefully calm him enough. She only wanted to make sure he did calm down, so he wouldn’t make any more problems down the line.
The kettle screamed, pushing her back to reality. She watched the steam rise, felt its warmth on her face, let it ground her. It was like any other situation; it was new, but she would figure it out. She was saving the world, arguing with people who had their heads up their asses every other day. How hard could Ryland Grace be?
“I’ll get milk from the canteen.” She said to him.
He barely responded. He was staring at her with something unreadable, some sort of openness she hadn’t seen before. He was still shivering. Those eyes stared at her like she had the solution; whether to that problem or something else was unclear.
“I...” she hesitated. Was it the right thing to suggest? She had no idea. “I could bring you a blanket from your room, if you’d like.”
“Why?”
He tilted his head to the side, confused. His brows furrowed and his face cleared of that strange expression from mere seconds earlier, like some part of his mind had returned to functionality.
Eva let her eyes drop down to his hands. They continued to tremble, harder, if anything.
She shook her head.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it, Doctor Grace. I’ll be back in a moment.”
She’d read somewhere it was better to assure a person in a fragile state of your whereabouts before you left them. She’d read a lot, over the past months, whenever there was time—political economics, psychology, high school biology textbooks. She was doing her best to understand it all, trying to convince herself that her mind could take it. It could take it.
She was moving on autopilot, the paths on the carrier ingrained more in her muscles than in her mind. She’d learned them, the first few weeks, so later on she could use the time spent traversing them to think about the meeting she was going to or any other more pertinent issue than whether or not to take the next turn right.
She was too tired to think anything of substance.
To the canteen, to the fridge, pouring milk into a cup in the dark and using the microwave to make it hot; taking a spoon from the drawer and flipping it between her fingers, the coolness of metal almost the same temperature as her hands. Raynaud’s; it was especially bad at the sea. She would have gotten compression gloves like somebody once recommended; if only she could push that task anywhere to the top of her priority list.
Milk out of the microwave, spoon in her other hand. Legs carrying her without conscious input, again, mind too tired. It had to be past midnight, by this point, but she didn’t want to check her watch. It wouldn’t do anything except make her remember all the things that still needed to be done.
She stopped in front of the men’s dormitory. Dr. Grace slept in one room with three other people. Eva could hardly recall their names. She pushed the door open, silent as she could be.
They were all asleep. Only Dr. Grace’s bed stood empty. She snatched the first blanket her eyes found, pulled it over her forearm and left.
She almost thought Dr. Grace was asleep once she returned. His eyes peered from beneath a curtain of eyelashes, ones that she was sure some teenage girl had at one point described as “yummy”; she was no stranger to American movies, to the way their youth talked, and to the fact that Ryland Grace was too attractive for his own good. It was good for him that he didn’t use social media. She doubted he would have appreciated becoming a man that the masses “simp” over.
He had something between his teeth. A necklace, she realised, that he was chewing on absentmindedly. She fought a grimace from making its way on her face, the idea of the plastic being contaminated with his spit disgusting.
Even despite that, she let her eyes linger on him again, as she closed the door, mindful to shut it quietly. He wasn’t relaxed, not yet, but there was something about him again. Some inhibition lowered to its maximum.
She looked away before it got to her. It was easy, to surrender to mechanical motions again, to mix hot chocolate powder into a cup of milk and focus only on the clink of her teaspoon, on the steam that blurred her vision. Relaxing, even. She rarely ever relaxed properly; she had no time for it, not now and not in her previous life. Even her reading habits had always been half-driven by ambition, focused often on expanding her literary base than ever reading only for leisure.
Her ex-boyfriend’s sister had once told her she was like Paris Geller in real life. When Eva didn’t understand what she meant, she was made to sit through a season and a few farther episodes of Gilmore Girls with Linda on an uncomfortable second-hand couch, sharing a bowl of popcorn. Eva spent most of that time thinking about the next essay she was meant to write. She had paid enough attention to see Linda’s point.
Then she broke up with Jeffrey, and Linda stopped speaking to her at all. Most of Eva didn’t miss her, except for a small part that did.
She blinked. When had she walked to the couch?
She needed to sleep properly, or she was risking her faculties.
“I brought you a blanket.”
He readjusted his position while nodding. God, he was shaking so badly. Eva needed her mind to work, needed to get over how strange this situation was. She needed him functional, not like this. She needed every member of her team at their best.
“Would you like it?”
Another nod. Perhaps that first one was a request as well. The more she looked at him, the more unlikely to speak he looked. Again, that lack of any inhibition on his face. He looked at her like her younger cousins did, with a wonder and a hope, like she was their whole world for the moment.
