Chapter Text
Tap Tap Tap
“Grace. Grace wake up. Computer beep. Why computer beep, question?”
He blinked his eyes open and found himself exactly where he left himself last night, right on his make-shift cot under Rocky’s Zenonite tunnel.
“What’d you mea-”
“Transitional course failed.”
The robot voice that he knew as the Hail Mary bleeped out again. Grace was vaguely aware there was a low alarm going off somewhere.
Something about it all really didn’t seem that urgent though so he took his time getting up from under his blanket and up the ladder towards the cock-pit isk like part of the ship, Rocky less following, more tumbling along behind him.
He blinked once.
Twice.
Three times.
Cleaned his glasses.
“Grace, what wrong, question? You’re silent. You’re never silent…” Rocky didn’t have his little crystal wand device down in the lab.
Grace didn’t answer, because the screens in front of him, instead of showing their projected course as Erid it displays the text of:
Projectrd Course: Earth, 1,975,630,694.5 km away
-
Tuesday, December 28th. 2:04 PM.
Why did he know that? Because it's the only thing Clark Kent had been staring at for the past ten minutes.
He got off work in a minute.
It was the little clock on the bottom right of his computer screen. He had his head on his chin, lazily spinning the mouse for that agonizing 60 more seconds to keep it awake.
Tuesday, December 28th, 2:05 PM.
He stood up and grabbed his bag. He nearly forgot to turn off his computer. He didn't know why he was so eager to get out of work that particular day, but he was. Sure it had been boring, and uneventful, but whatever.
Part of him probably hoped the world needed saving.
It didn't.
Clark Kent headed out, a short nod to Louis as he did.
He tied his scarf tight around his neck, coat over his shoulders, bag over his body and he left, a blast of the cold winter air hit him straight in the face, pushing his glasses down a bit.
He smiled anyway and pushed them back up.
He loves it nonetheless. The streets were still decorated with fake snowflakes and Christmas-y lights, the sky a clouded grey colour, the sun peeking through every few minutes to light the afternoon streets.
It had been a relaxing little while.
For some reason unknown to him, no one had bothered to try and kill anyone!
Of course there was always going to be some little side things. Street fights and robberies, hit and runs, little things, and although he helped in the moment, most of the time he let the city police or the other heroes that had sprung up over the years to handle the suspects. Especially if it was just local citizens. He was no longer the only “super-hero” in the city after all.
So really, it had been basically what he could call a vacation.
He froze half way down the street, someone that he didn't know or care about at the particular moment running into his back and shouting at him to mind where he was going before storming off down the side-walk again.
He furrowed his brow in thought. Something was wrong.
The sun filtered through the clouds and landed right on his face.
He looked up at the skies above, tilting his head a bit, seeing if there was anything to hear, loosening his tie.
Something was there that shouldn't be.
--
Grace stared at those numbers for a very, very, VERY long time before he sprung into action, sliding back down the ladder towards the lab that was, granted, very messy off of right now, but they had spent long enough keeping it clean so they could save their worlds.
Rocky and Grace figured there were no more experiments to be done on their way to Erid.
These weren’t experiments, but rather math. Grace’s brain just started working, ignoring Rocky for now as he flipped one of the old whiteboards over and erased the dried marker there not so well with his hand, along with the quick assistance of his shirt, which ironically said “I need my space” in big letters on the back, which is all Rocky was able to see of Grace in that moment.
He scrounged for a whiteboard marker, and after a few minutes, and a few curses, he settled for a Sharpie instead.
“1,227,600,000 km… and if the Hail Mary is going umm…” He was muttering to himself as he wrote equations and numbers on the board, tapping the back of the marker against his chin every now and again. A habit of his.
“Hmm… we’ll say an average of 95% the speed of light…” Grace muttered and jumped forward again, scribbling it down under the distance the charts had shown him earlier.
Rocky, thank the gods, realized this was not a time for him, and stayed quiet, just watching his weirdly shaped human space blob work.
“95% the speed of light should be about 284,802, and half if you really want to be specific, kilometers per second…”
Scrible scrible
His hand-writing was getting messy, but Grace couldn’t bring himself to care. He just needed to write this down somewhere.
His soft muttering as he calculated quickly added to the sounds of the marker squeaking against the board in front of him.
“5 days… The Hail Mary is saying we’ll reach Earth in 5 days and 4 hours. That’s assuming a constant speed of 95% the speed of light, but anyway.”
Grace popped the marker cap back on and dropped it on the ledge of the board, then put a hand in his hair, the other coming to rest on his hip as he sighed.
“Is your Earth, question?” Rocky finally spoke up, the robotic voice somehow quieter now.
The sudden sound startled Grace for a moment. He had been far too lost in thought, and Rocky had been uncharacteristically quiet as he had rambled.
He looked back once for a split second, did a small double take before shaking his head.
“No. It can’t be. The last time I checked, we were more than 14 light years from my Earth. This is suggesting we’re less than a light-year away,” Grace paused then huffed a bit. “Unless we suddenly ripped a wormhole through time and space itself and teleported, that’s…”
The realization kind of hit him then.
“That’s not my Earth, Rock.” That part was said in a much quieter tone.
Everything in the past however long it had been should theoretically be physically impossible, or only remained true in theory…
Grace and Rocky, had, once again, done the impossible and proved the existence of alternate versions of their worlds, because theoretically, if Earth existed here too, presumably different, Erid would, too.