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still on the phm writing grind, dont worry. HOWEVER i do kind of want to start branching out into writing for other fandoms.... any recs or ones people would like to see?
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
summary: something enormous waits outside the window, watching. grace, somehow, seems to know you better than you know yourself. what you don’t understand is why guilt, a feeling you abandoned years ago, has suddenly found its way back in.
Your body moved before reason developed, with little dignity in the zero gravity. Your hand was still gripping Grace’s sleeve, and the next thing you knew, you were pushing away from the console beside him, floating toward the window with more force than intended. Your shoulder struck his halfway there and Grace caught your arm instinctively, his fingers closing around your sleeve before both of you drifted sideways together.
The window was ahead, and Grace’s hand found a wall to grip, halting both of you with a soft jerk. You ended up suspended beside him, shoulder to shoulder in midair, the two of you pressed close.
Outside, the stars were disappearing. Something was crossing in front of them, blotting them out in sections, a shape moving through the black.
Your mind tried to give it ordinary language. A vessel, some kind of structure. It was rectangular, except it wasn’t. The longer you stared, the less your eyes could settle on its boundaries. It had edges, but the edges seemed layered, built in sections that overlapped and receded and angled away from each other in ways that made the shape feel bigger than the outline suggested. A lattice ran across its exterior, dark and earthen in colour, something like rust or clay or old bark, though earth had no place here. Earth was very far away.
The structure caught the light along its ridges. Thin lines of pale gold travelled through the layers as it turned, each piece glinting and vanishing again, the whole thing glowing faintly against the pitch black. It did not look manufactured in the way human machines looked manufactured. No comforting seams where one might imagine hands, human hands, putting one section against another.
And yet it had been made.
It had been made.
No natural object moved like that.
Intelligent life.
Beside you, Grace had gone completely still. You could feel him rather than see him properly, the line of his arm brushing yours, the slight tremor in his breathing. He was looking at it too, his face reflected faintly in the thick glass, eyes wide behind his crooked glasses.
That object was larger than the Hail Mary.
Your instincts came up automatically. Distance. Speed. Direction. Relative size. Escape routes. Intent. Behavioural indicators. Patterns of aggression. Likely escalation. Your brain reached for the old pathways and found only empty space.
You could deal with threats when they had bodies. You could deal with government officials in sharp coats or operatives lying badly under fluorescent light. You could follow micro-expressions, inconsistencies, the thousand tiny betrayals of men who thought themselves unreadable.
This was not that. This was a thing built by something you had no category for. You felt your breath shorten.
Not fast enough.
The ship continued around you as the foreign structure floated in its slow approach, larger and larger and larger until it felt like the whole window had become an eye and you were the thing being watched through it.
You were in space.
You were in space.
You were in space, in a stolen body with a stolen memory, beside a man you barely knew and trusted too much already, while something impossible moved toward you through the dark.
Your fingers tightened around the edge of the window frame. The metal dug into your palm. The pain was useful. Pain belonged to a body and therefore could be understood.
That thing outside could not be.
Your breath hitched, and humiliation flared through the fear. You were trained for composure. Or you had been. There was nothing in you that knew what to do when the threat had crossed interstellar space.
A hand settled on your shoulder. You flinched anyway, but Grace didn’t remove it. He only held there lightly. You turned your head to look at him.
His eyes were still wide, still frightened. He looked pale beneath the harsh control-room light, his hair floating slightly around his face in weightless strands. He was terrified; anyone could see that. Even without your expertise, you knew fear when it was less than a foot from your face. If you looked close enough, you recognised the subtle hints of concern that painted his fearful expression. Concern that was pointed at you.
You weren’t used to that.
It seemed to surprise him, seeing you like this. He had seen your fear when you first woke, but that had been fear with direction. Fear that could become anger if it needed to.
Grace swallowed. His hand pressed a fraction more firmly against your shoulder.
“Hey,” he said quietly, not sure what else to say in this situation, not that you could blame him. You stared back at him, breathing shallowly.
That was a terrible reassurance.
“Okay,” he said, mostly to himself. “We don’t like this.”
“No,” you managed.
“Okay…”
What else was there to say?
You might have laughed if your throat had not been trying to close. The structure outside continued to move. The last of its momentum vanished until it hung there in space beside you, dark latticework shining faintly.
Waiting.
Grace’s hand slipped from your shoulder as his mind seemed to catch up. Fear was still in his expression, but something had hardened underneath it. A decision, maybe. Or the fragile performance of one. He turned away from the window.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Nope. Absolutely not.”
“Grace?”
He pushed off from the wall. His body moved badly. Too fast at first, then too slow as he overcorrected. Under other circumstances, it might have been funny.
You remained by the window, unable to make yourself look away from the object. It stayed exactly where it was. Grace hauled himself toward the pilot’s chair in the centre of the control room. He moved with visible effort, jaw tight, shoulders stiff. He was trying to look determined. He was also, very obviously, one bad noise away from screaming.
“Alright, Mary,” he said, grabbing the side of the seat and pulling himself into position. “Let’s go.”
The chair accepted him with cold indifference.
“Pilot detected.”
He forced himself down into the seat, one hand gripping the armrest, the other braced against the console.
“Yes,” he said breathlessly. “Pilot detected.”
“Please engage restraint.”
A sharp, irrational anger rose in you. You were beginning to understand Grace’s hostility toward Mary after all.
He fumbled for the straps. His fingers missed the buckle twice before he managed to drag the restraint across his chest. You watched the movement, watched the tremor in his hands, watched the way he pressed his lips together to steady them.
Though the deep haze of fear, he was still trying.
“Pilot detected,” Mary repeated as he clicked the buckle into place.
Grace stared up at the ceiling. “Yes. Pilot detected.”
That pulled your attention from the window at last. His gaze was fixed on you with such absurd conviction that the room seemed to steady around it.
“We’re gonna get out of this,” he reassured both you and himself.
You had no evidence. No plan. No understanding of the controls. And from the looks of it, neither did he. There was a vast alien craft outside the window, and the man promising your survival had already admitted to naming the ship Mary.
But you believed him.
You pushed away from the window and drifted toward the second chair at the side of the control space and caught its back with one hand. Grace had already turned to the console, scanning the panels with growing despair.
“Controls,” he said as he began to fiddle. “Controls. Controls. Controls.”
“Engage spin drive,” Mary said. “Incorrect.”
Grace snatched his hand back as though the console had bitten him.
You pulled yourself fully into the other chair and hooked one hand around the side to stop yourself drifting away. The restraint straps floated uselessly near your shoulder. You ignored them for now, eyes moving over the console in front of him. None of it meant anything.
“Is it this thing?” he muttered. You opened your mouth. Several possible responses presented themselves.
How the hell would I know?
Would you like me to psychologically profile the lever?
Yes, Grace, obviously that’s the correct foreign stick.
“Try it,” you said, voice tighter than intended, “so we can try something else.”
His hand closed around the control and something deep in the belly of the ship locked into place with a heavy mechanical thunk. Your chair jolted sideways beneath you. You slammed one hand against the armrest and the other against the console, catching yourself before your body floated clean out of the seat. Grace made a strangled sound as the restraints held him in place.
“Erratic movement detected,” Mary said.
“Oh, is it?” Grace snapped.
You gripped the chair harder. “Try it smoother!”
“I’m trying!”
“You are yanking it!”
“I am not!”
The ship jerked again. The stars outside tilted, sliding across the window in a dizzying arc. The alien structure shifted out of frame.
“We’re moving,” Grace said.
“Thanks, Einstein!” you snap at him, not able to control the words leaving your mouth. You almost expect him to snap back at you, but he doesn’t; in fact, you could have sworn you heard a nervous chuckle, a huff leaving his throat. You don’t have time to focus on it as your body begins to unwind.
Your fingers slowly loosened from the chair as you became aware of your breathing again. Too fast still, but no longer shallow enough to hurt. Your pulse was pounding in your ears, but it was no longer the only sound in the universe.
After what felt like several minutes but could not possibly have been, the ship’s movement eased. The stars steadied and the vibration beneath you softened back into the usual hum.
Grace released the joystick. He sat there breathing hard, as his head dropped back against the chair.
“You good?”
You nodded, though it was not entirely true. Your body still felt hollowed out by adrenaline. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a colder part of you was already cataloguing what had happened, how quickly you had panicked, how poorly you had adapted, how little control you truly had. But Grace was looking at you like your answer mattered more than any system status. So you nodded.
“Yeah,” you said, voice rough. “You?”
He looked down at himself, still strapped into the pilot’s chair, then back at the controls he clearly did not understand.
“Oh, thriving.”
The laugh that escaped you was small and mostly shock. Grace laughed again too. He rubbed both hands over his face, forgetting one was still partially caught beneath the restraint and nearly hitting himself with the buckle.
“Gosh—” he said into his palms. “That—that was close.”
You let out another unsteady breath. The space between you and him felt changed again, altered by panic and proximity. It should not have been comforting; the sight of him frightened, but it was. You didn’t like the idea of him afraid, the notion hollowing out your stomach. But you couldn’t deny it, Dr Grace was brave. Possibly braver than yourself right now.
He was afraid and still here, looking back at you, trying to turn terror into a sequence of solvable problems because that is just what Grace did. You didn’t know why he made everything feel survivable, only that you were unbearably grateful he was beside you. You looked at his hands on the chair, still containing an unsteady edge. He noticed you noticing and immediately folded one over the other, as if that hid anything.
You opened your mouth to tell him some reassurance, some kind words in perhaps the greatest hour of need. That was until there was more movement that crossed the far window.
No.
“Grace.”
He did not hear you at first. He was tugging at the buckle, trying to free himself, still turned half away.Something massive entered the edge of the window, dark lattice catching the light.
“Grace.”
He looked back at you with a lopsided smile, that was until he followed your eye line. The smile vanished from his face as the foreign structure moved into view.
“Blip-A detected.”
“Oh, for fuck’s—”
Not on your watch.
You took matters into your own hands as you lunged toward the control stick, shoving yourself out of the chair hard. The strap across your chest yanked you back, pain flaring along your collarbone. You swore again, dragged yourself loose, and grabbed the console with both hands.
Grace’s head snapped toward you. “What do they want?”
“If you ask me one more question about this, I swear to God—”
You closed your hand around the control before he could answer as the ship responded immediately. The Hail Mary roared back awake, the low mechanical vibration rising up through the chair, through the console, through your bones. The foreign structure slid out of view once more as the ship jerked away.
“Erratic movement detected,” Mary said.
“Oh, you can fuck right off, Mary.”
Beside you, Grace made the correct decision to stay silent.
Smart man.
You pushed the stick farther than you meant to. Your stomach rolled. Your knees hit the underside of the console. Pain sparked up your leg, but you kept your grip.
Anywhere but here.
That was the only strategy left in your head.
You angled the ship away from the structure as best you could, though best was generous. You did not know what you were doing. You did not know if the direction mattered. You did not know whether you were piloting the Hail Mary to safety or directly into some other catastrophic object hidden in the dark.
A shadow moved at the edge of it again.
“It’s still following,” Grace said.
“I got that.”
“It's not changing course.”
"I heard you."
"I'm just saying—"
“What are you saying, Grace?”
Your breath had gone shallow again. The control stick felt slick beneath your palm. Sweat, probably. Fear, definitely. Grace’s eyes moved from you to the window and back.
“I’m saying we should stop the ship.”
Yeah, right.
“We are not stopping the ship.”
“It’s just going to keep following us.”
“Yes,” you snapped. “And potentially enslave and kill us.”
His expression shifted, and you felt a tinge of resentment creep up the back of your spine. He said nothing as he reached across the console.
“Grace, don't!—”
His hand closed over yours, firmly enough that the movement stopped. His fingers slid between your grip and the control, lifting your hand away as he took the stick from you with his other hand.
Your wrist turned against his hold and every practical part of you rejected the idea of being physically moved aside, especially now, especially here, especially when the thing outside had already proved it could track you. But he did not even seem to notice that he was still holding you; his attention had gone to the window.
His hand kept yours folded in his own, your fingers trapped against his palm while he took the control. He leaned forward in the pilot’s chair, eyes fixed on the foreign structure, jaw tight with concentration. His breathing was still too fast, but his movements were suddenly, impossibly careful.
He nudged the stick forward.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then he stopped entirely. You stared at him, still breathing hard, your hand still locked in his.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing something.”
You could barely believe what you were hearing, not dignifying him with a verbal response as your hand quivered in his own. The silence filled every part of the control room, pressing against the walls, stretching out through the window, out into the impossible space between you and the thing that had followed.
Then the foreign structure moved.
Once.
Stopped.
Twice.
Stopped.
Three times.
It settled again beyond the window, enormous and silent and your grip went slack inside his. Grace turned his head slowly toward you.
“That was...” Grace began.
Deliberate. It was deliberate.
Your throat tightened.
No. No, no, no.
Deliberate meant choice. Observation. Response. Deliberate meant something inside that massive dark lattice had seen you move and answered in kind. It meant agency. Intelligence. Interest.
Interest could become curiosity. Curiosity could become dissection.
“We don’t know anything,” you said quickly. “We don’t know its threat capacity, or if it has weapons, if that was mimicry or warning behaviour. We don’t know if it recognises the ship as occupied or if it thinks we’re a machine, or prey, or a contaminant, or—”
“Hey—”
“—or an invasive object. If it has the technological capacity to approach and match course, it almost certainly has the capacity to disable us. If they can build that, they can breach this. We have no diplomatic framework. We don’t even have a shared sensory assumption, Grace! They might not hear! They might not see the way we see! They might not even conceptualise us as alive—”
“Hey, hold on—”
“And first contact scenarios—God, even human contact scenarios—are statistically terrible when there is an asymmetry of power. We are trapped in a sealed vessel with limited manoeuvrability and no possibility of external intervention. If this turns hostile, there is nowhere to run!”
Your voice broke on the last word. You blinked hard, furious with yourself, but the tears had already gathered. They did not fall as you would not let them. You had some standards left, even at the end of the universe.
He could feel the fear radiating off you, the adrenaline pulsing through your veins. He unbuckled the restraint properly this time and pushed himself out of the pilot’s chair. He moved slowly, one hand braced against the console so he would not float into you by accident, the other still locked in yours. You could see him choosing each movement.
“Listen to me,” he said.
You shook your head once.
“No, I—”
“Listen to me,” he repeated, still gentle. “I know. Okay? I know this is—this is possibly the worst case scenario, but this is what we came here for.”
He nodded toward the window, toward the vast shape outside, toward the impossible thing that had followed and answered.
“Not that, specifically. I really hope nobody planned for that and forgot to leave us a note, because that would be a major oversight.” He swallowed. “But problems, big ones, that’s why we’re here. To find something we don’t understand and figure out how it works.”
The panic did not vanish. It remained inside you, pacing the edges of your ribs. But his voice did something to it. Grace drifted closer by inches, stopping at the edge of your reach.
