Chapter Text
Ryland Grace has gone too long without touching another human being.
He probably wouldn't have come to that conclusion by himself, but then he was under unusual stress. Trapped on an isolated ship, responsible for the fate of all life on Earth, aware every moment he was in way, way, way over his head. He'd been restless, jerky, itchy, not sleeping well, uncomfortable in all his clothes, and his ability to concentrate was suffering. Things had gotten bad during the worst parts of his abortive academic career, but he'd been depressed, bored, and frustrated then, on top of everything else, and that had presented diffrently. Say what you will about the Hail Mary: there were always new challenges to take on and problems that were actually solvable and didn't involve his PhD advisor!
But for all that he was eating and sleeping better, spending time on the treadmill until he was in the best shape of his life, it was starting to show in his work. He had quantitative data. His cortisol levels were higher than they ought to be, he did the blood tests himself when he couldn't sleep last night. He was all at sixes and sevens, as he absolutely could not have gotten away with saying to his kids at Grover Cleveland Middle School.
He was telling all of this to Carl, who'd been in a hovering mood since his distraction almost led to hydroflouric acid ending up where it very, very much should not have been. He'd caught it last minute! Nobody had gotten hurt, nothing had gotten damaged! But, he told Carl in a moment of unwise vulnerability, he'd almost regretted missing the chance to spend a few days getting fussed over in the medical suite.
"When's the last time somebody hugged you?" Carl asked.
Ryland thought about it. He apparently thought about it for too long, because Carl sighed very deep, and spread his arms, and said, "C'mere."
Carl was a pretty good hugger.
More importantly, it really did settle him. Carl, as usual, was the best problem-solver on the boat, and probably deserved credit for at least half of the things Ryland kept getting lauded for, which he made sure to tell him for the umpteenth time.
It wasn't, like, a miracle cure or anything. All the other sources of stress were still there, and one hug wasn't going to solve years of social dysfunction, or the wider societal dysfunction that drove his original decision-making that led to the social dysfunction. But his stress hormone levels were slightly but significantly lower - scientifically signficantly! - and he slept through a full deep eight hours. (Okay yes, he didn't have anything like enough data points for a meaningful p value. But it was a big drop!)
He was the first person to admit he was not always great at taking care of himself, but Stratt didn't want her handpicked scientists, engineers, astronauts and technicians burning themselves out, either, and she was really good at getting people to listen to her. It did make more sense to eat, sleep, and exercise regularly than the alternative. And an unexpectedly large fraction of the science team was researching nothing but what it took to keep human beings alive for five years without any contact with the rest of Earth; it felt especially stupid to let yourself burn out from physical deprivation while you were reading reports from people desperately figuring out how not to do that.
...When was the last time he had a hug? Surely he'd hugged a colleague or a friend back in San Francisco, right? Was it Susan Callahan at her retirement party? They hadn't even been particularly good friends, but she'd hugged everyone goodbye. That was, what. Three years ago last June?
Teaching middle school in a country working itself into a panic about child predators trained you fast to find ways to express affection and comfort without touch. And he hadn't been much given to touch before that; it wasn't that he was touch averse, but if you let people get touchy with you, they started expecting things. Adult American humans associated touch with romantic relationships; he would be the first one to say it was fudged up, but it was true.
He'd tried romantic relationships. Well. He'd tried one, and he'd been in a couple other weird Heisenbergian situationships. In his experience, they consisted of someone badgering you into agreeing to things and then an escalating series of deeply awkward and often boring or distressing experiences until the other person either faded away from your life or told you it just wasn't working and you needed to break up.
The touching each other part was nice. But even with that, he didn't think they'd overall decreased his net stress levels.
When was the last time anyone had touched him at all, other than a brush of hand passing a file folder or jostling with a crowd in the halls? Stratt physically positioning him like a puppet in front of a room full of brass, before she'd realized she didn't need to?
The Project wasn't a milieu for casual touch, either. It was 100% Stratt's life's work, you could sense her in every inch of the project and, well, Stratt was Stratt. Not that everybody here was touch-deprived; it was the end of the world and there were a lot of stressed-out humans in close quarters; people were hooking up left and right. And not that he hadn't been tempted, but he still didn't feel like dealing with people expecting things, and this seemed like possibly the worst place and time in the world to try out no-strings casual sex for the first time. Plus, people kept treating him as Stratt's second in command for some reason, even though he definitely wasn't, just because he was basically the only person who talked to her like a fellow human being. But that meant there were complicated power issues with pretty much everybody else on the boat, so just as well he didn't particularly feel a need to hook up.
Basically: he'd perfected his "I need personal space" aura at age 12 when all the girls suddenly got really weird about how "cute" he was, and he'd never really seen the need to turn it off again.
But that didn't change the fact that he needed to do something about how skittery he was getting, to help him self-regulate in a high stress-environment. And he probably wasn't the only one who wasn't excited about the hookup culture but was feeling the lack of touch, either. But, look: he'd worked with plenty of neurodiverse people who had touch and sensory stress issues - and not just in middle school either. This wasn't an unsolved problem.
He stuck his head into the medical suite and found that Kiera, his favorite of the nurses, was on duty, like he'd hoped. "Hey," he said. "Do we have weighted blankets in stock?"
She looked thoughtful and started typing on her laptop. "Looking for a little comfort, Dr. Grace?" she said, and then immediately looked appalled at herself for saying it.
Well, at least the aura was still working.
