Chapter Text
Beyond the shell, some light is burning
You know it's calling me back home
Put down your sorrow and dance to me
That worried mind entranced to me
In stars that swim across your brows
Waiting through this night, I scout
michael nau — rides through the morning
[ ACCEL: NORMAL. TEMP: NORMAL. MAG: NORMAL. TRANSMITTER: ACTIVE. RECEIVER: STANDBY. SUPERSYMM: NONE. CONNECTION: PENDING. ]
SENDING PACKAGE...
PACKAGE SENT [λ∀+ MS]
PINGING...
REQUEST +∀λ,Vℓ∀
STATUS: UNOBSERVED
SENDING PACKAGE...
PACKAGE SENT [λ∀I MS]
PINGING...
REQUEST +∀λ,VIℓ
STATUS: UNOBSERVED
SENDING PACKAGE...
PACKAGE SENT [λℓI MS]
PINGING...
REQUEST +∀λ,VII
STATUS: UNOBSERVED
The Eridian summer camp enters its second year.
He helps out with the administrative tasks again. Not because he wants to do the guy a favor, but because she can't, and it makes her upset. He doesn't like it, the way her eyes get glassy and her fingers flex against the papery sheets, so he does it. For her.
Whenever someone asks for his honest opinion, he says some variation of this: Nein, mögen tu’ ich ihn nicht unbedingt. Aber darum gehts für mich gar nicht.
Grace isn't all that likeable, and not because he's weird and probably autistic. Leon has zero issues with weird or autistic. That part's actually fucking blazing. Half of his friend circle are furries, kinksters and people who get very into Eridian biology in their freetime. There's a lot of overlap between all of those, too, just in case you weren't aware. Let's just say some of them know their Astrophage-era history and alien biology for reasons that are only tangentially related to saving the world.
Personally, he thinks Grace has a tendency to be a little entitled and intentionally abrasive. Aber naja, maybe that comes free with being a hero? (Debatable.)
It's not like he isn't grateful for all of the guy's sacrifices. He would just prefer to be grateful from a distance. You know, by getting drunk on Relumination Day to celebrate the Hail Mary crew, and by diving too deep into the very colorful Early career section of his Wikipedia article, and sometimes by arguing with people online when they make up vile theories about why he's so reclusive or talk shit about what he wears.
No, Leon doesn't like Ryland Grace, but he doesn't need to like him to respect her wishes.
It happens in late August, on the kind of day where people either relish in the sun's scorching glory or get sun-struck and forget how desperately they were asking for this kind of weather a few decades ago. It's the kind of day where the heat sticks your clothes to your skin and the air is dry and the emergency rooms fill with elderly people who couldn't handle the heat. It's the kind of day where things that are at a tipping point finally tip and tumble.
Eva would want him here, so Leon sends the invitation, and he shows up.
He's seven minutes late and he grimaces as the door falls into the lock behind him and everyone turns to look. Leon suppresses a snort as Grace ducks his head and slips into the hindmost pew. He also hasn't bothered with the formal wear like everyone else; instead, he's in jeans and a (new) cardigan and his usual (excessive) amount of Eridian accessories.
The rest of the congregation are other professionals, connections she's forged, employees, her lawyer, and some nameless people who will slip out of the building first, like weasels. Those who forge documents and pass on information for a price. Jerry, the head of NASA, is also there.
Everyone files out at a measured pace until it's just Grace left. Leon doesn't acknowledge him.
They stand there, pondering her body in silence, or as silent as Grace ever gets, which is the occasional tap of his foot or a set of metallic tinkling sounds when he rolls his shoulder.
“Wie fühlt sich's an?”
Grace should understand enough German at this point to know what he's saying, though not enough to reply in kind. When he clicks his tongue twice and tilts his head inquisitively at the floral arrangement beside the casket, Leon assumes that what he's asking for is clarification.
“Outliving her.”
