Chapter Text
(Rocky had been a long ways from home. Even farther away from his home than Grace was.)
Grace would have enough food left in the Mary to make it to Earth, just barely.
He has enough to get back to Earth. He won’t have enough to make it to Erid with Rocky.
It isn’t new knowledge, of course. Grace had known well before he turned back around to go save Rocky. It was okay. He had accepted it and made peace with it. Genuinely, this time.
Rocky had not.
Grace had tried to fight it, to argue; Rocky deserved to go home. He needed to. Rocky had been alone for half a century, truly alone and all by himself. He had a mate he loved so deeply, and a family and friends and a world to go back to that would still have his place in it.
Grace is truly happy to be able to provide that for Rocky even if he doesn’t get to see the reunion himself. The knowledge that it will happen is more than enough. Rocky is more than intelligent enough to keep the Mary functioning until they reach Erid, even without a human around to operate it. He would make it home in the ship, even though his own Blip-A had been overrun. Rocky could go home.
But.
No, Rocky said.
It had been genuine hours of yelling, sharp crinkling and whistling and furious vibrating as Rock began systematically tearing Grace’s arguments into tiny, pathetic little pieces. No, they would not go to Erid so that Grace could die on the way there and leave Rocky alone again. No, Rocky would not abandon Grace to the cold of space for the rest of time. No, he would not let Grace die when he didn’t have to. He had been livid that Grace had even entertained the possibility, and so the lecture lasted until Grace was laughing and sobbing and full body trembling.
Futilely, he’d shoved his chest against his knees with as much force as he could, hands running distraught claws through his hair as he fought not to tug at it in overwhelm. He grinned and cried and apologized until his lungs hurt and felt so relieved his head was light.
Only when he was satisfied his message had been fully communicated, Rocky had settled. He’d pinned Grace to the floor, carefully laid down to trap him but not crush him. “Human so messy,” he’d crooned, exasperated and soft. “Clearly feel many emotion at once, but still only one way to speak at once. Inefficient.”
Hiccuping laughter. Grace laughed. His stomach hurt with anxiety and guilt and fear. They’d split up the probes. Two for Earth just in case, and two for Erid.
He’s gonna go home. Rocky is bringing him home, and Grace cries.
Rocky is extremely angry at Eva Stratt.
Grace, who had spent as long as reasonably possible before explaining the full impact she had had on his current situation… Kind of understands?
He considers being angry. He remembers being small and bitter and vibrating with rage all the time, and how everything had made him hurt and upset, and being angry resulted. God, he had been an angry kid. He’d been miserable. When his life had been blowing up time and time again and then culminated shortly before a conference in Denmark, he had been angry all the time, too. Ryland hated feeling angry.
It made him feel reckless and unreliable and dangerous and vaguely ill. He did not like to feel angry, and it has been a long time since he has been genuinely angry. He snaps sometimes, still, temper flaring out of his control at the stupidest things. It never fails to make him feel like a scolded child, something embarrassing and twisting settling inside him. It flashes hot and bright in his chest and he kicks things like a child or snaps at people who don’t deserve it, so he tries not to be angry.
He… should be angry at Eva Stratt, he thinks. Rocky certainly thinks that Grace should be. But it has been months now, of time he has spent thinking about it and rationalizing and remembering and examining. He is not angry at her. It makes him strange, he’s sure. But there are a lot of other things that make him even stranger, and Grace can’t find it in himself to care enough to be angry at Eva just because he probably should. Rocky has it covered enough for both of them, anyways.
If he had to describe his feelings, it would just be… upset. He had been… scared. Ryland had been very, very scared.
(Rocky throws himself into a xenonite wall with enough force to startle Grace upwards, the first and then only time that he had called himself a coward in front of him. Not coward, he had hissed. Brave, brave, brave, brave-
“Okay, okay, Rock, jeez- Okay!”)
Three hours, he thinks as he stares at uninteresting ceiling panels of the Hail Mary. He had been given three hours to make a choice he couldn’t actually make, and that’s the part that gets him.
He thinks he might have known, on some level. That it had been an option, a possibility. It had been buried under the firm and solid belief that- Why? He was not the man who could do anything to save the world, so why would he be sent-
Why offer a choice, though, when Ryland already did anything Stratt ordered. Why lie and let him choose and then let him run like escaped prey only to be held down and shot. Why let him think he could choose, why give him an impossible decision for three hours only to not care.
