Chapter Text
Solnyshko, what have you done? Solnyshko, why are you crying? Who made you cry like this? Where are you going? Do not leave me alone here. Please don’t leave me alone here. Please don’t leave me…
He knows immediately that his name is Ilya Rozanov, but that’s the only thing he knows, and he only knows it because the fucking robot thing hanging from the ceiling announces that he's awake, using his full name.
It calls him “Doctor Ilya Rozanov”, so he supposes he also knows that he’s a doctor. There is nothing else in his memories. He’s a black hole of information, strapped to a strange bed, with a threatening-looking robot floating over him, in a room with lights that are far too bright. His heart races, and there’s something he knows he has to do, something he knows he has to say to make things right, but it’s like when he’s tired and overwhelmed and trying to search for a word in English that he doesn’t often use. Like it’s there, behind layers of fog, and he just can’t reach it. The urgency fades, and his heart slows down. He thinks the robot has possibly injected him with something to make him more calm, and he wonders if he’ll fall asleep again, but he doesn’t. He drifts there, alone.
He doesn’t have to wait in isolation for long. He’s staring up at the robot hanging from the ceiling, following its structure with his eyes, trying to work out its exact number of robot arms, which is difficult because it keeps whirling them around, various tools doing various incomprehensible things, scanning over his body and his brain, looking oddly anxious or fussy in its movements. He has barely looked at the rest of the room, and certainly hasn’t done anything to try and get free from his restraints, and then a door whooshes open, somewhere behind his head, and he cranes his neck to look.
He’s disappointed when he sees who’s standing there. He’s not sure why, or how he can be disappointed when he doesn’t even know who he is, and when he can’t pull a single memory of a single other person from his empty brain, but he recognizes the emotion as disappointment, like he’d wanted it to be someone else.
The intruder is fairly handsome, with dark hair and dark stubble and a faintly exhausted look to him, but he is not the one Ilya was hoping to see.
“Welcome back, Rozanov,” the man says, and even his voice is tired. “Do you know who I am?”
Ilya is relieved that he's been asked such an easy question.
“No,” he admits. The man laughs a little.
“Small mercies for me, I guess,” he mutters. “Try not to be too worried; we all knew this was a risk.” He speaks into some kind of communication device in his hand. “Another one with amnesia.”
The reply comes with a crackle of static.
“Who?” asks a voice, gentle and warm. Ilya's ears perk up to hear it, like a dutiful dog. His chest hurts. His fingers twitch where they’re restrained at his sides.
“Your boy Rozanov,” is the answer. The voice on the communicator sighs.
“He's not my boy,” it says bleakly.
Ilya is put through multiple indignities at the hands of the robot arms to make sure it’s only his head that has failed him, and then the intruder returns to release him from his tiny prison cell of a room.
“All clear on the medical front,” he says when he enters, like he'd been watching from somewhere nearby. He says everything very blandly; he has a terrible bedside manner. “The amnesia is an unfortunate side effect of being kept in a medically induced coma for the last sixteen months, the length of our trip so far. We've got two other crew members showing the same symptoms. The good news is that it should resolve within the next few days. The bad news is that you're eventually going to remember what a pain in everyone's ass you are.”
He sticks out his hand to shake, very American, flashing a bright smile.
“Hunter,” he says. “Scott.”
Ilya reluctantly shakes his hand.
“Ilya Rozanov, apparently,” he answers, which makes Hunter laugh.
Ilya lets Hunter talk at him as they move through the spaceship. Because it is a spaceship. That much is obvious from literally everything about it. Ilya recognizes the various parts, most of the equipment, the shape of the modules through which they pass, like he once must have known every inch of this place, but he doesn't have any idea how. It's a large ship, like something out of science fiction, although of course he doesn't know how he knows that, either, or what a typical realistic spaceship looks like, with its cramped quarters, but he somehow does know these things.
“We trained for a long time?” he asks.
