Work Text:
I’d never been the sort of person who drew the attention of a room.
I’d been an awkward kid, and I’d grown into an awkward adult. That was pretty normal for people like me. I liked to think of it as the lifecycle of a scientist, except I’d gone off on a sidequest to become an awkward teacher as well.
When I was young, I was nervous and honestly not very interested in what other kids had to say. I’d faded into the background and gotten my work done in the back of the classroom, unless it was science class — I’d sat right up at the front for that, but I’d only ever asked questions after the lesson ended. I hadn’t had many friends, despite my mom’s best efforts, and that had continued into high school and college. I just hadn’t spoken to anyone, and I didn’t draw enough attention for my peers to want to strike up a conversation first.
In academia, it was different. I kept to myself, sure, but so did everyone else. They didn’t make me nervous. I guess that’s what made me feel comfortable enough to publicly insult them all — I’d definitely been the centre of attention at the conference directly following my infamous paper’s publication, right up until I’d gotten myself fired then and there.
Then, I’d hidden. My career had blown up behind me, and I’d spiralled. Packed it all up. I’d planned to wait out the rest of my dying days in a struggling middle school, my head down and my past behind me.
Except, I’d begun to find that I’d kind of liked it there. Attention was different as a teacher. Kids judged less than adults did, and being weird and passionate made them smile instead of frown. My coworkers had still thought I was strange — that never changed — but the kids had loved me. I’d been the cool teacher. Suck it, Mr Harris from Humanities.
I still kept my head down.
Then came Stratt’s Vat and all the chaos that followed it. I drew attention there — people were interested in what I had to say, cloying for insight only I could give them — but it was different. I guess they called me Stratt’s science lapdog for a reason. She was always by my side, and the attention gravitated towards her. She fed it through to me, drip by drip, and every question I was asked went through her, as if there was no one else in the room. Even in a meeting full to the brim of high-ranking officials, when I had to answer questions, it only ever felt like I was speaking to her.
All that was to say, I wasn’t ready for this. And I think that was why I was finally buckling under the pressure.
“Dr Grace?”
A voice came to me — I didn’t know its name, or its face. It was summer, but I was inside, the air conditioning brushing against my skin. 22 degrees, as it always was. A shiny wooden conference table stretched out in front of me, a projector whirring above my head, and an ergonomic chair pressed itself into my back.
Then, I looked up. Belatedly. Absently. Even watching from inside my head, I could tell my eyes were glassy and not-quite-there.
“Sorry. What?” I answered seconds too late.
I could tell the people around me were getting impatient. I was, too, but I was mostly tired. Pale skin stretched over sharp, human bones designed only for solid ground. It flexed as I thinly breathed, my lungs moving the artificial air of the conference room around my hard-working body, and my eyes slowly traced my surroundings until they found the dozen faces I was so stiflingly aware were there.
It had been thirty years for me since I’d faced a single human being, let alone a crowd of them. A week had passed since they’d brought me down to Earth, old-boned and dying of a hundred different ailments, and I’d barely had a moment to myself ever since.
(Except when I slept. At night in my bedroom, it was completely silent — there were no Eridians on Earth yet to watch me sleep.)
During our calls to where my Eridian escorts were still being held in space, Rocky told me it was normal. The crowds, the attention. I could barely walk through a hallway to get to a meeting without a mob of interns staring at me from behind in slack-jawed wonder.
It didn’t feel normal. In times like this, I knew Rocky had handled things on Erid far better than I ever could.
Right now, I was being stared at, as was becoming my new routine for life on Earth. I could feel all of them, once I remembered where I was. The PR people, the social media managers, the younger NASA and ROSCOSMOS employees who’d slipped in midway through to sit at the back and catch a glimpse of me alive. I’d felt my throat tighten the moment I’d stepped into the room, and after a minute, my mind had checked out, too.
I remembered now: I’d been barely speaking; just nods here and there, clipped sentences when they were needed, bad jokes until I got too self-conscious to voice them. It was a briefing about a public appearance that the World Space Council wanted me to do. People wanted to see me. To gawk at me. To know I really was alive.
I’d been nodding, smiling, adding my own two cents at the right moments. But inside, I felt hollow. I’d just come from a meeting with the scientists working to bring the Eridians down to Earth, and before that, I’d been roped into a tense, subtext-filled hallway conversation with a NASA executive that I still didn’t think I’d fully understood.
Who would’ve known that saving the world would be so full of bureaucracy?
“I’m really sorry, but… this is kind of important,” said the woman who’d been trying to get my attention, and I drifted back to reality. She sounded hesitant, like she didn’t want to offend me. Like she was talking to a puppy, or an old man whose brain was soup. “If you can just stay with us for a few more minutes, that would really help.”
