Chapter Text
One minute, Grace is on the Hail Mary, about to eat his daily allotment of taumoeba-meal, with Rocky in another compartment of the ship, tinkering with some Xenonite gadget or another. Then, between one blink and the next, he’s in what looks like a home theatre, surrounded by humans, people he hasn’t seen in Sol-knows how long.
He can recognise Stratt; her face has haunted his dreams for years now, since he first remembered how she forced him onto the Hail Mary. He has to do a double take at some of the people he sees. Yao and Illyukhina were not only here, but alive in a way they had only been in his memories. Carl was here as well, but he seemed more secondary to the people that Grace had last seen as he was sending their corpses off to the surrounding stars. Then, there’s a bit of commotion when someone, who sounded like Grace, actually, if he were 30 years older, makes a little broken sound then says, “Ryland?”
Everyone freezes, like they’re all of a sudden realizing that this might be a Thing ™ . Stratt glances over the assorted people, mentally cataloging everything she could. The man in the corner, holding a bowl of indeterminate sludge with a spoon halfway to his mouth, face almost unchanged from the last time she saw it, with a metal rectangle strapped to his back that almost looked like a keyboard. The older man standing roughly ten feet away from her, looking exactly like Dr. Grace would have, had he aged three decades overnight, blue eyes staring at the ghost in the corner with a lost expression on his face. She took in the appearances of Dr. Lamai and Dr. Lokken, both looking decades younger than she had last seen them. She had to double take at Carl’s appearance; she had not seen him since the Taskforce “Officially” disbanded after launch, since he had been a hire from the U.S.A.’s security forces and quickly been swallowed in the turmoil following the launch as countries did their best to amass resources before things went completely off the rails.
Grace cleared his voice. “So… Does anyone here know what’s going on?” He asked, foot tapping twice to punctuate his query. He swallowed another spoonful of sludge as he looked around the room. “No one? We should probably look around to see if we can find anything.”
Everyone looked around the room, trying to see if there was any way out, or any indication of what had brought them together. After half an hour passed, they had not found anything, and Grace was getting antsy. Rocky wasn’t here, and the last time they had been completely away from each other the Blip-A had Taumoeba eating its way through the fuel lines. Then, like whatever had brought them there had sensed his anxiety, Grace heard some distinctly familiar whalesong coming from behind him, and turned, quick as a whip.
Behind him, Rocky was frantically scuttling towards a much larger, green Eridian, both of them in suits that looked like a closer-fitting version of the Xenonite suit Rocky had been prototyping for the past few months before… whatever this was. Rocky was warbling a string of chords Grace recognised from the conversation they had in the “Don’t Go Crazy” room as his mate’s name.
As they’ve approached Erid, Grace has been using Eridanian more and more as Rocky has been getting him accustomed to speaking it with the Xenonite Keyboard he’s currently wearing on his back. Grace pushed past the realization that he had not had the keyboard near him before his transport to wherever this theatre was and swung it around to his front. He let Rocky babble at Adrian for a bit before he interrupted as politely as he could for a clumsy human.
“So, Rocky, are you going to introduce us?” He asked, finger flitting across chords with practiced ease with his foot tapping twice for emphasis. Lamai, Yao, and Illyukhina looked at him like he was insane, but he waved them off as Rocky finally turned towards him, almost bouncing in excitement.
“Friend Grace! This is Mate Adrian! They are a scientist, like you!” Rocky honest-to-god chirped. Grace could only smile as he played a greeting to the larger Eridian, blue eyes glinting in awe as he took in Adrian’s appearance. Where Rocky was smooth, Adrian was more spiky; and towering over everyone present at a staggering 18 feet tall. On their glittering carapace, different shades of green and teal swirled across the surface with small bits of rust-red throughout, unknowingly mimicking the planet that had been named after them.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Adrian!” Grace said, speaking English in a calculated move to more quickly humanize the Eridians to the people around them as he played the corresponding chords. “Rocky could hardly stop talking about you on our way to Erid.”
“Mate Rocky is much excited,” Adrian responded, their voice a deep baritone that rumbled through Grace’s body. “They are quiet for an Eridian. Last time Mate Rocky was so talkative was when courting Adrian. Much thanks are to be given to Star-Savior Grace for this.”
Grace flushed, “Best Friend Rocky is not giving himself enough credit. Grace can think of five times in the past year alone that he’s saved me, and that’s not including anything we did with the Astrophage problem.” Adrian gave a low chirping noise that Grace recognised as laughter. “Why funny, question?” Grace tapped his foot twice.
“Star-Savior Grace use Mate Rocky term for 𝀆♬♮𝀄♪𝅘𝅥𝅰𝆺𝅥𝅯𝆷𝅝𝅔,” Adrian hummed. “In polite Eridanian, you essentially called it ‘gross-liquid-space-goop.’”
Grace glared playfully at Rocky. “I feel like I should have known, he said his Eridanian was more informal than proper when I started learning how to speak proper Eridanian.”
An exaggerated cough cut through the conversation happening between the Eridian and the Erid-bound human. “Sorry to interrupt, but do you mind explaining what exactly you’re doing, Dr. Grace?”
Grace looked over to the humans standing awkwardly around him, and he gave a little embarrassed trill. “Sorry, sorry, sorry! Grace-,” he cut himself off and shook his head, reorganizing his words into proper English for the first time in years. “I mean, I’m being rude. These two,” he said, gesturing with his free hand towards the two Eridians, “are Rocky and Adrian.”