He feels small and too-full and ashamed, and he curls his hands into fists so tightly that they shake. He scowls and takes a deep breath and tries to soothe himself; anger isn’t an inherently ugly emotion.
She could have just ordered him, he thinks, and it makes his body hurt to think about. She’d known he was a coward. She should have known he wouldn’t be able to say yes.
Three hours. Human brains are so irrational. Certainly his own is no shining example, he got worked up if he had to change his dinner plans too unexpectedly. So. Three hours, Grace, and decide. Go through the required chemical and biological processes to understand this decision and its ramifications in a logical and coherent state and accept it. Flood with adrenaline and cortisol and make a rational choice about the most important mission in the world. Everything you understand about what you must do needs to change as drastically as possible and you are going to die within the conscious year, but you must agree, and you are terribly afraid.
Don’t agree.
Go anyway.
He shoves his shaking hands underneath his cardigan.
Let him say no and then not care-
He doesn’t enjoy anger, no, but it’s illogical to assume he could be successful in entirely ridding himself of it. Some part inside him still howls and rages, pleads and screams how, how, how could you do this to me? How could you betray me like this?
But it fades fast and quick, because he knows how. He knows why.
It was the right decision to send him. Ryland knows that. No one else had been more qualified than him even though his brain screams in an imposter-syndrome type affect that he’s blinded by. It feels blatantly and catastrophically untrue, but listing data points out, it is true. Look at the matter objectively. He was best for the given job and the given job was dramatically important. Even if he had been given enough time to actually rationally think about going and had still disagreed, sending him by force would have been right.
He’s not angry with Stratt for it. He can’t be. Rage sits inside him at the injustice and simple unfairness of it all, but he couldn’t blame her for her choice.
It had been for everything.
(Rocky is slightly less angry, after this discussion.
“It’s my entire world, Rocky,” he had rasped. “It wasn’t just, just me or someone else. It wasn’t me or a different team, or- it’s everything. This was our only chance. It’s every living person and animal and ecosystem, from billions of years ago to now. It is every- every story we have ever told, it is every evolution that an entire world has seen, every discovery we’ve made, every piece of art we’ve created, all the history we’ve written. It’s gonna freeze and starve everyone who lives there and any possibility of further life. A whole world gone extinct because it can’t support life anymore. Against- against one person. It’s not… It doesn’t matter that I didn’t want to die. It was me or a world. Not just… some hypothetical.”
Slightly less angry, but only slightly.
He had asked Grace how he was able to forgive Stratt. How he could tolerate his ♩♫♩♩♩♫♫ sending him away.
Grace had paused. “It’s not ‘forgive,” he had settled on eventually, quiet. “‘Forgive’ is an act. It means you consciously choose to let go of those things like anger or bitterness, and stop feeling them. You move on, and then you get that emotional relief. But I don’t need to forgive her. I never was angry at all, really, even if I should have been. Not at that.”)
She hadn’t been happy to send him, either. It hurts. Deeply and cruelly, it hurts to think about her sending him to go die alone a dozen lightyears away, but he looks back now and knows that her voice had cracked and her eyes had been wet and that she had begged him to understand the impossible dilemma she’d had to make. He wishes that he had been less overwrought with emotion at the time so that he could look back and remember more clearly how deeply upset she was. He hadn’t ever seen her a fraction as distraught, he knows still. He wishes that he had been brave enough to make it less difficult for her. He wishes he had been brave enough that she could have just told him and not given him a false freedom. It would have been easier on them both.
All of that combined, and, no, Grace isn’t angry at her. He certainly should be, he knows. Emotions aren’t supposed to be logic and rationale fueled, and they often show up even if you understand the given circumstances. He should, in theory, understand Stratt’s decision and still be angry. Normal people would be, he knows. He certainly has been ostracized or looked upon differently in the past for not agreeing with the generally accepted way to ‘do’ emotions. It doesn’t change how the weight of heavy emotion settles in him. While Grace hurts, irrevocably, it doesn’t sit in fury like Rocky’s.
Betrayal, maybe.
Grief. Shame.
She hadn’t wanted to send him but she had let her men pin him to the ground while he fought and screamed and pleaded. She had stood above him in that conference room and told him he wouldn’t be missed. She’d let him choose and then torn that choice away from him anyway. Those parts… sink into him a lot closer to anger.
