Work Text:
The first time that Eva Stratt sees Ryland’s ghost, she is still one-hundred percent certain that he is alive.
It is the second day of the mission. The Hail Mary is still in radio contact. Life signs are being monitored, and there is nothing but paperwork for Eva to do. She is sitting at her desk, her head in her hands, and when she looks up, he is standing right there, hair tousled gold, glasses askew.
For a moment, she stops breathing. He’s here, he’s somehow escaped her men, fought his way out of her death sentence. Exuberant joy sneaks its way up her spine for just a moment before her mind takes over again, before fear settles in her throat like a stone.
If he’s here, then the planet—this precious, singular Earth—will be dead.
She opens her mouth. She’s not sure what she means to come out, but whatever it would’ve been, Grace beats her to the punch.
“I forgive you,” he says, simply. The edges of his sweater look seared by the warm afternoon sun. “You made the right call, and I forgive you.”
And then he blurs, and so does the bookshelf behind him and the rough carpeted floor, and the pages and pages of paper on her desk, because she knows what she did was unforgivable, and so this Ryland Grace standing before her cannot possibly be real. He must still be on the spaceship travelling away from all he has ever known, the one she put him on in her deepest moment of desperation, in her cruelest act of cold, cold logic. He must still be on his way to execution by her hand.
When she blinks, he is gone. She looks down at her papers and tries to smooth out the tearstains. Her heart is thundering in her chest.
<>
When Eva is six years old, she rescues a frog from the boys down the street. They are trying to drown it in a puddle, stupid as only boys and careless men can be, and small and quick as she is, she dodges between them, snatches up the creature, and runs.
“You poor thing,” she whispers, cradling the frog in her hands. She carries it all the way home, hiding it beneath the folds of her dress as she enters the kitchen, and then in the deepest part of her closet, in a box. Frogs like the dark, she knows, because they are noc-tur-nal. It’s a new word she learned in school.
Later, when her father starts to yell and her mother starts to cry, she crawls into her closet and makes friends with the frog. It is a little bit like her, she thinks, small and quite alone.
She keeps it secret for a week and then her grandmother finds out when she visits, tells her, Sometimes, the best thing to do for a friend is to let them leave.
But the frog is her only friend and Eva won’t let it go. So the frog dies in her closet, in a space that is too small and too cold and too lonely. No amount of CPR performed by her tiny fingers could save it.
<>
She thinks it’s a one-off thing, seeing him as a ghost, but he comes back on the day the Hail Mary reaches the sun’s termination shock. He puts a cold hand on her shoulder an hour before the press conference, when she’s in the dressing room adjusting her blazer. For a moment, she wonders if she should call her doctor.
“I’m nearly a hundred AU away from you now,” he says. “That’s a hundred times the distance from the Earth to the sun.”
“I know,” she snaps. She has been following the Hail Mary’s flight path, can trace it out in her head a thousand times over. She walks it in her dreams, her feet tripping over meteoroids and stardust. And when she’s awake, she is still the leader of the project, tying up loose ends and putting on a brave face. Grace had once asked her what she would do for the twenty years after launch; turns out it was the same damn thing as before.
“You should retire,” he suggests from his place in the mirror, “go somewhere, before they put you in jail for murder.”
And however many other charges, all for which she is guilty.
“And you should go back to your coma.”
The moment she realizes what she has said, her heart stutters, and her fingers pause on her sleeve. But he says nothing. He only frowns, his hair falling over his eyes, and disappears.
The room feels empty without his ghost.
<>
Six-year-old Eva buries the frog in her back garden. She puts a spring daisy in its shallow grave, and cries herself to sleep.
<>
They finally come for her on a hot summer day five years after the launch. She’s been expecting it, of course she has; the day that she took the job, she’d known she was signing up to be a sacrificial lamb. Whether or not one desired to be a martyr was never really a question to be considered until the choice was right in front of you.
She still doesn’t know what had compelled her to say yes.
