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Grace sometimes reflected that he and Mark had only had one real argument throughout their friendship so far. He argued with Rocky a lot, if you considered Rocky calling Grace stupid every five minutes arguing. Most of the time, it wasn’t serious, just the bickering of two people who had spent extended periods of time trapped in a small space together; really, it was miraculous they hadn’t argued more. That was the whole point of the comas on the way to Tau Ceti, after all; Stratt wanted to make sure her suicide squad didn’t get into any fatal confrontations before they did their job.
He was lucky, he supposed, that he and Mark had only had one sort-of argument on their way back from Mars. Even that hadn’t been an argument, so much as a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding; it had been resolved reasonably quickly, considering their respective traumas. After that, they’d gotten along better than Grace had ever gotten along with anyone on Earth, to his recollection. It helped that neither of them were particularly argumentative people; Mark had told him he’d been selected for the Ares mission in part because of his psychological profile. He’s optimistic, generally slow to anger (unless Eva Stratt and/or Grace’s autonomy was involved, in which case he made the Hulk look like a Buddhist monk), and fiercely loyal to his friends. He’d been firmly in Grace’s corner almost from the moment he met him, and he was completely averse to doing anything to upset him.
It looked like their almost spotless record of non-confrontation is about to come to an end; Grace was sure that him disappearing was going to see to that. He knew with certainty that Mark was going to go insane, to say nothing of the hell Rocky was going to rain down on him when they found him.
He hadn’t done it on purpose. He’d been out of the NASA labs for once; they’d run out of coffee, and Grace was lured away from his research by the promise of glorious, life-sustaining caffeine. Rocky and Mark had both been somewhere else, probably with the Ares crew, presumably coming up with ways to make Stratt’s life difficult without violating Grace’s new “no committing federal crimes, dear God, I will not be posting bail for you lunatics” rule. Mindy was somewhere, running the world with an iron fist, Grace assumed. So, he’d ventured out alone. NASA weren’t huge fans of him roaming the streets without any security, but a) he was a grown man who could do what he wanted, and b) the siren call of coffee was worth any level of risk. He shoved a beanie low over his head in a vague attempt at disguise, and left on his caffeine pilgrimage.
Things were fine, all the way to the coffee shop, and he ordered without anyone realising he was that guy who almost died a bunch of times in space. He’d turned to leave, and that was when it happened. A woman had pushed the door open, bumped him slightly as she did so, and she turned and gave him a laughing apology. He took in her long brown hair, her sparkling eyes, the slight accent; and then, all at once, he wasn’t there anymore.
**
“So,” Ilyukhina slid into the chair across from him in the lab, eyes bright and mischievous, “come here often?”
Grace laughed. “I bet that’s the line you use with all the girls.”
She winked at him, exaggerated. “Only the pretty ones”
He laughed again, batting her hand away from where she’d reached out to ruffle his hair. “Do you need something?”
“Do I have to need something to come and see my favourite astrophage expert?” She asked, eyes wide in a poor imitation of innocence.
Grace rolled his eyes. “I’m your only astrophage expert, Ily.”
She blew a raspberry at him. “Pah, you’re no fun, Grace. Maybe I just wanted to talk.”
“That doesn’t sound likely,” he says, eyebrow raised
Maybe I’m just feeling sentimental,” she teased. “Only a few months to go until launch; I won’t be able to bother you like this for much longer.”
Grace sobers instantly. He hates that the best case scenario for all of them still involved the crew, the bravest people he’s ever met, dying in space, far away from home.
“Don’t make that face,” Ilyukhina purses her lips, pokes him in the cheek with a finger until his face relaxes. “I chose to go on suicide mission, you know this. I can make jokes whenever I want.”
Grace can’t bring himself to smile. He likes all the crew (even if he’d prefer De Bois and Shapiro stop talking so explicitly about their sex life while he was in the room. Seriously, he can’t unhear that), and he knows from his years of teaching that he isn’t meant to have favourites. But if he did, Ilyukhina would be his. He wishes they’d met before all this, before the world was ending and the only way to save it involved her dying. He thinks they would have been friends.
“Aren’t you scared?” He asks, unable to stop himself. He can’t even imagine how scared he’d be in her place.
