If the Stars Could Bleed

The first thing Simon Fischer learned about saving humanity was that no one asked whether he wanted the job. They simply informed him he was the only engineer qualified to keep the Mary alive. Every propulsion system, environmental control, fabrication unit, air recycler, or electrical failure would be catastrophic. If something broke millions of miles from Earth, there would be no repair crew to call, no replacement parts waiting in a warehouse, and definitely no second chances. There would only be Simon.

He'd argued, refused, and even pointed out there had to be someone else. There wasn't. The sun was dimming, and every calculation ended the same way: someone had to go. So Simon went.

He hadn't expected to become humanity's last engineer, and he certainly hadn't expected to become friends with a mysterious scientist welded into a submarine.

Notes:

I'd like to thank the one and only egg_soup (Ally Larson) on Instagram for inspiring this swap concept. I love a good character swap AU, so it was just the perfect opportunity to expand upon their interpretation of it.

Check out their art on their official page here:
https://www.instagram.com/egg_soups?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==

Much thanks!

Work Text:

The medical bay had smelled wrong. Empty, even.

Simon still remembered standing in the doorway after waking from the coma, his legs barely willing to support him as he stared at five motionless bodies sealed inside their pods. Five of the brightest scientific minds humanity had managed to gather, each one chosen because their field of expertise might save billions of lives. None of them had survived the journey.

The coma systems had failed. Or maybe the human body simply wasn't meant to sleep for years. Whatever the reason, Simon had watched one diagnostic after another flash the same merciless verdict.

NO CARDIAC ACTIVITY

Again.

Five times. Five deaths. Five people who were supposed to wake up beside him. Instead, the only heartbeat left on the ship belonged to an engineer who knew just enough science to realize he was catastrophically underqualified. His hands had shaken so badly he'd nearly dropped the medical scanner.

"No," he'd whispered to an empty room. "No, no, no..."

He wasn't supposed to do this alone. He could rebuild an oxygen recycler from scrap metal. He could fabricate replacement valves. He could even reroute power through half a ship if necessary. Ask him to repair a fusion manifold, and he'd have it finished before dinner. Ask him to solve the mystery of dying stars?

Simon wanted to laugh. Or scream. Possibly both.

"I'm an engineer," he'd barked at nobody in particular, pacing through the command deck with increasingly frantic energy. "I'm not a physicist. I'm not an astrophysicist. I'm not a biologist. I'm not any kind of '-ist' besides the one that hits broken machines until they start behaving again."

The ship, unsurprisingly, offered no advice. The stars outside remained just as indifferent as before. Simon had stood alone on the bridge for a very long time. The silence had been unbearable.

Then the impossible happened.

It introduced itself by knocking on the hull. Well… not literally.

The sensors screamed first. Simon nearly fell out of his chair.

"Contact?" he muttered.

The Mary wasn't supposed to encounter anything out here. The distances between stars were incomprehensible. Running into another object was statistically absurd. His heart hammered as he hurried through the diagnostics. It wasn’t debris or an asteroid, but it was something moving. Something intelligent.

The airlock cycled. Simon grabbed the nearest wrench. It just felt wrong to greet an alien civilization empty-handed.

The door opened, and a massive, blue, rock-like figure stepped inside. Simon stared. The alien stared back. They continued staring for approximately fifteen very uncomfortable seconds.

Finally, Simon lifted the wrench a little. "...Hi."

Several months later, Simon would describe meeting Adrian as simultaneously the most terrifying and most relieving experience of his life. Terrifying because— Alien. Relieving because— Not alone.

Communication had been painfully slow. Adrian spoke in a series of melodies, a baritone deep enough to rumble Simon’s chest. Simon could appreciate music every once in a while, but actually trying to talk to this rock figure needed to be addressed. With Adrian’s brilliance, he had experienced the universe in ways Simon struggled to comprehend. Simon, meanwhile, insisted on explaining everything with terrible metaphors and increasingly expressive hand gestures.