Grace is quiet for a while, looking at her body and the silver Eridian earrings matching the gleam of her snowy hair, neatly combed and parted. Her sunken eyes closed, her age-spotted skin pale and powdered. Minimal amount of touch-ups, Leon insisted, and a simple white linen blouse. She was a utilitarian to the bittersweet end. If you didn't know her name, you might confuse her for an angel. Funny thought. They will incinerate the body, so all of those people wanting her to burn got their wish in the end. But so did she, so it's a stalemate, right?
Grace shrugs.
“Ich weiß es nicht,” he says, or tries to say.
Every syllable comes out so completely drenched in his godawful American accent that Leon almost bursts into laughter right there in the funeral parlor. Apparently a unique proficiency in Eridian doesn't indicate a universal linguistic genius. Leon likes to think Eva would've found it funny, too. Maybe she's laughing right now.
When Grace turns to go, Leon studies the pattern on the back panel of the man's knitwear. Two planets, a star, and a thin red line. It's all a little bit too... self-referential for Leon's taste, but he can't deny the piece is well-crafted.
“You really should go to Australia,” he says, on a whim. Grace pauses, then turns around. His hands submerged in his pockets, his glasses hanging around his neck and his eyebrows poking up.
“Maybe terrorizing Radetzky will cheer you up. Or you can put aside your differences and bond over the whole… long-distance thing. His husband stayed back in Genf, if you didn't know.”
There's an extended pause where Grace just stares at him. Leon almost thinks he's pushed it too far, with his audacity, but then he gets a laugh. It's brief and dry, more of a snort, but still.
“Okay, Leon,” he says. “Thanks for that.”
There's a slight edge to his voice, and he appends a pair of harsh-sounding, throaty noises that probably mean fuck you, asshole. The Eridian curse takes the edge off; the sharp glint in his eye fades, he purses his lips and nods a few times. If you squint and tilt your head about twenty degrees, his grimace could almost be a smile.
Much unlike the first time he left Eva Stratt behind, Grace is willing and the moment isn't dramatic. The sound of the door falling into the lock, soft and unceremonious, says this is it. Something old ticked off the list, something new just beginning. Click.
Leon stays with her for another three hours, just sitting and watching over her body until the twilight reaching in from the windows turns her skin blue and the shadowed furrows into bluer river valleys. He commits her to memory, one last time, just to be safe. The slope of her eyebrows and the shape of her nail beds, the scar on her temple and the tattoo he refused to let them cover up. The silver cross around her neck. She had a complicated relationship with religion, but maybe when you feel yourself fading, you return to what you know.
He cries once he gets home.
A couple weeks later, while he's dictating an application letter (the people at ESA already know him, this is just a formality), a notification pops up in Eva's inbox. He hasn't managed to close all of her accounts yet. It feels too final.
Grace's bank account was never disconnected from her email, even once his own address became the primary contact and she stopped taking care of it. Large transfers always trigger an automatic notification.
He purchased a flight from an Australian airline.
Leon feels his lip kick up into a smile, and then he deletes Eva's user profile from his account.
SENDING PACKAGE...
PACKAGE SENT [λ∀∀ MS]
PINGING...
REQUEST I,∀++,V∀∀
STATUS: UNOBSERVED
SENDING PACKAGE...
PACKAGE SENT [+Vℓ MS]
PINGING...
REQUEST I,∀++,λℓℓ
STATUS: UNOBSERVED
SENDING PACKAGE...
PACKAGE SENT [λ∀+ MS]
PINGING...
REQUEST I,∀++,λℓI
STATUS: OBSERVED
INITIALIZING RECEIVER...
RECEIVER PRIMED [+∀Vℓ MS]
STATUS: NORMAL
READOUT: NULL
[ CONNECTION: ACTIVE. ]
Leon sees him again at 7:30 in the morning on a Tuesday.
On the news, that is.