She shrugs. “A little,” she confesses. “But if I don’t do this, I die anyway. At least this way, if it works, I will die doing the right thing. That’s important, to me.”
“But you’ll still be-” Grace’s voice breaks, and he has to try again. “You’ll still be gone.”
“I think people live on in memories,” she tells him, squeezing his hand. “So, I won’t ever be gone, not really. If I save the world, that is. If not, you have different set of problems.”
He laughs, watery. “Yeah, that’s true. I guess you’ll just have to save the world then.”
She shrugs. “Will be easy,” she smiles, “then, when I save the world, you will remember me. Then, I live on- yes?”
He shakes his head, smiling through his tears. “Yeah, sounds like a plan. I’ll remember you, Ily. Promise.”
He holds out his pinky, like he’d seen his kids do a thousand times before. She grins, and links her pinky with his, like an oath as serious as one a child would make with their best friend. Simple, sincere, and unbreakable.
“Now,” Ilyukina says, grinning again, “I have a couple of hours free. Want to go annoy Carl for a while?”
Grace shakes his head, smiling. “Why not?” The work can wait, for a few hours. He had limited time with Ilyukhna, but he had the rest of his life for the everything else.
He lets her lead him away. “So,” she tells him, linking her arm with his, “I thought of something we could do to his office.”
**
Grace comes back to himself all at once. His precious coffee falls from his limp fingers, spills all over the floor and soaks in to his shoes, hot enough to burn. He barely feels it. The woman, the one who triggered the first new memory he’s had in months, who had looked, for a split second, so much like Ilyukhina it nearly knocked him over, is looking at him with clear concern. He sees her lips move, presumably asking if he’s alright, but he can’t hear her over the roaring in his ears, blood pounding in his head.
He doesn’t think. He wrenches the door open, and flies out of the building like it’s on fire. Once he’s on the street, Grace does what he does best. He runs.
**
What do you mean, he’s missing?”
Mindy did not want to be the one breaking the news the Mark and Rocky that Grace was MIA. She might be feared by world leaders and respected by Earths new alien friends. She might even scare the bejeebus out of Mark Watney, a fact she’s incredibly proud of most days. But Mark has one sure-fire trigger, one detonation button on his usually even temper, and it’s Ryland Grace. Mark about has a conniption every time Grace so much as sniffles- any hint of actual harm is going to cause an eruption that’s going to make Mount Vesuvius look like a fucking science fair project.
Rocky, meanwhile has made it perfectly clear from the very first communication with NASA that he takes Grace’s health and wellbeing incredibly seriously, as if he’s really trying to drive the point home that he, Rocky, will look after Grace the way the human race never bothered to. He’s the kind of friend Grace needs, in Mindy’s opinion; the kind who threatens intergalactic war at even the vaguest hint of a situation that could cause Grace distress. Despite the headaches this usually causes her, Mindy is usually on board with the way Rocky is prepared to violently defend Grace’s interests. Usually, but not today.
Today, the explosion that was going to follow her telling the founding members of the Ryland-Grace-Protection-League that Grace had gone missing on their watch was liable to level a city block.
“Lost Grace, question?” Rocky demands, although it’s less a question than a declaration of complete and utter disbelief that he must constantly be subjected to other people’s idiocy. “How lose a person?!”
“I’m with Rocky,” Mark says, dangerously calm in a way that set Mindy’s teeth on edge. “You’ve lost the most famous person to ever walk the Earth. You’ve lost him? How the fuck has this happened?
Mindy can’t even argue with them about it, because they’re right, and she’s been asking the same question since she’d been informed Grace had walked out of the lab and hadn’t returned. Given that they usually had to pry Grace away from his test tubes at the end of the day, the alarm had gone up immediately. She’d sent her entire security team out looking, and they couldn’t find hide nor hair of him; she had them checking security cameras, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
She’d even brought Stratt in, although she had absolutely no intention of telling Mark or Rocky this unless she had to; she was desperate, not suicidal. She’d relayed what little information she had, half frantic, half accusing- Stratt was at the top of the list of people who would kidnap Ryland Grace, given her existing track record of doing just that. But instead, she’d gone silent on the other end of the phone, in a way that spoke to genuine concern; Mindy had been reasonably sure that if she really had Grace, she would have come out and said it. Abductions were her style, but this didn't feel like her.
