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Grace raps his hand on the door to Stratt’s room, quick and sharp.
Knock, knock, like she’d done the day she came into his life. He thinks about it often, pondering different decisions and divergent scenarios.
If there was ever a moment he’s regretted asking to keep researching the Astrophage the most, it would be this one.
Stratt opens the door, looks him up and down passively. He wonders if his distress is written all over his face, some manifestation of the turmoil in his mind. She lets out a breath that almost sounds exasperated, but he chooses to ignore it.
“Dr. Grace, we should have this conversation in my office, not my personal quarters.”
“I understand that you think I'm the right person for this mission, but I can’t do it,” Grace says, pushing past her. His leather coat squeaks with the motion, loud in the silence of the room, but his agitation exceeds any sense of embarrassment. “I can’t do it.”
Stratt’s face shifts, her lips twisting to the side ever so slightly. It’s a subtle movement, but it’s one he recognizes immediately, having spent years watching her.
Disappointed.
She’s disappointed in him.
He doesn’t know when her opinion of him started mattering this much (perhaps from the first), and he looks down at his hands, shame turning his words into ash in his mouth.
“My—my place is in a classroom.”
“Stop pretending this is about your children,” she scoffs. “It’s so insulting.”
“I understand the stakes. I do. But I don’t have it in me,” he pleads.
“I don’t think you actually understand the stakes, then. Leclerc’s Antarctica nukes bought us some time, but not much. Half the global population will die. There’ll be wars, fought for the same reason most wars in ancient times were fought for: food, then when that’s gone there will be malnourishment. Disruption. Famine. The entire fabric of society will fall apart. There’ll be plagues too. All over the world: war, famine, pestilence, and death,” she says, brows furrowing, shoulders heavy with the burden of the fate of the human race.
It’s too heavy to be passed onto him. He will collapse under its weight; he’s sure of it.
“Grace, if you truly cared about the children, or anyone else for that matter, you'd get on that ship.”
That stings. Resentment seeps into his skin, like venom from a barb.
“Of course I care!” he says, defensively. “I’m still here, aren’t I? But I worked my ass off on this project and I deserve to live!”
“And who would you say on this mission don’t deserve to live? Do you think Yao, Ilyukhina, DuBois, and Shapiro all jumped at the chance to leave their families for fun?”
“They chose to do that. I don’t want to.”
“And I’m saying that we’re past the point of choices,” she insists. “All your work will be for nothing. Not just your work, but everyone’s. You’re willing to throw all that away?”
“Why is that on me?” he says, throwing his arms out in frustration.
She lets out a deep breath.
“Because you’re not just smart, you’re brilliant. I know you don’t want to hear it, but you are the most qualified. You are our best chance at the Hail Mary succeeding.”
His ears burn from the praise.
“Can you please just take the compliment? It’s an order,” she’d said, under that gray Baikonur sky. They laughed together, unaware of the tragedy about to strike. He preened from her amusement at him, not knowing that she’d be signing his death warrant hours later.
He lets the bitterness fill him, creeping from his chest up slowly, steadily.
“Easy for you to say because you’re not the one being sent up there.”
“You know I would’ve already been on that ship if I was a viable candidate. But you’re it, and you’re running away now like you ran away from academia back then.”
She’s not wrong, and that part rankles the most.
He puts his hands on his hips, shaking his head in indignation. “What is this? Are you trying to provoke me?”
“Anything’s better than this self-deprecating routine you’ve got going on. You abandoned a promising scientific career because people didn’t like a paper you wrote,” she says, her tone taking on a mean edge. “Do you think I don’t know you, Grace? You’re not humble. You’re a coward.”
Hurt wraps a hand around his throat, squeezing.
“Fine! I’m afraid! I don’t want to die!”
She laughs, a sharp bark devoid of humor. “We’re all going to die. You, me, your children.”
Her expression hardens in a way he’d never seen directed at him, eyes turning to flint.
