Work Text:
The way the giant government SUV dwarfed the other cars at Home Depot that day filled Grace to the brim with childish glee. Everything felt electric, like they were getting away with something they shouldn’t. Carl had given him the tiniest of grins when they flew down the highway, shifting gears and looking over to catch Grace letting out a loud whoop in response. The sunroof was down and Grace’s hair was flying about, Carl’s tie whipping to the side. That grin turned into a full-faced smile, and Grace mirrored it. He stuck his hand out from the car’s ceiling, and let it cut through the wind. It was like a movie. They were actually saving the world, and he could buy all the candy he wanted.
Watching the same car shoulder past everyone else’s cars in the tiny parking lot in front of this family-owned dentist felt like something akin to presenting in front of all the scientists from every country. Heads in the waiting room were craning over and murmuring, trying to catch a glimpse of which important figurehead ordered this behemoth of a car, only to see a meek, bespectacled man scurry out the door to it, apologizing under his breath.
He had to suck in his stomach as he squeezed past the Corolla that Carl had parked beside, sideways shuffling over and creaking the door open enough to let him get on the footstep. Having to climb into the thing made him feel like a child now, minus the glee. Why the heck did cars this big need to exist? It made him want to shield his face using the bag of dentistry goodies he was given. People were definitely still staring.
“Everything go okay?” Carl asked without turning to him.
“Uhn-huhn. Jusht one cavity. My mouf shtill feels weird. They numbed me.” Grace waved a finger around his face where the corner of his mouth was still counteracting the anaesthesia. He had to swallow before continuing. “I can talk, but it’sh sho awkward.”
“So that’s a no to more Sour Skittles.”
Grace chuckled and tried to close his mouth before responding. “Nooo way.”
“More for me, then.”
Turns out, when you buy the checkout line’s entire stash of Sour Skittles, you’re going to want to snack on them every time they enter your peripheral vision. At least, that’s what happened to Grace. Somehow, Carl evaded this fate, but he could have sworn that his new friend ate the same amount of sickeningly sour candy as he had. Or maybe it really was all him. Grace chewed on the inside of his cheek as he tried to remember.
“I’ll stop by my place for a bit before we head back,” Carl stated. His fingers drummed on the steering wheel, the car flying smoothly down the road. Grace shrugged and grunted out an affirmative noise. That was a casual answer, right?
Deep down, he wanted to ask why. It already felt like a major inconvenience having Stratt fixate on the way Grace was wincing and holding his jaw, ordering him to get it assessed immediately, like he couldn’t handle a little toothache he gave himself, only to then task Carl in taking him all the way here, and then back. It felt like common sense that he’d drop Grace off at the lab as fast as possible. Surely the government had better things to do than chauffeur around a 6th grade teacher with an achy tooth.
I’m not the government, though. I just work with ‘em. A memory of Carl’s voice knocked on the front of his brain. In the past, Grace tried to sniff out how Carl came to work for Stratt, but he remained tight lipped, only offering things Grace already knew from the Project Hail Mary debriefing. He didn’t even know the man’s last name for Pete’s sake. And yet, he definitely knew way, way too much about Grace. Most of which were verbally supplied as impulsive outbursts to fill gaps of silence that Carl easily slid into. Sometimes, Grace couldn’t place why his palms started to sweat slightly when things got too quiet between the two. He even blurted that observation out loud one day, dragging a deep laugh out of Carl while Grace sat on his hands, cursing himself.
You’re funny, man, Carl had said. That made no sense, because he wasn’t trying to be funny, but his ears got all hot regardless and his stomach flipped a little.
While Grace was poking and prodding at his feelings, they arrived at their destination. It was a modest apartment complex. Not a single other car in the lot was a big beefy SUV either, which was a small surprise. He was half expecting them to pull up to a row of symmetrical government vehicles and an equally imposing building, but it was… normal.
Grace stayed in his seat while Carl exited, getting the hint that he was meant to stay inside and sit still. That lasted a single second before an impulse gripped him. Before Carl could shut the door, Grace wriggled out of his seat belt and leaned over the middle console at the last minute.