“We don’t know if they’re hostile,” he said. “We don’t know if they’re friendly either. They could have attacked us. They could have done... whatever they do. I don’t know. Vaporised us?”
“Grace.”
Not the time.
“Right. Sorry.” He breathed out. “The point is, they responded. That means communication might be possible.”
“Or manipulation.”
“Yes.”
“Or containment.”
“Yes.”
“Or a display of dominance.”
“Okay, yes—” he said again, and this time his voice was very quiet. “But it might also be hello. Did you think that?”
You looked away from him, the foreign structure hanging there.
“We might be killed.” The words that left your mouth came out small, small but soaked with truth.
When you looked back, the look on his face hollowed something in you. Something older than the last ten minutes, though you knew that was impossible. He gave you the saddest smile.
“We’re going to die out here anyway.”
He said it so gently, almost like an apology. Like he had known for a while and had been waiting for the right moment. You searched his face for the fear you expected to find, but there was only resignation. It hurt more than fear would have.
“What?” You stuttered.
Grace looked down, his lashes lowering behind his lenses.
“Not long ago,” he said, answering the question you had not yet managed to ask properly. “I figured it out not long ago.”
Your heart sank so fast it felt physical.
“When, though?”
He rubbed one hand against the back of his neck, suddenly unable to look at you properly.
“It came to me a little more than a day ago, by Earth time at least”
The guilt sat heavy on your chest as you stared at him, round eyes staring right back into yours.
“Grace—”
His hand was still holding yours.
“Thank you,” he said, giving your fingers a light squeeze. The guilt sharpened so suddenly you almost pulled away.
“Huh?”
He looked at your joined hands rather than your face.
“For letting me believe we had a bit more of a chance.” His thumb shifted once, barely there. “No matter how short.”
Grace seemed to understand, or maybe he simply chose not to address it. He held your hand for one more second, then slowly let go. The cold that replaced him was immediate. He turned back toward the console, drawing in a breath that shook only at the very end.
“Okay,” he said. “Task at hand.”
You nodded, though your throat still felt tight.
“Task at hand,” you repeated.
He settled back into the pilot’s chair and you did the same beside him. Beyond the window, the alien structure remained in position, waiting.
“Let’s leave it,” he said.
You looked over. He did not look confident. If he had tried to look heroic, you might have disliked him for it.
“We can see what they want,” he continued. “If they wanted to hurt us immediately, I think we’d already be hurt. So... maybe we don’t make any sudden moves? Maybe we watch.”
“And if watching gets us killed?”
“Then I will feel very silly.”
You huffed despite yourself. He glanced over, and something in his face warmed for half a second before he turned quickly back to the screen.
“Okay,” he muttered, fingers moving across the controls now with more intention.
“Mary, show position of Blip-A.”
The display changed and a scatter of data appeared across the screen, most of it meaningless to you. Grace leaned forward, eyes narrowing as lines and numbers reflected in his lenses. He tapped one part of the display, then another, muttering under his breath.
“Thanks, Mary. Can we get a—wait—”
You straightened.
“What?”
He lifted one hand, not looking away from the screen.
“Hey. Wait.”
“What is it!?”
“There’s something happening.”
You followed his gaze to the window. At first you saw nothing except the same massive structure, the same layered darkness, the same glow along its ridges. Then a section of the lattice shifted.
A smaller shape detached from the vast body and moved outward, separating itself from the darkness like a splinter of night coming loose. It was difficult to track against the black, but once you saw it, you could not stop seeing it.
“Blip-B detected.”
Grace went very still as you turned to him.
“Current distance from Hail Mary is eight hundred metres,” Mary said.
Your heart had already started its violent climb again, but the panic had changed shape now.
“Lab?” you asked.
“Airlock first,” he said quickly. “Maybe. Or observation. Or—actually, I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions.”
“Brilliant.” You sighed as you followed him, leaving the control room behind you both.
The ship never truly went quiet. Even at this hour, long after most of its temporary inhabitants had surrendered themselves to whatever passed for sleep aboard a military vessel. Pipes shuddered somewhere behind the narrow metal panels. Every few minutes, the structure gave an aching groan.
You sat upright against the headboard, freshly showered and dressed for bed, with an open book resting across your lap. You had been reading the same paragraph for nearly fifteen minutes.
Your eyes continued to pass dutifully over the words, but your attention remained fixed on the corridor beyond your door. Each distant footfall made your gaze lift from the page. Each time they faded in another direction, you returned to the beginning of the paragraph and pretended you had ever cared how it ended.
Changing rooms had been your suggestion.
It had not been difficult to arrange. You had mentioned to Stratt that closer proximity would make your work easier, and she had approved the move before you had finished explaining it. There had been no discussion of comfort or convenience. Stratt did not care where anyone slept, provided they woke somewhere useful.
Grace was useful.
He was not quite a loose cannon. Loose cannons were unpredictable because they lacked conviction; Grace, on the other hand, had far too much of it. His objections were principled and profoundly inconvenient. He was unused to governments and the particular arithmetic required of those operating at their highest levels. He understood sacrifice perfectly well in theory, but he had not yet learned how the greater good could function in reality.
His morals remained painfully clean, which might have been admirable under different circumstances. Here, with the world ending around you, it made him dangerous.
Grace’s mind was indispensable to the mission, which meant his cooperation could not be left to chance, and fortunately, you had always been good at making friends.
Dr Ryland Grace, with his nervous jokes and poorly concealed suspicion of authority, would hardly be your most difficult assignment. He was already warming to you. A well-timed smile here, an honest answer there. A shared look across the room whenever Stratt issued a particularly ruthless command. Nothing excessive.
People trusted those they encountered in unguarded moments. Late at night. Early in the morning. Half-dressed, half-awake, too tired to remember that every conversation revealed something. And so you had moved into the room beside his.
You turned another page without reading it as footsteps sounded at the far end of the corridor. Your gaze lifted.
They were heavier than usual, each one landing against the metal floor. The pace was slow and uneven, belonging to someone whose body had continued moving long after the mind controlling it had begun begging for bed. Only one person aboard would fit the criteria in such proximity.
You closed the book and placed it on the bedside table as the footsteps drew nearer. You climbed from the bed, moving quickly but quietly toward the door. Before opening it, you paused to glance down at yourself. Matching pyjamas. Soft fabric. Your hair was loose, your face bare.
Perfect.
You waited until the footsteps reached the neighbouring door before you opened yours. Grace was clearly startled at your presence.
It was a muted reaction, dulled by exhaustion: his shoulders jerked upward and several papers shifted precariously in his arms. He caught them against his chest before they could escape, pinning the bundle beneath one forearm while a tablet remained awkwardly tucked beneath the other.
He looked terrible.
His clothes were rumpled, his glasses sat slightly crooked across his nose, and his hair appeared to have endured repeated attacks from his own hands. Shadows had settled beneath his eyes. Recognition softened his face.
“Oh,” he said. "It's you?"
A small smile appeared, the tension around his mouth eased; his shoulders lowered slightly. He looked almost relieved to find you standing there. Interesting.
“Hi,” you said, allowing a soft laugh to colour the word. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”
“You were waiting for me?”
There was something endearingly hopeful beneath the question. He attempted to hide it by adjusting the papers in his arms, but the movement only made him look more awkward. You giggled again, lowering your gaze.
“Kind of. Stalker-ish, right?”
“Kinda,” he agreed, chuckling.
His eyes remained on you a moment before he glanced between your open door and the one beside it.
“So… are we neighbours?”
“Yeah.” You leaned lightly against the doorframe. “Something was going wrong in my room, so I got reassigned here.”
The lie came easily.
“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “Well, I promise to keep the noise to a minimum, neighbour.”
“Same here.”
Silence settled between you. His gaze dipped toward your room behind you, then returned to your face. He looked too tired to disguise the faint colour rising into his cheeks.
“Are you doing okay?” you asked.
Grace released a short laugh and shook his head. One hand rose to push through his hair, worsening its already considerable disarray. The movement nearly cost him several pages.
“I don’t really know anymore,” he admitted. “It’s a bit of an adjustment.”
Understatement seemed to be one of his preferred forms of self-preservation.
You nodded slowly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Grace glanced toward your room before looking back at you. The opening you had been waiting for.
You softened your posture and stepped slightly aside, allowing him a glimpse into your space. The small lamp cast a pool of warm light across the bed. Beside it sat two mugs, along with the small collection of snacks you had spent the afternoon acquiring.
A coincidence, arranged down to the last detail.
“If you wanted to come in for a chat,” you said, making the invitation sound spontaneous, “I have tea. And a few snacks, if you wanted to talk about everything.”
Grace looked past you into the room. His exhaustion briefly gave way to startled uncertainty, as though you had offered him access to a private luxury rather than a cup of tea several metres from where he slept.
“Are—are you allowed to do that?”
You laughed. It was such a Grace question. The world was ending, the ship was carrying several of the most powerful people alive, and he remained concerned that visiting the room next door might violate some regulation.
“I’m second-in-command,” you reminded him, stepping farther aside. “I can pretty much do anything I like.”
Grace hesitated before stepping inside. You shut the door behind you both, letting the latch click softly into place. He turned at once, eyes moving around the space, taking in the bed, the plain metal walls, the small desk in the corner, the little wardrobe. There was very little to see.
The ship had not exactly been built with warmth in mind. Still, you had managed a few things. A folded jumper over the back of the chair. A scarf abandoned near the end of the bed. Books stacked unevenly on the bedside table, several of them already marked with slips of paper. Grace’s gaze settled on the books for a moment longer than the rest. Of course it did. Typical academic.
You brushed past him before he could stare too closely and crossed to the small table in the corner, where the kettle sat. The movement was casual as you pressed the switch down, listening as it began its mechanical bubble, glancing back at him over your shoulder.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he said, still looking around, papers held awkwardly against his chest.
You chuckled before you could stop yourself. A real one, strangely.
“It’s what I could do on short notice.” You reached for the small box of teabags and held one up between two fingers for him to see. “Is chamomile fine?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly. “That’s perfect, actually.”
His eyes flicked once more over the room before he wandered toward the table and chairs, careful not to touch anything without permission. Even now, half-dead on his feet, he still was measured in your space.
He gestured to the chair. “May I?”
“Of course.”
You were, despite yourself, pleasantly surprised by the manners.
“Make yourself at home,” you said, turning back to the mugs. “Or… at least as at home as you can.”
He chuckled as he sat, the sound tired but genuine. “I’ll try my best.”
You poured the tea slowly, letting the steam rise between you as he sat down, placing his papers on the table in front. Chamomile was not your favourite, but it suited the moment. The kind of thing a person drank when they wanted to be soft. You slid one mug across toward him.
“You miss San Francisco?”
An easy conversation starter, and more about his past.
He looked down at the tea, then let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I really do.”
You kept quiet. It was one of the easiest ways to make people continue. Silence made people nervous, and most rushed to fill it, spilling things they would have kept contained. Grace took the bait without even noticing there had been a hook.
“It was kind of a big change, you know?” He wrapped both hands around the mug, not drinking yet. “One minute I’m in the classroom and then…”
“You’re accosted on your way home?” you supplied, teasing lightly.
“Yeah, pretty much—” He paused, blinking as the thought caught up with him. “Wait. Were you there?”
You giggled at that and crossed one leg over the other beneath the table, leaning just slightly closer.
“I was in the car when Stratt approached you,” you admitted. “She thought it would be less intimidating if only one of us went.”
He stared at you. “And she was the less intimidating option?”
Another laugh escaped you, smaller this time. “Are you saying you would have preferred me?”
“Yeah,” he said, the honesty leaving him before he could catch it. You watched the realisation hit him a moment later. His eyes widened slightly behind his glasses, colour rising along his cheekbones as he looked down into his tea as though the answer might have been there.
“Uh, I mean—” he began quickly. “You—you just have a way with people. More than her—I’m not saying she doesn’t, I mean. She has a certain way with people, too? It’s just—it’s effective! It’s certainly effective in some regards, but you’re—”
You smiled, and his words immediately cut off. Interesting.
“She can be cold sometimes,” you admitted, giving him an escape route before embarrassment swallowed him whole. “But I wouldn’t have anyone else in charge.”You turned your mug between your hands. “Did you know she waited outside my house for nearly an hour before I got home? I nearly reversed into her SUV to make a clean getaway.”
This would be safe to share.
“Were you scared?” he asked.
The question was soft as you considered telling another half-truth. You udecided against it in that moment.
“More annoyed,” you said. “I don’t enjoy the performance of threat.”
Grace’s brows lifted faintly. “You’d hate me as a teacher, then.”
“Oh?” You looked at him over the rim of your mug. “How so, Dr Grace?”
Something changed in his face then. His eyes shifted away from you, his expression going distant around the edges, softened by a memory that belonged somewhere warmer than this ship. A classroom, perhaps. Sunlight through windows with bad drawings on a board, multiple children asking impossible questions.
Nostalgia. Dangerous, if handled poorly. Useful, if handled well.
“Well,” he said, setting the mug down, “I’ve found that the only way to get them to behave is to pretend you’re going to do something. I have a warning system.”
“A warning system?” you asked, smiling as the image arrived before he had even described it. “A three-strikes-and-you’re-out sort of thing?”
“No, I’m not that predictable.”
Wasn’t he?
Grace sat up a little, animated despite himself. “It’s called the Doom Comet.”
You blinked. “The Doom Comet?”
“Yes. Very official.” He lifted one hand, already beginning to get lost in the explanation. “I draw a comet on the board at the beginning of class.”
You found yourself smiling. This is going to be good, you can feel it.
“Every time the class gets too loud, the Doom Comet moves closer to Earth. First warning, it enters the solar system. Second warning, it passes Mars. Third warning, it reaches the moon.”
“And what happens when it hits Earth?” you asked.
“Well, that’s the thing.” Grace leaned in a fraction, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “It never hits Earth.”
“Never?”
“No. That would be irresponsible teaching.” He looked genuinely concerned by the idea. “But if it gets close enough, then I have to pause the lesson and give a very dramatic speech about how humanity’s future depends on everyone opening their textbooks to page forty-seven.”
You laughed then as his face warmed at the sound, his mouth lifting.
“And that works?”
“Shockingly well,” he said. “Middle schoolers have very strong opinions about hypothetical extinction events.”
“I imagine they do.”
“They take it seriously. One time a student asked if the comet could be redirected with enough collective good behaviour.” He looked faintly proud. “So obviously we had to discuss orbital mechanics.”
“Obviously.”
“And then they were quiet for twelve whole minutes.” He shook his head, eyes soft with the memory. “It was quite beautiful.”
You watched him carefully. This was what Stratt had meant, whether she knew it or not. This was the problem with Grace. He did not think of children as future statistics or useful minds or human capital waiting to mature. He thought of them as noisy, ridiculous little people capable of caring whether a chalk comet destroyed a badly drawn Earth. That sort of decency was difficult to move around, especially when you held some admiration for it.
“And what happens if you get to the end of your tether? For real this time,” you asked. “Detention? Suspension?”