She wrapped the blanket around him, smoothed out the creases. He curled into it, smiling a little, still shaking.
Eva considered her options. Her only idea of what was going on was some undefined state of his mind where he perhaps needed to be cared for like her cousins did. She’d babysat them enough. He was an adult man in a fragile state, and she could help him. No different to any time she’d helped family.
She placed the mug in his hands, directed his palm over it when his reaction time proved too slow. Shaking, shaking, unceasing, unrelenting.
“Don’t spill,” she said, like that could help the clearly involuntary response.
He brough the mug to his lips and almost immediately pushed it away with a wince and a look to her. As though she had the solution to that problem. Again.
Her hand was on the cup before the contents spilled over. Only now did she note how warm the ceramic had gotten; damn it, that microwave was too good. She was still used to the model that lived in her flat, the one that needed 3 minutes to heat up soup.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot how powerful that microwave is.”
She didn’t realise she kept holding his hand. It was warm in her own freezing fingers, not uncomfortably so. She returned it to him when it hit, gently as she could. She feared this openness, this strange thing about him that she had never seen on anyone close to her age before.
It was primarily scary because it neared dangerously close to trust. She wanted his trust, yes, but as a boss, a manager. Not as whoever they were in this moment. That felt too dangerous. Too much like it could be made into a relationship, which would only cause them both pain, in the end. She had done her best to keep everyone on the project at arm’s length. Isolation wasn’t healthy, but it was better than the alternative; than getting too attached and having her judgement clouded.
But she couldn’t say that to him now. She had a distinct feeling that would break him.
She settled into what he expected of her, or more so into what felt natural. She held his hands steady as he drank, helped him arrange his body in a way that made sense. She did her best to keep him company. She called him by his first name; this wasn’t the place for professional titles.
Her every action, Eva passed through a lens that still felt strange, but also worked, which was most important. Would I do this with Finn? No matter that Finn was six years old last she’d seen him. She had always thought some care transcended age, despite what society seemed to think of it, especially when it came to men. She’d seen her father care for his own father and then his friends, whose age caught up to them much sooner than his did to him, too often to agree.
It pushed the air out of her lungs when he so openly, with no hesitation, declared an utter lack of physical boundaries. She stared at his face, unable to look away. Afraid, perhaps, that if she did, it would do something to alter him forever.
He really did seem like he had about the faculties of a child, right then.
She pondered on it as she traced incoherent words into his back, a song that she’d had stuck in her head from when she played it on loop for 3 hours straight to keep awake. Her other hand typed away on her laptop, still trying to get as much done as possible.
He curled into her more and more. She, in turn, became more and more tired.
She maybe shouldn’t have taken him to her bed. But he’d looked close to tears when she woke him, and she had finally figured out what that “no” he’d shaken his head in had meant earlier.
It was an I don’t want to be alone.
And it was only practical. Only meant to keep him psychologically sane. For the good of the project.
Ryland was on her bed, sitting down, his body the definition of exhaustion. She thought he would come, but for something like a sleeping pill prescription or to tell her about a discovery that had been keeping him up at night. She’d been anticipating him running out of those post-it notes for weeks, after she kept finding them under her door.
She had called him Ryland on a reflex, seeing that way his hands were unsteady, again. It had relaxed him, had cleared something in his mind, again. She didn’t know what it was, but she had a suspicion.
He had acted like a child the last time she’d seen him late in the night. He’d needed help brushing his teeth, even after she’d finally managed to get his hands to stop trembling.
He was already an anxious man, someone very fast-paced; he was someone whose thoughts matched the pace of her own. It wasn’t above the realm of possibility that something like this, that his mind turning off the part of him that had to consider every single minute detail of life and think about its stakes, the part that made him run away from risk because it would mean the variables twisted more towards the unfavourable, would help him.
“I…” she ran her hands through her hair, contemplating. “I don’t want you to… I’m making an assumption. I could be wrong.”
She was tired, again. She’d slept more than he had, clearly, but she guessed the difference wasn’t anything big. She was simply more used to it. She blamed that lack of sleep, the unsteadiness it gave her, for the fact that she was honestly concerned about being wrong—what would that do? Make him uncomfortable or dislike her? Those shouldn’t have been things she worried about.
If it was the day, she didn’t doubt the anxiety wouldn’t even cross her mind. The night was the time when everything fell quiet, and when she sometimes reached moments of quiet reflection. It was only natural. Human brains did that, used any moment of silence to analyse themselves, their environment.
She tried to avoid them best she could. They were a distraction, a piece of time for her conscience to try and bargain with logic and her feelings and hard facts. They never came to any conclusions, because nothing that was being done for the world could be agreed upon by those four forces: soul, mind, heart and society.
