Work Text:
Ryland had three hours to decide whether he wanted to die, and he made up his mind. He was ready to die. He was ready like never before. That day, when he had asked Stratt to spare him a few Astrophage, when he had become the first human to make a space baby, when he had officially joined project Hail Mary — he had taken responsibility. Now it was his personal responsibility to save the world. His. Nobody else. Nobody else was going to do that. Well, technically, there were other volunteers, but it was Ryland who knew every single piece of information on the Astrophage, and if there was anyone able to defeat these little bastards, it was him. He had discovered how to make more Astrophage, maybe he would find a way to destroy them once and for all.
He was heading to Stratt’s office, ready to announce his decision. Yet, there was one condition she had to meet if she wanted to sentence him to death. Ryland had a legacy to pass to younger generations, and he expected Stratt to fulfill his wish. She would probably refuse, arguing she had no time for nonsense. But Ryland did not give a damn about her tight schedule. This time, Stratt had to hold back her authoritarian tendencies and listen to Ryland’s demands.
“Stratt,” he opened the door and stepped into the office, his voice way too loud. “I’m going to Tau Ceti.”
“Excellent,” she answered coldly. “I would force you to go anyway if you resisted.”
“Good to know.”
“Sit, we have to talk.”
“Yes, we have,” he agreed, taking the seat next to her. “I will go, but there’s a condition.”
“A condition, you say,” Stratt gave him one of her stern looks. “Well, maybe I’ll find some time to fulfill your wishes, but even if not, you’re going anyway.”
“No. My wish has to be fulfilled. Before I leave. Otherwise I stay on Earth.”
“You are not the one to give orders here, Grace.”
“But I’m the one who will die to save humanity! Stratt, I know you have no heart, no soul and no mercy, but at least try to pretend to show some empathy and listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
Ryland pushed a giant pile of papers aside and looked straight in her eyes.
“Fine,” he sighed. “For the last two years, I’d been writing a fanfic.”
“A gay one?”
“Yes, gay, don’t interrupt. It’s almost done. It lacks beta reading. I will not post it without beta.”
“What a pity you’ll never publish it then. What a terrible loss.”
“You will beta read it and post it on ao3. And write a sequel.”
“What?”
“Let me repeat. You will beta read my fic. You will post my fic on ao3. You will write a sequel. It must be you and nobody else.”
“You’ve gone crazy, Grace. I’m not going to write nor beta read your gay fantasies.”
“Then I’m not going.”
“You are going.”
“I’ll sabotage the mission!”
“Wow,” Stratt rolled her eyes, losing patience, “you’ll sabotage the only hope we have to save our civilisation just because I don’t have time to beta read your fanfic. What a wonderful plan.”
Ryland leaned in. He had one more trick up in his sleeve.
“If you beta read my fic,” he said slowly, “I will publicly announce that thanks to your outstanding management skills, humanity has a chance to survive a global catastrophe, and you should definitely stay in charge instead of ending in jail. I will write an open letter to every politician, asking them to always listen to you and do as you wish. And they will respect this last wish of a hero who sacrificed himself to the greatest purpose in the human history. So… Do we have a deal now?”
Stratt was taken aback, shocked with Grace’s audacity. She hold her breath for a moment.
“Will you…” she started hesitantly, “really do this?”
“I will, just beta read my fic before I leave so I’m sure it’s done. And later, in your free time, write a nice sequel. I will trust you with this part.”
“Where did you learn to be such a manipulative jerk, Grace?”
“I had a good role model.”
“Fine,” Stratt finally gave up. “I’ll beta read your fic. What ship is it?”
“Kirk/Spock.”
“Is this smut?”
“Yes. A loooooooooot of smut.”
“How many words?”
“Seven hundred fifty-two thousand.”
“Sweet Jesus…” Stratt hid her face in her hands. It was first time when Ryland saw her having a mental breakdown.
“I read yuri only,” she admitted, her voice weak.
“I’m sure you can make a small exception.”
“Okay. Fine. Send me this fic. The sooner I start, the sooner I finish.”
“I’ve already sent it to you in an email. Probably landed in spam. There are also my login and password to my ao3 account so you can post it.”
“This is not a good cybersecurity practice to show anyone your login details. Especially in an email.”
“I’m dead already, why would I bother? I gave you all my logins and passwords. At least these I could recall.”
Stratt was already opening her laptop and looking for the message in the spam folder, then she sent the file to her fancy, super-expensive printer that had a tendency to break even more often than normal printers. Luckily, this time it obeyed and started to spit out paper.
“Don’t tell me you’re about to print everything,” Ryland raised his eyebrow.
“I’m about to print everything.”
“Think of how many trees had to die…”
“And more will die soon, why would I bother?”
The printer was letting out terrifying noises, something between a pig being slaughtered and an ancient demon being summoned.
“Bring me coffee,” Stratt ordered. “Or two.”
“I’ll bring you three.”
It took more than an hour to print every single page, and after that, the printer died from exhaustion once and for all. Another being sacrificing itself for the sake of humanity’s survival.
“Let’s begin,” Stratt took out a giant box full of markers of all colors possible.
“Can’t wait till you get to the chapter forty six.”
“Do me a small favor and shut up, Grace.”
He did. The room fell silent, only the antique clock on the wall was ticking, and the wind was blowing behind the window. Ryland took out his phone to read fics, but he had no idea which fandom to choose. So many fics, so many fandoms, so little time he had left.
“Typos,” Stratt sighed after checking over ten pages. “Typos, typos and typos.”
