Archive of Our Own

Ryland Grace had no plans to return to Earth- why would he?  20 years on Erid, and he was happier than he’d ever been.  Sure, sometimes he missed his old gang, but his old gang was probably gone by now- even with a shirt-ton of time-dilation, he was still in his mid-late fifties.  The chances of anyone he had once loved on Earth being around were next-to-nothing.  And even if they weren’t, well… there was nobody on Earth that he had ever loved as much as he loved his adopted Eridian family.  Rocky, Adrian, his students, his friends.  He felt less ‘alien’ on Erid than he ever had on Earth, where his lack of romantic attachment was apparently seen as yet more justification for why he was easy to ship off non-consensually into space.

His xenonite cane tap-tap-tapped a gentle rhythm along the well-worn path from his home to his classroom as he hummed thoughtfully.  Maybe he would have eventually agreed to go to space if he’d had the time and a real choice or at least the knowledge that there wasn’t actually a backup plan and that the impossible ‘choice’ he’d had next to no time to make wasn’t really a choice at all.  But that was neither here nor there.  He knew he was brave enough now; he had been brave enough to make the choice for someone he loved and for a planet that never would have asked that of him.  He was, quite honestly, a bit afraid of how things would go over during eventual Erid-Earth relations, especially as they weren’t likely to make face-to-face contact until after he was gone.  Eridians had a long memory, and they held grudges.  

The knowledge that he’d been put to sleep without his knowledge and sent on a one way trip hadn’t gone over well, even if they could, logically, understand the necessity of it.  Contrary to what many alien-themed sci-fi programs on Earth had unintentionally perpetuated about sentient aliens, they weren’t actually any more logical than your average human.  The Eridians were brilliant, obviously.  More brilliant than humans, Grace would happily tell you.  But they were also very empathetic and very driven by emotional bonds.  Resources were communal and each life was seen as a very precious thing.  No matter how many thrums Grace had been involved in, they still couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the idea of capitalism and material desire being placed over the basic needs of another.  Although, neither could Grace, if he were perfectly honest.

Being surrounded by people who cared for him so deeply, without reservations and without care for what he could give them in return (although he’d happily have given them everything without so much as a second thought) made Grace feel so content and so full that he simply couldn’t fathom ever leaving, even if the heavy gravity wore on his joints.  His soul was so full, and the Eridians did everything they could to make him comfortable.  They’d synthesized arthritis medication from nothing but formulas on a laptop, for Cripes’ sake!   Good stuff, too- while he occasionally had to make use of his xenonite wheelchair (so, so lovingly designed by Rocky and Adrian), most days, the cane was enough.  He reached his classroom with a happy hum and began tuning his organ as his class eagerly scuttled in.  It was absolutely full to capacity and they were planning an expansion because Grace could never turn away any student who wanted to learn.

________

The earthquake (well, Eridquake, he supposed) hit suddenly and violently.  The classroom, like the rest of his dome, was designed to handle most anything, including the rare quake, but this was stronger than anything he’d ever felt, even in California.  He’d spent a lot of time with the meteorology thrums as they tried to determine what long-term effects the dying (and then reviving) star might go on to have in the coming sixes of centuries, but this was well beyond their predictions. 

Even then, the xenonite wall might have held out (barely), but the rock it was built into was cracking along fault lines that didn’t exist a moment ago, and the panicked thumping of six-dozens of pebbles was only making it worse.  Grace watched the first stress-fracture form in the xenonite in front of his kids and felt his heart, already working so hard in double-gravity, start to pump faster than he realized it could.  

The oxygen.  The xenonite was going to crack, and the pebbles would be exposed to the oxygen.  His side of the dome was holding out okay so far, but that would only make it worse- and more combustible- for his beloved cluster of little stone students.  

The decision was easy, and made with the sort of calm clarity that takes over when panic no longer serves a purpose.  He grabbed his cane and stood as quickly as he could; Rocky and Adrian would be on their way already, so he had to work fast, before they could stop him.  

He made his way to the airlock and punched in a manual override code that he wasn’t supposed to know, but Rocky was simply too predictable- the code was a combination of the day, in Eridian base six, when he and Rocky had met, and the other six numbers were the day he and Adrian mated.  He dismissed the warning and cycled the airlock.  His last thoughts were physics calculations; he was fairly certain that there would be just enough time for his dome to fill with ammonia before the partition separating him from his pebbles cracked open and exposed them to his side of the classroom.  It would have to be enough; he could go in peace.

______

Grace woke up very confused.  He didn’t believe in an afterlife, and even if he had, why would an Eridian afterlife have such light gravity?  He swiped a hand over his forehead with far too much force, and brushed up against a sticky note while essentially clocking himself in the face because 1G was foreign to him now.  

He looked at the sticky note and nearly let out the one Eridian curse his single set of vocal chords could form (but not quite, just in case this entire thing was a hallucination and his pebbles would hear).   It had a schedule of meetings for the day, written in Stratt’s handwriting and with her signature on the bottom.  It was something she’d taken to doing back on the Vat whenever there was a change of itinerary- she knew he rarely checked his phone, especially when he was wrapped up in some scientific quandary, so she’d taken to entering his room to put a sticky-note on his face just like she had that very first day.  It probably hadn’t helped stop the rumors that they were fornicating, but it definitely gave her some small amusement, and so Grace had never bothered calling her out on it.  