“I think I have a solution, to you. But it’s… if I’m wrong, if last time was only how you react to too much stimulus, I—I don’t want you to worry that this changes our relationship. As I said. I will still like you. And you will still respect me.”
He didn’t look too bothered about the respect issue. Eva was slightly surprised, at that, but it did prove to make her like him more. He wasn’t somebody who let his ego crush everything else; the fact that he seemed to have the opposite problem didn’t weigh on her too much. Insecurity, in their situation, was preferrable to hubris.
“I’m not having sex with you.”
Well, of course, you fucking idiot—
“Good. I’m not having sex with you either.”
She didn’t believe in God. She stopped when she was 17, too many years ago, now. But Lord, the look on his face, the plea towards her, again that same stare that told her she might as well have already saved them all and hung the stars from the sky…
It was like being given the power to save the world, all over again. And she would. She would have spoon-fed him oatmeal if it could help.
It wouldn’t come to that, she hoped.
He was still talking, his mind a hundred miles per hour. She didn’t know how to start it, how to make him stop trying to make it work.
So, she didn’t think about it. She pictured Finn.
“Have you brushed your teeth, manekke?”
She didn’t think about it. She tried not to think too hard about it, not as she kissed his forehead, not as she pulled out the book she’d brought for reasons uncertain even to her, a worn hardcover that had been read many a time under the covers when she was 10, 11, 13.
It took only a moment, until he started to cry again. She was singularly focused on him, on making sure that he didn’t lose it. That she didn’t break him. He shouldn’t have placed this kind of trust in her; it should have felt heavier to her, too. But as she wiped his tears, as she looked at him and saw the open joy on his face when handed that damned necklace she had ordered before she had fully realised what she was doing, her mind cleared. He was the only thing she could think of, not in some cliché, romantic, distracting way, but in the way that his issue was the one she was fixing right that moment.
And he was easy to fix. Like a child.
She didn’t mean to call him a child in English. She did. He didn’t bat an eye.
There was probably a name for it, in some psychology textbook she had yet to get to. There was probably a reasoning and some old man pathologizing and rationalising and criticising. Perhaps, the old man was even correct.
Rylie. He liked that. He was maybe five, six, seven at most, in his mind. Or younger; Eva didn’t meet too many children.
She had once wanted a child. Then came the realisation that she would rather kill herself than sleep with somebody, and that she could never hope for a marriage like her parents had. Neither one of those had been particularly distressing. She made the only reasonable choice, then—a child was too much for a single parent. Countless studies she found showed children did better with two parental figures, and she scarcely even had a friend who could serve that role with her. So, she let that want go, because it was unreasonable.
Her stupid, human brain didn’t get rid of it, truly. It had only buried it, like it buried everything to keep her focused. It only ever surfaced sometimes at 3 am, along with everything else.
She shouldn’t have let him in. She would get attached. It would be bad. It was a distraction none of them could afford.
But he helped her sleep. Holding someone, a purely human need, a physical reflex, and it was enough to make her not toss and turn, not get up to write down one more problem that needed solving.
She could let it happen, for one more time.
He barely nodded to her during the day. When she called him to a meeting, he went there, same as he always was—reluctantly present and often annoying.
He was the same as always. He didn’t look at her any differently, didn’t mention anything. He called her Ms Stratt, or Stratt if he wanted to be a bother. They were both different people, during the day, in the sunlight, in the commotion of work.
This was an unwritten arrangement. Something that could work, because Dr. Grace wasn’t an utter idiot. She had known that. It was nice to have it affirmed.
Sure, Dr. Lokken now looked at her like Eva had personally offended her, but that was beside the point. She didn’t care about anybody’s opinion of herself. There wasn’t any time. She still moved from task to task, meeting to meeting. It was normal. Nothing had changed.
Two weeks later, he was at her door again. He was already Rylie, already terrifyingly vulnerable. The moment she saw him, her mind cleared.
It could work.
“Here,” he handed her a paper cup of coffee. She opened the lid and took in the scent. Vanilla.
“How did you know how I liked it?” she asked him. Dr. Grace blushed and looked away.
Eva retraced her memories, what she had told him the last time they’d met in the night. She couldn’t think of anything. She kept staring at him, impassively curious.
Dr. Grace coughed. He adjusted his glasses, which had almost slipped off his ear. Eva sipped her coffee and looked at her watch; they both had 3 minutes until the helicopter would come whisk them away to another conference where Dr. Grace would show the world he was still as socially inept as ever.
“So… funny story…”
“Oh, for God’s sake, just spit it out.”
He reached for his pendant and began chewing on it. She didn’t think she’d ever gotten a coworker a gift they used this much.
