More for the Lifehailmartian (Ryland Grace x David Jordan x Mark Watney) space exes AU
For now tentatively titled: Somebody That I Used To Know
Here focusing on the Life x Project Hail Mary aspect and the inevitable angst of this au...
Like for Grace waking up and there's a human doctor there to help him remove the tubes and to comfort him when he wakes up confused on the Hail Mary. And an actual astronaut too who knows what he's doing. Who helped build this ship even. Which leads to even more confusion for Grace because what the fudge was he even doing here? He's a school teacher, not an astronaut!
And David...
David assumes Grace must have volunteered. And they must have trained him--surely they wouldn't just launch some random school teacher into space without basic astronaut training right? He must have at least done the pool. Right...?
Right...???
Unlike him, Grace is supposed to be here.
David applied for this mission--he'd be more then happy to save the Earth if it meant he never had to go back there ever again--but was rejected. He thinks perhaps Stratt made a mistake in turning away a willing and qualified volunteer but he most definitely isn't supposed to be here now that he's been contaminated. In his head Rory teases him, asking him when he's going to stop hiding him, them, and what they were from Grace like concealing a zombie bite. There's no way to properly quarantine in here. And they need him. So David focuses on his work, his patients.
Grace.
He clearly volunteered for his students. David felt a twinge of regret for a relationship long since torched. That life was never truly his, they were just going through the motions, doing what he thought he was supposed to do but...
Ryland had clearly grown up since he last knew him. Become a braver man, a better man than he was, with far nobler motives.
He had to help him remember that. Help him see that...
[Read More, Part 1]
Memory loss is common post coma and poor Grace is clearly feeling out of his depth here--he kept crying and having panic attacks. So David couldn't abandon him... at least not yet. So he'll stay awake, just long enough to make sure Grace is up to speed with everything, that he remembers his training and the Mary's systems and it's operations. Or re-teach him if he needed to. He had helped Rory become accustomed to the I.S.S. when he was new to space so David could be a calm and patient teacher when called upon to do so. Even with his amnesiac ex from a lifetime ago. Of all the crewmates to wake up it just had to be Grace. At this time. In these circumstances. It was like the universe was conspiring to torture him.
But at least Grace is a fast learner.
Which was good because they had much to teach him. David and Rory, back when Rory was human, had helped build this ship and after four years of them waking up and fixing problems the Mary was now as intuitive as the ISS had once been for them. They knew every circuit, every pipe, every wire. Especially Rory. Though cross-trained in multiple disciplines David's specialty was medicine. Rory was more the engineer, the fix it guy who knew the station schematics in his sleep... Which made it such a disaster when Calvin assimilated his brain and became intimately aware of the station. The station his all too familiar hunting grounds and his once crewmates his prey...
Grace needed to know. About the ship at least. Rory pinky sweared he was done rampaging now. He even seemed to like Grace (most of the time anyway) and it also seemed they weren't contagious so Grace probably didn't need to know about his contamination.
(Rory: Coward. )
They'd have to teach all this to Grace before they took any kind of long sleep but as soon as he'd learned enough...
David: Okay, you're up to speed now so you can take it from here. I need to go back into hibernation.
Grace: No no no you are not leaving me all alone in the middle of fudging space!
David: Ryland... every time I wake up I eat your food.
Grace: Yesh that's... that's called breakfast, bud.
I can't be awake and eating your food. I'm not even supposed to be here and they only packed food for three people.
Grace: [*Already having another panic attack.*]
David really did intend to have his symbiont put them back in hibernation again but Grace kept finding reasons, finding things he needed "help" with preventing David from going back to sleep...
But the food remained a problem.
Partly this was a problem of David's own making because he previously came out of hibernation twice before when Calvin awoke to the life support alarms and David had saved Yao and Ilyukina. Both times he and Calvin had needed to eat... or perhaps feed was more appropriate, that word more properly conveyed the sinister connotations of what would happen if Calvin got hungry.
For the sake of his sanity David drew a line. When they were bickering and bitching at each other like an old married couple when he spoke with the entity in his head that spoke to him in the voice of his dead crewmate, he was Rory. When he was being his usual monstrous predatory self and craving human flesh he was Calvin. Even though David knew it was one and the same entity residing in him in both cases. So far he'd managed to keep Calvin from feeding on their patients but he didn't know how long the alien's patience would last. Though it had been four years now he'd been asleep for most of it so for him this still felt like a new partnership.
He and his partner needed to hibernate to conserve resources but... he knew Ryland. He needed someone to bounce ideas off of. This would have been easier if he had his own Calvin. Preferably one that was friendly from the start, tolerant of fuck-ups, and didn't want to eat people.
Of course another alien wouldn't really make things better as far as David could see it. Especially not another alien of Martian persuasion. Even Rory/Calvin seemed to agree aborting and devouring their own eggs to avoid competing for resources.