But it was definitely not something that would have happened on Erid- they didn’t even have sticky notes.

Well fudge.  

_______

Grace was of the opinion that he was having a very strange, pre-death hallucination resulting from a rapid firing of neurons.  Like Simone was convinced was happening in The Good Place, except actually real.  Because there was no way he had time-traveled.

But, the little voice whispered in his head, and it sounded like Adrian, who had always been a little more spiritual than him and Rocky.  No reason to make a fool of yourself, just in case.  

Grace agreed with the voice.  Even though he was ∀.∀∀∀ percent sure this was all a vivid hallucination, time-travelling was still every science nerds dream, and if he’d been granted such a cool hallucination, he was not going to be one of those idiots who made a fool of themselves by blabbing to everyone that he’d time travelled and making them think he was crazy.  So, Stratt’s Vat, business as usual.  

Well, usual-ish. He wasn’t going to turn down the chance to save as many lives as he could, even if they were just a construct of his imagination.

________

Stratt pursed her lips and furrowed her brows as she looked at her scientist.  He’d started acting very… eccentric over the past few days.  Well, more eccentric than usual, considering that he was a scientist and also had an autism diagnosis (like many of the scientists on the project, both undiagnosed and not.  They were certainly the best people to get things done). 

Her so-called ‘Stratt’s vat’ was not a normal place, nor was it populated by normal people.  Only the best minds in the world were gathered around her, whether willingly or not on their parts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a neurotypical employee on board outside of maybe a few of the guards.  Dr. Grace’s myriad eccentricities were not too far out of the norm, even if he was largely more charming about it (and one of the more well-liked people on board, although she knew he’d be surprised about this if he were to become aware of it; he had a shockingly low level of confidence).  So for everyone to agree that he was suddenly acting… strange in a place where strange was the norm… it was concerning, to say the least.

It started with Doctor Lamai.

“Does Dr. Grace have a background in medical technology that I was not aware of?” she asked one day, apropos of nothing.  

Stratt knew that it was not an idle question.  Dr. Lamai did not take time out of her busy schedule to ask idle questions.  This was merely a segue into whatever she had come to talk about, but Stratt answered anyway.

“Not that I know of, no.  And I have his entire transcript from kindergarten through his post-doc, so if he’d taken any sort of class on the topic, I would know of it,” she answered.

Dr. Lamai sat down on the couch.  Dr. Lamai did not sit for discussions.  Dr. Lamai talked at you without bothering to stop and make it a real conversation.  As long as people knew what she’d wanted to say to them, then that was enough for her.  If the other person had anything to add, they could say it in an email later.  

“What’s he done?” Eva sighed.  

“Objectively? Something very helpful.  He mentioned an idea for exercise-stimulating electrodes for the nanny-bot that is way better than anything that my team has come up with so far.  The odd part was that he was speaking of it as if we’d already figured it out and implemented it.  It was a very confusing conversation.”

“That is strange,” Stratt agreed.  “But it will be useful?” 

“Yes, incredibly so.  If one of my staff had come up with it, I’d be giving them a raise and an entire day of PTO.” 

“I’m not giving my best asset a day off, but I suppose he is due for another raise,” Stratt mused.  

“Does he even know he’s getting paid at all?” Dr. Lamai asked.  “It always seemed to me that he was under the impression that he was paid in sour skittles and access to an expense account for the lab.”

“He knows I pay the rent on his apartment for him so that he has a place to go back to when the project is over, but he’s never actually asked me for the information for his personal bank account; I’m not putting money in American banks, so he may not be aware that he is being healthily compensated.  But we are getting off track.”

“Ah yes, forgive me.”  Dr. Lamai did not get off track.  What a strange day Eva was having, and the source of it was completely unaware of the whole thing, hard at work in his lab, probably while simultaneously making conversation with the DNA sequencer he’d named after Rosalind Franklin.  “He’s essentially moved our work forward by months, but he talked of it as if it was a problem we’d already solved.  It was very strange.” 

“Well, he is a strange little man,” Eva murmured.  “But this does seem to be of interest.  Please keep it between us, but come to me if anything similar happens again.”

“Yes Director.”
________

“Hello, Dr. Lokken,” Eva sighed, two days later, as the woman entered her office without knocking.  While brilliant, the woman was stubborn as a mule and seemed to resent Eva for more than just pulling her away from her life.  Probably the rumors of the ‘sexual congress’ she and Dr. Grace were supposedly engaged in, never mind that neither of them were interested in that sort of thing to any degree.  But Dr. Lokken didn’t know that, and the way she needled Doctor Grace reminded her of a child pulling pigtails on the playground, trying to get their crush’s attention.  It was really very juvenile and didn’t befit someone of her brilliance.  Eva was glad that she herself had no inclination towards romance; it truly made people act idiotically.  She was even more grateful that Dr. Grace had no inclination towards such things; he was enough of an idiot already, for all that he was also the smartest person she’d ever met.  

“Dr. Grace knows far too much about my centrifuge,” she began, not returning the greeting. 

“I would have thought that you’d be pleased he was listening to you when you rambled at him,” Eva hummed, not looking up from the email she was typing.

“No, you misunderstand me.  He knows things I’ve never told him, because he knows things I’ve not even thought of.  They seem like things I would have come up with eventually, but they’re certainly not things I’ve thought of yet.” 

