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There were a handful of things in life that Dr. Captain Ryland Grace was confident about: the universal laws of physics, the beauty of Earth, and the fact that he was not a brave man. As he had told Commander Yao once, he just "didn't have the bravery gene." It wasn't something he possessed. That was okay. Certain kinds of people were brave, and Ryland Grace just wasn't one of them.
He never had been.
When Ryland was seven, he had watched through his fingers as his twin climbed to the top of the tallest tree in the backyard. Ryland had refused to do it, saying that it was too high and they were going to get hurt if they tried. He had been right in the end. Colt did get hurt, falling from halfway up the trunk when he slipped on his climb down. He broke his arm and had to spend months in a cast.
The fact that Ryland had been right, and had been the one to run and get Court while Colt lay on the ground crying, didn't change how it had started: with Ryland refusing to climb a tree because he was scared. That wasn't something a brave person did. Someone who was brave would have gone all the way to the top and declared their greatness, just as Colt had.
At seven years old, Ryland decided that he wasn't brave. And over the next couple of decades, he was proven correct time and time again.
A brave person wouldn't turn their face away, hiding it in an EMT's arms and refuse to look as their older brother was loaded into a police car because he protected him. A brave person wouldn't give in to the subtle blacklisting and repeated rejections by leaving academia for the classroom. A brave person wouldn't turn their back on their twin brother just because he got a little nasty after a life-altering injury.
Most importantly, a brave person didn't threaten to sabotage humanity's last, desperate hope just to selfishly save their own skin. They didn't try to run away when the entire world was counting on them, try to flee from the hopes and dreams of 8 billion people. And they certainly didn't beg for their life, tears streaming down their cheeks, as they were held face down in the dirt.
So no, Grace had never applied the label 'brave' to himself. That was an honor reserved for actually brave people: his brothers, Commander Yáo, Ilyukhina, and so many more. Not him.
He hadn't really told many people this, of course, because the few people he had told had a strange habit of trying to convince him that he was wrong. Colt had repeatedly argued with him about it as they were growing up. Commander Yáo hadn't believed him when Grace tried to tell him he didn't have the bravery gene that he and the other astronauts did. The rest of the crew had sat in that conference room and believed he would be brave enough, strong enough, to choose to save Earth over his own skin.
Even here, in space, the problem persisted. Rocky had told him he was brave during the conversation about returning to Earth, and even repeated it when they were parting ways. No matter where he went, people refused to believe that he wasn't brave.
Stratt was the only one who had. She had looked him in the eyes and called him a coward. And she was right. Grace had fully agreed with her, sitting in that office and condemning Earth to death.
But now?
He honestly wasn't so sure anymore.
Was this brave? Was turning around your space ship to go back for a friend who was potentially in danger a brave act? Was Yáo right when he had told him that he just needed to find someone to be brave for? Was Rocky that person?
Or was this a stupid choice? Would the people of Earth watch his final log, explaining his choice, and call him an idiot? Would the beetles even make it to Earth? Was he potentially dooming Earth to die by not escorting the beetles to their final destination himself?
Grace didn't know. He genuinely wasn't sure. He would probably be able to find an answer, if he dug through Mary's complete collection of all of humanity's philosophical and ethical writings throughout history. Aristotle at least, if Grace revisited the horror-days of his undergraduate ethics class, would definitely have something to say on the subject of bravery and sacrifice.
He honestly didn't care. The question of whether he was brave to turn around and go back for Rocky, to try and defy the ancient tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, wasn't a concern to him. It just wasn't his priority. Humanity would argue and debate it. Scholars would apply every bit of logic they could to the situation, analyze it from every ethical framework that there was.
But Ryland Grace was just a man. And his best friend was in danger.
The choice had never been easier.
"Rocky!" he yelled. Grace raised the wrench he had tied to his belt and swung it down again. The heavy metal bounced off the xenonite, sending impact tremors echoing up his bones. He repeated the movement again, and again, and again. "I'm here buddy! I'm on your hull!"