Once, on their way back from a meeting they’d overheard a soldier on the Gansu saying something derogatory about Ilyukhina, some pointed comment about “entrusting the fate of humanity to a frivolous Russian girl.” It was a brief flash, but for a second Stratt had the same look on her face as she did now. He never saw that soldier again. They never spoke of it.
When she speaks now, the ice in her voice makes him shudder, gooseflesh pebbling his arms.
“Stay on Earth, then, Ryland Grace, and watch your children die slowly over the next thirty years. Look them in the eyes as the world freezes over, knowing that you refused the chance to save them.”
Something long-tethered within him snaps.
Like a stretched rubber band suddenly let go, his feet move of their own volition, and he lunges at Stratt, caging her into a wall with his arms. She steps back but doesn’t cower, steadily meeting his wild eyes with her own steely gaze.
“You want to curse at me right now,” she says, tilting her head, “but you won’t.”
“You—“ he grits out, blood pounding in his ears.
She’d always been stern, but he never thought her truly unfeeling, despite some auxiliary staff whispering about it when she’s not around. They just didn’t know her the way the people closest to her on the project did. The way he did. But the Stratt in front of him at this moment is cruel, goading.
Honest, his mind prods at him, but he shutters it.
He wants to scream at her until his throat is shredded raw. Shake her by the shoulders until the answers fall out. Was it not enough that he’d uprooted his entire life and transformed it according to what the project demanded of him? How could she condemn him to a lonely end in the void of space, after everything they’d been through together?
Stratt watches him silently, searching his face for something. Seemingly having found it, she lets out a breath.
“There he is. I was wondering if you still had it in you,” she says, casually, as if she’s not currently trapped between a wall and a six-foot tall man trembling with barely suppressed rage.
“What?” He deflates a little, taken aback by her sudden change in attitude.
The corner of her mouth lifts. “Just needed to see a bit of that spark back, Dr. Grace. Now go save us all.”
“I don’t know what you’re playing at, but it sure is strange that you think you can convince me to give up my life with this.”
“I’m not trying to convince you of anything,” she says, shrugging lightly. “Remember what I said about choices. You will get on that ship.”
He gets the feeling that she knows something he doesn’t, and the way her lips press into a thin line is so calm—too calm—that it reignites the fury inside him.
“You…you are so fucking frustrating.”
He lifts a hand, fully intending on slamming it on the wall beside her head. To let out some of this poison building up in his veins. To show her he’s not her plaything, maybe try to scare her a little bit. Years of walking beside her in ship hallways, in labs, in military bases; sharing countless cups of coffee and trading sticky notes; working late nights and accidentally falling asleep next to each other on conference tables; finding out idiosyncrasies that only he knew about—he’d thought it meant something. He wasn’t foolish enough to assume that she considered him a friend, but they sure were more than a boss and her subordinate.
Turns out he is just her little science lapdog. Heck, even dogs are more valued by their owners. No, Stratt finds him valuable. That’s the whole point of this wretched argument. She just doesn’t care for him.
(It hurts more than he has the right to be angry about.)
The hand still in the air follows a different impulse, wrapping around the back of Stratt’s head instead, and he pulls. She falls into him, their lips crashing together in a hungry kiss, bodies pressed closer than they’ve ever been.
Eva, Eva, Eva.
His shock at his own actions doesn’t matter anymore. There’s only her strawberry blonde hair in his fingers and her taste, his tongue rich with the coffee she never stops drinking, dark and bitter.
Bitter, like the ache in his heart, wondering why he’d ask her to die in the dark, so far away from the warmth of the sun—from her—so blithely.
Then ice-cold terror washes over him, suddenly reminding him where he is. He steps back with both arms raised, horrified, but he stills at the sight of her.
She looks utterly wrecked. The blue of her eyes are nearly swallowed by her pupils, her lips the color of raspberry from his eager nipping. Pink dusts her cheeks, and her red hair is a halo around her face, skin flushed and glowing in the light.
