grilchgurt/svedone's masterlist (ryland grace x reader)
(...because that is the only thing i'm writing right now lol)
ao3 is svedone (this was the name of my old tumblr blog which i have since sadly lost access to. rip to a real one and the proof that i once had a famous tumblr post.)
I am open for requests!!
The Latin Teacher
a series of loosely connected one shots with Latin teacher!reader; pre-PHM (no astrophage); AFAB reader with no use of pronouns and no y/n
mille et centum: Ryland Grace discovers that you've never seen a truly dark sky. This simply cannot stand. (~5.9k words; fluff) [ao3]
Greek and Latin Roots for Science (or: aliens are much more fun for middle schoolers than learning the ablative): You discover that Ryland has let slip to some of your students that you don't believe in aliens (intelligent aliens, by the way, and this is a very important point), a fact which had completely derailed one of your classes. He has a lot of making up to do. (~4.6k words; smut - oral, f!receiving) [ao3]
Lap Desk: Ryland comes over on a Saturday night to grade. You've already taken an edible, so that's not happening for you--but you can think of other ways to occupy yourself while he does that. (~3.3k words; smut; sex while high so mildly dubious consent; thigh riding; Ryland talking about homework is getting you off) [ao3]
Conference Talk, Bathroom Break: You give a talk at a conference. Ryland is, apparently, very into it. (~4.3k words; smut; semi-public sex; oral, f!receiving; unprotected sex) [ao3]
Concurrency
features software engineer!reader and mixes book and movie canons; AFAB reader with minimal use of pronouns and no y/n
concurrency [currently writing and updating]: (noun): the ability of a system to execute multiple tasks through simultaneous execution or time-sharing
You have just barely been rescued from your four-year coma. Your friends are dead. The fate of the planet is in your hands. But you do not have to do it alone. (~18k words posted, draft is currently at ~43k words and counting; thus slow-burn; eventual smut; found family; themes of grief, loss) [ao3]~
this thing can run doom, question?: Rocky sees Doom in some of the Hail Mary's files. This, of course, means that you and Grace must help him play. It's a welcome distraction from the growing feelings you have for your crewmate. (~3k words; fluff; can be read separately from main concurrency series and vice versa) [ao3]
One-Shots/Prompts/Other
my endeavor (tell me what makes you tick): Dr. Ryland Grace is, truly, an enigma. You want all the time in the world to figure him out. That time does not exist. (~5.4k words; angst; doomed relationship; prompt request) [ao3]
sunday mornings: It's a Sunday morning, and you and Ryland have nothing to do. You know how you want to fill the time. (~1.1k words; smut; oral - m!receiving; AFAB reader, no pronouns) [ao3]
a taste of some of the next latin teacher!reader/grace fics i am currently developing/cooking up:
museum date: possibly two chapters, where one is a science-focused museum and the other is one with ancient history/art exhibits (i already have the museums picked out lol), and ryland and the reader guide each other through each one respectively; this would be pure fluff
foggy beach morning: huge shout out to souldier on ao3 who commented this idea, because i hadn't even thought of it before but now my brain won't stop running with it! i'm thinking it's a weekend trip, staying at an airbnb on the beachfront, but it's late autumn/early winter bc that's the only time something like that would be affordable; cozy vibes that will probably turn into smut--i'm thinking riding on the beach, maybe a very cliche "oh you're cold? i know how we can warm up" LOL
if people have any other ideas, either for this or literally anything else, please feel free to send them my way <3 i am also always just down to chat, i am such a yapper you guys don't even know (maybe you do because i constantly reply to people with about 50% more detail than i need to)
thank you!!!! it happened like eight months ago so it's technically not that recent, but we aren't getting actually married for a hot minute--i want to wait until closer to the end of my PhD--so it feels recent enough LOL
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
It's a Sunday morning, and you and Ryland have nothing to do. You know how you want to fill the time.
~1.1k; smut - oral, m!receiving; AFAB reader (no pronouns); no use of Y/N
a/n: i think i fixed the thing that was bothering me about concurrency, so i wrote this short blurb to celebrate :) this could be read as a part of the latin teacher series, but ultimately i decided to keep it separate
A mourning dove cooing outside of your window slowly brings you out of your slumber. The sound is nostalgic; it reminds you of autumn mornings spent waiting at the bus stop as a child, waking up early on a camping trip, walking to a 7 AM class in college. You can’t tell what time it is, but it seems early, because the sun is barely peaking through the curtains.
You shift, and Ryland’s arm tightens around your waist, his nose nuzzling further into the back of your neck. He must have woken up sometime in the night and turned over to hold you in order to fall asleep again. The feeling of his hand on your ribs makes you breathe out deeply through your nose and push yourself back into him.
“Morning,” he mumbles. Your shifting has apparently woken him up, too. “What time is it?”
“Early. Go back to sleep.” It’s a Sunday, and there’s nothing either of you need to get up for, and you want to savor the rare morning where the two of you can stay in bed together, when he doesn’t have to get up to go teach so early. He pushes his face against your hair, breathing deeply and then sighing. His hand moves up to cup your breast, and his hips just barely rut into yours, enough where you can feel the slowly-hardening length of him brush against you.
His hand squeezes a little. “Don’t want to.”
“Mm,” you hum, because his thumb is already starting to circle over your nipple through your shirt. It’s his shirt, actually, because you like wearing his clothes to bed, and you know that he likes it, too. “Thought you wanted to sleep in.”
“That was then. New information has come to light.”
A soft gasp leaves your lips as he rolls the bud between his fingers, and you clench your thighs together. “Yeah? Like what?”
“You, mostly.”
You say nothing at that, simply enjoying the feeling of his hands on you, the way your pleasure rolls through your waking body. His hand starts to glide down your stomach, and you gently grab his wrist to stop him. “Wanna make you feel good,” you whisper, letting go of his wrist and moving your hand behind you to palm him through his boxers.
Ryland whines a little as his hips jerk forward. “But—making you feel good makes me feel good.” He sounds a little petulant, but his hand does not dip underneath your shorts like you know it wants to.
“Please?”
He inhales roughly, his cock still twitching beneath your hand. “…Alright.” Your hand slips beneath his waistband, and he lets out a choked gasp as you graze your fingers over him. “But—I’m—I’m making up for this later.”
You run your thumb over his tip, collecting his leaking precum and twisting your wrist to grasp his length. “Yeah? How so?”
“I’m thinking—hah—the kitchen counter, probably. Or the couch. Or maybe both—” The last word is a little garbled, because you’re gripping him a little tighter, setting your rhythm as you move your hand up and down. “Both, definitely both.” Ryland’s hand moves back up and starts teasing your nipple again, because he’s kind of a brat who likes it when things are done his way.
So you withdraw your hand, and the sound he makes at the loss is so good that you take a moment to try and etch it into your brain. Then you’re turning over, pushing his shoulders so he lays on his back. You straddle him, and he blinks a few times, trying to push away the lingering sleep in his eyes and the fact that he cannot see you without his glasses when you’re so close. You press a loving kiss against his forehead, then both of his cheeks, his nose, and then you slide down, deliberately skipping his mouth in favor of his neck, his chest, his stomach. You take a moment to run your fingers through the hair that trails across his lower abdomen, marveling at how his muscles contract at the touch.
“Please,” he whines, shifting his hips upward.
You smile. “Please, what?”
“Please, just—something, anything—”
You decide to show him some mercy instead of pressing for a clearer answer. Your hands grasp the waistband of his boxers and slowly slide them down as you shift even further, until you’re face-to-face with his leaking cock. It’s so pretty, you think, grazing your nails over it and listening to the way he moans. You press your mouth against him and then lick, tracing the vein that runs from its base to his tip. He’s already a mess, tipping his head back against the pillow and moving his hand to clutch at your hair.
On any other day, you might tease him for his eagerness, but right now, you just want to make him feel good, just like you said you would, so you take him into your mouth and revel in the sounds he makes as you swirl your tongue, the way his fingers tighten around your hair. You can already sense that he isn’t going to last long. It makes you wonder if he had dreamed about you, dreamed about your body and your cunt and the way it all feels against him. The thought makes you rub your thighs together, and you can tell that he has lifted his head to look at the motion by the way he groans and twitches in your mouth.
“You are so—love the way you take care of me, I love you,” he babbles, and you hum around him, taking him into your mouth so deeply that your nose brushes against his hair. The hand that isn’t grasping the base of his cock grips his thigh, so tightly that you’re sure you’ll be able to see the crescent shapes your nails have pressed into him when he makes you both breakfast later, because even though he hates cooking, he will do it for you.
You hollow your cheeks and move a little faster, because normally you would draw this out, but right now you just want to hear him when he comes in your mouth. You do not have to wait long; his hips start stuttering, and he’s still babbling, fisting the sheets and squeezing his eyes shut as he spills into your mouth. You make sure to swallow every drop as you guide him through it, until he twitches from the overstimulation, and you move back up the length of his body and kiss him properly.
Ryland sighs into your mouth and grasps your hips. “Alright,” he says against your lips. “Your turn.”
You laugh as he flips you over, your back pressing into the mattress. “I thought you said the counter. Or the couch. Or both.”
“I’ve revised the list,” he murmurs against your throat. You find that you do not mind, because it is a Sunday morning, and there is nothing else that the two of you have to do.
i don't think i would ever do a full-blown fic about Ryland proposing but. i have Thoughts.
like, i think he would plan it out so much and would be very secretive about it all, even though you know it's coming at some point and have tried on rings and have probably been dropping not-so-subtle hints about the things you would like. (sidebar: as someone who is semi-recently engaged, the sign of a healthy relationship is to actually talk about getting engaged so you are not blindsided by a proposal. the only thing that should be a surprise imo, if you even want one, is how it happens)
the man has a spreadsheet. there are charts. there is a secret, hidden calendar, and it's a physical one that is in the bottom of a drawer in his desk at school, not even one on his phone. he is deep into reddit threads that range from last week to ten years ago reading about other people's proposals, what went wrong, what people liked, etc. he is even asking another teacher about it. he is checking an almanac for the weather outlook around the time he wants to do it, and then getting annoyed at how inexact meteorology is. (the information from the almanac is added to the spreadsheet anyway.)
and then. you are laughing at something he says while sitting on the counter in the kitchen, or you are out for a walk and the sun is gleaming off of your hair just right, or you both are tangled up in bed together, just holding each other, catching your breath. and he realizes that the point of it is not the spreadsheet, or rather that the point of the spreadsheet is no longer relevant, and then he just blurts it out--not because he's nervous, or because he thinks he's fucking it all up, but that suddenly he cannot keep the question inside for another second.
and, like--it is perhaps not the way that you imagined, not exactly the hints you were dropping, but you also realize that maybe none of that was really the point of it either, the point was the way he's looking at you when he asks, while he waits for your answer.
i think that i can tentatively say that i am open to taking requests/prompts for grace/reader fics/blurbs/headcanons/whatever!
i don't have anything immediately lined up for the latin teacher series (there is an idea simmering in the back of my mind but i have not fully developed it yet), and i think concurrency might benefit from me taking a step back and returning to it after a day or two with fresh eyes since there is a pacing issue i have been trying to fix for a few days but haven't quite managed it. so i think it would be a nice change of pace for me! i will try to do my best to write what people send (if anyone chooses to do so, of course), but fair warning, sometimes i cannot always control what my ADHD chooses to have me fixate on lol.
here's my masterlist in case anyone stumbles upon this post and wants to see the sorts of things i've written before :)
concurrency (ryland grace x reader), chapter 5: regression testing
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
regression testing: re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs after a change
software engineer reader; slow burn; eventual smut; mentions of death; grief; found family; AFAB reader (with very infrequent uses of she/her pronouns); no use of y/n
a/n: it might be a sec before i post the next chapter, bc i have begun to suspect i may have written myself into a corner where i am at currently in my draft, and i believe the problem starts in the chapter after this one. the woes of not having a beta-reader
previous chapter | next chapter
“This is so not fair,” you grumble over the radio. Grace is currently in the airlock and suiting up to catch the Blip-C. You had argued with him over it for a while, but he’d given you a look that was essentially a pout and said that he really wanted to be the one to catch the alien tube, and you don’t think you’d ever seen a grown man make a face like that. It had done a weird thing to your stomach, so you’d given up and settled onto the footrest of the pilot’s chair while he went down to the airlock.
And, look. He has been extremely nice to you this entire time, all things considered: he saved you from your coma, essentially carried your naked body down from the platform in stronger-than-Earth gravity, gave you the picture of you and Lesya, supplied you with vodka, listened patiently while you drunkenly rambled on about computer programming and space explosions, cut your hair—the list could go on.
Most of all, Grace had been, whether he realized it or not, helping you carry your endless grief. Because, if you were being honest with yourself, the box you had made wasn’t working. You had been thinking about Lesya and Yao and Annie and Dr. Dubois the entire day, a constant idle hum running in the back of your mind, and it hurt, it hurt so much, because no one was meant to hold all of this despair and guilt inside them, but you simply could not figure out where to put it all or how to let go of any of it. And yet Grace was there, keeping you anchored to yourself, making you laugh, despite the fact that he had little to no memories and thus was essentially meeting you for the first time again. And all of that was even after he had spent days thinking he was the only one alive.
So. Okay. He can be the one to go catch the cylinder. And you will only be a teensy bit bitter about it.
His voice comes through the coms once he’s fully inside the EVA suit. “Take it up with Mary. She asked me, not you.”
You roll your eyes and then realize he can’t see it. “I just rolled my eyes, by the way.”
“I figured.”
“Just wanted to keep you informed.”
You glance at the screen where you’ve pulled up the EVA suit’s bio-monitor. His heartrate is a little elevated—probably to be expected—but otherwise everything looks good. “You know,” he says over the radio as he hits the button to depressurize the airlock, “I am weirdly very familiar with this.”
“Uh, yeah, I would hope so. You were basically the guinea pig for testing all of the EVA tools on the Vat.”
A beat passes. “I don’t remember that at all.” Another beat. “I think I might have brain damage from the coma.”
Right. That was the other thing that you’ve so far chickened out of talking to him about. To be fair, you were not a medical doctor, and four years is a long time to be in a coma, so maybe it was nothing to be too worried about. Well, a little worry might still be warranted. A normal amount of worry. You decide you’ll talk to him about this when he’s not floating outside of the ship, so instead you say, “Are you sure it was from the coma? You weren’t dropped on your head as a child or something?”
“Ha, ha.” The depressurization finishes. “Okay. I’m opening the hatch now.” And then he pauses. “Actually. Maybe we should revisit the conversation about who should go get the cylinder.”
“Grace.”
“Yes.”
“How badly do you want the alien tube?”
“Very badly. More than I have ever wanted anything.”
God, he’s so dramatic. “You’ll be fine.”
“Yeah. Yeah!” He repeats confidently. “I feel like I’ve done this a million times. So it can’t be that hard, right?”
“That’s the spirit.” Grace finally opens the hatch, then, and carefully tethers himself to the side of the ship. You bring up the exterior cameras on another screen so you can watch as he slowly sidles away from the hatch, reflexively ensuring that he constantly has multiple points of contact and two tethers hooked in at all times. It occurs to you that the recording you had set up earlier is still going, and that maybe you should be saying something. “Dr. Ryland Grace is currently performing an EVA to retrieve the cylinder, possibly humanity’s first communication with an intelligent, alien species—”
“Who are you talking to right now?” He interrupts. He sounds slightly winded, but he continues moving down the ship. “I know all of that. I’m Dr. Ryland Grace.” It almost sounds like he’s reminding himself of that fact, too.
“I’m recording, remember? For science.”
“Oh. Right.” He stops moving for a moment. “It wasn’t recording when we threw up, right?”
“…No.”
“Okay, great.” Grace resumes moving and then pauses again. “What about when I swore?”
You smile. “Yeah, it was recording then.”
Through the external camera’s feed, you can see him drop his head against the exterior wall of the ship. “I hope that doesn’t make it into the documentary they’ll make if all of this actually works out. My students will think that I’m such a hypocrite.”
“I think you’ve now just ensured that it will.”
He simply groans and continues on. Once he reaches the middle of the ship’s length, he starts to climb upward, before finally stopping at the top and settling into a sitting position (as much as one can sit on the outside of a spaceship in zero gravity). He’s made it there with plenty of time to spare—he really is good at this—so all you can both do now is sit and wait while the cylinder slowly drifts closer. “Uh.”
“What? What is it?” You look more closely at the camera feed, but he’s still just sitting there. His heart rate has settled, too, so you have no idea what’s going on.
“I think I’m going to have to jump.”
You pan the camera toward the cylinder and then slowly move it back, estimating its trajectory. Hm. He’s right; unlike Blip-B, Blip-C is going to pass just a little bit above the ship instead of hitting it. “Maybe they thought we were offended that the first one hit the ship?” You offer.
“Maybe. Okay. Alright. I can do this.”
“You can do this,” you reaffirm, and you find that you sincerely mean it.