“Let me see what I can do,” she’d said eventually, voice slightly less level than usual, then she’d hung up the phone before Mindy could do more than make a thankful kind of croak at her.
So that was a bust. And now, she had to tell Mark and Rocky that so far, they had nothing; you can understand why she hadn’t wanted to give them that information. She had a feeling that they were going to be in a shoot-the-messenger kind of mood.
“I don’t know what happened,” she interrupted the continuous diatribe from the two homicidal astronauts in front of her. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Do you have any idea where he might have gone? Anything he had to do?”
“Nothing,” Mark snarled. “Nothing that he wouldn’t have told us about. He just said he had to work.”
She shakes her head. “We can see him on the cameras leaving the building, and he looks happy enough. Something must have happened, wherever he was going.”
“Has anyone tried calling him?” Mark snapped, while Mindy did her level best to ignore the tone, given the situation they found themselves in.
“Yes,” she said, with what she considered incredible understanding and patience, “we’ve tried calling him. He left his phone in the lab; you know how he feels about his cell. He doesn’t use it unless he absolutely has to.”
“Rocky superglue phone to Grace hand when he comes back,” Rocky said darkly; Mindy doesn’t doubt it for a second.
One of the lab techs, who had been standing very still in a corner of the room until now, presumably to avoid the worst of the damage from Hurricane Astronaut, pipes up. “The coffee.”
All three heads whip round to face them. “What?” Mark demands.
The lab tech wilts, voice small. “Um. Dr Grace drinks a lot of coffee- when I got here this morning, there was no coffee, but all of Dr Grace’s things were here. Maybe… maybe he just went to get coffee?”
Mark looks ready to rip the poor guy’s head off, but Mindy is considering. Everyone who’s ever met Grace is well aware of his dependence on caffeine, to the point Stratt had his custom coffee order programmed into the Mary. If there’s one thing that could lure him away from the alure of science, it was coffee.
“Let’s get his bank records,” she tells one of her security team, and he immediately starts tapping away at a laptop. After a moment, he looks up at her and nods.
“He made a purchase at a coffee shop about ten minutes after he left the building.”
“Do they have cameras?”
“Let’s find out,” he says, looking back at the screen; another minute, another affirmative.
“Pull up the footage,” she orders, and they watch Grace on the cameras. They watch him order coffee, beanie pulled low, watch him smile at the barista. Then, they see him turn, and watch as a small bump from the woman opening the door sending him spiralling.
Mark, who had been vibrating with rage, deflates immediately. “Oh, fuck,” he said, horrified.
Mindy concurs. She’s never seen someone have a flashback before, but she knows without talking to any shrink that’s what she’s just watched. Something about the woman Grace had locked eyes with before his body went rigid and his face went still had set him off in a big way. She watches the way he comes back to himself, the way fight-or-flight makes him flee, coffee abandoned on the ground where it had slipped from his hand.
She should have known better than to even assume Grace would run for anything less than this. For all his trauma, he was the most balanced, the most dependable of all her astronauts; all the people she interacted with day to day, really. He wasn’t the type of person to disappear; at least of his own free will. Watching this footage, it’s clear that will had very little to do with it; this was instinct. Oh, Grace, she thinks sadly, looking at the paused video, his blank face on the screen.
“So,” Mark says, looking tense and heartbroken and terrified, “he remembered something, panicked, and ran?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Mindy says. “So now we have a traumatised, dissociating former amnesiac, and we have no idea where he is. He might not even know where he is.”
Mark puts his head in his hands. “This is a fucking nightmare.”
Mindy looks back at the screen. “Where are you, Grace,” she murmurs. “Where would you go?”
**
Grace didn’t even consciously know there was a memorial in this park. As far as he could remember, he’d never been told the location of any statues or landmarks dedicated to himself and the rest of the Hail Mary crew. He’d known there would be some; whatever else Stratt had lied about, she hadn’t lied about ensuring Grace was remembered as a hero. Mindy had tried to show him a few pictures that had made him feel sick to his stomach, and Mark had told him that there was a grave somewhere with his name on it, which made him feel even worse.
