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Three years after the Hail Mary returned to Earth, Ryland Grace still couldn't walk down a street without being recognized.
The afternoon sun hung low and golden over Boulder, casting long shadows across the sidewalk. It was a Tuesday in late September—the kind of day that made tourists fall in love with Colorado and made locals complain about the sudden drop in temperature as soon as the sun dipped behind the Flatirons. Ryland had been back on Earth for thirty-eight months now. Long enough that the gravity should have felt normal again. Long enough that the smell of rain on dry dirt didn't make him stop mid-sentence, overwhelmed by a sensation he'd thought he'd never experience again.
Long enough that people had stopped calling him an astronaut and started calling him a legend.
You'd suggested the walk—something about fresh air and vitamin D and the therapist's recommendation that Ryland "reintegrate with public spaces at his own pace." Dr. Iwasaki had been clear about that. You can't hide forever, Ryland. The world wants to celebrate you. Let them. But Dr. Iwasaki had never been cornered in a grocery store by a sobbing stranger who wanted to thank him for saving humanity. Dr. Iwasaki had never had to smile for photographs while his chest felt like it was caving in.
His own pace turned out to be glacial.
Not that you minded. You walked beside him, close enough that your shoulders brushed every few steps, watching the way his eyes tracked over every approaching pedestrian with barely concealed wariness. He'd gotten better at hiding it over the months. The smile came easier now, the polite nods, the patient pauses for photographs. But you knew the difference between his real smile and his public one. You'd always known.
He was forty-two years old, though he looked older—the kind that came from surviving things no human should have to survive. The gray threading through his brown hair had been there when he landed, a gift from the astrophage and the loneliness and the constant, grinding terror of being the last human alive in a billion miles of nothing. His glasses were wire frames that had gone out of style in 2015 but that he refused to replace because they were "still functional, thank you very much." He wore an old cardigan with a hole in the left elbow, and his jeans were fraying at the cuffs. He looked, more often than not, like a middle school science teacher who'd just come from a long day of explaining the difference between mass and weight.
Which, you supposed, he was. At least originally.
"There's a woman with a stroller," Ryland murmured, barely moving his lips. "She's looking at me."
"Maybe she's looking at the pretty sunset."
"She's been looking at me for the last thirty seconds."
You glanced over. The woman—mid-thirties, curly hair piled into a messy bun, pushing a toddler in one of those jogging strollers—had indeed fixed her gaze on Ryland with that particular expression of dawning recognition. You'd seen it hundreds of times now. The widening eyes. The slight parting of lips. The sudden intake of breath, as if they'd just spotted Bigfoot or the Northern Lights or something equally impossible.
"Five bucks says she asks for a picture," you said.
"I'm not taking that bet." Ryland's hand found yours, squeezing once, quick and hard. "I'm not—I don't—"
"Hey." You stopped walking, turning to face him fully. His grip on your hand was almost painful now, but you didn't pull away. "You don't have to if you're not up for it. We can cross the street. Turn around. Whatever you need."
His jaw worked back and forth. Behind his glasses, his eyes looked tired. They always looked tired these days, even after a full night's sleep. Even after therapy. Even after you'd held him through the nightmares and whispered that he was home, he was safe, he was here.
"No," he said finally. "No, I can... I can do this. It's one person. It's fine."
It wasn't fine. You both knew it. But you nodded anyway, and when the woman rolled the stroller up to you with an excited squeak, you stepped back half a pace and let Ryland do what he'd learned to do.
"Dr. Grace? I'm sorry to bother you, but I just—I can't believe it's really you. My husband and I watched the documentary three times. Three times. What you did up there, with the astrophage and the... the aliens and everything..." She was crying now, actual tears streaming down her cheeks. The toddler in the stroller stared up at Ryland with the blank incomprehension of a two-year-old confronted with a tired-looking man in an old cardigan. "You saved the world. You saved everyone."
Ryland's smile was a masterpiece of engineering. You watched him construct it in real-time—the slight crinkle at the corners of his eyes, the tilt of his head, the softness in his voice that he'd practiced in front of the bathroom mirror until it sounded almost natural.
"Thank you," he said. "That's very kind. And please, just Ryland is fine."
"Could I—would you mind—" She was already fumbling for her phone. "Just one picture? The kids will never believe I actually met you. I mean, I can barely believe it myself."
"Of course."
He posed with her in front of the stroller. His hand rested lightly on her shoulder. His smile stayed fixed. The phone clicked. She thanked him three more times, wiped her eyes, and pushed the stroller away with a final "You're a hero, Dr. Grace. A real hero."