“Some news outlet had photographed us when we were walking to the—”
“So, the news thinks you’re my boy toy, or whatever,” she rolled her eyes. This was old news and this conversation was a waste of both their time. “As if that was new.”
Even if it wasn’t new, it still never ceased to irritate her. She was trying to save the world, and they were concerned with whether she liked to kiss her lead scientist. Idiotic.
“Wait, what—” he shook his head. “It must have been the first time the news got to it, because your parents called me.”
She swallowed her coffee, met his eyes over the rim of the paper cup.
“Why?”
His eyes traced around her face.
“I don’t know. They were asking about you, and then they just sort of started talking to me about every single part of your life. I didn’t know how to stop them so I didn’t hang up until your mother took a drink of something and they were silent enough that I could say ‘goodbye’.”
She forced herself to move on from the revelation.
“Dr. Grace, why did you pick up a call from an unknown number?”
“It was just in case it was someone calling you, but you gave them my number again!” he raised an eyebrow at her. “I know you did that at least once.”
She felt the corner of her mouth twitch.
“How did they get your number?”
Grace sighed, looked up at the sky.
“I think one of my student’s had leaked it.”
“Your students had your personal number—”
“No, no, Jesus, Stratt! I’m not stupid,” debatable, she thought with a smile which she immediately wiped off her face. “It was a school-assigned contact. It only worked because I still have that phone. In case… in case the kids call. The school never disconnected the number, since I’ll be back to teaching after this is over.”
She gritted her teeth. She moved the coffee cup to her other hand and extended her dominant one.
“Give it. You can’t have that here, it’s dangerous.”
He frowned at her.
“Come on—!”
“Dr. Grace,” she didn’t relent. It would make him sad, but it was too much of a risk. “If my parents found your number, everyone can find it. That is not a suitable state of things for somebody as important as you.”
“I’m not important,” he said. She ignored the protest.
He handed her the phone, looking away. She rolled her eyes at the tears that began to spring out of his eyes, mostly to centre herself on the annoyance of the situation and not the fact that she could understand his pain.
“Oh, stop crying,” she looked at him expectantly. It worked. He wiped his tears away with his sleeve. “Our transport is here.”
“Do you want to eat?”
He shook his head no.
“Drink?”
No again.
“Sleep?”
Again.
“Rylie, I am not a mind reader,” she ran her hand through his hair. It was pleasantly soft, as always. “You need to tell me what you want.”
He wasn’t crying, tonight, which was honestly a relief. She’d had too much of a frustrating day to trust herself not to scream at him if she couldn’t get him to stop, and then she would feel like the worst person in the world. Because it was 2 am and her mind was too tired to pretend, too tired for reason, and because it was Rylie, and she wasn’t a monster. Anyone would feel bad if they yelled at a someone that vulnerable for crying. Unfortunately, she was stuck in this instead. Trying to figure out what he wanted because he wasn’t talking tonight but also kept tapping her on her arm whenever she tried to work.
She searched her mind.
“Do you want a story?”
No again.
She took it back. This was worse than crying. Crying she could solve, indecision was…
He pushed her onto the bed, to a laying position. She yelped, stared at him with wide eyes.
He held her, as he always did, his arms a comforting weight around her waist.
“You’re too worried,” he whispered, the first words he’d said the whole night. They vibrated through her ribcage. “I wanna help.”
She was glad he wouldn’t see what that did to her, the emotions clearly painted on her face.
He trusted her. He wanted to help her.
She tried to make herself believe, again, that this was ill advised. That it would sabotage the project.
She was steadier, had better concentration. Turned out, half the emails in her inbox resolved themselves, because people were stupid and inefficient and impulsive. She could afford to sleep longer, sometimes 5 hours when he came over. She could afford to spend a few hours only thinking of a single other human being that needed help with meeting his needs and then would look at her with that stare, that utterly and honestly impressed gaze. She could hardly bare it, most times. It was too much trust, and it scared her still. She wasn’t scared of the world trusting her, because she didn’t doubt that she was competent and driven enough to see the Hail Mary through. But this man, a single person, not a number, not a vague recollection, giving her that same magnitude of trust, was unsettling.
She had gotten attached, it was undeniable.
It was helping. Perhaps, it would be the thing that carried the project to its end.
The door to her office opened right as she shut off her microphone and listened to someone from JAXA drone on about safety protocols and flight preparations and everything else. She was listening, but not too attentively. The meeting was hardly about that, but he was a meticulous man, who liked wasting time making sure everyone was following protocol and well-versed in the rules.
Eva didn’t tear her eyes from the screen. She mentally ran down the agenda, estimated the amount of time each segment would take.