Against all odds… It worked.

It was pretty easy to work with the alien Adrian since he possessed a brilliant engineering mind. The two worked through some engineering schematics before settling on making a translator. Simon remained convinced human engineering was more elegant. Adrian remained convinced that human engineering was held together by optimism and excessive confidence.

Neither changed the other's mind.

Still, the arguments filled the silence. Simon found he didn't mind that.

He repaired failing systems while Adrian modified equipment using Eridian technology that bordered on witchcraft. Meals gradually became shared instead of solitary. Evenings often ended with the two engineers bent over some impossible mechanical puzzle, disagreeing loudly while secretly enjoying every minute of it. The loneliness never disappeared entirely, but it became quieter.

Simon found himself grateful for the company, even if Adrian possessed the deeply irritating habit of being correct far more often than any alien had the right to be.

The alert arrived during what should have been an uneventful maintenance cycle. Adrian froze. His translator emitted a soft chime. "Friend Simon."

Simon looked up from the dismantled coolant pump resting on the workbench. "Hm?"

Adrian's massive fingers danced across his instruments. "Object."

Simon frowned. "What kind of object?"

"...Unknown."

That got his attention. He abandoned the pump immediately. Minutes later, they stood together on the bridge, watching the sensor display. Simon frowned harder. "That's impossible."

The object drifted silently through space. It was small, cylindrical, and heavily damaged. Its outer hull looked as though someone had dipped the entire thing in dried blood. Rust covered nearly every exposed surface. Long fractures spiderwebbed across reinforced steel. It looked ancient, older than anything that should still be functional.

Adrian adjusted another instrument. "Heartbeat... present, statement."

Simon blinked. "No."

"Affirmative."

"No, I mean that's impossible." He leaned closer to the display, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. "That's a submarine."

Adrian tilted his head. "Submarine?"

"It goes underwater."

Silence. Then Adrian looked from the screen back to Simon. "We are not underwater, observation."

"I noticed." Simon rubbed both hands over his face. "No, no, this makes absolutely zero sense."

His engineer's brain had already begun dismantling the problem piece by piece. "A submarine generates oxygen by splitting water molecules. Electrolysis. No water means no oxygen production. Even if they had compressed reserves, those would've run out long ago."

He pointed toward the screen. "Whoever's inside should've suffocated."

A beat. "Actually..." Simon frowned deeper. "If your reading is right and their heart's somehow still beating, then they would've experienced catastrophic oxygen deprivation. Brain damage. Severe organ failure. There's no scenario where someone survives this in any meaningful condition."

Adrian remained thoughtfully silent. "Heartbeat continues, statement."

Simon stared at the impossible vessel. "Let's go get them."

The submarine looked even smaller in person. Simon couldn't imagine spending hours inside it, much less days or weeks. The hatch protested violently as he forced it open. Metal screamed, ancient seals snapped, and the door finally gave way. A thick metallic smell flooded outward.

Blood.

The cockpit was barely large enough for a single person. Whoever had designed it clearly hadn't cared about survival, much less comfort. Simon climbed inside, then stopped. "Jesus."

One man remained strapped into the pilot's chair. His head hung forward, and his blond hair, darkened by dried blood, obscured most of his face. Crimson stains coated both hands, his sleeves, the control panel, the floor—everywhere Simon looked. Medical tubing snaked through the cramped cockpit, connecting improvised life-support equipment to failing machinery that should have stopped functioning years ago.

Around him sat dozens of carefully secured scientific containers: glass sample tubes, petri dishes, a microscope, stacks of weathered notebooks filled with dense handwriting, and an incubator still humming quietly to itself.

This was all scientific equipment. The stranger hadn't been fighting anything. He'd been studying it! Simon immediately switched into the mindset that had carried him through every emergency repair of his career.

Assess.

Prioritize.

Act.