You watched Ryland's face as she walked off. Watched the smile drain away like water from a cracked cup, leaving behind something hollow and gray.
"Ry."
"I'm fine." He started walking again, faster now, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket. "I'm fine, let's just—let's just get home."
The walk back took fifteen minutes. It felt like an hour.
Ryland didn't speak. You didn't try to make him. You'd learned, over the past year and a half together, when to push and when to wait. This was a waiting time. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward, his gaze fixed on the sidewalk ahead, and every few seconds his jaw would tighten like he was grinding his teeth. You recognized the signs. The way his breathing had gone shallow. The way his left hand kept twitching toward his chest, reaching for something that wasn't there—grounding himself in the only way he could.
The condo was dark when you got there. The curtains you'd opened that morning were still drawn against the afternoon sun, and the only light came from the kitchen, where a single bulb burned over the sink—the one you'd forgotten to turn off. Ryland fumbled with the keys for longer than necessary, his fingers uncooperative, and when the door finally swung open he stepped inside without taking off his shoes—something he never did, something that made you look at him sharply.
He turned.
And you knew.
You'd seen this look before. Not often—he tried so hard to hide it, to keep the broken pieces contained where you couldn't see them—but enough times to recognize it. The way his eyes went glassy. The way his lips parted slightly, as if he'd forgotten how to breathe through his nose. The way his whole body seemed to fold inward, collapsing under a weight that only he could feel.
"Ryland—"
He made a sound. Not quite a word. Not quite a sob. Something in between, something raw and ragged that tore its way out of his throat and hung in the air between you. And then he was moving, stumbling forward, and you caught him the way you'd caught him a dozen times before, with your arms around his shaking shoulders and your cheek pressed to his hair.
"I'm sorry," he gasped into your neck. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I—"
"Don't." You held him tighter, one hand coming up to cradle the back of his head. His hair was longer than it had been when he first came back, soft between your fingers. "Don't apologize. Just let it out. I've got you."
The dam broke.
He cried like he'd been holding it in for years—and maybe he had. Great, heaving sobs that shook his whole frame, that made him clutch at you like you were the only solid thing in a universe that had tried very hard to kill him. He cried for his dead crewmates, you knew. For the ones who'd never gotten to see Earth again. He cried for Rocky, his friend left behind on a distant planet, and for all the Eridians who would never breathe Earth's air or see its sun. He cried for himself, too—for the man he'd been before the mission, the one who'd thought he was going to die alone in the dark, and for the person he'd become instead.
"It should have been them," he choked out. "It should have been them. They had families. They had—I was just—I was nobody. I was the science teacher. The one nobody would miss. And I'm the one who gets to come home? I'm the one who gets you?"
You pulled back just enough to cup his face in your hands. His cheeks were wet, his glasses fogged and crooked, his nose running. He looked terrible. He looked beautiful. He looked like the man you loved, the man who had crossed interstellar space to save two worlds, the man who still couldn't believe he deserved to be happy.
"Listen to me," you said. Your thumbs brushed away his tears, uselessly—more kept coming. "You are not nobody. You were never nobody. And you didn't survive because you were expendable. You survived because you're brilliant and stubborn and too goddamn brave for your own good. You survived because you earned it. Do you understand me?"
He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut.
"Ryland. Look at me."
He opened his eyes. They were red-rimmed and bloodshot, the eyes of someone who hadn't slept properly in months, but they were his eyes, and you loved them.
"You didn't choose to be the one who lived," you said softly. "But you're here now. And I am so, so glad you're here. Every single day. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones."
His breath hitched. For a moment he just stared at you, searching your face for something—doubt, maybe, or pity, or the lie he expected to find. He didn't find it. You made sure he wouldn't.
"I don't deserve you," he whispered.
"That's not your call to make."
A sound escaped him that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so wet. His hands came up to cover yours, still pressed to his cheeks, and he turned his head just enough to press a kiss to your palm.
"I'm so tired," he said.
"I know, baby. I know."
You got him to the bedroom eventually. It took some coaxing—he kept stopping in the hallway, leaning against the wall, apologizing for things that didn't need apologies—but you'd learned patience. You'd learned how to take his weight when he couldn't carry it himself. You'd learned how to say "it's okay" in a hundred different ways.
The bedroom was dim, the curtains still drawn from this morning. You sat him down on the edge of the bed and knelt to untie his shoes, sliding them off one by one. Then his socks. Then the jacket, the cardigan, the t-shirt underneath, until he sat in just his jeans and his glasses and the thin white scar across his ribs—a souvenir from the Hail Mary, from some piece of debris that had caught him during a spacewalk. You traced it sometimes, in the dark, mapping the evidence of everything he'd survived.