Grace double- and triple-checks his tethers. Once the cylinder has drifted even closer, he squats down, clutching one of the handholds near his feet. This is starting to stress you out. Well, more than you already are. Then he jumps.
It starts out quite graceful—ha—but then it quickly becomes clear that he’s jumped a little too early and with a bit too much force. Thankfully, the cylinder catches him in the middle, and he brings his arms around it tightly before the tether grows taught and yanks him back down. He hits the side of the ship, and his ach! comes loud and clear through the comms. He manages to keep one arm around the tube and uses another to grab hold of one of the railings.
He lays there against the ship for a moment too long, so you start to speak. “Grace? Grace, are you—”
Then he’s grasping the cylinder and lifting it up triumphantly. “I got it! I—oh, ow, ow, wow, this thing is hot, very hot.” You watch as he hot potatoes it around carefully and then wedges it between his knees to grab the loop of rope attached to his belt. He winds it carefully around the cylinder and reattaches the makeshift sling to the suit. “I don’t know how it’s still this hot after drifting through space for forty minutes. Their ship must be…” You can tell he’s trying to do the math, but because he doesn’t have a good enough estimate of the cylinder’s temperature other than ‘hot,’ especially through the gloves of the suit, he lamely finishes, “…really warm.”
“For the people back home watching this,” you say, “let the record reflect that Dr. Grace’s official scientific opinion is that the alien spaceship is, and I quote, ‘really warm.’” Grace merely laughs and begins moving back down the side of the ship and then laterally toward the airlock. You continue narrating. “Dr. Grace is now returning, the cylinder secured after some very careful and well-thought-out maneuvering. Again, the cylinder is, and I’m still quoting here, very hot. We’ll update you with some numbers after Dr. Grace finishes moving very slowly toward the airlock and the sample is secured within the ship.”
“Are you mean to all of your friends like this?”
“No, just you.” He probably finds the response endearing, but you realize with a little sadness that it’s kind of true. Lesya had always been the one to tease you more—though you did your fair share of it during your programming lessons—and your list of close friends ends there. You used to tease your brother like that, you remember, before… “Also, stop interrupting. You’re ruining the material.”
“Did you like the thing I did, holding it in the air? I thought that would be some good footage.”
“It was great. Very Breakfast Club.”
“Oh, good movie. So if I’m Bender, does that make you Claire?”
You’re silent for a moment. It’s unclear if he made that comment understanding the implication of it. “Uh, sure.” You don’t really know what else to say, so you simply watch as he nears the hatch.
“You know,” he huffs after a few moments while transferring one of the tethers, “you have a really good narrating voice, by the way.”
Your stomach is starting to feel weird again. You really hope you’re not about to throw up again, and, man, when was the last time you had any water? “Thanks, I guess?”
“No problem. Just reached the hatch, opening it now.” You end the recording. Once he’s out of the suit, he switches to the ship’s intercoms and says, “It’s still extremely hot. And also smells kind of bad. I think it’s ammonia.” Gross. “I’ll have to leave it in the airlock to cool off.” He must have floated out of the airlock, because he says nothing else into the intercom. And then his voice crackles through again. “Okay, just one little test and then I’ll let it cool off.”
You snort and turn your attention back to the screens. Oh, right—the spectral analysis. That should be done by now. You pull it up and then stare at it for a while.
You are not an expert in spectroscopy. You are also not an expert in physics or chemistry, though your knowledge is definitely much more extensive than most. You know enough to say that the reading you are getting is not a reading that should exist. You double check the optical spectrometer’s calibrations, then the program which spits out the cleaned-up reading extrapolated from the raw data, and it all looks fine. There’s no way for you to tell if the data itself was bad, or something, because this is about where your knowledge ended. (Admitting this to yourself puts a bad taste in your mouth.)
You turn on the intercom again. “Hey, Grace? Can you—”
“What?” He responds, and he sounds incredibly frustrated.
“Jeez, sorry. I was just asking if you could come up and take a look at something for me.”
“Sorry—I’ll be right up.” A few moments later, he’s floating up the ladder shaft and grumbling to himself in annoyance. “Sorry, again. I think some of the equipment is broken.”
“Broken? What do you mean, broken?” You turn to look at him and then narrow your eyes. “Is that possibly due to the fact that nothing was secured before we went zero-g?”
“No! No, the stuff turns on, the readings are just total garbage. The handheld spectrometer is telling me that the cylinder is made of xenon. I don’t think any of this stuff is made to work in zero gravity, the rest of the lab is set up like there’s supposed to be gravity, and I don’t…” You kind of stop listening after the word xenon. Wordlessly, you gesture toward the spectral analysis you ran, and this makes him go quiet. “Oh. So the whole ship is broken, then. That’s great.”
You scoff. “It is not broken. And if it was, I would fix it.”
“Okay, well, looks like you have a lot of fixing to do, then, because xenon should not be a solid. Not without an insane amount of pressure.” He groans and rubs his hands on his face, which pushes his glasses out at an extremely amusing angle. “What I would really like is to have a lab that actually works.” Grace lowers his hands and looks at the screen again, his glasses still barely on his face, and then his gaze slides towards some of the controls on the walls. His eyes get that faraway look again. “…right. Butter. Civil War.”
“Uh, what?”
“Nothing, don’t worry about it. I just remembered the centrifuge. That makes the giant metal ring I climbed over earlier make a lot more sense.”
Oh. Oops. You keep forgetting that there’s a whole lot that he still hasn’t remembered yet. You are not being a very helpful crewmate. Now might be a good opportunity to bring it up, but then he’s flipping some switches and engaging the ship’s centrifugal configuration. An alarm sounds, and the pilot’s chair slowly swivels on its vertical axis as the habitable compartment detaches and the entire ship begins to spin. The Petrovascope has locked out, but the telescopic cameras are still on, and the feed accounts for the spin so that the image is still relatively static. He looks impressed by this, and you puff your chest out a little. That had been one of the trickier things to program.
Then you notice that Blip-A is spinning now, too. Oh. Hopefully they weren’t trying to figure out if the whole spinning-thing meant something.
Grace floats gently down until his feet are firmly on the ground. Mary announces that the configuration is complete. He smiles and claps once. “Science time.”
He turns around and then promptly trips over the lip of the hatchway.
--
You walk into the lab from the dormitory. Grace had sequestered himself immediately to run a million different tests, so you had taken the time to eat (your food was getting more and more solid, which was exciting) and wash your hair while the centrifuge was engaged, which had involved squeezing water out of a plastic pouch while you held your head over the incredibly small toilet behind one of the panels in the dorm. You had it wrapped up in a spare shirt, and your flight suit was tied around your waist, revealing your white tank top. It made you feel very Sigourney Weaver-esque. Minus the chest-bursting aliens. You would like to avoid that, if at all possible.
He doesn’t even look up from the cylinder as you approach. “Still xenon,” he says as you stand behind him. “And that’s somehow not even the most frustrating thing.”
You walk forward and heave yourself up to sit on the table so you can look at him. His expression is both deeply frustrated and also, somehow, still very excited. This seems to be his happy place: not just in the lab running experiments and trying to solve a tantalizingly difficult problem, but getting to explain his thought process to someone else. No wonder he loved teaching so much. You think about how soul-crushingly alone he must have felt in those first few days he was awake. “What is?”
“I can’t get it open. It’s definitely hollow, so I’m assuming it has something inside, but I can’t get the darn thing to open.” He bangs it on the table a few times for emphasis and then hands it to you.
It is pretty light. You carefully rotate it in your hands. It has, fortunately, cooled down, though it still smells vaguely like cat piss. You grasp both ends and twist, hard, the motion straining your biceps, but nothing gives. “Huh. Yep, that’s a real head-scratcher.”
Grace doesn’t respond at first. He’s staring at your arms, and you glance down to see if there’s a leftover vomit stain or something on your skin before handing the cylinder back to him. He blinks a few times and slowly grabs it. “Uh—yeah.” A cough, and then he’s back in scientist mode. “No seam, either, as far as I can tell, so nothing to wedge open.” He turns it over a few times and then casually says, “Have you always had that tattoo?”
That makes more sense. He must have been distracted by the ink on your forearm. Why it caught him so far off-guard is beyond you, but whatever. “Yeah, I got it in grad school. It’s my brother’s handwriting.” You run your fingers over it reflexively. “He died when I was in my third year.”
“Oh. Gosh, I am so sorry.”
You shrug. That was the thing, about losing someone and having to tell other people about it: you never really learn how to respond when people apologize for it. “Thanks. You’d think it would mean that I’d be used to all this death by now, but…” You give a weak laugh before waving your hand. “Sorry. Please go back to your science.”
“No, it’s—actually, what you said made me think of something. Not the death part, but the ‘being used to stuff’ part.” Your expression must be a little confused, because he continues, “I’ve been trying to open this thing while operating under Earth assumptions. What we’re used to. But it’s not from Earth, it’s an alien object from a completely different planet, probably with completely different rules. I wonder if…” Grace grabs it by both ends but twists the opposite way. The cylinder hisses as both ends detach slightly. “Huh. No kidding.”
And then the cat piss smell intensifies, and you’re holding your nose and gagging while sliding off the table to stand away from it. “Oh, that is disgusting, do not open it any further before—”
“Yep, I’ve got it, I’ve got it—” He rushes to over the fume hood in the corner and places the cylinder inside. Once the hood is closed, he sticks his arms in the rubber gloves and continues twisting the ends until they pop off completely.
Two hunks of metal fall out of either side, and one of them springs open when it lands, forming a kind of half-sphere made up of thin spokes of various lengths. Grace jumps at the sudden motion and grabs the more solid hunk first. You move closer to the hood so you can watch as he turns the object over in his hands. It looks like two spheres of different sizes, connected together by a thin, arcing line.
“It’s a Petrova line,” he murmurs with awe, and his hands start shaking a little. He looks at you, then, and there are tears in his eyes. “I think we’re all here for the same reason.” He sets the model down gently and pulls his hands out of the gloves. The next thing you know, he’s hugging you, arms around your middle, and then he lifts you up and starts to spin, laughing into your shoulder. “It’s a Petrova line!”
You clutch his upper back and then you’re crying, too, and it all feels a lot like hope.
potential angst idea 👀 a songfic-type thing based on My Endeavour by Ruby Roberts. perhaps scientist!reader who's struggling with their crush on Grace while working together aboard the Vat, having to watch Stratt ship him off to space and being powerless to do anything?
ask and ye shall receive my beloved mutual :) i hope you like this!! i tweaked it a little but i think it still fits the song.
my endeavor (tell me what makes you tick) - ryland grace x reader
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
Dr. Ryland Grace is, truly, an enigma. You want all the time in the world to figure him out. That time does not exist.
~5.4k words; Biochemist!reader; angst; doomed relationship; canon compliant; gender neutral reader (no use of pronouns); no use of y/n
The first time that you meet Dr. Ryland Grace, he startles you so badly that you almost knock over an insanely expensive piece of equipment that is probably worth more than your life insurance payout. You are not an actuary, but it is actually expensive enough that you don’t need to be one in order to make this claim confidently.
“Oh, yikes, that’s probably not a good thing to drop. Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he says from the doorway of your workspace. It’s a makeshift thing, really, plywood and cheap aluminum framing, the sorts of materials that could get to the carrier as quickly as possible, and he’s leaning so much of his weight on it that you wonder if it might just fall over. “I’ve just been walking around for twenty minutes—can you help me with something? There’s, like, barely anyone around.”
That would probably be due to the fact that it is approximately three twenty-four in the morning. There were, most likely, other people awake, but the hangar is so large that you’re not surprised he hasn’t really found anyone else yet. You’re up because you can’t sleep, and a few weeks ago you would have used the excuse of jetlag, but now it’s become a kind of calming routine, whenever you wake up and don’t recognize your surroundings for half of a sharp inhale.
You don’t know why he is awake at this hour, but whatever it is, it is likely important, because he is, after all, the world’s leading expert in astrophage biology.
“Of course, just let me finish up here.” By ‘finishing up,’ you mean making sure the pump of the HPLC-MS will not fall over when you turn around. You look at it for a second, marveling at the fact that it is there, sitting on a table on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific. Your doctoral lab had had one, and it had essentially been a glorified decorative object, because everyone was simply too scared to use the thing, and now here one was.
You follow him out of your workspace and into the maze of labs that populate the expanse of the main hangar deck, turning corners seemingly at random until he stops, suddenly, and then turns around to look at you. “I just realized I didn’t even say who I am. I’m—”
“I know who you are, Dr. Grace,” you say with a small, polite small. Then you give him your own and offer him your hand to shake, which he just looks at for a second before muttering oh, right and shaking it.
The two of you resume walking. You are starting to get the suspicion that he does not actually know where he’s going. “So, how’d you end up here? I mean, besides the whole getting kidnapped thing.” You wonder if this is a tactic to distract you from the fact that he is most definitely lost.
“Kidnapped? No, my PI from grad school got involved with the project pretty early on and reached out to me.” There is a distant sense of embarrassment at admitting that you are, basically, a nepo-hire, but that’s just how research and academia operate.
“And you just—showed up? Dropped everything?”
“Essentially, yes.”
Dr. Grace makes an appreciative hum. His stride starts to get a little more purposeful, and you think this is a good sign. “That’s…admirable, of you.”
You shrug, and then you realize after doing the movement that he can’t see it, because you’re walking behind him. “Well, it was this or staying in my dead-end postdoc. And the former involves saving the world. It wasn’t really much of a choice.”
“Yeah. Makes sense. Okay, here we are.” He’s turned the corner just ahead of you, and you wonder what exactly he needs help with. He had figured out how to breed astrophage in just a few days, by himself, or so you understand, so whatever he’s working on must be particularly tricky.
When you turn the corner, Dr. Grace is standing in front of the doorway to his lab space, which is currently filled, almost wall-to-wall, with boxes.
You look between him and the boxes, and then back again. And then at him once more for good measure. You must not be doing a very good job of concealing the pure and utter confusion on your face, because he smiles sheepishly and rubs the back of his head. “So. Yeah. You can see the problem I’m currently dealing with.”
“…what is all of it? More equipment?”
“Ah, no, not exactly, but you know, really, it is just as vital. It’s. They might be. Twizzlers.”
You blink slowly at him and then slide your gaze over to do some quick math. “There are about ninety-six boxes of…Twizzlers. In your lab.”
“That is correct.”
“Okay. Can I ask why?”
“Well. I might have made an off-handed joke about needing brain fuel. And I think that this is either Stratt’s version of a joke, or she is just that thorough.”
Hm. You hadn’t had much of a reason to interact with Stratt before, but she didn’t seem like the type to play practical jokes. Or maybe she and Dr. Grace were simply that close? They did sit next to each other at the very few meetings you’ve been asked to attend, and your PI had told you he had been the very first one to handle the astrophage when the ArcLight probe returned from Venus, so clearly she must trust him.
You decide not to ask him about it, and instead step forward to carefully grab a box from the top of its column. “Alright. We should probably find somewhere to put these. We could ask one of the naval officers if there’s a spare room?”
Dr. Grace grabs a box of his own and looks at you with one of his eyebrows just barely raised. “Do you know Mandarin?”
“No. Do you?”
“Can’t say that I’ve picked it up yet, no.”
After a bit of brainstorming, the two of you decided to distribute the boxes across the lab spaces in the hangar. Everyone would wake up to free Twizzlers, apparently, courtesy of Eva Stratt. You think that Dr. Grace is about to keep five boxes for himself, but then he hands one to you—not that four is really much more reasonable than five—and smiles. “Thanks.”
“Not a problem. I suppose if you ever go to your lab in the middle of the night and it’s filled with boxes of candy again, you know where to find me.” You are fairly certain that he does not, actually, but it doesn’t really matter, because you cannot imagine any scenario where he would need to seek you out again. “It was nice to officially meet you, Dr. Grace.”
“You, too. Thanks again for your help. Enjoy, you know, your bulk Twizzlers.”
You nod and walk away, confident that this was probably the only time you would ever speak to him.
--
It is not, apparently.
You are sitting at the very end of the long, square configuration of tables that the project used for most of its meetings. You don’t even notice when Dr. Grace comes in late and looks at his normal seat next to Stratt, which is now taken, nor do you see him scan the room until his eyes land upon the empty seat next to you, because you are too busy taking notes and turning something over in your mind. There’s something not right about their analysis of the microbe’s structure, you think, but it was an offhand comment, and you are not really sure that it’s relevant.
The sound of the chair next to you dragging, very loudly, across the floor makes you finally look up. He winces at the sound and offers an apologetic smile, ignoring the several heads in the room that have turned to look at him. There is a Twizzler hanging from his mouth, and he takes it out for a moment and holds it up for you to see in case you, somehow, hadn’t noticed it.
You simply nod and return to your notes. You think it’s something that they said about one of its intracellular membranes, so you jot your line of thinking down quickly before you fall behind in the presentation.