They haven't talked in years. He occasionally sends inappropriate memes via email, and Grace sends back ASCII art and photos from field trips with his Anishinaabe students and samples of his unpublished music.
Leon's spouse turns on the projector in the living room while their boyfriend rushes in with a giant plate of eggs and vegan bacon from the kitchen. He almost trips over Sasquatch, who, despite being a cat, always follows him around like a dog. Sasquatch doesn't care, just scales the back of their ripped-up couch (it was a second-hand purchase, anyway) and snuggles up against Leon's thigh. He cards his fingers against her soft fur and pretends he isn't nervous.
The three of them eat their family-sized breakfast eggs off their family-sized serving plate and witness planet-sized history.
This time, Ryland Grace isn't shown stumbling out of a Russian-made capsule or sedated with his face in the dirt.
Instead, he's in the background of a press conference, gathered off to the side with a small group of researchers. He's in a wheelchair. Gray all the way, bright-eyed and jittery, he's fidgeting with the metals in his knee-length skirt and tilting his head up to mouth things at a straight-faced and straight-backed Dr. Radetzky. They've both grown a little paunch, and with the way Radetzky is resting a hand on one of the handles of Grace's chair, it almost looks like they might be getting along, now.
When they cut away from the live footage, the stream shows an aerial view of the SLHC winding its way through the rusty colors of the outback like a glittering, silver snake. In the background, the reporter catches the audience up on the history of the project. The land it's built on is subject to a highly complicated legal agreement between the government of Australia and a collective of Aboriginal communities who approved of the project in exchange for seats on the board and veto-power where land use is concerned.
The text crawling along the chyron in the lower third of the stream reads:
Major breakthrough in international efforts to receive Eridian deep-space communication — United Nations representatives, CERN officials and members of the Australian Institute of Physics to announce details — Earth's first quantum end-to-end communication with intelligent alien life — Major breakthrough...
When they cut back to the conference, a tall person sweating dark patches into their tan suit is adjusting the cluster of microphones by the rostrum. Far away, behind the crowd, heat twists the horizon into flickering shapes. The outskirts of a satellite dish array the size of Monaco blur into molten blobs of polymer, xenonite threads and aluminum.
A man in a gray suit steps up to the podium. Dr. Jasper Wiesenthal-Sarasvati, director general, CERN, says the caption.
Then, the camera briefly zooms in on the researchers gathered behind him. Grace is squinting against the light, the sun-rashed flush on his face matching the scarred left arm. He's flexing his fingers around the yellow fabric bunched in his lap and looking a little queasy. One of the people standing closest to him, a feminine-looking Asian person no older than thirty, leans in and squeezes his shoulder. His gaze stays fixed on the man at the podium, but he puts his hand over theirs and squeezes back.
CERN's director general announces that he will be relaying the message verbatim, as it was received.
“Or rather,” he says, with a well-timed smile into the cameras, “as it was translated by our own Dr. Grace.”
GREETINGS EARTH, HUMANITY, PLURAL.
WE CALL TO YOU FROM PRIMARY QUANTUM RESEARCH HUB AT TWIN SPIRE NODE 3 ON PLANET ERID OF 40 ERIDANI.
THIS MESSAGE WAS COMPOSED BY FIRST HUB ENGINEER [ROCKY], APPROVED BY COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIVES, AND TRANSCRIBED BY SECOND EXPERIMENTAL PARTICLE SCIENTIST [JANEWAY].WE SPEAK ON BEHALF OF ALL ERIDIAN INTERESTS.
UPON RECEIPT OF THIS TRANSMISSION, URGENTLY DISCLOSE CURRENT STATUS OF HONORED HUMAN ERID CITIZEN TEACHER-SCIENTIST GRACE. IF ABLE, ESTABLISH DIRECT COMMUNICATION.
FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FOR OPTIMAL CALIBRATION ATTACHED.WE ARE READY TO HEAR YOU.AS YOU SAY: DO NOT BE STRANGERS.