"Lift your hips," you said, and he did, and you worked his jeans down his legs and tossed them toward the laundry basket. He sat there in his boxers, looking small and lost and impossibly young despite the gray threading through his hair. The glasses had slipped down his nose again. You reached up to push them back into place, but he caught your wrist.
"Stay," he said. "Please. I know you have—you probably have things to do, and I'm being—I know I'm a lot, but I just—please. Don't go."
The words hit you somewhere in the chest, a dull ache of tenderness so intense it almost hurt. You stroked your thumb over the inside of his wrist, feeling his pulse flutter beneath your touch.
"I wasn't going anywhere."
"But you were thinking about it." His grip on your wrist tightened. "You have work. And there are dishes in the sink. I saw them. You always do the dishes when you're stressed, and I'm the reason you're stressed, and—"
"Ryland." You leaned forward, pressing your forehead to his. His breath was warm on your lips, slightly sour from tears. "The dishes can wait. My work can wait. Right now, the only thing I care about is you. Okay?"
He swallowed hard. Nodded. But when you tried to pull back, his arms came around your waist like iron bands, pulling you against him so hard that you lost your balance and tumbled onto the bed together.
"Sorry," he mumbled into your chest. "Sorry, I just—"
"It's okay." You shifted until you were propped against the headboard, your back against the pillows, Ryland curled against you like a question mark. His head rested over your heart. His arms stayed locked around your waist, his fingers digging into the fabric of your shirt like he thought you might dissolve if he let go. "I've got you. I'm right here."
His breathing was still uneven, hitching every few seconds with the aftershocks of crying. You ran your fingers through his hair—slowly, gently, the way you knew he liked—and felt some of the tension drain from his shoulders. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But some.
"Rocky saved my life a dozen times. Probably more. I lost count. And I just... I flew away. I came home. And he's still there, on Erid, in that... that hellscape of a planet, and I don't even know if he's okay. I don't know if he made it. I don't know if I'll ever see him again."
You kept stroking his hair. "You did what you had to do. You saved his species. You saved both our species. That's not nothing, Ryland."
"It doesn't feel like enough."
"Maybe not." You tugged gently on his hair, tilting his face up toward yours. His eyes were still red, still wet. "But it was everything you had. And that has to count for something."
He stared at you for a long moment. Then, slowly, he pushed himself up on his elbows, shifting his weight until he was hovering over you. His legs tangled with yours under the covers—when had you pulled the covers up? You didn't remember. But you could feel the warmth of him, the solid weight of him, the way his body fit against yours like it had been designed for exactly this.
His glasses had slipped down again.
"Your glasses," you said softly.
"Hmm?"
You reached up and slid them off his face, folding the temples carefully and setting them on the nightstand. Without them, his eyes looked even larger, even more vulnerable.
"You're beautiful," you said.
He made a sound—disbelief, maybe, or embarrassment—and then he was kissing you.
His mouth came down on yours like a man falling from a great height, and you were the ground. The first press of his lips was almost clumsy—he'd never been graceful, not really, not in the way that mattered—but then he found the rhythm, the soft give and take, and everything else fell away.
His lips were dry. They always were, these days, no matter how much water he drank or how much chapstick you smuggled into his pockets. Years of recycled spaceship air had done something to his skin that Earth's atmosphere hadn't quite managed to reverse. But beneath that initial roughness was warmth, real and alive, and when he parted his lips slightly, you felt the soft, damp inside of his lower lip brush against yours. There was still the faint salt of his earlier tears, the ones that had tracked down his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth. You tasted it—salt and Ryland and something underneath that was just him, the particular sweetness of his breath after he'd been crying, when his body was too tired to do anything but exist.
His tongue touched the seam of your lips.
The first slide of his tongue against yours was slow, almost reverent. He tasted of coffee from that morning—cold, black, the way he always drank it because he'd never quite shaken the habit of treating every liquid as a precious resource—and something sharper underneath, the metallic tang of exhaustion. His tongue swept along the roof of your mouth, then curled to meet yours again, and the sound he made was muffled against your lips, a low, broken hum that vibrated through your whole body.
His hands were everywhere. One had fisted in your hair, fingers threading through the strands at the nape of your neck, tugging just enough to tilt your head back and give him better access. The other was splayed flat against your ribcage, his thumb tracing back and forth over the fabric of your shirt, finding the dip between your ribs and pressing there as if he was counting each one, reassuring himself that you were solid, that you were real, that you weren't going to dissolve into starlight like so many things had.