Then, suddenly, the Twizzler is on your notebook page, pointing at what you’ve just written. Dr. Grace has at least had the wherewithal not to use the end that was just in his mouth. “You should tell them that,” he whispers. A few people glance up and shoot a glare at him. He does not appear to pay them any mind, or if he does, he is simply choosing to ignore them. “I’m serious. Raise your hand.”
“No. It’s fine, it’s not that important,” you hiss under your breath, because suddenly he has decided to raise his hand for you.
“Dr. Grace? Is there a question?” One of the presenters asks, breaking off in the middle of their sentence. He simply points his thumb over to you, and then every single person in the room is looking at you expectantly.
You clear your throat. You have only had two interactions, now, with this man, and you somehow understand him even less than when you hadn’t spoken to him at all. “Sorry. You mentioned, briefly, symbiogenesis when you were explaining the membranes of the astrophage’s organelles, and I was wondering if you could clarify that. Because we don’t know if any symbiogenesis occurred. It’s possible, of course, but it sounds to me like you are basing this off of the assumption that we can fruitfully compare the astrophage with, for example, eukaryotic evolution on Earth to explain its structure, when I’m not sure that we can, particularly because astrophage appears to predate such events in our evolutionary history. Because of the. Mitochondria.” You run out of steam there, at the end, so you simply stop talking.
The presenter shifts uncomfortably at the front of the room, while a few people nod and mark something down in their own notes. Dr. Grace nudges your arm with his elbow and gives you a thumbs-up underneath the table. “Well, yes, that’s—that’s right. It was more of a theoretical suggestion, because as you have pointed out, we don’t have the data required for more concrete analysis of the astrophage’s evolution.”
It’s a moot point, because as they have just pointed out, it really is all theoretical; without knowing the conditions of wherever astrophage originated from, there was only so much you could tell about the microbe’s evolution from the cell itself. But it still feels satisfying to have contributed something.
You do not say anything else for the rest of the meeting, but you can feel Dr. Grace reading your notes as you take them. It makes you want to cover them with your arm, and you are not sure why you are suddenly so self-conscious.
“Nice job, earlier,” he says when the meeting has concluded and the other attendees are shuffling out of the room.
“Thanks. I was strong-armed into it.”
“Are you a microbiologist?” Dr. Grace asks, ignoring your insinuation.
You start to pack up your things, but he doesn’t move. “No. Biochemist.”
“Hm. That’s close enough.”
“Sure.” Your notebook is now in your bag, and he is still not moving. “Was there something else?”
He takes another bite of his Twizzler. You are not sure if it is the same one from before or if he has produced a second one from his pocket. “You seem to have some thoughts on evolution.”
“…I suppose?”
“What are your thoughts on, you know, water?”
Ah. You smile a little and turn to face him, deciding not to stand up just yet. “Is there a particular reason why you ask?” You know the reason, but you would like to find out if he will say it himself.
“No, no,” he replies, a little too casually. “Just, you know, curious. Scientifically speaking.”
“Of course.”
“So?”
You take a moment to consider what you will say next. “I think that, hypothetically speaking, it is not necessary to assume that it is a prerequisite for all life—”
“Thank you—”
“But,” you continue slowly, “it seems a bit like an endless thought experiment. To remove the parameters that we know allow for life isn’t just like trying to find a needle in a haystack, it’s like trying to find a single grain of sand in the Sahara. Worse than that, probably.”
He blinks at you, then. “But. You just said—”
“I know what I said. Hypothetically, it’s a sound idea. But it’s also a little like trying to answer the question that, if God is omnipotent, could he make a burrito so hot that he can’t eat it? You’ll spend a long time trying to answer it, and not a lot to show for it,” you finish, and with that you stand up.
Dr. Grace gets up from his chair, too, and is silent for a few moments before he mumbles, “That was a fun analogy. The burrito.”
“Thanks.”
He looks as if he is going to say something else but elects not to. And then he follows you out of the room, all the way to the mess hall, and he sits down next to you, and the entire time he is talking about evolution and waving around a third Twizzler for emphasis. You don’t even know where he’s storing them on his person.
--
Contrary to your initial belief, you are suddenly seeing a lot more of Dr. Grace. It is made even more quietly infuriating by the fact that the more that you talk to him, the less that you seem to understand how he ticks.
And you do not like not understanding things.
One moment, he will be saying the most insightful, technical, detailed thing about astrophage, because he has now taken to bouncing his ideas off of you, and then he is following it up with an example so inane that you cannot possibly think of how it occurred to him to say those things together in the same sentence. Or he will ramble on and on about some absurd opinion that he holds, to the point that you’re not even sure he knows that he is saying it all aloud, and then he will interrupt himself to comment on something that you are doing because he is somehow keeping track of your every movement in your lab while monologuing.
The worst part about it all is that you are finding yourself becoming obsessed with tracking all of this information about him, despite the fact that each new piece creates an even more distorted picture.
You haven’t seen him in about a week, and it has been a very dull week, because you have no new data to add to your model, and the notion is a little troubling to you.
Then, suddenly, it is moving down the list of things that are troubling, because you are standing in front of your lab, and your equipment is gone, replaced with someone else’s things, and a person you have not seen before is standing there working on something.
They turn to do something else but stop when they see you. “Oh, hi. I’m supposed to give this to you,” and then they hand you a note written in Mandarin, so you have to track down one of the naval officers on the carrier, who then leads you back into the maze of workspaces, until you are standing in front of the makeshift room next to Dr. Grace’s.
He’s back, apparently, and is fiddling with one of his astrophage samples when he looks up and sees you. “Hey! You got the note,” he greets, gesturing to the piece of paper still in your hand.
“I did. After I walked to my lab to discover that it was no longer my lab.”
“Sorry about that. I was just getting kind of annoyed at having to find my way there every time.” He says this as if it is a logical explanation for uprooting your workspace and plopping it right next to his.
Then it looks as if he is going to say something else, and this, this is the thing that infuriates you the most: when you can tell that he is saying something to himself, and you know that he knows that you can tell, and yet he will not say it, and you do not know why.
You really, really want to know why.
“Twizzler?” He finally says, holding another one of those godforsaken candy ropes up, as if this is the thing he was thinking about, even though it is most certainly not.
And you do not want a Twizzler. You have consumed so many of the things, and the box that is now sitting in your new lab barely has a dent in it, and on top of that, you have also watched him eat so many that you are starting to get concerned about his dental health.
You take the Twizzler.
--
You are trying to analyze the opaque cellular membrane of the astrophage, because no one has gotten any closer to understanding the cell’s super cross-sectionality, when Dr. Grace says, “I think we’re about to blow up a chunk of Antarctica.”
Your head snaps up to look at him. He is currently spinning in his chair just outside of your doorway, and at this point you should not even have to note that there is a Twizzler hanging from his lips, but you note it anyway. “Come again?”
“Sorry, I should have been more specific. We’re going to plant multiple nukes into Antarctica, and then we’re going to blow it up.”
“Oh.” That seems a little…extreme, you think, to put it mildly, but then you think about it for a little longer. “To try and trap heat with the methane? As a sort of stop-gap.”
“Ding-ding-ding.”
“And…how do you feel about that?”
He stops spinning, then, and slowly takes the candy out of his mouth to look at you. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Doesn’t it?” Because everyone on the ship knows that Dr. Grace is, essentially, the second-in-command on the project, that Stratt takes him everywhere she goes to meet people and review utterly insane proposals like paving the Sahara so extensively that it’s visible from space. “She trusts you. Trusts your opinion.”
“Who, Stratt?”
“Who else?”
This is another one of the many things that you simply cannot figure out about him. How he can be so perceptive and yet so blind all at once. You have long passed the point of being annoyed; now you simply just want to know how it all works.
You have not, however, reached the point where you acknowledge why that is. You can see it coming, and you are simply choosing to wait until it happens on its own.
“What makes you say that?”
The look you give him is flat and a little exasperated. “Ryland,” you say, because one of the things that you have managed to figure out so far is that his first name will really make him stop and listen. “She takes you everywhere. She has you review pretty much every new addition to the project. You explain all of the science to her that she doesn’t fully understand. You’re testing the EVA tools in the pool.”
He considers what you’ve said for a moment. He does that thing, again, where you know he has something he could say but won’t, and you watch him do this until he starts spinning in his chair again. “I don’t like it,” he finally answers, “but I don’t think we have many other options.”
“Okay.” You look back at the astrophage.
The spinning stops again behind you. “‘Okay’? Well—what do you think?”
“I think that, unlike you, it actually does not matter what I think.”
Despite the fact that you cannot see him, you can hear that he is thinking something that he will never say. He rolls his chair back into his lab.
--
The two of you are sitting on the top deck of the carrier, watching as the sun dips below the Pacific and paints the sky in a rich array of color. Grace is uncharacteristically quiet, and you think it’s probably because he has just finished meeting with the primary and secondary crews about their preferred methods of suicide.
“Would you do it?” He suddenly blurts.
You look over at him, then, but he’s still staring out at the horizon. “Do what?”
“Go to space. On a mission that might not work. And will only end with you dying.”
“Well,” you shrug, “I don’t have the gene, so it doesn’t really matter, I suppose.”
He turns to you at that. “But if you did.”
You hum and consider your answer for a little while, searching his face. His glasses are crooked on his nose, and the way your fingers twitch is so normal at this point that you do not register it as something interesting. “I don’t know. Probably.”
“‘Probably’? That—that doesn’t—you would probably go on a suicide mission,” he finishes flatly.
You do not understand why this is bothering him so much. “It’s such a deeply hypothetical question, Grace. You know how I feel about those.”
“Yeah. God. Burritos.”
You try to give him a small smile, but he does not return it, instead looking back out as the sun continues to dip. The two of you have been out there long enough that Venus is visible, a bright prick of light, and for a moment you can pretend that it does not currently serve as the breeding grounds for humanity’s biggest challenge in the history of the species.
“I don’t think I could do it.”
The admission is so quiet that it is almost lost in the sound of the salt water cresting and lapping against the aircraft carrier. It is, you think, perhaps the first time that he has ever said a thing he has been thinking of saying but normally would not.
You do not know what to say in response. You simply put a hand on his shoulder, and after a few moments, he places his own hand on top of yours, still staring at the line where the sky meets the ocean.
--
It is not often that you agree with Ryland on something without any arguing or pedantry or devil’s advocacy. But you agree with him right now: this party is very, very strange.
Most people are wearing hats. It is unclear to you why they were purchased. They’re the sort of thing a company buys when they had a little excess room in the budget at the end of the fiscal year and did not want to disperse this excess to their employees. The project had the budget of the entire world, so there was probably always going to be an excess.
There is also a lot of making out. This is more understandable than the hats, because the bar is open tonight, and everyone has been taking advantage of it, including yourself, because the time on the Vat was nearing its end. You watch this all unfold as Ilyukhina and Yao sing in the background, sitting next to Ryland and nursing your third drink.
“This is so weird,” he mutters, again, and you turn to follow his line of site to Shapiro and Dubois, who are practically sitting on top of each other and whispering into each other’s ears. They’re probably dirty-talking about genetics, you think idly, and might be trying to figure out how to incorporate their doctoral diplomas in the bedroom.
This leads to another thought which would normally be troubling to you but currently isn’t, because there is a reason you are nursing your drink rather than sipping it enthusiastically. It has been a long time since you have had sex, and you find that you would really like to as you watch Shapiro and Dubois laugh at something one of them has said.
You look back at Ryland—he has been this in your mind, not Dr. Grace or even just Grace, for some time, and you find that you cannot pinpoint when exactly that happened—and suddenly the moment you had been steadily watching as it approached has finally arrived. You have been in love with him, probably since you watched him stand in front of those boxes of Twizzlers and realized that he was frustrated not because he suddenly had an entire store’s stock of candy in his lab, but because they were simply in the way of the work he wanted to do. You still do not understand how he ticks, and you know now that this has been part of the appeal the entire time, and that you would like to keep trying and failing to work it out as long as he will let you.
This lands exactly how you expect, which is to say with very little fanfare, because you have known it was coming for months, and every single one of those little Twizzlers that he has been pulling out of different places has been acting like a countdown.
You carefully place your hand on the bar top, close to the hand that is holding his beer, still watching him, waiting for him to notice. It is a quiet invitation, one that can be ignored, but it is an invitation nonetheless.
He glances at you after a while, and then down at your hand, and then back up again. He is doing the thing, the thinking thing, and you think you would be able to know that he was doing it if you were on the other side of the world. His fingernail idly scratches at the label of the bottle, and the corner peels off, just a little.
Ryland does not say the thing he is thinking. Instead, he quickly finishes his beer and stands, muttering, “Need some air,” and then he is gone.
You finish your drink and signal the bartender for another before getting up and moving to another seat to watch the next song. You are not sure who is the bigger coward between the two of you.
Later, when you watch him as he smiles at Stratt, you wonder if you have been framing your research question wrong this entire time.
--
The time at Baikonur is slow and full of anxious energy, the kind that exists just before the first drop of a rollercoaster, the hush of a theater when the curtain begins to move.
It is extremely clear that you do not need to be there. It is also clear that Ryland is part of the reason that you have not been shunted back to your old life yet, why you have been given a little trailer and some mindless paperwork to do.
You spend most of the time thinking about what will happen when all of this is over. Having the project on your CV guaranteed you pretty much any tenure-track job you might desire, but it is debatable how long the higher education system will continue to function as it does, along with the rest of human society.
Perhaps you could teach at a lower level, you muse, staring at the launch tower in the distance and feeling the cool breeze bite at your cheeks. Not that it had much more job security than a position at a university. But it could be a nice change of pace. You hear that the Bay Area is nice this time of year.
Nothing has changed between you and Ryland. He is still working on finishing his stash of Twizzlers. You have been secretly putting some of yours into the boxes in his trailer. The two of you do paperwork together, sometimes, speaking about nothing and everything, but never broaching the subject of what life will look like after. You continue to mentally note his behaviors, his words, his affect. You are still no closer to understanding how it all fits together, and this is no longer troubling to you in the slighest.
You cross your arms to keep in some body heat. There is a part of you that is certain that with a little more time, he will say the things that he has been thinking. That if you are patient enough, he will let you in just a little bit more.
There is an explosion in the distance, and after a few seconds you are knocked to the ground by its sonic wave.
--
You find him on the roof.
There had been a naïve part of you, one that you didn’t know was still there, that had hoped he would come to find you. After an hour, when this did not happen, you resolved to do this yourself, instead.
Ryland is holding his head in his hands, clutching his navy beanie and staring down at the concrete at his feet. The wind whips the flaps of his raincoat. You stand in front of the roof access door for a few moments before quietly walking over and sitting down next to him.
He does not look up at you as you settle onto the roof. He simply keeps staring at a spot between his shoes. One of them is untied. “I can’t—I don’t know if I can do it. I’m just a teacher, I’m not…”
You want to point out that he has not been ‘just a teacher’ for a very long time. You do not. Instead, you gently take one of his hands and hold it between your own, rubbing his knuckles with your thumb.
This makes him raise his head and meet your eyes. They are bloodshot and wet behind his glasses, which are almost at the point of falling off his face completely. “Tell me—tell me what to do. What should I do?”
It occurs to you, suddenly, that you could ask him to stay. That you have also been doing his thinking thing, not saying the things that you could but have chosen not to. You could beg him to tell you the things he has not been saying in return.
You also know, with deep-seated certainty, that you cannot. He has to choose this for himself, he has to decide that he wants to share those things and wants to share them with you, because you do not think you could live with yourself if you told him to stay and then have to wonder for the rest of your life if you have doomed the planet in doing so. And—and you want it to come from him. You want him to be the one who does this, because you are too scared to voice it yourself, you have been scared ever since you watched him sit at the bar and look on with a smile at Eva Stratt singing.
“I can’t do that,” you finally whisper, and you clutch his hand a little tighter. There are tears gathering and then spilling over your lower lids, and you cannot remember the last time you cried. “You know I can’t do that.”
Neither of you speak, then, and you keep holding his hand until the sun grazes the lip of the rooftop, and someone has come to collect him so he can deliver his decision. You stay there, sitting on the cold concrete, as Ryland walks to the stairs.
He turns around in the doorframe and just looks at you. You do not even need to articulate in your mind that he is doing it again.
The door closes.
--
You do not stay at Baikonur. You return to your tiny apartment and watch the launch on your TV, alone, listening to the countdown, looking on as the rocket clears the tower.
There is a small comfort in knowing that he finally made a choice. You are happy to be the coward, out of the two of you, even if it means that you will carry it with you for the rest of your life.
i'm gonna be so real. i'm a little afraid to read back over the grace/latin teacher!reader fic i posted last night. bc i may have been a little inebriated when i finished it. and i'm not prepared to see how many mistakes were left in there
Conference Talk, Bathroom Break (ryland grace x reader)
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
You give a talk at a conference. Ryland is, apparently, very into it.
~4.3k words; Latin teacher!reader; smut; public sex; cunnilingus; unprotected sex (sorry guys, i am just way too into creampies to write in protection but please use that irl); AFAB reader (no use of pronouns); no use of y/n
a/n: another installment of me making people learn about classics academia before they can have smut. it's like a treat for me.
