Chapter Text
It’s after the day’s classes, as he was horsing around with Rocky in his habitat’s waves, that Grace first breaks his leg.
It’s a nasty break, spiraling up the tibia and breaking the fibula into multiple pieces, one of which wound up poking out the back of Grace’s calf. There was blood everywhere, he remembered later, the sound of Rocky’s screaming fading into the background as the world narrowed to red, red, red.
He was told that it took Armando, Bones, and Franklin nearly twelve hours to piece him back together, forcing the bones back into place with xenonite pins and a rigid boot.
The next weeks passed in a haze of pain and exhaustion, only improving slightly when he moved to the Mary. Physical therapy was impossible on Erid’s surface, the force of gravity dragging on the bones and misaligning the pins holding him together.
It was three months before he could return to the surface, and even then, his entire lower leg stayed encased in its xenonite boot. He limped from his house to his classroom and back, did his physical therapy, and watched Babylon 5 with Adrian, but more than anything else, he slept.
Healing in doubled gravity was exhausting. His muscles had to work twice as hard to get him from point A to point B on a normal day, and with his leg broken, all of that effort fell to his arms and the crutches Rocky designed for him. By the time his leg was finally healed, Grace would have the arms of… an athlete with strong arms. He wasn’t a sports guy, alright?
Thanks again to the higher gravity, his blood pooled in his legs if he stood up for more than a few hours at a time, which was a problem with his foot in a form-fitting cast. The swelling would cause an intense, throbbing pain that wouldn’t leave until he went to lie down.
It didn’t help that the only pain medication the Eridians had been able to synthesize was acetaminophen. Grace would have killed for some oxycodone in those first weeks after the fracture.
The medical texts from the Mary said that a compound fracture of both leg bones would take four to six months to heal, but with the different environment on Erid and the lingering effects of near-starvation, it was almost a year before Grace was finally able to take off the boot and get a look at his scarred, transparently pale foot.
It looked like it belonged to a corpse, honestly. Granted, the rest of him wasn’t much better — the Eridians had yet to believe him when he said that some UV exposure was good for humans, so suntanning was right out.
Not that Grace had ever been one for tanning. Northern California didn’t have that kind of beach, and anyway, melanoma ran in his family.
Despite extensive physical therapy (‘helped’ along by Rocky’s enthusiastic, completely exhausting cheerleading), the muscles in Grace’s broken leg were much weaker than in the unbroken one.
Maybe it was the weakened muscles that did it. Or perhaps his bone density still hadn’t properly recovered from his near starvation. Maybe it was just the luck of the draw.
Whatever the cause, two months and one misplaced foot later, all the progress he’d made was worth nothing. The tibia cracked right along the same lines as before, putting him right back at square one.
~*~
“Grace.”
“No,” Grace replied, staring out at his beach habitat.
It really was beautiful, what the Eridians had made for him. It would never match the majesty of the Pacific on a cool summer morning, but the gratitude he felt for all the effort put into creating and maintaining the illusion more than made up for any lack of natural grandeur.
“Grace,” Adrian repeated, the trilling of their voice punctuated by Rocky splashing in the gentle waves. The intensity and randomness of the wave generator had been scaled back after Grace’s injury in order to prevent the sand from becoming too uneven. It dampened the illusion that he was on a real beach, making it feel more like a wave pool at a water park than a real ocean.
Grace sighed. He missed the waves from before.
“You know this isn’t sustainable,” Adrian continued, giving him the courtesy of ‘facing’ away from him as they spoke. “This is the third time your leg has broken in the last eighteen months.”
Staring down at his booted foot, Grace took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to have this conversation again. He hadn’t wanted to have it ever, actually, but the repetition was starting to wear on him.
“Adrian, I’m not moving back onto the Mary. The bones won’t be able to set right in zero g. I’ll just come back down here and break them all over again.”