“Almost two and a half years for this mission,” Hunter replies. “While the ship was being built. And you did more, before that, for the first mission; I only came on for the second. Not counting your little nap, you’ve been working on this project for, god, maybe seven years?”
“I went on another mission?” Apparently Ilya is a seasoned cosmonaut. Good for him.
“No, no. You missed out on selection for that one,” Hunter says. He sounds like he’s only pretending to be sympathetic. Like it secretly thrills him very much that Ilya wasn't chosen. This makes Ilya laugh, and he decides that he likes this Hunter guy.
“They were stupid, then,” he says. Hunter's expression goes a little sour.
“Well, they never made it back, so it's probably lucky for you that you didn't,” he says.
Ilya is brought into a room that looks surprisingly lived-in and homey, for a room on a spaceship. There is a sort of kitchenette along one wall, and in the center is a round table with some chairs, and another table along the back wall with a booth-style seat that has a fluffy blanket tossed on it, and a book on top of that, like someone had been using it as a reading nook before this meeting started.
There are a bunch of other people in the room already. He doesn’t recognize any of them. A few are standing against the walls, but two are seated at the round table, and Hunter gestures for Ilya to sit, too. Ilya does, slouching into his seat and feeling a bit like a sulky teenager. One of the people already seated is a pretty woman with big eyes and brassy hair pulled into a tight bun. She offers him a bewildered smile. The other person at the table is a scowlingly handsome man towards whom Ilya feels a flare of dislike. Apparently, some things have stayed with him, even through the memory loss. That’s probably a good sign.
Standing near the back of the room, his arms folded across his chest, one hip popped in a way so casual it might look fake, except it reads natural on him, is a very tall man with dark hair and dark stubble. Considering his blue coverall is already grease-stained, Ilya is guessing that he's one of the people who keeps the ship running. Another man, leaning back against the kitchenette, looks like he’s about to start giving them a speech. He’s an older, upright gentleman who looks like he left his ability to smile back on Earth. Ilya immediately pinpoints him as the commander. There's an older woman standing beside him who is looking between everyone with an assessing gaze. Some kind of medical personnel, maybe? There's a bland-looking man with an uneasy smile near the breakfast nook who could be literally anyone. Ilya doesn't have any guesses as to what he does.
One of the doors wooshes open, and the man who walks in then is so beautiful that Ilya can feel himself sitting up straighter. He's wearing a dark blue flight suit, unzipped to the waist so that the pristine white t-shirt underneath is visible. He has dark hair and a spray of freckles across his cheeks and beautiful brown eyes that are torturing Ilya by refusing to meet his. The smile on his face is flat, awkward, like he’s surprised to find everyone waiting. Ilya hears a sharp intake of breath from the woman next to him.
“Shane,” she sighs, like the name has suddenly returned to her, and the beautiful man smiles at her, and, great, you might as well stomp Ilya's heart into the dirt. How come she gets to remember him and Ilya doesn't?
“Hey, Rose,” says the beautiful man. Shane. He doesn't look at Ilya once. Ilya can’t make himself look away.
“Now that we're all here,” the commanding man drawls. “We will explain the mission to the three of you unlucky enough to experience the worst of the side effects. I know you must have questions, and I will answer them for you, but please wait until the end. No interruptions.” He looks at Ilya in particular when he says that. Ilya is unsurprised to be shown more evidence that he is, apparently, a bit of an asshole. Maybe that’s why Shane won’t look at him.
The commanding man introduces himself as Commander Theriault, and he gets down to explaining the purpose of the mission with a sense of efficiency that impresses Ilya as much as it annoys him.
Apparently, the sun is dying.
Ilya understands why Theriault felt the need to tell him not to interrupt, because Ilya's first instincts are to say, uh, hey, what the fuck? The pretty woman—Rose, apparently—furrows her brow and looks around the table. When he meets her eyes, she mouths what the fuck? at him. Unfortunately, he thinks he must like her too. Why is he so reluctant to like these people? Is he that much of a dick? Maybe his memories should stay gone so he can become a nicer person.
