my name is azalea

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(it’s not enough to be afraid, she wants to scream at him. she cannot do it; her breath is caught in her throat, and she is talking too fast, and the word she ends up with is coward.) (she means it. she means it. she fucking means it.) (does it hurt? does it hurt? does it hurt you, eva stratt, to hold a knife to the throat of something terrified and living and oblivious to the blood you have fed it from your hands? does it hurt?)

(from smoker’s lung)

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so this is for smoker’s lung, one of my wips that’s the closest to being finished. really what’s holding me back right now is transitions from scene to scene—i’m not sure if i like the current order, and i’m not sure if i like the pacing in each section so far. i guess that should be more of a problem for editor vin, but it’s kind of fucking me up right now.

anyway, this is a little excerpt from the first scene in the fic, which is just stratt at a point that is ambiguously during/after The Conversation and The Sedation. it’s intentionally kind of jumbled and all over the place, because i imagine the whole thing would feel somewhat surreal. it happens so fast, doesn’t it? i’m not entirely happy with it right now—i kind of want to add a little bit of the before as well, but we’ll see how the cookie crumbles i guess.

regarding this specific part, i’m thinking stratt would probably be having a lot of conflicting emotions on the whole thing. on the one hand, she didn’t really have a choice. on another hand, she was cornered into taking the role of a betrayer. on a third hand, she probably felt quite betrayed in her own right as well.

i mean, can you imagine? i think i’ve talked about this before, but just. she never had a choice in her involvement in the petrova taskforce. she was the unanimously elected scapegoat of the world—ms stratt, they said, the sun is dying. save it.

it was a suicide mission from the start, even before the whole project hail mary plan was fully conceptualized. she was the UN’s blood sacrifice—she would make all the hard decisions so no one else would have to be hated for it. she would tie the people to the tracks. she would greenlight every unethical, necessary choice. she would secure the nooses and put the bags over people’s heads and load the guns and prepare the lethal injections and she would pull the lever and then she would die. that was what it was from the start.

she didn’t have a choice. she never had a choice. the sun was dying, and she would save it, and then she would close her eyes and let go of the world she would spill blood to save. because after every decision was made, after everything was done and over with, she would lose all of her protections, and the world would come after her. but it would be worth it, because the world would be alive.

you know who did have a choice? canonically, from the start, who was given a choice to back out of the project? you know who decided to stay?

grace. grace chose the fucking project. he did his job and stratt said, thank you, that’s enough from you, go live your life and we’ll take it from here. and he said no, actually, i won’t do that. my students will die. let me have the fucking astrophage. he got in front of the single most powerful person in the world and he demanded to be allowed to work on phm, no one forced him to do that, no one even asked, and he still did it. he chose it, fundamentally, from the start. stratt didn’t. she didn’t choose. she resigned herself to it, she gave herself to it, but she didn’t choose.

looking at him, then, a disgraced middle school teacher with fire in his eyes, she must have thought that he would be brave.

he walked with her so far. throughout the entire project, he was her right hand man, whether he was willing to admit that or not. (decidedly not, really.) he had just as much blood on his hands as she did, and the difference is that he chose to be there, and she didn’t. and he was selfish, and she wasn’t.

“i don’t care about morals,” said stratt to leclerc (solemn).

“she really doesnt,” grace agreed (lighthearted).

he had the blood on his hands too. he did. he was there for the trials and the recruitments and the ecoterrorism. he made himself important. so when the research center exploded, the moment it was confirmed that shapiro and dubois were dead and eva stratt knew it had to be him, she thought he would be brave.

it’s kind of clear in the way the whole situation plays out. she took the easy way, gave him an option, gave him time to think. (he said no at first. she felt her heart drop to her stomach. she had hope. she had hope. you have three hours.) she could have forced him from the start. he didn’t really ever have a choice. but she gave him the room to make the choice anyway, because she thought he would make the right one.

(give me some gosh-darned astrophage, he said, and she really, really, really did believe in him.)

and he didn’t. he didn’t make the right choice, and god, how much that must have hurt. she wasn’t upset that he had to get on the ship. she was upset that she had to force him. maybe she was a betrayer, yes. maybe he betrayed her too. he was afraid, she knew, but it’s not enough to be afraid when eight billion lives are on the line. stratt would kill herself on live tv if it meant giving humanity one sliver of a chance at survival. she would give her life for the world, not even in a hypothetical scenario, because she did give her life for the world. she would have done anything. grace wouldn’t.

he had taken the hard path himself. and when it got to its most difficult point, the inevitable summit (because if it wasn’t getting on the hail mary it would have been taking over for stratt, making the hard decisions in her place), he backed off. there was blood on his hands, too. he led the way, too. he got on the project in the first place, and for all humanity, he would not have gone all the way.

the word he was left with was coward. and she meant it, i think. she meant it.