“I write fast. I think fast. I am fast. I have ADHD diagnosis.”
“I know.”
“But I didn’t tell you about that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Of course… Is there a single thing you don’t know?”
“I don’t know why I’ve agreed to do this.”
“To publicly announce that fanfiction saved the world. Fanfiction saved me, now I’m going to save the world, therefore fanfiction saved the world.”
“Right, it may annoy these idiots who want to censor it. Don’t tell anyone, but I secretly write darkfics just to make them cry.”
“Glad we agree on something.”
“Grace, I want you to know that after Hail Mary takes off, I will make every effort to preserve fandom legacy. Maybe the apocalypse is coming, but fanfiction must survive.”
“Oh,” Ryland’s eyes got glassy, and he quickly wiped his face. “Thank you. I didn’t expect that from you.”
“You don’t know me, Grace.”
“Doesn’t matter. Everyone who protects fanfiction is my friend. Can you upload your fics to Hail Mary’s computer so I can read them before death?”
“I can. Now let me work.”
An hour passed, then two, then three, then it got dark outside, and they had a quick break for dinner. Green tea replaced coffee.
“There’s smut in every chapter,” Stratt commented, stirring her soup with a spoon.
“Is this a bad thing?”
“No. This is exactly as it should be.”
“I don’t know anything about gay sex,” Ryland admitted. “To be honest, I don’t know anything about sex at all.”
“I see. That’s why it is so dirty.”
“Asexuals write the dirtiest smut, right?”
“That’s true, indeed.”
The evening turned into a night, and Stratt wasn’t even in the middle of the fic. She’d used up ten markers already.
“You don’t know how to use inversion correctly,” she sighed with resignation. “Instead of ‘Had Spock never orgasmed so hard before’, it should be ‘Never before had Spock orgasmed so hard’. Your grammar structures are rather… dubious.”
“Grammar is difficult. Can you blame me?”
“You’re the native speaker here. How many languages do you speak?”
“One.”
“Then you have no idea what truly difficult grammar is. You have no idea what it means for verbs to conjugate for person and number, for nouns to decline for seven cases, or for adjectives to have a different form for each gender, number and case. You know nothing. You’re just pathetic.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Well, it’s too late for you to learn any foreign language anyway.”
“Maybe I’ll meet intelligent aliens in Tau Ceti, and I’ll have to learn their language!”
“For the good of aliens, I hope you won’t meet any.”
“Why?”
“Because you are unbearable. I pity Yao and Ilyukhina who will spend their last days trapped in a big tin can with Ryland Grace.”
“And I pity all human beings who will be trapped on Earth with Eva Stratt!”
“Then be glad you’re not one of them,” she smirked.
The clock was pointing to midnight when Stratt finally finished reading the first half of the fic. Just one more to go.
“Spock is kinda out of character,” she took a big sip of green tea. “But he’s even funnier this way.”
“Exactly.”
“I strongly advise you to go to sleep now. You’re leaving Earth in four days.”
“Oh no, I almost forgot about my death sentence!”
“Then go to sleep.”
“No. I have to be sure my fic is beta read.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I do trust you, but this is matter of a great importance. I poured my heart and soul into this fic.”
“I don’t quite understand why you just don’t post as not beta read.”
“Typos, typos, typos, you said it yourself.”
But three hours later Ryland fell asleep anyway, sitting on a chair in a weird position, with a phone in his hand, the characteristic font of ao3 visible before the screen locked.
Stratt was battling exhaustion as well, though she kept going, correcting every typo and every grammar mistake, making notes what tags she should use when she posts the work on ao3 — and there were a lot of them, since Ryland’s interpretation of Kirk and Spock decided to try out every single kink possible. Stratt wasn’t even familiar with some of them and had to google, using her work laptop. But she was Eva Stratt, the boss of Earth, and nobody would ever check her browser’s history. Anyway, she was using Arch Linux with an obscure window manager, so few people would even know how to use her laptop.
The sun was slowly rising, shining like nothing wrong was happening to it, and Stratt was finally heading to the end, to the finale of this epic story and to the last, the craziest smut (Spock grew tentacles for some reason). Before nine in the morning her work was done, and she woke up Ryland, smacking him with one of her thick notebooks.
“I’ve finished,” she announced. “Are you happy now?”
“What? What happened… Ummm… You finished? Everything?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
“This is not the most impressive thing I’ve done in my life.”
“I know.”
“Is your final wish fulfilled? Can you go to Tau Ceti now?”
“Yes, but…”
“But…”
“How are you going to post that if all your corrections are on paper, not in the file directly?”
“I’ll tell people from administration to apply the corrections to the file. They are all too bored there, I need to find them a serious job.”
“Ummmm… Okay.”
“No worries, before you leave, I’ll show you the work posted.”
“Thanks… for everything. For everything you’re doing for fanfiction.”
“No problem. As long as I’m the boss here, fanfiction will be protected.”
***
Eva Stratt was starting her days with checking Ryland’s ao3 account, where kudos, comments and bookmarks were growing each day, appreciating this epic story and the amount of work he had done to write it. It was as satisfying as observing the engagement in her own fics. Unfortunately, she still had little time to write and read fanfiction, absorbed by her work, still in charge of the whole world — she started a new project in order to convince all the countries to cooperate and share resources, increasing the chances of the survival of the whole civilisation. Nobody knew how much attention she paid to keep ao3 servers operational and backup all works regularly. Maybe, just maybe, if the humanity went extinct, and some intelligent aliens visited Earth thousands of years later, fanfiction would be the last thing for them to find.