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Olesya Ilyukhina was doing her damn best to hold in a sniffle, trying to tell herself that it didn’t matter if the world wasn’t fair. But it wasn’t- not only was this quite probably the last time she’d ever see her friend alive, but also the best damn teacher she’d ever had. The last two and a half days before launch had seen them getting a crash course in astrophage and molecular biology, and Ilyukhina, despite never having any interest in science beyond what she needed for her field, had actually loved it. She’d loved it because Dr. Ryland Grace was, she was sure, the world’s best teacher. She fingered the hem of the “Princess? No, I wanna be a scientist!” t-shirt she’d won from the treasure box for winning the most lightning round questions (after an off-handed comment from Ryland about how he wished he had his San Francisco classroom stuff with him to make the crash course more fun, Stratt had had all his stuff, including his ‘treasure box’ flown in from San Francisco. It was mostly full of candies and silly trinkets, but there were also ‘big’ prizes, like nerdy t-shirts in different sizes and crocheted models of atoms and molecules that Ryland had not only lovingly made by hand but also drafted the patterns for).
She could tell Yao was thinking the same thing beside her, clutching his plushie crocheted nitrogen molecule that he’d won for being the first of the two of them to correctly calibrate the electron microscope like a lifeline. The tension he was feeling was only visible in his white-knucked grip on the amigurimi as his face remained impassive, but Olesya knew.
Ilyukhina, despite having checked her bags a thousand times, resolved to triple-check that her own CO2 molecule was in there before they launched the next morning. She looked at Grace, who was lying in the pod-bed, already dressed in his coma suit and hooked to tubes and wires galore. He didn’t look happy about starting his coma early, but he understood the necessity of it, and, like most things about this project that he’d been frog-marched into with little to no warning, he had taken it without (much) complaint, she remembered.
_________
“We have to put you under tonight, Doctor Grace,” Stratt’s face looked almost apologetic.
“Wait, so I have to be an astronaut, but I don’t even get to see Earth from space? Is this because you think I’ll throw up during take-off? Because you’re probably right, but also, Carl gave me anti-nausea tablets so it should be fine… probably…” Ryland protested.
“It’s not about that. We need Doctor Lamai to put you under personally, and we want the cancer specialists there too as we hook you to the coma-bot. We need to make sure that everything goes well and to do one final check on the treatment protocol to make sure that everything is calibrated. It needs to be able to monitor the levels of cancer in your blood, administer the correct doses of chemotherapy at the right time, and to monitor you once you’re in remission. You will also need frequent health checks upon waking up. We need this to go well.”
Ryland looked at Stratt dubiously. She kept saying hopelessly optimistic things like “when he woke up” and “when he was in remission.” He was of the opinion that today was, in all likelihood, his last full day alive. Once they put him under, math and probability suggested that he was just a corpse in waiting. He felt awful that Olesya and Li-Jie were going to have to deal with his body.
Stratt read the doubt in his face. “Have a little faith, Dr. Grace. I do.”
“I’m a scientist and the sun is dying. I don’t believe in G-d,” he argued.
“Who said anything about G-d?” Stratt rebutted. “I believe in you.”
“You keep saying that. Your English is better than mine, really, but maybe we need to just review the words ‘faith’ and ‘believe’.”
“I’d hit you if it wouldn’t bruise,” Stratt sighed. He looked terrible- the late nights giving Yao and Ilyukhina their astrophage crash course had left a visible toll, the ever-present bags under his eyes deeper than usual. His natural clumsiness had left bruises all over his body, huge and dark and ominous. She was afraid that this was what a young Ryland had looked like, back when he stepped in front of a mother to intercept a father’s swinging fists, and the mother had left anyway, leaving him behind.
He didn’t know that she knew, and he never would, but she knew everything about her crew that could be found in any government database. A mother who’d run and a father who had finally gone far enough to land an eleven-year-old Ryland in the hospital, beaten half to death. And then a year of foster care later, and some mandatory parenting classes, and the system had just left him with the mother who’d abandoned him. Clearly, that hadn’t ended well, because by 16 his government-registered address was a homeless shelter. She wished his parents were still around so she could kill them herself (or have Carl do it).
His weak laughter brought her back to the present. “You’re going soft.”
“You take that back,” she demanded, trying to stop the upward curving of her lips. She was sending her best friend off to die; she figured she deserved a bit of sentiment.
“So I’m really gonna miss seeing the Earth from space, huh?” he brought the topic back around, politely ignoring the lapse in her stony, stoic image.
“There’s no other way to minimize risk. We need to put you under here on Earth, where it’s safer and we can monitor if things go wrong. But if it’s any consolation, you’ll get to see a whole new solar system when you wake up.”
“You and your ‘when’,” he rolled his eyes at her.
_______
Ryland looked around again. They were in a med bay, so not much to see, but he’d already gotten to see the sky one last time, and to call his students in San Francisco. Stratt had made an excuse to the kids for why they couldn’t turn the video on, and he was grateful. He was terminally ill and he knew that- he looked it- and he didn’t want the kids to see how thin his face had gotten or how his hands shook all the time now no matter what he did. For the past two weeks, a lab tech had needed to prep his slides and adjust the delicate knobs on his equipment for him.
