Chapter Text
It had been two months since the Denmark incident.
"Unprofessional, quack science" they'd called him and his 1,700 hours of work.
"A complete waste of carbon," he'd called Charles Drachmann, the leading expert in Molecular Biology, in his field.
It'd lost him nearly everything. His access to the best labs at UCSF, a better paid internship with Dr. Margarette Lund, and very nearly his degree. He'd been lucky to not get expelled outright from UCSF for his "stunt", as it'd been called by the board, and instead suffered the consequences of stripped lab access, a small and isolated lab room that also served as a janitorial closet, and an increased drive to prove them wrong.
At first, he'd argued about the loss of his lab privileges, but the arguments quickly faded and dampened when he saw the weary look on his professor's face, and eventually accepted the judgement.
Ryland Grace, previously the most promising student in the Molecular Biology program at the University of California, San Francisco, was left alone to his own devices within four concrete walls.
Did he miss chatting with Yao and Olesya? Absolutely. While he wasn't overly social, he did miss talking with the reserved and disciplined engineer and boisterous materials scientist major. They still saw each other on the weekends, but it was different, quiet, in the small and dimly lit lab. Alone, studying, obsessing over microscopic bacteria that disputed, trashed, his thesis.
Wake up, go to work, go to class, work in the lab, eat, sleep, repeat.
This was Ryland Grace's life for over two months. Go to work in the campus library for a few hours, then to lectures, study for hours on end, get dragged away for food by Carl or Eva or some other friendly face, work on his thesis, and eventually (ultimately) pass out sometime after midnight, waking up the next day with a crick in his neck to do it all over again.
Wake up, go to work, go to class, work in the lab, eat, sleep, repeat.
He didn't notice as his body changed each weak, a lack of sleep and proper nutrients eating away at the small pudge in his stomach, arms and legs losing the slight definition they once held. Limbs thinning and ribs showing slightly more every weekend that Olesya and Carl dragged him out, never noticing the worried looks that Carl shared with Stratt over his head, and not noticing just how much he pulled away from the group as the third month rolled around.
So maybe he went out less, maybe he focused more on his research and less on when he needed to eat, or sleep, or pretend to be a normal person. Maybe he went longer and longer each stretch in the lab, waking up with papers and staples and ink sticking to his face as he pulled it from the table.
Wake up, go to work, go to class, work in the lab, eat, sleep, repeat.
Three months, thirteen weeks, ninety-two days like this. Summer was long gone, and fall wasn't far behind it, leaves abandoning their positions within the trees and crunching under beat up converse.
It was the start of the weekend and late in the evening of day ninety-three when he heard the alarming and ear-splitting crash.
Cycling back from the lab in a rare moment of acknowledgement, knowing he needed actual sleep, Ryland Grace was halfway to his lonely home when he heard it, feeling it more than anything.
The chain on his bike clicked with each wheel revolution, stuttering and nearly crashing with the thundering sound that shook the ground beneath him. Instead of crashing, however, the microbiology major skidded to a complete stop, his ill-fitting glasses nearly flying off as he whipped his head around to the source of the sound.
There, in the park he regularly cycled by each morning, surrounded by smoke and dirt and burning ash, was a strange mound, glistening with the remaining light of day as it crept under the horizon.
Ryland Grace, a self-described coward to anyone who asked, let the bursting curiosity and concern guide him to turn the bike around, cycling back uphill towards the smoke and flames.