A painting of a goddess, with his kiss the stroke of the brush.
He didn’t mean to cross the line. Not that he’d never thought about it, of course. But she is who she is, and Eva Stratt never lets people close enough for him to even entertain the idea that she might regard him in the same way. So he contented himself with what she allowed him to have: a word of praise, a slight quirk of her brow at his jokes, and now and then, a smile that made her eyes crinkle at the corners.
This, however, is almost inconceivable in its audacity.
“F—ahhh,” he exclaims, the word dying on his lips. “I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry—”
Her brow wrinkles, and he braces himself for a slap. This was too far, too unforgivable for whatever their relationship truly is.
Instead, she hooks a finger on his shirt collar. “Stop being a coward, for once,” she says, slanting her hot mouth over his, only pausing intermittently to tug his jacket and shirt off, baring him to her.
In the back of his mind it occurs to him that this could be a trap, a way for him to lower his inhibitions so that she can sedate him or something. Why else would Stratt let him do this to her? But his body is aflame with her touch, his skin scorched where her little hands land as they roam: his face, his scalp, his neck, his chest, his arms—
Unless she wants this. Wants him.
Then why is she sending him on the Hail Mary?
Confusion, frustration, and unbridled lust meld and morph into anger, and angry Ryland Grace is a lot of things, but most of all, he is bold. With one hand back in her hair, the other creeps under her sweater, kneading her breasts as he slides his tongue against hers, her soft gasps music to his ears.
“Is this what you wanted, Stratt?” he says, lowly. “For me to lose control?”
He pries down the zip on her trousers and slips his hand past the waistband of her panties.
“That would require you to actually have any sense of control in the first pl—“ she retorts, losing the thought when he dips into her wet heat.
His fingers glide in her folds smoothly, and his brain short-circuits as he realizes just how wet she is for him.
“Fuck, you’re dripping. All this for me?” he rasps, genuine amazement in his voice.
He strokes at her entrance, and she nods against his shoulder, whimpering softly as he works one, then two fingers in and out. Slowly at first, then in a punishing rhythm, the obscene sound of his ministrations joining her moans.
She pushes at his forearms as she squirms, trying to put some distance between his clever fingers and her swollen sex, but her attempts to slow his movements causes her thighs to clamp together, trapping his hand.
A huff of amusement escapes him at her desperation, at the ever-stoic Eva Stratt currently being unable to decide between riding or pushing his fingers away, whose ragged breathing is becoming more erratic as she reaches a peak, higher and higher.
“Come for me, then, Eva,” he whispers into the shell of her ears, and she feels him tighten around his fingers at the sound of her name. “Come for the man you want to send to his death.”
She tenses as she does, and suddenly Grace has to support her weight as her legs give out from under her. As he grasps her arms, the slick on his hands catches his eye, the shine mesmerizing in the light.
Eyes half-lidded, Stratt watches him clean her arousal off his fingers with his tongue.
He could get drunk from the taste of her. This is ambrosia, if such a thing ever existed, but Grace is unwilling to share it even with the gods themselves.
Stratt reaches for him and pops his fingers in her mouth. He hisses, every sweep of her tongue around his digits causing his cock to throb painfully against his jeans.
“Take me to bed, Grace” she whispers when she’s satisfied, wrapping her slender arms around his neck. As if by instinct, he slots an arm under her legs and lifts.
It’s too intimate, the way he carries her. Like a groom crossing the threshold of a home with his bride.
The image pulses behind his eyes.
“What are you gonna do for the next twenty years?”
He’d asked the question not knowing how she’d answer, but deep inside, he’d hoped he could persuade her to visit him once in a while in San Francisco. Maybe more often.
They can go get coffee and catch up. He could give her a tour of his school, show her his favorite places in the city. They can have dinner after. Or even better, he can make her dinner in his apartment. Pasta and some nice wine, probably.
Maybe she can stay over for the night.
Maybe she can stay over forever.
