Chapter Text
"One more journey into space; one final shot at hope for humanity. Stay with us for more on the mission as the Project Hail Mary crew prepare to launch…"
Of all the places you expected to ever hear of Dr. Ryland Grace again, this is certainly not one of them.
Upon hearing his name out of a tinny speaker in a corner of the staffroom, you dart across to join the small group of teachers crowded around a laptop at the table, just fast enough not to seem as invested as you are, wrapping your scarf tighter around your shoulders at the sudden drop in temperature. On the screen, a panel of 'experts' sit in a newsroom, discussing the mission in depth, and your colleagues hang on to every word with rapt attention. You've been trying to block out the end of the world headlines for your own sanity, and you've never been particularly invested in space exploration — but then, it isn't every day that the man you'd once loved suddenly resurfaces as part of the crew on a suicide mission to save the planet.
You have no right to panic, not anymore… But when you'd accused Ryland of having his head too far up in the clouds to notice what was falling apart right in front of him, you had no way of knowing that would eventually have him sent off on a one-way ticket into the unknown. The media's coverage frames the mission as hopeful, though the more you think about it, the more devastating it truly sounds. The general bleakness of the present and the sense of impending doom sweeping the school and the wider world hardly help soften the blow.
And yet… You watch on, helpless and hopeless on the other side of that little screen as the spacecraft launches into the clear sky, leaving a plume of smoke and the distorted sound of a blast in its wake.
Your stomach turns at the mere sight of it. You hadn't noticed how tightly you'd been clenching your fists until you release them, leaving little crescent shaped marks where your nails dug into your palms. Granted, Ryland didn't owe you an explanation after what you'd done, but without any warning or trace at all? Hell, you thought you'd known each other better than that, but now the nerdy science teacher who feared rollercoasters and elevators is blasting off on an interstellar mission and you're none the wiser. He's just… gone, and now you'll never be able to ask him why, never even know whether he would live to see any of it, and the most you could hope for is to be fortunate enough to make peace with that fact eventually. He had to have done the same, to embark on such a mission at all…
Then again, that doesn't sound like the Ryland you know at all. There was so much you didn't know — and now, so much that you never would.
You think back to the day you'd first met Mr. Grace, as you knew him then. Cliché as it was, the memory remains as vivid as though it were yesterday.
You'd been hiding out in your classroom during lunch, attempting to get ahead on some marking while trying not to fall asleep on your sixth graders' homework, when a low yet gentle voice startled you out of your almost-nap, respectfully calling upon you from the doorway.
Your head snapped up to trace the source of the sound. There he stood at the threshold to your classroom, bright blue eyes fixed directly on you, awkwardly charming with his windblown blonde hair, glasses hanging haphazardly off his somewhat crumpled button-down, layered up in a tweed blazer. He greeted you with a soft smile, almost hesitant to enter the room until you invited him in.
You hadn't known a great deal much about him then, aside from casual staffroom gossip about the disgraced academic who'd joined the Grover Cleveland Middle faculty a few years before you, fondly known as every student's favourite teacher and more than a few of the teachers' not-so-secret crush. But you'd been ships in the night, barely crossing paths outside of polite passing nods in the staffroom; what business did the English department ever have with Science, really?
"Mr. Grace," you acknowledged with some surprise, placing your pink pen down on the desk, "Sorry, I'm, uh - feeling the effects of the coffee machine's latest breakdown. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Ryland finally stepped into the room and approached your desk with an awkward laugh, offering a well-worn copy of The Giver, one you recognised immediately. "Rekha left this in my classroom before lunch. Figured it'd be wiser to bring it to you than try tracking her down," he explained sincerely, as you took the book and placed it carefully on your desk.
"That's kind of you," you smiled up at him, "Thank you, I'll make sure she gets it back."
"Great!" He smiled, moving to leave the room. "Oh, one more thing," he turned on his heel, fixing those piercing blue eyes on you again, pausing a second too long to seem like he hadn't been running this exact scenario in his head twenty times before entering the room, "How do you like your coffee?"
You looked up at him, puzzled. "What?"
"I have a secret stash. Happy to share, though; just don't tell anyone," he grinned. There was something oddly endearing about the way he offered; casual, playful, trying to play it off as an offhand comment.
Stifling a laugh, you told him your coffee order, and he tiptoed out of the room with a finger on his lips. What an absolute dork, you smiled to yourself as you watched him go.
Students had already begun to filter into your classroom by the time Ryland returned, with your promised cup of coffee in hand.
"Thank you so much," you said sincerely as he placed it on the coaster on your desk, "You really didn't have to do that!"
"I wanted to," he shrugged, "Post-lunch classes, you need all the caffeine you can get. Good luck, they've been…especially distracted today."
Rekha and Abby sauntered into the room just then, took one glance at the pair of you at the desk, and began whispering and giggling between themselves. To his credit, Ryland took that as a suitable cue to bid you all a good afternoon and stride out of the room, only stopping in the doorway to shoot you a wink over his shoulder.
And as much as you pretended not to be flustered by it… his gesture did not go unnoticed by your students, and you were about to find out exactly what he meant by especially distracted — though somehow, you weren't sure it was just the students he referred to.
