Archive of Our Own

When he lands, the last thing he wants to do is see Eva Stratt.

It’s also the thing Grace wants the most. But the things he’s always wanted have always been the ones he loses first. So, he doesn’t ask after her and nobody brings up her name. It’s always Project: Hail Mary or the Taskforce.

More and more often, it’s been the Director.

He hasn’t been able to let go of the rage. He had almost forgiven her and he had always understood why she had done what she did, but then he went ahead and almost died of starvation. It angered him again. He was tired of almost dying.

No. That’s not true.

He was tired of wanting to live.

It’s exhausting, surviving one thing after the other, only to have to fight again and again and again. Grace was never a fighter. He used to always roll over and show his belly.

And she put him in the position where he had to fight every goddamn minute—alone. Because she believed in him. Sometimes, he wishes she never saw it in him, whatever strength she thinks she saw. She made him into the hero she needed for the Earth she loved. He never wanted to be the hero. And isn’t that a pathetic excuse for staying angry?

It’s why he can’t let go of it, the burning anger. Somewhere inside him, he’s still the man that left academia, that left after he learned astrophage was made primarily of water, that ran when Eva Stratt asked him to join in on her sacrifice. Somewhere inside him, a scared little boy rages about the unfairness of it all—he’s selfish and scared and petty. And that man and boy come out of him every time he thinks of her. It makes him feel ashamed of himself and undoes all the growth he’s done.

He wants to leave that man behind him.

He wishes he could let go. She weighs heavily on his heart and every time he thinks about her the pit in his stomach grows wider and wider.

He’s so tired. He’s never felt so heavy.

So he doesn’t ask about her.

But somehow, he always learns something new.

——

The scientists he used to work with reached out to him as soon as he was given a phone. After being able to walk on his own, he met with every single one. They all allude to the same thing, but nobody wants to come out and say it.

Stratt is in prison. And has been for a very long time. Nobody will say the exact time because apparently, there’s been several breakouts.

She was the one who sent the Taumoeba to Venus. She stole money and resources, and displaced people around the world so she could get the predator off Earth and to Venus. Stratt worked with a very small team of scientists because no one was willing to associate with her anymore. None of them worked on the Taskforce before.

They expected her to fail and didn’t concern themselves when the Director fished one of the beetles off the water and left the other two on land. Her team called what was left of the U.N. and sent them the coordinates.

It was a race against time. Everybody wanted to beat the Director. They had more scientists, more personnel, more political power, more money.

But none of them loved Earth like the Director and her team did. Nobody was as motivated.

Most importantly, nobody owed Dr. Ryland Grace more than the Director. And nobody loved Dr. Ryland Grace as much as the Director.

__

It came out in the trials. Technically, the trials were still ongoing when Grace landed because not every country had gotten the chance to prosecute her. There were rumors that she was too weak to travel, that now that the Savior was here, she couldn’t be punished for his death.

She was left to rot. And nobody complained about it. It was stain on history that the Director was right about Project: Hail Mary and that she was the one to send the Taumoeba to Venus with less than ten scientists on her team.

When Grace’s coercion into the Hail Mary was made public knowledge, several people from Stratt’s Vat testified about the inappropriate relationship between the Director and her second in command. It was common knowledge that the two were engaged in a sexual relationship and that she forced him all around the world on her private jet to keep him as her own personal sexual entertainment. Some said the relationship was not as consensual as others were saying.

The rumors just kept mounting and mounting. By the time it was the Director’s turn to be on the podium, there was hardly anything she could say to combat the rest of the Vat’s testimony. There were more of them than her. And the Director using her second in command as a boy toy was too good to pass up as the truth for some that wanted to humiliate her and break her down.

There were too many crimes piling up against her that it became useless to deny this one, in the Director’s opinion. And perhaps she didn’t deny the rumors because everything she said was twisted into a lie. She nuked Antartica because she personally hated penguins. She paved over the Sahara Desert because she’s incredibly racist.

The final nail in the coffin was when they found a marriage certificate filed with the rest of her documents. The Director had given a trusted colleague the key to her office and asked said colleague to shred everything. It didn’t matter that the Director only wanted the documents shredded to avoid implicating several prominent members of the Taskforce—who very much agreed with several of her crimes back then, by the way. After that, the Director stopped trying. They wanted the Director in prison and so they shall have the Director in prison.