So, he’d known these things, but he hadn’t been aware he’d known the specifics. He must have, because when he finally stopped running, chest heaving, legs burning, he’d been in front of a memorial. It was in a park, although he wasn’t sure which park, exactly. The memorial is a simple one; white stone, almost like a monolith, with all three of their names carved into it. Yáo Li-Jie, Olesya Ilyukhina, Ryland Grace. The pain in his chest isn’t just from exertion anymore.
Ilyukhina. He stares at her name, and all he can think is, I didn’t keep my promise. He knows, intellectually, that the forgetting, the fact that the conversation had to be jarred loose from whatever box the amnesia drugs had locked it in, wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t asked for amnesia; he’d raised a hell of an objection to it, if his admittedly spotty memory served. He knew, deep down, that forgetting wasn’t something he’d done, so much as something that had been done to him.
Knowing this made absolutely no difference. Not when the newly-recovered conversation was still rattling around in his skull, reminding him that he’d promised to remember Ilyukina, to keep her alive through his memory. Not now he knew that he’d failed to do so, had broken his promise to one of the funniest, kindest, brightest people he’d ever met. She’d been his friend, and he’d let her down.
He should leave. If he doesn’t, everyone’s going to worry. Mark was going to lose it, if he got to the lab and Grace wasn’t there, to say nothing of how angry Rocky would be if they couldn’t find him. Instead, his legs fold under him without his permission, and he’s sitting on the ground, looking up at the monument like it holds the secrets to the universe.
Grace doesn’t know how long he sits there. His legs go numb, the sun moves across the sky, the noises of the other people in the park wash over him like water. People must have noticed him, wondered why someone was sitting, unmoving, beneath a memorial to the two astronauts who’d died trying to save them all, and the one coward who should have died but hadn’t. No one recognises him, with his beanie pulled low and the collar of his jacket turned up around his neck, so no one bothers him.
He probably would have been sitting there until the sun went down, if a voice hadn’t spoken from behind him.
“That doesn’t look comfortable.”
He looks up. Carl is standing in front of him, expressionless if you didn’t know him. Grace did know him, or, he used to. So, he can see the barely concealed concern in Carl’s eyes.
“How’d you find me?” He asks, not really caring about the answer.
“If you don’t think Stratt’s keeping tabs on you at all times, you’re dumber than you look. Although, you must already be pretty dumb to have pulled a stunt like this.”
Grace shrugs. “I was smart enough to be the science specialist you helped Stratt press gang into space,” he points out, merciless.
Carl’s expression flickers slightly. Grace can’t tell if it’s regret, or pity; he doesn’t know which would be worse.
“That’s true,” he allows. “But leaving without telling anyone where you were going wasn’t your smartest moment. There’s a lot of people who have been worried about you.”
Grace feels a twinge of guilt at that- not quite enough to cut through the numbness, but more than the complete emptiness he’s been feeling since the memory came back. That’s something, he supposes.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I guess that was pretty dumb. It wasn’t exactly a conscious choice.”
“Want to tell me what brought this on?”
Grace really, really doesn’t. Carl isn’t his friend; he’s partly responsible for the nightmares he still gets, semi-regularly. He let armed men pin him to the ground while he begged for his life, let a doctor jam a needle into his neck and take everything from him. He doesn’t want to tell him anything.
It comes out anyway. Because Carl knew Ilyukhina, had known her on the Vat just the same as Grace. He knew what her laugh sounded like, the way she could lift the mood of any room with her irreverent humour, the fact that she wasn’t scared of anything. The fact that she’d been so young, and so bright, and so willing to die as long as it meant doing the right thing, the heroic thing. Carl might be one of the only people on Earth who could even begin to understand the shining star that had been lost because of a technical issue, might understand the bone-deep river of grief that cuts through Grace whenever he thinks of her.
“I remembered something,” he says, eventually. “Something Ilyukhina said, before... She asked me to remember her.” He finally looks up at Carl, just in time to watch something like understanding flit across his face. “Obviously, things didn’t work out like that.”
“No,” Carl says quietly. “I guess they didn’t.” He looks conflicted for a moment, and then sits carefully next to Grace, evidently deciding the risk of Grace committing violence against him if he got any closer is low. Grace isn’t sure about that.
