Chapter Text
To Carl, watching Ryland Grace over the last year had been like watching a slow-motion car crash.
As a guard, Carl’s job was to watch people, to read their body language, and to know when they were about to break. He had watched Grace run himself ragged, drinking endless cups of terrible coffee, his hands shaking as he held pipettes, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with dark, heavy exhaustion. Grace had worked himself past the point of sanity under Eva Stratt’s thumb, and Carl had hated every second of having to stand at the door and facilitate it. Providing the man with the occasional packet of candy, insisting he slept and making sure the man ate, was the very least he could do to keep his friend going.
But nothing compared to the quiet, devastating horror of the hospital wing after the amnesia drug was administered. The drug was doing its work, eating away at Grace's mind, burning away every memory of his students, his life, the lab, and even Carl himself. Grace lay completely unresponsive, his coma already having been induced.
Carl sat in the metal chair beside the bed. The room was deathly quiet, save for the soft beep of a heart monitor.
Gently, Carl reached out and took his friend's limp hand. The skin of Grace's knuckles was scraped raw, and his fingernails were caked with dark dirt and crushed green blades of grass, ugly remnants of the desperate, frantic struggle on the lawn outside when Grace had tried to run. Carl had been one of the guards who had to hold him down. He could still feel the phantom wrenching of Grace’s shoulders, still hear the raw, terrifying screams of his friend begging them to let him go before the needle found his neck.
Carl reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out a small, heavy-duty pocket knife, flipping out the file. With a tenderness that felt entirely foreign in a military bunker, he began to clean the dirt and grass from under Grace's fingernails.
He worked slowly, scraping away the soil, using a damp paper towel to wipe the skin clean. He didn't want Grace waking up in the cold dark of space with the dirt of the Earth he’d fought so hard to stay on, still stuck under his nails.
"I'm sorry, man," Carl whispered, his voice thick as he wiped Grace's hand clean. "I'm so sorry."
Later, after the medical team wheeled Grace toward the integration chambers, Carl went to his friend's quarters. The small room smelled like stale coffee and old paper. With trembling hands, Carl began picking out the man's clothes from the small storage closets in the room. He folded them carefully, smoothing out the fabric with his palms, trying to press some semblance of order into the chaos. He placed them inside a plastic storage bag, hooked up the nozzle of the vacuum sealer, and watched the air hiss out, flattening the clothes into a hard, lifeless block, ready to be packed onto the ship
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The facility was a madhouse of final checklists, shouting technicians, and heavy boots echoing on concrete. But the science wing was entirely dead.
Twelve hours before the engines of humanity's last hope were set to ignite, Carl pushed open the door to Grace's abandoned classroom. The heat had already been turned off to conserve power, and the air was freezing.
Carl stood in the center of the dark room. On the chalkboard, Grace's handwriting was still there, diagrams of cells, funny little drawings of space helmets, and bold letters spelling out the week's assignments. Along the back wall hung the construction paper cutouts and crayon drawings collected from Grace’s middle school students.
Carl walked over to the wall. He began peeling the tape off the concrete, careful not to tear the paper. He stacked the messy, colorful drawings of rocket ships and smiling solar systems.
He moved to the desk, gathering the little things Grace had left behind, the things the transport team had deemed useless weight. A painted cardboard fox mask, its elastic band stretched out. A couple of dusty plush beanbags. The man's favorite coffee mug. Pictures of his old life.
Carl packed them all gently into a small plastic crate. These weren't mission-critical supplies, but to Carl, they were the only proof left that Ryland Grace was a teacher who loved his kids, not just a pawn in Stratt's global chess game. He added them to the pile of supplies still to be packed into the ship.
When the countdown eventually reached zero, Carl didn't watch it on a screen. He stood outside on the cold tarmac, his hands shoved deep into his pockets against the biting wind.
The earth shook as the astrophage powered rocket blasted into the atmosphere.
A blinding, artificial sun tore through the grey horizon, brighter than their actual sun at this point, casting long, stark shadows across the concrete. The sheer, physical roar of the Astrophage engines hit Carl’s chest like a solid fist, a vibration so deep it rattled his teeth. He watched the tiny, silver needle of the Hail Mary rise on a pillar of absolute fire, climbing higher and faster until it punched through the clouds and vanished into the black.
Up there, floating in the dark, his friend would wake up with no memory of who he was or the man who had just cleaned the dirt from his hands. Carl turned around and walked back into the silent bunker. He went straight to his tiny, windowless guard quarters. He sat on the edge of his cot handling a small knitted beanbag.
For twenty-four hours, Carl didn't move. He didn't check in for his shift. He didn't monitor the security feeds. He ignored the static chirping of his radio and the automated alerts flashing on his console. He just sat in the dim light, staring at the wall.
He heard various, authoritative boots click past his door several times over the next day. Now that the Hail Mary was launched, there wasnt much to do other than pack everything up, and wait. Eva herself was still a whirlwind, bark-ordering logistics into a satellite phone, her voice hoarse and strained as she fought to finish everything she could before she was stripped of her powers and thrown into a cell.
Despite probably needing his help, the woman didn't knock. She didn't come looking for him once or more likely have someone else come get him. Maybe she knew she had pushed Carl’s loyalty to the absolute limit. Or maybe, for once in her life, she was simply too ashamed to look a good man in the eye.
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