A plate landed on her desk, next to the computer. She looked up, for maybe 3 seconds, only long enough to see Grace nodding at her and the plate of sandwiches he’d brough in.
She frowned at the sight, looked at him for a second again.
He nodded towards her laptop, then put a finger to his lips and tilted his head.
She pointed at herself. He nodded. She nodded too, as faintly as she could.
“You mentioned you hardly had any time, today. I brought you something to eat in between this meeting and the next. I would have brought you soup, but it’s tomato again, so it’s disgusting. And these won’t get cold.”
She remained impassive, only let her eyes widen for a moment. It was nice of him. She was hungry.
She picked up a tissue, brought it to her face to pretend to blow her nose.
“Don’t you have work, Grace?”
He smiled. She didn’t need to look at him to know.
“You could just say ‘thank you’.”
She didn’t respond. He didn’t wait for her to, only lingered for maybe 2 additional seconds before he left, letting the door shut behind him with a click.
She had never seen him as panicked as then, when she was kneeling in front of him, forcing him to regulate his breath. God, somebody had tried to kill him. She hadn’t even considered that option.
She was both angry and laser focused on him. It had taken only a few minutes for her to decide she wouldn’t leave him with this. He was important, to her. He was important to the mission.
“It is scary. But I can guarantee you it will be taken care of, manekke. Nobody will hurt you.”
She would take care of it. Starting with whoever was incompetent enough to let this happen. This was not the thing she needed to deal with on top of everything else.
“Promise?”
Her breath caught in her throat. She hadn’t anticipated that.
She didn’t intend to hurt him. If it went her way, they would easily part ways after the launch, since she doubted she could keep him there then even if she wanted to. They would both move on from the need for each other, and perhaps she would miss him, but not too terribly. Like you miss a distant cousin, only sometimes when a fleeting memory arises.
He was her tertiary option. But she’d made sure Shapiro and DuBois had been separate every time they were out of her or Grace’s reach. She couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t come to sending him, because that would mean she was becoming foolish.
She could hope, though.
“I promise.”
Rylie was still crying. It hurt more than usual, because it wasn’t the typical tears of his emotions getting too much for him or of frustration. She didn’t doubt that, even if his mind didn’t pick this way of dealing with things, he would have cried, nevertheless. He cried a lot, at a myriad of different things. A threat to his life like that… she could understand his outburst.
She needed to get his mind off of it, let him calm down and then come back to full adult capabilities to process it. She also needed to get 10 other things done, because it was the day and she hadn’t anticipated that she would have to care for him.
It still came easily, as breathing. It was some way, some safe, agreed upon way, that had set, though mostly unspoken boundaries, for her to be affectionate with her friend. Because he was her friend. She liked him, not only when he was her Rylie but also when he was Dr. Grace; she cared about him when he came to her to give her the week’s report and when he went with her to more and more meetings to run interference between scientists and her, and she cared about him when he smiled so she could brush his teeth and when he rested his head on her shoulder as she typed another email.
She hadn’t had any friend like that in a long time. Ever, perhaps, or maybe sometime when she was still in school, but the memories of then were blurry at best.
She thought he may have thought the same of her. Even when he was pretending to hate her, even when he had to be dragged to a meeting tooth and nail.
She used to think he didn’t like her. She wasn’t so sure of that, anymore.
Eva Stratt cursed herself for having hope.
When the explosion happened, the first thing she did was check on Grace. He was okay. The relief did not last long.
Eva wasn’t sentimental. She didn’t cry over people lost long ago, rarely thought about the family members or a beloved pet that she would never see again. That came with time, though.
She pushed her grief away, barely gave it time to register. Shapiro and DuBois. Secondary and primary science specialists. They were only that to her, nothing more, not people she’d seen almost every day, not humans with voices she could understand, not anyone that she had an opinion on. There wasn’t any time for thinking of them like that.
Save humanity. Damn the rest.
It was still hard. She’d dealt with harder.
Grace didn’t bat an eye when she slapped his panic out of him. Or rather, he looked at her with that analytical, distinctly ‘scientist’ stare of his for a few moments, something she’d noticed him doing more often in the past few months; then, he nodded, like he was agreeing to something.
He did what she told him, disputed her slightly as he always did, but relented in the end. It was predictable. It was good, because she could recentre; she could find her next objective.
Grace was looking up alternative science specialists. Only a few days until launch, and they had nobody to put on that ship.
Except.
Except she had her choice.
She didn’t want to let him in. She didn’t know how she was going to do it. She knew she was asking the impossible of him. If it were her, she would have gotten on that ship, no questions asked. But Grace wasn’t her, and she liked that, even when it annoyed her. She liked him as he was.