What would happen, you wonder idly, if you threw up right here on the stage.
Because, really, the lights were just entirely too bright, and who on earth thought it was a good idea to make all of the panelists sit up here the whole time instead of being called up from the audience to deliver their paper? And, of course, you’re going last, which means you have to politely look engaged for an hour, even though not a single word that’s being said is registering.
(This is actually not true. After the first paper, you’d settled in a bit, and then for the following papers you simply could not stop yourself from asking questions.)
It’s not necessarily some kind of fear of public-speaking that was getting to you in the moment; you had, after all, delivered plenty of papers like this in grad school, and now you stand up every day in front of middle schoolers, which had actually been more nerve-wracking at first than your dissertation defense. Rather, it was more that you felt a little…rusty. It had been a while since you’d given a talk, but you simply could not pass up the opportunity to submit a proposal, not when the annual meeting was being held right on your front doorstep in San Francisco. Because while you loved your job, you really did, you also missed the research, being able to present your ideas and hear others give theirs, getting to ask questions; you missed being an academic.
So when you had gotten the email that you had been accepted to the conference, after your initial shock had worn off (because it was quite difficult for anyone to get into, much less someone who had been out of the game for a few years), you had abandoned your class mid-quiz—on Latin adjective-noun agreement, which was very important for them to understand before you introduced the third declension—to run across the school building and press your phone up against the window of Ryland’s door.
And then he had helped you in the following months, listening to you practice your paper and giving you feedback on your handout, which had been an incredibly foreign concept to him, because apparently STEM talks exclusively used slides. You had similarly been aghast to learn that it was the norm in the sciences to give papers without a word-for-word script, which was very much not the norm in classics.
You’re thinking about all of this behind a fixed expression of attentiveness, on top of your paper, how you plan to hold the mic while you read, what sorts of questions you might get asked afterward. Maybe a back-up plan to sink into the earth if you did end up hurling. You glance up from your script, briefly, to see Ryland sitting there in the front row, because of course he was going to come to the conference with you and hear your paper (as if he hadn’t heard it approximately one million times by this point), because he was just that kind of person. He had also been pretty excited when you told him that there was a bioarchaeology panel the next day.
He smiles, then, and gives you a little thumbs up, careful not to lift his hand out of his lap and risk drawing attention to himself. It is really difficult for you to describe all of the feelings that flit through your chest, but you can at least discern that one of them is relief. Relief that he had spent all that time on this thing with you, that he was here now, despite the fact that you had reassured him he didn’t have to, because you know his last experience at a conference had been—well. Not great. Career-ending.
But he’s here, and he’s still smiling at you, and then you’re being introduced so you have to look away and focus on not falling over as you walk to the podium. But you find him again when you start speaking, and suddenly you’re not sure why you were even nervous in the first place, because right now it just feels like you’re practicing the paper again for him in your living room. Ryland is nodding at all of the right places, looking down at the handout when you reference it, even taking notes.
You have to fight to keep yourself from smiling as you continue reading.
--
You don’t want to brag, but you’re pretty sure you knocked the ball out of the park.
There had been so many questions, and Ryland hadn’t even needed to ask the one you had him prepare, just in case no one raised their hand (because there was no worse feeling than when the panel moderator opened the floor for questions and everyone stayed silent, looking blankly at you before awkwardly shuffling through the conference program to decide where they were going next). In fact, there had been so many that the panel was starting to go over its allotted time, and the moderator had to step in and thank everyone for coming, and then you’d been held up by several different people stopping you to ask a question and give you their emails, and you’re not sure you’re capable of smiling any harder.
When you finally manage to extract yourself, you head over to Ryland, who’s waiting for you with your bag and water bottle. Before you can even take them from him, he presses a kiss to your forehead excitedly. “You did amazing.”
“Really?” Suddenly you’re feeling a touch self-conscious, because Ryland had actually been in academia, had landed the tenure-track job, seen countless talks and conference papers, and you want to know that he means it and isn’t just saying it because it’s you.
The two of you start walking to the back of the room as he continues. “Uh, yeah, did you see how excited the room was? I don’t think I’ve seen a group of academics that energetic since—you know. The thing.”
“The carbon thing?” You smile and bump your shoulder against his as you near the exit.
“That would be the one.”
You’re about to respond that you hope that it hadn’t been for the same reason as his whole debacle, but then a man you don’t think you’ve met before intercepts the two of you in the hallway. “Excuse me, I wanted to introduce myself. That was a fantastic talk.”
You smile politely and shake the hand that he’s offered as he tells you his name and university. “Thank you!”
“And I wanted to give you this,” he says, handing you a business card. Hm, he must be kind of important, because most academics in classics settled for their handouts to serve that function. “This isn’t public knowledge, yet, but we’re posting a job ad soon, and you should think about applying. We’re hoping to hire someone in your research area. You can use that email to contact me with any questions.”
“Oh—that’s—wow, thank you, I will.”
The man nods and shakes your hand again before leaving, and then you’re turning to Ryland, holding up the card just in case he had somehow disappeared during all of that. He’s smiling, but he also seems to have some kind of nervous, restless energy, and you’re not completely sure if it had been there the whole time or if this was a more recent development.
You are simply too excited to pay it much mind, so you keep walking while he trails a little behind you. “There was a panel I wanted to go to in the next session,” you muse aloud, “but honestly, I think I’m starting to crash a little and would kind of like to lay down.” Thankfully, your room was in the same hotel that the conference was being held in, so you turn into an empty hallway to head to the elevator.
“Mm-hm.”
This makes you pause. Normally he would have some kind of follow-up question. Or something to say at all. You stop walking and turn to face him. “Are you alright?”
“Peachy.”
You snort. “Yeah, because that sounded genuine. What’s up? You seemed fine after the talk.” Then you look down at the business card still clutched in your hand and then back up at him. “…are you jealous of that guy?”
“What? No. That’s—that’s not even. No.” And you can tell that he means it—he doesn’t sound defensive in the slightest, and, okay, you can admit that your suggestion had been a little bit of a longshot, because the entire time you’ve been together Ryland has never been weird or over-protective of you.
“Alright.”
He breathes out through his nose, long and hard, and he looks a little uncomfortable. A pink tinge is slowly starting to creep onto his face. “This might sound—stupid.”
“You don’t have to preface with that, I’ve already come to expect it.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry. That was a joke. Please keep going.”
Ryland steps a little closer to you, and you have to tilt your face upward slightly to meet his eyes. “I am. Trying very hard. Not to be all over you. At this moment in time.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“…can I ask why?”
He looks at you like he can’t believe you’re asking this, because in his mind you should already know the answer. “It’s. You. You did a really good job up there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you were answering questions very capably.”
“Right.”
Ryland makes a frustrated sort of noise and rubs the back of his head with his hand. “Please don’t make me keep explaining this.”
Wow. Okay. This is new. You don’t think you have ever seen him balk from explaining something, because it’s basically one of his favorite pastimes. “Hey,” you murmur, placing a hand on his upper arm, “I was just teasing you. You’re fine. Let’s just head back—”
He interrupts you by sliding his hands through your hair to cradle your head, his thumbs resting on either side of your jaw, and then he’s kissing you, desperately, licking into your mouth as if he might simply combust right then and there if he cannot taste you. The hand you had placed on his shoulder moves to grip the lapel of his jacket, and you press yourself closer to him, and—oh, you think, he’s already hard, and you are standing in the middle of a public hallway and finding this latter fact to be alarmingly irrelevant.
“Okay, okay,” you murmur against his mouth. “Let’s—we should—”
“Yep, yes, way ahead of you.” He takes your hand and the two of you start half-walking, half-running down the hallway, and you both begin to laugh as you race toward the elevator.
Then, he evidently decides that this is all taking far too long, because he tugs you by your hand and walks you against the wall to keep kissing you, and when he dips down to teeth at your throat, you gasp, “Ry-land, this, we are in a hallway, there could be people,” and then you have to bite the inside of your cheek to prevent yourself from making anymore noise, because his hands are squeezing your waist as he presses his mouth against the curve of your neck, right on the spot that he knows will make you whine.
As if the universe would like to prove your point (and normally, you would be very happy at this happening so immediately, but right now it is just frustratingly bad timing), you hear a group of people chatting around the corner at the end of the hallway. Ryland lets out an annoyed whine against your skin and raises his head to look around. He tugs you toward a bathroom, and thankfully, the universe still seems to be on your side, because it’s one of those single-occupancy ones, so you lock the door behind you quickly.
And it’s just in the nick of time, really, because as soon as you turn the latch he’s pressing you up against the door, untucking your blouse so he can splay his fingers against your stomach and grip your sides. “You don’t even know,” he mumbles into your throat, pressing open-mouthed kisses against it, moving upward until he reaches your ear, “the effect that you have.”
“Hm?” It’s not that you can’t hear him; you are just more focused on running your hands through his hair, playfully tugging because you know that he likes it, likes the feeling of you gripping and pulling, and then on trying to wrestle his jacket off.
He rests his forehead against yours, then, and stares intently into your eyes, moving his arms away from your body for a moment to let the piece of clothing you’ve been waging war against slide off and crumple onto the bathroom floor. “You are—you—I don’t even have the words, and I need you to know that this is not normal for me. Because it is very much not normal. You know this. I know this.”
You smile and press a kiss against the corner of his mouth. “My talk really did it for you, huh?”
His nose comes forward to brush against yours, and the two of you stay like that for a moment, shuddering breaths mixing in the air between you, hot and heavy and wanting. You can feel his hands slip underneath your blouse again and his fingers twitch against your skin, like he’s torn between wanting to stay like this forever and fucking you right against the door. “Well,” he breathes. “obviously. Because it’s you.” He says this so simply, like it is an unwritten rule of the universe: that you could do something, anything, and Ryland will be right there, watching and needing and desiring. Action and reaction. “And. It was pretty attractive.”
“Yeah?” You whisper, and it feels like you can sense the word drifting in between you.
“Yeah.”
“Ryland.”
“Yes.”
“Please,” and it’s all you have to say, but instead of desperately pushing forward like you expect him to, he slowly presses his mouth to yours, like he’s savoring the way the two of you slot together, taking his time to commit the feeling to memory so he can replay it over and over and over again whenever he wants.
But he’s still a little impatient, like he was in the hallway just minutes ago, and so his movements slowly become more hurried, more frantic, and you feed into it until he’s groaning as your tongue slides against his and you palm him through his jeans. He pulls your bra down, not even bothering to unclip it, and the feeling of your shirt and his palms brushing against the buds of your nipples makes you arch into him, head pressing back against the door. He leverages the movement and returns to your throat to lathe his tongue on your skin, right at the base of your neck, just above your collarbone. He stays there, feeling the buzz of your moan, licking up the sweat that’s starting to accumulate because, really, you both still have way too much clothing on.
“I can’t—I want to wait, but I just,” Ryland says, and you can’t tell if it’s to you or to himself. He presses another kiss into your neck before suddenly dropping to his knees, fumbling with the button and the zipper of your slacks. He doesn’t even bother with taking them all the way off, simply dragging them down along with your underwear while mouthing against your stomach, your hip, the seam of your thigh.
The position is a little awkward, but you find that you simply do not care, can’t care, not in the slightest, not when his face is pressed against your cunt and he’s looking up at you because he simply cannot stand the idea of not being able to see you as you squeeze your eyes shut and tip your head back, grasping at his hair and skewing his glasses awry in the process. “Hah, oh, fuck, please, that’s—it’s—you—it’s so good, you are so good, so good to me, please,” you keen. The praise makes his eyes flutter, but he still doesn’t look away, doesn’t close his eyes while he whines and sucks at your clit, scraping his teeth ever-so-slightly against you in a way that makes your hips roll against his face and your hand clutch his hair a little tighter.
You bring your other hand to your chest, rolling one of the buds of your nipples through your blouse, and this drags a feverish moan out of him as he watches you add to your own pleasure. The sounds of him licking into your folds mix with your sighs and echo around the tiled room, and you are fairly certain that anyone walking by can hear every single second of this, and at this point you are not even surprised that this does not register as a concern.
“Ryland, I—I’m, please, I don’t…” You are starting to feel a little shy, but, fuck it, he’s on his knees and his face is between your thighs and he is still looking up at you when you manage to open your eyes, and it doesn’t really seem like the time to be suddenly timid. “I don’t want to come without you inside me.”
This causes his eyes to shut, just for a second, and then he’s pressing one last, long, broad lick against your cunt and standing, helping you shuffle over to the sink. Really, in any other situation you would laugh at having to do this, but he’s carefully moving your hair so he can kiss the back of your neck, the side, while your hands grip the sink, and you can just barely smell yourself on his breath.
You find yourself wanting to say so many things in that moment, watching the reflection in the mirror as Ryland looks at you, the way your hair falls, the set of your shoulders, the line of your spine, the swell of your hips pressed against him. None of it is enough, so you simply stare, trying to tell him all of it with a single, desperate, wanting gaze. And you know that he understands it, when his eyes finally meet yours in the mirror; because he always knows, because he has catalogued every look and sound and tell that you have. Because he has always, first and foremost, just wanted to understand everything there is to know about you.
“Please,” you breathe again, “please.”
Ryland nods, quickly, frantically, and works at the button and zipper of his jeans behind you. You feel the heady weight of his cock slide against you, and when the head brushes against your clit you buck your hips against the pressure. “I don’t,” he pants, idly grasping your hip, “I don’t think I could ever say no to you, even if I wanted to.” He drops his head, briefly, and places a gentle kiss onto your shoulder and looks up at your reflection while he does it, his eyes just barely peaking over the lenses of his glasses. “And I don’t, by the way, in case, you know, you were wondering.”
You smile and hum, which turns into a gasp as he slowly presses inside you. The drag of it makes you grip the sink even tighter, and there is a distant part of your mind that wonders if you could make it crack. Your head dips down at the feeling, and maybe you should have been more patient, let him prepare you with his fingers, but the stretch is so good, and you feel so full as his hips finally meet yours. There’s a trace amount of discomfort, but it’s the good kind, the kind that you like, that you know he likes, when you pull his hair and stamp crescents into his skin with your nails and lovingly bite his thighs.
He stills, then, and one of his hands draws up your torso, past your breasts, resting upon your neck just below your jaw so he can pull your head back up to look at him in the mirror. The sight makes you clench around him, and his fingers squeeze a little against your pulse points. “Want you to look,” he murmurs. “I—I want—I just want you to see what I see.”
You nod, and the motion causes just a little bit more pressure at the sides of your throat. His glasses are still crooked, and you raise your arm to fumble with them and push them up, because you want him to be able to see, too, want him to see how he makes you feel, how your body reacts to his touch. “Ryland,” you gasp again, begging, shifting your hips back to take him even deeper inside of you.
The hand on your neck flexes, barely, and you know he can feel his name vibrating in your throat, and he finally moves, slowly, carefully, so you both can feel every inch as he draws back and then forward again into your cunt, and you have to fight to keep your eyes open so you can watch the look in his eyes while he sets his rhythm. “Feels so perfect, so right,” he chokes out, because he knows that you love the sound of his voice, “I don’t, I just, I don’t think I can ever have enough, want to be like this all the time. And, and it’s, it is such a problem—you already know—I can’t even—you make me so—”
“I know, I know,” and suddenly you so desperately need him to know that you feel the same, you need it so badly that, when drops his head to press another kiss into your shoulder, you raise your hand again and yank at his hair so he can’t stop looking at your reflection, at the way you use the sink to drive your hips backward, fast and sloppy and uncontrolled. “Always want you. All the time, just like this.”
His hand moves away from your throat, grasping at your breasts, while the other dips between your thighs, gathering your wetness on the pads of his fingers and circling your clit. It is incredible, you think, how good he is at this, how much he just wants to make you feel good, that he has committed to memory the exact pressure and movement and speed that you like, as if his own pleasure was merely an afterthought, a chemical byproduct of your own.
One of his knees nudges your leg, barely, and the shift in position causes your eyes to close involuntarily, and you want to keep them open, you really do, but he is simply so deep, his cock is dragging just right and his fingers are moving exactly the way that you like, that you simply can’t, and you let your head lean against his as he drives into you. “Oh. That’s, please, Ryland, please do not stop, it’s so—just like that, you are so perfect, so fucking good, I can’t,” you babble, turning your head to whimper into his cheek.
He moans and wraps one of his arms around your torso, hugging you close, and you can feel when his rhythm starts to stutter, and your toes curl at the thought of him coming inside of you. “I’m—I need you to, please, I want to feel it, I don’t want to—not before—”
You are so close, so close, and you tell him as much, begging him to keep going, and then you open your eyes again and tilt your face slightly to look at him as his brows furrow and the hand at your hip squeezes, and something white-hot sears through your body at the sight of him so lost in you, and you have to fight to keep watching him as it cascades, as your thighs tremble and your legs threaten to give out and your cunt flutters around him. “Want you to, want to feel you come inside me,” you sob, “please, please, Ryland, I need it, just want you to feel good, please let me make you feel good.”