“When I woke up,” he tells Carl, not looking at him, “and I found… their bodies, I didn’t remember who they were. I only remembered their names when I found their suits and saw the mission crest. I got impressions of their personalities, when I had to put them in the airlock and send them into space, but that was it, for a while.”
Carl is dead silent. Grace doesn’t think he’s told anyone this before. He hasn’t even told Rocky, who really should have been the first one he told, since he was the only person who could possibly understand what it was like, to be alone in space with your crew dead around you. He’d told himself, when he’d been able to bring himself to think about it, that he didn’t want to burden Rocky with his own grief when he had so much of his own. He’s realising that was a lie.
“Later,” Grace continues, “I’d think about them, and I’d realise I was crying. And I didn’t remember why, but I knew I’d known them, and that I cared about them, and that they were gone. I was crying because I missed them, but I think it was because I let them down, too.”
“Listen,” Carl looks uncomfortable, “you didn’t let anyone down. It’s not your fault you didn’t remember them, and you completed the mission. You didn’t-”
“I promised her,” Grace said, looking down at his hands. “She only asked me for one thing, and I didn’t do it. I can hardly remember her at all.”
He feels Carl’s hand rest on his shoulder, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t deserve the comfort, but he accepts it anyway; the contact makes him feel less like he’s floating away from his body, back up in to space where he left his friends.
“She was so funny,” Carl says, low and serious. “I even saw her make Stratt laugh once, thought the apocalypse had come early. She loved apples, and hated pears, for some reason, and you made a stupid joke about fruit one morning at breakfast that made her laugh so hard juice went up her nose.”
Grace laughs, tears that hadn’t come all day finally welling up. “That sounds like me,” he admits. He thinks for a second. “The memory I got back, it was a few weeks before the launch. She asked if I wanted to go and annoy you, and said she had a plan for your office. Do you remember?”
Carl laughs loud. “I remember, alright. You both annoyed me all the time, like it was your goddamn job. That day, I get back to my desk, and you’d both completely covered it with post-it notes. Hundreds of them. Stratt walked in half-way through me removing them, I thought she was going to bust a blood vessel. I don’t think Ilyukhina stopped laughing for days.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. He takes out a folded piece of paper, opens it, and hands it to Grace. And it’s a picture of him. Him and Ilyukhina; he’s wearing a lab coat over a shirt with a cat on it, and she’s draped over his shoulders, grinning at the camera while he looks up at her, mouth twisted like he’s trying to be annoyed and failing miserably. He can see the fondness in his own eyes, and for probably the first time since he’d woken up as a blank canvas, he thinks hey, I know you. That’s the way he looks at Rocky, at Mark, at Mindy. He holds the picture in his hands like it’s something delicate, precious. He thinks about what it means, to miss someone so much when you don’t remember them, to have loved them so much it’s still on your face after they’re gone, when you look at the people you love now.
Grace looks at Carl. “Thank you,” he says, quietly. Carl might have helped take the memories from him; but he’d given some of them back today. He thought that should count for something.
Carl looks pained. “Don’t thank me. Seriously, don’t. The least I can do is give you a story and a photo. It was nothing.”
Grace considers that. “Maybe,” he allows. “But I have more of her to remember now. That’s not nothing.”
They both sit with that for a while. Eventually, Carl stands, wincing as he does; it’s easy for Grace to forget, sometimes, that everyone he’d known before had gotten old, while he’d been in a coma, virtually unchanged, while his friends laid dead around him. Even though he must be sore, Carl reaches out a hand.
“Come on,” he tells Grace, “I’ll give you a ride home.”
Grace looks up at him, and for a moment, he can almost believe nothing has changed at all. He takes the offered hand, pulls himself up. He sighs- Mark and Rocky are going to be so mad. He doesn’t know what time it is, but it’s dusk now, and it was morning when he left NASA; that’s hours they’ve had to worry and stew and get angry. He doesn’t know how he’d going to explain that even after all these years, his instincts will always tell him to flee, then freeze. If Carl hadn’t found him, he probably would have been sitting there until dew sat on the grass the next day.
“Sure,” he says, exhausted. Time to face the music.