(It’s more likely that she’ll let him follow her around forever.)
“You’re asking me to give up my life?”
“I am. We all are.”
Stratt pulls him out of the reverie and back to reality, down, down, down to the bed until he’s on his back. She peels his jeans and underwear down in one go, then takes him in her hand. His stomach seizes at her touch, his abdominal muscles rippling under her other palm as she keeps him in place. He props himself on his elbows in time to watch her press her tongue to the underside of his shaft, licking a broad stripe upwards before swirling it around the head.
Grace thinks he must’ve died and ascended to heaven, because surely, surely, there is no reality in which the most powerful woman in the world is debasing herself to give him this incredible pleasure.
A strangled groan tears through his chest as she bobs up and down on his cock, using her hands to stroke him where her mouth isn’t. He gathers her long, silky hair in his hands, and her striking blue eyes peer at him through her eyelashes as she takes him even deeper, sliding down until the curved length bumps the back of her throat.
A sight he’d only seen in his dreams, when his longing for her overcomes all the rational parts of his brain, when he decides to indulge his basest instincts despite the reality of his one-sided affection. In his dreams, she reaches for him, like this.
She pulls back to drag along the thick vein along his length, making his breath catch as she hollows her cheeks to take him back down to the base, its tip making her throat flutter. It’s dizzying, the way he wants her, and it takes a Herculean effort for him not to rock his hips into her mouth, not after he noticed how the initial stretch made her eyes water. Yet she increases the pace anyway, the rhythm driving him closer to release as she gags on his cock.
“Eva, you don’t have to—” he chokes out, mind warring between his desire to spill down her throat and his alarm at the tears now streaming down her face.
He summons all the strength he has and pries her off him, pushing on her shoulders until she detaches from his cock with a pop. He’s still painfully hard, but she hadn’t been breathing, and that seemed more important.
Stratt coughs violently, clearly overwhelmed, but before he could say anything, there is something in her red-rimmed eyes that silences him.
It feels like an accusation. It looks like guilt.
He shakes his head in disbelief and confusion. “Why are you doing this?”
She says nothing, just swings her legs over to straddle him.
“I—I don’t have a condom,” he admits, part of him grateful to realize that at least some part of his brain is still functioning despite the arousal clouding his mind.
“I’ve seen your medical records, and I know everything happening on this ship. We’re both clean, and you’re not sleeping with anybody,” she says, coolly. “Shut up, and fuck me already.”
(Oh, she’s a piece of work today.)
She’s seemingly set on eviscerating what remains of his patience and self-control, and unfortunately for him, he is at the end of his rope.
Then she pulls off her sweater and her bra, and all coherent thought leaves him at the sight of her body, the toned arms and gorgeous breasts she hid under all her sweaters and trench coats.
Stratt leans forward, her hair falling like a curtain around his head. “If you want me, do something, or get out of my room.”
She’s so beautiful, and so, so infuriating.
“You want me to be mean? Fine.” He surges up and flips them over, pinning her wrists over her head with one large hand. “If you wanted me to fuck you so badly you could’ve just asked nicely,” he says, sucking a bruise into the skin at the junction of her neck and her jaw.
She whines, and his other hand roams on her creamy skin, squeezing and smoothing and spanning down her body, and when he’s satisfied with the hickey he’d left where it would still peek over her turtlenecks, he spreads her legs wider and notches himself at her entrance. She’s even wetter than she’d been with his fingers inside her. The contact makes his hand shake, his composure slipping quickly. “But I think you wanted me to take you roughly.”
He sinks into her all at once, and the friction knocks the breath out of him. Her back arches as she moans brokenly, pressing her bare chest to his. Gorgeous, she is so gorgeous like this.
Her eyes flutter open, and her brows crease slightly.
(Ah, he’d said it out loud.)
Stratt tries to free her wrists, but the movement only shifts and shoves him right down to the base. Chasing the exquisite feeling, he rolls his hips, devastatingly slow, then faster, until she thrashes against his hand, a butterfly flapping its wings against the pins holding it down. But Grace knows she’s anything but fragile.