The sun is dying, due to something that Theriault doesn’t even bother trying to explain. Either he figures they will all remember eventually, or he hasn’t bothered to understand the science of it, himself, and either way, Ilya understands him. The important bit is that the sun will die if they don’t intervene. Things are already getting cold on Earth, and they will continue to get worse, because even if the sun is only dimming a tiny bit over hundreds of years, a few degrees is enough to guarantee humanity’s extinction, and so they have no choice but to try and fix it.
“Humanity’s first attempt at this, a few years back, was a similar mission. We lost contact with The Voyageur at the expected point, as they were passing through Mercury’s orbit, but the payload was never delivered, and we have had no contact with them since. That was supposed to be our last shot. Our Hail Mary. As you can imagine, what we’re doing now is a little more desperate than that.”
He looks at Shane, then, who looks uncomfortable with the attention, leaning back against the wall, fiddling with the zipper of his flight suit before he lifts his hands away with visible effort and shoves them into his pockets to hide them. Ilya needs him, actually.
“If we fail, the planet dies,” Shane says, in the general direction of the round table with its three amnesiacs. “There's not going to be a third chance.”
“So, you know. No pressure,” the bland man agrees, from over by the reading nook.
“What's the mission, exactly?” Rose asks. “Why are we here?”
Theriault launches into an explanation, looking relieved to be allowed to keep talking. The man apparently loves a monologue. Ilya is surprised to find that he can keep up. It's like rereading a book he hasn't touched in many years. He would not have said that he remembered any of it, but as the commander speaks, the details come back to him.
They are in a state-of-the-art ship—this one called Chiron, because it was cobbled together, centaur-like, from the old Voyageur blueprints and newer designs meant to compensate for every potential failure of the Voyageur, since they apparently don’t know what actually caused the failure of the first mission. It is designed to keep them alive and relatively comfortable for three-ish years, and to get them closer to the sun than anyone has ever been. The ship itself is much larger than the original Voyageur, and its entire structure is tucked behind an enormous array of solar shields that need to be gently tweaked to face the sun every time they change positions, which means Pike—the bland man—has to do a lot of math and spends most of his time in the cockpit with Shane, who is apparently the pilot.
Of course the hottest man on this mission is a pilot. Fuck. He's so fucking cool. Ilya gives him what he hopes is an appraising once-over. Shane notices him looking, and his expression shutters, and his jaw clenches, and his eyes dart away.
Great. Another person on this ship who can’t stand him.
“Everyone on this ship has been chosen for one primary asset they bring to the mission, as well as one backup specialty, due to the small size of our crew,” Theriault says, in this droning, awful voice that would put Ilya to sleep if this wasn’t so important. He gestures to the older woman beside him. “Galina and Hunter are our medical team. Galina specializes in keeping your brain in check, while Hunter is focused on the rest of the body, but there’s a lot of crossover between the two of them. Landry, you are our primary botanist, which has crossover with nutrition, so you’ll be working a lot with Hunter. We have plenty of rations to make it there, but you're the one who's in charge of growing enough food to get us home and making sure our oxygen levels keep steady.”
“Oh cool, definitely no pressure for me, then,” Rose says with an easy smile.
“Marleau over there knows the ship better than anyone on Earth.” The tall man with the greasy coverall raises one grease-covered hand in greeting, laughing at Shane's wrinkled-nose expression. “He’s also our auxiliary botanist, so he’s your new best friend, Landry. He’s also one of our backup pilots.”
“I'm a man of many talents,” Marleau agrees. He winks at Ilya, and Ilya tries not to feel too gratified that he has at least one friend here.
“Kent.” The handsome, unlikeable man sitting beside Ilya looks up, ready. “When we get closer to the sun, you will be piloting the detached vessel that will make the final approach. You are also Rozanov's backup.”
“And what do I do?” Ilya asks, unable to help himself. He notices the way Shane looks down at the ground when he speaks, squeezing his eyes shut, annoyed.
