Chapter Text
Eva Stratt liked outliers. She always had. Whether it was something as predictable as a height below 145cm, or as unpredictable as her childhood neighbor who dabbled in fire eating. Freak shows and circus people, CERN scientists and astronauts with three PhDs, Olympic athletes and World Guinness Record holders. They all held their own charm that never failed to intrigue her.
People who lived in the median were exactly that and in this particular endeavor of saving their planet she didn’t need people who lived within the realm of what was and was not possible. She needed visionaries. Even if those visionaries were wrong from time to time. Any engineer could design a box. Only a visionary could fill that box with astrophage and send it four thousand times further than any other man-made object in the whole of human history.
When she was made aware of Dr Ryland Grace’s work Eva wasn’t particularly piqued, at least not until she heard the way he’d left academia was by causing a scene while literally cursing his contemporaries. That was the sort of gumption she wanted. Needed.
So it was a bit of a disappointment to find that face to face he was actually very milquetoast and unassuming with his ready excuses for why he demurred when asked to step up to the plate and help save the world he lived in. Maybe he was demoralized at being so thoroughly rejected by academia, leaving without a fight and his tail tucked between his legs, but Eva found that if you played your cards right rejection almost always led to something better.
Dr Grace had no idea how to play his cards and that was a shame.
It was why he surrounded himself with young and impressionable minds who bestowed upon him the rare honor of being the cool teacher. Eva didn’t need cool. She really didn’t want trendy either. But Dr Grace suited her purposes in the immediate, even when his pet theory was disproved by astrophage’s makeup being mostly water, impossible though it seemed. At least he’d accepted the truth with only a minor emotional breakdown in his makeshift lab. She had resigned herself long ago to the fact that scientists had a tendency towards dramatics. At least he hadn’t run naked through the streets shouting Eureka! when he found success.
Still, when she left him his triad of cells she almost immediately forgot about him, at least until she received his call that he’d become a father. A unique way of saying he’d made one of the most relevant and important discoveries in contemporary science, but she could forgive his enthusiastic euphemisms if it got her results. Outliers had a tendency towards weirdness anyway.
If she’d known the effect he’d have on her once they were in close quarters she would have had the first available officer put him on a life raft and point him in the direction of San Francisco. But by the time she realized the danger she was in, it was too late to backtrack. Especially once she was told he was coma resistant.
“And – uh – see, the thing about the reproduction of astrophage is that it takes time – I mean the incubation period and its lifecycle – and the numbers you’re asking for are . . . see, it’s just . . . the manpower it would take . . . and there’s storage and . . .”
He had roundabout ways of coming to the same conclusion she’d come up with an hour earlier, but at least his math was always correct. Yet when he put himself to work he was . . . innovative. What’s more he got along with others. Even if Annie and Dubois referred to him as a wet cat behind his back. He was competent and he wasn’t bogged down by things like two thousand years of reliable science in the face of the alien microbes he was studying.
His science wasn’t her distraction. He was one voice of many, even if he was proving himself the most knowledgeable in the biology of astrophage and its life cycle, and Eva didn’t know if it was because he quite literally had nothing else to do or pay attention to, or if he was secretly a savant. Not an idiot savant, just a run of the mill genius who refused to live up to his potential without a heavy dose of coaxing. At one point she’d considered shaking a box of treats in his face if it got him to stop complaining about what he was asked to do. Especially when they both knew he was going to do it anyway.
Perhaps genius was too strong a compliment. Molecular biologist who wasn’t bogged down by the possible when faced with the impossible. Dr Grace wasn’t stubborn about admitting the sky bloomed red with an impossible alien species that by all accounts should not exist.
Christ, but she hated underachievers. Especially when she’d had to work three times harder as a woman in her line of work. A lifetime spent being treated as a second class citizen, simply because her genitals weren’t properly displayed. When would mankind finally admit that genitals on the outside of the body was clearly an evolutionary joke and admit what they all already knew?
Yet whenever she saw Grace bent over his paperwork, squinting into a microscope, or dear god, when his glasses hung off one ear and her fingers itched to fold them correctly – it was then that she realized perhaps her milquetoast lackey was actually quite dangerous.
Eva didn’t have a type. She couldn’t afford to have one. Not when pickings were slim and her libido made itself known. She didn’t indulge often, finding that men had a tendency to be clingy when it came to matters of the heart. They were always hurt if she didn’t want to cuddle post coitus. Tedious really. The point was to exhaust oneself to sleep, not stay up an extra hour with pillow talk.
But looking at Dr Grace she couldn’t help but wonder what he’d look like in the aftermath of a tussle in bed. His hair would still flop over his eyes. He’d most likely leave his glasses on, not to see her better, but because it wouldn’t occur to him to take them off. Perhaps she wouldn’t even mind falling asleep afterwards to the low timbre of his voice as he rambled on about core temperatures and reproduction cycles of the very thing that would destroy their world as they knew it.
Certainly more than one person had suggested a liaison might help her . . . relax.
Fair point. She had no problem admitting she was a bitch. So long as she was a bitch who was doing whatever it took to keep her species from global extinction. She would be the villain of the story if it meant an extra few million – god, please a billion or two – more people survived. She was no bleeding heart, but the thought of so much life lost terrified her. Even as a child the numbers lost in war had always stopped her in her tracks. How were others so casual about a hundred dead in an air strike? A thousand in a tsunami. A dozen in a boat lost at sea. She didn’t know how people could hear those numbers and continue on with their day as if the world hadn’t stopped to mourn for a microsecond. Screw saving the whales and pandas who refused to copulate. What the hell were they going to do to mitigate the worldwide famine scant decades away?
Still, an evening with Grace was a teasing idea and not one she was completely averse to. Not if it was with him. No one else would do, really.
She’d been on the verge of inviting him into her room one evening with that intention when she noticed something she’d never noticed before, a rarity, true: Dr Grace had a tendency to blush when she looked at him.
At first she’d just assumed he was naturally rosy cheeked. That he always stammered. That his gaze flicked over her shoulder, briefly met her eyes, flicked away and returned to hers again. Always coming back to look her in the eye before fleeing once more like an over excited house cat.
The good doctor had a crush and unfortunately it was the nail in the coffin that were her plans to relieve the tension they’d both taken on by seducing him into her bed. Certainly she was capable of being callous with another person’s emotions when it suited her. She didn’t blink twice about pushing her weight around to move her chess pieces where they suited her best. Not when she knew her intentions were pure, even if people loved reminding her that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Damn Americans and their fatalistic proverbs. As if it wasn’t bad enough that their Puritanical roots ruined their sex lives, it had to create a moral superiority complex that was unearned.
But she could not in good conscience take a man to bed who felt more for her than simple attraction. Not when he was a good man. Not when he was sweet and tender and liable to fall in love. Not when she was mostly ambivalent to his good looks and surprising if fumbling charm.
A shame. She had a feeling it would have been wonderful to lay beside him.