Chapter Text
You had been drifting through space for a very long time, over seven years according to the calendar in the corner of the dashboard on the ship, though you stopped keeping track a while ago. The stars and planets all disappeared two years into journey, last you heard from the space stations they had started calling it The Great Rapture. Their name for the event mirrored the developing fanaticism and religiosity ended up scaring you off as you saw it developing among the people left alive with you.
Now you hadn’t had contact with anyone for over a year, probably more, choosing instead to drift listlessly through space until you could think of something to do, or you supposed, until your supplies were depleted. Though with how much excess they sent you up with when you first launched combined with the rationing that you began after the planets and stars disappeared meant you had enough food to last you two decades at the very least.
Originally your mission was pretty simple, as far as space travel could be considered simple at least. Despite having established a small colony on mars and a space station for the colony as well as a few different space stations orbiting Earth, humanity hadn’t ever tested the effects of long term space travel out of orbit. There was a decent chance that the difference between the orbit the space stations were in and being out of orbit was negligible, but you never know until you try.
So, the Hermes mission was born, a plan to send an astronaut as far out into space as possible and then have them come back so that they could test the effects on their body and plan for future potential long distance space travel. They picked you to be the pilot for a few different reasons, admittedly you didn’t have many connections to Earth, sure there were a handful of friends and your mom was still alive but nothing truly keeping you tied down, and you were an okay pilot on top of being a damn good engineer. They needed someone capable of fixing the ship if something went wrong, sure they technically needed someone who could steer the ship but most of the journey would be automated so it was less important.
The ship took four years to build and another whole year to run as many tests as possible to guarantee it would hold up during the decade long journey. The process probably could have been done in just a year or two, but as far as everyone was aware they didn’t have any time constraint, the idea of all the stars and planets just up and disappearing one day would have gotten you laughed out of any room.
The idea of it was still absurd to you now, and you were living it. So oblivious to the future that awaited the universe you took off, happy with the knowledge that you would be returning to Earth in 10 years’ time. Looking back on how certain you were that you would return home would almost be funny if it wasn’t so depressing.
After the stars disappeared you floundered for a few days before making the decision to turn around and head back to where Earth should have been. Upon getting back you made contact with the space stations left. For a year or so you hung around the other space stations, helping some of the other engineers fix issues when they popped up and generally trying to be helpful in such unprecedented times. It had taken you two years to get back to the spot in space where Earth used to be, and during that time the stations had managed to organize themselves as well as they could.
The order of the stations was comforting for a while, if you tried hard enough you could almost pretend the world was normal. The longer you stuck around though the more you observed strange social patterns beginning to emerge among the station populations. Eden rallied around their trees with a growing fervor, referring to themselves as the brothers of Eden, and when a child was born they became a child of Eden. Before their society had revolved around the trees, they were after all the only trees in space, but now the trees were being made into an almost god-like figure in the community. A few of the other stations had banded together and began referring to themselves as the Coalition of Iron, when they established their prison they began to scare you for a different reason than Eden.
You could see the lengths they were willing to go in the name of preserving resources and though they lacked the religious undertones developing in Eden the single-minded focus made you wonder how far they would be willing to go in the future. Your worry that someone would one day realize your stockpile of supplies existed and react in a way that would harm you led to you making the decision to flee. Your life was your top priority, it might be selfish, but if it had to be lived without other humans then so be it.
Nowadays you might have made a different decision, years without company had fucked with your brain and you had become, for lack of a better term, apathetic, choosing to simply sleep or staring out into nothingness all day, hoping an idea on how to fix or even just change your situation might come to you. Then one day something in your head snapped, it was like when you stretch a rubber-band out too far and let go of one end so that it shifts back into its original shape, usually hitting the person holding the rubber-band in the process.
You weren’t sure what caused what caused the snap, but you suddenly remembered the existence of black holes. Back when everything went dark there was speculation among those remaining that they might have survived whatever event erased everything else, but without any light there was no way to check, and nobody in their right mind was going to waste the resources to try.
You, fortunately or unfortunately, were certainly not in your right mind and at this rate your resources would outlast you. So, with a renewed vigor you set out for the closest black hole, or where the closest black hole should be, provided they had stuck around.
It was probably a good thing that you weren’t a scientist, if you were aware of the properties of black holes, or the chances of your survival upon trying to go through one your will to live probably would have shot down the thought and you would’ve been back to drifting around sadly. Instead, for the past few years you had been approaching a black hole with a quiet hope and all sorts of improbable theories about what would be on the other side.
Your personal favorite theory, and perhaps the least likely, was the idea that you would find the universe as it should be, stars and all. As you grew closer to your destination the feeling of anticipation grew as well, you had begun fliting through the ship, checking on parts you hadn’t thought of in years, and generally making sure the ship was in perfect condition.
When the last few days of your trip rolled around you decided to barricade yourself in the sleeping area. You grabbed enough food and water to last you a week and a half, picked out a few TV series that were downloaded to your tablet to watch, and hunkered down. You couldn’t exactly rationalize why you were doing this instead of watching out one of your few windows desperately, but maybe it was because you weren’t sure what you would do if the black holes were really all gone too, if you had to go back to your mundane existence of barely living until you died.
So that’s what you did, for ten days you slept, binge watched TV, and ate. Nothing felt off, you had had a bout of queasiness for a bit, but that was chalked up to anxiety. Anxiety that came back full force when it was time to emerge from your weird little cocoon. Despite the many, many theories you had come up with on the trip you had no clue what would await you outside your window and as excited as you were to find out, you were also terrified.
Eyes closed you navigated through the ship blind, spending over a decade on it had made you intimately aware of where everything was, to the point that you could move around on instinct at this point, no need to rely on any sense other than touch. When you finally floated over to where the biggest window should be you paused, mind going blank for a second before you forced your eyes open.
They opened to stars, so many stars, and planets all around you, the lights seeming to twinkle at you as your eyes glossed over with tears. Not only had you not died, but you had come out somewhere much better.
Filled with hope and a lightness that might have lifted you off the ground if you hadn’t already been in space, you set course for where Earth should be. You knew that wherever you were now might not be the same as where you were from, but you were far too happy to consider any depressing thoughts like that now. According to the calculations the ship was able to run you should be back at Earth (an Earth) within six years. Such a time felt impossibly small compared to the time you’d already spent in space and you couldn’t help but grin to yourself as you began you journey back to… home?