“How intriguing,” Stratt said, actually meaning it this time.  She was no statistician- she hired people for that- but she certainly could recognize a pattern, be it historical or behavioral.  “Take what he offers, but don’t bother him for more; the centrifuge is your job, and he’s busy enough.”

Dr. Lokken scoffed.  “As if I’d even need his help in the first place.  I simply thought you’d be interested in knowing about whatever it is that your pet scientist is up to.  I’m informing you as a courtesy.”

“Ah yes, you are nothing if not courteous, Doctor,” Eva replied.  Lokken missed the sarcasm completely and simply huffed and turned on her heel.

_________

The first instance that Eva personally witnessed of Doctor Grace’s strange behavior was on a Tuesday.

“I need you to tell the crew that we’re cancelling shore leave in Shanghai this weekend,” she told him as he prepared three coffees, two for her and one for himself.  “They always take these things better when it comes from you, and I don’t have time to deal with a mutiny.”

“Ah yea, probably not a good idea to go ashore right now, what with the coup and everything.  Personally, I think it’s been a long time coming; you don’t need to speak Mandarin to know how unhappy people were with Xi Jinping.” 

“What are you talking about- there was no coup?” She didn’t mean to phrase it as a question, but Dr. Grace looked so confident about the whole thing, as if he were speaking of something that was not only indisputable fact but also common knowledge.  “We’re cancelling shore leave due to issues with the tides.”

“Oh, right.  Of course.  I’ll let everyone know.  Guess I just had a really vivid dream or something.”  Panic visibly crossed Dr. Grace’s face for a moment before he awkwardly covered it up.  “I guess I need my coffee more than usual… maybe I’ll make two today as well.” He was clearly trying to do his usual ‘embarrassed laughter’ but it fell far off the mark.  Eva decided to let the matter drop for the moment.

Two days later, Xi Jinping was ousted in a democratic coup.

________

Perhaps the strangest thing for Eva Stratt was the change in Doctor Grace’s eating habits.  He still slept rarely and terribly, but he suddenly started skipping meals with far less regularity, and even partook in foods that he had, up until recently, expressed textural aversion to.  She never thought she’d see the day where Dr. Grace not only ate a bowl of oatmeal willingly, but with a look in his eyes that suggested he was close to jubilant tears as he did it.

He also started carrying around healthy, calorie-rich foods as well as his candy and snacks.  He offered her a protein bar (really, pushed one at her with an insistence that she needed to nourish her body that up until very recently would have been highly hypocritical coming from him) often enough for her to know that he had a healthy stash of them.  She’d even seen him work his way through no less than six oranges over the course of a single day, even though she knew that he hated the way that the juice made his hands feel sticky.

He also started taking vitamins of all things… vitamins!   According to Carl, even getting the man to remember to take his Adderall regularly was a complete pain in the ass, but suddenly he was taking vitamins?  Dr. Lamai seemed to find that even stranger than the increasingly-uncanny knowledge of her coma-bots that he’d come to possess seemingly overnight.

“What?” He asked both women in the cantina one morning, seemingly oblivious to her surprise that he’d even broken away from his lab long enough to take a proper breakfast. And now they were staring at him, happily swallowing a gel capsule with a glass of apple juice that he was enjoying a little too much for it to be entirely normal.  “B12 deficiency causes gnarly hallucinations,” he continued, with a look in his eyes that was slightly haunted and entirely too knowing.   “Or so I’ve heard…” He added, unconvincingly, once he eventually realized they were still staring at him as he gleefully tucked into his breakfast burrito.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when she’d snuck into his bunk to place a sticky-note with an updated meeting itinerary onto his forehead and accidentally bumped her foot against a bin under his bed, that things fully solidified for her.

The bin was full of shelf-stable, compact, highly nutrient-dense foods.  Her Berlinese grandmother, who had constant nightmares about the Soviet blockade and the hunger that she often described as clawing at her like some living thing, had kept a similar storage of such things up until the day that she died, and not even full grocery store shelves, a flourishing garden and a chicken coop out back, or the fall of the Berlin wall had ever persuaded her to give it up.  This was a physical manifestation of the very trauma that Eva hoped to prevent with this project.

“Oh,” she whispered, and left the room, her head churning along with her gut. 

______

“I just think that we should have a probe on board that is able to collect samples in a planet’s atmosphere,” Dr. Grace was saying in the meeting with the astronauts and the ship designers.  “I mean, there’s a solar system around Tau Ceti… what if we need to get data from a planet or something… the ship isn’t designed for that.”  Nobody missed the use of the present tense for a ship that, outside of blueprints, did not yet exist.  

“I suppose he has a point,” Dr. DuBois agreed.  “It wouldn’t hurt to be prepared for every  potential eventuality which we can reasonably predict.” 

“Oh yeah, speaking of that…” Dr. Grace interrupted, closing the projector which had his proposed probe design on it (Steve Hatch, who was staring at the man with stars in his eyes and looking for all the world like he was reconsidering his heterosexuality, frowned noticeably as the blueprint disappeared).  “Are we sure three months of food is enough… I mean, what if it takes longer for us… them, the astronauts, I mean… to find a solution.” 

