miniature space opera. (II)
summary: after waking up on the hail mary, you're having a difficult time finding your bearings. between your half-memories and the bodies on board, you and grace have a lot to sort out. (part 2/???)
pairing: ryland grace x gn!reader
tags: pre-tau ceti, canon character death, heavy angst, very minimal fluff, canon memory loss, flashbacks, tw for claustrophobia and emetophobia (reader almost throws up), planned slow burn, engineer standby!reader, gn!reader
cross-posted to ao3 / previous chapter here!
You’re in a bag. The plastic is clinging over to your face with some mix of condensation and what you think must be sweat. It’s difficult to make sense of this situation you’re in. You don’t think you’ve been camping recently—that doesn’t sound very familiar—but you’re clearly laying supine in a tight bag. It’s difficult to move your arms and your legs in this contained state. It takes another minute or so to recognize that you should be panicking, because the bag isn’t restricting your movement as much as your own body is. You’re static from head to toe, aside from the miniature twitches and spasms of your fingers trying to wriggle back to life.
It takes you about thirty minutes to jolt yourself back into full functioning. After shedding the bag, which takes far more effort than you’d like, you realize that you’re still stuck. Your surroundings are a pitch-black box that’s only a little larger than you. You don’t like being encapsulated in this tight container, whatever it is. You can’t quite remember—are you claustrophobic?—but it doesn’t matter much because you think most people wouldn’t enjoy being trapped like this.
You have to feel around for a switch or a lever with your half-working hands, and you’re dismayed at the fact that everything’s feeling very smooth. There’s a rectangular ridge protruding out of the surface above your head, traced by a rectangular band of plastic. At your feet, the metal container goes completely smooth. So, door up, floor down. You have to make a few battering knocks, then another few belligerent pushes. You must have the strength of a paper doll. Your efforts are virtually ineffective.
Another twenty minutes of knocking and striking, all while regaining control over your muscles, the door to your little container finally cracks. Unlatched and opening, the rack that you’re laying on appears to pull out on its own. An automated system. The light outside is glaring, and you have to give yourself a moment to adjust. You take a few deep breaths, nearly rolling off the body-sized tray and landing unsteadily on your bare feet. Around you, there’s a collection of storage crates and a ladder leading up to another room.
Up the ladder, out of the hatch, and in through a few affixed halls, it’s a little easier to make meaning of things. You’re on a ship, and you’re able to recognize the general layout with more ease than expected. It seems mission-ready over commercial, which accounts for the level of emptiness your surroundings are. It feels like you’ve run through this space before, and it feels like déjà vu passing from one corridor to the next. You know there must be a cockpit here somewhere, and once you find it, you might get a better grasp of what you’re doing. Something in your mind’s itching to get a view of your trajectory, the velocity of the ship, some kind of extraneous details to help you get your bearings…
Your head is pounding. You don’t think you're concussed, but by the lightheaded feeling overtaking your skull, you must be severely dehydrated. You’re in a bit of a hurry to shed off the rest of the squeaky plastic second-skin off your body, leaving you in only a standard-white set of underwear. This leaves you cold and stumbling around the ship in search of some kind of coverage. You have to scramble around the existing mess for clothing. Papers, beakers, and plastic wrappers are scattered around the floor from corridor to corridor.There should be jumpsuits around here somewhere, maybe a standard set of sweatpants and a t-shirt…
A dark t-shirt strewn across a stool in this room, what you think has to be the lab. Two misshapen yellow eyes pierce their way out of the dark fabric. It’s Cats—strange that you know that. You’d like to know where you are, and what you’re doing on this ship, and all you know is that this is a t-shirt for the musical Cats. You slip the shirt over your head, letting it fall over your legs. It doesn’t offer the best amount of coverage, but it’ll do.
You keep moving along, corridor to corridor. The windows all show the same star-speckled black sky. You’d like to spend a little bit of time admiring this landscape when you have a better grasp of your current situation. There’s an open chamber, one window to peer in across from another to peer outside of the ship. Air-lock. And just nearby, there’s a ladder leading up to an open hatch. Best-case: the cockpit. You approach the opening with narrowed eyes. There’s a bit of clattering, and someone’s talking up there—single voice, raspy and uneven. Not the best sign. With a soft breath, you begin pulling yourself up rung by rung.