“You are the man who invented the bomb that's going to save the world,” Theriault sighs. “And believe me, we are all very annoyed about that.”
Light laughter from everyone who doesn't have amnesia, except for Shane. Shane is still looking at the ground. His shoulders are tense. Ilya feels very unfairly judged.
“Obviously, it's not ideal that both of our bomb experts got hit with the amnesia side effect,” Theriault says. “But we have full confidence that you will retrieve your memories over the coming days, which is why we woke you now: two weeks before we reach Mercury. We still aren't sure what took out the Voyageur team, so we want to have everyone ready by the time we get to their last confirmed location.”
“And if we can't remember?” Kent asks. It's a valid question. Ilya is a little worried about that, too.
“That's where Hollander comes in,” Theriault says, gesturing to Shane, who is no longer staring at the floor, but is now staring at Theriault like an eager student taking notes for a test later. “Hollander is cleared to do all of our jobs. If we could have cloned him in a lab, we would have done so.” More laughter. “Our job is to make sure we all stay alive so he doesn't have to try and save the world himself, all right?” Vague agreement from everyone but Ilya, who is now just spinning in his chair and staring openly at Shane, irritated by Shane's refusal to look back.
Ilya, Rose, and Kent are each given handy, overwritten mission information packets in little three-ring binders. Rose gets shown to her room by Shane, of course, but Ilya is stuck with Galina, who is nice enough, but not nearly as beautiful. She shows him to his tiny room, indistinguishable from any others, except that his personal effects are stored in a flat case under the narrow bunk. He shifts through his things, interested to see if there are any clues about the person he’s supposed to be. His items are very neatly packed, every clothing item folded with military precision, so apparently he's a neat person. That’s nice to know. There's a necklace in a baggie on top of everything else, a gold orthodox cross on a chain. He slips it over his head, his heart thudding loudly in his chest as he does so. He doesn't remember it yet, but he supposes it was probably important, and he feels better once it's on his chest. He tucks it under his shirt, against his skin, and it feels odd there, off-balanced, like the weight is not quite right. He moves it out over his t-shirt instead; maybe that’s how he wore it.
He has some pictures that he shifts through without much interest. He’s hoping they’ll trigger something, but they don’t. A grave-looking older man, some kind of professional headshot, inspires no warmth. There is a softer picture of a blonde woman and a child, the picture faded and older; he assumes the child is himself, and that the woman is his mother, and he smiles at it. There’s a selfie of himself and a beautiful woman with warm brown skin and a riot of pretty curls, kissing him on the cheek. A girlfriend, maybe? He smiles at her, too. He’s surprised that there are only three pictures. Are some missing? He will keep a look out for more. Maybe some slipped out into his clothing. He tucks them beneath his pillow for later.
He has a few books in Russian, beaten-up old paperbacks of classics. Maybe he should start reading them before his memories come back. He clearly chose to bring along some old favorites, and now he has a chance to read them for the first time all over again.
Tucked between the cover and the first page of one of the books is a scrap of paper, folded in half, sticking out like a bookmark. Ilya opens it, but it only says I'm so sorry, Ilya, in shaky handwriting. Beneath it, erased poorly, are the words forgive me, as if the note writer had believed that Ilya would not, and had changed the message accordingly. Ilya frowns at it, but can't remember why it's there, why he would have put it in his book, and so he puts it back in place.
None of these personal effects trigger any new memories. It feels like going through someone else’s things, a stranger’s things, and trying to come up with the shape of the person implied by their existence. He supposes he’ll just have to wait a little longer. He lies on the bed, pleased that it's actually comfortable, and then reads his information packet cover to cover.
The little binder answers most of the questions he had. Most of the crew was put into induced comas because it was decided that the risks of mental health deterioration and the pressure of staying ready for the mission would be too great to risk, especially given that they still don't know what happened to the Voyageur team, who had to stay awake for all those months in space, apparently. Chiron has been in space for sixteen months, and it will be a little more than sixteen months before they get home. Reading that length of time makes Ilya feel panicked for some reason, like there is something on Earth he left behind. Like he’s afraid he left the stove on in his apartment, or something. It’s just a sore spot that sticks at him. Maybe he’s missing his girlfriend.