They come with an army, even though it’s been years since she’s commanded one herself. Big burly guards. In the back of her mind, she remembers Carl, who she had made complicit in her greatest crime of all.
“Yeah, and he was my friend, too,” Ryland Grace says from within the pack. His knitted cardigan stands out against the black uniforms. “Like you were.”
Quietly, she holds out her wrists for the handcuffs. She’s being sent to what is, presumably, a life sentence. How fitting that Grace should be here to watch.
<>
He doesn’t visit her in jail. Instead, he shows up when she closes her eyes, when her tired heart escapes the walled confines of the little room they’ve put her in. He shows up in the library of her old university, surrounded by shelves of books, and in her first apartment, a shadow against the backlit dust. He shows up in her childhood bedroom, looks around, sits on her bed.
“So this is where a murderer grew up.” He shifts, pats her bedspread. The accusation makes her stomach turn, but she doesn’t try to deny it. It would be a lie, anyways, if she did.
“Not for long. I moved out when I graduated.” As she moves to sit beside him, her gaze falls to her closet door, slightly ajar. She remembers her grandmother, wants to say, Look at me, letting people leave. It doesn’t make a difference in the end.
This time, she doesn’t have a body to bury. This time, she only has a ghost.
“To pursue history,” he says. She shouldn’t be surprised he remembers. On one hand, he has always been detail-oriented. On the other, he is only a spectre, a punishment borne of her own mind.
“Yes, history.” Her voice feels stuck in her throat. Dimly, she registers that her hands are freezing cold.
He looks over at her, a half-smile on his lips. She sees it forming, almost lets herself relax.
“What do you think history will say about you, Eva?”
What do ghosts do, other than haunt?
<>
When Eva is twelve years old, she sits on her bedroom floor, a history textbook in her lap, and dreams about doing something good for the world.
One day, she promises to herself, she will find her way out of this house. One day, she will see her name in a book.
She does. She will. But the cost is almost too high to bear.
<>
“I don’t regret it, you know,” she says to him. She can feel her hair at the nape of her neck. His face is a blur now, has been blurring for years.
This time around, they’re in the little coffee shop near ESA headquarters. She doesn’t think it exists anymore; coffee is a luxury when wheat is scarce, and wheat has been so very scarce.
Her hands sit beneath the small wooden table. They tremble, and though he is only a figment of her imagination, she doesn’t want him to see.
Still, he sees her, because of course he does. The ghost of Ryland Grace raises an eyebrow, his wire-rimmed glasses hanging off the edge of his nose. He shakes his head. He laughs. “Who are you trying to convince, Eva?”
She frowns, and with a shrinking of her shoulders, the scene disappears. She is left with only the bare prison wall for company.
Her hands, beneath the desk, still tremble.
He had always been too smart for his own good.
<>
The blast throws her back against the wall and straight into a memory. There they are, standing on the grass, and Ryland is asking her what she plans to do for the next twenty years. There they are, watching their futures go up in flames. Him, knowing his friends are almost definitely dead. Her, knowing in her sinking heart that she will have to make yet another impossible, difficult decision.
Astrophage. How much hubris did humanity have, daring to think its downfall could be moulded into salvation?
The dust from the rubble settles and Carl is standing there, arms crossed, new lines on his face.
“We need you, Stratt,” he says, and without a word, she gets up, walks towards the hole in her wall. Stepping from one cage into another.
<>
When Eva is sixty-three years old, Ryland Grace comes for her again.
In her visions, he had never aged, and in this video, he looks the same as he did twenty years ago, frozen in the moment of his execution.
It’s not a surprise. She had never expected to see him grow old, after all.
“At least I never have to hear you say I told you so,” he says, “Even though you were right.”
She has never doubted that—not once—these twenty years. It was the only decision she could’ve made, for Earth to have any semblance of a chance.
But this feels just a little bit like forgiveness.
She smiles at the video, at this real, tangible, Ryland Grace gazing back at her, still miraculously alive, and unbidden, her fist rises to her forearm.
She couldn’t give him a funeral, not a proper one. But she can give him an Eridian goodbye.