Ilyukhina has convinced you that this is the roof—after scoping out a few solid roofs, each of a similar quality, for the two of you to sit atop of. You have to be thankful, considering how much effort it takes to scan in and make one’s way up the flights of stairs (and in this case, ladders) to finally reach the view. She insisted on doing all the work herself, for the sake of exploration. She’d told you, over sandwiches in the cafeteria one day: Nobody else in the world has this much access to the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It is basically Area 51. You’d accompanied her on about three of these up-and-down searches, before deciding that you would leave it to her altogether.
You have to admit that the view here is nice. It’s a lot different than the Vat, considering there’s just empty fields and hills; it’s grayer, foggier, and there’s a lot more power plants in sight. Not so many seagulls, either—though there are the occasional eagles that like to dip down in short sweeps over the area. You’ve been thinking about it more and more lately that the sky is theirs, too. When Ilyukhina, Yao, and DuBois make their way up to Tau Ceti, it won’t just be a human problem needing fixing. It’ll be everything. The birds, the fish, the land…
The rooftop provides a clear shot of the Hail Mary’s launch pad. The ship is covered from top to bottom in steel scaffolding and surrounded by all kinds of platforms and trucks. It could be beautiful, if it wasn’t so eerily large. You like to sit yourselves facing east, backs to the Hail Mary, so you and Ilyukhina don’t have to think so much about it. It’s easier to look at the hills. Even if the two of you might only use this roof a few more times before the launch, it’s still something. Ilyukhina tells you, wholeheartedly and almost weekly, that it’s crucial you carve time to spend together before it’s go-time.
As usual, she has a knack for exploring the fine details of your romantic life. Like now, when she’s thrilled, for the fifth time, to ask you to retell your evening with Grace on the Vat. Away from the rest of the crew and their boosted karaoke speakers, when you’d both admitted to reciprocation of the semi-romantic sort. The two of you have a deck of cards laid out on the smoothed-out concrete surface; go-fish, like usual, has devolved into the casual kind of gossip. “This is what I mean,” Ilyukhina proposes, pointing her stacked hand of cards towards your chest, “You and Grace will make great spouses.” A very drastic conclusion in comparison to what you’ve told her.
It’s as if Ilyukhina already has your future prospects all mapped out for you. You find yourself giving her a sour look. “We agreed to call each other on the phone. And maybe meet after a while. That’s all!” It’s still difficult to imagine what your life should look like after the launch. You’ve all been working so hard at getting trained up, making sure all the equipment is in order, assuring that you’ll be ready in time for the launch window. At the end of this, once the Hail Mary’s up in the air, you’ll just be expected to… dissipate. You’re not sure how you’re supposed to return to a normal life—as normal as life can be—after putting this much of yourself into the project operations.
She clicks her fingers. “This is good. We will launch, you will go back home, and when you’re bored after one month, you will call Grace. He will ask you to come to his tiny teacher-apartment, and you two can get, ah—frisky?” She has such a way with words.
“Please don’t. It’s already embarrassing enough as it is that everyone already thinks we hooked up.” It’s difficult for word not to spread fast, whether on the Vat or around the Cosmodrome. You and Grace both know how it looks, the two of you sneaking off while everyone else is well into the evening with their beers and karaoke. No better than DuBois and Shapiro. Really, you’d only talked for an hour or so before deciding to make it back to everyone. You did promise to write your number into his work notebook. Now, you barely even see each other outside of the usual meetings—both too busy prepping for the launch.
“Okay. I am just identifying the most likely course,” Ilyukhina shrugs. “And I am very sure that Grace will ask you to stay with him. He’ll be so lonely, and you’ll be so lonely by then, too.”