(But but but-
But the ship computer knows his coffee order, and all of his favorite shirts have been packed, and his flight suit doesn’t have the itchy, irritating lining along the back that the others did. But there’s ramen packed that she thought was disgusting, and there are several packs of Twizzlers even though they’re weight-dense. But there’s piles of his student’s art and letters and a small fox keychain he’d never seen before.
But there’s a small, soft world in his hands that he imagines he can still feel the residual heat of her palm around.
But Eva had always taken care of him in the best ways that they could afford.)
And now he’s going home. He will, hopefully, make it before he starves to death.
It will have been long enough that Eva Stratt could have died.
That hurts viscerally, too, and so Grace tries not to think about it too much. He just curls into himself tighter, throws himself further into whatever he and Rocky are getting into that given day, and runs away from that problem, too.
(He decides, eventually; he isn’t angry at her for sending him to space.
Sending him to space had been a necessary evil that he’s sure she hadn’t wanted to do, either, and it had been to save people. The other things that she had done in those last few hours on Earth, however…
There is a pinch in his chest and makes him feel nauseous when he recalls with all too vivid clarity the terror of waking up not knowing who he was, or why the only people around him were long dead and he couldn’t place their names but he knew how they laughed when walking into a room, or why he was in empty, empty open space. Anger at Stratt is closer within his grasp when he is unable to force the sense-memories away. He had been so, so scared. He’d been entirely and completely utterly alone from his entire world and he couldn’t even remember his own name and it had been awful. The first few days he had barely coasted by in a state of world-ending terror and confusion and loss, and it had been Stratt’s fault. She didn’t have to take his memory away. His mind was all he had, and she’d just locked it away. Just threw it out like it didn’t matter.
And Ryland couldn’t even try to fathom why without shame so intense he couldn’t breathe overcoming him. She must have thought he’d sabotage the mission or something else equally catastrophic. This is the only logical explanation he can settle on. She must have thought he really was that selfish and cowardly and that he would be so furious at his own betrayal that he’d abandon the last hope of humanity.
Surely after all of the time they spent together, after the years he spent working as hard as he possibly could have to help, she should have trusted him at least that much. She should have had at least a little faith in his character. He could have at least been left his own identity if he was to lose all else.
(This may seem like me betraying you, but it’s actually me believing in you.
Sure feels like you’re betraying me.
Don’t make this harder, please.)
He had been alone and frightened and abandoned but she could at least have trusted him to not be the most selfish bastard in existence. That makes him upset, he supposes. Angry. Yes. But that way also sits a swirling wall of self-loathing and shame so caustic that he doesn’t dare linger in for fear of what it would do to him. What is the point in feeling rage at Stratt when the thing that makes him angry at her makes him want to kill himself first?
Coward, he thinks with a dull cynicism. She was right. He’d always been running and hiding and fleeing and maybe she was right that he could have run away from the Project. He can’t even handle thinking about his own flaws.
You know who you are, Carl had told him, but Grace can’t think about Carl either. It’s unfair, unjust, and internally Grace rages at himself for the way he can so easily let go of Stratt’s missteps but thinking about Carl makes him so angry. Grace doesn't think about Carl, nor about his words that had meant to be encouraging but just made him remember hands bruising his arms and dirt on his chin and screaming in fear and being told you know who you are. It hurts. He runs away from it.
He’s angry at what Stratt had said in that conference room, and this part he admits easily. It had been wrong and cruel of her to say those things. To imply that a life - his life - was less inherently valuable because it didn’t conform to the ways that it was meant to. He didn’t have a pet, he didn’t have a family, no. Maybe people really wouldn’t miss him, even if it would be nice to pretend that he had at least had friends or allies in a way. It didn’t matter, though, because what right did Stratt have to decide that a lonely life was one less valuable than the other?
It irritates him. It strikes at insecurities he has spent decades trying to come to terms with. It wasn’t even a good argument, he thinks, because he knows Stratt despite what she might sometimes pretend. She was like him. He was like her. And he knows that Stratt doesn’t actually think those things. She is not nearly as heartless as she pretended to be and he has seen her soul more than any other person on Earth.
So it had been, what? A childish attempt to irritate him? To discomfort him until he weakened and let her pry at the cracks in his armor even more, like he wouldn’t have let her slide a knife between his ribs if she only asked? It had hurt, to her credit.
It irritates him. Angers him, the way that she had suddenly pretended that there was something wrong with the two of them. With however many other people in the world were like the two of them. And it makes him bitter because she was such a liar sometimes. As if him having family or dependents would have kept him on Earth anyway; Stratt said, so the world jumped.