“Gosh, no.” He looked almost offended. “I don’t think I handed out a single detention in two years, actually.”
Huh. Two years was a long time.
Children, in your experience, respected very little on principle. Authority was usually tested, mocked, negotiated with, or plain ignored. If Grace had made it years without handing out a single detention, then either his students liked him very much, or he possessed a level of patience that should have been studied.
You leaned back in your chair, letting the mug rest between your hands as you looked at him properly. He had relaxed since entering your room, though not completely. One knee had angled beneath the table, glasses slipping down his nose again. He seemed unaware of it.
“I’m impressed,” you told him honestly. “I feel like if I had you as a teacher, I would have paid a lot more attention in class.”
Grace smiled at that. “I try my best.”
It should not have been charming. He shifted in his seat, rearranging the papers to give his hands something to do. A few corners had bent during the walk over, and he smoothed them with the side of his hand before glancing back at you. He seemed nervous.
“I bet your work is far more compelling than my own,” he told you. “I mean, what was it you said you did again? A consultant on…”
“Criminal Behaviour and Cognitive Analysis,” you finished for him. “But as I said, I’m just a profiler.”
“No, you’re not,” he looked at you over the rim of his mug, smile still there but gentler now. “You’re not just anything. People don’t get pulled into something like this by accident.” He seemed to consider that, then added, “Well. I did. But that’s different. I was ambushed by a terrifying woman in a parking lot.”
You laughed softly.
“My point is,” he continued, lifting one finger as if lecturing a classroom, “you hardly got here without merit. It’s like I tell my kids: accuracy matters. That includes accurate self-reporting. If you did something well, you’re allowed to say so. ”
A laugh escaped you before you could smooth it into something more useful.
“I basically get called for advice,” you said. “Essentially. Behavioural threat assessments, negotiation strategy, suspect modelling, witness reliability, that sort of thing.”
He leaned forward a little. “That sort of thing sounds like quite a lot of things.”
You shrugged. “Do you remember the Larkspur Interception?”
His expression shifted at once. “The embassy thing?”
“That was one version of it.”
“The one with the biochemical threat?” he asked. “That was you?”
“Not…. entirely me.”
Grace stared as you took a sip of tea, buying yourself a second. Chamomile was a poor substitute for wine, but at this hour, on this ship, in this crisis, one learned to be grateful for mediocrity.
“I was brought in when negotiations stalled,” you said. “They had a man inside who was threatening to release a nerve agent into the ventilation system unless several political prisoners were freed by midnight. Everyone thought he was ideologically driven.”
Grace’s eyes had gone wide behind his glasses. “He wasn’t?”
“No.” You set the mug down. “He was humiliated. He had attached himself to ideology, but the core wound was personal. He wanted to be witnessed. Admired, if he could manage it.”
Grace was silent now. You gave him a faint smile.
“Men with martyr complexes are usually much less mysterious than they’d like to believe.”
A startled little laugh left him, then vanished beneath his fascination.
“So what did you do?”
“I told them to stop negotiating with his politics and start negotiating with his pride.”
“That worked?”
“It bought us forty-seven minutes.” You tilted your head slightly. “Which was enough time for the response team to breach the west service corridor and arrest him before he could open the canister.”
You left out the uglier parts. The forged implication that one of his allies had betrayed him. The media leak that had made him believe his public image was already collapsing. The way you had used his sister’s recorded voice not to comfort him, but to fracture him at precisely the right moment. Those details were locked behind contracts, reports, official secrets, and the very understanding that some truths served no one when spoken aloud. Grace was still looking at you as though you had hung the moon.
“Wow,” he said.
You looked down. “It was messy.”
“That’s like—I mean…” He shook his head once, unable to arrange the sentence. “I can see why you were chosen for the mission.”
“Stratt needed someone used to handling a room,” you said casually.
“You do more than that.”
His fingers were wrapped around his mug, both hands holding it for warmth despite the room being neither cold nor comfortable enough to justify it. The exhaustion around his eyes made him look almost boyish, which was absurd given the scale of the work sitting beside his elbow.
“I, for one, am relieved you’re on this mission,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” You had meant it lightly, but curiosity crept in despite you. A dangerous indulgence. “Why?”
“Because…” He looked down, searching for the correct words. “I don’t know. You basically put your neck on the line to make sure people are safe. That’s humanitarian.”
Humanitarian. That was one way to put it.
It was an optimistic way of describing what you did, but far too generous. You wondered what he would say if he knew the rest. If he read the files. If he knew whose names had been sacrificed, whose careers had been ruined, whose loyalty had been exaggerated or erased because it made an operation cleaner. If he knew how often you had chosen the least catastrophic cruelty and called it success because no better option had survived contact with reality.
You doubted he would look at you the same way if he heard half the things you had signed off on.
“Thank you, Grace,” you said. Your voice was softer than you intended. “That means a lot from you,” you added. “But I think your job is far more important in the grand scheme of things.”
Once again, you were not lying.
Without people like him, the world became full of people like the ones you were usually called to manage. You had seen what happened when adolescence had no support system, no adult steady enough to make curiosity feel safe. You had read those histories in case files so many times that the pattern had become nauseating. Neglect. Shame. Isolation. Anger given nowhere clean to go. His job was foundational.
Grace looked down, the smile returning slowly, touched now with something private.
“I like to think of it that way. I mean, when I took up teaching, I never knew how attached I could get,” he said as you could see the classroom return to him. “I felt real bad when I left the kids behind—not like I had much of a choice.”
His eyes flicked up to yours with a teasing look. You rolled your eyes and giggled.
“I’m just saying! There was some very forceful recruitment involved.” He took another sip of tea. “But I hope I’m doing my part. I always wanted to create a better world, even when I was in academia. I wanted people to think outside the box. Ask strange questions. Not be scared of being wrong for once.”
You watched the movement of his thumb along the side of the mug.
“I want my kids not to be scared to grow up,” he said, quieter now. “I want them to look forward to something. To believe that anything is possible.”
The room seemed to still around that. Outside the door, the ship continued, but here was only you and Grace and the impossible sincerity of his tired eyes.
“Anything is possible,” you said.
The hope in his expression faltered at the edges, thinning into something almost melancholy.
“I really hope you’re right,” he said. He stared into the mug a moment longer. “I really hope you’re right.”
He finished the last of his tea and set the mug down, careful not to make too much noise. The gesture felt unnecessarily considerate.
“I really should be getting to sleep,” he said with a sigh.
You could tell he did not want to leave. It was there in the way his hand lingered, the way his eyes drifted once more to the books by your bed, the way his body seemed to prepare itself for standing without actually committing to it. More concerning was the fact that you did not particularly want him to leave either.
“I’ve got to be up in what…” He squinted slightly, calculating with visible pain. “Four—no. Five hours?”
You nodded. “My schedule is about the same.”
“Right.” He grimaced. “At least we're in the same boat.”
You both giggled at his pun. Damn him.
Grace gathered his papers from the table, tapping the edges into a stack. You stood as he did, the two of you moved toward the door, close enough that his shoulder almost brushed yours. He paused before you opened it, looking suddenly as though several thoughts had collided at once and none of them had survived intact.
“If you need anything,” he said, then stopped. “Uh, my door is always open as well. I’m a light sleeper, so if you need anything—I mean, it’ll probably be the other way around because you kind of have everything here or could have—“ He glanced back at the room. “But I guess what I’m trying to say is…”
He sighed at himself. You watched him with an expression you hoped looked amused rather than affected.
“I’m next door if you need me,” he decided.
Your chest tightened.
“Thank you.” The words were gentler than planned as they left your lips. “Genuinely,” you added. “Sometimes it’s nice to have someone to confide in.”
The feeling moved then. You felt it beneath the ribs, the internal flinch. There were worse kinds of deception; you had used almost all of them. So why was this one hurting?
Grace nodded, relieved by the sincerity he believed he had been given.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I think too. Problem shared, problem halved.”
You leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Another one of your teaching mantras?”
“It hasn’t failed me so far.”
He lifted one hand in a small wave, the gesture made awkward by the papers. He turned toward the neighbouring door, walking the short distance with tired steps. You remained in your doorway, leaning out slightly to watch him go.
He reached his room and paused with one hand on the handle. He looked back at you. His face was softened by exhaustion, but there was something else there.The dangerous warmth of a man who believed he had found an ally in a place where allies were rare. He smiled and stepped inside, and his door shut.
You closed yours a moment later, the room changing at once.
Without him in it, the space looked bare again. The books became props and the tea became evidence. The carefully softened bed, the open invitation—all of it returned to its original shape.
The strategy.
You stood with your back against the door and felt the small ball in your stomach tighten. You did not want to name it guilt.
You had grown too much in your career for something as silly as that. Guilt held people back. It tampered with clean decisions, and you had never had patience for people who confused remorse with morality.
Grace was different from the targets, profiles, ministers, insurgents, ideologues, liars, grieving fathers, ambitious cowards, and political animals you had dealt with before. You were used to dangerous people. People who would sell friends, family, countries, principles, anything at all for the chance to do damage.
Ryland Grace did not seem capable of that.
You let your head fall back against the door with a dull thud and dragged both hands over your face, pressing your fingers into the ache that had settled behind your eyes.
Ryland Grace was going to be difficult.
He spoke about his students like they were the whole point of the future. He asked permission to sit down. He looked at you as though you were not a weapon Stratt had placed neatly in his path, but a person sitting across from him in the middle of the night with tea cooling between her hands.
He was earnest and unguarded and painfully, ridiculously good.
And you were going to have to get inside him anyway, it was a direct order after all.
a/n: after two weeks it is finally finished! im really excited about the next chapter omg, but i dont want to spoil anything
hope you enjoy, as always let me know what you think. work has been a lot as well as the second heatwave in the uk, but alas i have monday and tuesday off next week, so hopefully i can get another part out!!
summary: something enormous waits outside the window, watching. grace, somehow, seems to know you better than you know yourself. what you don’t understand is why guilt, a feeling you abandoned years ago, has suddenly found its way back in.
Your body moved before reason developed, with little dignity in the zero gravity. Your hand was still gripping Grace’s sleeve, and the next thing you knew, you were pushing away from the console beside him, floating toward the window with more force than intended. Your shoulder struck his halfway there and Grace caught your arm instinctively, his fingers closing around your sleeve before both of you drifted sideways together.
The window was ahead, and Grace’s hand found a wall to grip, halting both of you with a soft jerk. You ended up suspended beside him, shoulder to shoulder in midair, the two of you pressed close.
Outside, the stars were disappearing. Something was crossing in front of them, blotting them out in sections, a shape moving through the black.
Your mind tried to give it ordinary language. A vessel, some kind of structure. It was rectangular, except it wasn’t. The longer you stared, the less your eyes could settle on its boundaries. It had edges, but the edges seemed layered, built in sections that overlapped and receded and angled away from each other in ways that made the shape feel bigger than the outline suggested. A lattice ran across its exterior, dark and earthen in colour, something like rust or clay or old bark, though earth had no place here. Earth was very far away.
The structure caught the light along its ridges. Thin lines of pale gold travelled through the layers as it turned, each piece glinting and vanishing again, the whole thing glowing faintly against the pitch black. It did not look manufactured in the way human machines looked manufactured. No comforting seams where one might imagine hands, human hands, putting one section against another.
And yet it had been made.
It had been made.
No natural object moved like that.
Intelligent life.
Beside you, Grace had gone completely still. You could feel him rather than see him properly, the line of his arm brushing yours, the slight tremor in his breathing. He was looking at it too, his face reflected faintly in the thick glass, eyes wide behind his crooked glasses.
That object was larger than the Hail Mary.
Your instincts came up automatically. Distance. Speed. Direction. Relative size. Escape routes. Intent. Behavioural indicators. Patterns of aggression. Likely escalation. Your brain reached for the old pathways and found only empty space.
You could deal with threats when they had bodies. You could deal with government officials in sharp coats or operatives lying badly under fluorescent light. You could follow micro-expressions, inconsistencies, the thousand tiny betrayals of men who thought themselves unreadable.
This was not that. This was a thing built by something you had no category for. You felt your breath shorten.
Not fast enough.
The ship continued around you as the foreign structure floated in its slow approach, larger and larger and larger until it felt like the whole window had become an eye and you were the thing being watched through it.
You were in space.
You were in space.
You were in space, in a stolen body with a stolen memory, beside a man you barely knew and trusted too much already, while something impossible moved toward you through the dark.
Your fingers tightened around the edge of the window frame. The metal dug into your palm. The pain was useful. Pain belonged to a body and therefore could be understood.
That thing outside could not be.
Your breath hitched, and humiliation flared through the fear. You were trained for composure. Or you had been. There was nothing in you that knew what to do when the threat had crossed interstellar space.
A hand settled on your shoulder. You flinched anyway, but Grace didn’t remove it. He only held there lightly. You turned your head to look at him.
His eyes were still wide, still frightened. He looked pale beneath the harsh control-room light, his hair floating slightly around his face in weightless strands. He was terrified; anyone could see that. Even without your expertise, you knew fear when it was less than a foot from your face. If you looked close enough, you recognised the subtle hints of concern that painted his fearful expression. Concern that was pointed at you.
You weren’t used to that.
It seemed to surprise him, seeing you like this. He had seen your fear when you first woke, but that had been fear with direction. Fear that could become anger if it needed to.
Grace swallowed. His hand pressed a fraction more firmly against your shoulder.
“Hey,” he said quietly, not sure what else to say in this situation, not that you could blame him. You stared back at him, breathing shallowly.
That was a terrible reassurance.
“Okay,” he said, mostly to himself. “We don’t like this.”
“No,” you managed.
“Okay…”
What else was there to say?
You might have laughed if your throat had not been trying to close. The structure outside continued to move. The last of its momentum vanished until it hung there in space beside you, dark latticework shining faintly.
Waiting.
Grace’s hand slipped from your shoulder as his mind seemed to catch up. Fear was still in his expression, but something had hardened underneath it. A decision, maybe. Or the fragile performance of one. He turned away from the window.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Nope. Absolutely not.”
“Grace?”
He pushed off from the wall. His body moved badly. Too fast at first, then too slow as he overcorrected. Under other circumstances, it might have been funny.
You remained by the window, unable to make yourself look away from the object. It stayed exactly where it was. Grace hauled himself toward the pilot’s chair in the centre of the control room. He moved with visible effort, jaw tight, shoulders stiff. He was trying to look determined. He was also, very obviously, one bad noise away from screaming.
“Alright, Mary,” he said, grabbing the side of the seat and pulling himself into position. “Let’s go.”
The chair accepted him with cold indifference.
“Pilot detected.”
He forced himself down into the seat, one hand gripping the armrest, the other braced against the console.
“Yes,” he said breathlessly. “Pilot detected.”
“Please engage restraint.”
A sharp, irrational anger rose in you. You were beginning to understand Grace’s hostility toward Mary after all.