It was all so ridiculous in her opinion anyway. The marriage certificate had been a hare-brained idea from one of her lawyers to keep Dr. Grace out of the trials. She never got around to actually discussing it with him, so the damn thing only had her signature and his printed name.

In her later years, somewhere between the ninth prison and the thirteenth, the Director realized she probably was in love with the stupid idiot. Why she never realized it herself was probably because she was trying to keep the world from dying and couldn’t keep an emotion inside her body for longer than two hours at a time—otherwise, she was at risk of feeling and not doing. Imagine how far behind the project would’ve fallen if she allowed her emotions to actually penetrate her heart? It’s horrifying to think of.

In the end, it didn’t matter. The Director sent her dear scientist to his death without a second thought. It didn’t matter that she did not like it and that she had prayed it would never come to that. It didn’t matter that it felt like she was wrapping her heart in barbed wire—after the launch, when she could not dismiss her emotions any longer, she became very familiar with living with a constricting heart. Every beat meant a deeper cut.

None of it mattered. The Director was guilty of all the crimes listed. By the time she realized she was in love with the man, she had started believing she had coerced him into a sexual relationship.

When she learned how to disassociate for days at a time, the Director’s favorite fantasies to sink into always involved working together at a conference table somewhere. Sometimes Dr. Grace would rest his feet on the arm of her chair. Sometimes she would rest her feet on his lap. She could work for hours and days in that conference room.

By the time the taumoeba landed with the beetles, there were many reports of the Director muttering his name in her sleep or yelling it during a nightmare. In everybody’s mind, the Director had been in love with Dr. Ryland Grace since she picked him up personally from Grover Cleveland Middle School.

Nobody cared that she was first accused of using him and coercing him into giving her sexual favors. They now accuse the Director of using her feminine wiles to force him on that ship and that her guilt had turned her lust into love—that this was the punishment she deserved.

Everybody agreed that Dr. Ryland Grace was better off in space 11.9 light years away.

__

He tries to live without thinking of her, but finds that he can’t. A year passes, then two then suddenly five. He has a good life, a precious one that he would have liked to have before the Petrova Line. But the world is still losing people and there’s still a food shortage.

Suddenly ten years have passed by and he’s been able to live by ignoring that part of him that craves contact with the Director.

It’s on the eleventh year when he’s out drinking with Leclerc and Lokken that she forces his attention to turn to her again. It happened very quickly. But it made it impossible to ignore her any longer.

Lokken had gasped and spilled her drink. He had started getting napkins but she’d flapped her hand at him to leave it and pointed to the TV hanging on the wall.

The Director was looking back at them with dark and sunken eyes.

It was the first time anybody had seen the Director photographed in thirteen years. Still, Grace would not have known it was her if her name hadn’t accompanied her picture. The headlines were telling him disturbing information. He did not want to understand that information.

Leaked photos of prison conditions over the last two decades flooded the screens. Most of them focused on the Director. There were a lot of blurred out faces and body parts, but the truly disturbing picture was one of an open notebook with blacked out names. There were columns for dates, hours, names and locations. All under a heading of the Director’s name.

A whistleblower had unearthed an illegal bartering system. The evidence? The notebook in the picture. And an even older notebook with schedules detailing the days and the money very powerful people paid to see the Director without the cameras on. It was detailed and it had been passed from prison to prison and over country lines.

It looked like the more time passed, the longer the list of names became. She had been forgotten, hadn’t she? Almost nobody remembers her actual name nowadays.

She’s become a figure, a warning—less than a woman, less than a citizen.

Grace’s stomach turns over. Lokken has her hand covering her mouth.

No. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. She was safe in some Norwegian cell with open air and a view of a tree. She had all kinds of books and sweaters to fight off the chill.

This wasn’t happening, no.

He stands up from his stool and shakes his head. “No,” he says out loud. “No, no, we would know, wouldn’t we? I mean, they don’t do that, right?”