“You’re saying that like it’s a good thing.” Lonely is a terrible thing to be. You can feel bitter cold air filtering into your nostrils as you breathe in deep and sigh. Ilyukhina grabs hold of your shoulder with a tight squeeze—as jovial as ever.
“It is a recipe for success,” she says to you. “You two are going to need each other. You already need each other. It is a natural fit.”
The second you pop your head into the hatch opening, you’re intrigued by the sight of this… supposed astronaut in the pilot’s seat. His brownish-blonde hair is ruffled wildly, glasses glinting against the bright red and white lights of the control panel. He’s looking at one of the larger monitors mounted in the cockpit wall, scratching his nails against his stubble. From the looks of it, he’s already beat you to the navigation. You’re thankful that he doesn’t look very crazy. In fact, he’s very well-put together, tight jumpsuit and all. Your priorities tell you that you need to stray away from those kinds of thoughts.
Tentatively, you pull yourself up into the cockpit with light feet, hunched over to adjust your height to the cramped space. You’re about to say something like “hello” or “excuse me,” but he’s already turning around to look at you with a gaunt expression and a shout. With a double take, he jumps into action. The sound of his squealing in terror is enough to send you stepping backwards, in narrow avoidance of the open hatch, hands gripping your temples. He looks like he’s seen a ghost—and you’re it. “What the—!”
You’re trying your best to ignore the boyish yells erupting out of him. “My head is killing me right now. Please don’t scream,” you rasp out.
The second you take a step closer to him, he’s throwing his arms up in a crude attempt at martial arts. His straightened hands are in front of his face, like he’s ready to give you a chop to the side. “Stranger danger!”
You can’t help but yell right back at the expression: “What?” You’re absolutely exasperated by the sight of his attempted self-defense. It’s undoubtedly ineffective. If you were trying to harm him—which you clearly aren’t—he’d be very easy to assail. “Would you put your hands down?”
He shouts again, this time above the both of you, hands still raised and ready for offense: “Mary, I’m supposed to be dying alone here.” Mary?
A computerized voice rings softly over the ship’s comms: “Dr. Ryland Grace. End of manifest.”
“But that isn’t really the end, is it?” he shouts upwards, beyond the both of you. The computer doesn’t seem to register that question too urgently.
“Grace. You’re Grace. Okay—that’s something,” you say, trying to jog some kind of memory. Right about now, you’re only able to rely on what’s right in front of you. He’s… pretty, even if he’s panicking. Grace has the composure and clumsiness of a baby deer, scrambling over the cockpit seats, hands running over the walls to try and find a steady anchor. You do not like the look of the way his hands are bumping all of the different buttons and scanners; your gut tells you to scold him for it, but you’re too distracted by your absolute lack of information. You should know him. He’s just as familiar as the ship’s layout, but you can’t pinpoint any specific details. Could you have known each other? He clearly doesn’t recognize you.
“Are you real?” Grace asks. He thinks you’re a hallucination, and he’s pushing up his glasses to get a good look at your face. “There’s no potential for gas leaks. We’re running on astrophage. It could be the air—” He’s reaching his hand up with two fingers to prod at your shoulder. You slap his hand with a soft thwack before he can make contact. He retracts it back with a muttered “okay, real, m’sorry.”
You can only shake your head, “We’re operating in a low-pressure environment. Oxygen toxicity would be highly unlikely.” You must be pretty textbook smart. Grace seems to be soothed by the rationalization.
“…No, yeah, that’s a good point.” And he seems more trusting knowing that you have some baseline scientific knowledge. It means you’re here for a reason, too. “Sorry,” he says again, this time more consciously, “My people skills aren’t very practiced at the moment.” Which you think must mean that he hasn’t needed them prior.
“Are you really the only person here?” you ask. His lips twitch into a frown. You don’t want to feel scared, and he’s really not helping your case.
On Stratt’s demand, the Baikonur Cosmodrome shut down all major operations to the public—including their on-site museum. You think you’d like it more with visitors, seeing as it’s an educational science center. It deserves field trips, with kids to learn about the wonders of space travel. It’s unclear how long it’ll take for them to re-open after the Hail Mary launches, and for now, the museum’s only visitors are the off-shift crew.