So soon they were going to have to make an awful choice. David wanted to give Yao and Ilyukina the chance, to let them try to recover but in doing so might doom Grace and the mission.
When Calvin put himself and David, his host, into hibernation they did not consume any food. They were essentially dead and perfectly preserved until Calvin restarted the process again. Yao and Ilyukina were still consuming food while in their comas. If Yao and Ilyukina weren't using it.. that would stretch their food supplies.
Rory claimed he couldn't feel Yao and Ilyukina's minds in there. That they were brain dead and wouldn't recover. Of course Calvin had an incentive in declaring them dead...
Unfortunately his own independent testing was only confirming what a certain smug martian space squid had already told him. They were breathing, they were using the feeding tubes, but there was no brain activity.
David hated having to even consider any of this but it was triage. A hard lesson he still hadn't properly learned even after watching so many die--you couldn't save everyone, you helped who you could. It was procedure... but he didn't want to do it.
Not again.
Acting on procedure got his crewmate killed. It was his fault Rory was dead, reduced to only a voice in his head. Trapped in the very thing that devoured him... if he was there at all and not only in his head, a comforting lie that either he or Calvin had come up with to make their situation easier...
These were two people, patients. He really didn't want to have to do this. He wanted to say he did all he could for them but doing everything he could would kill Grace. He couldn't do anything further to help Yao or Ilyukina. He could only help Grace. Could only extend his life...
David knew what he had to do.
They were gonna have to pull the plug on Yao and Ilyukina to save their remaining food.
And it gets worse.
A respectful burial was protein lost to space--it was pretty much a given that Calvin was going to eat them.
But Grace wasn't going to like that. Dammit, he should have just let Calvin eat them before Grace woke up.
Calvin/Rory: That's what I've been saying!
David: You wanted to eat all of them.
Calvin/Rory [Shrug of tentacles]: Well, yeah. Duh.
David did the math, and the math was cruel and unyielding. He had to pull the plug, he had to let Calvin eat Yao and Ilyukina. And he'd still have to hibernate so Grace would have enough food.
And how to do all that, any of that without Grace knowing...?
No.
He couldn't hope to conceal this from Ryland. For one the ship was too small for any kind of subterfuge. And he wasn't a very good liar. Hell he couldn't even keep his disdain for humanity hidden long enough to get on a stupid suicide mission!
And... he knew what that was like, to be kept in the dark. David still felt the sting of betrayal from the people he'd trusted the most--that was still raw in his psyche. The lies. The rescue that wasn't. The hidden quarantine procedures, and that he and the crew were denied that informed choice...
No, Grace might hate him for this but he deserved to know the truth...
All of it.
Rory/Calvin: Fucking finally!
David: This is about more than just food isn't it? ...You just want to show off to my ex, don't you?
Rory/Calvin: Naturally. I really wanna meet him properly. Wouldn't you if you were the one trapped inside?
David: You are not trapped.
Rory/Calvin: 'Don't show yourself, Rory, you'll upset him.' I've been trapped inside you for weeks while you teach the teacher. I just wanna come out and stretch my tentacles. And hell yes I wanna show you off. Can you believe he fumbled this bad bitch?
...Well, maybe not all of it.
He'd be forthright about their current situation regarding the Mary and it's crew but Grace had no need to know the personal stuff. Their long dead history. David wasn't that person anymore. That person didn't exist and never truly had.
However Grace did need to know he was sharing the ship with an alien. A territorial, vicious shape-shifting microorganism/space-squid from Mars that was growling in his head whenever Ryland held eye contact with him a little too long...
David: No we are not doing this. We are not going to doom the planet just because you're being a jealous hoe.
Rory/Calvin: You want to know what I think?
David: No, not really.
Rory/Calvin, [grinning shark-toothed grin]: I think you want to show me off.
David: Please.
Rory/Calvin: You know you traded up. He has just the one reproductive organ and I have...
David: Okay... that's enough. Yes, yes. You read the hentai. We know where this is going. Can we focus please you goddamn horndog.
Okay, back to the matter at hand... would that really be the best for Ryland? Bringing him into this decision? He was such a sensitive soul. At least back when he knew him. Was he just trying to assuage his guilt? Get Ryland to agree it was all for the best before he... murdered his patients.
Fuck.
David sat down, rubbing his eyes.
It would be shitty to make him complicit in this. But going behind his back and taking the choice from him... that would also be a shitty thing to do too.
David briefly wondered if Stratt was ever in the same position. She must have had to brief Ryland on some of the shadiest shit when her right-hand man clearly volunteered to go to space on her.
They were friends, weren't they? Grace and the crewmates David was considering euthanizing--Yao and Ilyukina were his crewmates they didn't send you up if you didn't work well together so... surely they were friends. In his experience Crew was family. More family than family. Grace deserved to know.