Ilyukhina looked at Yao significantly.  For all that they were a team, a team which Dr. Grace had a very significant contribution to, he’d always been careful to verbally place himself a step below the astronauts in terms of importance, since he had always expressed that he didn’t want to minimize their sacrifice or give himself ‘too much credit’ when he was ‘just a science grunt.’  The slip-up was highly out of character even if they didn’t really mind it or disagree that he was part of the ‘us.’  The fact that Dr. Grace did not was the significant point that gave them pause.

“Dr. Grace, there simply isn’t room for more food on board- we have a weight limit,” Director Stratt reminded him. 

“Then pack more coma slurry- it doesn’t taste good, but it will keep them alive long enough to get the job done.”

“How do you know what the coma slurry tastes like?” Dr. Lamai asked.

“Uh… scientific curiosity,” he tried.  “I mean, I didn’t like, break into your lab or anything to taste any if that’s what you’re worried about.  But I’ve licked a lot of things in my scientific career, so I can reasonably guess at what that particular combination of synthesized nutrients must taste like, is what I meant…”

“Naturally,” Dr. DuBois agreed, although his expression said otherwise.  Luckily, it was enough to placate Dr. Grace, who continued with his suggested list of ‘ship improvements.’ 

“Also, what if the Beatles need to be able to contain a scientific sample of something, not just hard data?  We should have a space for that.  It’s really hard to modify that type of probe to carry extra weight and still have the programming and speed work out how it’s supposed to.  It took- would take, I mean- days to fine-tune all those calculations, and I’m sure Steve doesn’t want us breaking into his babies.”

“He has an excellent point,” Hatch agreed.  “We don’t know what is out there in Tau Ceti, and perhaps a physical sampler wouldn’t be a bad idea.  It shouldn’t be too hard to modify the boys to have a bit of space for that.”

“You seem to be very good at predicting things, lately,” Dr. Reddell told Dr. Grace bluntly.  “Any stock you think is about to be worth something?”

Dr. Grace squirmed uncomfortably.  “I’m not a crystal ball, Bob.  I just have anxiety; I’m trying to be thorough about all the things I think might go wrong.  It’s just what I do instead of sleeping.”

“For all that insomnia, though, you’re still making remarkably quick progress with the astrophage,” Dr. Shapiro piped up.  “I mean, you’re running these experiments that are so unique and creative… Normally, these sorts of things take ages of trial and error to get to, but you’re coming up with them as your first idea.  It’s brilliant, really.”

Dr. Grace squirmed again- the energy in the room was weird today.  He didn’t like it, and it felt more than just his natural aversion to praise or compliments (something that Rocky and Adrian had tried to train him out of for years, but it had been an uphill battle).  

“I’m a middle school teacher; we’re just a naturally creative sort of people, is all.” 

“Absolutely; it’s part of why I recruited you,” Stratt agreed, silencing all discussion.  “Now, Dr. Grace, you’ve made a number of excellent contributions today, but your eyes look like they’re about to take the vacation the rest of us can only fantasize about, what with how heavy the bags under them are.  Dr. Lamai will give you a dose of melatonin, and then you’ll take the rest of the day to recuperate.”

One did not simply ignore an order from Eva Stratt, so Grace was herded out by their good doctor very much despite his protest.

_______ 

Once Dr. Grace had been settled into bed and Dr. Lamai had returned, she found that the room was still full by silent agreement.  

“Precognition?” Yao asked, and none of them needed clarification as to what or who he was talking about.

Dr. Martin DuBois shook his head and connected his own laptop to the projector screen, and a complicated series of equations came into view.

“As a scientist, I don’t like to say ‘impossible’ but precognition is extremely unlikely.  Even more unlikely than what I believe to be the actual solution.  Now, it’s always been highly theoretical when approached before, but I’ve gone through every more sensible reason and the math simply doesn’t work.  For this, however, I’ve triple-checked my work and had Dr. Shapiro do the same.  There’s simply no other plausible explanation, and although it is improbable, Sherlock Holmes gives some very good advice on the subject.  However improbable, I am very confident in my theory that our Dr. Grace is a time-traveller.”

______

Dr. DuBois had perhaps expected a bit more of a hubbub, or even a hullabaloo, in response to his pronouncement.  But the others simply looked at each other consideringly and nodded their heads as the room came to a silent consensus.

“I could have told you that without all those maths,” Ilyukhina said eventually.  “It’s very sci-fi, but what other reasons could we possibly have?”

“He could be having a psychological break,” Embezzler Bob piped up, ever the contrarian, but even his disagreement seemed perfunctory and half-hearted.  “Like, what about all those times he looks at the floor beside him and does those weird hums and whistles that seem too structured to be absentminded?” 

“Stimming?” Dr. Lamai suggested.

“No, I know all his stims, and that’s not one of them,” Eva shook her head.  “And he’s never had perfect pitch before, either.  Not until a few weeks ago, that is.” 

“Did he really expect us to believe that nothing was off when he could suddenly do a perfect Fur Elise on the piano in the officer’s lounge, or play by ear while we had music night at our rare Shabbat hangouts?” Annie Shapiro laughed incredulously.  “Two months ago, he could barely keep up with karaoke, and now he’s a classical pianist?  No, something weird happened to him, wherever he went.”

“What worries me,” Yao mused, “is that he talks as if he was on that ship.”  

“Maybe he volunteered?” Dr. Martin DuBois asked, running a hand along his chin.  “As much as I’d like to believe otherwise, on a scientific level, he would be the best choice even if he’s not exactly an astronaut.  He’s an excellent teacher, but even still, nobody else understands astrophage the way he does.”