It’s Grace’s idea to come in at midnight, after dark—the only opportunity either of you can chip out a solid chunk of free time. You’ve still gone through the motions, lately, of being distantly enamored with each other. What you’ve learned of Grace is that he likes slow. He likes the eye-tag. He likes giving you pep talks for flight simulations. He likes identifying where you sit in the crowded debriefs, making sure he can spot you wherever he’s stationed next to Stratt. Grace is all for taking his time—and really, so are you.
And, this is slow: Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum, empty as can be. Just the two of you here, wandering placard to placard. Neither of you can read a lick of Russian, but it’s still enjoyable enough to look at all of the old aerospace artifacts. There’s model rockets, extracted control panels, old spacesuits… The headshots of all the historical figures are only slightly unsettling, and Grace makes good fun out of faking fun facts off the top of his head for you to laugh at. His murmurings make the cleared space of the museum marginally less creepy.
The fact that the two of you are cozied shoulder-to-shoulder in your matching Hail Mary hoodies isn’t so bad, either. You’re secretly grateful that the Museum is so poorly insulated. It gives you a greater excuse to be closer to Grace, huddled like penguins trying to keep their warmth. You separate only at the opportunity to see a particularly darkened display room, tucked around the corner from the rocket launch models. Grace calls out the second you’re out of sight. “Uh… where’re you going?”
You’re far too excited to wait up for him. “Just come and sit!” Finally, Grace makes it over to you, a few yards away. His glasses descend just slightly on the bridge of his nose as he tilts his head down to look at you. He’s smiling—smirking, really—at the sight of you on the bench with your legs crossed. Grace lets out a whistle as he plants himself down right beside you, taking in the view ahead of you both. It’s beautiful, this mock-up Solar System, and the little dotted lights making up distant stars.
The two of you sit there a moment, soaking in the sight of it all. Grace rests his elbows on his knees, staring out at the fiber-optic stars. “You know, I have a model just like this in my classroom back in S.F. It's paper-mache. Not cool as this, but it’s something.”
“Huh,” you huff out. “Did you make it yourself?” You love it when Grace talks about his outside life. Maybe optimistically so, and altogether from Ilyukhina’s influences, it’s nice for him to tell you things to look forward to.
“No,” he chuckles. “No, I put it together with a couple of after-school students. They all got a planet, we made it to scale. It was a whole thing.” It isn’t difficult for you to picture this at all. Grace talks in lessons as-is. The image of him in your head, Mr. Grace in the middle of a decorated classroom, trying to encourage his students with textbook images of each of the planets (with a particularly snooty quip about Pluto), is crystal-clear.
This is the person that he is outside of the mission. It makes perfect sense. You shift your gaze from the hanging planets to Grace. His eyes are still raised up, looking somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn. His shoulders are dropped, the most relaxed you’ve seen him in the past month. You can see the multicolored reflection of all of the planets distorted across the lenses of his glasses. “That’s sweet,” you murmur. “You… care about them a lot.”
Finally, he takes a look at you, still just as soothed. He tugs at the logo on his hoodie. “This is all for them. And… other things now, I guess.” The sheepish look on his face is contagious, and you find yourself fixing your eyes back up at the model planets. Still shy. It’s hard not to be. You’re both on the verge of that future after launch. But for now, you’re still here—Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum, Solar System model—waiting on that ship to go up in the air. You’re small, and so is Grace, and Hail Mary will be the farthest manned human mission, a thousand light years away. Under the most dire of circumstances. You can only hope that it’ll pan out well when that ship ends up where it’s supposed to be.
And now, in the middle of some other planetary system, looking at a sun that isn’t yours, you’re still sitting with Grace. It’s strange, the echoes you have of a museum, fake planets, a pending launch. And you can corroborate that Grace is supposed to be a science teacher. Not many other details there. Still, he’s spent the last two hours trying to explain to you what he knows about himself and the Hail Mary. You’re very disheartened to find that he knows very little—basically, as much as you do. The most you can attempt is tracing your steps.