They both noticed Rocky pause in his splashing, though he recovered quickly. He was doing a good job pretending not to listen, but neither Grace nor Adrian was fooled.
“So you would amputate it just to live on the surface?” Adrian demanded. “What happens when you break your other leg? What happens when you fall and break your back, Grace?”
“I don’t know!” Grace exclaimed, wishing more than anything that he could get up and walk away. He settled for pulling at his hair in frustration. “I can’t live on the Mary for the rest of my life, Adrian, I’d lose my mind!”
“Grace, I want more than anything to keep you with us,” Adrian said, turning so their favored side was facing the human. “But you can’t stay here; we have to face the facts.”
“What would you have me do, Adrian?” Grace sighed, his tone defeated. “Spend the rest of my life in space?”
The two sat there quietly, Grace staring at the tamed waves, Adrian watching the space around them. Rocky ambled around the shallows listlessly for a few minutes before making his way toward them.
“Grace could go home, statement,” Rocky said quietly, reverting to the pidgin language he’d shared with Grace for so many years. “Grace should go home.”
“This is home, Rock,” Grace protested.
“Then home is killing you,” Rocky replied bluntly. “At least on Earth, you’d have a chance to live out your normal lifespan. Your leg isn’t the only problem you have here.”
“Bones needs to learn about doctor-patient confidentiality,” Grace muttered, taking off his glasses and dragging his hand over his face. “Seriously, is everything about me public knowledge?”
“No,” Rocky replied, fidgeting guiltily. “They wouldn’t tell me anything — I had to ask Franklin.”
Grace’s eyes rolled toward the top of his biodome. Of course. Franklin, named after the doctor in the show he and Adrian had binged while his leg failed to heal, was new to human customs and still sometimes treated Grace more like a science experiment than a patient. If they hadn’t been the leading researcher on heavy metal chelation on Erid, Grace might have politely asked them to leave his care team.
At least he could die of heavy metal poisoning in peace, that way.
Rocky was right, of course. He usually was.
Broken bones weren’t the only thing making Erid a hostile place to live.
Heavy metals were everywhere. It was impossible to escape them; his water had trace amounts of mercury, lead leached into his atmosphere, and the less said about the thallium, the better.
His kidneys were doing their best, but his blood concentrations of toxic metals were steadily increasing. He was looking at more cumulative toxicity than acute poisoning, but the effects would get to him eventually.
“I like it here,” Grace said, sounding petulant even to his own ears. “Heading back to Earth would mean another five years in space, and I don’t want to spend the majority of my adult life in a tin can.”
Adrian shifted next to him while Rocky went still. Grace glared.
“What.”
“Scientists… may have solution,” Rocky hummed, pushing his claws together nervously. “Grace will not like, but is good plan.”
“Alright…” Grace said cautiously, not loving the way Adrian fidgeted. They were usually steady — the rock in the relationship, as it were — and seeing them sway side-to-side with nervousness made Grace’s stomach do unpleasant things.
“If Grace travels with Eridian diplomatic ship, can reach Earth in less than one year,” Rocky explained, settling down now that he had something concrete he could explain. He always did better with straightforward concepts, an engineer to his core.
The math worked out, Grace knew. He’d been the one to teach the Eridians about relativity, after all.
The Hail Mary had taken four years to reach Tau Ceti because it had accelerated at a constant 1.5 g the entire trip, getting closer and closer to the speed of light until the middle of the trip, when it had flipped around and started slowing down at the same rate. Grace, if he’d been awake, would have felt the same forces for the entire trip, halfway between Earth’s gravity and Erid’s.
Dr. Lamai had calculated 1.5 g as the maximum safe force for humans over the long term. A team of dozens of experts had backed her up — if they’d pushed any harder, they’d have risked health effects like the ones plaguing Grace on Erid.
If humans weren’t so squishy, they could have accelerated harder, shortening the relative time experienced by the crew of the ship. At least twelve years would pass for Earth, no matter what, but time would contract for the people inside the ship.