**
Carl comes around to open the door for him when they get back to Mark’s house. Grace still feels limp, like a balloon with all the air let out; he doesn’t have it in him to open the door, even though he knows he has to face this at some point. Carl helps him out of the car, carefully, with a level of care Grace wouldn’t have thought he was capable of a day ago. He puts an arm around Grace’s shoulders, and the weight goes a little way towards grounding him; he’s still numb, can’t feel his fingers where they’re still clutched around the picture of him and Ilyukhina.
Mark is stood in the doorway, face blank, as Carl leads him up the front lawn. They come to a stop in front of Mark, who is completely silent for several moments; Grace wonders if this is going to be the thing that finally makes him break his pattern of unconditional love and trust. He wouldn’t blame him, if that was the case.
Grace has underestimated Mark Watney’s capacity for empathy, for understanding. Mark grabs him by the shoulders, drags him in to his arms with a huge, shuddering sigh that Grace feels more than sees. He’s squeezing so hard that Grace feels a little like he’s suffocating.
“Oh, thank god,” Mark says into his hair, and Grace realises he’s crying. It’s this, Mark Watney in tears because Grace went AWOL, that opens the floodgates. His knees buckle, and he breaks into tears, sucking in air like he’s been holding his breath all day.
“S-sorry,” he gasps, hardly able to force the words out. “I’m s-so sorry, I couldn’t, I’m-” He realises he’s hyperventilating, can’t stop, and Mark is hushing him, rocking him back and forth like he’s a baby, and Grace doesn’t deserve it, but he couldn’t pull away for the life of him.
Rocky rolls up, making awful, mournful sounds as he presses himself as hard as he can against Grace’s legs. Grace drops a hand down to touch the xenonite, thinking, for the hundred millionth time, that he would give anything, anything to be able to touch his best friend for real.
“It’s okay,” Mark is saying, “you’re fine, it’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean-” Grace sobs.
“We know,” Mark tells him, pulling back slightly to look at his face. “We saw what happened in the coffee shop. Are you alright?”
Grace nods shakily, calming down a little. “I’m okay, I promise. I just… I remembered something, and I ran. I’m sorry.”
“Grace not be sorry,” Rocky says, serious. “Worry worry worry about Grace, but not angry. Understand.”
Grace sniffs. “Thanks Rock. I’m still sorry I worried you.”
“Don’t be,” Mark says firmly. “Considering all the bullshit that’s happened to you, the fact this has only happened once is a minor miracle.”
Grace laughs a little at that. “Once so far,” he points out.
“Once,” Mark says seriously, “because I’m putting a tracking chip in every single pair of shoes you own. You can freak out whenever you need, but I came very, very close to setting NASA on fire today. I think I owe the lab techs an apology, actually.”
“Grace forget phone,” Rocky says firmly, “so tracker is solution. No lose Grace again.”
Mark is looking over Grace’s shoulder. At Carl, he realises. He’s got a look on his face like he knows he should be grateful, but isn’t about to feel anything past the bone-deep hatred he has for anyone involved in the Petrova Task Force. He’s still occasionally hostile with Dimitri, who only found out about the kidnapping after the fact, and Grace has known him to be less than civil with Dr Lokkan, who wasn’t even involved. As far as he knows, Mark hasn’t been in the vicinity of anyone actually involved in his unwilling induction to the astronaut hall of fame since the night of the party, where he had gleefully beaten up several of those involved people. Grace is really hoping he’s not gearing up for round two.
Mark struggles for a moment, clearly torn between staying as close to Grace as humanly possible and murdering Carl in full view of all their neighbours. He points at Carl. “You’re not off the hook,” he tells him, snappish, “but you have a stay of execution, for now.”
Carl nods. “I’ll take that.”
Grace doesn’t want to say anything. He still sort of feels like his organs have been scooped out, and now he’s just empty. He doesn’t want to say a word until he starts feeling things right again. But he has to. Because Carl isn’t his friend, maybe wasn’t ever his friend, maybe pretended to be one to stay close enough to Grace to keep him in line, to be in position to betray him when necessary. But he’d come for him today, and he’d understood, and brought him home, with no expectations of gratitude or forgiveness. And Grace thinks about the picture in his hand, a picture of him, faded with age, with fold marks well worn in to the paper, like it had been opened and closed again over and over, kept in the wallet of a man who didn’t think he was ever going to see him again.