“Wait, wait. Thank you, by the way. You didn’t have to drive me around all day but… I appreciate y- appreciate it, man.” The way he had to contort his lips around the word ‘appreciate’ twice to get his numb tongue to stop slurring made him actually drool. God. So humiliating, and gross. His cheeks flushed with heat as he quickly swiped the edge of his sleeve across the black leather console and then his face frantically, dislodging his glasses and laughing way too loud. “Woah, careful of the splash zone.” His voice was strained with embarrassment.
Carl didn’t even flinch. “It’s nothing. You’re an important guy.”
“Important?” His frames slid down his nose.
“Yeah, to all of us, to the team. Now sit tight, I’ll be quick.”
To the team. Yeah. That should be at the front of his mind, that most of, if not all of their hangouts, revolved around work. The car door slammed shut, and Grace readjusted his glasses from where he knocked them askew.
Carl was fun, and so was having a hand in something this grandiose, being at the forefront of scientific and microbiological innovation, but Grace needed to remind himself that he shouldn't feel like he was around for anything more than what he provided for the team. Which somedays, when the experiments were slow and unyielding, felt like nothing. Apparently, it was still worth enough to net him free dentist appointments. So that was cool.
Grace slid down his seat and looked straight ahead, as if staying still and folding his hands in his lap would make Carl forget his embarrassing display once he returned. Scratch the idea of feeling like a kid, he was acting like a stupid one year old right now, drooling everywhere and needing to be babysat. The echoes of the headache he was battling all day pulsed at the back of his head.
His fingers returned to picking out that one thread at the hem of his cardigan he had been teasing out all week. Every time the self deprecating thoughts resurfaced, guilt would begin to creep in. No one needed to hear them, but he sure did spend a lot of time in his head about it. Being in the presence of all these people who were so much smarter and more worldly than he was, did a number on his self esteem. It didn’t take him that long to notice how much Stratt let him toe the line of practically begging for praise, but it was starting to get weird around Carl in particular. A trait that he prided himself in was being able to keep an emotional barrier between him and the world, a safe cavern to hang back in when he inevitably felt too involved and intertwined, and Carl was kind of throwing a wrench into that whole thing.
It must be the proximity. They had been spending… a lot of time together lately. Their hours of operation melded closer together every day. This is where Grace would default to blaming himself for being needy or something, but that wouldn’t reflect reality. He never called the other guy up, he’d just appear. Carl hung around the lab longer than all the other security personnel that Grace barely knew the names of, to the point that Grace would leave his sweater on a stool, saving him a spot for when he’d inevitably arrive. He assumed it was out of the norm, since he never caught his colleagues or superiors chatting it up this much with the security, but who were they to deny the namesake of the Carl hypothesis that allowed them all to get this far? Is what Grace had declared one day, after a newbie soldier questioned if Carl had a right to be in there with him without a scientist’s clearance badge. It felt good to tell him off. And he was ego tripping a bit off of a very successful video call.
He did double-check with Stratt almost immediately afterwards, and she acted like he was asking something stupid. Of course Carl was allowed to observe, from where did you get the notion that he wasn’t? It is a group effort, she said, as if describing the solution to 1+1.
And Carl was becoming a larger and larger part of Grace’s scientific method. It was easy to bounce ideas off him. He didn’t need to have an equal footing of scientific prowess to keep up, because Grace loved explaining. That was how he could find the lone thread in an idea to unravel. Pick at the thread with words until Carl pointed out the knot in the equation, high-fiving him when it came undone. He glowed under the praise. If Carl wasn’t there, he would’ve been talking to the walls anyways. So he was lucky. Blessed, even. The man hungered to hear the new developments with the mission and the fuel problem. And he could have just as easily asked Stratt, since Grace knew they talked (and talked about him), but Grace was his first point of contact when it came to the science of it all. That felt nice. Carl would listen to him rattle on about isotopes and alien cell wall structures for hours, he had empirical proof of it.
He came bearing gifts a few times, too. A slice of cake from one of the physicist's birthdays Grace wasn't invited to, or an extra pair of shoes and socks when a pipe burst one day. The new shoes fit so much better than his sodden Converse. It was Carl who showed up with a portable DVD player tucked under his crisp suit jacket, a small reprieve from the monotony of burning his retinas peering through an electron microscope all day.