But she needed him to do this.
He’d brought her tea, spoke to her in an approximation of her own words; she felt like she was looking back on the first time they did this through warped, stained glass.
She couldn’t make herself drink the tea. She had to shut it all out or she would start to cry. There was no doubt in her mind about what needed to be done. Not for a second did she consider a different option. She wouldn’t compromise the mission; she would save humanity.
Save humanity. Damn the rest.
He was too good at it.
“You’re making a good choice,” he said to her, hushed like she always spoke to him in the dark.
How had he known? How could he tell that she had already decided?
“What choice?”
“I don’t know,” he adjusted his position, leaned the book on his legs. “I respect you too much and don’t know you enough, to think I know what you’re going to do. But it will be the right thing.”
He didn’t know.
She bit her lower lip, began tearing off the skin like she hadn’t done since university.
She wished God existed, in that moment. She wished it, so she could blame Him for this. There was no God; it was only her, and the predetermined outcome of everything. She wasn’t even playing God. She was looking in the mirror and telling herself that she had to give up the only thing that had kept her tethered, the past few months.
Damn the rest. Damn him. Damn me.
“Good and right aren’t the same thing.”
“I know. I don’t know if all your choices have been good. I spent a lot of time wanting to tell you they were horrible; I’m not so sure now. I think most of them were both. Good and right.”
His hand was over hers. He was so sure of his words, still trusting her. Still there, like a broken record, one that she would never throw out even after the scratches of age made the music illegible.
She let herself entertain the notion that he would understand. Maybe he would. Maybe if she was calm enough, reasonable enough, he would say yes. She would let him think about it, of course.
She almost suggested it right then. But her eyes traced the profile of his face, those same features she could map out in her mind. The same mouth that smiled at her, the same curved, angled nose, the same eyes, that same trust.
He would never say yes. She knew that. She knew what she would have to do.
But maybe she could enjoy this last hurrah with him. Something good to remember.
“You’re so good,” he said, smiling.
She couldn’t do this.
Eva could count on one hand the number of times she cried in her adult life. She wasn’t emotional. She was too distant for most, too logical and dry. She’d had more than one person confuse her with a German, based only on the efficiency stereotype.
She didn’t want to let Rylie go. She didn’t want to let Grace go. He was her friend.
She loved him.
He wasn’t hers to keep.
Save humanity. Damn everything else. Even if it hurts.
She held him as close as she could, tried to tell him everything but buried it in his shoulder. He didn’t deserve the pain of knowing. This was her burden. It was a choice she was going to make no matter what.
No matter what.
Station one: Jesus condemned to death.
“The decision’s been made.”
She was perfectly steady, confident. She let herself pretend she was speaking to Grace as though she only knew him as much as she did when she first met him. When her opinion of him was limited to maybe three words. It did not work well, but it did enough.
She didn’t dare tear her eyes away from him. She hoped, for once, that he could read it from her face. The hope; the plea that he would say yes. That he would see there was nothing else any of them could do.
Some bitter part of her shone through there, too. A bit of her heart that wanted revenge for the pain; she wanted to tell him, if he did not agree, that he was a coward. That Earth needed him too much and he was meant to answer that call.
He started to argue. She’d expected it. It still prickled annoyance in her. It still made her resigned. It still hurt.
“I just mean…come on! There has to be someone else!” she didn’t like that expression on him. Something like a cornered animal. He had to know there was nobody else, she’d spent too long with him to not see hints of that resigned assurance in the twist of his lips, the shaking of his hands. But he was arguing, in spite of that.
“You know how the ship works,” Eva continued. She was trying to catch his eyes. He wouldn’t let her. “You know the science behind Astrophage. You know how to use an EVA suit and all the specialized gear. You’ve been present for every major scientific or strategic discussion we’ve had about the ship and its mission—I made sure of it. You have the genes we need, so I made damn sure you had the skills we need. God knows I didn’t want it to come to this, but here we are. You’ve been the tertiary science specialist all along.”
I’m sorry. I can’t risk the Earth for you.
Station two: Jesus carries the cross on his shoulders.
“But I… I don’t want to die…” I don’t want you to die.
“Nobody does.”
He still had protests. She could hear them, even if they died on his tongue, even if he shut his mouth and stared at her, at Yáo, at Ilyukhina, disbelieving. She was worried, for a moment, that he would begin to laugh. He was close to crying, but laughter would have been worse.
He opened his mouth again. Closed it.
“It must be your decision,” said Yáo. Eva nodded like she agreed.
She knew what she would do if he said no. It would be unforgivable by moral standards. It would be the only correct choice.