Calvin/Rory: Hey quit stalling, I'm starving.
David: No, they are still my patients. And even when... if... if I let you eat them you are going to wait for me to administer a lethal dose of painkillers before you rip them apart.
Calvin/Rory: Wouldn't that be a waste of resources though? Surely you don't have an endless supply of meds on board either.
David: We owe them at least that much. It's the very least we can do. You have a point though we should take thorough inventory of whatever drugs they have packed here.
Calvin/Rory: That'll take forever! You're just stalling. You already know what they most likely sent up. It's not like you're gonna find a hidden cache of heroin. I'm hungry now!
David, snapping: Then take what you need from me.
Rory stopped whining.
Strange...
Not for the first time or last he wondered why Calvin hadn't eaten him yet.
But back to the problem at hand... surely Grace would never agree to this. At least the Grace he used to know--ever the idealist, head in the clouds, never wanting to face the difficult reality in front of them...
Then again they'd both changed--David knew he'd changed a lot in the last decade and gender was the least of it.
The war had changed him. He'd been forced to watch too many friends die in front of him even before Calvin added to that number. And this queer, forced ... partnership with Calvin was likely affecting him more than he even realized. How far gone was he that the moment he declared the situation hopeless that he'd let Calvin eat The Heroes of Earth without a second thought?
And it sounded like Grace had changed too-- last he'd heard he'd become Eva Stratt's right-hand man.
That Stratt. So maybe he did understand tough choices.
He wondered if the people of the astrophage crisis Earth were eating each other yet. Because of time-dilation it had been thirteen years on Earth. Knowing humans, they probably hadn't even waited that long.
Of course, David was well-aware of another solution--Grace could also save food if he got rid of him (them) but.. that evidently that wasn't an option, at least so far. At least he'd been unable to do it when he tried it early on upon realizing 1. where he was and 2. that he'd been very much contaminated and 3. knowing what was at stake with the Hail Mary mission, David had tried to space himself (and that which had attached itself to him like a fucking parasite) but... Calvin wouldn't let him.
He'd tried but he couldn't do it. His body was weak from over four hundred consecutive days in space atrophied muscles, brittle bones--easily breakable by a being like Calvin should he have a mind to and Calvin enjoyed living. He also happened to enjoy David's company so he wouldn't let him die.
David did not consider this a good thing.
Maybe Grace could figure out a way for them to die? He didn't want to put that on him lest Calvin pick up that stray thought. Besides he had enough to worry about.
---
David: Grace, we need to talk.
Grace: I really don't like those words in that order...
[Somebody That I Used To Know Lifehailmartian space exes au]
Interlude: Astronaut lessons with David (and Rory)
Ryland [Looks outside the airlock, terrified]: Nope. Sorry, I just can't do it. I have this thing with heights.
David [a bit too cheerfully]: Then you'll be pleased to know that there isn't really a "down" in space.
Ryland: *Whimpers*
David: Come on, Ry. It's better to practice in a low-stakes situation than to panic in a disaster scenario, wouldn't you agree?
Rory: Like you did?
David: [To Rory] Not helping. [To Ryland] Obviously you can't plan for every scenario.
Rory: ...This is the easy part, you know.
Ryland: Maybe to you guys.
Rory: You know they made us do this and learn Russian too.
Ryland: Oh I already know some Russian! Started picking it up when I was working with Dmitry on the astrophage. And then when we were working in Baikonur...
David: See? You're already halfway there. Remember every spacewalk has to be well-planned in advance, also remember the pre-breathing we did. You can't just throw a spacesuit on whenever--
Rory: Hypocrite.
David: It was a mistake letting you out.
Rory [grinning the shark-toothed Calvin grin]: This guy says 'cycle the airlock' before he's even got his spacesuit all the way on. He's nuts. You shouldn't listen to him.
David: Thanks for that vote of confidence.
Ryland [Wide-eyed]: Did you really do that?
David: My friend was dying outside.
Ryland: Oh...
David: Out in space you know we don't have anyone else to rely on but each other.
Ryland: ...I want to try again. I got the the uh... tether things.
David: That's good. Come on. Take my hand, you're doing great.
What if Calvin absorbed Rory's mind and consciousness when he ate/absorbed/assimilated him because that's easier then regenerating a whole new brain from the single celled organism that it had been reduced to with the extinction of Mars.
That would explain how Calvin seems to instantly know the layout of the station and how everything works. Calvin also seems to become more impulsive after eating Rory whereas before it seemed more slow, cautious, methodical. Testing the waters versus feeling right at home on the station which has suddenly become such an easy hunting ground.
What if "Calvin" fully remembered his life and identity as Rory Adams... but only after killing half the crew...