From the frequency of its breakdowns, you'd begun to wonder if Cupid had misfired an arrow at the coffee machine instead of the exhausted teachers that hovered by it.
One fine day a few weeks after that first contact, you entered the staffroom to find Ryland frowning at the machine, brows furrowed in concentration and a Twizzler hanging out the side of his mouth like a less-stylised movie detective's cigarette, as he poked and prodded at buttons with more optimism than you could hope for on a Monday morning.
"Again?" you asked with a sigh.
"Again," he confirmed, turning to face you and leaning on the counter behind him in defeat, awkwardly shoving the Twizzler into his pocket. He looked a little worse for wear today, his eyes devoid of their usual glimmer, his hair scruffier than most days, and his glasses hanging precariously off one ear until he set them right… Still gorgeous, though. Always that. (Maybe those arrows weren't quite as misfired as you'd initially assumed.)
"Well… it's a good thing I came prepared," you grinned, reaching into your tote bag and proffering two sticks of instant coffee, "I owe you one, anyway."
"You're a lifesaver!" he said with relief, dutifully setting about the task of retrieving a pair of clean coffee mugs from the shelf above. You tipped the instant coffee into the mugs; in easy, wordless understanding, he stepped around you to pour hot water over the coffee, and you grabbed a spoon to stir it together before handing him one of the mugs, all while trying your level best not to read too deeply into the casual domesticity of it all.
Ryland sipped his coffee, glancing at you over the rim of the cup, glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. Truth be told, you were never one to be immediately floored by a pair of pretty blue eyes fixing upon you like there was nothing else he'd rather see, but goddammit, his eyes were like a clear sky on a summer's day and you'd happily let your heart soar in them.
"That's good coffee," he remarked with an appreciative hum, "Now we're even!"
So maybe Cupid was hiding in a broken coffee machine this whole time. You weren't denying it, and evidently neither was he; his smile now was miles away from the worry written all over his face just a few minutes prior, and the caffeine didn't warrant any of the blame or the credit.
"Just what the doctor ordered?" you teased, trying to shake off your own spiral with a throwaway joke, but it quickly went sideways when Ryland coughed, almost choking on a sip of coffee, looking like he'd seen a ghost.
"Sorry, I, uh—" he stumbled over the words, clearing his throat, "I should go… Thanks for this!"
You quirked a questioning brow at him as he awkwardly turned to leave, "Are you okay?"
He turned to face you again, shoulders slumped, somehow even more weary than he had been when you first walked in. "How did you know about that?"
"What, your secret past life, Dr. Grace? Well, we share a group of very gossipy sixth graders who are, for some strange reason, quite fascinated by you," you explained, keeping your tone light and breezy. You hadn't meant any harm, just curiosity.
"Figured I could only keep that quiet for so long…" he sighed, dragging his free hand through his hair, "Do me a favour and don't use the honorific, please?"
You narrowed your eyes, but relented, not wanting to prod any further, "Alright. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable—"
"No, it's fine, just… I'd rather not encourage any of that formal hierarchical stuff. I came here to—" he stopped abruptly, as if not wanting to say too much, "Don't make it a thing, y'know?"
"That's fair," you tried to reassure him with a smile, "Force of habit, I guess, but don't worry, I won't say anything out of line."
Ryland hesitated, glancing back at you for a second — not the awkward look he'd fixed you with before, but something softer instead, as though that one short exchange had earned you some level of trust. "Thank you. And I mean that," he said sincerely, raising his cup to you before striding out of the room.
From then on, it became a ritual for you and Ryland to seek each other out every time the communal coffee machine broke down — and more often than not, it wasn't an accident. You'd both leap at the excuse to take your breaks together, retreating to either of your classrooms instead… much to the amusement of your fellow faculty, who'd wasted no time turning your flirtations into the latest subject of staffroom gossip.
Soon enough, your workdays began to consist of stealing spare seconds in the staffroom, sneaking glances when no-one was looking, and if anyone asked, you'd find another excuse for driving the five-minute detour on your commute that saved him from having to cycle the same route to school… The more time you spent together, the easier it was to let both your painstakingly-built guards down, and the more he began to trust you, the more you'd started to adore him.
The most surprising part of it, though, was the laughter. Ryland had been notoriously quiet until then — your colleagues all had their theories, was he shy or awkward or aloof or just scared after being ridiculed for apparently saying too much? You didn't push for details if he wasn't ready to share them, but he'd warmed up to you enough to begin an endless laughter war riddled with terrible jokes and deliberate teasing, much to the amusement of anyone fortunate enough to witness it.
Once you discovered how easy it was to break him into a giggle fit, you missed no opportunity to do exactly that — and when you realised his gaze immediately sought you out when you were near, he was done for. Even then, you remembered noticing how sweet his laugh was: just a pure, bashful kind of joy that lit up his whole demeanour, and exuded even more warmth… Whether it involved you making faces at him through the window of his classroom when he should've been teaching, or countering his nerdy science puns with equally intellectual literary jokes, his laugh was permanently imprinted in your memory.
That rose-tinted image in your mind shatters when the realisation barrels into you, a hurricane of a reality check that destroys everything in its path: you would likely never hear his laugh again.