Nothing. There was no movement from inside the dark depths of Rocky's ship.
Grace's heart pounded. "Rocky, please! Say something, please!" he yelled as he continued to swing the wrench. His arms were going to ache the next day, but the pain would be nothing if it meant saving Rocky. "My EVA suit is on the same frequency as always! Say anything!"
Static. He sucked in a deep breath and swung the wrench again. Grace's mouth trembled, and his eyes began to water. He couldn't be too late. He couldn't be. He couldn't. If Rocky was dead, then so was Adrian, and his family, and all of Erid. So was his entire species. Grace couldn't have failed. His own mistake, his own failure to account for the xenonite tanks when breeding the taumoeba couldn't be the finishing blow of a whole species. It couldn't.
His best friend had to be alive. Grace wasn't sure what he'd do otherwise.
There was still no noise over the radio. There was still no change in the tunnel's darkness, nothing to indicate that Rocky was alive. He swallowed thickly and raised the wrench once more.
"Grace, question?"
Grace blinked, the wrench snapping to a halt mid-swing. "Rocky?" Grace murmured, his vision blurring slightly. He sucked in a shaky breath. "Yes, Rocky, it's me!"
"You are here, question?"
The darkness of the tunnel to Rocky's ship shifted, moving slightly. A single arm appeared, quickly followed by the rest of a stony carapace as familiar to Grace as breathing. Rocky drifted up to the barrier and collided gently with it. His claws latched onto the subtle divots and crevices in the xenonite, holding him steady.
He was alive. Rocky was alive. Grace had made it.
"I'm here buddy. I'm here," he murmured, reaching out one hand and resting it against the xenonite. Rocky echoed the motion they had both grown so fond of, and Grace's heart swelled. "I'm taking you to Erid."
Rocky trilled, a series of unknown notes echoing over the line. Grace frowned and Rocky paused, reconsidering his phrasing. "What about Earth, question?"
Yeah. That.
The metaphorical elephant in the room. In space? In the universe? He wasn't in a room, per se, right now. Whatever, it was just semantics.
"Saving," Grace hesitated, his throat thick. "Saving you was more important. I couldn't leave you to die in space, alone. I couldn't let all of Erid die."
Grace's heart stuttered, and a single tear slipped down one of his cheeks. He wasn't lying. The choice to turn back and save Rocky was one of the easiest choices he had ever made. But it still hurt. It hurt more than anything else Grace had ever done, and that was really saying something.
Of course it did. Earth was his home. He had grown up there. His brothers were still, hopefully, there and thriving. Grace hadn't wanted to give up the chance of ever seeing the way the sun set over a calm ocean on a foggy day again, or walking through a quiet forest, or running through fields of grass as tall as his hips. Most of all, he hadn't wanted to leave behind his brothers, his family.
But they would understand. Stratt, or whoever found the beetles, would show them the videos he had recorded specifically for them, and they would get it. He knew they would. They were his brothers after all.
"Besides," he chuckled wetly as the tears began to flow in earnest and pressed his gloved hand harder into the xenonite, "who would watch you sleep?" Rocky leaned his carapace towards the hand, pushing into the thin barrier separating them as if they would be able to touch if he tried hard enough. Grace had never wished more for something to be possible.
A flash of light glimmered in the edge of his vision, ripping his attention away from Rocky. Sudden light really wasn't good in space. It meant sparks that could potentially set fire to the dangerous pure-oxygen environment of the Hail Mary, or a sudden alarm going off, or, potentially most horrifying, another astrophage leak.
Not this time, apparently.
The small dot of light grew in size, enlarging until Grace could just barely make out the tint of green. It arced towards them faster than he could react, curling around his body again and again before finally slowing to a stop just in front of his helmet.
Huh?
"What Grace doing, question?"
Right. Rocky couldn't hear through the void of space. Sound didn't propagate. He would have no idea what happened, aside from Grace suddenly becoming distracted for some reason. At least Grace's hand was still pressed against the barrier. Rocky probably would have had a heart attack, or whatever the eridian equivalent was, if he had just vanished.