Relativity was wild.
Eridians, having evolved for twice the g-forces and being able to survive even higher ones, could cut a five-year trip to Earth to a little less than nine months. It would still be at least sixteen years to people outside, like on Earth or Erid, but that was relativity for you.
There were a number of issues with speeding up the Mary to make the trip that short beyond the ‘human go splat’ issue, but Grace had no doubt the Eridians would be able to solve any mechanical problems. Their materials science was so far beyond Earth’s that it was comical.
Accelerating Grace, though, would be impossible. He was already having trouble at 2 g; a trip at 5 g or more would kill him.
Unless…
Well, there was one way it could be done, theoretically.
Rocky was right. Grace hated it.
~*~
The plan was simple, if insane. Grace would be placed in a special liquid that could fill his lungs and exchange oxygen directly with his bloodstream (a highly oxygenated fluorocarbon, to be scientific about it). While he was in that liquid, he would be “weightless,” experiencing no force from acceleration, just like how swimmers on Earth feel like they are free from gravity. That way, the ship could go as fast as the Eridians could safely tolerate without being limited by the leaky space blob in their midst.
As long as he stayed submerged, that was.
For nine months.
Therein lay the rub.
“You want me to stay in a bathtub for nine months,” Grace said flatly. “In a coma, because of course.”
“Would you really want to be in that small a space awake for nine months, question?” Rocky demanded, pounding his leg on the floor and looking impatient. “You were already claustrophobic on the Mary, do you think you could be in a Grace-sized capsule for that long?”
“You’re forgetting the part where I’d be in a coma,” Grace emphasized, knowing the full force of his glare was lost on Rocky, who couldn’t see. “Using the system that killed two out of three of my crew, in case you’d forgotten!”
“Grace, dearheart,” Adrian chimed in, their deep thrumming resonating in Grace’s ribcage. “There was no one to watch you sleep last time. There would be many Eridians to watch, this time, and either Rocky or I would be with you always.”
It was a good idea.
No, really, it was a good idea. He’d get away from Erid’s crushing gravity to a place where his bones might actually get a chance to heal. He wouldn’t have to worry about an early death from heavy metal poisoning or cardiac failure from the strain of pushing blood against Erid’s powerful gravity.
He could see for himself if Earth had solved the astrophage problem and could make sure the next generations lived their lives in warm sunlight.
He’d see the ocean again.
It should have been a no-brainer.
It just… wasn’t.
“Can I…” Grace paused, then took a deep breath. “Can I think about it?”
“Grace,” Rocky started.
“Take all the time you need,” Adrian rumbled, drowning out Rocky’s higher tones. “The diplomatic ship won’t be ready for another eight months. You have time.”
Grace breathed. The echoes in his head, reminding him of another time he’d needed to make a life-changing decision, faded with the knowledge that this time, he had time to consider his options.
He sat with that knowledge, his dearest people next to him, and just… breathed.
~*~
Relativity was a strange concept. It occupied the same space as quantum mechanics in Grace’s head: the more time he spent studying it, the less it felt like he understood.
He’d traveled four years in the Hail Mary to get to Tau Ceti, a star twelve light-years from Sol. That was already crazy, to imagine experiencing only four years while the world outside the ship felt three times that. But for Grace, who had been in a coma before even leaving Earth’s atmosphere, it had been like falling asleep on Earth and waking up the next morning in a different decade. As far as his hindbrain was concerned, he might as well have time-traveled to Tau Ceti.
The time he and Rocky spent in the Tau Ceti system, and the time Grace spent heading for Earth before releasing the Beetles and turning around to get Rocky, hadn’t been spent close enough to light speed for relativity to matter, so Grace’s body and his brain were in agreement about the time passed there.
Then, on what Rocky called their great road trip adventure, they spent three years and nine months traveling the ten light-years to Erid.