Leclerc looks at him with sad eyes. He shakes his head at him. “She told us what would happen, promised to take the fall for all of it. But then we learned about what she did to you and we were…angry. It just spiraled from there. And then, honestly, we forgot. People were dying, everybody was running from one bad place to another bad place. It was very ugly here for a long time, Grace.”

“I didn’t mean—I wasn’t trying to forget about her—.”

“Ah, please Lokken. You’ve never visited her. You testified against her and fueled the rumors.”

“Not for this! This is barbaric!”

“You knew it might happen! We all did. We were angry enough to let it happen in the first place.” He downs his drink. “Truthfully, we all thought she’d be out after the beetles landed. We thought that was a good amount of years to pay for killing Grace.” He barks out a hysterical laugh but Grace doesn’t understand what’s funny.

“But she has contacts and allies—I mean, she escaped from prison like ten times!”

LeClerc shakes his head and stares at his glass. “My guess is they kept a better eye on her. Didn’t want to let her go if she was making that much money for them.”

Grace hurries out the bar and throws up everything in his stomach.

__

They’ve put her in a different place now that the news has come out. It isn’t hard for him get permission to see her. Perks of being the Savior of Earth and her apparent love of her life. His gut churns with guilt.

Eleven years back on land and he never bothered to visit. Eleven years and he never thought to deny the claims that she was in love with him. Why? Because she very well might have, like he had. He just didn’t want to deal with it. It didn’t matter anymore, did it?

She’s on a thin but clean mattress when he arrives. She’s facing the wall and is curled up tightly in a ball, and he can barely tell she’s shivering slightly.

He has an image pop into his mind, Eva against the sunset with her hair half up, a soft but self-deprecating smile sent his way. Full cheeks, red and soft.

She looks nothing like that now. Her hair is brittle, what is left of it. Her weight is almost non existent. He could snap her femur in two just by looking at it wrong. Her head looks too big against her neck and the rest of her body. She’s too skinny.

No, she’s not skinny, she’s malnourished. She’s being eaten alive by her own body.

They let him inside. She stops shivering. He can tell that she’s paying attention to all his movements without looking at him. There’s a bench across her bed that he sits on. He can’t call her Director inside this dirty cell where she’s not even wearing shoes.

“Eva?” He whispers.

She turns around so quickly she almost falls out of bed. He’s worried her neck isn’t strong enough for her movements but she catches herself and sits up. They spend a good minute staring at each other. Oh, its worse than the pictures. He can see her skin pulled taut over the bones of her face. The hollow between her jaw and cheekbones. It scares him in a way he’s never experienced. Goosebumps erupt all over his body.

“Dr. Grace?” There’s a look of wonder on her face. Both of her hands are reaching for him as if she can’t believe he’s real. He gulps and nods his head.

“Hi, Eva.” He feels stupid. What else do you say to the woman who sent you to space but made you a hero? Who took the fall for all the crimes they committed together?

“Did you see?” She asks excitedly. “Could you tell a difference already?”

“Wha—what do you mean?” His throat is dry. Her excitement makes him feel nauseous. She’s happy to see him.

She’s happy to see him. The man she supposedly loves beyond distance and betrayal. The man whose name was used in his absence to secure her in prison.

“The sun!” She wraps her hands on the edge of mattress and jumps in place. “I did it, could you tell? I sent your taumoeba to Venus, Dr. Grace. It was me!”

He begins to nod. “Yes, I saw. The sun is almost at full capacity.” His words come out slow and carefully. She’s nodding along to every word. He feels like he’s underwater and his nose is stinging with water.

“Yes! I did that! I beat them all and I sent the taumoeba first and I finished it! Our work, Dr. Grace! Three decades and we finished it!”

Her childlike wonder is making him panic. She’s so malnourished, she’s so…empty. But there’s still a glimmer of light in her eyes. She’s wanted to tell him this, he realizes. For how long?

“You did it,” he repeats. Whatever part of him that wanted an apology or a thank you died as soon as he saw her collarbones. This is not the Director.

“We did it! You went to space and found the solution. I knew you would! I knew it!” She shakes a finger at him as if she’s scolding him for not believing and he can’t even muster a lick of anger.

She continues but more subdued. “Thank you, Dr. Grace. Thank you. You saved Earth. You saved our planet and our people and our sun. I wanted you to see our work persevering.”