He fumbled for the straps. His fingers missed the buckle twice before he managed to drag the restraint across his chest. You watched the movement, watched the tremor in his hands, watched the way he pressed his lips together to steady them.
Though the deep haze of fear, he was still trying.
“Pilot detected,” Mary repeated as he clicked the buckle into place.
Grace stared up at the ceiling. “Yes. Pilot detected.”
That pulled your attention from the window at last. His gaze was fixed on you with such absurd conviction that the room seemed to steady around it.
“We’re gonna get out of this,” he reassured both you and himself.
You had no evidence. No plan. No understanding of the controls. And from the looks of it, neither did he. There was a vast alien craft outside the window, and the man promising your survival had already admitted to naming the ship Mary.
But you believed him.
You pushed away from the window and drifted toward the second chair at the side of the control space and caught its back with one hand. Grace had already turned to the console, scanning the panels with growing despair.
“Controls,” he said as he began to fiddle. “Controls. Controls. Controls.”
“Engage spin drive,” Mary said. “Incorrect.”
Grace snatched his hand back as though the console had bitten him.
You pulled yourself fully into the other chair and hooked one hand around the side to stop yourself drifting away. The restraint straps floated uselessly near your shoulder. You ignored them for now, eyes moving over the console in front of him. None of it meant anything.
“Is it this thing?” he muttered. You opened your mouth. Several possible responses presented themselves.
How the hell would I know?
Would you like me to psychologically profile the lever?
Yes, Grace, obviously that’s the correct foreign stick.
“Try it,” you said, voice tighter than intended, “so we can try something else.”
His hand closed around the control and something deep in the belly of the ship locked into place with a heavy mechanical thunk. Your chair jolted sideways beneath you. You slammed one hand against the armrest and the other against the console, catching yourself before your body floated clean out of the seat. Grace made a strangled sound as the restraints held him in place.
“Erratic movement detected,” Mary said.
“Oh, is it?” Grace snapped.
You gripped the chair harder. “Try it smoother!”
“I’m trying!”
“You are yanking it!”
“I am not!”
The ship jerked again. The stars outside tilted, sliding across the window in a dizzying arc. The alien structure shifted out of frame.
“We’re moving,” Grace said.
“Thanks, Einstein!” you snap at him, not able to control the words leaving your mouth. You almost expect him to snap back at you, but he doesn’t; in fact, you could have sworn you heard a nervous chuckle, a huff leaving his throat. You don’t have time to focus on it as your body begins to unwind.
Your fingers slowly loosened from the chair as you became aware of your breathing again. Too fast still, but no longer shallow enough to hurt. Your pulse was pounding in your ears, but it was no longer the only sound in the universe.
After what felt like several minutes but could not possibly have been, the ship’s movement eased. The stars steadied and the vibration beneath you softened back into the usual hum.
Grace released the joystick. He sat there breathing hard, as his head dropped back against the chair.
“You good?”
You nodded, though it was not entirely true. Your body still felt hollowed out by adrenaline. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a colder part of you was already cataloguing what had happened, how quickly you had panicked, how poorly you had adapted, how little control you truly had. But Grace was looking at you like your answer mattered more than any system status. So you nodded.
“Yeah,” you said, voice rough. “You?”
He looked down at himself, still strapped into the pilot’s chair, then back at the controls he clearly did not understand.
“Oh, thriving.”
The laugh that escaped you was small and mostly shock. Grace laughed again too. He rubbed both hands over his face, forgetting one was still partially caught beneath the restraint and nearly hitting himself with the buckle.
“Gosh—” he said into his palms. “That—that was close.”
You let out another unsteady breath. The space between you and him felt changed again, altered by panic and proximity. It should not have been comforting; the sight of him frightened, but it was. You didn’t like the idea of him afraid, the notion hollowing out your stomach. But you couldn’t deny it, Dr Grace was brave. Possibly braver than yourself right now.
He was afraid and still here, looking back at you, trying to turn terror into a sequence of solvable problems because that is just what Grace did. You didn’t know why he made everything feel survivable, only that you were unbearably grateful he was beside you. You looked at his hands on the chair, still containing an unsteady edge. He noticed you noticing and immediately folded one over the other, as if that hid anything.
You opened your mouth to tell him some reassurance, some kind words in perhaps the greatest hour of need. That was until there was more movement that crossed the far window.
No.
“Grace.”
He did not hear you at first. He was tugging at the buckle, trying to free himself, still turned half away.Something massive entered the edge of the window, dark lattice catching the light.
“Grace.”
He looked back at you with a lopsided smile, that was until he followed your eye line. The smile vanished from his face as the foreign structure moved into view.
“Blip-A detected.”
“Oh, for fuck’s—”
Not on your watch.
You took matters into your own hands as you lunged toward the control stick, shoving yourself out of the chair hard. The strap across your chest yanked you back, pain flaring along your collarbone. You swore again, dragged yourself loose, and grabbed the console with both hands.
Grace’s head snapped toward you. “What do they want?”
“If you ask me one more question about this, I swear to God—”
You closed your hand around the control before he could answer as the ship responded immediately. The Hail Mary roared back awake, the low mechanical vibration rising up through the chair, through the console, through your bones. The foreign structure slid out of view once more as the ship jerked away.
“Erratic movement detected,” Mary said.
“Oh, you can fuck right off, Mary.”
Beside you, Grace made the correct decision to stay silent.
Smart man.
You pushed the stick farther than you meant to. Your stomach rolled. Your knees hit the underside of the console. Pain sparked up your leg, but you kept your grip.
Anywhere but here.
That was the only strategy left in your head.
You angled the ship away from the structure as best you could, though best was generous. You did not know what you were doing. You did not know if the direction mattered. You did not know whether you were piloting the Hail Mary to safety or directly into some other catastrophic object hidden in the dark.
A shadow moved at the edge of it again.
“It’s still following,” Grace said.
“I got that.”
“It's not changing course.”
"I heard you."
"I'm just saying—"
“What are you saying, Grace?”
Your breath had gone shallow again. The control stick felt slick beneath your palm. Sweat, probably. Fear, definitely. Grace’s eyes moved from you to the window and back.
“I’m saying we should stop the ship.”
Yeah, right.
“We are not stopping the ship.”
“It’s just going to keep following us.”
“Yes,” you snapped. “And potentially enslave and kill us.”
His expression shifted, and you felt a tinge of resentment creep up the back of your spine. He said nothing as he reached across the console.
“Grace, don't!—”
His hand closed over yours, firmly enough that the movement stopped. His fingers slid between your grip and the control, lifting your hand away as he took the stick from you with his other hand.
Your wrist turned against his hold and every practical part of you rejected the idea of being physically moved aside, especially now, especially here, especially when the thing outside had already proved it could track you. But he did not even seem to notice that he was still holding you; his attention had gone to the window.
His hand kept yours folded in his own, your fingers trapped against his palm while he took the control. He leaned forward in the pilot’s chair, eyes fixed on the foreign structure, jaw tight with concentration. His breathing was still too fast, but his movements were suddenly, impossibly careful.
He nudged the stick forward.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then he stopped entirely. You stared at him, still breathing hard, your hand still locked in his.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing something.”
You could barely believe what you were hearing, not dignifying him with a verbal response as your hand quivered in his own. The silence filled every part of the control room, pressing against the walls, stretching out through the window, out into the impossible space between you and the thing that had followed.
Then the foreign structure moved.
Once.
Stopped.
Twice.
Stopped.
Three times.
It settled again beyond the window, enormous and silent and your grip went slack inside his. Grace turned his head slowly toward you.
“That was...” Grace began.
Deliberate. It was deliberate.
Your throat tightened.
No. No, no, no.
Deliberate meant choice. Observation. Response. Deliberate meant something inside that massive dark lattice had seen you move and answered in kind. It meant agency. Intelligence. Interest.
Interest could become curiosity. Curiosity could become dissection.
“We don’t know anything,” you said quickly. “We don’t know its threat capacity, or if it has weapons, if that was mimicry or warning behaviour. We don’t know if it recognises the ship as occupied or if it thinks we’re a machine, or prey, or a contaminant, or—”
“Hey—”
“—or an invasive object. If it has the technological capacity to approach and match course, it almost certainly has the capacity to disable us. If they can build that, they can breach this. We have no diplomatic framework. We don’t even have a shared sensory assumption, Grace! They might not hear! They might not see the way we see! They might not even conceptualise us as alive—”
“Hey, hold on—”
“And first contact scenarios—God, even human contact scenarios—are statistically terrible when there is an asymmetry of power. We are trapped in a sealed vessel with limited manoeuvrability and no possibility of external intervention. If this turns hostile, there is nowhere to run!”
Your voice broke on the last word. You blinked hard, furious with yourself, but the tears had already gathered. They did not fall as you would not let them. You had some standards left, even at the end of the universe.
He could feel the fear radiating off you, the adrenaline pulsing through your veins. He unbuckled the restraint properly this time and pushed himself out of the pilot’s chair. He moved slowly, one hand braced against the console so he would not float into you by accident, the other still locked in yours. You could see him choosing each movement.
“Listen to me,” he said.
You shook your head once.
“No, I—”
“Listen to me,” he repeated, still gentle. “I know. Okay? I know this is—this is possibly the worst case scenario, but this is what we came here for.”
He nodded toward the window, toward the vast shape outside, toward the impossible thing that had followed and answered.
“Not that, specifically. I really hope nobody planned for that and forgot to leave us a note, because that would be a major oversight.” He swallowed. “But problems, big ones, that’s why we’re here. To find something we don’t understand and figure out how it works.”
The panic did not vanish. It remained inside you, pacing the edges of your ribs. But his voice did something to it. Grace drifted closer by inches, stopping at the edge of your reach.
“We don’t know if they’re hostile,” he said. “We don’t know if they’re friendly either. They could have attacked us. They could have done... whatever they do. I don’t know. Vaporised us?”
“Grace.”
Not the time.
“Right. Sorry.” He breathed out. “The point is, they responded. That means communication might be possible.”
“Or manipulation.”
“Yes.”
“Or containment.”
“Yes.”
“Or a display of dominance.”
“Okay, yes—” he said again, and this time his voice was very quiet. “But it might also be hello. Did you think that?”
You looked away from him, the foreign structure hanging there.
“We might be killed.” The words that left your mouth came out small, small but soaked with truth.
When you looked back, the look on his face hollowed something in you. Something older than the last ten minutes, though you knew that was impossible. He gave you the saddest smile.
“We’re going to die out here anyway.”
He said it so gently, almost like an apology. Like he had known for a while and had been waiting for the right moment. You searched his face for the fear you expected to find, but there was only resignation. It hurt more than fear would have.
“What?” You stuttered.
Grace looked down, his lashes lowering behind his lenses.
“Not long ago,” he said, answering the question you had not yet managed to ask properly. “I figured it out not long ago.”
Your heart sank so fast it felt physical.
“When, though?”
He rubbed one hand against the back of his neck, suddenly unable to look at you properly.
“It came to me a little more than a day ago, by Earth time at least”
The guilt sat heavy on your chest as you stared at him, round eyes staring right back into yours.
“Grace—”
His hand was still holding yours.
“Thank you,” he said, giving your fingers a light squeeze. The guilt sharpened so suddenly you almost pulled away.
“Huh?”
He looked at your joined hands rather than your face.
“For letting me believe we had a bit more of a chance.” His thumb shifted once, barely there. “No matter how short.”
Grace seemed to understand, or maybe he simply chose not to address it. He held your hand for one more second, then slowly let go. The cold that replaced him was immediate. He turned back toward the console, drawing in a breath that shook only at the very end.
“Okay,” he said. “Task at hand.”
You nodded, though your throat still felt tight.
“Task at hand,” you repeated.
He settled back into the pilot’s chair and you did the same beside him. Beyond the window, the alien structure remained in position, waiting.
“Let’s leave it,” he said.
You looked over. He did not look confident. If he had tried to look heroic, you might have disliked him for it.
“We can see what they want,” he continued. “If they wanted to hurt us immediately, I think we’d already be hurt. So... maybe we don’t make any sudden moves? Maybe we watch.”
“And if watching gets us killed?”
“Then I will feel very silly.”
You huffed despite yourself. He glanced over, and something in his face warmed for half a second before he turned quickly back to the screen.
“Okay,” he muttered, fingers moving across the controls now with more intention.
“Mary, show position of Blip-A.”
The display changed and a scatter of data appeared across the screen, most of it meaningless to you. Grace leaned forward, eyes narrowing as lines and numbers reflected in his lenses. He tapped one part of the display, then another, muttering under his breath.
“Thanks, Mary. Can we get a—wait—”
You straightened.
“What?”
He lifted one hand, not looking away from the screen.
“Hey. Wait.”
“What is it!?”
“There’s something happening.”
You followed his gaze to the window. At first you saw nothing except the same massive structure, the same layered darkness, the same glow along its ridges. Then a section of the lattice shifted.
A smaller shape detached from the vast body and moved outward, separating itself from the darkness like a splinter of night coming loose. It was difficult to track against the black, but once you saw it, you could not stop seeing it.
“Blip-B detected.”
Grace went very still as you turned to him.
“Current distance from Hail Mary is eight hundred metres,” Mary said.
Your heart had already started its violent climb again, but the panic had changed shape now.
“Lab?” you asked.
“Airlock first,” he said quickly. “Maybe. Or observation. Or—actually, I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions.”
“Brilliant.” You sighed as you followed him, leaving the control room behind you both.
The ship never truly went quiet. Even at this hour, long after most of its temporary inhabitants had surrendered themselves to whatever passed for sleep aboard a military vessel. Pipes shuddered somewhere behind the narrow metal panels. Every few minutes, the structure gave an aching groan.
You sat upright against the headboard, freshly showered and dressed for bed, with an open book resting across your lap. You had been reading the same paragraph for nearly fifteen minutes.
Your eyes continued to pass dutifully over the words, but your attention remained fixed on the corridor beyond your door. Each distant footfall made your gaze lift from the page. Each time they faded in another direction, you returned to the beginning of the paragraph and pretended you had ever cared how it ended.
Changing rooms had been your suggestion.
It had not been difficult to arrange. You had mentioned to Stratt that closer proximity would make your work easier, and she had approved the move before you had finished explaining it. There had been no discussion of comfort or convenience. Stratt did not care where anyone slept, provided they woke somewhere useful.
Grace was useful.
He was not quite a loose cannon. Loose cannons were unpredictable because they lacked conviction; Grace, on the other hand, had far too much of it. His objections were principled and profoundly inconvenient. He was unused to governments and the particular arithmetic required of those operating at their highest levels. He understood sacrifice perfectly well in theory, but he had not yet learned how the greater good could function in reality.
His morals remained painfully clean, which might have been admirable under different circumstances. Here, with the world ending around you, it made him dangerous.
Grace’s mind was indispensable to the mission, which meant his cooperation could not be left to chance, and fortunately, you had always been good at making friends.