They fell into a routine around watching movies in short intervals and shooting the breeze on the longest days. Stratt usually would tersely dismiss everyone in the lab once it was time to get their required sleep, but as the weeks crawled closer to the penultimate ship launch that would fire off the Hail Mary, she had them stay later and later. It is a necessary pain, her voice would crackle over the intercom. Time is precious.
Time was precious, but experiments and Astrophage testing didn’t care about that. Results came at their own speed, and that’s what they structured their daily schedule around. With Grace often being bone tired and hoarse from repeating test results all day to everyone overseas, Carl would take over the chatter during the down time between sample taking and charting. He loved gesturing to the little screen with a movie from his weird little collection, talking over the characters whenever his favorite part was incoming.
When Carl whipped out a Goosebumps DVD with a completely straight face, Grace had laughed for a minute straight. It was infectious, and Carl fell into laughter too, that smile of his cracking the stoic expression he liked to wear, reaching every corner of his face. It lit up the room. He smiled so openly. The first day they met, he never thought Carl would be such a smiley guy, but… maybe that was just around him…
Well, that’s a stupid thought.
His mind was way too clouded with memories and he tried to shuffle his thoughts back to the present. Ah, Carl took the keys with him. Why didn’t he leave the AC on? Grace had now been mentally demoted from one year old baby to a dumb dog locked in a hot car. Did local anaesthesia somehow get to his brain? He knew that wasn’t how it worked, but that would be a less mortifying explanation as to why his head felt fuzzy simply recalling the way Carl’s voice dipped low and sincere, in response to something Grace thought was casual and forgettable. That settled it, it was definitely the increased proximity. The data points added up. This would probably be much easier to mull over once he was alone again and not currently lingering in the faint smell of his usual cologne.
Ughhhhhhh.
There was a knock on the glass, and Grace jerked his head up from where he was balling his hair in his fists. He put his glasses back on, swallowed his thoughts, and offered a mostly left-sided grin as Carl slipped easily into his seat, with a plastic bag in one hand.
“They drilled you pretty bad back there, huh?” Carl quipped.
It took a second for Grace’s brain to plug back in. “I’m a big guy, I could handle it.” Carl didn’t need to know that he took the dental assistant’s hand the second it was offered.
“I could hear your moaning and groaning before I even opened the door.” The corner of Carl’s mouth twitched in amusement.
“Oh. Ha ha.” It was a humorless response, but Grace couldn’t help but widen his own smile. “I guess I still have a headache from earlier. ‘S like, weird that the less time you spend sleeping, the more your head hurts. You think Stratt knows how that works?”
They had a running joke between them that Stratt caught z’s in blinking intervals, allowing her all that energy to keep everyone awake and working.
“Probably not.” Carl pushed the engine button on, but didn’t touch the wheel. He leaned back a little, giving Grace a once-over. “You need to get your ass to bed.”
“You’re telling me. The sun’s still up. Uh, so, what’s in the bag-”
Carl held a finger up. “No, I changed my mind. Come with me.”
Grace was unbuckling his seat belt before he fully processed what Carl meant by that. Come with him to… his apartment? Where they’d spend more time together, and he’d have more chances to shove his foot in his mouth over and over? That sounded fantastic.
Carl was returning to the building without looking back to see if Grace was following. Grace tripped over his feet a little in catching up, stuffing his hands in his cardigan pockets as the car locked itself with a little chirp. Now that they were approaching the lobby of the apartment, he could see how it wasn’t as nondescript as he expected. Some of the walls still sported masking tape, and not all the ceiling panels were in place, exposing dark metal pipes and harsh lighting.
“This is some interesting decor. Very modern.” Grace poked a finger into a random hole in the drywall. The elevator panel wasn’t even completely installed, with the floor number indicator staying blank after Carl pressed the button with his knuckle.
“It’s temporary,” he said casually.
