Chapter Text
The Sprawl had been falling apart for a while now.
Isaac could feel it in the floor beneath him; the shudder of something structural finally giving way, a distant crack and groan of pressurized corridors. He sat in the middle of it, closing his eyes and rubbing his tired face with hands that hadn't stopped shaking in what felt like years. Everything hurt in a way that had long since became background noise.
This was it. Probably his demise. The thought arrived with less weight than he'd expected. Ellie was safe, and the Marker was destroyed. That had to be enough. He laid down, willing himself to look up at the sky of stars that had watched everything that happened without care, as death's embrace welcomed him… except his back never met the floor.
A pull. Nauseating, like gravity forgetting what it was supposed to do. He didn't feel the wormhole open; he just felt the floor leave. His RIG helmet sealed itself on instinct as light split open around him, there and then gone, a door that closed the moment it was done with him. There was no station falling apart around him. No humming at the back of his skull. Just the void in every direction, identical and infinite. Isaac turned slowly, the motion sending him into a lazy drift, trying to find something, anything to orient himself against. There was nothing to push against and nowhere to go. No sense of up, or down. Just him, and the sound of his own breathing loud inside his helmet.
What. The. Fuck.
⋆ ⏜
“BLIP-D detected.”
“Grace, you might want to check that out. Could be another ship,” Rocky said while aiming his texture monitor at the Petrovascope, trying to make sense of the shape the sensors were painting for him.
“A little busy here, Buddy.” Grace sighed, focused on not tripping over the xenonite chain Rocky had started working on for the collection unit. The outline was wrong for debris. Wrong for a ship. Too small. Too… Rocky worked through the shape again, methodically, and then stopped. “No, not a ship. I do not have word. Grace, what is your word for thing that is not where it should be?” Grace opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. Something in the way Rocky mentioned it made him move without thinking. He pulled himself to the Petrovascope and looked.
What he saw made every coherent thought leave his head all at once. Floating in the middle of the Petrova line, like a piece of lost cargo, was a person. An actual person in what looked like some kind of spacesuit he didn’t recognize, alive, barely, from what he could tell by the way they were moving, slow and disoriented but moving, and absolutely nowhere near where any person should be.
“Holy hel—moly.” Grace breathed. His brain cycled through explanations and discarded them all in about half a second. His body was in autopilot, already moving toward his EVA suit.
⋆ ⏜
Isaac wasn't sure how long he drifted, but it was long enough that the fear had burned itself out and left something quieter in its place. Then he saw it, a shape in the nothing, growing slowly larger until he could make out what it was. A ship, one that looked like the older models that existed before he was even a thought. With hull plating and thruster configurations that definitely made no sense to him in his half-delirious state. His brain filed it as wrong and moved on. The ship slowed before him, then an airlock opened and a figure emerged, crossing the void towards him. Reaching for him.
Isaac looked up. Nicole looked back. Not the version the Marker had shown to pull at him, to break him down, but the way she looked before the Ishimura, in every video message he'd replay just to look at her. Some distant part of him knew this couldn't be real. The same part that had always known through every hallucination, every whispered name in an empty corridor. But that part was very far away.
He reached out, and she grabbed his hand. The contact was solid enough. “Yeah, maybe I could die like this.”
Except the voice didn’t match.
The hand pulling him towards the airlock was definitely real, the ship filling his vision was real, but the voice speaking to him was not Nicole. “Hey, talk to me. Are you conscious?” Isaac opened his mouth. “I thought—” He looked at the visor, the reflection of his own helmet staring back at him, nearly covering the face of the stranger who saved him. “You thought what?” The airlock was closing, the figure had guided him in with somewhat practiced efficiency.
“Nothing,” Isaac said. “I’m alive, I think.” The figure stifled a nervous laugh.
“I hope so, it would be really awkward if I went out there for a dead guy.” The person, Isaac figured out from the voice, was definitely a guy, reached up. Breaking the seal on his helmet, and, with a hiss of equalizing pressure, pulled it off. Isaac looked at him. A stranger stared back, nobody he recognized, which somehow made everything finally feel real.
“I’m, uh, my name’s Grace—” He faltered over his words for a split-second. “Ryland Grace, everyone calls me Grace though.”
“Isaac Clarke,” he paused, longer than he meant to. “Engineer.” He wasn’t sure why he added that. Force of habit, maybe. Something to be other than the guy who’d been pulled out of nowhere. His brain was running too slow to second guess it.
“Where are we exactly? I know we're in space, but—” Grace clapped his hands together, his behavior shifted immediately into full teacher mode. Isaac's eyes snapped to the movement, still running on threat assessment even now, even here. He made himself look away. “Right! Uh, you’re currently aboard the Hail Mary, a spacecraft sent on a mission to Tau Ceti.” He made his way out of the airlock. Hands moving erratically as he continued to explain the mission before Rocky rolled towards them. “Rocky came to meet the new person.” Rocky announced. Isaac's hands were already reaching for the plasma cutter that he surprisingly didn’t lose in the wormhole situation. “What the fuck is that!?”
Oh, Oh. Grace was not exactly expecting that reaction from Isaac when he laid eyes on Rocky, maybe a scream or a panicked “Is that an alien?!” but not this.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Grace moved between them, hands up. “He’s friendly!” Rocky confirmed from behind him. “Grace is correct, Rocky is friendly,” Rocky shifted slightly, as if looking at the device in Isaac's hand. “Rocky is curious, what does that device do, question.”
“It’s… an engineering tool, but it’s also a weapon.” Isaac responded flatly, not even sure why he was answering the question. “Interesting. Rocky would prefer it pointed away from Grace.” A pause, he noticed the shakiness in Isaac's arm. “Rocky would like to know if Isaac is going to pass out." Isaac kept the plasma cutter raised for another long moment before his arm dropped, not because he was convinced but because his body simply stopped cooperating. Any adrenaline he might've had was already fading. “I’m not putting it away.” Grace exhaled slowly, letting the tension leave his shoulders. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair.”
The three of them ended up in the dormitory. Grace continued where he left off in the airlock, hands moving, words tumbling over each other. The Petrova line, Astrophage, Tau Ceti, even Rocky chimed in occasionally with corrections or additions that Grace acknowledged without breaking stride. Isaac listened, or at least tried to. His brain kept losing the thread, catching on Astrophage, then missing whatever came between. “So you’ve been out here alone…”
“For a while, yeah,” Grace said. “At least, until Rocky and I stumbled upon each other, like we did with you.” Isaac nodded slowly. “Friend Isaac has not relaxed since coming aboard,” Rocky pointed out. “Rocky—” Grace started. “Is not criticizing, it is an observation. Rocky is noting, there is a difference.” Isaac glanced at Rocky for a moment. “Smart alien... I'm not your friend though,” he said before his eyes kept moving, never fully settling on one thing, as if he expected something to jump out. Rocky shifted, but said nothing. “Are you doing okay?” Grace asked, with the helmet gone, he could see how worse for wear Isaac looked. He was quiet for a moment before responding. “I’ve had worse days.” A beat. “This one’s up there, though.” Grace gave him a worried look, but decided not to push.
A few minutes passed before Isaac’s eyes slowed, then stopped moving altogether. His body had already made the decision for him when his head started dropping heavily to the side. Grace noticed before he hit the floor, holding him upright. A moment passed before Rocky spoke. “He has been through something bad, statement."
“Yeah,” Grace said as he carefully laid Isaac down. “I think he has, buddy.”