"A, well, uh." Grace opened and closed his mouth. He didn't have a good explanation for this. "A green ring just, um, flew out of nowhere and is hovering in front of me."
It was small, appearing to be just about the right size to fit on his finger like any normal ring. But normal rings didn't appear from the void, fly, or glow green. That defied the basic principles of physics he knew.
"Green, question?"
"Medium-rough texture," Grace corrected himself. Stupid mistake. "It's also glowing, and looks like–"
A soft, almost mechanical-sounding trill cut Grace off. "Ryland Grace," a robotic voice spoke, much like Mary. The words echoed in his head, bouncing around his skull as if they had somehow come from everywhere at once. "You have shown the ability to overcome great fear. Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps."
The what?
The ring never seemed to stop glowing. It hadn't dimmed even a fraction in the whole three days it took to properly reconnect Rocky's ship to the Hail Mary and move him and all of his luggage inside. As far as Grace could tell, it was still exactly the same as when it first flew in front of him.
Actually, that was really the only thing he could tell about it. As soon as Rocky was settled again, and they were safely on course for Erid, Grace had begun investigating it. He had basically the best laboratory ever built in the history of humanity, and an impossible space ring in front of him. Why not really put the lab to the test?
That was what Grace had thought, at least. Studying the ring was somehow worse than the astrophage. All forms of spectroscopic analysis showed absolutely nothing. When he pointed the XRF gun at the ring, it just… glitched? Nothing showed up on the little screen, an impossibility. Similarly, his UV-Vis spectrophotometer didn't pick up any atomic transitions.
If Grace couldn't see the ring with his own eyes, and feel it when he picked it up and moved it around, he would have said it didn't exist.
The ring also seemed impenetrable to every single attempt to burn, melt, or freeze it. None of the radiation he shot at it could penetrate it, or reacted in any discernible way with whatever material it was made of. He could float it in water, and it weighed about as much as a normal ring would, but that was really all Grace could figure out.
Well, about the physical make-up at least. He certainly learned a lot from the ring's constant talking.
The most notable fact he had learned was that the ring wasn't actually speaking. Or projecting audio in any manner he could tell. There were no speakers, and audio recorders hadn't picked up anything. It was, somehow, accurate to say that the ring was just transmitting its words straight into his own brain and automatically translating it into English, or whatever language was applicable. Rocky had been quick to inform him that he actually heard the ring speaking Eridian.
It only ever seemed to repeat the same phrase though: "Ryland Grace, you have shown the ability to overcome great fear. Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps."
Wasn't that a strange, and somehow both exiting and terrifying thought? What sort of device could translate between every language and connect directly to the brain? Not to mention the fact that it didn't seem to exist according to any test he could do. It was a complete and utter simultaneous mystery and marvel! Or, it would be, if Grace could figure out literally anything else about the stupid thing.
He groaned and reached up to rub at the temples of his head, before returning his gaze to the microscope before him.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Grace didn't stop working. Tapping was a fairly common sound on the Hail Mary. Both he and Rocky had a tendency to make noises while they worked, a trait that humans and Eridians seemingly shared. That realization had caused a very long, very intense, and very fascinating discussion on differences in unconscious behavior between the two species. Grace still had to write up the results of that discussion and format it into an official paper.
No other human would ever read the paper of course. But still. For his own sanity.
Tapping, in particular, was an unconscious sound that both he and Rocky gravitated towards. Grace also tended to hum songs under his breath, and Rocky had an interesting proclivity for scratching his hard fingers against xenonite. As far as Grace could understand, it was something similar to the feeling of running the pads of your fingers along the wall as you walked. Fascinating.
But regardless, the point was that tapping was a normal, and entirely expected sound. Grace didn't think anything of it. At first.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Grace?" Rocky broke the calm silence in the laboratory.
Grace still didn't look up from the microscope. He turned the ring over in his hands, frowning. There was still no clearly structure. Nothing. He couldn't see anything but a perfectly smooth surface.