He doesn’t say anything, then, he can’t, as he spills inside of you, hips pressed flush against yours, burying his face into your neck and crying out against your skin. The two of you stay like that for a moment, savoring, basking in the closeness of it all, until he slowly moves back, and you clench while he does it, mourning the loss.
After admiring you for a moment, the way you’re still gripping the edge of the sink with your legs spread and your face flush, he grabs a towel from the dispenser and gently cleans you up, and you shudder at the contact.
“So,” you breathe, trying not to laugh, because you are suddenly very aware of the fact that you are half naked in a hotel bathroom.
“So.”
“I take it that more conferences are in our future?”
“…it’s possible. I think we might need a little more data. Just to be completely sure.”
And, oh, do the two of you gather all of that data and more, back in your hotel room, on the bed, in the shower, against the window. You do not make it to nearly as many panels as you thought you would. It doesn’t bother you, not really, because there’s always next year, right?
i absolutely love the ryland x latin teacher universe 😭 i am so blessed that i stumbled across your fics! i haven’t seen anyone write ryland so well. 🩷
alksjdfkjawoiej thank you!!! oh my gosh you do not even know how much this means to me <3 <3 to be so honest, i find him kind of difficult to write, because he's a little bit different across the book and the movie but i love both of them so much so i try to balance them together. i am so so glad to hear that i'm doing an okay job at it!! and i am just so glad that people like these fics, i was so nervous posting the very first one bc it was just so self-servicing that i didn't know if anyone would be able to relate lol.
also i want you to know that you have the honor of being the first ask this blog has received lol! i've been on tumblr for a super long time, but i lost access to my old blog a few years ago (i could not figure out the email it was linked to) and was so devastated that i've just been lurking with this blog until now. (and also i did not realize until a couple of days ago that my inbox had been turned off the entire time lmfao.) so thank you!!!!!
is it too niche if the next latin teacher!reader/grace fic is about ryland fucking the reader in a bathroom after you give a paper at a conference. asking for a friend
concurrency (ryland grace x reader), chapter 4: integration testing
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
integration testing: the phase in software testing in which individual software modules are combined and tested as a group
software engineer reader; slow burn; eventual smut; mentions of death; grief; found family; AFAB reader (with very infrequent uses of she/her pronouns); no use of y/n
a/n: we're still following the book/movie quite closely but things will start to diverge quite significantly soon! i keep wanting to post even more frequently since there is so much i've written that i want to get to already but i am being very patient and good
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“Okay, okay,” you say, once the panic at the sudden loss of gravity has subsided. Apparently, the training in the pool was not quite similar enough to prevent all of the anxiety and vomit that happened when you switched to zero-g. The feeling of the pork-sludge meal floating around against your torso is almost enough to make you hurl again. “We’re fine.”
Grace is still clutching the chair with one hand, the other holding his own jumpsuit to his collarbones, all the while curled into a fetal position, though he seems to be slowly unclenching as more time passes. “We’re fine,” he repeats weakly.
“We did not die.” You take a few breaths to calm your gag reflex.
“We should probably,” he says, while carefully breathing through his nose, “change our clothes. Before anything else.”
“Agreed.”
You let him float down through the ship in front of you before following closely behind. It’s a little tricky with only one arm available to guide you around, but having your vomit floating around was less ideal than banging into a few walls and the various crap floating around in the lab on the way to the dormitory. All modesty is gone once you get there, and you’re both stripping down and doing your best to bunch up the puke into your jumpsuits before Grace calls for waste removal again. He seems to be collecting himself emotionally much quicker than you are. You chalk it up to your hangover.
Then you’re both scrubbing yourselves down with sponges. There were no showers on the ship, and even if there were, spraying water in zero gravity is not exactly the smartest move. He’s getting impatient, and you can tell because he’s completely missed a patch of vomit that somehow managed to get stuck in the hair trailing between his belly button and his chest. “Wait, Grace, you’ve still got—” You wipe it away with your sponge and pause to watch his abdominal muscles contract at the touch.
Not the time. God, you must be so starved for touch and attention if cleaning puke off of someone’s stomach is enough to do it for you. You chuck the sponge into the waste chute and push yourself toward your bin, which is currently floating in the corner of the room. It’s an entire ordeal to pull on new underclothes and another jumpsuit before leveraging yourself to turn back around with the help of the wall. Grace is currently trying to wiggle into a suit that is definitely too small for him, so you swivel around again to scan the different pieces of clothing floating through the room before locating a suit that’s actually his size. You fling it toward him. “Here, take this one.”
“No time, I want to look—”
“I’m pretty sure you’re trying to squeeze into one of Yao’s suits, and you’re not—okay, look, I’m just going to say it, you are way more jacked than I remember, and that suit is not going to fit.”
He groans impatiently before shucking off the too-small flight suit. “I know, and it’s so weird, I keep noticing it.”
Once he’s got the suit you had passed to him on, you follow him back up to the cockpit. While he seems to have gotten his excitement back much quicker than you, you’ve acclimated to zero-g better, and you wait patiently while he bumps into a few walls on the way back to the cockpit.
“It’s Petrovascope time,” he says while strapping himself into the chair. “Are you pumped? Because I’m pumped.”
You float over his shoulder, gripping the back of the chair, and simply watch as he pulls up the controls for the Petrovascope. There’s a moment where you both sit there, holding your breath, until he finally toggles it from ‘VISIBLE’ to ‘PETROVA.’
The both of you gasp as the display changes, the previous brightness of Tau Ceti diminishing to a faint red corona. He starts fiddling with the controls, and then you shout, “Wait!” You pull up a program on another monitor to record the screen as well as turn on an internal camera to capture both you and Grace. It was important to document the entire process, not just so they could replicate whatever solution you found here back on Earth once you sent everything on the beetles, but for scientific progress more generally. And, yes, okay, part of you was secretly envisioning a documentary about all of this if you succeeded. This would be good footage.
Once you confirm that both recordings are working, you motion for him to continue. He carefully adjusts the view to pan around, and—there it was. A Petrova line, just like the one on your sun, arcing from the star’s northern magnetic pole to a planet within the system. Tau Ceti-e, you’re fairly certain, though there are a couple possible candidates. Tau Ceti-f, maybe. You feel a little lightheaded, because no matter which planet it was, you and Grace are confirming the incredibly debated existence of any exoplanet around Tau Ceti, on top of being one step closer to finding a way to halt the apocalypse currently happening back on Earth.
“Yes!” He shouts, and then he glances back at you with barely-contained glee, all previous panic forgotten. You’re smiling so hard that it hurts, and it feels so good, the sense of collective discovery. It was one of the reasons you had wanted to work at NASA, all the way back in your childhood, and actually experiencing it now with someone as equally excited as you were was making your stomach do an entire gymnastic routine. You both return your attention to the screen, simply watching the red arc in front of you. Grace is practically buzzing, undoubtedly planning experiment after experiment to perform.
And then something strange happens.
“Did you—did you see that?” You’re worried that you’re going crazy from a lack of sleep—it feels slightly insane to think that after being in a coma for four years—or that your hangover is messing with your eyes.
But Grace is leaning forward, too, peering closely at the screen. “The flash? Yeah, I saw it.” It happens again, and he flicks the controls around to center it. “Could be more astrophage, maybe?” He thinks aloud. “A clump seeing our ship and trying to move toward it?”
“It’s possible,” but you don’t sound convinced, because the spin drives have been shut off for a while, and presumably if there was a chunk of astrophage headed your way, there would be a relatively continuous prick of light getting closer rather than these intermittent flashes—the little microbes were quick and had a tendency to keep moving until they got where they wanted to go, not start and stop randomly on the way there—the last of which slowly grows brighter until it vanishes completely. You both wait with bated breath for it to reappear, and after a while, when it’s evident that nothing’s happening, you say, “Go back to the Petrova line.”
“Already on it.” He pushes the controls to move the camera again. “Well, first step is to find out where the planet it’s connecting to is, and then we figure out how to get there.” He pauses and looks back at you. “Do you know how to fly this thing?”
“Theoretically speaking, basically.” This answer is very clearly not the one he was hoping for, so you offer, “I’m a quick learner?”
But his attention is already elsewhere, fixed back on the Petrova line. “Um.”
“What?”
“Either something is wrong with the scope, or there’s now a gap in the Petrova line that was not there a few seconds ago.”
You hastily pull up the sensor readouts for the Petrovascope on another screen. “I’m not seeing any physical obstructions here.”
“Okay. Okay,” he breathes, still staring at the gap. “We could have interfered with their migration pattern, but that doesn’t make any sense.” He pushes his glasses up as he puts his face even closer to the screen.
“Toggle it back to the visible light spectrum?” You suggest, but his fingers are already moving before you can finish speaking.
The silence that settles once the view switches is palpable, and it stretches on until he finally says, “Holy fucking shit.”
This is, strangely, more stunning than what you’re looking at on the screen. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you curse before.”
He shushes you. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.”
What you’re seeing is undeniable: there is a massive structure, floating incredibly close to the Hail Mary, cutting a diagonal line through Tau Ceti’s Petrova line. And it’s a structure, alright, nothing that could occur naturally, and you know because you’ve worked at NASA long enough to be able to tell the difference. And, well. Look at the thing. You probably could have told the difference even if you worked at an ice cream store. (Which you had, briefly, in college.)
“This is…” Grace is breathing quickly, almost hyperventilating, but instead of from panic it’s from pure elation. “This is first contact. That is an alien ship. There is an alien ship right in front of us. Unless,” he looks back at you for confirmation, “we sent another ship for redundancy?”
You shake your head. It took the entire planet coming together and years of preparation to send the Hail Mary here. No, there was no other ship. “We don’t even have the capability to communicate with another ship, not via radio,” you finally say. “Just a short-distance system for communicating with crew while they’re doing EVAs.” Then you pause for a moment. “Actually, I think I could fix that.” Your mind is already thinking through how you’d do it: adjust the orientation of the radio transceivers, go out and make the dishes wider with siding harvested from the ship’s body, write a program to scan for different frequencies until it found one to latch onto. Hm, but you’d need to do some math on adjusting the size of the dishes, because that would affect the strain on the ship’s exterior where they were attached, and the beamwidth would decrease, meaning they would need to be very precisely positioned and calibrated to receive a signal…maybe a larger array instead? It would alter the readouts, but you could probably automate that…
He interrupts your train of thought, which is probably for the best, because the pounding in your head has returned. “Well, before we go putting the cart in front of the horse, how about…” He clicks through another few menus before turning the radar on, and suddenly an alarm blares through the ship, making you both wince. This is not helping the hangover.
“Blip-A detected,” Mary says over the alarm, and you reach over his shoulder to press a button to mute it.
You both sit in silence as he glances over the readings from the radar. “Well,” he finally says, “I did promise that you could name the next thing we found.”
In any other situation, like one that wasn’t, you know, humanity’s first encounter with an alien species (well, after the astrophage—intelligent alien species, then), you would have laughed. Instead, you settle for, “I think Blip-A is fine,” because really, you’re being put on the spot, and you don’t think you can come up with something that isn’t totally lame.
Grace amusedly huffs through his nose before mentally retreating to do some quick math based upon the radar’s current readouts. “It’s matching our velocity exactly,” he murmurs. “And it is, like, so close. It all has to be on purpose.”
“This is going to sound really judgmental,” you preface as you study the structure more closely, “but I feel like I’m allowed to say it. The design of it is—”
“Terrible?” He finishes for you. “Yeah. I don’t even know how you’d maintain a stable atmosphere in it. Maybe it’s a probe, then, not a ship?” Your eyes meet, and it is very clear that this is just as, if not more, exciting for the both of you than the prospect of it being an alien ship.
You’re struck by how much Lesya would have loved this. She would have had so many thoughts about all of the flat surfaces this thing was made out of, which would have been immediately and loudly shared. And then she probably would’ve spacewalked right over and knocked on the door (you can’t actually see at the moment if there’s a door, but you assume there is) to tell the potential aliens exactly what she thought about their ship before inviting them over to yours.
You realize, quietly, resignedly, that it is going to be like this the whole time, no matter how tightly you shove it all into a box. That you’ll keep looking over your shoulder, hoping that she’ll be there, probably right up until the moment you die.
Grace’s fingers tapping rapidly around the screen brings you back into the moment, and you watch as he pulls up the ship’s manual navigation system. “Uh, what are you doing?”
“Testing something.”
“Okay, that’s not vague at all.”
He hits the ‘yes’ prompt to allow manual control, and then groans when a second prompt pops up requiring him to type in ‘yes.’ “Seriously?” He gives you a quick glance.
“Just because I was one of the software engineers on the project does not mean every single annoying thing is my fault.” Actually, this one had about an 80% chance of being your fault, but you’re not going to tell him that.
While he inputs some values to send the ship forward a short distance, you pull the radar back up on another screen. You think he must not be used to having multiple monitors—which, how is that even possible, you wonder, because you would simply die if you were forced to only use a computer with a single monitor. Grace takes a deep breath before finalizing the command, and the Mary drifts forward.
And then Blip-A moves forward, too. You both look at the radar and arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously. It has matched your velocity exactly. Grace hurriedly inputs more commands, shooting the ship forward in bursts of various lengths, and each time, the Blip-A immediately mirrors the movement. Then, for good measure, it maneuvers a little more to return to its initial distance from the Mary, around 217 meters.
“Grace.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what this means.”
He’s nodding very, very fast. “There’s someone—something—on there. It can’t be a probe. It’s not a probe,” he repeats. You think he might simply combust from excitement. “I want. There are so many things I want to do right now, but most of all I want to look closer at an honest-to-god spaceship.” Grace tabs back to the Petrovascope and tries to zoom in. “Uh, how do I—”
“Here, switch to the telescopic cameras—” You go to reach over him to do it yourself, but he smacks your hand away. “Hey!”
“Sorry.” He does not sound apologetic in the slightest. Once the display is up, he zooms in on Blip-A, and you both stare in wonder at the mottled color of the flat sides of the ship which meet each other in points.
You would really like to know what this thing is made of. The splotches of colors give the impression of some kind of alloy; perhaps the variations in color were akin to a patina, or a general wear from traveling through space. There’s some light blue patches, and the color gives you an idea. You float up a little to a different screen and pull up the array of spectrometers fitted to the ship. They really hadn’t spared any expenses when it came to the Mary’s instrumentation—every kind of spectrometer under the sun was available to you. You settle for an optical spectrometer and wait for the spectral analysis to return.
“Look at this,” Grace says below you, so you push yourself back down. He’s focused the cameras on a pair of arms on the side of the ship. One has a sort of crystal disk, and the other is more properly an arm, ending in a claw-like hand. You both watch as the hand tilts back and then flings forward a small, cylindrical object.
“Blip-B detected.”
“Thank you, Mary,” the two of you chime. Then you say, “It’s your turn for naming.”
“Blip-B has a good ring to it.” The chair in front of you turns as he swivels around to face you, and suddenly you’re floating quite close to his face. “Okay, so.”
“So.”
“I think they’re friendly. And I think they’re trying to communicate.” A beat. “Or it could be a bomb.”
“It could be a bomb.”
He turns the chair back around, and the movement sends a miniscule gust of air toward you, making you start to drift a little, so you grab the back of the chair to still yourself and look at the cylinder steadily moving toward the Hail Mary. “A very slow-moving bomb.” His finger presses against the screen, first at the arm which flung the cylinder, then sliding over to the cylinder itself and finally the camera’s resolution at the bottom of the screen. “It’s moving at the exact velocity that I had the Mary at,” he concludes in wonder.
“I don’t think it’s a bomb.”
“Me neither. But, uh. Just to be safe—does this thing have any shields? Mary, shields?”
At the same time that the Mary intones, “There are no shields aboard the Hail Mary,” you say, “No, there aren’t any shields—what do you think this is, Star Trek?”
“I don’t know!” His shoulders are slightly hunched against the back of the chair, and you can tell that he’s torn between pure panic and sheer joy. “Okay. Okay. Here’s what I’m thinking: we wait to see what it does. And if it’s not a bomb, they seem to be trying hard enough to communicate with us that they’ll send another. And if it is a bomb, well…”
“We’ll be dead,” you supply helpfully, “and then it won’t really matter, and everyone on Earth will also die.”
“Yeah. I’m really hoping it’s not a bomb.”
With that settled, all there is to do is wait.
For forty minutes.
It is simultaneously the fastest and the slowest forty minutes of your entire life. As the cylinder steadily grows closer, you can feel every muscle in your body start to tense. When it’s about a minute away from contact, you unthinkingly clutch his upper arm. He grabs your hand and squeezes tightly.
Thunk.
You can just barely hear it hit the ship, and you both watch as the Blip-B moves away in the readings before disappearing entirely. Grace lets go of your hand as he exhales shakily, and you draw your arm back, stretching out your fingers to relieve the soreness from his vice grip.