She hated, often, that she was able to see that. That she didn’t let her judgment be clouded by feelings, by her own desires. It had to be so easy, to abandon everything, to leave the world to rot because you loved somebody.
Or perhaps it was simply this: Eva Stratt loved the world. Loved it more than anything else. Loved it more than her closest friend.
“Can I think about it?” tears began to fall down his face. She stopped the automatic urge to wipe them off.
“Yes,” Eva said. “But not for very long. If you say no, we have to get Cáceres here in a hurry. I want your answer by five pm tonight.”
If you say no, I have to hurt you in a way I hoped would never come to pass.
Station three: Jesus collapses for the first time.
He stood up, shaking like she had not seen him in a while. It was her fault. She could not do anything about it. He laughed, quietly, wiped the tears from his eyes with his sleeve. His eyes met hers over the rim of his glasses, which hung off his mess of a face, barely holding onto his ear.
She saw that he understood. She saw that it hurt him.
She was bad at reading people. She found that if she was stern and direct enough, they would end up explaining themselves to her. She didn’t have the gift of looking at a person and having their thoughts presented to her on a platter.
She’d spent so long learning the face of Ryland Grace; she studied every crease of his skin, every muscle twitch, especially when he fell asleep and she was still in the space between wakefulness and dream. She did it because she cared. He was perhaps the only person she could read with not too much effort.
He turned away after too long a moment. His steps were steady, at least.
He tripped over himself, almost collapsed to the ground. Dr. Lokken caught him, let her hand linger on his arm for a few seconds too long. Like she also knew he was a dead man walking; like she was trying to get the best of her one-sided affection for him, while she still had the time.
Station four: Jesus meets his mother.
“I can’t do it,” he shook his head. He smacked his lips. “I can’t do it.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes, now. She turned to look down, so that her face would at least settle into a single emotion, not a twist and turn of confused logic and heart and mind.
“I see.”
Eva was angry. She tried to focus on that feeling, on the utter dismay of not only the situation being unfair, of the Earth asking the most of her again¸ after she’d already given it her health, her relationships, her time; but also the anger towards Grace. He was a coward. This was the only way, he knew it. How could he know that, how could he be so intelligent and still sit there and pretend like he was in any place to say “no”.
It was unfair to him. She had no doubts about that. The entire situation was unfair and if she focused on her simmering rage, then she would be able to get through this without once breaking.
She would send him to die and make him believe she had no regrets. At least then, he would be able to hate her in peace.
“You’ll find a solution.”
“You are my solution.”
They both knew that. She didn’t know how many times she’d have to run that thought through her head. They were both on the same page, and yet on the opposite sides of the battlefield.
“My place is in the classroom! With the… children; I need to teach, I’m… they need me here. They’re asking me to come back. I can’t—I can’t abandon them.”
Station five: Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry his cross.
She focused on the way that made her feel. It was impractical, she was angry, this was unfair. No positive emotion, nothing personal, no regret. She would convince him this did not hurt her. It would be better for the both of them.
She could always make him forget, should push come to shove.
“Stop pretending this is about your students.” She was grimacing so hard. It hurt her face, somewhat. She was never this… wilfully angry, before. “Dr. Grace. You’re a coward and you’re full of shit.”
The statement was true. Harsh, but true.
I still love you, even if you’re not brave.
She forced her face to clear. Steady. Calm, Eva, there would be time to mourn. Later. When the world was safe.
She started telling him about the losses, then backed out. He knew about them, too. He knew everything. Yet here she was, trying to make him say yes… not even, not anymore. She was trying to make him understand.
He wouldn’t understand. That, at least, she couldn’t blame him for. She didn’t think she would understand, if somebody were to do it to her.
“I know you, Dr. Grace,” she started. She made sure the words would burn. “You’ve always been a coward. I hear what people whisper around here, I’ve read about you, I know you. You’ve run from everything in your life. You abandoned a promising scientific career because people didn’t like a paper you wrote. You avoid risk like the plague. You hide behind a smoke glass of fake reasons, behind stupid jokes that don’t land, and pretend that you’re not utterly alone because you’re too afraid to—”
It got away from her. She didn’t mean it all, at least not like she made it sound. There wasn’t time to take any of it back.
“I have you!”
She couldn’t bear that stare. She couldn’t bear that it was trying to make her change her mind.
“No, you don’t.”
She wasn’t his to have. He wasn’t hers to love.
She went on.
“If you would truly care about the children, or anyone else for that matter, you would get on that ship.”
Station six: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.
He couldn’t stop crying. He tried to wipe his eyes conspicuously, pretending to adjust his glasses. She saw through him, didn’t comment on it.