"Yeah bud? What's up?" he responded to Rocky without really paying attention.
A normal ring, when placed under a microscope, would show some form of variation. Metals weren't perfectly smooth on a small-scale. There were tiny imperfections, usually in the form of microscopic scratches that weren't visible to the naked eye. If you had a good enough microscope with very high resolutions, as he obviously did, you could even start to see grain structure, fracture surfaces, or complex crystals.
But this ring, to the best of Grace's ability, appeared to be truly perfect. There wasn't a single scratch anywhere on the surface. His high-resolution microscopes, even his electron-scanning microscope, couldn't see anything but a flat, smooth surface. The curves were impossibly smooth, forming a perfect circle. Even the corners and edges of the emblem on the top were perfect. No chips, dings, nothing. Its corners were exactly 90 degrees.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Grace," Rocky repeated, a bit more forcefully this time.
This ring shouldn't exist. Every other test Grace had run had already convinced him of that, but this was just the final nail in the coffin. Nothing could be this perfect. It was physically, scientifically, impossible. Perfection was a myth.
Until now, apparently.
"Grace!" Rocky said again, his musical tones crescendoing into a pitch that rattled Grace's eardrums.
Grace hissed and finally ripped his head away from the microscope. "What?" he snapped, whirling around to glare at Rocky. "I'm trying to–"
Oh. Rocky had apparently abandoned the air pump he was working on in favor of just pointing out the lab door. Strange. Rocky was normally so focused on his work though? What could cause him to put down his latest project?
He turned, following the arc of his best friend's finger. On the far side of the hallway leading out of the lab was a small, circular window into the infinite abyss. Grace blinked. He rubbed his eyes, paused, and rubbed them again. There was no change.
It was a man. Like, a human man. A human being. On the other side of the Hail Mary's window, in the middle of space. He had no spacesuit. But he was somehow in space, perfectly fine. A human. With no suit. Oh, and he was glowing green.
The man smiled and waved through the window. "Mind letting me in?" the ring, still laying on the glass slide he had placed it on, spoke in his mind.
Grace screamed.
It turns out that letting a glowing green man with no spacesuit into your spaceship, while in the middle of space, really isn't that hard. Grace just had to cycle the airlock and let the guy on board. That was it. Just like any normal spacewalk. Except, well, without the spacesuit part.
That was actually, really, the thing that was getting to him. Not exactly surprising, considering the tiny fact that they were in space. People can't survive in space. That's not a thing. You can't just go into space with no protection and live. Humans weren't tardigrades, or even astrophage!
Grace took a deep breath as he opened the door. Breath in, breath out. In, out. Calm down. Think straight. Or, try to at least. This entire thing may be a bit too insane to actually think straight.
Okay. The man had been glowing when Grace saw him through the window. But as soon as he stepped inside the Hail Mary and the airlock safely closed behind him, the faint green aura faded from view. Was that the spacesuit? Somehow? Green light? Never mind the fact that even the idea of a shade of light being a spacesuit didn't make any sense. Whatsoever. At all.
The important thing was that the light faded, leaving just a normal-looking man. A human man. He was dressed really weirdly, with what looked like some sort of uniform covering his entire body. His chest and boots were green, but his legs and most of his arms were black, and his hands covered in white gloves. All of the pieces appeared to be connected to each other, like a massive bodysuit. A mask covered his eyes for some reason and it kinda reminded Grace of those old superhero comics, like Bucky Barnes or those Umbrella Academy Kids. A massive emblem covered the middle of his chest like a badge.
Aside from the strange fashion sense, he appeared to just be a normal man. Who was somehow in space, 13 light years away from Earth.
Grace had seen some exceptionally odd things in his time aboard the Hail Mary. This, however, had to take the cake for 'weirdest thing he had ever seen.'
"Wow, it's really you. Dr. Ryland Grace himself," the man murmured and held out his hand. Grace took the hand in a daze. "I'm Hal. Hal Jordan."