Letting her hands go, he brackets his arms on either side of her head, allowing him to drive into her cunt deeper. He wants to burrow inside her, to crawl in between her ribs and make a home there.
See if she can send him away then.
“Fuck, you feel incredible,” he grunts, as their bodies moved together, sweaty and sticky and slick, her nails raking red marks down his back, sending crackles of electricity down his spine.
Her reply is a whimper, and he marvels at the transformation of her voice—the voice that commanded him to uncover the mysteries of an alien species; that sang to him that everything will be all right; that only hours ago coldly asked him to willingly serve himself up on a platter, now softly mumbling “so good” and “harder” and “yes, just like that” in his ears.
He grasps her jaw with a hand, firmly, demanding her attention as her eyes glaze over with lust.
“Say my name, Eva. Who’s making you feel so good right now?”
“Grace,” she breathes.
“Uh-uh. Try again.”
“Ryland.”
A shiver runs up his spine at the way she rasps his name, her voice low and thick with desire.
He wants to mark her, to ruin her, to make sure she never forgets him. Not after what she’s asking him to do.
“Tell me, where should I come? On your tits? On your face? Or do you want it inside?”
“Shut up,” she gasps.
He chuckles at her petulance. Of course she’d be like this, even as she writhes deliciously beneath him. “You have to say it, or I won’t let you come.”
She growls lightly, frustrated. “Inside.”
He hisses at the thought of filling her up, flooding her womb until her thighs drip with his cum.
“How irresponsible of you, Director,” he teases. “You want me to put a baby in you, hmm? Want me to knock you up so you can have something of me after you send me to space?”
He doesn’t know what possessed him to say it, but she clenches around him so tightly that the reason doesn’t even really matter. It doesn’t warrant further interrogation.
“And what will I have from you,” he demands, mouthing at her ear. “The memory of your cunt, wet and tight just for me?
She cries out wordlessly as he punctuates his questions with deep thrusts, each one causing him to unravel more and more, wildfire spreading from his core to the tips of his fingers to his feet.
He nips at her earlobe. “Will you tell our child what you’ve done?”
Our child.
He only said it to provoke her, but a pang inexplicably shoots through his chest. In his mind, a little girl with dirty blonde hair sticking out under a fox beanie blinks at him with impossibly large deep blue eyes.
He grits his teeth, snaps his hips harder, trying to focus on Stratt.
“Yes, yes,” she babbles mindlessly, lost in pleasure as he ruts into her. “Tell her I’m a monster.”
The little girl in his mind runs across a meadow into the waiting arms of a red-haired woman clad in black, childish laughter echoing in his ears.
The sound wraps around his heart, squeezing, and he drops his head to Stratt’s shoulder to catch his breath, the warmth of her skin grounding him as they rock together in perfect sync.
She’d called herself a monster—why? Guilt? Eva Stratt didn’t do guilt. He watched her order a fourth of the Sahara to be paved, stood by as she sent nukes to melt glacial shelves in Antarctica without flinching. Stratt made decisions and stood by every single one of them.
He’s one of those decisions, and it hurt to realize that their relationship—this confounding, nebulous, demented thing between them—didn’t seem to matter to her at all.
Why won’t she let him stay by her side?
Sorrow, profound and bottomless, claws at him. Tears prickle at his eyes. He digs his fingers into her waist, gripping the soft flesh until she grunts. He hopes it bruises.
“Do you really hate me that much, Eva? That you’d send me light-years away into space to die?”
“I—I wish I hated you,” she gasps. “Then this wouldn’t be so hard.”
His hips stutter, his thoughts sent back to a moment of quietness. Stratt smiling against the fiery hues of the sunset as he salutes her.
“You said it wasn’t. On the deck.”
“I didn’t know I’d have to send you,” she whispers, voice trembling.
He stills.