Dr Ryland Grace, with his nervous jokes and poorly concealed suspicion of authority, would hardly be your most difficult assignment. He was already warming to you. A well-timed smile here, an honest answer there. A shared look across the room whenever Stratt issued a particularly ruthless command. Nothing excessive.
People trusted those they encountered in unguarded moments. Late at night. Early in the morning. Half-dressed, half-awake, too tired to remember that every conversation revealed something. And so you had moved into the room beside his.
You turned another page without reading it as footsteps sounded at the far end of the corridor. Your gaze lifted.
They were heavier than usual, each one landing against the metal floor. The pace was slow and uneven, belonging to someone whose body had continued moving long after the mind controlling it had begun begging for bed. Only one person aboard would fit the criteria in such proximity.
You closed the book and placed it on the bedside table as the footsteps drew nearer. You climbed from the bed, moving quickly but quietly toward the door. Before opening it, you paused to glance down at yourself. Matching pyjamas. Soft fabric. Your hair was loose, your face bare.
Perfect.
You waited until the footsteps reached the neighbouring door before you opened yours. Grace was clearly startled at your presence.
It was a muted reaction, dulled by exhaustion: his shoulders jerked upward and several papers shifted precariously in his arms. He caught them against his chest before they could escape, pinning the bundle beneath one forearm while a tablet remained awkwardly tucked beneath the other.
He looked terrible.
His clothes were rumpled, his glasses sat slightly crooked across his nose, and his hair appeared to have endured repeated attacks from his own hands. Shadows had settled beneath his eyes. Recognition softened his face.
“Oh,” he said. "It's you?"
A small smile appeared, the tension around his mouth eased; his shoulders lowered slightly. He looked almost relieved to find you standing there. Interesting.
“Hi,” you said, allowing a soft laugh to colour the word. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”
“You were waiting for me?”
There was something endearingly hopeful beneath the question. He attempted to hide it by adjusting the papers in his arms, but the movement only made him look more awkward. You giggled again, lowering your gaze.
“Kind of. Stalker-ish, right?”
“Kinda,” he agreed, chuckling.
His eyes remained on you a moment before he glanced between your open door and the one beside it.
“So… are we neighbours?”
“Yeah.” You leaned lightly against the doorframe. “Something was going wrong in my room, so I got reassigned here.”
The lie came easily.
“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “Well, I promise to keep the noise to a minimum, neighbour.”
“Same here.”
Silence settled between you. His gaze dipped toward your room behind you, then returned to your face. He looked too tired to disguise the faint colour rising into his cheeks.
“Are you doing okay?” you asked.
Grace released a short laugh and shook his head. One hand rose to push through his hair, worsening its already considerable disarray. The movement nearly cost him several pages.
“I don’t really know anymore,” he admitted. “It’s a bit of an adjustment.”
Understatement seemed to be one of his preferred forms of self-preservation.
You nodded slowly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Grace glanced toward your room before looking back at you. The opening you had been waiting for.
You softened your posture and stepped slightly aside, allowing him a glimpse into your space. The small lamp cast a pool of warm light across the bed. Beside it sat two mugs, along with the small collection of snacks you had spent the afternoon acquiring.
A coincidence, arranged down to the last detail.
“If you wanted to come in for a chat,” you said, making the invitation sound spontaneous, “I have tea. And a few snacks, if you wanted to talk about everything.”
Grace looked past you into the room. His exhaustion briefly gave way to startled uncertainty, as though you had offered him access to a private luxury rather than a cup of tea several metres from where he slept.
“Are—are you allowed to do that?”
You laughed. It was such a Grace question. The world was ending, the ship was carrying several of the most powerful people alive, and he remained concerned that visiting the room next door might violate some regulation.
“I’m second-in-command,” you reminded him, stepping farther aside. “I can pretty much do anything I like.”
Grace hesitated before stepping inside. You shut the door behind you both, letting the latch click softly into place. He turned at once, eyes moving around the space, taking in the bed, the plain metal walls, the small desk in the corner, the little wardrobe. There was very little to see.
The ship had not exactly been built with warmth in mind. Still, you had managed a few things. A folded jumper over the back of the chair. A scarf abandoned near the end of the bed. Books stacked unevenly on the bedside table, several of them already marked with slips of paper. Grace’s gaze settled on the books for a moment longer than the rest. Of course it did. Typical academic.
You brushed past him before he could stare too closely and crossed to the small table in the corner, where the kettle sat. The movement was casual as you pressed the switch down, listening as it began its mechanical bubble, glancing back at him over your shoulder.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he said, still looking around, papers held awkwardly against his chest.
You chuckled before you could stop yourself. A real one, strangely.
“It’s what I could do on short notice.” You reached for the small box of teabags and held one up between two fingers for him to see. “Is chamomile fine?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly. “That’s perfect, actually.”
His eyes flicked once more over the room before he wandered toward the table and chairs, careful not to touch anything without permission. Even now, half-dead on his feet, he still was measured in your space.
He gestured to the chair. “May I?”
“Of course.”
You were, despite yourself, pleasantly surprised by the manners.
“Make yourself at home,” you said, turning back to the mugs. “Or… at least as at home as you can.”
He chuckled as he sat, the sound tired but genuine. “I’ll try my best.”
You poured the tea slowly, letting the steam rise between you as he sat down, placing his papers on the table in front. Chamomile was not your favourite, but it suited the moment. The kind of thing a person drank when they wanted to be soft. You slid one mug across toward him.
“You miss San Francisco?”
An easy conversation starter, and more about his past.
He looked down at the tea, then let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I really do.”
You kept quiet. It was one of the easiest ways to make people continue. Silence made people nervous, and most rushed to fill it, spilling things they would have kept contained. Grace took the bait without even noticing there had been a hook.
“It was kind of a big change, you know?” He wrapped both hands around the mug, not drinking yet. “One minute I’m in the classroom and then…”
“You’re accosted on your way home?” you supplied, teasing lightly.
“Yeah, pretty much—” He paused, blinking as the thought caught up with him. “Wait. Were you there?”
You giggled at that and crossed one leg over the other beneath the table, leaning just slightly closer.
“I was in the car when Stratt approached you,” you admitted. “She thought it would be less intimidating if only one of us went.”
He stared at you. “And she was the less intimidating option?”
Another laugh escaped you, smaller this time. “Are you saying you would have preferred me?”
“Yeah,” he said, the honesty leaving him before he could catch it. You watched the realisation hit him a moment later. His eyes widened slightly behind his glasses, colour rising along his cheekbones as he looked down into his tea as though the answer might have been there.
“Uh, I mean—” he began quickly. “You—you just have a way with people. More than her—I’m not saying she doesn’t, I mean. She has a certain way with people, too? It’s just—it’s effective! It’s certainly effective in some regards, but you’re—”
You smiled, and his words immediately cut off. Interesting.
“She can be cold sometimes,” you admitted, giving him an escape route before embarrassment swallowed him whole. “But I wouldn’t have anyone else in charge.”You turned your mug between your hands. “Did you know she waited outside my house for nearly an hour before I got home? I nearly reversed into her SUV to make a clean getaway.”
This would be safe to share.
“Were you scared?” he asked.
The question was soft as you considered telling another half-truth. You udecided against it in that moment.
“More annoyed,” you said. “I don’t enjoy the performance of threat.”
Grace’s brows lifted faintly. “You’d hate me as a teacher, then.”
“Oh?” You looked at him over the rim of your mug. “How so, Dr Grace?”
Something changed in his face then. His eyes shifted away from you, his expression going distant around the edges, softened by a memory that belonged somewhere warmer than this ship. A classroom, perhaps. Sunlight through windows with bad drawings on a board, multiple children asking impossible questions.
Nostalgia. Dangerous, if handled poorly. Useful, if handled well.
“Well,” he said, setting the mug down, “I’ve found that the only way to get them to behave is to pretend you’re going to do something. I have a warning system.”
“A warning system?” you asked, smiling as the image arrived before he had even described it. “A three-strikes-and-you’re-out sort of thing?”
“No, I’m not that predictable.”
Wasn’t he?
Grace sat up a little, animated despite himself. “It’s called the Doom Comet.”
You blinked. “The Doom Comet?”
“Yes. Very official.” He lifted one hand, already beginning to get lost in the explanation. “I draw a comet on the board at the beginning of class.”
You found yourself smiling. This is going to be good, you can feel it.
“Every time the class gets too loud, the Doom Comet moves closer to Earth. First warning, it enters the solar system. Second warning, it passes Mars. Third warning, it reaches the moon.”
“And what happens when it hits Earth?” you asked.
“Well, that’s the thing.” Grace leaned in a fraction, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “It never hits Earth.”
“Never?”
“No. That would be irresponsible teaching.” He looked genuinely concerned by the idea. “But if it gets close enough, then I have to pause the lesson and give a very dramatic speech about how humanity’s future depends on everyone opening their textbooks to page forty-seven.”
You laughed then as his face warmed at the sound, his mouth lifting.
“And that works?”
“Shockingly well,” he said. “Middle schoolers have very strong opinions about hypothetical extinction events.”
“I imagine they do.”
“They take it seriously. One time a student asked if the comet could be redirected with enough collective good behaviour.” He looked faintly proud. “So obviously we had to discuss orbital mechanics.”
“Obviously.”
“And then they were quiet for twelve whole minutes.” He shook his head, eyes soft with the memory. “It was quite beautiful.”
You watched him carefully. This was what Stratt had meant, whether she knew it or not. This was the problem with Grace. He did not think of children as future statistics or useful minds or human capital waiting to mature. He thought of them as noisy, ridiculous little people capable of caring whether a chalk comet destroyed a badly drawn Earth. That sort of decency was difficult to move around, especially when you held some admiration for it.
“And what happens if you get to the end of your tether? For real this time,” you asked. “Detention? Suspension?”
“Gosh, no.” He looked almost offended. “I don’t think I handed out a single detention in two years, actually.”
Huh. Two years was a long time.
Children, in your experience, respected very little on principle. Authority was usually tested, mocked, negotiated with, or plain ignored. If Grace had made it years without handing out a single detention, then either his students liked him very much, or he possessed a level of patience that should have been studied.
You leaned back in your chair, letting the mug rest between your hands as you looked at him properly. He had relaxed since entering your room, though not completely. One knee had angled beneath the table, glasses slipping down his nose again. He seemed unaware of it.
“I’m impressed,” you told him honestly. “I feel like if I had you as a teacher, I would have paid a lot more attention in class.”
Grace smiled at that. “I try my best.”
It should not have been charming. He shifted in his seat, rearranging the papers to give his hands something to do. A few corners had bent during the walk over, and he smoothed them with the side of his hand before glancing back at you. He seemed nervous.
“I bet your work is far more compelling than my own,” he told you. “I mean, what was it you said you did again? A consultant on…”
“Criminal Behaviour and Cognitive Analysis,” you finished for him. “But as I said, I’m just a profiler.”
“No, you’re not,” he looked at you over the rim of his mug, smile still there but gentler now. “You’re not just anything. People don’t get pulled into something like this by accident.” He seemed to consider that, then added, “Well. I did. But that’s different. I was ambushed by a terrifying woman in a parking lot.”
You laughed softly.
“My point is,” he continued, lifting one finger as if lecturing a classroom, “you hardly got here without merit. It’s like I tell my kids: accuracy matters. That includes accurate self-reporting. If you did something well, you’re allowed to say so. ”
A laugh escaped you before you could smooth it into something more useful.
“I basically get called for advice,” you said. “Essentially. Behavioural threat assessments, negotiation strategy, suspect modelling, witness reliability, that sort of thing.”
He leaned forward a little. “That sort of thing sounds like quite a lot of things.”
You shrugged. “Do you remember the Larkspur Interception?”
His expression shifted at once. “The embassy thing?”
“That was one version of it.”
“The one with the biochemical threat?” he asked. “That was you?”
“Not…. entirely me.”
Grace stared as you took a sip of tea, buying yourself a second. Chamomile was a poor substitute for wine, but at this hour, on this ship, in this crisis, one learned to be grateful for mediocrity.
“I was brought in when negotiations stalled,” you said. “They had a man inside who was threatening to release a nerve agent into the ventilation system unless several political prisoners were freed by midnight. Everyone thought he was ideologically driven.”
Grace’s eyes had gone wide behind his glasses. “He wasn’t?”
“No.” You set the mug down. “He was humiliated. He had attached himself to ideology, but the core wound was personal. He wanted to be witnessed. Admired, if he could manage it.”
Grace was silent now. You gave him a faint smile.
“Men with martyr complexes are usually much less mysterious than they’d like to believe.”
A startled little laugh left him, then vanished beneath his fascination.
“So what did you do?”
“I told them to stop negotiating with his politics and start negotiating with his pride.”
“That worked?”
“It bought us forty-seven minutes.” You tilted your head slightly. “Which was enough time for the response team to breach the west service corridor and arrest him before he could open the canister.”
You left out the uglier parts. The forged implication that one of his allies had betrayed him. The media leak that had made him believe his public image was already collapsing. The way you had used his sister’s recorded voice not to comfort him, but to fracture him at precisely the right moment. Those details were locked behind contracts, reports, official secrets, and the very understanding that some truths served no one when spoken aloud. Grace was still looking at you as though you had hung the moon.
“Wow,” he said.
You looked down. “It was messy.”
“That’s like—I mean…” He shook his head once, unable to arrange the sentence. “I can see why you were chosen for the mission.”
“Stratt needed someone used to handling a room,” you said casually.
“You do more than that.”
His fingers were wrapped around his mug, both hands holding it for warmth despite the room being neither cold nor comfortable enough to justify it. The exhaustion around his eyes made him look almost boyish, which was absurd given the scale of the work sitting beside his elbow.
“I, for one, am relieved you’re on this mission,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” You had meant it lightly, but curiosity crept in despite you. A dangerous indulgence. “Why?”
“Because…” He looked down, searching for the correct words. “I don’t know. You basically put your neck on the line to make sure people are safe. That’s humanitarian.”
Humanitarian. That was one way to put it.
It was an optimistic way of describing what you did, but far too generous. You wondered what he would say if he knew the rest. If he read the files. If he knew whose names had been sacrificed, whose careers had been ruined, whose loyalty had been exaggerated or erased because it made an operation cleaner. If he knew how often you had chosen the least catastrophic cruelty and called it success because no better option had survived contact with reality.
You doubted he would look at you the same way if he heard half the things you had signed off on.
“Thank you, Grace,” you said. Your voice was softer than you intended. “That means a lot from you,” you added. “But I think your job is far more important in the grand scheme of things.”
Once again, you were not lying.
Without people like him, the world became full of people like the ones you were usually called to manage. You had seen what happened when adolescence had no support system, no adult steady enough to make curiosity feel safe. You had read those histories in case files so many times that the pattern had become nauseating. Neglect. Shame. Isolation. Anger given nowhere clean to go. His job was foundational.
Grace looked down, the smile returning slowly, touched now with something private.
“I like to think of it that way. I mean, when I took up teaching, I never knew how attached I could get,” he said as you could see the classroom return to him. “I felt real bad when I left the kids behind—not like I had much of a choice.”