"Uh," he started. Great. Way to go Grace. First human in… way too long, let's leave it and that, and your first words are uh? Nice job. "Ryland. Dr. Ryland Grace. But you somehow already knew that, I guess."
Hal's grip was firm and steady. It reminded Grace a bit of Carl's grip, or Captain Yáo's grip. Strong and confident. Even through Hal's gloves, Grace could still feel the warmth of his skin. This was real. Grace was really, actually, talking to and touching another human being for the first time in a number of years that he really didn't want to think about.
His lips began to tremble, and he swallowed thickly.
"And what's your name?" Hal asked, dropping Grace's hand and turning to speak to Rocky. His best friend had rushed into his ball, rolling to a stop just beside Grace's legs as if he were guarding him. It was adorable.
"I am Rocky, from Erid!" Rocky introduced himself, the musical notes filling the air. No words followed them. Right. Grace had turned off the translator in an attempt to practice his Eridian, since he, y'know, would be going to Erid now. Forever.
"He said–"
"Oh, Erid? I was there just last week, speaking with the diplomacy thrum. We were trying to negotiate a trade agreement between Erid and a couple other planets," Hal jumped in before Grace could even try to translate for Rocky. "Erid still needs to have a few more thrums before they come to an agreement on whether they should accept it, but they're getting close!"
…….What?
"You– you can understand him?" Grace interrupted before Hal could begin explaining the terms of the treaty. "Wha– how– huh?" He only felt mildly bad about cutting off Rocky's chance of hearing news from Erid. Rocky could ask about Erid later. Figuring out what exactly was going on came first.
Hal chuckled softly. "It's the ring. It has this universal translator feature installed on it. Pretty handy actually, considering how many languages I have to work in every day. I'd never be able to learn them all." He shrugged and crossed his arms in front of his chest, adjusting his stance slightly. "It also comes in handy during diplomatic discussions. I've saved more than a handful of treaties, just by being able to correct bad translations in documents."
Was Grace dying? Was he hallucinating? Was this all some sort of dream? Had he finally cracked and gone insane? Because none of this made sense, in any manner of the word.
He glanced down at Hal's hand, then looked over his shoulder at the ring on his lab table. Sure enough, Hal was wearing what appeared to be a carbon-copy of the ring that had bonked Grace in the head only a few days ago.
Actually, now that he was thinking about it, the emblem on the front of Hal's green and black uniform was the exact same as the symbol on top of the ring. How had he not noticed that before? Stress, probably. Tunnel-vision, disbelief, preoccupation with the fact that he was seeing another human again. Understandable, really, but still.
"You have one too," he finally managed to get out. Grace's voice was soft and shaky. Oh god. Rocky pressed his ball into his legs
Hal sighed. "Yeah. That's, uh, that's actually why I'm here." Hal paused, rubbing at the back of his neck for a moment. But then he straightened up and squared his shoulders. Oh. This was serious, wasn't it? "I'm Hal Jordan, Green Lantern #1 of Sector 2438. I have been sent by the Guardians of the Universe to escort you to Oa to begin your requisite training. You haven't reported for duty, so you've gotten yourself a personal escort," he finished with a one-sided shrug and tilt of his head.
Yeah, so, that didn't explain anything at all. Great. Thanks so much.
"Green Lanterns? Guardians? Oa?" Grace prodded, raising an eyebrow. He crossed his arms. "You're going to have to give me more than that before I, somehow, go anywhere with you. Not that I can. We only barely have enough fuel to make it to Erid. Besides," he narrowed his eyes, "none of this explains how there's another human here, in space. Where did you come from, and how did you get here?"
"Yeah, of course. You wouldn't see this coming, would you?" Hal smiled sadly at him. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly, before opening them again. "You haven't been on Earth in a long time, Dr. Grace. A lot of things have changed, and we're far more connected to the rest of the universe than we were when you left. But, Dr. Grace," Hal paused, locking eyes with him. "I promise, after we visit Oa and you give me a chance to explain everything, I'll take you home. I'll take you back to Earth."