He adjusts the camera back to the arms on the side of Blip-A, and sure enough, the claw-hand one is flinging yet another cylinder forward. “Blip-C detected.” He looks back at you with raised eyebrows as if to say, I think it’s your turn again.
You huff. “Just—the blip naming convention is fine.”
Then he’s unclipping from the seat and floating up. “Alright. It’s moving at the same velocity, so we have another forty minutes to catch it.” You watch as he looks around for something before settling his gaze on you. “If we wanted to catch an alien cylinder floating toward the side of the ship, how would we do that?”
The Mary answers before you can. “Dr. Grace, would you like to go on a spacewalk?”
The look he gives you is a combination of childlike glee and anxiety. “…Yes. Yes, I think that I do.”
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
Ryland comes over on a Saturday night to grade. You've already taken an edible, so that's not happening for you--but you can think of other ways to occupy yourself.
~3.3k words; Latin teacher!reader (takes place sometime after Greek and Latin Roots for Science); established relationship; smut; high!reader; so mildly dubious consent; thigh riding; a touch of dacryphilia (as a treat); premature ejaculation
a/n: i've been working on kind of a depressing part of concurrency, and i wanted to take a break and write something fun. so this one goes out to all my homies who get extremely horny when high--you free later? jk jk...unless?
TW: reader is a little bit high (like...4mg of an edible high) hence the mildly dubious consent, but reader and Grace are in an established relationship, have engaged in inebriated sexual activity in the past, and check in with each other before proceeding
You get the text forty minutes after the edible, which is to say that you are already starting to get decently high.
Okay, to be fair, you’re not actually that high. Usually you can only do, like, somewhere between a third and a half of a gummy, because otherwise you’re just a paranoid mess that can’t get comfortable. So. To be more accurate: you are forty minutes out from roughly 40% of an edible, and Ryland has just texted you, grading session?
You should say no. It is a Saturday night, and you are trying to relax—hence the edible—and do anything other than think about work, which means that you’re currently melting into your couch and watching a video that you think you’ve watched approximately one thousand times already, but the great thing about getting high is that it’s like you’re watching it for the first time again.
You do not say no.
Instead, you text back, sure, mine? :)
Then, twenty minutes later, there’s a knock on your door, and you are well and truly feeling great at this point, so you practically traipse over to the door. God, he is so cute, and hot, who authorized his stupid little glasses and his arms, and your fingers are twitching as you look at him across the threshold. In ancient Roman culture, thresholds were liminal spaces—it’s where English gets the word, actually, from the Latin limen—dangerous places, places full of potential and the unknown.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” you giggle, and the jig is immediately up.
His eyes narrow. “Are you…drunk?”
“No.”
“…are you sure.”
You laugh again and drag him inside and then toward your couch. Oops. The container is still on the coffee table, and he clocks it immediately, because of course he does, because you have never known him to not clock something, particularly when it’s a bright pink plastic bottle that has ‘THC’ in giant letters on the front.
He smiles and rubs the back of his head with his hand, taking in the way you look: baggy t-shirt, pajama shorts, dilated pupils, no bra. “You could have just said no.”
You settle in beside him on the couch. “Yeah, but I didn’t want to.”
He looks at you and then just shakes his head in disbelief. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Your cheeks are hurting from how much you’re smiling.
Ryland pulls out a stack of papers from his bag and props his feet up on your coffee table. You thrifted the thing, and the top was very scuffed from previous moves, so you quite literally do not care.
When you press play on the video, he glances up for a moment. “So. I take it that this is just a grading session for me.”
“Yup,” and you make popping the ‘p’ a whole thing, which you find very funny, and he also finds it funny but a little less than you think he should. Rude.
The two of you settle in like this for a while, you watching the video and subsuming yourself into the cushions, him grading worksheets and periodically glancing at the TV or at you. At some point, your legs come to rest on top of his, so he shifts the stack of papers to lay on top of them, and the hand that isn’t holding a pen starts running over your bare shin idly. This causes your attention to shift away from the TV and toward his face. You could stare at his face forever. It’s—it’s something about his nose, or his jaw, or his lips, or a combination of all of them together, and you keep triangulating all of them, tracing the bridge of his nose with your eyes and examining the scruff on the lower half of his cheeks.
It does not take him long to notice. “You’re not watching your video,” he says, without even looking up from the worksheet he’s currently marking up.
“Mm-hm.”
Ryland makes a few more ticks before planting his feet on the floor and leaning forward to set the stack of papers and his pen down on the table. “Is there something I can do for you?” Both of his hands are resting on your legs now, one on your knee, the other tracing patterns into your thigh.
“No.”
“Right.”
There really isn’t anything in that moment. You’re just taking your time looking at him. He smiles at you for a few more moments before lowering his glasses to hang beneath his chin so he can lean back on the couch and watch the video that’s still playing.
His hands are still on your legs. You are suddenly acutely aware of this fact, and your senses narrow in on this contact until the only thing you’re thinking of is the five spots where the fingers of his right hand dimple into your bare thigh. The pressure is heavenly, and your skin is buzzing, and his thumb brushes against you, just barely that you think he doesn’t even notice he’s done it.
You have noticed.
Then your focus shifts to realize that there is a growing pressure in between your thighs, and it is now so heavy that it is nearly unbearable. You cannot imagine how you had not noticed this before. You squeeze your thighs together in a way that you think is imperceptible. It is not.
He looks down at your thighs and then at your face, bringing his glasses back up so he can fully take you in. You try to imagine what you must look like: eyes glassy and wide, pupils blown, mouth slightly parted, chest rising and falling deeply. “Should I—should I go?”
You honest-to-god whine at the suggestion. “No.”
“Okay.”
And then you realize: he is not going to do anything. He is not going to do anything, despite the fact you have definitely had drunk sex, multiple times, one of which was on this very couch, you’re fairly certain, and, man, it had been really good. Ryland had been sitting right there, right where he is now, except then his head had been tipped back and your hand had been on his throat, not doing anything, just resting, feeling his breath and his pulse and his groans while you rode him, and he had felt so good inside you, especially when he had grasped your waist and shifted just right—
Okay. Okay. This sidetracking is not helping you settle down. But it has given you an idea.
You sit up—which takes some effort on your part, because you are, like, deep into the cushions—and swing your leg over his lap. He just watches you, face carefully blank, while you do a whole show of making yourself comfortable on top of him. “Hi,” you finally say, probably grinning like an idiot, fighting with every cell in your body to wait before you start running your fingers all over him.
“Hey there. What—what, uh, what brings you over here?” You simply cannot tell if he’s doing a bit where he pretends he doesn’t know what’s going on or if he is genuinely asking. Signs are pointing to the former, because Ryland’s thumb has already found the bone of your hip, and his mouth is curling upwards.
You shrug and very gently place your hands on his shoulders. The gentleness is a requirement, because you would like to savor this. “Nothing much. Just wanted to be a little closer.”
Ryland searches your face for a moment. “You’re good?”
His kindness and care are going to be the death of you. How did you get this lucky, you wonder distantly, who was looking out for you and made sure this man worked at the same school you did, had the same prep periods as you? You would like to shake their hand and give them a sloppy kiss on the mouth. (You are very horny at this point.)
“I’m always good with you.” This is not some kind of reassurance to him or to yourself; this is a simple, stated fact. You trust him, more than you’ve trusted anyone, because he listens to you talk about Homer and shows you his favorite movies and is so single-mindedly devoted to your pleasure that it made you realize that you’d been missing out on something your whole life that you weren’t even aware existed. And you’re pretty sure that he trusts you, too. “Are you good?”
“Yes. Yes, I am, I’m very good. Nowhere I’d rather be.”
“You can keep grading, if you want.”
Ryland looks at you over the rims of his glasses, one of his eyebrows raised. You love it when he looks at you like this, and you will never tell him that fact (although you suspect that he suspects as much) because no one man should wield all of that power. “…even if I wanted to, how do you suggest I go about doing that.” He gives your hips a squeeze for emphasis, which almost causes you to grind down onto his lap. You just barely manage to refrain, because you are trying to enjoy the buildup for as long as possible.
“Fair point.” Your fingers run over the seam of his shirt’s collar (it’s one of his many science pun shirts) and you marvel at the way his Adam’s apple bobs. His pulse is just barely visible on the side of his throat. “What were you grading?”
He leans forward, shifting one of his arms to wrap around your back, and grabs the TV remote to pause the video that’s still playing behind you. This causes his lap to press into you, and the seam of his zipper lines up with your cunt perfectly—thank god he, for some reason, is wearing jeans on a Saturday night—and it causes a bolt of pleasure to shudder through you. He’s half-hard already, just from touching you and having you on top of him. You would like to tell him how wonderful this is, but you also want him to keep talking, so you say nothing as he reclines back onto the couch again. “Labeling worksheet. Plant and animal cells.”
You hum. “Tell me about it.” Your fingers are running over his skin now, tracing the line of his jaw, reveling in the scrape of his stubble and then moving up to the shells of his ears, the arms of his glasses. You gently push them up a little on his nose and watch as his tongue darts out to wet his lips.
“I mean, it’s—it’s pretty self-explanatory. Two pictures, there’s a bank of words. I was almost nice and repeated the words for things that both kinds of cells have, but I want them to really think about the similarities and differences.” His hands have slowly crept up underneath your shirt. You are already beginning to approach the maximum amount of sensory stimulation you can take, so you wrap your arms around shoulders—he leans forward slightly, reflexively, so you can do this—and press your forehead into the crook of his neck, closing your eyes.
Pressing a kiss against his skin, you murmur into his throat, “And how are they doing so far?”
“Um, good, they’re doing good, some minor mistakes, but mostly everyone is getting it.”
“That makes sense. You’re a great teacher.”
He shifts underneath you and the delightful pressure is back, and this time you let yourself grind down, chasing it, and his fingers flex on your waist as you whimper. Screw the buildup, because in order for it to properly be a buildup, it needs to actually build up to something, and you’ve decided that the something is here and you would like it this very second. “This, you are—are you not wearing any underwear? Did you not put on underwear before I came over?”
“Not important, just, keep talking. Please.” You nuzzle into him while you say this, still rolling your hips, because you think you would like to be underneath his skin.
“Okay, hah, okay, sure, um—” Ryland grasps your hips, then, and helps you find a rhythm against his jeans and his now fully-hard cock, and his voice is a little strained when he speaks again. “They are. They are doing good on this unit, I think, I spent a long time making models, and the thing about cell models is that it is very easy to overestimate how much space you have, and then suddenly you have no room for the mitochondria, which as everyone knows is very important to highlight, for very obvious reasons.”
You graze your teeth lightly against his earlobe. His hips buck up in response. “Of—course.”
“And, I don’t. Are you sure that this is—cells are not really, you know, the most suitable conversation topic for. This.” His hands pull your hips down as if to underscore his point.
It is impossible for you to overstate how much you do not care right now, because you are simply letting yourself be surrounded by him, by Ryland, feeling his skin and his hands on your sides and his voice filling up your brain. And it is so good, every second of it is incredible, it’s like each moment you’re forgetting and discovering over and over again that he’s there, and it means that the pleasure never wanes or plateaus, it just remains new and delightful and toe-curling. “I don’t care what you talk about, just please do not stop, I want—I want—I want you, I don’t care,” you babble, and you think you might be tearing up a little, because it all already feels so good and you are so happy to be held and heard and seen.
“Okay, yes, I can do that, I won’t, I’ll keep going. It’s just—you are making it very hard to concentrate. Alright, um. Okay, yes, you are very distracting. I will talk about that, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and it’s kind of a problem, because I think about you when I wake up and on my way to school and when I’m teaching,” and he groans and rests his forehead on your shoulder, both of your hips rising and falling to meet each other, “and it’s the worst when I’m alone in my classroom, because I’m trying to grade and I cannot stop thinking about you laying on my desk, and it’s a problem, not because I want to stop but because I don’t—”
One of your hands moves upward into his hair and you pull, and this forces a needy whine from his throat which goes straight to your cunt. It’s so sweet, his voice is so sweet, and the sounds he’s making are causing your heart and your thoughts and your hips to stutter.
“—and I need you to know that you’re doing this to me, in case you accidentally change a variable without realizing it, and then the whole thing shifts and I don’t spend an hour after school remembering how you taste—”
“I won’t, I won’t, I promise—I wouldn’t want to—I’m the same, I never want to stop thinking about you—” You think your shorts have finally shifted to the side, because suddenly the contact has become exponentially more intense, almost to the point of being painful, and you would like to live in this moment forever.
You’re panting and mewling into his ear, and your cunt is sliding along the length of him through his jeans, and suddenly Ryland’s mouth is on your shoulder, gently biting as his hips jerk and stutter and he gasps your name and then keens, low and sweet, and you think you might explode at the thought that you have just made him come in his pants.
“Sorry—sorry, I’m—”
There is quite literally nothing he should be apologizing for, and you would like to tell him this, but you think the part of your brain that controls speech has just checked out for the moment, so instead you kiss him and moan into his mouth in an effort to communicate this. You think he gets the gist, because then his tongue is tracing your bottom lip and one of his hands moves up to swipe a thumb over your beaded nipple.
You start to move your hips again, but Ryland lets out a sort of pained moan and holds you still. “I’m sorry, it’s—kind of a lot—here,” he drops his hand back down again and you whine. “I know, I know, I’ve got you.”
He repositions you so one of his thighs is slotted between your legs and then pulls you down by your waist, and the loss of the ridge of his zipper is less than ideal but the way he’s looking at your hips move in awe is more than making up for it. Then his hand moves back up, and you let out a stilted whine, and you think you should probably close your eyes again because your body is on fire and you are already so close and you want to keep going, but you can’t bear to stop looking at his face, at the way his lips part and his half-lidded eyes behind the lenses of his glasses.
Just like you had asked him to, he keeps talking—“That’s, that’s it, you’re so, you sound so good,”—until you place a hand on the side of his face and swipe your thumb across his swollen bottom lip, and he takes the digit into his mouth so you can press down on his tongue.
You wonder how many more times you could make him come tonight, make him spill on your face, your chest, your back, inside you, and then your eyes are squeezing shut and your body shakes and you cry out; and he holds you the entire time, guiding your hips through it, looking at you like you are the only thing in the entire universe worth looking at.
Ryland gently guides you forward as you collapse against him, because your whole body kind of feels like jelly. After a few moments you start laughing, and then he’s laughing, too, your chests shaking against each other.
He presses a kiss against your temple before speaking. “Sorry that I—well.”
“Ryland.” You manage to lean back a little so you can look at him properly. His cheeks are flushed. “I do not even have the words to explain to you how hot that was.”
All he does in response is hum and smile, and then he kisses you again, softly, slowly, and it causes something to bloom in your chest and trickle into your limbs.
“…And I’m the one who should be apologizing. I think I just ruined your jeans.”
He laughs against your lips. “Don’t need ’em. You can launch them into the sun, that is how much I do not need them.”
Later, after you both have showered—the shower might have been held up by certain activities—and changed, because he already keeps some spare clothes at your apartment, and his jeans are in the wash in an attempt to salvage them, you’re sitting together on the couch again, your legs draped across his like before and watching the same video. He laughs at all the right spots and asks questions and makes you appreciate it in a new light, even though you have rewatched it countless times, and you think you understand the feeling that had unfurled inside you earlier. You decide that you’d like to sit with that knowledge for a little bit, not out of fear, but to enjoy the buildup.
concurrency (ryland grace x reader), chapter 3: garbage in, garbage out
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
garbage in, garbage out (phrase): used to describe the concept that flawed or nonsense input data produces nonsense output or "garbage"; can also refer to the unforgiving nature of programming, in which a poorly written program might produce nonsensical behavior
software engineer reader; slow burn; eventual smut; mentions of death; grief; found family; AFAB reader (with very infrequent uses of she/her pronouns); no use of y/n
a/n: a note about the NannyBot/Armando naming thing: in the book, Grace comes up with the name 'NannyBot' while at Tau Ceti, but i really liked the name Armando in the movie, so i hope the solution i have come up with to have both works :)
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When you wake, your head is pounding.
Your eyes still feel puffy from crying yourself to sleep, but the more pressing issue at the moment is how dry your mouth feels and the fact that you still feel like hurling. It turns out that, if you’ve recently been in a coma for four years and therefore haven’t had alcohol in a while, the hangover hits you like a semi-truck.
You would very much like to stay inside your blanket cocoon for the next several days and probably cry a little more, but you remind yourself of the decision you made last night and take a deep breath. And then a few more, for good measure. Then, feeling a little bit more emotionally grounded and less likely to puke, you draw the blanket back. You immediately regret this decision as the lights shine into your eyes, and you groan a little.
“Morning, sunshine,” Dr. Grace says. He’s sitting on the floor, back against the wall, typing away on the computer in his lap.
“Um, sunshine? What—oh.” You look down at your wrinkled clothes and then attempt to run a hand through your hair, which is still too long and now incredibly tangled. “Right. You’re making a joke. Because I probably look like shit.” He says nothing at that, instead snapping and pointing a finger gun at you as he continues looking at whatever he’s working on. “I didn’t sleep for too long, did I?”