Apparently Shane, Marleau, Theriault, and Hunter were all awake the entire time. Ilya doesn't like the annoyed flare of something petty that flashes through him at that. What, they were mentally healthy enough to stay awake, but not Ilya? What's wrong with Ilya? Maybe they put Ilya to sleep like a sick dog because Ilya is just so annoying they couldn't deal with him. He has gotten the impression that he’s not very well liked.
He reads through the descriptions of his crew members and all of their duties. They’re all geniuses with doctorates, of course, except for Theriault, who was originally a fighter pilot, and Shane, whose biography surprisingly doesn’t include mention of any modeling contracts.
Everyone on the ship has multiple duties except for Ilya. Ilya is the bomb guy. His only job is Bomb. Theriault said that Ilya invented it. He tries to remember it, can't, but when he flips to the section of his packet with the bomb information, he knows everything written there. Like uncovering something that has been barely hidden beneath sand. It’s frustrating, like he has failed himself and this entire mission by getting something as stupid as amnesia.
He refamiliarizes himself with the bomb information. It's a complicated device, and it took a lot of trial and error to figure it out, and he knows it must have taken a long time to build it, especially given they would have had to build most of it in space. He understands all of that even without having the exact steps in his brain, the memories of how he'd created it. He remembers…
Oh. He remembers.
Then
“Ilya Rozanov?”
Ilya looks up from his laptop, and there is a beautiful man standing in the door of his office, an awkward smile on his face that doesn't quite reach his eyes. He's pulling a hat off his head, dotted with little white snowflakes from the early afternoon flurries. He steps in without waiting for an invitation or confirmation, which seems rude, but Ilya has never been very concerned with politeness, so whatever. From the man's voice, the pronunciation of his name, Ilya can tell that the beautiful man isn't Russian, and so of course he answers in Russian, just to be a dick.
“Must be my birthday, if someone sent me such a beautiful present,” he says, trying to look casual, kicking his feet up on the desk and twirling his pen in the air. The beautiful man’s smile turns into an embarrassed grimace.
“My Russian is not very good, but I understood that,” he says, and Ilya drops the pen, and he laughs at himself.
“Okay, fine. What do you want, Mr. Beautiful Man?” he asks, in English this time. His English is a bit rusty, since coming back to work in Moscow, but he would rather butcher English than listen to someone else butcher Russian, today.
“I'm, uh, Shane Hollander.” Mr. Beautiful Man waits, like he's expecting recognition. Ilya shrugs apologetically, though the name does sound familiar. Hollander strides across the room and sticks his hand out. Ilya tries to hide a smile as he consents to shaking it.
“Okay, hello,” he says. “Why are you here?”
“I'm the mission liaison with the Voyageur Committee?” Hollander says, like a question. He clears his throat, as if realizing how hesitant he sounds, and then suddenly he is all confidence, all business. Ilya admires it, almost, the way he so neatly packs his awkwardness away behind a mask. “I was hoping I could have a moment of your time to discuss the possibility of you developing a bomb for us.”
Ilya was prepared to turn this man down the second he heard Voyageur Committee. He knows about the Voyageur mission, of course. The whole world knows about it. He supposes it would be an honor to be involved in a thing that the whole world will be watching, in any capacity, but Ilya is not interested in working for the government—for any government, really. Not as some middling peon, anyway. He has worked hard to get to his position as young as he is. He is an important physicist, a man who commands respect in his field. He’s not the kind of person who wants to sit in a room and be yelled at by old men who are trying to save the world via committee. But this? This is a little promising.
“You want me to build a bomb?” he asks, considering. Hollander smiles a little more genuinely this time.
“I thought that might get your attention,” he says.