But that isn’t some life-changing, betraying anger. He’s just annoyed at her, and mad at her stupidity. He’ll get over it after fifteen minutes of passive aggressiveness and snappy comments, just the same he could have if he had stayed on Earth and dealt with the repercussions there.
If he sees her again, he has no way to ascertain whether or not his feelings will change. Maybe he’ll get back and see her, and be furious. Knowing that he’s prone to fits of rage doesn’t make it any easier to prevent them. Maybe he will want to scream and shout at her, rant and rage. He hopes not; it sounds awful. The anger he already feels is more than heavy enough inside his gut.
Forgiveness was a conscious decision, he had told Rocky, and so Grace takes time to consider it.
She’d given him agency and then torn it away in an awful way, terrifying and humiliating and cold. He’s mad at her for that. There’s residual anger at the betrayal. He’s upset at her stupid comments. He is mad at her, he discovers. She had made choices that hurt him, consciously and purposefully. She was the person he knew and loved best on Earth, and she had looked at him and told him that no one on Earth would miss him. He can’t look at Armando for too long because he remembers a needle stabbing dangerously into his neck and then waking up raw from breathing and NG tubes, scratched and prickly feeling from IVs he’d torn out in frantic desperation. He still wakes breathless and crying because even though he thinks he’s remembered everything, he can’t be sure.
He… wants to forgive her. Anger sits uncomfortable in him. He wants to forgive her. He doesn’t know yet if he does.
So. Yeah, he is angry at Stratt. Not, he faintly thinks with some amusement, for sending him on a suicide mission, though.)
“...I’m sorry that you aren’t going to get to see Adrian for even longer.”
“Don’t be stupid, statement. Rocky has explained already.”
“I know, just- I know that you miss them. It’s already been so long, and I hate that because of me it will be even longer.”
“Don’t be stupid, statement. Because of Grace I get to see Adrian again at all. Will be longer, yes. Rather longer to see Adrian and Erid than let Grace-Savior die and see them sooner. Not even question.”
“...”
“I send message already, with Beetles. Adrian will understand, would make same choice. I will send another message in few years, if can, or will wait longer too. I miss Adrian, yes, but I would miss Grace-dead more, and more permanently. Human brain stupid! I told you already, don’t be stupid. Statement.”
“...Thank you, Rocks.”
They make it into his solar system, and Grace sobs for so long that Rocky has to threaten to get Armando involved over fear of dehydration making him even sicker.
His mind is blurry and vague and weak most of the time now. He stares at Venus and wonders if the teams back on Earth have managed to send the taumoeba yet. If the beetles arrived okay, if the trip was any good to begin with. He doesn’t know how he would begin to deal with it if he’d done all this, taken Rocky home with him, if he couldn’t even manage to save anyone.
He stares at the sun - his sun - until his eyes water and he’s on the verge of triggering a migraine. He can’t find it within himself to hate the sun, for all he kind of wants to. The sun was just a victim in this. The taumoeba was just a creature, too. It wasn’t malicious.
They were all just trying to survive.
He worries for hours over what to say first. At what point his comm signals, surely outdated by this point, would reach the satellites. If they were still running at all. If there was still anyone down there to receive the messages in the first place.
Rocky tells him he’s being stupid and overthinking, which is probably fair. Rocky is usually correct, for all that Grace bickers with him over little stuff.
Grace argues back that he should have something profound or at the very least funny to say for first contact. He laughs at his own pun then, too, and then laughs over the hysteric thought that he’s also going to have to introduce an alien lifeform to whomever he contacts and make sure that they don’t try to exterminate or dissect Rocky.
The probes should have arrived a few months ago, based on his calculations. Hopefully, those were accurate. This was going to be a very rough conversation if not.
He wonders and wonders, and spends hours offering possible alternatives of greetings with Rocky. Rocky isn’t very helpful. He tells Grace that whoever he contacts will of course be the most gracious to speak with the savior of their planet, no matter what he says. Grace, who has spent an awful lot of time with humanity and about the same amount of time with near-crippling social anxiety, isn’t so sure.
In the end, it doesn’t matter.
They reach out to him first.
Monitor screens flicker to life and are filled with paragraphs of frequencies and call signs, downlinks and bandwidths. Static is bitingly loud as things suddenly turn online.
-his is the International Space Station. Hail Mary, do you hear us?