“And why would he volunteer?” Dr. Lokken asked incredulously.  “So you two could have your ‘grand love story’ or whatever?”  Her voice was derisive.

“Maybe he got tired of those two proposing threesomes,” Ilyukhina remarked, her smile positively impish.

“No, he is, thus far, completely oblivious to Martin and I’s advances,” Annie replied in all seriousness.  “We were going to start being more forward, but then the apparent time-travel took precedence.”

“And you will continue with the lack of propositions,” Eva ordered sternly.  “You’re going to make him uncomfortable.”

“Oh, I apologize, Director,” Dr. DuBois replied.  “I did not realize that you two were exclusive.”

Eva ignored that remark- for now.  They had higher priorities.  

“He was always safety-conscious about astrophage measurements, insisting on having at least three different people double-check before each experiment in his lab, but lately he’s been insisting on personally checking the quartermaster’s measurements before he’ll sign off on anyone else’s experiments either,” Lokken realized, with a terrible certainty that put a sinking feeling in her gut.  “He went because there was nobody else.”

Eva Stratt did not cringe externally, but she did feel her spirits falter.  She was deeply worried that, in this alternate timeline, she’d had to enact ‘Plan C.’  

Carl had been quiet in the corner up until now, a constant shadow that really only spoke or smiled or emoted when Grace was around.  But now he looked at Stratt with an accusation in his eyes.

“What did you do?” he asked her, horror lacing his words.  “That French pharmacological delivery, the one you never passed on to the med lab… tell me you wouldn’t.” 

Tell me I wouldn’t, the thought to himself, heart in his throat.  Lord, please me I wouldn’t just watch.  Tell me that we’d find another way.  

“Apparently, I did what was necessary,” Stratt swallowed, refusing to allow her composure to dip.  “We will not allow it to be, this time.”

“Are you telling me,” Yao asked, voice tight, and for all his composure, Ilyukhina could tell by the tension in his jaw that he had fury held back by a tight leash.  “That you are willing to send a man to space against his will, enough so that you have made a contingency plan to do so?”

“I will do whatever it takes to save the world.  Hopefully, with Dr. Grace’s foresight from living this once before, such a thing will no longer be necessary,” Eva replied primly.

“I will not have an unwilling man on my ship,” Yao argued.

“You would not have known about it, and even if you had, you cannot possibly think that you would be given that choice either.  I have done terrible things for the greater good, Commander Yao.  Regardless of the nature of your sacrifice, do not think yourself above those I am willing to harm to save the world.”  She ignored his silent fuming and turned to DuBois and Shapiro.

“You two are no longer permitted to be in the same room until launch.  Dr. Grace’s life may depend on it.  Whatever you think of me, know that Dr. Grace’s survival is not inconsequential to me.  It is a choice that I hoped I would never have to make, and, so Gott will, a choice that now I will never have to.”  She pivoted on her heel and exited the room.

______

Dr. Grace’s time-travel was an open secret on the Vat, but the man himself did not seem to know of it.  He continued to stumble through his work with the same earnestness and work-ethic he had always possessed, speaking longingly of his middle schoolers to whatever lab tech was in his proximity as he spent long hours holed up in the lab.  

Stratt hired him an assistant to bring him his meals and run his errands, and considered it a great oversight that she hadn’t done so before- of course the man who didn’t realize he was her first officer wouldn’t have known that he could send his lab techs off on personal errands like fetching coffee or snacks.  She’d had to practically present the poor young graduate to him with a flourish and a stern admonishment that “this is your personal assistant and you can send him on trivial errands to get fruit or coffee or skittles or whatever else without feeling bad about ‘interrupting his work’ because this is his work” to make sure that he was aware that the man was there to help him and not just some lost bureaucratic intern who was bored and wandered in to hear him ramble on about the visual light spectrum while he peered into his microscope.  Naturally, he was treated to quite a lot of that as well, but at least Dr. Grace also stayed hydrated.  For all that he was better (not perfect, but better) about taking regular meals, he was still horrible at drinking enough water.

He was somewhat surprised that he was now teaching Martin and Annie separately, but he accepted Martin’s lie that ‘we did not want our sexual tension to distract us from our studies, Dr. Grace.  It was a mutual decision.’ He probably assumed they were still fornicating in supply closets during their precious few snatches of between-meeting time.

When he congratulated Ilyukhina on her best friend’s pregnancy, Olesya hid her surprise and just replied ‘thank you’, and then was not at all surprised to receive the aforementioned news via email that very same weekend.  

He had his eyes on the stars all the time now, though.  He slept on deck at night a lot, and Eva just assigned Carl to watch him and didn’t actually ban his new habit even if it made her a bit nervous about him getting tossed overboard.  If he was willingly going to sleep instead of being carried to his bed after passing out in the lab, she’d take it.

He was clumsier now, too.  He’d always been, but now he seemed like he was trying to have a fistfight with empty air and losing.  He put too much energy into things; once he went to help the cleaning staff lift an empty coffee urn after a meeting, and he’d put so much force into it that it nearly went flying up towards the ceiling.

“Must have been the ship’s heavier gravity that has him stumbling around like Spiderman getting used to his superstrength,” Dimitri hypothesized one day as they all drank in the officer’s lounge.  It was Annie’s turn to hang out with them; Martin was in his bunk.  As much as they missed each other, they weren’t willing to stake Dr. Grace’s survival on it. 

