Chapter Text
He swore he had just closed his eyes to enter his own coma after checking to ensure Olesya was safely in her’s and Doctor Grace’s vitals were holding steady.
It had been unnerving, one crewmate asleep since the start of the journey, the other talking non stop to fill the void of silence on the ship that was so like the stretch of inky sky outside their metal home that would one day be their tomb.
He was the first to awaken, or at least he thought he had. Swinging his legs off the edge of the coma bed.
Something was off.
The commuter that controlled the ship’s automatic monitoring system, should have greeted him into consciousness.
But there was only silence and the whir of the robotic system moving behind him.
That was odd, why wasn’t it paying attention to him?
And why was there a cat and a dog in front of him?
Commander Yao Li-Jie was not a man to jump in alarm.
This time however, had caught him so off guard and the strangeness of the situation was so beyond anything he had ever experienced that he leapt back a few feet.
The dog barked and wagged its tail, it had a very old USSR mission patch on its little space suit.
The cat had a French flag.
He knew these animals.
Olesya had talked endlessly for months about the dog, Laika. How the three of them were going to be just like the brave pup, on a one way trip for the benefit of humanity.
Felicette, the French Space cat, less known than Laika but Yao had always had a soft spot for felines.
“How?” he exclaimed.
Then he turned around and saw…..himself?
The IVs had been removed and so had the oxygen mask and every tube.
Then he realized why it was so earily quiet, he couldn’t even hear his own heart beating.
He tried to take a deep breath to calm himself and yet, there was no rush of air through his nose, just his body moving like it always had yet this time for no reason.
He was dead.
That was the only conclusion.
He had failed before even beginning to try to save Earth.
He had failed his crew at his promise to be the last to die.
He had failed.
He knelt on the ground and wept, silent sobs no one would ever hear and without tears.
He felt the touch of soft fur and a rhythmic rumbling sound before looking up.
Felicette was rubbing against him and purring.
Laika had gone to perch on Olesya’s bed, on her chest.
Russians stuck together, he guessed.
Yao walked around the ship, he couldn’t even address the computer system, He could interact with the ladder and the floor but he phased through nearly everything else. Luckily he found he could still sit in his chair in the control room.
Felicette hopped onto his lap as he stared out into the depths of space. He sat there for what felt like hours, days, months? He didn’t know.
All he knew was that he was a ghost and there was a very soft cat on his lap.
He prayed Olesya and Ryland could handle the mission, or else the Hail Mary would truly be a failure.
He looked at the instruments, it had only been a little over a year since they began the trip, and he had only been in the coma two months before dying.
He shouldn’t have died! He had the gene! What in the world happened?
No system was perfect. Something in the system must have glitched and caused him to either suffocate or starve.
Oh how he hoped it didn’t happen again.
Felicette’s purring brought him out of his thoughts.
“How long the two of you must have waited for company, yes?” he asked the cat.
He got a soft mew in response and she pressed her head hard against his chin.
He went back to absentmindedly petting her and staring out into the void ahead.
“Perhaps I can’t move on until my crew joins me? We came on this journey together, we must leave it together,” he said absently.
He got a soft meow in return followed by even louder purring.
After a while he sighed and got up, allowing Felicette to climb onto his shoulders, he was very glad her claws couldn’t hurt him.
He walked back to the dormitory.
He still had a duty to look after his crew after all.
Laika seemed to have Olesya guarded well so he went over to Grace.
The man had been in his coma for so much longer than the others. He didn’t even get the luxury of seeing the Earth from space like all astronauts do, it was like a rite of passage the young man had missed out on, one that none of them would ever get again.
Grace would die without the final glimpse of home.
Yao tried to put the thought out of his mind, Grace wasn’t dead like him, not yet anyway.
Something had felt so…off, about the circumstances of Grace being here.
Dubois and Shapiro’s deaths, Grace’s hesitance then sudden acceptance after a mere three hours?
Stratt’s insistence on Grace being placed into the coma before the launch.
Yao himself had needed a full day to decide if he wanted to volunteer for this.
No, now that Yao thought about it and had even more time to dwell on it, the more Grace’s presence felt like something that shouldn’t have been.
He’d ask the man when he joined him.
For now, he only had himself and two fluffy heroes of the space race.