His eyes flicked up to yours with a teasing look. You rolled your eyes and giggled.
“I’m just saying! There was some very forceful recruitment involved.” He took another sip of tea. “But I hope I’m doing my part. I always wanted to create a better world, even when I was in academia. I wanted people to think outside the box. Ask strange questions. Not be scared of being wrong for once.”
You watched the movement of his thumb along the side of the mug.
“I want my kids not to be scared to grow up,” he said, quieter now. “I want them to look forward to something. To believe that anything is possible.”
The room seemed to still around that. Outside the door, the ship continued, but here was only you and Grace and the impossible sincerity of his tired eyes.
“Anything is possible,” you said.
The hope in his expression faltered at the edges, thinning into something almost melancholy.
“I really hope you’re right,” he said. He stared into the mug a moment longer. “I really hope you’re right.”
He finished the last of his tea and set the mug down, careful not to make too much noise. The gesture felt unnecessarily considerate.
“I really should be getting to sleep,” he said with a sigh.
You could tell he did not want to leave. It was there in the way his hand lingered, the way his eyes drifted once more to the books by your bed, the way his body seemed to prepare itself for standing without actually committing to it. More concerning was the fact that you did not particularly want him to leave either.
“I’ve got to be up in what…” He squinted slightly, calculating with visible pain. “Four—no. Five hours?”
You nodded. “My schedule is about the same.”
“Right.” He grimaced. “At least we're in the same boat.”
You both giggled at his pun. Damn him.
Grace gathered his papers from the table, tapping the edges into a stack. You stood as he did, the two of you moved toward the door, close enough that his shoulder almost brushed yours. He paused before you opened it, looking suddenly as though several thoughts had collided at once and none of them had survived intact.
“If you need anything,” he said, then stopped. “Uh, my door is always open as well. I’m a light sleeper, so if you need anything—I mean, it’ll probably be the other way around because you kind of have everything here or could have—“ He glanced back at the room. “But I guess what I’m trying to say is…”
He sighed at himself. You watched him with an expression you hoped looked amused rather than affected.
“I’m next door if you need me,” he decided.
Your chest tightened.
“Thank you.” The words were gentler than planned as they left your lips. “Genuinely,” you added. “Sometimes it’s nice to have someone to confide in.”
The feeling moved then. You felt it beneath the ribs, the internal flinch. There were worse kinds of deception; you had used almost all of them. So why was this one hurting?
Grace nodded, relieved by the sincerity he believed he had been given.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I think too. Problem shared, problem halved.”
You leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Another one of your teaching mantras?”
“It hasn’t failed me so far.”
He lifted one hand in a small wave, the gesture made awkward by the papers. He turned toward the neighbouring door, walking the short distance with tired steps. You remained in your doorway, leaning out slightly to watch him go.
He reached his room and paused with one hand on the handle. He looked back at you. His face was softened by exhaustion, but there was something else there.The dangerous warmth of a man who believed he had found an ally in a place where allies were rare. He smiled and stepped inside, and his door shut.
You closed yours a moment later, the room changing at once.
Without him in it, the space looked bare again. The books became props and the tea became evidence. The carefully softened bed, the open invitation—all of it returned to its original shape.
The strategy.
You stood with your back against the door and felt the small ball in your stomach tighten. You did not want to name it guilt.
You had grown too much in your career for something as silly as that. Guilt held people back. It tampered with clean decisions, and you had never had patience for people who confused remorse with morality.
Grace was different from the targets, profiles, ministers, insurgents, ideologues, liars, grieving fathers, ambitious cowards, and political animals you had dealt with before. You were used to dangerous people. People who would sell friends, family, countries, principles, anything at all for the chance to do damage.
Ryland Grace did not seem capable of that.
You let your head fall back against the door with a dull thud and dragged both hands over your face, pressing your fingers into the ache that had settled behind your eyes.
Ryland Grace was going to be difficult.
He spoke about his students like they were the whole point of the future. He asked permission to sit down. He looked at you as though you were not a weapon Stratt had placed neatly in his path, but a person sitting across from him in the middle of the night with tea cooling between her hands.
He was earnest and unguarded and painfully, ridiculously good.
And you were going to have to get inside him anyway, it was a direct order after all.
a/n: after two weeks it is finally finished! im really excited about the next chapter omg, but i dont want to spoil anything
hope you enjoy, as always let me know what you think. work has been a lot as well as the second heatwave in the uk, but alas i have monday and tuesday off next week, so hopefully i can get another part out!!
I still think it’s so hilarious that dr Ryland “it’s a small to medium whoop” Grace got sheepish when people were impressed at the astrophage propulsion demonstration. It’s not even that he’s nonchalant he just genuinely thinks that people won’t be impressed with his work. Self doubt so strong that he downplays melting a metric ton of metal in 5 seconds for fun
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summary: something enormous waits outside the window, watching. grace, somehow, seems to know you better than you know yourself. what you don’t understand is why guilt, a feeling you abandoned years ago, has suddenly found its way back in.
Your body moved before reason developed, with little dignity in the zero gravity. Your hand was still gripping Grace’s sleeve, and the next thing you knew, you were pushing away from the console beside him, floating toward the window with more force than intended. Your shoulder struck his halfway there and Grace caught your arm instinctively, his fingers closing around your sleeve before both of you drifted sideways together.
The window was ahead, and Grace’s hand found a wall to grip, halting both of you with a soft jerk. You ended up suspended beside him, shoulder to shoulder in midair, the two of you pressed close.
Outside, the stars were disappearing. Something was crossing in front of them, blotting them out in sections, a shape moving through the black.
Your mind tried to give it ordinary language. A vessel, some kind of structure. It was rectangular, except it wasn’t. The longer you stared, the less your eyes could settle on its boundaries. It had edges, but the edges seemed layered, built in sections that overlapped and receded and angled away from each other in ways that made the shape feel bigger than the outline suggested. A lattice ran across its exterior, dark and earthen in colour, something like rust or clay or old bark, though earth had no place here. Earth was very far away.
The structure caught the light along its ridges. Thin lines of pale gold travelled through the layers as it turned, each piece glinting and vanishing again, the whole thing glowing faintly against the pitch black. It did not look manufactured in the way human machines looked manufactured. No comforting seams where one might imagine hands, human hands, putting one section against another.
And yet it had been made.
It had been made.
No natural object moved like that.
Intelligent life.
Beside you, Grace had gone completely still. You could feel him rather than see him properly, the line of his arm brushing yours, the slight tremor in his breathing. He was looking at it too, his face reflected faintly in the thick glass, eyes wide behind his crooked glasses.
That object was larger than the Hail Mary.
Your instincts came up automatically. Distance. Speed. Direction. Relative size. Escape routes. Intent. Behavioural indicators. Patterns of aggression. Likely escalation. Your brain reached for the old pathways and found only empty space.
You could deal with threats when they had bodies. You could deal with government officials in sharp coats or operatives lying badly under fluorescent light. You could follow micro-expressions, inconsistencies, the thousand tiny betrayals of men who thought themselves unreadable.
This was not that. This was a thing built by something you had no category for. You felt your breath shorten.
Not fast enough.
The ship continued around you as the foreign structure floated in its slow approach, larger and larger and larger until it felt like the whole window had become an eye and you were the thing being watched through it.
You were in space.
You were in space.
You were in space, in a stolen body with a stolen memory, beside a man you barely knew and trusted too much already, while something impossible moved toward you through the dark.
Your fingers tightened around the edge of the window frame. The metal dug into your palm. The pain was useful. Pain belonged to a body and therefore could be understood.
That thing outside could not be.
Your breath hitched, and humiliation flared through the fear. You were trained for composure. Or you had been. There was nothing in you that knew what to do when the threat had crossed interstellar space.
A hand settled on your shoulder. You flinched anyway, but Grace didn’t remove it. He only held there lightly. You turned your head to look at him.
His eyes were still wide, still frightened. He looked pale beneath the harsh control-room light, his hair floating slightly around his face in weightless strands. He was terrified; anyone could see that. Even without your expertise, you knew fear when it was less than a foot from your face. If you looked close enough, you recognised the subtle hints of concern that painted his fearful expression. Concern that was pointed at you.
You weren’t used to that.
It seemed to surprise him, seeing you like this. He had seen your fear when you first woke, but that had been fear with direction. Fear that could become anger if it needed to.
Grace swallowed. His hand pressed a fraction more firmly against your shoulder.
“Hey,” he said quietly, not sure what else to say in this situation, not that you could blame him. You stared back at him, breathing shallowly.
That was a terrible reassurance.
“Okay,” he said, mostly to himself. “We don’t like this.”
“No,” you managed.
“Okay…”
What else was there to say?
You might have laughed if your throat had not been trying to close. The structure outside continued to move. The last of its momentum vanished until it hung there in space beside you, dark latticework shining faintly.
Waiting.
Grace’s hand slipped from your shoulder as his mind seemed to catch up. Fear was still in his expression, but something had hardened underneath it. A decision, maybe. Or the fragile performance of one. He turned away from the window.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Nope. Absolutely not.”
“Grace?”
He pushed off from the wall. His body moved badly. Too fast at first, then too slow as he overcorrected. Under other circumstances, it might have been funny.
You remained by the window, unable to make yourself look away from the object. It stayed exactly where it was. Grace hauled himself toward the pilot’s chair in the centre of the control room. He moved with visible effort, jaw tight, shoulders stiff. He was trying to look determined. He was also, very obviously, one bad noise away from screaming.
“Alright, Mary,” he said, grabbing the side of the seat and pulling himself into position. “Let’s go.”
The chair accepted him with cold indifference.
“Pilot detected.”
He forced himself down into the seat, one hand gripping the armrest, the other braced against the console.
“Yes,” he said breathlessly. “Pilot detected.”
“Please engage restraint.”
A sharp, irrational anger rose in you. You were beginning to understand Grace’s hostility toward Mary after all.
He fumbled for the straps. His fingers missed the buckle twice before he managed to drag the restraint across his chest. You watched the movement, watched the tremor in his hands, watched the way he pressed his lips together to steady them.
Though the deep haze of fear, he was still trying.
“Pilot detected,” Mary repeated as he clicked the buckle into place.
Grace stared up at the ceiling. “Yes. Pilot detected.”
That pulled your attention from the window at last. His gaze was fixed on you with such absurd conviction that the room seemed to steady around it.
“We’re gonna get out of this,” he reassured both you and himself.
You had no evidence. No plan. No understanding of the controls. And from the looks of it, neither did he. There was a vast alien craft outside the window, and the man promising your survival had already admitted to naming the ship Mary.
But you believed him.
You pushed away from the window and drifted toward the second chair at the side of the control space and caught its back with one hand. Grace had already turned to the console, scanning the panels with growing despair.
“Controls,” he said as he began to fiddle. “Controls. Controls. Controls.”
“Engage spin drive,” Mary said. “Incorrect.”
Grace snatched his hand back as though the console had bitten him.
You pulled yourself fully into the other chair and hooked one hand around the side to stop yourself drifting away. The restraint straps floated uselessly near your shoulder. You ignored them for now, eyes moving over the console in front of him. None of it meant anything.
“Is it this thing?” he muttered. You opened your mouth. Several possible responses presented themselves.
How the hell would I know?
Would you like me to psychologically profile the lever?
Yes, Grace, obviously that’s the correct foreign stick.
“Try it,” you said, voice tighter than intended, “so we can try something else.”
His hand closed around the control and something deep in the belly of the ship locked into place with a heavy mechanical thunk. Your chair jolted sideways beneath you. You slammed one hand against the armrest and the other against the console, catching yourself before your body floated clean out of the seat. Grace made a strangled sound as the restraints held him in place.
“Erratic movement detected,” Mary said.
“Oh, is it?” Grace snapped.
You gripped the chair harder. “Try it smoother!”
“I’m trying!”
“You are yanking it!”
“I am not!”
The ship jerked again. The stars outside tilted, sliding across the window in a dizzying arc. The alien structure shifted out of frame.
“We’re moving,” Grace said.
“Thanks, Einstein!” you snap at him, not able to control the words leaving your mouth. You almost expect him to snap back at you, but he doesn’t; in fact, you could have sworn you heard a nervous chuckle, a huff leaving his throat. You don’t have time to focus on it as your body begins to unwind.
Your fingers slowly loosened from the chair as you became aware of your breathing again. Too fast still, but no longer shallow enough to hurt. Your pulse was pounding in your ears, but it was no longer the only sound in the universe.
After what felt like several minutes but could not possibly have been, the ship’s movement eased. The stars steadied and the vibration beneath you softened back into the usual hum.
Grace released the joystick. He sat there breathing hard, as his head dropped back against the chair.
“You good?”
You nodded, though it was not entirely true. Your body still felt hollowed out by adrenaline. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a colder part of you was already cataloguing what had happened, how quickly you had panicked, how poorly you had adapted, how little control you truly had. But Grace was looking at you like your answer mattered more than any system status. So you nodded.
“Yeah,” you said, voice rough. “You?”
He looked down at himself, still strapped into the pilot’s chair, then back at the controls he clearly did not understand.
“Oh, thriving.”
The laugh that escaped you was small and mostly shock. Grace laughed again too. He rubbed both hands over his face, forgetting one was still partially caught beneath the restraint and nearly hitting himself with the buckle.
“Gosh—” he said into his palms. “That—that was close.”
You let out another unsteady breath. The space between you and him felt changed again, altered by panic and proximity. It should not have been comforting; the sight of him frightened, but it was. You didn’t like the idea of him afraid, the notion hollowing out your stomach. But you couldn’t deny it, Dr Grace was brave. Possibly braver than yourself right now.
He was afraid and still here, looking back at you, trying to turn terror into a sequence of solvable problems because that is just what Grace did. You didn’t know why he made everything feel survivable, only that you were unbearably grateful he was beside you. You looked at his hands on the chair, still containing an unsteady edge. He noticed you noticing and immediately folded one over the other, as if that hid anything.
You opened your mouth to tell him some reassurance, some kind words in perhaps the greatest hour of need. That was until there was more movement that crossed the far window.
No.
“Grace.”
He did not hear you at first. He was tugging at the buckle, trying to free himself, still turned half away.Something massive entered the edge of the window, dark lattice catching the light.
“Grace.”
He looked back at you with a lopsided smile, that was until he followed your eye line. The smile vanished from his face as the foreign structure moved into view.
“Blip-A detected.”
“Oh, for fuck’s—”
Not on your watch.
You took matters into your own hands as you lunged toward the control stick, shoving yourself out of the chair hard. The strap across your chest yanked you back, pain flaring along your collarbone. You swore again, dragged yourself loose, and grabbed the console with both hands.
Grace’s head snapped toward you. “What do they want?”
“If you ask me one more question about this, I swear to God—”
You closed your hand around the control before he could answer as the ship responded immediately. The Hail Mary roared back awake, the low mechanical vibration rising up through the chair, through the console, through your bones. The foreign structure slid out of view once more as the ship jerked away.