Your own hands found his back. His skin was warm beneath your palms, slightly damp with the sweat of the walk and the crying and the effort of holding himself together. You could feel the ridges of his spine, each vertebra a small hill beneath your fingers. You traced downward, feeling the way his muscles tensed and relaxed under your touch, and when your nails dragged lightly across his lower back, he gasped into your mouth.
The kiss broke for a moment—just long enough for both of you to breathe. His forehead pressed against yours, his breath coming in short, hot bursts against your lips. His nose bumped against your cheek, then your temple, nuzzling there as if he couldn't bear to be even an inch away from you.
"I need—" he started, but he didn't finish. Couldn't finish. Instead, he kissed you again.
This time, he started at the corner of your mouth. His lips were softer now, warmed by the contact, and he pressed a lingering kiss to the spot where your upper and lower lips met. Then he moved. His mouth trailed across your cheek, open-mouthed, his tongue flicking out to taste the skin there. He kissed the apple of your cheek, then the bone beneath your eye, then your closed eyelid, so gently that you felt the whisper of his lashes against your skin.
"You're so soft," he murmured against your temple. His voice was wrecked, scraped raw by tears and want and something deeper, something that sounded like worship. "I forgot. I keep forgetting how soft you are."
His nose pressed into the hollow beneath your ear. He inhaled—a deep, shuddering breath, like he was trying to memorize the smell of you. Shampoo. Laundry detergent. The faint trace of the deodorant you'd put on that morning. Underneath all of that, just you, the scent he'd learned to associate with safety, with home, with the only person in the universe who had ever looked at all his broken pieces and refused to look away.
His mouth found your throat.
The first kiss there was barely a kiss—just the brush of his lips against your pulse point, feather-light. But then he pressed harder, his tongue tracing a slow, wet line down the column of your neck. You felt the heat of his breath, the way it fogged against your skin before cooling. His teeth grazed your collarbone—not enough to hurt, just enough to make you shiver, to make your back arch off the bed and your fingers dig into his shoulders.
"Ryland—"
He pulled back just enough to look at you. His eyes were dark, pupils blown wide, and there was a flush high on his cheekbones that hadn't been there before. His lips were reddened, slightly swollen, slick with the evidence of everything you'd just done. He looked wrecked. He looked beautiful. He looked like a man who had been drowning for three years and had finally, finally found something to hold onto.
"You're my salvation," he said. The words were barely audible, pressed into your collarbone like a prayer. "You know that, right? You're the only reason I'm still—the only reason I haven't—"
"Don't." Your voice came out thicker than you intended. Your hand came up to cup his jaw, your thumb brushing across his lower lip. It was damp and warm and it trembled slightly under your touch. "Don't finish that sentence."
"Okay." He turned his head and pressed a kiss to your palm, his lips lingering there, his tongue darting out to taste the lines of your hand. Then he kissed your wrist, the inside of your forearm, the bend of your elbow. Each kiss was slower than the last, more deliberate, as if he was trying to commit every inch of you to memory. "Okay. I'm sorry. I just—I need you to know. I need you to know."
"I know." You turned your head so that your lips met his again. Your tongue met his in a slow, lazy dance, and your hands came up to frame his face, holding him like he was something precious, something fragile, something worth protecting. "I know, Ryland. And I'm not going anywhere. Not now. Not ever."
He made a sound against your lips—relief, maybe, or something close to it. His body sagged against yours, all the tension draining out of him at once, and his face buried itself in the curve of your neck. His arms tightened around your waist, pulling you as close as physics would allow, and you felt his breath even out, his heart slow from a frantic gallop to something steadier.
His breathing slowed further. His grip on you loosened slightly, going slack as sleep crept up on him. His lips were still pressed to your neck, soft and warm and finally still. One of his hands had come to rest on your hip, fingers curled loosely against the fabric of your shirt. The other was tucked between your bodies, pressed over your heart, as if he could feel it beat and reassure himself that this was real.
You kept running your fingers through his hair, tracing the same soothing patterns over and over. The gray strands were coarser than the brown, and you loved them both equally. You loved the weight of him. The warmth of him. The way he fit against you like he'd been made to be there.
The dishes could wait. Your work could wait. The whole world could wait.
Ryland Grace had crossed the void between stars to come home to you. You weren't about to let him face the darkness alone.
Outside, the sun finished setting behind the Flatirons. Inside, tangled together in the quiet dark, you held each other—and for a few hours, at least, he didn't dream of space.