A hot rush of embarrassment welled in me when I realised she was treating me like I was slow.
I knew I came across as old and sick. I was, even though I was roughly only in my sixties. But my mind worked faster and better than it ever had. I’d been teaching Eridian children up until the day I finally left Erid. I’d still held lectures with Eridian scientists, sharp as ever, and even on the journey here, I’d forced the crew to let me help out with logistics and trajectories wherever I could.
My body was sick, but my mind wasn’t.
Today, though, in this room… that wasn’t the case. And I had no idea why.
Something was wrong. My thoughts were thick and all over the place, and all my jokes from the past few hours had been bad enough to make me want to kill myself. I felt stupid. Not coma-stupid, not sleep-stupid. Just really, really stupid. The buzz of the overhead lights held equal real estate in my brain as the talking points the PR team was trying to explain to me; I could feel the attention of every person in the room on me, and it was pulling my consciousness away from me in every direction.
I found it impossible to meet the woman’s eyes, so I stared at the wall behind her and nodded, swallowing thickly as I did.
“Yeah. ‘Course,” I said like it was nothing. My voice was rough. “Sorry, if you can just… say all that again.”
She looked empathetic, but my eyes darted away too quickly to really gauge her reaction. Someone flicked the futuristic PowerPoint (which was really just normal PowerPoint; it even used the same default template as the 2010s and everything) back a few slides, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled with self-consciousness.
Under the table, I balled my hand into a fist in the hope that it would keep my brain in my skull.
Focus, brain. This is important… social media stuff. I really need you right now.
My brain responded by going on a holiday the moment someone started talking again.
For some reason, it was really hung up on the air conditioning. Cool, stale air. Climate control. It was what I’d been used to for the last thirty years, kept alive by the Hail Mary’s life-support system and what was later developed on Erid. But for some reason, I couldn’t stand it now.
My first breath of fresh air upon arriving at Earth had been mindblowing.
I’d walked for hours in a National Park my assistant had hesitantly taken me to a few days ago. Alone, I hadn’t spoken a word. The birds had filled my ears instead — and the wind, and the sound of rushing water.
In the last week, I’d soaked up everything I could. I’d eaten fruit. Fruit! But I’d barely had enough time to experience it all yet.
Instead, I was trapped in a room being stared at. And talked at. And I knew I should feel grateful that I was even here, but every one of my movements felt tracked, every expression logged, every mannerism noted down, and it just felt… so terribly, awfully human in a way I’d been more than happy to leave behind so many years ago.
Eridians didn’t stare. They couldn’t see. Of course, they were aware of my movements, but they didn’t know what most of them meant. They weren’t offended when I avoided eye contact with them, didn’t know whenever I was frowning ever so slightly, couldn’t read my emotions at a glance without me telling them how I felt.
Funnily enough, I didn’t think any of the people staring at me right now could tell how distressed I really was, either. I didn’t even think I could sense it — until it was too late.
They kept talking, but inside, something horrible was building in my chest.
“We’ll have an outfit prepared for you, something classy,” a man was saying now. “Of course, all you’ll have to do is shake the president’s hand and give a wave to the press. Obviously, we don’t want you speaking. The people just want… reserved, grateful, heroic. Nothing you haven’t run past one of us first—”
In other words, they needed me to act normal. Not like this. Nothing like this.
Dammit, I couldn’t do it.
I didn’t know if I was even capable of that anymore.
My head slowly dropped onto the table, burying my face in my arms. I needed a moment. Maybe a couple of moments. Three or four would do the trick. But I just couldn’t keep going on like this.
It was too much too fast.
By the time someone noticed, my nerves were on fire. Every inch of me felt frayed enough to fall apart, and I was horrified to feel it happening in front of so many people.
Why had I ever come back to Earth?
A hand reached out to touch my back, and I flinched. Too much, too much!
“Are you alright?” I heard, and I felt a noise pull itself out of my throat, something like a strangled whine.
Gosh, this was the worst. This was literally the worst. What was I doing?
“Dr Grace?”
“I— Yeah,” I cut whoever was speaking off, my voice sounding strange and distant, like I was hearing myself from ten feet away. “I’m fine, I just have to… I think I need… uhm…”
I was rising to my feet, then, my thoughts blurry and all over the place. As I shuffled out from under the table, I moved too fast and hit the edge of it with my knees. It was a terrible idea — pain flashed through my hips and spine without the help of my cane, which I vaguely registered leaving on the ground as I pushed away from the conference table, took one more look at the people gathered around it…
And broke out into a run.