She smiles widely at him and he wishes she didn’t. Her gums are bleeding and her lips crack open with the movement. Blood dribbles out the corner of her grin. He’s drowning, he can’t stay here, he needs to find some air.

“You’re welcome, Eva.” He nods to her, bending into a low bow like he used to do with her. He stays.

The guard outside snorts. Grace turns to him, he had forgotten the prison wouldn’t let him be alone with her. When he raises his eyebrows at the guard, the guy looks a little contrite.

“This is about the time she has her hallucinations.” He shakes his head. “She doesn’t think you’re real.”

“Oh,” he croaks out. “Okay.” That’s fine. He’s only been haunting her for three decades. That’s great.

“And did you see your students?” She’s looking at him expectedly. When he shakes his head, she continues. “I looked after them for you! Because you cared for them and I sent you away.”

She waits for him to respond but he can’t because by the end of the sentence her happiness has dimmed from her smile and now she looks sad and lost.

I sent you away. Like she put him on a train to his grandmother’s house.

He swallows and remembers to breathe, focuses on her words. His students? He hasn’t heard anything about the Director and his students. He reached out to some in the very early days of his return and he exchanges cards with them.

But he’s never heard about what she’s done.

“Why don’t you tell me about them?”

She nods excitedly and starts rambling. This is not Eva Stratt. This is someone who’s operating her body while Eva Stratt is hiding somewhere in there. He wants to knock on her forehead and ask for the lady who used to leave sticky notes on his forehead while he slept.

He learns a lot. Most of the younger students from his middle school died three years after the launch of the Hail Mary. It was the very first winter where the temperatures caught everybody by surprise. Eva managed to track down most of the students who were in his last class—she said this was during her first prison breakout. She set up funds for those that needed it, found jobs for others, and relocated a lot of them to warmer places. She’s very sad when she says that it didn’t matter because many of them died. Too many.

Grace’s heart drops with every name she mentions and every name she doesn’t by the end of her list. By the end though, she looks happy and proud of herself but it’s nothing compared to how she looks at him, like he’s the sun who is growing the life-saving crops. She’s expecting something from him. She almost looks like one of his students when they bring him a gift…

She wants him to be proud of her. She wants to know she’s done a good job. It’s unbelievable.

“Thank you, Eva. For looking after my kids.”

She sighs happily and clasps her hands together under her chin. Apparently that’s all she wanted from him because she looks ecstatic at his words but has nothing else to say. Just stares at him and waits.

Right. Time to bring her back to reality.

“Eva, I’m actually here. I came back on the Hail Mary.”

“No,” she frowns. “Don’t be mean again.”

“I’m not, I promise. I met someone in Tau Ceti. There’s life out there, remember? Rocky from the beetles?”

She nods cautiously. She’s still skeptical.

“He gave me fuel to come back after we made our way to Erid. I stayed there for some years. But now I’m back on Earth.”

She stares at him with wide eyes. Wider than they already look, sunken in to her skull. She shakes her head aggressively and then gets a determined look on her face. She slowly stands up and shuffles over to the bench he’s sitting on. He watches as she raises a trembling hand to touch his shoulder. He lets her.

When she makes contact, she lets out a deep breath and her shoulders drop.

“Grace?”

“Eva,” he smiles up at her. “I’m real. I promise.”

If possible, she smiles wider than she did before. He has two second to prepare himself before she’s throwing her arms around him. It’s a very weak hug but it lasts longer than Grace wants it to. He can feel her bones pressing into him and smell her dead hair—he can’t breathe, he has to breathe again. Grace pats her back twice and then starts to pull back. She smiles shyly at him when she lets go and she doesn’t take her eyes off him as she walks backwards to sit back on the bed.

“Did you see?” She starts again. He can’t hear it again. He can’t. “Could you see a difference already?”

It’s been over and done with. The excitement of the sun coming back has worn off for many of them. But to her, it’s like it just happened. She’s done her job and she’s celebrating with him because they worked together from opposite sides of the universe. She hasn’t said “I told you so.” It makes his stomach churn again. Stratt would have been so smug.

He remembers how she used to say it was cruel of the Taskforce to make humanity wait 26 years for salvation. He wonders if she’s been waiting for him to show up to see her so they could celebrate their success.