Grace had spent seven months in orbit around Erid upon arrival while the doctors and scientists tried to figure out how to feed him and get his strength up to a place where he wouldn’t immediately collapse under Erid’s gravity. He’d gotten almost a year’s worth of living and teaching in before breaking his leg, then spent the last eighteen months recovering, rebreaking it, and recovering again and again.
Now, here he was, staring down the barrel of another relativistic journey. This time, he’d travel for nine months to end up sixteen light-years away, back at the place where it had all started. He would arrive back on Earth forty years after he left, eleven years older and having consciously experienced only seven of those years.
How old was he, even? He’d been thirty-five when he left Earth — would that make him seventy-five, or forty-six, or forty-two once he returned?
Would anyone he knew even still be alive? Forty years was a long time, and that was assuming no one died of starvation or from wars…
Well, if Stratt retained even an ounce of power, she’d have made sure her people didn’t die from something so mundane as a mass extinction event. Grace would be willing to put all the money he’d never had on her ability to stay afloat while the world burned around her, and despite her extremely dubious methodology, she always did her best by her people.
The food that had been stocked on the Mary was truly top-notch stuff. Grace had never eaten so well in his life, right up until the point where he started starving to death.
He was getting off track. Would he still know anyone on Earth if he returned?
Would he want to?
Earth hadn’t exactly been the kindest place to him while he was there. Even if he was willing to exclude being kidnapped for science and yeeted off the planet on a suicide mission, getting laughed out of his field and treated to a public school teacher’s salary in San Francisco was no walk in the park. Health issues aside, the people of Erid had treated him far better than those on Earth ever had.
He could see his students again, though. They’d all be older than him… that was a little too wild to wrap his head around, honestly.
Would Stratt still be alive?
It was times like these, with life-or-death decisions looming over his head, that he really missed Eva Stratt.
Oh, he hated her; there was no question there. She’d murdered the Ryland Grace he used to be, the nerdy, pop-culture-illiterate middle school teacher.
The coward.
She did exactly what he’d accused her of, killing that man and leaving who he was now behind in the wreckage of Ryland’s memories. The drug she gave him may have been intended only for short-term amnesia, but that wasn’t how it’d turned out for him.
Grace still couldn’t remember his mother’s face.
For all she’d stolen from him, though, he missed the clarity of purpose she’d brought to his life. Every decision he’d made with her was backed by a conviction he hadn’t felt since publishing his thesis. It had been addicting, that feeling, and Grace knew his path would never feel so clear as it had when he’d been part of the Petrova Task Force.
She’d probably tell him to stop being a coward and get on the darn ship here, too.
Granted, nobody’s life but his own depended on this decision, so she might not have had anything to say after all. He still had no idea what he’d meant to Stratt other than a means to an end.
He thought they’d been friends.
Maybe they had been.
Grace shook himself, inhaling deeply and pushing his glasses back onto his nose.
Ultimately, he couldn’t make this decision based on what might be waiting for him on Earth because he had no idea. There was no way to know what was happening except by going there or by waiting more than a dozen years for Sol to brighten again.
So, that left the health angle.
If he stayed on Erid, he’d die. The math on that was clear. All trends pointed to him dying an ugly death from heavy metal poisoning if cardiac failure didn’t get him first. Actually, scratch that — getting a bone infection in his stupid leg that wouldn’t heal that turned septic would probably kill him first. That’s why Franklin had even brought up the idea of amputation in the first place.
Grace would really prefer not to lose a leg.
He would prefer not to die, too. He knew it had to happen eventually, but he’d prefer it to be far, far in the future, not practically imminent.
It really felt like he’d been living on death’s doorstep for the last few years.
It would be nice to be somewhere where the tiniest glitch in the system wouldn’t kill him immediately.
Where he wasn’t dying slowly, inch by inch, and making Rocky watch.
He started the laboring process of getting up with his crutches, grunting with effort. He was pretty sure he knew what he was going to do, but there were a few conversations he needed to have first.