Now
Ilya comes back to his own body, and he flips through the bomb information again. Yes, he remembers Shane’s hand, Hollander's hand, in his. He remembers Hollander's smug amusement, inoffensive because Ilya has always loathed false politeness, and he was just glad that Hollander hadn’t been that. He remembers, too, the bomb. He remembers why he was approached, rather than some big American company with too much experience in such things. He remembers the careful chemistry of it, the way it started out so theoretical and so seemingly impossible but slowly morphed into something that seemed, actually, like it might work. Ilya had not, at first, enjoyed the idea that he was creating something that might one day be repurposed to hurt people, but his friend Svetlana had said…
He puts his binder down.
Svetlana.
“There is a way to receive messages, yes?” he asks Hunter, the first unlucky crew member he ran into after leaving his room and bumbling down the unfamiliar hallways with a confusing sense of almost physical memory, like he would be better able to walk the halls with his eyes closed than with his eyes open, like his body remembers what his brain does not.
“Yeah, you should have all of them saved up in the Earth Module,” Hunter says. Ilya hits him with an unimpressed, eyebrow-raised expression that hopefully reads as I don't know where fucking anything is, idiot.
Hunter feels guilty enough about the slipup that he leads Ilya to the Earth Module, which is apparently Galina's territory. That makes sense, Ilya supposes, considering it’s all about staying connected to the planet they left behind, which is probably a huge part of keeping everyone’s mental health at least fairly steady. Its main area has several off-shooting rooms. One is labeled Earth Room. A second is unlabeled. A third is labeled Comms (Crew), and it's to that room that Hunter directs him. The door is closed, with a little red light above it, which according to Hunter means someone is inside sending their own messages, so Ilya must wait in a little seat that has been placed in the hallway for that purpose. Ilya is glad when Hunter leaves without trying to make awkward conversation, and is glad that he brought his binder for something to do. The binder came with a pen clipped to the front pocket, and Ilya uses it to jot down notes about his first official memory, about Hollander in his office. He makes sure it reads professional by leaving all his opinions about Hollander’s attractiveness off the page, but he thinks his admiration probably comes through in the tone anyway.
Galina's office is apparently the source of the unmarked door, because she leaves the Earth Room and heads to open it, but not before stopping to smile at Ilya.
“Waiting to see my messages,” he says to her, hoping to head off any suggestion that he might want to step in and talk to her about how he’s feeling.
“You will need to schedule a talk with me soon,” she replies in Russian, and Ilya can't help but perk up. He hadn't heard any Russian traces in her voice when she delivered him to his new room, but her accent is perfect, and it’s such a relief.
“Oh thank god, a civilized person.”
Galina rolls her eyes at him, but she looks fond. So Marleau and Galina are his two friends, and maybe Rose likes him, too. It could be worse.
“Come in when you are done with your messages, okay? Knock first.”
“Of course I will knock first. Civilized, remember?”
She laughs again and disappears into her office. The door to the Comms room opens only a little while later, and of course it’s Hollander who steps out, looking unhappy, and looking even unhappier once he registers that Ilya is so close. For less than a second, before his expression smoothes over into a maddening, very professional blankness, he looks afraid, like he thinks Ilya will strike him. That feels fucking awful, after remembering their fairly friendly first meeting. Is their relationship now so terrible?
“I remembered something,” Ilya says, and Hollander goes still in the way a frightened rabbit goes still, eyes flicking up to meet Ilya’s for a second before they dart down to somewhere around Ilya’s cheek.
“All your memories will come back soon enough,” Hollander says.
“You aren’t curious what I remembered?”
“No,” Hollander replies. “I didn’t forget anything. I know what you’ll remember.”
He’s nothing like the man Ilya remembers from that one memory. Well, he was polite in the memory, too. Polite and very polished, like someone who was put out into the world because he had a friendly smile and a grasp of social niceties but wouldn’t get too wrapped up in them to get the job done. This feels more unglued, like he is clinging to politeness as a shield. Ilya supposes that however many years it has been since that memory have probably changed both of them, but still.