“Surely he’ll eventually get used to Earth’s gravity again,” the secondary scientist replied.  “I mean, he’s not going up this time.  Stratt seems guilty enough about something that she’s technically never even done in this timeline; there’s no way he’s getting near that ship.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Ilyukhina replied, oddly subdued, her third shot of vodka in front of her.  “Have you seen the way he looks at sky?  Not just the sky, but always in same spot, whether there’s visible star or not?  He left something up there, and I think Stratt’s going to have to force him to stay this time around.” 

Dmitri laughed and clapped her on the shoulder.  “I think you are getting out of practice with your vodka, Моя соотечественница. Our boy isn’t going into space.  Director won’t allow, this time, and Yao has been very vocal about not taking the unwilling.”

“Yes, I will not take him if he’s unwilling,” Yao murmured into his beer, also oddly muted.  His emphasis on the last word was so slight that Olesya doubted anyone else caught it, but the two shared a look.

________

Stratt had been spending more time in his lab lately.  It was… weird, Grace thought. Before, he had existed in her space and at her leisure, and she felt no compunctions about monopolizing his time.  She called him into her office just to sit in silence while they both worked on their own paperwork in silence.  She dragged him around the world ‘in case your scientific expertise is needed’ even though it felt like half the time he never ended up speaking a word.  He’d been vaguely irritated, all those years ago, at all the interruptions to his ‘lab time,’ but he’d always humored her before.  She had nobody else to share her burdens with.  

She still didn’t, and yet her demands on his time and attention were fewer, these past few weeks.  She just brought her work and stared at her tablet and sat in the corner and said nothing as he chatted away with Micky (the microscope) about whatever observations he was making that day.  

The first time that he caught her out of the corner of his eye as she entered his lab in ghost-like silence, he’d flinched or startled, and there had been something there and gone in her eyes too fast for him to recognize.  Eventually, he got used to it.  He didn’t really mind her presence, per se.  Even if he’d never fully forgiven the past version of her, time had dulled the wound to a gentle sort of acceptance, and maybe even gratitude that her choice had given him more fulfillment and more joy than he had ever hoped to imagine back on Earth.  His feelings around her were complicated until they weren’t, until he only occasionally thought of her with a soft sort of nostalgia and a hope that she felt vindicated and at peace, because she’d done it all despite the toll it took on her.  

It was so easy when he was sixteen light years away, and yet if you’d asked him back on Erid he didn’t think that he would have said that it would be easy to see her again.  Maybe he wouldn’t have been angry, but he would have thought it likely to be difficult.  But it wasn’t difficult now; it was simply strange.  Eva Stratt in all her vibrancy and commanding dominance and surety, and now she spent hours working quietly in his lab and orbiting him the way he had once orbited her. 

Then again, he thought to himself.  I’m probably thinking too deeply about this.  Maybe she just needs a change of scenery.  

Still, when she came into his lab that day as she had so many times before, in those small hours between a late dinner and the eventual necessity of giving into their bodies’ need for rest, he smiled at her softly. 

“Hello Eva,” he murmured, surprising himself slightly with the use of her first name.  But she didn’t comment on it.

“Dr. Grace,” she greeted back, her accent slightly stronger than usual.  He went back to his work and wondered idly how he’d convince her to let him on the ship now that Martin and Annie were alive.  But even with his foreknowledge and the experience of having done this all before significantly moving up the timeline in which they’d be able to launch, there were still at least 18 months until they’d be off to Tau Ceti, so he decided just to enjoy the steady warmth of her presence behind him.  

Still, though, something felt slightly off.  Maybe she just needed a break, and despite everything that the past version of her had done to him, his heart still ached to see the heaviness weighing down her shoulders like a living thing.  He spun his stool around and grabbed her hand.

“Come on,” he told her.  “Let’s go look at all the stars you’re trying to save.  No sense bearing the weight of the sky if you never even take a moment to look at it.”

________

Doctor Grace took her out on the deck.  He pulled a rolled-up throw blanket out of his briefcase and spread it with a flourish.  

“The weather is perfect for stargazing tonight,” he told her, and despite what Eva knew she must have done to him in the time he’d fallen out of, his gaze held no malice.  If anything, his blue eyes were fond and nostalgic and looked so much older than his 33 years.  Despite being the one people always looked to, she found herself feeling uncomfortably vulnerable.

“Do you think we’ll really be able to do this?” she asked him, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice.  He’d done this once before, at least partially.  She didn’t know how far he’d made it, or if they were successful, or if there even was a solution to find.  But this new confidence, this soft assurance, this steadiness that was so foreign on him but balanced the new unsteadiness in her own soul- it all made her believe that he could give her an answer worth hearing.

“Yeah,” he replied.  “I think we will.  Now look up, I want to show you my favorite star.”

_______

“We need to tell him we know,” Ilyukhina argued.  “This is getting ridiculous.” 

“Things are proceeding just fine the way they are,” Lokken argued.  “Stratt’s already basically made it protocol that anything he suggests is incorporated into our plans.  Aren’t there dozens of warnings against messing with the fabric of space-time?”

“Yeah, in fiction,” Olesya snorted.  “But this is not Dr. Who.  And I think we need every benefit we can get for this, which would be easier if he knows that we know.” 