“Uh huh. The area must be… pretty awesome for this to be where you hang your hat and all. No offense,” Grace threw in at the last second. His hand flew to his hair to ruffle it nervously. He wished he had his beanie to pull over his ears. If Carl lived in such a run down place like this, then the exorbitant spending he did on Grace- on the project, made him feel even more guilt ridden than he already was. The man was so kindly inviting him to his home and the first words out of his mouth were to trash it in some lame form of deflecting feelings. You are coming off as such a stupid asshole right now, he yelled at himself internally. Stop while you still can!
It still made Carl laugh, to the surprise of Grace. “My budget? No, man. I’m serious about it being temporary. I don’t even own this place, the contractor does. My real spot is up in Chicago, it’s so much nicer than this shit hole. They recently bought this new hotel for security personnel, so I barely spend time here.” He broke eye contact with Grace before he finished his thought. “Just a quick place to rest my head up before going over to the lab.”
So he wasn’t an asshole, just stupid. The elevator ride was quiet, save for the rhythmic tapping Carl was doing with his hand that still carried the mystery plastic bag. It didn’t let up for the entire ride. Grace put two and two together. A nervous tic? A part of him felt incongruently soothed by it. And a teensy bit flattered. He wasn’t the only one feeling jittery about all of this.
They stepped off at the 12th floor, and Carl’s door was as uniform as all the others, no decorations or welcome mat in sight. He could have sworn that there was a story about a Slimer Christmas ornament that a neighbor of his had beef with, but he must’ve been talking about his real home…
But this place wasn’t bad, to say the least. The interior did not match the half-finished state of the lobby, but it was furnished without the personality flourishes that Grace expected Carl to have. It was roughly the size of a hotel room. That made sense, as he just so helpfully described the building as a new hotel. There wasn’t even a shelf, for crying out loud. Just a coffee table, with papers and old take out boxes strewn about, the couch hosting a suit still wrapped in its dry cleaning plastic, and a laptop. A kitchenette was recessed into the wall, and a dusty TV stood beside it. The bed was done, and took up the majority of the main room, sporting even more paperwork piled on the quilt. It painted a mental image of Carl choosing to sleep on the couch instead.
Grace spun around once. “I love what you’ve done with the place.” He really tried, but he just could not shut up.
“We have a good…” Carl paused to flick his watch out from under his sleeve. “Two hours before Stratt starts asking why a dentist appointment is taking so long.” He fiddled with whatever was in the plastic bag.
“Hmm, so we’re playing hooky.”
“Our secret." Carl put a conspiratorial finger to his lips in a shush motion.
Grace quickly turned back around. He knew he was blushing because he could feel it, but he hoped Carl wouldn’t notice. He opted to instead make a show of flinging himself on the couch, missing Carl’s clean pressed suit narrowly, and draping an arm over his face. “I’m not gonna sleep,” he mumbled. “Just resting my eyes a bit.” The AC unit was on, and it felt heavenly on his slightly clammy skin. The mild anaesthesia was finally wearing off, but he still worried the inside of his cheek, letting dull jolts of pain distract his mind for long enough so he could stay quiet.
He didn’t want to think about it for too long, but barring visiting the sleeping quarters back when they were holed up on the ship, this was the first time in many years he was invited to someone's place. The same muted cologne scent from the car smelled fresher in here. Carl’s voice pulled him out of the self reflective spiral he was about to fall into.
“Eat first, we won’t have much time later.”
The unmistakable smell of wonton soup wafted over, savory and delicious, and any feeble comments he had loaded up on not being hungry were banished from Grace's mind. He sat up, alert.
Carl waved the container at him. “Or if you want, I can have both…”
A petulant little “No!” escaped his mouth. It was pointless too, since Carl was already so graciously doling out a serving for him. Just like he would split food with him at the lab. But he liked the way his exclamation pulled Carl’s smile out again.
The way they hunched over the coffee table, Grace and Carl were practically knee to knee. And after all the mental hemming and hawing over the nature of his mixed up feelings, the final mental puzzle piece finally fell into place, when Carl plucked extra scallions from his bowl, onto Grace’s.
“I’ve said that you don’t have to do that…”
“I know. I just want to.”
