Chapter Text
Ryland Grace was 12 years old when he was taken into foster care because his father got drunk and beat him so severely and so loudly that not even the neighbors in their shitty, crack-den of an apartment building could ignore the screaming and called the police. That night, Ryland Grace was beaten so badly that the doctors had to take out his left kidney. He spent the next four years being bounced from group home to foster home to group home again. The most consistent person in his life at that time was his social worker and court-mandated therapist- who was, thankfully, good enough at her job that Ryland thought he had a good shot at eventually becoming a functioning adult.
“Becoming a functioning adult” happened a little too fast for Ryland Grace, who finished high school at 16 during the winter semester. There was no ceremony, but he didn’t care. A full ride to UC Berkeley for a biology degree was enough to get him legally emancipated. He sped through a Bachelors, a Masters, and then a doctorate in only eight years. He met Marissa- 3 years his senior and finishing her own Masters Degree in Statistical Analysis- the night that his current roommate (her boyfriend at the time) got a little too drunk and reminded Ryland just a little too much of his own father. So he stayed in the living room, and when his creepy roommate was getting a little too handsy with Marissa, he’d stepped in and gotten his ass kicked. Marissa tased the roommate, dragged him to Urgent Care against his will, and decided that they were best friends now.
Dr. Ryland Grace had been dragged to a party after his thesis defence. Marissa, who was suffering from horrendous period cramps but had still dragged herself to her thesis defence, had gone home directly after congratulating him, and so there was nobody to back him up or give him an excuse not to be dragged out partying. A lot of horrendous shit had happened to the newly-minted Dr. Ryland Grace, but that night was one of the worst of his life even though he didn’t remember it afterwards. All he knew was that he woke up in the hospital with GHB in his system, along with other drugs that were meant to cause physical arousal.
There were witnesses, and Marissa insisted he file a police report even if he was never going to press charges. A student in one of the graduate-level classes he’d TA’d for, who’d always been a little too familiar during his office hours in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable. He wasn’t interested in sex, or romance, and although both Marissa and his therapist said that it was normal, that it didn’t make him broken, he’d still had trouble believing it. At any rate, it made it all the worse when the first and only time he’d had sex, it was against his will and while roofied out of his mind.
He’d just wanted to move on with his life; he’d already gotten into a post-doc program and he didn’t want the distraction. So he kept going to therapy but otherwise tried not to think of the incident at all. Until an hour before his conference presentation in Denmark, nine months into his post-doc when he found out he had a daughter, and that she was with his rapist.
He’d been toying with the idea of leaving academia altogether, but he definitely hadn’t planned to do it quite so spectacularly. He barely even cared as he dialed Marissa’s number and asked her to help him find a lawyer. He wasn’t leaving his daughter with a rapist.
The mother of his child was trying to use a paternity suit as an excuse to get involved with him again; she was clearly delusional, wanting to manipulate him into playing happy family and was willing to use an infant to do it. She clearly thought that being genial made him spineless, but Dr. Ryland Grace did have a backbone for the things that mattered to him. The dusty old police report, even though charges were never filed, came in handy. He didn’t want a trial, and her parents didn’t want the embarrassment.
His lawyer had told him privately that it was unlikely they’d get a conviction anyway- male victims of rape were often dismissed in the society they lived in, and a jury was unlikely to convict a younger woman of raping her male TA even if all the evidence pointed in that direction. But the evidence did give them leverage. Ryland got custody of his daughter, the rich parents used the threat of cutting their daughter off financially to force her hand in signing away parental rights, and there was a one-time settlement that would be enough to sustain them both while Ryland figured out what to do next.
He named his daughter Rosalind Andromeda Grace. Rosalind for the woman whose contributions to DNA were equal to or greater to that of her male counterparts, but who was not given the recognition that she was due until much later. Andromeda for the neighboring galaxy, because when he looked at her for the first time, he swore he saw stars in her blue eyes. Despite how she came about, Ryland was so immediately head-over-heels for his daughter; she healed something in him that had been broken for so long he’d stopped feeling it. He resolved, for her, to be the parent he’d never had. She was everything he loved about the world that had fascinated him since childhood, but with none of the ugly parts that he’d come to know so intimately.
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Ryland was used to everyone having opinions about how he lived his life; he had chosen to remain single despite having many, many eager and willing potential options should he have decided otherwise. He’d chosen to get a teaching certificate and work at a public middle school in a disadvantaged part of town despite being headhunted by a number of biotech firms who were interested in both his intellect and his apparent willingness to go against the grain and challenge both accepted norms and powerful academics in the field.
He could have made a lot of money if he’d taken one of them. He knew that, were more people aware of his choices, he’d be judged for not doing so when he could have given his daughter much more material comfort. But he’d not trusted any of them; he didn’t want his ideas or intelligence being used for the sorts of morally questionable things that he knew such big firms got up to. He didn’t want to contribute towards making the world more unkind or unsafe than it already could be; this was the world his daughter was growing into. His daughter was everything to him.
He and Marissa quietly married by signing a paper at city hall, so that she could adopt Rosalind in case something ever happened to him. Not even over his dead body would his daughter ever go into foster care or, even worse, to her biological mother. People thought it was strange that he was legally married but didn’t wear a ring or live with his wife.
His colleagues thought it was strange that he didn’t insist his students call him “Dr. Grace.” Ryland told them that he’d done the degree out of love of knowledge and discovery, but that he found the title pretentious and academia at large too elitist and close-minded. This was true. He never told them the other half of it, which was that the day he’d started being called ‘Dr.’ was also the day he had his autonomy violated in the worst way imaginable, and thus he had very complicated and dissonant feelings about the title. His therapist said it was normal and that there was nothing wrong with wanting to be called ‘Mr. Grace’ by his students, so he didn’t much care what others thought of it.
He was happy with his life. Really and truly. It had taken him so much struggle to get to this point, but he had his daughter and a job that he loved and he was fulfilled. The biggest problem he had at the time was the looming anxiety about the Petrova Line, but even that felt distant. Like he’d told his kids- the best minds in the world were on it, and he wished those ostentatious fart-waffles the very best. He was sure they’d figure out something once they’d finished self-aggrandizing enough to actually put themselves in front of a microscope.
The last thing in the world that he expected was for Eva Stratt to enter his classroom, call him by the title he never used, shove his post-doctoral, well-researched but acerbic middle finger to the academic community into his hands, and insist he be one of those ostentatious fart-waffles.
Oddly enough, as he was bundled into an ominous-looking government SUV and texted Marissa to please pick up Rosalind and keep her for the evening and that he’d explain later, and simultaneously assured a concerned-looking 6th-grader that he was like, 75% sure he wasn’t being kidnapped, he looked at Eva Stratt and had the fleeting thought that he hoped his Rosie grew up to be just as tenacious and only half as annoying.