He types a few more things before closing the laptop and setting it to the side. “About seven hours. I slept for a while and then poked around the ship some more. By the way, just to confirm my theory—the Petrovascope doesn’t work while the spin drives are active, because that would be like looking into a pair of binoculars while pointing them at the sun, right? Since that’s about the amount of energy we’re shooting out our backside right now.”
“That is…a weird way to describe that, but, yeah, you’ve hit the nail on the head.”
“Good, good. Just checking. I can give you the math for that, by the way, if you want. Since I did the math.”
You look at him flatly. “I think if I tried to think about math right now, my brain would explode and you’d be mopping up gray matter for days.”
He laughs and then stands, shifting his glasses to hang below his chin and stretching his arms above his head. His flight suit is tied around his waist, and he’s wearing a shirt with an image of the Earth. Above and below the picture, the shirt reads, ‘THE ROTATION OF THE EARTH REALLY MAKES MY DAY.’ It makes you smile, and for a brief moment you can forget that you’re currently hurtling through space with the weight of four lives (plus about ten billion more, give or take a few million) resting on your shoulders.
His shoulders are weirdly broad, by the way—were they always like that? The cuffs of his sleeves are a little tight, too, especially now as the muscles of his upper arms are stretched above his head. You definitely do not remember him being this buff, and you’d spent a decent amount of time around him during those science lessons. Granted, he was usually wearing a lab coat, so you suppose you don’t have much control data—
You decide that you are going to think about this later. Or never, actually; that’s probably better. Dr. Grace walks over to you and offers his hand, and after a moment you accept it and let him help you up from the floor. Which is not doing any favors for your back, by the way, so you resolve to find some extra padding at some point, because there is still no way you’re getting back onto one of those platforms.
“Fair enough,” he says while pulling you up, and it takes you a moment to realize he’s still talking about the math. “Just, you know. If you decide you want me to explain it to you. I can do that.”
You narrow your eyes. “Explain it to—I can do math.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I do math all the time!”
“Of course.”
“I do so much math. I work—worked—at NASA. I have a doctorate in software engineering.”
“I didn’t say anything.” He’s smiling at you, eyes full of mirth behind his glasses, and he’s still holding your hand. You get the sense that he wants to ask about what sent you hurtling off to bed last night (or…day? It’s all relative when you’re in space, you suppose) but is instead choosing to wait until you decide that you want to talk about it, and in the meantime is doing everything he can to make you feel at least somewhat normal.
Then you’re thinking about the promise you made yourself last night, that you would ask him what he remembered about the explosion at Baikonur. Or if he even remembered it at all. The thought of having that conversation makes your chest clench painfully. He seems to sense the shift and looks like he’s about to say something, but he’s interrupted by the NannyBot dropping a tube of food onto your head.
“Eat.”
“Oh my god, I hate this fucking thing.”
Dr. Grace’s hand finally drops yours, and he takes a step back with a look of faux-hurt. “Be nice to him. He might be a little stupid, sure, but he feeds us.”
You scoff as you stoop down to pick up the tube. The motion makes your back hurt and sends the blood rushing to your head, which brings the pounding back in force. Great. “‘He’? Don’t humanize it.”
“You mean Armando.”
“No, I mean the brainless bucket of bolts hanging from the ceiling.” You swear that the arm does a sad little whir. “And—Armando? Really? They named it the NannyBot, which is a stupid name for a stupid machine.” You tear the tube open with a little more force than you intend, and some of the sludge goes flying. “God damn it—wait.” You look up at him then. He looks like he wants to say something about all of the cursing but is, instead, politely refraining, because you are an adult, not a twelve-year-old middle schooler. “You named it the NannyBot. They hated the name, but everyone started calling it that and it stuck.”
“I did?” He looks annoyingly proud of himself.
“Armando, NannyBot—you named astrophage, too, didn’t you?”
“I thought it was pretty clever. It means—”
“I know what it means, I’m hungover, not illiterate.” He lifts his hands up in surrender. You take a tentative sniff of the tube. It’s some kind of pork dish, you think, and it smells delicious, but the thought of that texture in your mouth right now makes you want to gag. You force yourself to eat it anyway. “I want to name something.” It comes out a little whinier than you mean it to.
He grins, either at the way you’re forcing the sludge into your mouth with a wince, or the glob that you sent flying to the side when you tore the tube open, or your petulant declaration. Probably all three. “Tell you what, the next time we find something, you can name it.”
“Oh, yay. It’s probably going to be a random asteroid or something else lame like that.” You pause for a moment. “Actually, that would still be pretty cool.”
You continue lapping up the tube-goop while he turns around to collect the laptop from the floor. “I’ll be in the lab,” he calls over his shoulder before climbing up the ladder. You go to respond, but you still have some food in your mouth, so instead it comes out as a hnchgkay. You swear you can hear him laughing somewhere above you. This is, already, likely the quickest you’ve gotten along with someone. You chalk that up to Dr. Grace being completely and utterly relieved at the presence of another human being.
While he’s gone, you take the time to ‘make’ your ‘bed’ and change, finally managing to finish your meal and discarding the wrapper on the floor. You look at it for a moment, and then add ‘find a trash can’ to the bottom of your current mental to-do list, which starts with attempting to brush your hair, then checking the computer, the ship’s instrumentation, dismantling Armando—NannyBot, you are not giving it the dignity of a name—and hurling him (it!) into Tau Ceti. The list goes on. Somewhere floating to the side of the list is asking Dr. Grace about Baikonur, which you haven’t quite figured out where you’re going to slot that in.
You try to comb through your hair with your fingers. This turns out to be a Sisyphean task. After your fingers get stuck for the fifth or sixth time, you huff and give up, turning to climb up the ladder instead.
You stop when you reach the lab and watch as Dr. Grace meanders around. It looks as if he’s attempting to reorganize all of the different items scattered around, a mess he must have made at some point while you were still trapped in your coma. This is probably as good a time as any to just rip the band-aid off and ask, so you slowly step off the ladder and square your shoulders.
“Can you cut my hair?” Is what comes out instead. Listen, you were trained to work with computers, create and execute complex algorithms, design spacecraft, analyze complications in their instrumentation and respond to them; hell, you even practiced spacewalking in a pool at one point. Having what would assuredly be a nuclear bomb of an emotional conversation is not something you have much experience with, especially considering the fact that people rarely stayed in your life long enough to have those sorts of talks with you.
Lesya would have been able to do it, you think.
Dr. Grace jumps at the sound of your question and turns around. The man has the survival instincts of a tadpole. (Do tadpoles have survival instincts, actually? You could ask him; he would probably know the answer.) “Oh—sure.” He rummages around for scissors and undoes whatever progress he had just made tidying up in the process, particularly when he picks up a bin and dumps its contents onto the ground. He motions for you to walk over and then gently turns you around, placing the bin behind your feet. “Just, you know, don’t expect anything special. They don’t teach you this in a microbiology PhD.”
You huff through your nose as he draws all of your hair behind your shoulders. “What, you haven’t had to cut gum out of a kid’s hair or something?”
“I can’t really remember if I have, but statistically speaking, probably.” He runs his fingers gently over your hair. Rationally, you assume that he’s just doing this to make it all as even as possible before he cuts, but it still makes your scalp tingle and sends a shudder down your spine, and you have to fight to keep still. “How long do you want it?”
“Just below the shoulders is fine.” You figure this is short enough to manage, but long enough to tie back if you need to. He starts snipping away, and the lab is silent save for the hum of the ship and sound of the scissors. Internally, you are waging war with yourself. Maybe you could start small—just ask him what he remembers about the project. Or how he ended up as the science officer. Okay, that’s not really starting small, but it’s at least slightly better than coming right out with hey, do you remember when an entire building exploded with our friends inside and then you had to decide to join the mission at the last minute?
He finishes before either side has triumphed over the other. “There.” You turn around to face him and reflexively touch the ends of your hair. The pile in the bin is much larger than you expect.
“What should we do with…all that?” You nudge the bin with your foot. “Should we, like, keep it? Waste not, want not, or whatever?”
He looks at you, utterly baffled. “What would we do with strands of your hair?”
“I don’t know!”
“We’re not monks. We’re not going to make hair shirts, or whatever. They’re the ones who make hair shirts, right?”
“Do I look like I know the answer to that?”
“I don’t know, you’re the one who wanted to use it.”
“Just—shut up and get rid of it.”
He picks up the bin with a smile. “That’s not how we speak to our friends.”
“We’re friends?”
This makes him pause, still holding the bin in his hands. “I mean, I assume so. We’re a crew,” he states simply, and this causes the emotions you had shoved into a box to begin to leak out and drip into your lungs. You hadn’t really been friends on the Vat. Outside of the conversation on the deck of the carrier, when he had caught you smoking, you had rarely spoken to him casually. Lesya had enjoyed teasing you mercilessly about him, insisting that you had some kind of schoolgirl crush on him from the astrophage lessons, but the reality was that you hadn’t actually had enough to go off of to feel anything other than respect for a skilled and passionate colleague. He was attractive, obviously, but everybody thought so. And, okay, you do remember drunkenly asking him to do a karaoke song with you that one night, but he had smiled and waved you off and shortly disappeared once Lesya had dragged you toward the front of the room to sing with her. So nothing had really come of that, either.
The longer you think about it, you realize that Lesya had been your first friend in a very long time. Yao, too, and then Annie and Dr. Dubois once you’d joined the science lessons, you suppose, but it wasn’t quite the same as it was with Lesya. You’d been friendly with other students in your cohort, your colleagues at NASA, the team on the Vat, but not…friends. Only Lesya. And that was probably due to sheer proximity and her relentlessness. You just—you always told yourself that you didn’t have time for it. That your career came before everything else.
Your career is ending on this ship.
“Okay,” is all you finally say in response. “Friends.”
He smiles and lifts up a fist, and after a moment you bump yours against it. “First fist bump outside the solar system.”
“Groundbreaking. We are truly pioneers. We need to contact Nature.”
Dr. Grace looks at you for a moment longer, still grinning, before walking over to the wall. “Waste removal,” he calls out, and a panel opens up to reveal a chute, and he dumps the hair into it, shaking the bin for good measure.
You stare at him, dumbfounded. You are an idiot. You had completely forgotten about that. “You—you’ve just been letting me litter all over the floor without saying anything?”
“I thought you knew! I didn’t want to judge.”
“You didn’t want to—yes, I knew, I just. Forgot.” His grin grows a little wider. “Oh, shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“But you thought it.”
“A mind-reader on top of an accomplished software engineer?” You would like to preen at the compliment, but he is being very annoying. You understand why his students must have loved him. “I didn’t know I was friends with such an utter genius.”
“You—I am going to go check on the computer now.”
“It was there the last time I was in the cockpit, but yeah, we should probably make sure it hasn’t run away.”
You do not deign his comment with a response and instead turn around and climb up the ladder. You can hear him cackling the entire way up, until what sounds like a pile of stuff clatters to the floor and he exclaims oh, darn it!
Ha. Karma.
The ship’s computer is, in fact, still there, and everything appears to be working as expected, but you run a few diagnostics just to be safe. Once those are done, you click through the various real-time schematics of the ship to check for any damage. There are some minor abrasions to the hull, likely from interstellar dust, but nothing so serious as to warrant immediate maintenance. You make a note to periodically check on this, though, because a ship flying through interstellar space at near light-speed was kind of unchartered territory in the grand scheme of human space flight.
You flick through a few more screens before pausing on the one that says TIME TO ENGINE CUTOFF: 00:00:00:02:27.53 and watch as the seconds tick down. Hm, that can’t be right. The crew was meant to wake up with a good handful of days before that happened, and you’ve only been awake for a day and some change, so surely there shouldn’t be only two minutes left.
Right. You woke up later than you were supposed to, because the platform got stuck and Armando (you’ve resigned yourself to it already) was a moron.
You turn to call down to Dr. Grace before remembering the ship’s intercom system. “Dr. Grace,” you radio down—radio isn’t quite the correct verb, but, whatever—“we have a bit of a situation.”
There’s silence before he yells up, “How did you do that?”
“There should be a screen on the wall, opposite from the ladder. You can access the intercom from there.”
A few beats, and then his voice rings out through the nearby speakers. “Oh.”
“Dr. Grace, could you come up to the cockpit, please?”
“Copy that,” he responds. “Gosh, that was as fun to say as I’d hoped. Also, we don’t need to do the whole honorific thing. I mean, we’re all doctors here.”
You sigh before pressing the transmission button again. “Okay, Ryland, can you—”
“Um, maybe just Grace, actually. Still getting used to the whole having-a-name thing. I don’t think a lot of people called me by my first name, which, I admit, sounds a little sad—”
“Grace. Can you please come up to the cockpit right now.”
“Copy. Over.” This would be funny if there wasn’t currently a countdown staring you right in the face. Thankfully, he wastes no time in clambering up the ladder into the cockpit. “What’s going on? Is this a ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’ situation?” Reflexively, you almost congratulate him on quoting the line correctly; instead, you simply gesture toward the screen in response. “Oh, yeah. I saw that a few days ago.”
“A few days—Grace.”
“Yep?”
“We haven’t—is anything strapped down? We’re about to go zero-g in,” you look back at the countdown, “less than a minute, and I haven’t strapped anything down. Have you strapped anything down? Such as, oh, I don’t know, any of the equipment currently laying around the lab?”
He blanches. “Oh, shoot—”
Grace turns around as if to climb down the ladder again. “No! We don’t have time for that now—”
“Well, what am I supposed to do—”
The Mary intones around you, “Engine cut off in fifteen, fourteen, thirteen—”
He lets out an involuntary squeal and hurries to pull his flight suit fully on before rushing forward to clutch the pilot’s chair. You’re sitting on the footrest, because it felt wrong to hear Mary chime ‘pilot detected’ when the real pilot was somewhere far behind you, his dead body drifting in space.
“Okay, okay, we’re not panicking,” he says, while panicking. “We trained for this. We trained for this, right?”
“In a pool, yeah.”
“—seven, six—”
“And the pool was close enough?”
“How would I know—”
“—three, two, one.”
And then you’re weightless. It’s a difficult feeling to describe as the previously stronger-than-Earth gravity simply dissipates into nothingness. Thankfully, you’re already clutching the metal footrest beneath you, so you don’t move much, but the lower half of Grace’s body starts floating away from the pilot’s chair.
He looks at you for a moment before promptly throwing up into the front of his flight suit.
The sound of him vomiting and the subsequent smell, combined with your hangover, means that you are also hurling into your suit.
While you clutch the fabric against your chest, you think, we’re fucked. Humanity is fucked.
concurrency (ryland grace x reader), chapter 2: confabulation
also posted on ao3 | my masterlist
confabulation (noun): a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world
software engineer reader; slow burn; eventual smut; mentions of death; grief; found family; AFAB reader (with very infrequent uses of she/her pronouns); no use of y/n
tw: body horror (for nightmare sequence)
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The project practically exploded when they confirmed astrophage could be bred.
There was still the problem, of course, of figuring out how to increase its reproduction rate nearly exponentially, particularly finding the energy required for such an endeavor, but you were sure Stratt already had plans, backup plans, tertiary plans—you get the picture.
It felt like once Dr. Grace had arrived and his findings had been confirmed by scientists across the world, the entire aircraft carrier had exhaled a collectively held breath and got to work. It wasn’t as if no one had been frantically working before; it was more as if all of the effort up to that moment had been dedicated to pushing a massive boulder up a hill, and now it was finally rolling down the other side, gaining speed, and you had the sense that it had already reached a point beyond stopping.
The capability of producing more astrophage meant that you and the rest of the team of software engineers could proceed under the parameters of a roughly four-year journey, with a little change on the end for the crew to find the solution you all desperately hoped was at Tau Ceti. And there were already problems.
It wasn’t like you were starting from scratch; there were decades upon decades of previous space missions to build from. But a manned, four-year, near light-speed, interstellar mission? NASA had a hard enough time staying in touch with and updating the software of satellites and probes within this solar system, much less outside of it. If something happened, even if it was an edge case of an edge case, there was no mission control to feed the astronauts changes to any of the ship’s programs, no way for anyone on the ground to communicate with the ship itself to make modifications. That combined with the fact that this was an essentially blind mission to unchartered territory was enough to make your team nervous.
You had just finished telling Stratt as much and now awaited her response. The team of software engineers—a group growing each day—was already a generally antisocial bunch, at least with outsiders, and delivering this kind of news was particularly unattractive. You had drawn the short straw.
She barely looked up from the papers strewn across her desk. “This is something we can account for as the project progresses.”