Now, you and Grace are standing in front of your precious home, tucked behind storage crates and just by the ladder. It’s still as you lifted, busted open with the body tray extended. Grace gawks, “You came out of that?” You’re both like two crappy detectives, Grace in his yellow jumpsuit and you in the Cats shirt and undies. A very ineffective combination.
“Yes,” you say, irked. You’ve run through this already. “I was stuck in it for half an hour before I was able to bust the door open.”
Grace squints his eyes, squatting down to look inside of the containment chamber. He’s pulling out a flashlight from his side-pocket. “What is it?” You’re staring down at his white Converse. You seem to remember those vaguely, too.
You chew the inside of your cheek. “A waste bin, I think. Somebody tried to do a last-minute MacGyver rig with me inside of it.” You kneel down beside him, watching as the beam of the flashlight casts into the box. “The IV’s were looped through here and here,” you point with your finger, “I ripped them on the way out.”
Grace sighs. “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t have to apologize. It’s very sweet, but completely unnecessary.
You find yourself giving him a nudge to the arm and a soft grin. “Well, you didn’t put me in it, did you?” He nearly tumbles from the force of your elbow bumping his arm. He has to tighten his grip on the flashlight to keep it from falling onto the floor.
“Well, no. It’s just a little Houdini gone wrong. That’s all,” Grace admits. “You handled it better than I would’ve. When I woke up…”
Grace is worried about bringing you to the room he started out in. He assures you that the two bodies there aren’t so much bodies as they are mummies. You’re lucky in this way to be trapped in a controlled environment. They passed away cleanly. The racks are empty, but their nameplates still glow strong. Grace, Ryland. Active. Yao, Li Jie. Deceased. Ilyukhina, Olesya. Deceased. Ilyukhina and Yao have been placed neatly in a corner of the room, right by the robotic arm. You find yourself having a hard time looking at their bags too long.
“The… names are familiar. The woman, Ilyukhina. I…” You feel like you’re going to be sick. You know you are, and so you peel away from Grace’s side to find the nearest waste bin. There’s a closed can in the corner, away from the bodies. You pull the top off as fast as you can and hold it up. You’re getting on your knees to try and spew, but nothing comes up. “Sorry. Gross,” you groan.
“It’s okay. Just take your time,” he assures you, “Do you need water?” Grace makes it over to you with a few steps, leaning down to rub the center of your back. Just like your mind, your body doesn’t treat him like a stranger. You can feel your nausea subsiding the more his palm juts in between your shoulders.
“No, uh, no thank you,” you huff out. Grace hums. And Ilyukhina. You can remember her high ponytail, her near-constant teasing, the focus she’d place into those mechanics simulations. It’s starting to make a little bit more sense now. “I’m her standby,” you mumble to Grace, words slightly slurred. He’s quiet behind you. “Like an understudy?” you say. “In case of emergency, she gets sick or she, you know—I step up to the plate.”
“That’s great!” Grace exclaims. He seems considerably relieved by this revelation. It means at least one of you is qualified to be aboard. But you’re still largely unconvinced.
“Is it? You’re a schoolteacher and I’m a backup.” You drop the waste bin back on the floor and Grace helps you to your feet. “They’re supposed to be doing this,” you mumble, squeezing your eyes shut and laying a palm over them.
“Well, statistically speaking, we’re better off because there’s two of us,” Grace reasons, “You might’ve upped our chances by a significant percentage.”
You scoff. “What, an extra 0.01%?” Grace tries to give you a little more joking reassurance—“You should give yourself a little bit more credit. Bump it up to 0.02.”—but you’re already feeling that tension headache return again. “We are so screwed,” you groan. Then, Grace is quiet. You both know it, and you’re only outlining the obvious truth of the matter.
So, instead, he gives you an alternative. “I was planning on sending them out right before you woke up,” he says to you, “If you want to, we could do it together.”