“I agree,” Martin DuBois added.  “And I speak on behalf of Dr. Shapiro as well; we discussed the issue via email.” 

“We are already reaping significant benefits from Dr. Grace’s foreknowledge; it seems likely that he has a lot of trauma associated with living through the events the first time; perhaps it would not be in his best interests to force him to confront that at this time,” Dr. Lamai contested.

“Whatever trauma he has, he’s already living with it alone.  Shared burdens are smaller burdens, no?” Dimitri turned to her.  

“Personally, I am of the opinion that we ought not to do anything that might increase the risk of being forced to send him to space.”  Lokken picked up the thread of her original argument.  

“Why don’t we just give him the choice?” Yao finally decided to put in his opinion.  “He is an autonomous and competent man, and from what information we’ve deduced so far, it seems like we were at least on the way to a solution when he got… sent back.” There was a very slight grimace on his face.  None of them knew exactly how that happened, and whether he’d simply fallen into a wormhole that had properties scientists hadn’t yet discovered, or perhaps to some other unlikely phenomenon out there in deep space.  But Martin, who they tended to trust when it came to such things certainly seemed to think that the most likely catalyst was his death.  It would also explain why only he had been sent back.  

In Yao’s opinion, it was likely that the alternate timeline-him and the alternate timeline-Ilyukhina were still floating through space with no science officer and no hope, and he’d like to avoid the mistake that had cost them their best chance in the first place.  Whether that chance ended up being Dr. Grace, Dr. Martin, or Dr. Shapiro in this timeline didn’t matter nearly as much as avoiding the death of whoever it was before they could solve the problem.

Yao pushed that line of thought into a box to be dealt with later- he had to convince the others to bring Doctor Grace into the fold before they could get any of the information that would help solve that issue.  He continued on.

“Doctor Grace will not be sent anywhere without his full knowing consent.”  He stopped here to glare just slightly at Stratt.  “But simply giving him the opportunity to freely share information without worrying that the rest of us will label him insane does not mean that we are asking him to go into space.  We are just allowing him to be fully transparent and give us- and the world- the best chance of survival.”

Stratt was oddly quiet during the discussion.  Reddell noticed.

“Are you not going to say anything, oh Great Director?” he asked sarcastically.

“I am recusing myself from this particular matter; I think it for the best.  As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t think that my opinion will help solve this issue, nor will it be as objective as it ought to.”  Her face was grim, but nobody could fault the logic.

“How should we vote?” Steve asked.  “Canadian jury or British Jury?”  

“You mean unanimous or majority,” Dr. Lamai clarified.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Unanimous,” Dr. Lokken put in.

“You’re only saying that because you’ll never agree,” Reddell spat at her.

“I think that we need to bring in Dr. Shapiro via video link,” Martin piped up.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Ilyukhina muttered under her breath, stalking out of the room.  

“We can vote when she gets back; she must need a few minutes,” Dmitri declared.

________

The argument hadn’t died down when Ilyukhina marched back in, Grace’s left arm ensconced within her grip, looking mildly confused but not terribly put out.  

“Oh dear, did I forget about a meeting?” He asked.  This all felt a bit too familiar to the first time he’d entered a room to find all of his colleagues already there, but DuBois was here this time and he figured he was just making too much out of a past that had only technically happened for him, so his anxiety was mostly in check. 

“You are all arguing like глупые дети,” the engineer scolded them, mouth set in a grim line. “I’m sick of it.  I’ve brought our Gallifreyan himself.” 

“What?” Doctor Grace looked around the room.  Some of his colleagues looked shocked, some angry, and Yao and Dmitri were both smiling a bit smugly.  “If you guys pulled me out of the lab for my extensive knowledge of Dr. Who trivia, I gotta say, I’m going to be a little bit peeved.”
“Not trivia; time travel,” Olesya corrected, pushing him towards a chair.  “Tell us everything.”

Dr. Grace startled, raised his hands in shock with entirely too much force, and decked himself right across the face.

“Ugh, stupid lack of gravity,” he muttered, collapsing into the chair with a weighty thump. 

_____________

“So let me get this straight,” Dr. Grace said five minutes later, a half-eaten cookie and a bottle of juice in front of him because Dr. Lamai was worried he’d pass out.  “You think I time-travelled?” 

“We know you time-travelled,” Yao corrected.  “We don’t think you’re crazy; we promise.  You don’t have to convince us of anything.  We will believe anything you tell us about the future you’ve lived; you are entirely too morally upright to lie about something this important.”

“Woah, um… okay.  Still digesting the fact that you figured all this out on your own, actually… I thought I was doing a pretty great job of being totally normal, frankly.”

Despite the tense atmosphere, a series of snickers erupted around the room.

“You are absolutely the most indiscreet time-traveller I’ve ever met,” Carl told him.

“I’m the only time-traveller you’ve ever met,” Grace began, until a thought visibly occurred to him “unless any of the rest of you… and that’s why…”

“Nyet, just you, Лисичка,” Olesya informed him.  “But you knew too many things you shouldn’t, and crystal balls are even crazier than TARDIS.”

“You became an orchestral genius literally overnight,” Dr. Shapiro piped up from DuBois laptop.  “I studied music for years as a child and I still can’t do half the pieces you suddenly can.  3 months ago, I doubt you could’ve fumbled your way through hot cross buns. So clearly, you made excellent use of the ship’s copyrighted material to learn piano up there.”