"Trying to set a good example of doing what you need for stress relief, whatever it is," he said, without acknowledging her gaffe, and she nodded briskly.
"It's a good thought," she said, striving for normalcy. "The stress is only going to go up, the closer we get to launch, isn't it. We don't have any in stock but I'll order you one, it should be here in two days."
"You really don't need to put it on rush," he said. "But maybe order a few? I'm probably not the only one who needs a little grounding in the middle of the Pacific."
"Too late, I already put the order in," she said cheerfully. "For a whole container's worth."
He'd been here over a year and he was still getting used to how available everything was, if the Hail Mary Project wanted it. "Thank you," he said. "You're doing vital work." He paused, but - he'd already said he was here to set a good example, and she was technically covered by medical confidentiality. "Any other advice for someone dealing with chronic lack of touch?"
"Touch people sometimes?" she suggested. "It really doesn't have to be a major thing, Dr. Grace."
He made a face. Sure, easy for her to say that. "How about more medical interventions?"
She thought for a second. "It's really not something that's covered a lot in nursing school, at least in a formal way," she said. "Though of course good nurses understand how important comforting tactile interaction can be to healing. I've read a few papers on the value of affective touch, though, especially with bedridden or long-term unconscious patients, we might be able to come up with something. Do you want to make an appointment with one of the doctors—?"
"Coma patients?" he asked, pulling out his tablet.
"Yeah, sometimes. I've never really worked with them much, though—" she started.
"Any idea if the coma program team has anyone working on that?" he asked, tapping away.
"I'm not really involved with them," she said helplessly.
"Do you want to be? Because it doesn't look like they do, and clearly they should."
"Dr. Grace, I am really not qualified to do research—"
"Don't worry, you wouldn't be doing research!" he told her as sunnily as he could. "You'd be looking up those papers and figuring out who's currently doing the work, and then calling them up and telling them the Project needs their help in order to save the world. You'd be surprised how easy it is. You're personable, and have basic background knowledge, and most importantly, you're already cleared."
"Dr. Grace, I really can't—"
He frowned as another important email popped up on the tablet. "Goshdarnit, I have to go deal with this. Well, think about it! And please let me know when those blankets get here!" he added on his way out the door.
The blankets were there in two days. And so was Kiera's decision on switching jobs, a new administrative role on the coma team, and a starting budget to build a sub-team of remote experts coordinating with the larger design team. He still wasn't used to being able to do things like that so easily, but for all Stratt's blitheness about building the ship being the easy part, figuring out how to get astronauts there alive was turning out to be the fiddliest thing in the whole project. You'd think after 300,000 years they'd have a better idea of the minimum basics to keep a human being alive and fully functioning, but nope.
He got first pick of the blankets. His was blue and had Minecraft creepers and spiders printed all over it, because he knew Kiera was his favorite for a reason, and she'd made part of the order cheerful licensed children's designs. Half the purpose of the project was building hope, after all.
It was warm and bright and reminded him of his kids and really did feel almost like a hug when he wrapped it around himself. He could feel his cortisol levels dropping in realtime, and his sleep was consistently better, too. And he definitely wasn't the only person who'd taken one - the medical team had sent out an email to the whole boat and he was pretty sure they were all claimed within a week. Plus the feeling of wrapping up in a comforting weight gave him new insight into his long-standing love of thick, baggy, heavy cardigans when he was feeling overwhelmed.
So: Excellent, problem solved. Stress levels down, ongoing team researching the issue, and back up to full capacity to deal with all the other many problems that he was somehow supposed to stay on top of.
Like whatever Stratt was pinging him about at 1 AM, a whole hour after they'd finished work for the night.
Well, if she was going to ask him to show up at her office at this hour, she could deal with him showing up still wrapped in his new blanket.
She greeted him with the same expression she always had, as straight and alone as if she had to be the only pillar holding up the world, but maybe a little more tired around the eyes than usual. "Dr. Grace," she said, standing up. "Come in. I hear you've been working on the problem of affective touch in long-distance space travel. Good work, that kind of thinking is why I need you here."
He hitched the blanket a little tighter around his shoulders. "It was all Carl's idea, as usual," he said, and Stratt nodded seriously. And then, well, an idea occurred to him, and he moved his mouth before he thought better of it. "Actually, when was the last time you hugged somebody?"
She frowned, opened her mouth, shut it, thought about it.
Ryland sighed, opened his arms - the blanket slid down - and said, "C'mere." When she seemed about to protest, he added, "I got official medical advice from Doctor of Nursing Practice Kiera that it 'doesn't have to be a major thing'."
She stood up a little bit straighter - as if that was even possible - and nodded.
Stratt was a very bad hugger, and Ryland spoke authoritatively as someone with almost no recent basis for comparison. Except Carl. She was a much worse hugger than Carl. She was somehow both too tense and too loose at the same time. And she tried to let go almost immediately, but he didn't loosen up. "You're going to have to tell me you're done in words," he said.
She didn't.
"I hope you don't expect this to be a regular thing," she said into the air over his shoulder.
"Nah," he said. "I've been managing with one every three years, personally. How about we schedule the next one in advance. Three years, one month, six days."
"You can let go now," she said, and he did. "That's the day after the end of the first launch window."
"I figure either we don't launch, and I'll need the hug," he said, "Or we do, and you can hug me in view of the cameras and get some good press."
"All right," she said. "I'll hold you to that, Dr. Grace."