Dr. Lamai looked like she was afraid and trying to hide it. Yao had wrinkles of concern around the corners of his eyes. Ilyukhina wasn’t smiling as brightly as usual, but she was trying- oh gosh, was she trying, and Ryland appreciated it.
Stratt’s face was confident, as always. She lightly brushed her fingers against her hip, where Ryland knew a large bandage covered the donor site under her clothing. When she’d found out she was a match, she wouldn’t hear of anyone else doing it. She insisted it was because she was the head of a project and thus it was her duty to look after her people however she could. Dimitri privately told Ryland that he thought she was just sentimental and wanted a piece of her to be there with him.
“Once the cancer is gone, the bot will give you the transplant. From there it should be simple enough- the bot has been programmed to add extra rations to help you recover and the exercise-simulating electrodes have been set to help build back musculature strength slowly,” she explained, and Ryland tuned her out. He’d heard it before, several times over, and he wanted to see these people’s faces one last time. Only the primary crew, Stratt, and Dr. Lamai were allowed in the med bay as they prepared to put him under, and he sighed. He wished Dmitri were here, and Carl, and heck, even Lokken. He feared the emotion in her eyes that he didn’t quite understand when she looked at him in a rare unguarded, non-snarky moment, but she was still his friend even if she might have wanted more from him, something that he could never give her. He’d tried with Linda- good lord, how he’d tried- but he just wasn’t built that way. His love was for his kids, for his friends, for the world, and maybe it was better to be launched into space than have to explain to his academic rival that the thought of a romantic relationship with anyone made him feel more nauseous than the chemo surely would, were he awake for it.
But maybe she knew that. Or maybe she just didn’t want to make a love (?) confession to a dying man. Either way, she spared him that, instead simply looking him in the eyes with all her steely determination and firmly ordering “Don’t die.”
“I mean, ideally I won’t die until we fix the astrophage problem, but it’s a suicide mission, so…”
“So find a way. You always do. You’re annoying like that,” she insisted, and it wasn’t desperation in her eyes, not like when she looked at him out of the corner of it with a yearning that was foreign to him. No, it was conviction, and Ryland wondered why everyone seemed so sure of it.
Even Carl, when they’d said goodbye. “I know you didn’t have time to pack, but I’ll make sure your science t-shirts and your converse make it in,” he promised. Ryland was already clutching his little earth ball in his shaking hands, ready to bring it into the coma-pod with him.
“Thanks,” he breathed shakily, tampering down on his instinctive response that he was glad they’d be there, so that Li or Oly could put one on before they commended him to the stars.
Carl saw the direction his thoughts were taking, and he squeezed his shoulder oh-so-gently. “You’ll do great,” he promised.
“Li-Jie and Olesya will. I’ve taught them everything I could. They’re smart; I think it’ll be enough.”
“No,” Carl insisted. “You’ll do great. They’ll be there to help you.”
“They’ll be there to take care of my corpse, Carl. You can’t possibly think I’m going to make it,” Ryland sighed.
“Of course you will. We made an alien baby together- you can do anything.” Carl cracked a small smile, and his eyes were softer than Ryland had ever seen them.
He chuckled at the memory of the first successful breeding of astrophage. He’d been sick even then, though he hadn’t known it yet. But the memory was good, and Ryland was trying to only take the good things with him on what he was almost certain would be his last day alive.
______
He looked up at Stratt, and Dr. Lamai, and Oly and Li. The sedative they’d put in the IV to relax him was already taking hold. He was floating, and he was almost content- they’d given him the good stuff. He wished he’d had a little more time, and that he could have spent his last months on Earth, but this was his lot, and it wasn’t such a bad way to die, he thought. He’d gotten to say his goodbyes, and his friends were kind, and someone was holding his hand but there was no expectation of more behind it. It was warm and soft and felt only like friendship. He looked up and was surprised that he wasn’t more surprised to see that the hand holding his belonged to Stratt, who was crouching to be at his eye level. He smiled crookedly at her as best he could, and blamed her shiny eyes on the fact that they’d already taken off his glasses. The light of the med bay made a halo behind her flaming hair, and he chuckled at the thought of a world where heaven was real and they had to deal with an angel like Eva Stratt.
“Tell the world my last words were something cool,” he managed, voice already heavy with oncoming sleep.
“Then dream up some cooler ones while you’re in the coma, and you can give them on the video logs,” he thought he heard her say back, but he was sure he was already dreaming, because her voice cracked and his hands felt they were being hit with warm raindrops. But that couldn’t be right, because Stratt didn’t cry.
________________
The others politely ignored the tears silently streaming down Stratt’s face as she carefully extracted her hand from Ryland’s pale fingers. “You two will stay awake for the first ten days. That’s as much fuel as we can spare if anything goes wrong with Grace and you need to turn around. Sleep in shifts- I want eyes on him every second for as long as possible. The world needs him.”
“Yes ma’am,” they both said in unison.
You need him too, Olesya thought. But when have you ever cared what you needed, when it comes to the world?
Today fucking sucked.