“Uh, actually, that’s not it…” Grace admitted sheepishly.  “More a side effect of my second language really, although I’ve used it way more than my first for the past 20 years or so…”

“Wait, 20 years?!” Steve screeched.   “How on earth did the three of you survive for that long?”

“Uh, just me, actually…” The ubiquitous Grace waterworks had already started.  “The uh… Yao and Ilyukhina didn’t make it through the coma.  I’m so sorry- but I’ll do everything I can to make it right this time.” 

“I think you need to start from the beginning, Dr. Grace.”  Stratt finally spoke up, and Ryland nearly jumped- he’d nearly forgotten she was there; it was so unheard of to have a meeting where she wasn’t one of the most frequent voices.

________

Dr. Lamai put her head in her hands.  “No wonder you’ve been so invested in my medical robots this time around,” she whispered, looking and feeling more off-kilter than anyone had ever seen her.  “Of course you couldn’t trust me to handle things myself after I essentially stranded you out in space alone.”

“What, no!” Grace looked almost offended that she’d thought that.  “Your coma bots were brilliant- I was just making conversation, is all.  I mean, I would have brought up the potential malfunctions once we got to that stage, but it wasn’t your fault that there was a mechanical failure on the other bots.  When they work, they work well- Armando’s been great, and his little fingers are great for massaging when the arthritis gets bad.” 

“I have never been so confused in my entire life,” Ilyukhina said bluntly.  “We are still missing very much context.”

“Yeah, of course.  Sorry.” Dr. Grace shook his head as if to recenter his thoughts.

“Stop apologizing,” Stratt ordered.

“Sorry,” Grace replied automatically, then cringed.  “I mean… not sorry?”

“So, you woke up all alone with complete retrograde amnesia,” Yao prompted, gently.  “Start from there.”

“Right… yeah.  Uh, before we go into that, maybe we should address the 🎶🎵🎶🎼 in the room,” he said, inadvertently chirping one of the limited number of Eridian words he could say without his keyboard (one that referred to a large herbivore common in less-populated areas of Erid). Then he winced when he realized that he’d slipped up in his near-constant effort not to code-switch.

“The elephant, I mean… the elephant in the room.  Me, on the ship.  That elephant,” he clarified, unnecessarily.  

“We will not force you onto that ship, Dr. Grace.”  He had to strain to hear Stratt’s voice; it was muted and dull, and it hurt a little, emotionally, to hear her like that.  

“What, no? That’s not what I’m getting at.  I want to go.  Willingly.  I know you don’t think I’m an astronaut, but I’ve done it all alone before and I can do it again since we’re not gonna let anything happen to the others.  Martin and Annie can stay on Earth and get married and do whatever weird sexual escapades that they are entirely too open about sharing.” He made a disgusted face that Ilyukhina could only describe as extremely asexual.  

“It seems like you already died once for this mission… nobody is asking you to do it again,” Martin soothed.  As much as he would love to have a future, a real future, with Doctor Shapiro, he didn’t want it to come at the cost of Dr. Grace’s life when he hadn’t been a volunteer in the first place.

“I didn’t die for the mission, I died for my pebbles!” the man exclaimed, frustrated.  “Oh crumbs, I really hope they’re okay…”

“Maybe he’s crazy and a time traveller?” Dimitri whispered in Russian.

________

It took three hours, two breaks, and four fruit cups to get the entire story out of Doctor Grace, and it still came in disjointed pieces and tangents, but they did get it.  Even if they had to put Dr. Lokken (who had the neatest handwriting) in charge of keeping track of the timeline on the whiteboard.

“So now you see why I want to go back- my family is up there, and he has no-one to watch him sleep.” Ryland’s face was red and blotchy and crusty with salt from dried tear tracks, and it was a contrast to the much more confident and composed (but still dorky and clumsy) man that they’d gotten used to over the past three months.

“That must be very hard for you,” Olesya soothed, rubbing his arm. 

“It is.  I need to go back for him.  We can do everything right this time, and breed the taumoeba so as not to get through the xenonite, and then you two can turn around and come back to Earth.  But I’m getting in the Blip A with Rocky and I’m going home.”

“I can see you’re set on this,” Stratt sighed.  To her credit, she hadn’t asked the question that Grace had thought she would- why would you die for him, but not for us?  

Then again, maybe she already knew the answer to that- that Rocky had given him time and space and choices and the kindness that she simply couldn’t afford to, and that if she could have, he probably would have made the same decision that he had for Rocky of his own free will.  The story of Eva Stratt was always destined to be the tragedy of the trolley operator, but at least it would be a little easier this time.  

“So you’ll let me go?” he asked, voice hopeful, and Eva hated the way his eyes were so kind and happy when they met her own.   Despite it all, she laughed.

“Let you go? Doctor Grace, you’re the captain now.”

“You mean in the command structure, I hope?” Yao asked, not seeming at all disturbed with his apparent demotion.  “Because I’m  not even sure he has a drivers’ license for a car.” 

“I do, actually,” Dr. Grace protested, before the words caught up with him.  “Wait a second… captain?!” 

“Welcome to the primary crew, boss,” Olesya teased, clapping him on the back.  Not only had this dork un-suicided their suicide mission, but (and no offence to Martin) it seemed like it was going to be way more fun.