“Dr Grace!” someone called from behind me, obviously shocked, but I was running before they could get to me. I was running before anyone even stood up. An old man on the loose. It would have been comedic if I weren’t completely and entirely overwhelmed with the need to get out.
I didn’t process much after that. My heart pounded, working overtime, and I felt dizzy from all the blood rushing away from my head.
Hallways, people, confused interns glancing my way. I carved a path through the crowd and heard footsteps behind me, and it was like a set of instincts I’d never needed before kicked in.
I ran. Dodged. Weaved. I could feel it coming like a wave a hundred feet high, and I was determined not to let it hit until I was somewhere safe.
Then I spotted it: an empty room. No glass walls, just a door swinging open ahead of me.
I launched myself inside, ignoring the carnage of what looked like half a dozen NASA employees scrambling over each other to get to me, and with shaking, arthritic hands, I managed to get the door to lock.
“Oh, god,” I spluttered, breathing hard. “Oh, god. Fuck.”
I leaned forward into the door, the fight draining out of me. Slowly, I realised there were tears streaming down my face.
And then the wave hit.
The door was heavy, strong. I slumped all my weight into it, sinking to the floor. I might have curled up into the fetal position at some point, which was just… great. But I guessed no one could see me now, so I was free to fall apart.
“He’s in here,” a voice called from outside, and I whimpered, curling further into myself. “Dr Grace? Would you please open the door?”
I gave a tiny, panicked shake of my head even though they couldn’t see.
“No,” I muttered wetly, too quiet to hear. “No, no, no—”
I couldn’t think straight. Something primal had overcome me, and I was helpless to it now.
I pulled my legs to my chest and hid my face, ignoring the way every bone in my body ached against the hard, carpeted floor. I could feel their eyes on me. I could feel their expectations.
They wanted a hero. And I was a coward who hadn’t seen another pair of eyes in thirty years — and now was freaking out about it.
Speaking of cowardice, I was full-on sobbing now. Of course I was. Awesome. Good job, Grace.
I missed Rocky. And my Eridian students. And the crew that had brought me here, ailing and homesick. I’d never had a place among humans — I’d always been strange, or antisocial, or too much or too little. But Earth needed me to be none of that right now, and I couldn’t.
A long time ago, I’d been able to act normal. To put on a facade. It had been exhausting, and now I was well out of practice.
“Grace, it’s Maya! Can you open the door, please?”
Maya, my assistant. She sounded anxious. I didn’t have the space in my brain to process what she’d said, though. It was in overdrive. Everything was in overdrive.
I couldn’t stand the noise. It was pathetic, but I just couldn’t. The shouting, the banging, the jiggling of the lock. The buzz of the bright fluorescent lights I hadn’t turned off when I’d flung myself into the room. I put my hands over my ears and hugged myself. I just wanted to go home.
Rocky never stared.
Rocky never expected anything of me that I didn’t understand. The Eridians never did. But humans…
It was too much. I should never have come back. What if I broke down like this on live television?
Something dull and heavy started to bang against the door, and I succumbed to it. They were going to get in. They were going to take me away, put me on the ship, send me off to space even though I’d begged them not to. Or maybe the air would rush in: ammonia, ten billion degrees, 27 crushing atmospheres of it.
Either way, I was dead.
I was alone.
“Dr Grace!”
I really wished people would stop saying my name.
The lock gave way, and the door buckled inwards. I didn’t even register that I’d scrambled away from it until people started streaming in.
“Is he okay?”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Dr Grace?” Maya asked, her voice closer than the others. Then, hesitantly, “…Ryland?”
I shook my head. Nope. Not talking. Not talking to anyone ever again.
“There’s a doctor coming,” she said, and my brain struggled to catch up. I squeezed my eyes shut, unsure of what my body was doing or where she was. But I could hear a wounded noise coming from somewhere near my throat. “They’re going to check you for injuries. I’m sorry, but we have to.”
A hand rested on my shoulder, feather light, and I sucked in a breath. But when I didn’t flinch, it got heavier, and I found myself leaning into it.
I didn’t respond to her, curling into myself to get away from everything that was happening in the rest of the room. People were talking. I could tell people were staring. I didn’t know how many, but it made me want to die.
I felt like a little kid who’d just had a big enough tantrum to worry all the adults in the area. Now, they were milling around, concern in their big beady eyes, and some poor girl had been chosen as the sacrifice to go and ask if I needed to have some carrot sticks and a nap.
There was no coming back from this. They’d never trust me again. But I didn’t care right now.
The tears had dried up, and now I was mostly just exhausted. My hands were trembling, wherever they were in space.