“I remembered meeting you for the first time,” Ilya says, pushing. “You were more polite, then.”
Hollander breathes out a laugh, but it’s shaky, tense.
“I really wasn’t,” he says. “Do you need help figuring out the message system?”
Ilya is tempted to say yes, just so Hollander will stick around a little longer, but he thinks it would be humiliating, and Hollander would probably be very condescending about it and would maybe continue to look insultingly terrified, so he shakes his head.
“The bomb stuff wasn’t hard to figure out. I think I can probably handle messages.”
Hollander does that breathy little reluctant laugh again, and he looks down at the ground, and it tightens something unfortunate in Ilya's stomach, because Ilya is predictable. Of course he thinks Hollander is sexy. Hollander is sexy. Of course Ilya wants to fuck him, at least a little bit. He probably wanted to fuck Hollander back on Earth, too. Maybe he made too obvious a pass once, and maybe Hollander is afraid he’ll do it again now that he doesn’t remember the initial rejection? It doesn’t sound right. Maybe they did fuck, and it was terrible. No, that doesn’t sound right either.
Hollander leaves with a single nod, still not meeting Ilya’s eyes, but he shoots a look back over his shoulder, raking his eyes over Ilya when he thinks Ilya isn’t looking. It would be stupid to read too much into it, but Ilya is sure he sees a hint of a flush on Hollander’s cheeks before he turns around and walks out, and he decides that reading too much into it might not be the worst thing.
Accessing his messages turns out to be as easy as he’d expected, which makes sense. He might not remember specific memories, but he remembers certain things, on some level. He remembers physics, remembers how to use a cellphone, remembers what a cellphone fucking is. It’s just everything personal that has been excised from his head. The messages are a piece of cake.
There are a number of video and text messages waiting for him, though not as many as he was hoping to see. Hollander probably is swimming in messages from loving parents, a loving girlfriend, a million and ten friends. Ilya’s are mostly from Svetlana. There’s one from someone named Alexei, near the very beginning, that he almost deletes without opening, out of some impulse. He stares at the name until he gets flashes of something. An older boy growing into an older man, the same sneering disinterest on his face. Alexei, he thinks. My brother. It’s just text, thank god. He doesn’t remember much, yet, but memories of his childhood are trickling in slowly, and there are very few good ones. Svetlana, on the other hand, has sent multiple videos, and his memories of her are warm. He knows now that she is the beautiful woman from that selfie. Not a girlfriend; she is more vital than that.
He opens Alexei’s, first, to get it over with.
You fucking traitor. You told me you wouldn’t go. You promised me you would stay here to take care of papa. Fuck you.
Ilya blinks in surprise at the message, reads it again. He feels affronted, like Alexei should have considered, more than a year ago, when he sent the message, that Ilya would wake up and not remember him, or their father, before he sent such a rude fucking message.
But it also doesn’t feel like a surprise, and he thinks back to those pictures that were with his personal items: father, mother, Sveta. No Alexei anywhere. That’s probably for a reason. Those memories, too, that are coming back piecemeal, all feel haunted with something. Fear, desperation to prove something impossible, the bewildered hurt of not being loved by a person who should love you.
He tries to remember his father. He gets his mother, instead. Flashes of her: a beautiful smile, a ringing laugh, a gentle scolding that always, always had love behind it. The two of them out shopping together, his mother helplessly giggling because of how bundled up baby Ilya is against the cold. He remembers the necklace, suddenly. It was hers. He remembers losing her, finding her, grieving her, holding the necklace close the rest of his life, like a totem. He's glad that he put it on even before knowing its significance, so he can clutch it in his hand now, in a way that feels reflexive, familiar. He’s so happy with himself for having packed it right at the top of his things, out in front, knowing that he would want it immediately after waking. That was considerate of him.
Was that note tucked into his book from her? Forgive me, erased? He can’t remember it, yet.
He remembers more of Alexei as a child, too. Softer in his youth, or maybe just softer because their mother was still alive.