She probably could have used a friend to check in on her during all these years. But she lost everyone after the launch, especially after her deception came to light. He probably would have visited her and noticed her deteriorating conditions. But would he only visit when she was in U.S. prisons?

She never once boasted about her achievements, even when they were astonishingly impressive. But here she is, asking if he’s seen her greatest work. That she’s done for him, apparently.

It makes sense. Humanity turned against her. He was out in space and she was supposed to never see him again. It’s much easier keep going and working when you have someone who will be proud of you at the very end. He was that person for Eva, everybody else had already proved to hate her. It’s much easier to pray to a dead person. But he knows that’s not all.

You are my solution.

“I did see, you just told me all about it.” She loses some of her excitement but she still looks at him with stars in her eyes.

“What do you think?”

This is me believing in you.

He blinks back tears.

“It’s amazing. The sun’s been growing brighter and brighter each year. I can definitely see a difference from 10 years ago.”

She nods along as he speaks and then her whole body freezes. She blinks then looks down to her hands and mouths something. She’s counting with her fingers. What is she—

“When did you land?” The question is innocuous. There’s no judgment and no suspicion. It’s probably why Grace doesn’t think anything of it when he replies.

“I landed on Earth eleven years ago, this September.”

“You’ve been on Earth for eleven years.” There’s a light dimming in her eyes. Grace doesn’t know what to do about it. He was always very good at chasing her back then but he never managed to catch her. He doubts it’s any different now. Wherever that light is going, he won’t find it.

“Yes, but you know, I was in quarantine for a while.”

“Did someone…did you know? About me…that I’m in here?” Her voice gets smaller the longer she talks but her smile is still cracking her lips open.

Oh.

She’s realizing that he could have visited her ten years ago but didn’t. She’s probably been repeating the same speech the she gave him about being the first to reach Venus and helping out his students for decades.

He doesn’t know what to say. It was a conscious choice not to visit her. He didn’t want to deal with any of the trauma that happened before he left. Didn’t want to admit any positive feelings he might have had and he knew that seeing her would test his resolve of leaving all that behind him.

Would she have been more cognizant ten years ago? Why is he always a coward when it comes to her?

Because she knows what you’re capable of. And it never aligns with what you want.

“I did. I mean, someone did tell me. That you were…you know.” He sweeps his hand over her small cell in a pathetic end to his sentence. He tries again. “That you were in prison. I just didn’t know which one.”

“Oh,” she nods but there’s nothing in her eyes anymore. The excitement is gone. Her pride at her achievement is nowhere to be found. Then an idea occurs to her that briefly lights up her eyes again. He tries to memorize it, sear it into his eyelids. A blue tunnel all lit up.

“Did you visit but they wouldn’t let you see me?” She looks so hopeful. He can’t wrap his mind around the fact that this is the Director. The once strong and confident woman who didn’t need any validation from the world. Or him.

Does she still love humanity? The humanity that did this to her?

“No, Eva. I-I didn’t visit.” He wants to say he’s sorry. He does. But he can’t. He watches the light dim again. He can see her burrowing deeper and deeper into her head. He wants to yell until Stratt comes out of whatever box she’s hidden in to survive.

She’s staring at her dry hands when he thinks of something to say.

“I saw on the news that you have a court hearing coming up to contest some of the old findings. Pretty cool of whoever orchestrated that, huh?”

He notices his mistake right away.

“Someone we know? Dimitri or—.”

“No, no.” He cuts her off before she breaks his heart again. “There was a whistleblower at your last prison. It kinda…set things moving.”

Instantly, the little smile that had barely blossomed dies at the words. She shudders like chills went down her back.

“Right. Yes.” She nods decisively, and she frowns. It’s a strangely serious face that contrasts to her earlier body language. It’s like she’s embedding this new information in her brain as the truth.

When Grace was alone up in space, he would imagine a moment where another ship from Earth came and found him when he got to Tau Ceti. They would say something like, we heard your crew died and we didn’t want you to be alone, so here we are!

It was a well-used fantasy until Rocky.

He wonders if he just ruined the fantasies that helped her get through prison life with her head screwed on right. They stay quiet after this exchange, except this time, she keeps her eyes on him through the silence until she speaks.