You’re wearing Ilyukhina’s red jumpsuit, not the best fit, but it’s better than what you had on before. You have the arms of the suit tied around your waist, and that same Cats shirt you found when you woke up. It’s all hers, including the mission. You can’t look at Ilyukhina for very long without looking away. You find greater comfort from observing all the other inanimate things on the ship. The clinically white lights mounted along the corridors, the storage crates pushed to corners of the room, the view of stardust and empty space outside the thick-glass windows. When you look down at Ilyukhina, you can feel your breath seizing up in your chest.
Grace has laid her and Yao in a gentle way, arms crossed over their chests, dressed in those yellow launch suits. He speaks for Yao, on his photographs, his silly faces, and the leadership he might’ve given you both. And then, it’s your turn. You have to kneel down to her side with a stack of prints in one hand. There’s a picture of both of you at the top, over the balcony of a marine ship you can hardly remember. In the photo, her arm is hooked around your neck in a sisterly way, and the two of you have your eyes squeezed shut from laughter.
In your other hand, there’s a full IV bag. It sloshes as you lower to the ground beside Ilyukhina. You fix your eyes on it and you speak. “I remember that we used to talk a lot near the water. That time was very dear to me, or else I wouldn’t have been able to recall it. I’m sending you out with this IV bag of… midazolam, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. That’s a pretty crappy mix. But it says on the label here that there’s diacetylmorphine here, too,” you read. You shake your head with a crackly laugh, “Heroin. It’s heroin and it’s got your name on it.”
Grace chokes back a laugh, just as shaky as you are. “And I hope you don’t mind me taking your shirt,” you say to Ilyukhina, “I told Grace I’m not sure if it’s because you liked the animal or just the show. Maybe both. I… uh, think I loved you. I do love you, even if I can’t remember it right about now. And I’ll be sad to see you go.”
Once the photos and the IV bag are tucked under Ilyukhina’s arms, you’re backing away in slow steps. Clumsily, you find yourself backing straight into Grace’s chest. He guides you by the wrist gently to turn and face him. He looks so worried, and suddenly, he’s pulling you into him with a strangled sigh. He's trying to stifle his tears, and it's not working out very well for him.
Grace lets you pull the small-lever on the air-lock. Yao first, Ilyukhina second. It’s an easy override for Mary. You don’t even realize you’re crying until you feel the welled up tears dropping down your cheeks all the way to your jaw. It takes you a moment to catch up to speed with your own crying, and when you’re finally more focused, you’re taking your fingertips up to smudge off the trails of tears. You remember hating crying in front of other people.
“I don’t want my last memory of you to be red and puffy,” Ilyukhina coos. “It isn’t flattering.”
“That is so mean,” you choke out. You’re trying to blot your eyes with your sleeves, cries getting muddled with stress-fueled laughter. You might be hysterical—you’re not sure.
“Okay. I take it back,” she says, “I’m just saying I want you happy in my head before I go under. So, when I dream, you will be happy.” She’s supposed to be launching a week from now. It’s the last time you’ll ever be on this rooftop with her, sunset in Kazakhstan, because she’ll be busy doing final checks. Stratt’s more strict than ever making sure that everyone’s prepared for the Hail Mary to go up. So, you and Ilyukhina might be seeing a lot less of each other. This might not be that last goodbye, but it’s close enough to it.
You sniffle a bit. “I don’t think that’s how it works.” The intermittent breezes on this droid are drying your tears quickly, and they feel searingly cold on your face. You’d beg Ilyukhina to go inside if you weren’t so hell-bent on taking in the scenery. You need to keep these memories close, and you can’t skimp out on the time.
She’s shaking her head at you with a click of her tongue. “You don’t get to grieve until you see the rocket break out of Earth’s atmosphere. Then, you can cry. I will be far enough away.” Per her request, you take in a shaky breath. Less tears.
“You’d better say hi to me in those video logs. When they touch back down, I’ll probably be sixty or something,” you think, “Maybe older, I don’t know.”
“You focus on growing old—with Mr: Middle-School or not—and I will make sure that you have a world to grow old into,” Ilyukhina shrugs. “That’s what I’m here for, no?”