He liked Carl. That made sense. As in, with all the information presented to him plus the way his throat suddenly got all heavy and choked up at the fact that someone remembered he liked green onions, it checked out. And it wasn’t some big realization that came crashing down upon him. It was a simple, logical observation. Astrophages are attracted to CO2 rich atmospheres, this wonton soup had a perfect ratio of scallions, and Ryland Grace liked Carl No-last-name. But that came hand in hand with the issue.
If Grace thought he was someone with emotional barriers, Carl may as well be a ship’s airlock with how selective he was in showing his hand. Sure, he knew about his taste in movies, but how much of that was because of Grace bringing up the cartoonish programs he showed his students? They shared meals, but almost all of them were from Grace mentioning them. He wasn’t even science trained, and yet the majority of their conversations revolved around offshoot topics in microbiology, because Grace never stopped talking. What Carl said earlier echoed again in his mind. The team. He couldn’t help but wonder how much of Carl’s proximity to him was on Stratt’s request.
Grace forced more soup into his mouth and chewed on the wonton, not caring about how hot it was. He had to just… bury these feelings deep. Now would be a very stupid time to ask and ruin it all, before he even got to know Carl for real. There would be a better time in the future. He hoped. He was truly banking on the guy still wanting to be around him after they sent the Hail Mary out into space to save humanity. Amidst the sinking feeling that the answer could be no, he still pictured them hanging out after all this, and maybe even showing him around his classroom.
By using the soup as a distraction for his chatterbox, Grace finished first, and sank back into the couch cushions. The warmth in his belly was speeding up his exhaustion. His mind still folded this problem of his, over and over, melding with a daydream where he’d introduce Carl to the planetary models his kids built that had more charm than the clinical diagrams they looked at all day, but the memories got hazy as sleep took over. When he let his eyes close again, they didn’t open until well into the evening.
–
Dr. Grace was out like a light. The soup must’ve been that good. He knew that, since it came from the takeout place he was ranting and raving about a few weeks ago. It was a quick detour from the dentist’s office. Carl knew he was starving, despite never bringing it up. The doctor wasn’t good about verbalizing his needs until it was too late, case in point being the whole reason for their little outing. Stratt let out a rare chuckle when Carl brought up the tooth pain Dr. Grace was experiencing. She was rarely amused by much, but Carl’s observation caught her off guard. I didn’t realize you have a keen eye for our Doctor, she had said. Carl could only shrug at the statement, before coming up with It’s hard not to. He had no idea how to explain it any more than that. He thought he was being obvious about how much he cared.
At least, he hoped it wasn’t too obvious to Grace himself. If he found it weird that he lurked around the lab, he wouldn’t humor him for this long, he figured. There wasn’t a mean bone in that man’s body. It worked in his favor that Grace was so absentminded at times, so he could get away with resting in his orbit for the short amount of time they still had left together.
He still hoped Grace would be awake for a bit longer today. He was selfish. He took what he could get. Like right now, taking his sweet time looking over the doctor’s sleeping form. His hands were folded as usual over his chest, unconsciously squeezing them tightly. The wrinkle between his eyebrows that deepened over the time Carl got to know him was smoother now. Those lips that were always flying a mile a minute, calm and still. He also hoped he could convince the doctor to lay on a bed since they were all doing too many stints of falling asleep in chairs, but the way his chin was poking into his chest right now was cute.
It was the same expression that would taint his memories later, on the day Stratt would break the news to the last person on Earth who knew what was going to happen to him. In the back of the military vehicle that bumped and jostled on uneven ground, Grace’s unconscious body lolling against Carl’s shoulder, he could be mistaken for sleeping peacefully. The horrified, betrayed look on his face during the last few moments Carl would see him awake melted away as the coma injection made quick work of paralyzing his body to the basic essentials, eventually requiring the use of machines to stop him from atrophying.
It did nothing to stop the tears still unshed from the betrayal, gathering at the corner of his eye and slipping onto his nose. His cheek still carried blades of dry grass from where he was pinned to the ground. Carl wanted more time. They all did. But this was above them all.
He stroked the glasses he pocketed during the scuffle to make sure they wouldn’t break for the permanent trip he was about to embark on. Carl knew this was happening for a long time now, he had weeks to prepare for it, but it didn’t make it hurt any less. He bit down on the inside of his cheek to school his expression, hard enough to draw blood.