Carl did a double take. “Like from the movie?”
Grace flushed. “Not… initially. I met Rocky first, and had we not been here, I would not have met Adrian for another month, at least. They’re from the 40-Eridani system!” He smiled brightly before frowning pensively, fingers resting on a contemplative tone. “Actually, I have a question, too. Spatial displacement isn’t too unusual, since both of our species have developed interstellar travel, so it stands to reason that a more resilient or developed species may have discovered or developed teleportation.” His fingers combined the Eridanian chords for ‘instant-movement-different-place’ together for the new word between him and Rocky. Grace then looked towards Yao and Illyukhina. “However temporal displacements have no such precedence; which begs the question: When are you from?”
Yao and Illyukhina looked at each other in confusion. “’When,’ is a strange question, yes? We are in quarantine before final launch. Or, we were.” Illyukhina spoke, her voice lilting in confusion. “Why are you asking, Dr. Grace?” Grace shrugged before responding, his eyes greedily drinking in the people he had last seen as yellow bits of space dust as their bodies were sent off to the stars.
“To be perfectly blunt; last time I saw you, Illyukhina, and you, Yao, in person, you were no longer among the living.” Grace leaned into Rocky, separated only by a thin Xenonite suit for comfort. “Speaking of, I owe you three bags of Vodka.” Illyukhina and Carl made faces simultaneously.
“You drank my Vodka?!” Illyuhina complained.
“You drank three bags of vodka?!” Carl spluttered incredulously.
“That’s really besides the point, there are more important things to worry about right now.” Grace responded, before twirling around to face the man who had called out to him earlier. “Court, right? Sorry if I get anything wrong or don’t remember things. My memory was pretty fried when I woke up from the coma, and there are some things I probably won’t ever get back, or get back fully.”
The man Ryland had called “Court” choked. “Close, Ry,” He said, voice rough with suppressed emotion as he swiped at eyes that hadn’t yet begun to leak. “Court was our older brother. We’re twins, me and you. Colt and Ryland.” Grace snapped his fingers in recognition.
“I remember now; we used to switch back and forth during elementary school whenever we could get away with it, then you decided you wanted to climb a tree one day and broke your leg, so we had to stop.” Ryland play-glared at him. “I also remember that you liked playing the ‘long lost brother’ thing in college to pick up girls.”
“That was a long time ago, Ry.” Colt sighed. “Do you remember Jodi? We got married about 20 years ago, after the launch. We have two girls, now.” Grace, ever the leaky space blob, started tearing up.
“What are they like? My nieces, I mean.”
Colt smiled at his brother, 30 years of stress seeming to lift from him as he spoke to his brother for the first time in decades. “Riley and Courtney. They’re graduating high school next spring, though Riley takes after her namesake and is officially done with High-school courses by the end of the first semester.” He chuckled. “She plans on going into Eco-Biology.”
Adrian gently bumped into Grace’s back. “Star-Savior Grace leaking question? Is leak good leak or bad leak, question?” Ryland wiped his eyes, patting the top of Rocky’s carapace as best he could through the Xenonite suit he’d worn.
“Good leak, very good leak, Friend Adrian.” Grace warbled in Eridanian; sounding like a pebble with his limited vocal chords. “I’ve missed you, Colt,” he added in English, stepping forward to hug his last blood family left. As soon as Colt’s arms closed around him, Grace just melted into his brother’s embrace, barely holding himself back from sobbing in relief as the simple feeling of touching another living human.
The other humans in the room were looking away from the reunion, trying to give them some semblance of privacy. Well, all but one.
Stratt was laser focused on the two, eyes catching on the way their noses crinkled when they were about to cry; the way Colt had gray hair spotting his temple while Ryland was still completely blonde; the way they grasped onto each other like they were the last people on Earth. Eva waved away the thought that, for Ryland, he may very well be. She had committed everything she could of Ryland to her memory, after the launch, and though she had not known it at the time, had callously told him “You don’t have any family, you don’t even have a dog.” Not even a week after Colt Seavers, Stuntman extraordinaire, rather successfully faked his death. Eva Stratt was not a person who regretted anything; but she had replayed those moments over and over in her head, mentally grappling with the ghost of the man she knew she killed as she wondered if she would have softened the blow, had she known; even as she knew she would have intentionally twisted that knife if it meant the Earth itself survived.
After the brothers finished “having a moment,” Grace, as energetic as a man on Taumoeba could be, clung to his brother with an arm as he waved Dr. Lamai and Dr. Lokken over. “I haven’t seen you since the meeting after--”
An earsplitting alarm blared through the room, causing both Eridian and Human alike to flinch and do their best to cover their audio receptors. Then a voice rang out, speaking Eridanian and English simultaneously.
“Take your seats and it shall begin.” The voice reverberated through their skulls and carapaces.
Without being fully conscious of it, everyone found themselves sitting in seats not dissimilar to theatre chairs; the only exceptions being Grace, who was sitting on a large, plush beanbag sofa on the floor, the two Eridians, both as close to each other and Grace as physically possible through the Xenonite, and Colt, who had refused to let his brother go and was seated next to him.
The room dimmed as the screen lit up for the first time; Red and blue flashing across the screen as… whatever they were watching began.