“Erratic movement detected,” Mary said.
“Oh, you can fuck right off, Mary.”
Beside you, Grace made the correct decision to stay silent.
Smart man.
You pushed the stick farther than you meant to. Your stomach rolled. Your knees hit the underside of the console. Pain sparked up your leg, but you kept your grip.
Anywhere but here.
That was the only strategy left in your head.
You angled the ship away from the structure as best you could, though best was generous. You did not know what you were doing. You did not know if the direction mattered. You did not know whether you were piloting the Hail Mary to safety or directly into some other catastrophic object hidden in the dark.
A shadow moved at the edge of it again.
“It’s still following,” Grace said.
“I got that.”
“It's not changing course.”
"I heard you."
"I'm just saying—"
“What are you saying, Grace?”
Your breath had gone shallow again. The control stick felt slick beneath your palm. Sweat, probably. Fear, definitely. Grace’s eyes moved from you to the window and back.
“I’m saying we should stop the ship.”
Yeah, right.
“We are not stopping the ship.”
“It’s just going to keep following us.”
“Yes,” you snapped. “And potentially enslave and kill us.”
His expression shifted, and you felt a tinge of resentment creep up the back of your spine. He said nothing as he reached across the console.
“Grace, don't!—”
His hand closed over yours, firmly enough that the movement stopped. His fingers slid between your grip and the control, lifting your hand away as he took the stick from you with his other hand.
Your wrist turned against his hold and every practical part of you rejected the idea of being physically moved aside, especially now, especially here, especially when the thing outside had already proved it could track you. But he did not even seem to notice that he was still holding you; his attention had gone to the window.
His hand kept yours folded in his own, your fingers trapped against his palm while he took the control. He leaned forward in the pilot’s chair, eyes fixed on the foreign structure, jaw tight with concentration. His breathing was still too fast, but his movements were suddenly, impossibly careful.
He nudged the stick forward.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then he stopped entirely. You stared at him, still breathing hard, your hand still locked in his.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing something.”
You could barely believe what you were hearing, not dignifying him with a verbal response as your hand quivered in his own. The silence filled every part of the control room, pressing against the walls, stretching out through the window, out into the impossible space between you and the thing that had followed.
Then the foreign structure moved.
Once.
Stopped.
Twice.
Stopped.
Three times.
It settled again beyond the window, enormous and silent and your grip went slack inside his. Grace turned his head slowly toward you.
“That was...” Grace began.
Deliberate. It was deliberate.
Your throat tightened.
No. No, no, no.
Deliberate meant choice. Observation. Response. Deliberate meant something inside that massive dark lattice had seen you move and answered in kind. It meant agency. Intelligence. Interest.
Interest could become curiosity. Curiosity could become dissection.
“We don’t know anything,” you said quickly. “We don’t know its threat capacity, or if it has weapons, if that was mimicry or warning behaviour. We don’t know if it recognises the ship as occupied or if it thinks we’re a machine, or prey, or a contaminant, or—”
“Hey—”
“—or an invasive object. If it has the technological capacity to approach and match course, it almost certainly has the capacity to disable us. If they can build that, they can breach this. We have no diplomatic framework. We don’t even have a shared sensory assumption, Grace! They might not hear! They might not see the way we see! They might not even conceptualise us as alive—”
“Hey, hold on—”
“And first contact scenarios—God, even human contact scenarios—are statistically terrible when there is an asymmetry of power. We are trapped in a sealed vessel with limited manoeuvrability and no possibility of external intervention. If this turns hostile, there is nowhere to run!”
Your voice broke on the last word. You blinked hard, furious with yourself, but the tears had already gathered. They did not fall as you would not let them. You had some standards left, even at the end of the universe.
He could feel the fear radiating off you, the adrenaline pulsing through your veins. He unbuckled the restraint properly this time and pushed himself out of the pilot’s chair. He moved slowly, one hand braced against the console so he would not float into you by accident, the other still locked in yours. You could see him choosing each movement.
“Listen to me,” he said.
You shook your head once.
“No, I—”
“Listen to me,” he repeated, still gentle. “I know. Okay? I know this is—this is possibly the worst case scenario, but this is what we came here for.”
He nodded toward the window, toward the vast shape outside, toward the impossible thing that had followed and answered.
“Not that, specifically. I really hope nobody planned for that and forgot to leave us a note, because that would be a major oversight.” He swallowed. “But problems, big ones, that’s why we’re here. To find something we don’t understand and figure out how it works.”
The panic did not vanish. It remained inside you, pacing the edges of your ribs. But his voice did something to it. Grace drifted closer by inches, stopping at the edge of your reach.
“We don’t know if they’re hostile,” he said. “We don’t know if they’re friendly either. They could have attacked us. They could have done... whatever they do. I don’t know. Vaporised us?”
“Grace.”
Not the time.
“Right. Sorry.” He breathed out. “The point is, they responded. That means communication might be possible.”
“Or manipulation.”
“Yes.”
“Or containment.”
“Yes.”
“Or a display of dominance.”
“Okay, yes—” he said again, and this time his voice was very quiet. “But it might also be hello. Did you think that?”
You looked away from him, the foreign structure hanging there.
“We might be killed.” The words that left your mouth came out small, small but soaked with truth.
When you looked back, the look on his face hollowed something in you. Something older than the last ten minutes, though you knew that was impossible. He gave you the saddest smile.
“We’re going to die out here anyway.”
He said it so gently, almost like an apology. Like he had known for a while and had been waiting for the right moment. You searched his face for the fear you expected to find, but there was only resignation. It hurt more than fear would have.
“What?” You stuttered.
Grace looked down, his lashes lowering behind his lenses.
“Not long ago,” he said, answering the question you had not yet managed to ask properly. “I figured it out not long ago.”
Your heart sank so fast it felt physical.
“When, though?”
He rubbed one hand against the back of his neck, suddenly unable to look at you properly.
“It came to me a little more than a day ago, by Earth time at least”
The guilt sat heavy on your chest as you stared at him, round eyes staring right back into yours.
“Grace—”
His hand was still holding yours.
“Thank you,” he said, giving your fingers a light squeeze. The guilt sharpened so suddenly you almost pulled away.
“Huh?”
He looked at your joined hands rather than your face.
“For letting me believe we had a bit more of a chance.” His thumb shifted once, barely there. “No matter how short.”
Grace seemed to understand, or maybe he simply chose not to address it. He held your hand for one more second, then slowly let go. The cold that replaced him was immediate. He turned back toward the console, drawing in a breath that shook only at the very end.
“Okay,” he said. “Task at hand.”
You nodded, though your throat still felt tight.
“Task at hand,” you repeated.
He settled back into the pilot’s chair and you did the same beside him. Beyond the window, the alien structure remained in position, waiting.
“Let’s leave it,” he said.
You looked over. He did not look confident. If he had tried to look heroic, you might have disliked him for it.
“We can see what they want,” he continued. “If they wanted to hurt us immediately, I think we’d already be hurt. So... maybe we don’t make any sudden moves? Maybe we watch.”
“And if watching gets us killed?”
“Then I will feel very silly.”
You huffed despite yourself. He glanced over, and something in his face warmed for half a second before he turned quickly back to the screen.
“Okay,” he muttered, fingers moving across the controls now with more intention.
“Mary, show position of Blip-A.”
The display changed and a scatter of data appeared across the screen, most of it meaningless to you. Grace leaned forward, eyes narrowing as lines and numbers reflected in his lenses. He tapped one part of the display, then another, muttering under his breath.
“Thanks, Mary. Can we get a—wait—”
You straightened.
“What?”
He lifted one hand, not looking away from the screen.
“Hey. Wait.”
“What is it!?”
“There’s something happening.”
You followed his gaze to the window. At first you saw nothing except the same massive structure, the same layered darkness, the same glow along its ridges. Then a section of the lattice shifted.
A smaller shape detached from the vast body and moved outward, separating itself from the darkness like a splinter of night coming loose. It was difficult to track against the black, but once you saw it, you could not stop seeing it.
“Blip-B detected.”
Grace went very still as you turned to him.
“Current distance from Hail Mary is eight hundred metres,” Mary said.
Your heart had already started its violent climb again, but the panic had changed shape now.
“Lab?” you asked.
“Airlock first,” he said quickly. “Maybe. Or observation. Or—actually, I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions.”
“Brilliant.” You sighed as you followed him, leaving the control room behind you both.
The ship never truly went quiet. Even at this hour, long after most of its temporary inhabitants had surrendered themselves to whatever passed for sleep aboard a military vessel. Pipes shuddered somewhere behind the narrow metal panels. Every few minutes, the structure gave an aching groan.
You sat upright against the headboard, freshly showered and dressed for bed, with an open book resting across your lap. You had been reading the same paragraph for nearly fifteen minutes.
Your eyes continued to pass dutifully over the words, but your attention remained fixed on the corridor beyond your door. Each distant footfall made your gaze lift from the page. Each time they faded in another direction, you returned to the beginning of the paragraph and pretended you had ever cared how it ended.
Changing rooms had been your suggestion.
It had not been difficult to arrange. You had mentioned to Stratt that closer proximity would make your work easier, and she had approved the move before you had finished explaining it. There had been no discussion of comfort or convenience. Stratt did not care where anyone slept, provided they woke somewhere useful.
Grace was useful.
He was not quite a loose cannon. Loose cannons were unpredictable because they lacked conviction; Grace, on the other hand, had far too much of it. His objections were principled and profoundly inconvenient. He was unused to governments and the particular arithmetic required of those operating at their highest levels. He understood sacrifice perfectly well in theory, but he had not yet learned how the greater good could function in reality.
His morals remained painfully clean, which might have been admirable under different circumstances. Here, with the world ending around you, it made him dangerous.
Grace’s mind was indispensable to the mission, which meant his cooperation could not be left to chance, and fortunately, you had always been good at making friends.
Dr Ryland Grace, with his nervous jokes and poorly concealed suspicion of authority, would hardly be your most difficult assignment. He was already warming to you. A well-timed smile here, an honest answer there. A shared look across the room whenever Stratt issued a particularly ruthless command. Nothing excessive.
People trusted those they encountered in unguarded moments. Late at night. Early in the morning. Half-dressed, half-awake, too tired to remember that every conversation revealed something. And so you had moved into the room beside his.
You turned another page without reading it as footsteps sounded at the far end of the corridor. Your gaze lifted.
They were heavier than usual, each one landing against the metal floor. The pace was slow and uneven, belonging to someone whose body had continued moving long after the mind controlling it had begun begging for bed. Only one person aboard would fit the criteria in such proximity.
You closed the book and placed it on the bedside table as the footsteps drew nearer. You climbed from the bed, moving quickly but quietly toward the door. Before opening it, you paused to glance down at yourself. Matching pyjamas. Soft fabric. Your hair was loose, your face bare.
Perfect.
You waited until the footsteps reached the neighbouring door before you opened yours. Grace was clearly startled at your presence.
It was a muted reaction, dulled by exhaustion: his shoulders jerked upward and several papers shifted precariously in his arms. He caught them against his chest before they could escape, pinning the bundle beneath one forearm while a tablet remained awkwardly tucked beneath the other.
He looked terrible.
His clothes were rumpled, his glasses sat slightly crooked across his nose, and his hair appeared to have endured repeated attacks from his own hands. Shadows had settled beneath his eyes. Recognition softened his face.
“Oh,” he said. "It's you?"
A small smile appeared, the tension around his mouth eased; his shoulders lowered slightly. He looked almost relieved to find you standing there. Interesting.
“Hi,” you said, allowing a soft laugh to colour the word. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”
“You were waiting for me?”
There was something endearingly hopeful beneath the question. He attempted to hide it by adjusting the papers in his arms, but the movement only made him look more awkward. You giggled again, lowering your gaze.
“Kind of. Stalker-ish, right?”
“Kinda,” he agreed, chuckling.
His eyes remained on you a moment before he glanced between your open door and the one beside it.
“So… are we neighbours?”
“Yeah.” You leaned lightly against the doorframe. “Something was going wrong in my room, so I got reassigned here.”
The lie came easily.
“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “Well, I promise to keep the noise to a minimum, neighbour.”
“Same here.”
Silence settled between you. His gaze dipped toward your room behind you, then returned to your face. He looked too tired to disguise the faint colour rising into his cheeks.
“Are you doing okay?” you asked.
Grace released a short laugh and shook his head. One hand rose to push through his hair, worsening its already considerable disarray. The movement nearly cost him several pages.
“I don’t really know anymore,” he admitted. “It’s a bit of an adjustment.”
Understatement seemed to be one of his preferred forms of self-preservation.
You nodded slowly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Grace glanced toward your room before looking back at you. The opening you had been waiting for.
You softened your posture and stepped slightly aside, allowing him a glimpse into your space. The small lamp cast a pool of warm light across the bed. Beside it sat two mugs, along with the small collection of snacks you had spent the afternoon acquiring.
A coincidence, arranged down to the last detail.
“If you wanted to come in for a chat,” you said, making the invitation sound spontaneous, “I have tea. And a few snacks, if you wanted to talk about everything.”
Grace looked past you into the room. His exhaustion briefly gave way to startled uncertainty, as though you had offered him access to a private luxury rather than a cup of tea several metres from where he slept.
“Are—are you allowed to do that?”
You laughed. It was such a Grace question. The world was ending, the ship was carrying several of the most powerful people alive, and he remained concerned that visiting the room next door might violate some regulation.
“I’m second-in-command,” you reminded him, stepping farther aside. “I can pretty much do anything I like.”
Grace hesitated before stepping inside. You shut the door behind you both, letting the latch click softly into place. He turned at once, eyes moving around the space, taking in the bed, the plain metal walls, the small desk in the corner, the little wardrobe. There was very little to see.
The ship had not exactly been built with warmth in mind. Still, you had managed a few things. A folded jumper over the back of the chair. A scarf abandoned near the end of the bed. Books stacked unevenly on the bedside table, several of them already marked with slips of paper. Grace’s gaze settled on the books for a moment longer than the rest. Of course it did. Typical academic.
You brushed past him before he could stare too closely and crossed to the small table in the corner, where the kettle sat. The movement was casual as you pressed the switch down, listening as it began its mechanical bubble, glancing back at him over your shoulder.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he said, still looking around, papers held awkwardly against his chest.
You chuckled before you could stop yourself. A real one, strangely.
“It’s what I could do on short notice.” You reached for the small box of teabags and held one up between two fingers for him to see. “Is chamomile fine?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly. “That’s perfect, actually.”
His eyes flicked once more over the room before he wandered toward the table and chairs, careful not to touch anything without permission. Even now, half-dead on his feet, he still was measured in your space.
He gestured to the chair. “May I?”
“Of course.”
You were, despite yourself, pleasantly surprised by the manners.
“Make yourself at home,” you said, turning back to the mugs. “Or… at least as at home as you can.”
He chuckled as he sat, the sound tired but genuine. “I’ll try my best.”