Propping himself up, he looks at her face, brushing away the hair plastered on her forehead with sweat. Blue eyes gaze at him, deepwater pools shining with unshed tears.
Eva Stratt called him a coward for running away from heroism, but isn’t she a coward as well, to pretend that she’s above emotions and sentimentality when the truth is that she cared so much? No, he decides, it’s courage. What else can one call the act of giving not just one’s life, but one’s self, so that billions of people can have a chance to see a future, for themselves and for their children’s children, and for more who will come after?
Every ounce of anger that’s still within him washes away with the tide, leaving in the sand only crystallized comprehension of the breadth of sacrifice that everyone in the mission has made, including her. She said as much to Leclerc: “You did what you had to do. We’re all doing what we have to do.”
Stratt isn’t damning him with her burden. She’s handing him the flame of her hope, praying that he has the grace to carry it for her where she cannot go to see it through.
“Oh, Eva.”
He rests his forehead against hers.
Darling, dear, Eva.
“Tell me you want this.”
“Yes,” she breathes, one hand on his jaw, thumb gently caressing his cheek.
“Tell me you want me,” he says, his voice cracking with grief.
“I do,” she says, unwavering, pulling his head down to gently press her lips to his forehead.
Tears slip down his cheeks, and he claims her mouth again with urgency, pouring everything he couldn’t say in his kiss. He rolls his hips against her once more and she meets him with ardor, their desperation matching the beating of their hearts.
She buries her hands in his hair, scrapes her nails on his scalp, clings to him as his thighs start to quiver, the pressure building up in his core.
He smooths his hand down her breasts, to the flat of her stomach, to the apex of her thighs, rubbing circles at her clit, and she whispers his name again and again and again, as if she’s committing it to memory.
She keens as she shatters, her trembling legs clamped around him. Grace fucks her through the waves, slowly at first, then sharper, deeper, as he reaches his own peak.
“Come, Ryland,” she breathes in his ear, and his release rips through him, white-hot pleasure coursing through his vein as he spills inside her.
She pulls him down for another kiss, hot and needy and tender, before they finally collapse, boneless, limbs entangled together.
Grace shifts to make her more comfortable, pulling her half atop him, with her head pillowed on his chest. They stay in each other’s embrace, silent, until the rest of the world is in focus again. Stratt shifts, and for a moment he fears that she’d leave him, but she only burrows closer.
Despite their physical and mental exhaustion, neither of them fall asleep, content to lay in each other’s arms as if time didn’t exist, as if they’re merely dust motes dancing in a sunbeam, and not two people on the precipice of apocalypse.
“Wanting to live isn’t enough, is it?” he says after a while, gently tracing the curve of her shoulders with the tips of his fingers.
“No,” she whispers. “It isn’t.”
“Huh.”
“You should be angry at me,” she says, “I can take it.”
He lifts his head to look at her. “Geez, Eva, why would you want that?”
She shrugs without looking at him. “Like we’ve established, it’s not a matter of wanting something. It happens. It will happen more as even harder choices would need to be made. People would want someone to blame.”
“But why would you want me to be angry at you?”
“I don’t want you to be angry at me,” she says, simply. “But I’m saying I understand it, and I won’t hold it against you if you are.”
He sighs, gently stroking her hair, thinking of the weight of everything she’d taken on by herself—never letting herself get close to anyone, forgoing companionship and warmth, willingly accepting anger and blame as punishment for the things she’s done to save humanity.
Sacrifice.
“You really think I could do it?”
“I don’t just think it, I believe it,” she says, gazing at him with full conviction. “I know it.”
He sees the both of them as they once stood outside the hangar. Her tossing him the Earth beanbag.
Stratt standing in front of him at the edge of the world, her hand outstretched with the flame.
Even as he holds her in this moment, he knows the eventual truth. He will go. Not with enthusiasm, especially now that there is a reason to stay other than his pathetic bid to save his own life, but that same reason is the one that will ferry him to the stars.
Someone to be brave for.