Maya, bless her, was silent. Presumably, she was waiting. For me, or for the doctor. Whichever one of us entered the room first.
She just sat with me. At some point, someone turned the lights off, and I felt the tension shudder out of me, the world narrowing down to this one place, this one dark, quiet corner.
“We’re putting the meeting on hold until further notice,” Maya eventually said in a low voice. “Your schedule is clear for the rest of the afternoon. So is this room, if you want to…”
A weight lifted from my chest, but I stayed put. The silence settled slowly, like dust in the sunbeams after something’s been knocked off a shelf.
God, I missed dust in the sunbeams.
I didn’t move at first. I wasn’t sure I could. My body felt wrung out, every muscle heavy and useless, like I’d just run a marathon instead of… whatever that had been. Crying on the floor of a NASA office, apparently. Real dignified stuff.
But the quiet helped. A lot.
No fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. No voices overlapping, no expectations, no eyes. Just the low hum of distant air systems and a human presence beside me.
After a while, I realised I could feel again. The floor, the air, the hand on my shoulder. My brain was in my skull again, and I didn’t have to tie it down.
I cracked one eye open.
The room was dim now, the overhead lights off, just a strip of softer lighting from the hallway and a window somewhere. Most of the people were gone. Thank god. There were still a couple near the door — probably security — but they were keeping their distance, talking in low voices instead of acting like I was a zoo exhibit.
Maya was sitting on the floor next to me, cross-legged. She smiled when I unfurled enough to sit up and stare at the wall.
We were under a table, pressed into the corner of the room. She’d ducked her head to get underneath and sit with me.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked.
She shook her head politely. “It’s alright.”
“I just—” I scrubbed a hand over my face. It came away damp. Awesome. “I don’t know why I did that.”
I was a grown man. And I’d freaked out like a kid. This poor woman had only known me for a week, and now she was being pulled into this mess, too.
“It’s a lot,” I weakly explained, as if that meant anything. “And I only got here eight days ago.”
I knew I didn’t have a long life left in me. The doctors hadn’t told me yet, but I could feel it deep inside. It was my body, after all. I had a few years left. Maybe less.
I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in the spotlight, cooped up in meetings in climate-controlled rooms. If I wanted to do that, I could have just stayed on Erid. I didn’t want to be stared at, or scrutinised, or expected to act a certain way.
With a sniff, I laughed grimly and admitted, “I just want to go to the beach.”
It drew a matching smile out of Maya, who glanced at the door before returning her attention to me.
“I think that can be arranged.”
“And I want to talk to Rocky,” I said. “I miss him. We call when NASA lets us use the radio, but it’s not enough.”
Maya nodded, as if she were noting it down in her head.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you,” I breathed. My hands were still shaking, I noticed. Less than before, but enough. “I just need it all to slow down. I’m not used to people. I was never… used to people.”
She hummed but didn’t say anything, which I appreciated.
I didn’t know what had come over me, but it seemed to have receded. We sat like that in silence for a while as I adjusted, and I found my breaths synching with hers — something that hadn’t happened for me in decades.
Outside, a bird called, and I remembered why I’d worked so hard to save this place.
Eventually, I shifted, wincing as my joints protested. “Okay,” I muttered. “I should probably… not live on this floor forever.”
Maya huffed a quiet laugh and stood, offering me a hand.
I hesitated for a half second — touch was still so foreign to me — but took it.
She didn’t pull me up fast. Just steady, giving me time to find my balance, to grab my cane when one of the burly security guards at the door passed it over.
“Easy,” she said.
“Yeah,” I breathed.
A guy in a suit stood up from a chair he’d dragged into the hallway. “There’s someone from medical here to see him.”
Maya took my free arm in hers — never let it be said that young people weren’t good to me — and slowly helped me outside. One step after another, my cane clacked against the wood floor of the hallway.
“How do you feel about one more set of eyes on you, Dr Grace?” she asked, and I gave a weak chuckle.
“As long as you let me go to the beach tomorrow,” I said, though I knew she couldn’t.
Things moved slowly here. Bureaucracy and everything. But I leaned into Maya’s touch — human touch — and through my exhaustion, came a little ray of peace.
Later, I sat at a desk in a dimly lit room near Houston’s Mission Control, draped in that familiar heavy knitted cardigan that had gone to space and back with me. The computer in front of me was hooked up to a radio receiver, and I didn’t have to wait long for a signal.
“Which humans are we mad at?” Rocky demanded the moment the connection was established.
I spluttered. “What?”
“They told us what happened to you. Now, when Eridians invade Earth, which humans should we destroy first?”