She knew he cared. He simply didn’t care like she did, she supposed. Didn’t care enough. He was selfish, in that way many people were; in the equation of my life vs the universe they chose themselves.
Was that wrong? To her, it wasn’t logical. But she understood survival instinct and primal drive; she understood that she may have been the outlier. That her self-preservation instinct was different from that of the world at large.
She would have done anything to at least put a hand on his shoulder, right then, to tell him it was a hard choice and that she knew it weighed on him, but that they both had to make it.
She didn’t dare move closer towards him.
Perhaps if they had more time, they wouldn’t be here. If he had time to think about it, real time, not 4 hours that felt like nothing at all, if she had been brave enough to ask him earlier, to tell him in private, to let him scream at her before he had to say yes, it would have been different.
“You just can’t talk me into it.”
She didn’t think she could. It was too final, to hear it said.
He stood up
“I am trying…” she swallowed. She got to her feet. “To make you understand… what I’m about to do.”
Station seven: Jesus collapses for the second time.
He fell back into his chair.
She nodded. She waved the medic inside.
This is the only way.
She was starting to cry. She couldn’t hold it back any longer.
This was her right choice. Not a good choice, a terrible, awful choice. But the right one.
“Please stay calm,” she pleaded. If only she could hold his hand, maybe give them both the last thing to have between each other that wasn’t tainted by resentment.
He was looking around like a startled animal.
Station eight: Jesus comforts the women of Jerusalem.
Her hand was on his.
“Mission plan will state that we induced your coma early to maximise your safety, you will be remembered as a hero.”
He tore his hand out as though she had burnt him.
“Rylie—” she regretted it immediately. It came out of her unfiltered, raw, unintended.
He laughed. It burned.
“No! No! Don’t you dare call me that!”
That rage, that ferocity—at least they could hate each other. At least he could resent her.
A large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children.”
She would not cry for him now. She would cry for herself later. She was giving him a gift, and maybe if she thought of that enough, it would become true.
He jumped on the table, made a commotion.
Station nine: Jesus collapses for the third time.
He almost fell off the table.
Station ten: Jesus is stripped of his clothes.
“I know this may seem like…” she was speaking so loud it began to hurt, pleading, a sudden open book. “Ryland, Grace, please, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
He was going to run away. She motioned for the soldier, motioned for the medic. She could feel herself get too close to crying.
“This isn’t me betraying you. I am believing in you!”
He broke the window. He began to run.
The soldier was behind him in seconds. The medic waited, waited as Eva pulled out her phone.
“He’s running.”
She was his executioner. She had accepted that job.
No, I haven’t. I care about him. Fuck you, universe.
Station eleven: Jesus is nailed to the cross.
She came just as they had pressed him to the ground. He knew she could hear him.
“You’re murdering me!”
She was. And she was doing it with full awareness, with her hands wet with his blood. She was doing it because it was the right thing to do.
He couldn’t see her face. She let a tear slide down her cheek.
It wasn’t fair.
“I’ll sabotage the mission! I’ll ruin everything!”
She didn’t believe he would. She couldn’t risk it; and the thought that he would remember her, that he would have to bear the weight of her betrayal…
Maybe she was a coward too. She preferred it that he didn’t remember at all, or that he remembered long after he completed the mission.
Station twelve: Jesus dies on the cross.
“The French have a solution for that,” she said. She waved her hand, a go-ahead for the medic. He methodically inserted the needle, unshaken by Grace’s wail of anguish. “Retrograde amnesia. You won’t remember this.”
You won’t remember me.
That’s okay. I’ll remember for the both of us.
He was still struggling, but slower and slower, his movements growing sluggish.
“You’ll do great.”
She waited until his eyes slipped shut and he stilled.
Station thirteen: Jesus is pulled off the cross.
She nudged the guard on top of him away. Conscious of the eyes on her, on the two of them, she slowly kneeled on the grass, the wet mud staining her pants.
He almost looked like he was peacefully asleep. If she ignored the dirt, the tear tracks, the bruise that was blooming on his face, she could imagine they were in her bed and he’d fallen asleep in her lap again.
She lifted his shoulders. One of the men approached to help, but she held up her hand.
She manoeuvred his upper body to lay on her thighs. She carded a hand through his hair, then another time. She wiped the tears off his cheeks, no matter that her own were falling on his face.
She wanted to hold him closer. She didn’t want to let this happen.
She got up. She cleared her throat.
“Take him to the medical building. The drug will be administered in the coma, close to its end; tell Lamai it’s a necessary precaution of some sort, against disease, because he’ll be in a coma longer than the other two.
She will want to forget this later.
You’re murdering me.
She’ll make herself remember every detail.
Station fourteen: Jesus is laid in the tomb.