Grace meets his eyes. “If you call me,” he tells Carl, who is looking back at him in shock, “I’ll answer. I might not say much. But I’ll answer.”
Mark’s arms tighten slightly; someone’s not happy about the idea. Grace doesn’t want to take it back though. He doesn’t think he’s going to be best buds with Carl, in the same way he’s not going to be having tea with Stratt just because she’s mentoring Mindy in How To Run The World 101. But he doesn’t think someone who didn’t feel bad about their choices would keep a photo of the person they betrayed in their wallet for decades. And honestly, now that he’s got some memories back, he finds himself wanting more. And Carl has plenty of them. He’d do worse than take a call if it meant more of Ilyukhina, more of anything, coming back to him.
Carl’s voice is gruff. “I’ll call,” he promises, before turning away. Grace stands there, still with Mark’s arm around his shoulder, and watches until he drives away.
Grace looks at Mark. He doesn’t want to have to explain himself; luckily, it doesn’t look like he’s going to have to. For someone who’s running an ongoing campaign against Carl’s boss, he’s clearly not going to argue with Grace about his decision; he’s been encouraging Grace to exercise his autonomy at every turn, and he’s unwilling to stop now, even though he evidently thinks the decision is stupid.
“Come on,” he says quietly, and leads Grace inside, Rocky as close to them as he can get without tripping them both. Mark settles Grace on the couch, excuses himself to the kitchen. Grace can hear him on the phone; presumably telling Mindy that her lost astronaut has been found all over again, and that she can call off whatever paramilitary force she’s probably assembled to scour the city for any trace of him. For a while, it’s Grace and Rocky, just like it was for all those years on the Mary. He realises he’s missed him; now that he thinks about it, today has been the longest they’ve ever spent apart since they separated at Tau Ceti. Even on Erid, when he was starving, Rocky had only really left when he absolutely had to, even when Grace had been urging him to go and enjoy being back on his planet, with his family. If he’d had his way, he wouldn’t have left Grace for a second.
“Grace… Grace remember something, question?”
“Yeah, bud,” he closes his eyes. “It was a new one. Hadn’t had one of those for a while.”
“What memory, question? Sad sad sad?”
Grace thinks about that. “It was happy, actually. It was the fact I hadn’t remembered that made me sad sad sad.”
“Grace tell Rocky, question?” He sounds hesitant, and Grace feels awful, like he’s been keeping something from his best friend. In a way, he has; he just didn’t realise he was doing it.
“It was about my crew,” he starts slowly. “Do you remember, I told you about our engineer- Ilyukhina?”
“Rocky remember,” Rocky replies.
“Well, the memory was about her. We were friends; before they decided to send me on the mission, she asked me for something. She… she asked me to remember her. And I couldn’t- didn’t. That’s what made me run.”
Rocky’s quiet for a moment. He has his own baggage there, with feeling like he let down his own crewmates, like it’s his fault he couldn’t save them. Grace didn’t want to make that worse; but then, he’s always told his kids, a problem shared is a problem halved. And there’s nothing Rocky’s better at than solving problems.
“Want to tell Rocky about her, question?”
Grace realises suddenly, that he really, really does. It would, in fact, be doing Ilyukhina a disservice if he didn’t; she wanted to be remembered, to live on through memory. What better way to do that, than tell Rocky about her, Rocky, who’s entire species has an eidetic memory, who has never forgotten anything Grace has ever told him.
“She was so great, Rock. So smart, so funny. She would have loved you.” Grace laughs, because it’s true. Ilyukhina and Rocky would have gotten along like a house on fire, and he never would have had a single moments peace for the rest of his life. They would have left a trail of chaos and miraculous feats of engineering in their wake, and the thought of it makes Grace ache.
He keeps talking, and with every word, he feels the memory of her get a little stronger, the edges a little less faded than before. Mark is standing in the doorway, watching Grace and Rocky with a smile in his eyes, listening intently. Ilyukhina would have liked him too, Grace knows, would have teased him relentlessly and bantered back and forth with him, the way Mark does with his crew.
Grace passes Ilyukhina’s memory on to his friends, who, in a better world, would have been her friends too, and with every moment, he feels less like he’s letting her down. He’s keeping his promise, and she was right; it feels just like she’s there with him.