“Are you well?”

He nods.

She waits for him to elaborate but he thinks if he opens his mouth, the water he’s been drowning in will come right out of his lungs and out his mouth to drown them all. Or he’ll throw up his breakfast.

“Are you happy?” Here, he hesitates a little. He’s happier now than he was on the Hail Mary. He was happier on Erid. But he is happy so, he nods again. She leans back and has a satisfied look on her face, as if all she was waiting for was a status report on Dr. Ryland Grace’s life.

He doesn’t know what else to say. He doesn’t want to talk to this Eva about what happened thirty years ago. He wants his friend back, but he know that is never going to happen.

Stratt is gone. He stands and motions for the guard to open the cell. Grace tries to think of what to say to her, but comes up empty. Until he comes up with a promise he can keep. This is still Eva Stratt, still his friend. He can’t leave her behind.

“I’ll visit you again, alright? Maybe not soon, cause I had to fly here. But I will, ok?”

She looks at him with dead eyes and stays seated on her mattress. She nods once.

He’s outside the jail bars when he hears her voice again.

“Dr. Grace? Would you collect my body when I die?” He flinches hard. Even after all this time, he doesn’t like talking about death.

“Um, uh, why?”

“I don’t want them to have it. My corpse.”

She says this with no emotion. It makes him want to fight somebody and flee at the same time. What can he do, say no?

“I’ll make the arrangements.” He nods at her. She tilts her head. “I’ll have someone pick up your body, alright? We’ll have a funeral.”

“Cremate me, please. You don’t even need to come pick up the ashes. Just make sure they don’t get their hands on my body.”

“Oh-okay, sure, Eva.” This is the most coherent she’s been during the whole visit. Her dead eyes, the request to not leave her corpse behind—it’s all very unsettling. He doesn’t run down the hallway, but it’s very close.

___

He’s packing up his things so he can be ready for his flight tomorrow when the hotel's front desk rings and tells him there’s a call from a prison waiting for him. He wonders if Eva got permission to talk to him and instantly feels bad for not wanting to talk. He’s still shaken up about her deteriorating and the part he had in it.

He needn’t have worried.

“Dr. Grace?”

“Speaking.”

“You visited Eva Stratt yesterday?” He has a very friendly voice. He wonders if he’s going to berate Grace for upsetting her.

“Yes. Did something happen?”

“She’s dead, Dr. Grace. We thought you would like to know.”

It takes him an embarrassingly amount of time to get his throat working again. He suddenly finds himself sitting on his bed.

“How did she die?”

“Natural causes, the mortician said. Bad health, bad mind, bad heart, too.”

“She just, died?”

People don’t die like this. Well, not people like Eva Stratt. She should have died running from the authorities or after nuking some country.

“Yes, in her sleep. Morning after you left, actually.”

A light getting dimmer in her eyes. Her excitement being tempered.

The sun! I did it, could you tell?

Was she waiting for him to visit? She was almost getting out of prison. Was it true then that she had loved him and learning that he hadn’t thought of seeing her for ten years—the thought that someone who knew her so close and could have put an end to her torment during those ten years—could that have been what she was waiting for?

I wanted you to see our work persevering.

“Dr. Grace?”

“Yeah, I’m here.” He sighs and rubs a hand down his face. “Will you make sure her body is secured somewhere private, please?”

“Very well, Dr. Grace. Goodbye.”

I’ll have someone pick up your body, alright?

He couldn’t even tell her that he would do this for her. Did she think he hated her? He sure did act like it. Did she still love him when she died? Why didn’t he ask? Why didn’t he say it first?

He’s on the phone with his manager a second later, asking if he should transport a dead body or if he should cremate her here and then bring her with him? He feels lost.

She’s dead.

She was waiting for you to see her work. Her greatest accomplishment.

She’s dead.

Soon, the news will report that the Director of the Petrova Taskfoce and Project: Hail Mary died in prison. Alone.

Is this how he was supposed to die, what she had envisioned when she put him in that coma—starving and alone until his body gave up?

The sun is bright.

Grace has life.

Eva Stratt is dead.

*

Did she love him, really? When she died, could he still fit inside her heart? She still fit in his.

.