You poured the tea slowly, letting the steam rise between you as he sat down, placing his papers on the table in front. Chamomile was not your favourite, but it suited the moment. The kind of thing a person drank when they wanted to be soft. You slid one mug across toward him.
“You miss San Francisco?”
An easy conversation starter, and more about his past.
He looked down at the tea, then let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I really do.”
You kept quiet. It was one of the easiest ways to make people continue. Silence made people nervous, and most rushed to fill it, spilling things they would have kept contained. Grace took the bait without even noticing there had been a hook.
“It was kind of a big change, you know?” He wrapped both hands around the mug, not drinking yet. “One minute I’m in the classroom and then…”
“You’re accosted on your way home?” you supplied, teasing lightly.
“Yeah, pretty much—” He paused, blinking as the thought caught up with him. “Wait. Were you there?”
You giggled at that and crossed one leg over the other beneath the table, leaning just slightly closer.
“I was in the car when Stratt approached you,” you admitted. “She thought it would be less intimidating if only one of us went.”
He stared at you. “And she was the less intimidating option?”
Another laugh escaped you, smaller this time. “Are you saying you would have preferred me?”
“Yeah,” he said, the honesty leaving him before he could catch it. You watched the realisation hit him a moment later. His eyes widened slightly behind his glasses, colour rising along his cheekbones as he looked down into his tea as though the answer might have been there.
“Uh, I mean—” he began quickly. “You—you just have a way with people. More than her—I’m not saying she doesn’t, I mean. She has a certain way with people, too? It’s just—it’s effective! It’s certainly effective in some regards, but you’re—”
You smiled, and his words immediately cut off. Interesting.
“She can be cold sometimes,” you admitted, giving him an escape route before embarrassment swallowed him whole. “But I wouldn’t have anyone else in charge.”You turned your mug between your hands. “Did you know she waited outside my house for nearly an hour before I got home? I nearly reversed into her SUV to make a clean getaway.”
This would be safe to share.
“Were you scared?” he asked.
The question was soft as you considered telling another half-truth. You udecided against it in that moment.
“More annoyed,” you said. “I don’t enjoy the performance of threat.”
Grace’s brows lifted faintly. “You’d hate me as a teacher, then.”
“Oh?” You looked at him over the rim of your mug. “How so, Dr Grace?”
Something changed in his face then. His eyes shifted away from you, his expression going distant around the edges, softened by a memory that belonged somewhere warmer than this ship. A classroom, perhaps. Sunlight through windows with bad drawings on a board, multiple children asking impossible questions.
Nostalgia. Dangerous, if handled poorly. Useful, if handled well.
“Well,” he said, setting the mug down, “I’ve found that the only way to get them to behave is to pretend you’re going to do something. I have a warning system.”
“A warning system?” you asked, smiling as the image arrived before he had even described it. “A three-strikes-and-you’re-out sort of thing?”
“No, I’m not that predictable.”
Wasn’t he?
Grace sat up a little, animated despite himself. “It’s called the Doom Comet.”
You blinked. “The Doom Comet?”
“Yes. Very official.” He lifted one hand, already beginning to get lost in the explanation. “I draw a comet on the board at the beginning of class.”
You found yourself smiling. This is going to be good, you can feel it.
“Every time the class gets too loud, the Doom Comet moves closer to Earth. First warning, it enters the solar system. Second warning, it passes Mars. Third warning, it reaches the moon.”
“And what happens when it hits Earth?” you asked.
“Well, that’s the thing.” Grace leaned in a fraction, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “It never hits Earth.”
“Never?”
“No. That would be irresponsible teaching.” He looked genuinely concerned by the idea. “But if it gets close enough, then I have to pause the lesson and give a very dramatic speech about how humanity’s future depends on everyone opening their textbooks to page forty-seven.”
You laughed then as his face warmed at the sound, his mouth lifting.
“And that works?”
“Shockingly well,” he said. “Middle schoolers have very strong opinions about hypothetical extinction events.”
“I imagine they do.”
“They take it seriously. One time a student asked if the comet could be redirected with enough collective good behaviour.” He looked faintly proud. “So obviously we had to discuss orbital mechanics.”
“Obviously.”
“And then they were quiet for twelve whole minutes.” He shook his head, eyes soft with the memory. “It was quite beautiful.”
You watched him carefully. This was what Stratt had meant, whether she knew it or not. This was the problem with Grace. He did not think of children as future statistics or useful minds or human capital waiting to mature. He thought of them as noisy, ridiculous little people capable of caring whether a chalk comet destroyed a badly drawn Earth. That sort of decency was difficult to move around, especially when you held some admiration for it.
“And what happens if you get to the end of your tether? For real this time,” you asked. “Detention? Suspension?”
“Gosh, no.” He looked almost offended. “I don’t think I handed out a single detention in two years, actually.”
Huh. Two years was a long time.
Children, in your experience, respected very little on principle. Authority was usually tested, mocked, negotiated with, or plain ignored. If Grace had made it years without handing out a single detention, then either his students liked him very much, or he possessed a level of patience that should have been studied.
You leaned back in your chair, letting the mug rest between your hands as you looked at him properly. He had relaxed since entering your room, though not completely. One knee had angled beneath the table, glasses slipping down his nose again. He seemed unaware of it.
“I’m impressed,” you told him honestly. “I feel like if I had you as a teacher, I would have paid a lot more attention in class.”
Grace smiled at that. “I try my best.”
It should not have been charming. He shifted in his seat, rearranging the papers to give his hands something to do. A few corners had bent during the walk over, and he smoothed them with the side of his hand before glancing back at you. He seemed nervous.
“I bet your work is far more compelling than my own,” he told you. “I mean, what was it you said you did again? A consultant on…”
“Criminal Behaviour and Cognitive Analysis,” you finished for him. “But as I said, I’m just a profiler.”
“No, you’re not,” he looked at you over the rim of his mug, smile still there but gentler now. “You’re not just anything. People don’t get pulled into something like this by accident.” He seemed to consider that, then added, “Well. I did. But that’s different. I was ambushed by a terrifying woman in a parking lot.”
You laughed softly.
“My point is,” he continued, lifting one finger as if lecturing a classroom, “you hardly got here without merit. It’s like I tell my kids: accuracy matters. That includes accurate self-reporting. If you did something well, you’re allowed to say so. ”
A laugh escaped you before you could smooth it into something more useful.
“I basically get called for advice,” you said. “Essentially. Behavioural threat assessments, negotiation strategy, suspect modelling, witness reliability, that sort of thing.”
He leaned forward a little. “That sort of thing sounds like quite a lot of things.”
You shrugged. “Do you remember the Larkspur Interception?”
His expression shifted at once. “The embassy thing?”
“That was one version of it.”
“The one with the biochemical threat?” he asked. “That was you?”
“Not…. entirely me.”
Grace stared as you took a sip of tea, buying yourself a second. Chamomile was a poor substitute for wine, but at this hour, on this ship, in this crisis, one learned to be grateful for mediocrity.
“I was brought in when negotiations stalled,” you said. “They had a man inside who was threatening to release a nerve agent into the ventilation system unless several political prisoners were freed by midnight. Everyone thought he was ideologically driven.”
Grace’s eyes had gone wide behind his glasses. “He wasn’t?”
“No.” You set the mug down. “He was humiliated. He had attached himself to ideology, but the core wound was personal. He wanted to be witnessed. Admired, if he could manage it.”
Grace was silent now. You gave him a faint smile.
“Men with martyr complexes are usually much less mysterious than they’d like to believe.”
A startled little laugh left him, then vanished beneath his fascination.
“So what did you do?”
“I told them to stop negotiating with his politics and start negotiating with his pride.”
“That worked?”
“It bought us forty-seven minutes.” You tilted your head slightly. “Which was enough time for the response team to breach the west service corridor and arrest him before he could open the canister.”
You left out the uglier parts. The forged implication that one of his allies had betrayed him. The media leak that had made him believe his public image was already collapsing. The way you had used his sister’s recorded voice not to comfort him, but to fracture him at precisely the right moment. Those details were locked behind contracts, reports, official secrets, and the very understanding that some truths served no one when spoken aloud. Grace was still looking at you as though you had hung the moon.
“Wow,” he said.
You looked down. “It was messy.”
“That’s like—I mean…” He shook his head once, unable to arrange the sentence. “I can see why you were chosen for the mission.”
“Stratt needed someone used to handling a room,” you said casually.
“You do more than that.”
His fingers were wrapped around his mug, both hands holding it for warmth despite the room being neither cold nor comfortable enough to justify it. The exhaustion around his eyes made him look almost boyish, which was absurd given the scale of the work sitting beside his elbow.
“I, for one, am relieved you’re on this mission,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” You had meant it lightly, but curiosity crept in despite you. A dangerous indulgence. “Why?”
“Because…” He looked down, searching for the correct words. “I don’t know. You basically put your neck on the line to make sure people are safe. That’s humanitarian.”
Humanitarian. That was one way to put it.
It was an optimistic way of describing what you did, but far too generous. You wondered what he would say if he knew the rest. If he read the files. If he knew whose names had been sacrificed, whose careers had been ruined, whose loyalty had been exaggerated or erased because it made an operation cleaner. If he knew how often you had chosen the least catastrophic cruelty and called it success because no better option had survived contact with reality.
You doubted he would look at you the same way if he heard half the things you had signed off on.
“Thank you, Grace,” you said. Your voice was softer than you intended. “That means a lot from you,” you added. “But I think your job is far more important in the grand scheme of things.”
Once again, you were not lying.
Without people like him, the world became full of people like the ones you were usually called to manage. You had seen what happened when adolescence had no support system, no adult steady enough to make curiosity feel safe. You had read those histories in case files so many times that the pattern had become nauseating. Neglect. Shame. Isolation. Anger given nowhere clean to go. His job was foundational.
Grace looked down, the smile returning slowly, touched now with something private.
“I like to think of it that way. I mean, when I took up teaching, I never knew how attached I could get,” he said as you could see the classroom return to him. “I felt real bad when I left the kids behind—not like I had much of a choice.”
His eyes flicked up to yours with a teasing look. You rolled your eyes and giggled.
“I’m just saying! There was some very forceful recruitment involved.” He took another sip of tea. “But I hope I’m doing my part. I always wanted to create a better world, even when I was in academia. I wanted people to think outside the box. Ask strange questions. Not be scared of being wrong for once.”
You watched the movement of his thumb along the side of the mug.
“I want my kids not to be scared to grow up,” he said, quieter now. “I want them to look forward to something. To believe that anything is possible.”
The room seemed to still around that. Outside the door, the ship continued, but here was only you and Grace and the impossible sincerity of his tired eyes.
“Anything is possible,” you said.
The hope in his expression faltered at the edges, thinning into something almost melancholy.
“I really hope you’re right,” he said. He stared into the mug a moment longer. “I really hope you’re right.”
He finished the last of his tea and set the mug down, careful not to make too much noise. The gesture felt unnecessarily considerate.
“I really should be getting to sleep,” he said with a sigh.
You could tell he did not want to leave. It was there in the way his hand lingered, the way his eyes drifted once more to the books by your bed, the way his body seemed to prepare itself for standing without actually committing to it. More concerning was the fact that you did not particularly want him to leave either.
“I’ve got to be up in what…” He squinted slightly, calculating with visible pain. “Four—no. Five hours?”
You nodded. “My schedule is about the same.”
“Right.” He grimaced. “At least we're in the same boat.”
You both giggled at his pun. Damn him.
Grace gathered his papers from the table, tapping the edges into a stack. You stood as he did, the two of you moved toward the door, close enough that his shoulder almost brushed yours. He paused before you opened it, looking suddenly as though several thoughts had collided at once and none of them had survived intact.
“If you need anything,” he said, then stopped. “Uh, my door is always open as well. I’m a light sleeper, so if you need anything—I mean, it’ll probably be the other way around because you kind of have everything here or could have—“ He glanced back at the room. “But I guess what I’m trying to say is…”
He sighed at himself. You watched him with an expression you hoped looked amused rather than affected.
“I’m next door if you need me,” he decided.
Your chest tightened.
“Thank you.” The words were gentler than planned as they left your lips. “Genuinely,” you added. “Sometimes it’s nice to have someone to confide in.”
The feeling moved then. You felt it beneath the ribs, the internal flinch. There were worse kinds of deception; you had used almost all of them. So why was this one hurting?
Grace nodded, relieved by the sincerity he believed he had been given.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I think too. Problem shared, problem halved.”
You leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Another one of your teaching mantras?”
“It hasn’t failed me so far.”
He lifted one hand in a small wave, the gesture made awkward by the papers. He turned toward the neighbouring door, walking the short distance with tired steps. You remained in your doorway, leaning out slightly to watch him go.
He reached his room and paused with one hand on the handle. He looked back at you. His face was softened by exhaustion, but there was something else there.The dangerous warmth of a man who believed he had found an ally in a place where allies were rare. He smiled and stepped inside, and his door shut.
You closed yours a moment later, the room changing at once.
Without him in it, the space looked bare again. The books became props and the tea became evidence. The carefully softened bed, the open invitation—all of it returned to its original shape.
The strategy.
You stood with your back against the door and felt the small ball in your stomach tighten. You did not want to name it guilt.
You had grown too much in your career for something as silly as that. Guilt held people back. It tampered with clean decisions, and you had never had patience for people who confused remorse with morality.
Grace was different from the targets, profiles, ministers, insurgents, ideologues, liars, grieving fathers, ambitious cowards, and political animals you had dealt with before. You were used to dangerous people. People who would sell friends, family, countries, principles, anything at all for the chance to do damage.
Ryland Grace did not seem capable of that.
You let your head fall back against the door with a dull thud and dragged both hands over your face, pressing your fingers into the ache that had settled behind your eyes.
Ryland Grace was going to be difficult.
He spoke about his students like they were the whole point of the future. He asked permission to sit down. He looked at you as though you were not a weapon Stratt had placed neatly in his path, but a person sitting across from him in the middle of the night with tea cooling between her hands.
He was earnest and unguarded and painfully, ridiculously good.
And you were going to have to get inside him anyway, it was a direct order after all.
a/n: after two weeks it is finally finished! im really excited about the next chapter omg, but i dont want to spoil anything
hope you enjoy, as always let me know what you think. work has been a lot as well as the second heatwave in the uk, but alas i have monday and tuesday off next week, so hopefully i can get another part out!!
half of fic research is rereading the fandom wiki four times for obscure character info and the other half is googling shit like “when did we start using drywall in home construction”
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Ryland Grace in just his boxers, on the floor, white board marker in hand as he's labeling bones in his body and telling Rocky what they are and how fucked he'd be if they broke: ...yeah so this one is my femur and if that one breaks that's gonna take 4 - 6 months and I basically can't walk for most of it.
Rocky, texture reader in one hand, watching all this in horrified silence:
izzy806
snowghoul
gummygunk
pixelskylines
2087
kaledo-art
dailybridgerton