He puts his head in his hands and breathes for a few seconds, needing to recover from the blow. It’s not necessarily like being hit with the same grief that he remembers feeling as a child. It’s more like uncovering something that must have been waiting for him to catch up. Like his body remembered that grief even when his mind did not, and so it settles into its old, familiar places. He remembers his father, finally, cruel and cold and arrogant. Always assuming that he was smarter than Ilya, stronger than Ilya, more important than Ilya, even after Ilya got his degree young and then his doctorate young and then an invitation to build a bomb to save the fucking world, and all anyone could talk about was how young and brilliant and special he was. It was never good enough. Ilya was never good enough.
You promised me you would stay here to take care of papa.
The message seems even more cruel now that he remembers. Why would he have stayed? He's on a mission to save everyone in the world. What is Alexei doing that's so fucking important that he would have Ilya give that up? And why would Ilya have promised such a thing, anyway? Promised to tether himself to a home that didn’t want him? For two men who are apparently not worth remembering?
There are no messages from his father. There are no messages from anyone other than Alexei and Svetlana, and it aches a little, to realize how empty his life was, back on Earth. Maybe that's why he decided to come to space, even though he is apparently as well liked here as he was back home.
“My father is dead,” he tells Galina, grateful to say it in Russian. “I have messages from my friend back home, Svetlana.” He looks curiously at Galina, who nods.
“I've met her, actually. You'll remember in time. She came to the project base often to see you.”
“She's my best friend. Maybe my only friend. The only friend I can remember, anyway.”
“You have always been surrounded by people, when I've seen you.”
“But that's not the same as having friends, is it?”
Galina smiles.
“No,” she agrees, like she's proud that he put that together without having to be told. He feels an unfortunate flare of competitive spirit at that. Like he is succeeding at tricking Galina into believing he's self-aware. “But I think you would be surprised. Everyone here cares about you quite a lot.”
“Everyone?”
“Well, most of them,” Galina admits with a laugh. “Even the ones you might not expect. Give it time. Now, tell me about your father. Was Svetlana watching him for you?”
“No. I set him up in a very expensive care home, apparently. I have no idea how I was paying for it. I certainly don’t remember doing it. But Svetlana was getting updates from my brother, who told her when he died. He didn't even send me a message. Blamed me for coming here, I guess.”
“How do you feel about your father being dead?”
“I'm not sure. I remember he was not a kind man. Did I speak about him to you?”
“Yes, many times.”
“You were my therapist, then?”
“On Earth, even before you joined the mission officially, I offered my assistance to anyone on the project who wanted to talk. We were all under a lot of pressure, of course. You, more than most people, and it was helpful for you to have someone to talk to in your native language. You were very resistant to talking to me about some things. You preferred to keep a lot of your personal feelings close to the chest, but you spoke of your father a lot.”
“What did I say?”
“You had a very strong sense of duty, even if you were conflicted, because you understood that your efforts would never be reciprocated. You were worried, when we spoke, about how best to handle him. You thought it was your duty to stay behind and care for him, even though you knew the cost.”
“I wanted to stay behind?”
“At first, yes.”
“What changed my mind?”
“I don't know. You never told me.”
Ilya nods. That sounds like him, or at least the version of himself that he is slowly coming to understand. He doesn't think he likes talking about things with people. Svetlana’s messages implied as much, and it felt right, settling into his skin. He thinks he is definitely the sort of person who would choose to carry things closely, and who would probably value duty even when it didn't make sense.
“I probably realized it would be fucking stupid to put my duty to my father in front of the safety of the world,” he says. Galina hums thoughtfully.
“There were also some extenuating circumstances. Do you remember anything of the explosion before the launch?”
Ilya searches his memory, but can find nothing that even remotely feels like that. He shakes his head.
“Okay. We will speak more about it when you remember, but I think you'll find the answers soon enough. In the meantime, I am sorry about your father.”
Ilya smiles at her and stands to go.
“That makes one of us, I think,” he says.