“That’s what we’re trying to tell you—it’s not. We simply do not have the technology to create an on-board system that can proactively account for and react to whatever they’ll encounter out there, not in a way that considers the rest of the software on top of a million other things. Nothing reliable enough for a mission this critical, anyway.” You sigh and pinch the bridge of your nose in an effort to come up with a way to communicate this effectively. “If this were any other kind of mission, this would be less of a concern. But the problem is we have literally no idea what the team might meet at Tau Ceti. Sure, we know the star, its luminosity, metallicity, and we’re decently sure it has a few exoplanets—and these are still unconfirmed, by the way, since the system is surrounded by a huge debris disk—but that’s pretty much it. If something happens, if a system or one of the instruments fails or needs to be significantly altered…”
“I didn’t realize you were an astronomer on top of an engineer.” In another context, this might have sounded dismissive, but Stratt had now shifted the full focus of her attention to you.
You manage to shrug. “You pick up a lot when you work at NASA, I suppose.”
Stratt nods, seemingly satisfied. “What is the team’s recommendation, then?”
“Either the engineer needs to be an extremely skilled systems expert on top of a materials specialist, or the pilot or science officer does, or…you need to add a fourth member with this skillset.”
Then something very weird happens. Yao and Lesya are standing behind Stratt when you look up again. That’s not right. They weren’t on the carrier yet. But there they were, looking silently at you, dressed in orange flight suits. Lesya has a soft, sad smile on her face.
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Her response is meant to dismiss you, and you know that you had left the room then to return to your team’s workspace. But in this version of the moment, instead, you’re rooted to the chair, still staring at the figures behind her. Stratt does not seem to notice them.
You watch in horror as their skin begins to desiccate, their eyes sinking into their skulls as the surrounding flesh wrinkles and collapses against their bones. This isn’t right, this can’t be right, because you didn’t see this, you weren’t there when they were shot into the dark emptiness of space, but your brain is forcing you to imagine it anyway. To make you pay for the sin of sleeping peacefully below them while they rotted.
Lesya is still smiling at you as the color leaves her complexion, and her lips darken and stretch sickeningly across her teeth. Your stomach roils. You want to throw up, scream, cry, beg for their forgiveness, ask them to stop, but your body is trapped in the chair, and Stratt is still sitting there, reviewing and signing papers that will eventually send you all to your deaths.
--
Something shaking your shoulder sends your eyes flying open. Your body is still frozen, mind stuck in the dream, and it takes a moment for your surroundings to return to you.
“—hey, hey, you’re alright, you’re okay, it was just a dream.” Dr. Grace is kneeling beside you, and once he sees that your eyes are open, he stops shaking your shoulder and instead hesitantly rubs your upper arm in an attempt to soothe you. “I came in to wake you, and you were groaning and crying, and I figured…”
You sniffle and nod. His hand leaves your arm as you move to sit up. Wiping the wetness off of your face—you hadn’t even noticed that you’d been crying until he said something—you mumble, “Thanks.” The NannyBot takes this moment to deposit another tube in your lap. You pick it up half-heartedly. It feels a little more solid than the last one. “How long was I out?”
“About five hours.” He sits back on his heels and watches as you tear the top off this tube off. It was salmon-flavored, this time, and it reminds you once again of a cat treat. “I know you said you only wanted to sleep for a few hours, but. You needed the rest.”
“What were you doing while I was asleep?”
He shrugs. “Figuring out what else is on the ship, mostly. Remembering some stuff about astrophage. I messed around with the computer for a bit, finally found some menus.”
A laugh leaves your lips before you can fully register it. You assume that you’re still too sleep-addled to sink back into your grief. “Hey, I made those. They should be pretty intuitive.”
“Keyword: should.” You smile weakly and finish off your (somehow absolutely delicious) salmon goop. “So, you’re a software engineer, then? Or a computer scientist?”
“Mm-hm.” There’s technically a difference, but that mostly had to do with degree paths and the scope of knowledge involved; computer science was a little broader and more theoretical, but even this was a massive oversimplification, because software engineering required more math, science, training in Boolean logic—if that’s not ‘theoretical’ you don’t really know what is—and it didn’t really seem like the time to go into the minutiae of it all with him. It strikes you just how little he remembers and the oddness of that fact.
He’s silent for a few moments while you drop the plastic onto the ground beside you. “Then…why are you here? I remember Stratt saying the crew would only have three people—a pilot, an engineer, and a scientist. Wouldn’t all of that be covered by the engineer? By Ilyukhina?”
Her name sends a spike of guilt through your gut. “Water,” you call out, and you take the paper cup from the arm with barely disguised distrust toward the thing before taking a sip and answering him. “That was the plan, at first. But the scale of all of this—we were worried about the capability of the crew to make changes to the ship’s programming if it became necessary. And believe me, historically speaking, it’s usually necessary.” Another slow sip to try and delay. “I…first I was training Lesya—Ilyukhina. She was brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but ultimately she was a materials specialist.”
You thought about the long hours you had spent with Lesya on the ship, pulling scenarios from previous NASA missions and coaching her through possible solutions. At the very first one, she’d insisted that you call her Lesya (“Ilyukhina,” she had said with her nose scrunched, “so formal. We will spend so much time together, Lesya is best.”). Then, when you’d run out of historical case studies, you’d started creating them yourself. It had been fun, pushing your skills to the limits and helping her through them. It probably hadn’t been fair to her, because you realize now that the entire time it had, at least in part, been more about proving to yourself that you could do it rather than ensuring the project could still have a chance at succeeding with three people instead of four.
Dr. Grace is still waiting for you to continue. You clear your throat before lamely finishing, “So. The decision was made early enough to add another crew member. Once they tested everyone on the ship and it came back that I had the gene, well. That was that.” The engineers had thrown a fit once they realized they had to accommodate for another person and all the added mass that came with it; the comas had mostly offered a solution for the issue of food, but random bits of weight had needed to be shaved off here and there, and the dormitory adjusted to accommodate a fourth shaft. Clearly, they had not accommodated for it that well, you think bitterly, looking over at the death trap you had been stuck in earlier. Dr. Grace had managed to remove the shelf and slide the platform back into the wall while you were sleeping. You must have been truly dead to the world.
He nods thoughtfully and looks at you a little longer before perking up. “That reminds me—” He stands and goes over to a soft container sitting at the edge of the room, rummaging around before producing a photo and bringing it over to you. “I promise I wasn’t snooping through your stuff, I just…well, I was operating under the assumption for a while that I was the only one alive. So.”
You take the picture from his hands and stare at it. It was of you and Lesya. She had an arm around your shoulders and was beaming at the camera held in her other hand while you deadpanned, though there was a slightly playful look in your eyes. You remember when she took this: during one of your training sessions, you had been combing through her code and growing increasingly (but fondly) annoyed by the notes she had left you throughout the script. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been serious; on the contrary, she was actually one of the most serious people you had ever known. It was just that she didn’t believe being serious was mutually exclusive with having fun, which for anyone else would have been an untenable oxymoron, an error in the logic, but with her…it was just her. It was Lesya.
A tear drops onto the photo, and you quickly try to wipe it away before it ruins the ink. “Thank you,” you croak.
Then he produces another gift from his pockets: two bags of clear liquid, one of which is half empty, and you can see Lesya’s scrawl on the bags labeling them as vodka. “There were three, but. Again. Thought I was the only person who’d be drinking them.” You take one and run your fingers over the Sharpie-d letters. “I don’t even know how she snuck these on here.”
You snort. “You underestimate her capabilities. And astronauts have always managed to smuggle personal effects when they really want to.” She hadn’t actually had to do any sneaking, though. It turns out when you’ve been asked to sacrifice your life for the sake of the entire planet, the people doing the asking were pretty willing to grant most of your requests. Within reason.
This is a bad idea, you think idly. You should get up and get to work, check the ship’s systems, the various instruments’ calibrations, maybe even dive into the NannyBot’s software if you had the time. Because now the four-person mission had been halved, and the fate of billions of people are in your hands, and even more than that, you had to succeed for Lesya. For Yao. It was the only way you could even attempt to atone for being unable to prevent their deaths.
But this had always been your problem, hadn’t it? Your inability to let go, to stop obsessing over every detail in an attempt to gain control. It was why you had so single-mindedly pursued your career at the expense of friendships, intimate relationships, your family, until one day you had looked around and there was nobody left. Why you had been across the country when you got the call about your brother, whom you hadn’t spoken to in almost six months. Why you were here, now, on this ship. Perhaps if you had been able to simply let go, the ship’s resources wouldn’t have been spread just a little bit thinner, and maybe the godforsaken metal arm in the ceiling could have saved them.
Well, saved them so they could live for a few more months.
What would Lesya do? You wish so desperately that she was here that it makes you feel sick. But she’s not, and you can’t ask her what she would do. You think back to one of the many jokes she had left you in her code during one of your sessions.
if (vodka) {
cout << drink;
} else {
cout << find vodka; // don’t forget you owe me a drink :)
}
It hadn’t run, obviously. She hadn’t defined vodka. Or drink, for that matter. But you could run it now, for her. And then you’d save the planet for her, too.
You pop the cap off the bag and take a large swig.
--
The other bag of vodka is in your hands as you sit in the affectionately-named mental health room. At first, Dr. Grace had attempted to give you a ‘tour’ of the ship, but that very quickly ended once you pointed out that unlike him, you remembered every little detail of the Mary. (At some point, you were going to sit down with him and explain that his amnesia does not sound normal, and then try to give him as many details about the project as possible to get him up to speed, but you figure that this is probably a task best left for when you’re not sipping vodka from a plastic bag.)
For a little while after that, you had been showing him around, albeit in the ship’s computer rather than in any physical space. This, similarly, was short-lived, because you quickly got distracted while clicking around. Then you remembered the laptops, and Dr. Grace was sent off to retrieve one (and the other bag of vodka). This had led to you uploading and installing random programs as you thought of them, just to see if you could—and you could; really, it was far too easy—and he watched the whole time, asking questions and making suggestions. After that, you started to teach him to code; just basic stuff, but it was clear he had some training in it already, and this was made especially apparent when you started making mistakes and he was pointing them out.
You had retired, then, to the screen room. One of the videos you had put together was playing, clips of scenes from Earth: a busy airport, the view of Yosemite Valley from the top of the Half Dome, a cat café. You take another sip of vodka and lean back against the grate that would normally serve as the floor in the ship’s centrifugal configuration, your legs dangling into the shaft of the ladder.
When you hear Dr. Grace coming down the ladder from the cockpit, you draw your legs up and shift over. “I wish I had a cigarette. You didn’t find any while you were digging through our stuff, yeah?”
He steps off the ladder to sit beside you. “Uh, no. Somehow I think they would have drawn the line there. Fire and spaceships don’t mix super well.”
“Ha!” You laugh, and then you have to swallow hard because making that sound almost gives you the hiccups. “Very true. Apollo 1, Apollo 13, um, other…ones.”
“Challenger.”
“Yep, that one too. Although that wasn’t caused by a fire. I mean, it exploded, obviously,” you make an explosion sound and mime it with your hands, “but it was the—the—the O-rings, you see, because of the temperature and the fact that the launch vehicle had been sitting on the pad overnight. Then. You know. Boom.”
“Right. It caused the primary and secondary O-rings to become rigid and fail when they were supposed to seal the joint in the right-hand rocket booster. I teach my kids about it every January,” he adds at your surprised expression. “Good lesson on the difficulties of space flight. And that managers are terrible and should go extinct.”
You laugh again, and this time it does give you the hiccups. You take a deep breath and hold it to try and expel them. While you’re doing this, the screen changes to a view of the night sky from Earth.
Dr. Grace looks up, confused. “This seems a little redundant.”
You exhale loudly and wait a moment to see if it worked. So far, all signs point to yes. “Hey, I put this on here. It’s got, like, Earth things.” You gesture to the bottom row of the screen array, which is currently displaying the outlines of trees against the night sky.
“Right. I’m just saying that we could look out the window and have a better view than, you know, the entire history of the human species.”
“Yeah, but. It’s not the same.”
“Uh, it is the same. We’re not far enough away from Earth to have completely different constellations. Some of the stars might look a little brighter or dimmer, sure, but—” He looks like he has more to say on the subject but stops when he sees you looking at him, deadpan, because he’s currently explaining constellations to a NASA employee. (Former employee? You weren’t on their payroll anymore, obviously. You wonder briefly if you had worked there long enough for them to pay out your life insurance to your family.) “Okay, okay. It’s not the same. Even though it is.”
“Anyway. Back to the much more important issue at hand. Fire and space—bad combo. We’ve established this. But,” you hold up a finger for emphasis, “and hear me out on this, something that they didn’t consider is that drunk cigarettes are the fucking best. So are you absolutely positive that you didn’t see any stowed away somewhere around here.”
“Hey now, language,” he says, and it’s half-reflexive, half-joking. “I didn’t know that you’re a smoker. Seems like it should disqualify you from space flight.”
“Was,” you correct, and you’re about to explain it all to him—you’d picked it up in grad school, mostly quit once you graduated and started working at NASA, only really indulged after a night out, you know it’s a bad habit, et cetera, et cetera—but you stop before you can when you look over at him.
His eyes have a faraway look to them, and his gaze slides from your face to the screens still displaying the night sky. “No, I did know that. I remember now.”
He did? You had smoked from time to time on the Vat, particularly once you had been officially added to the crew, but you had usually refrained from doing so in front of the more important people on the project (and everyone knew that Dr. Grace was essentially the second-in-command); it wasn’t that you were embarrassed, or anything, or that you thought you would get in trouble—you were in your thirties, for Christ’s sake, no one was going to tell on you for smoking a cig every now and then—but it was more a self-conscious habit out of respect.
You look back at the screens, too, and that finally jogs your memory, and you think back to what he had likely just recalled.
You had been sitting on the top deck of the Vat, dangling your legs off the side of the carrier, watching the dark waves glide by with a cigarette between your fingers. The view had been really beautiful, out there in the middle of the ocean; with little to no light pollution, the night sky was brilliant. You’d been sitting out there more and more since the blood test results had come back and plans to add a fourth crew member were all but confirmed.
“Smoking kills, you know,” he had called out, and you turned your head to watch him walk over and sit beside you.
You laughed and flicked the ashes off, turning your head forward again to watch them float down into the darkness below. “You gonna report me?”
“Detention, maybe. I’m a teacher, remember? Gotta keep fighting the good fight. D.A.R.E. and all that.”
It was endearing that he still referred to himself as a teacher despite having been gone from his classroom for months. You took another drag. “That’s admirable,” you said, careful to blow the exhale of smoke away from him, “especially considering that we definitely lost the war on drugs.”
It was his turn to laugh, and afterward you had sat together in silence for a little while, watching the sea and its choppy reflection of the stars. You had offered him the cigarette at one point, at which he shook his head and raised his hands up as if to ward it away. “Where’d you even get one, anyway?”
“One of the Chinese officers.” Another drag. “Smoking is still pretty big in east Asia. It’s how I picked it up, actually—there was an international student from China in my cohort.” He nodded, and the quiet resumed. You had looked at him, then, just barely angling your head, and studied the side of his face, the way his fingers fidgeted and curled around the railing in front of him. Dr. Grace was probably the second most well-known person on the ship, and yet you hadn’t had much of a reason to interact with him before. He was well-liked, you knew that, but he had also seemed a little…reclusive. Always in his lab, rarely sticking around at whatever social events were cobbled together on the ship, really only speaking extensively with Stratt or arguing with Dr. Lokken. It all made it a little strange that he was sitting with you in that moment.
“So. I hear you’re joining my science class.”
Ah. That made more sense. “Yeah, looks like it.”
“I’ll go easy on you.”
You scoff and roll your eyes. “Hey, I had to take chemistry and all that in college, too.”
“How long ago is that, now?” He smiles at your pointed silence. “How about this: I’ll start out with a few softball questions, make you look good in front of Shapiro and Dubois—”
Oh god. Annie and Dr. Dubois. The explosion. That pulls you out of the memory. That’s why Dr. Grace is on the ship—it had happened three days before launch, the event just on the periphery of the memories affected by your four-year coma. You had almost remembered it when you had gotten your first good look at his face, after you’d yanked the IV out of your arm.
Did he remember it? You don’t know if you have it in you to break the news if he doesn’t, certainly not in your current state, because you’re drunk and now grieving four people all at once instead of just two. So you stand up hurriedly, swaying, and you think you might puke or cry or some secret third thing which likely involves a combination of the first two.
“Hey, woah, do you need help—”
“No, no, I’m fine, I just—” You step over him and get on the ladder to climb down to the dormitory. “I need to sleep. You can finish the vodka, I can’t—”
He calls your name from above you, but you ignore him and finish climbing down before diving into your nest of blankets on the floor, trying to focus on your breathing and failing. You curl in on yourself and do your best to cry silently. You’ll ask him tomorrow, you decide. Tomorrow. And once that’s done, you resolve, still sobbing, that all of this emotional bullshit will be packaged up and put away, and maybe you can take it all out again once you’ve done what you were shot out into space to do. You will not let this swallow you whole; you will make sure the Mary functions long enough to find a solution to the astrophage, that the beetles can make it home. For Lesya. For Yao. For Annie and Dubois.
You hold onto this as you finally drift off to sleep. This time, there are no dreams.