His knife sliced cleanly through the restraints holding the man to the chair. He disconnected portable life-support units one by one, checking each connection before moving to the next. Every motion was efficient, practiced, almost automatic. Only after the final restraint fell away did Simon carefully lift the unconscious man into his arms.

He weighed almost nothing. Simon felt ribs beneath his hands. The stranger's breathing was shallow enough to frighten him.

"Easy," Simon murmured, though he wasn't sure whether he was speaking to the man or himself.

Together, he and Adrian transferred every scientific sample they could safely recover before hurrying back toward the Mary. Armando met them outside the medical bay. The ship's robotic medical assistant immediately came to life, extending mechanical arms as Simon laid the unconscious man onto the examination table.

"Beginning emergency stabilization," Armando announced calmly.

Simon stepped back only far enough to avoid interfering. Monitors activated around the stranger. His oxygen, heart rhythm, and blood pressure looked… bad. Very bad.

Simon helped remove the ruined clothing while Armando cleaned away layer after layer of dried blood. Warm water carried crimson streaks into the drains until, little by little, the stranger beneath finally emerged. Simon reached toward the man's face. Very carefully, he slipped off a pair of blood-speckled glasses. Without them, the stranger looked younger than Simon had expected.

Armando continued washing dried blood from pale skin while Simon gently brushed damp strands of blond hair away from the man's forehead. The overhead lights caught those golden strands immediately. For just a second, the hair seemed almost to glow, like a soft halo beneath the sterile fluorescent lights.

Simon blinked. The ridiculous thought arrived completely uninvited.

He looks like an angel.

Simon snorted quietly to himself.

"Get a grip," he muttered under his breath.

Sleep deprivation. Stress. Loneliness. Clearly, his brain had decided hallucinations were next on the list. The man wasn't an angel. He was simply another human. A battered, half-starved scientist who had somehow survived inside an impossible submarine drifting through the vacuum of space.

Simon carefully adjusted the oxygen mask over the stranger's face before fastening the monitoring leads across his chest. One by one, the machines sprang to life, each steady beep sounding just a little stronger than the last. Only then did Simon allow himself to exhale.

Whoever this man was, against every law of engineering, he was still alive.

The first thing Ryland Grace noticed was warmth.

Not the suffocating, humid warmth that had permeated every inch of the Iron Lung, where the air had always felt too heavy to breathe, and every surface seemed permanently damp with condensation. This warmth was gentle and noticeably dry. It seeped into aching muscles through soft blankets that molded around him instead of biting into his skin like rusted steel.

His body sank into a real mattress, and for several blissful seconds, he floated somewhere between consciousness and sleep, content simply to exist without alarms screaming around him or metal groaning under impossible pressure. It didn't make sense. Nothing had felt comfortable in a very long time.

His eyes fluttered open.

The ceiling above him was an immaculate white, interrupted only by recessed lighting and ventilation panels. There were no rust stains bleeding through cracked paint, no water droplets sliding down corroded pipes, and no claustrophobic walls pressing against his shoulders from every direction. The room smelled faintly antiseptic, tinged with the sterile scent of cleaned metal and recycled air rather than stagnant water and old blood.

Ryland frowned. The last thing he remembered was the eel’s mouth and the submarine twisting violently around him. He remembered alarms as the cockpit flooded with warning lights, the certainty that this was finally it. That after surviving every dive into the blood ocean, after every sample collected and every order obeyed, he would die alone in a steel coffin drifting beneath an endless crimson sea. Instead, there was a ceiling, a bed, and medical equipment humming quietly around him.

His gaze wandered slowly across the unfamiliar room, still sluggish from whatever medication flowed through the IV in his arm. Strange monitors displayed vital signs in symbols he didn't immediately recognize. Cabinets lined one wall, meticulously organized. Transparent tubes carried clear fluids between machines that looked far more advanced than anything Filament Station had ever possessed. Eventually, his eyes landed on the only other person in the room.

Several feet away sat a handsome man absorbed in what appeared to be engineering schematics projected into the air. Holographic blueprints rotated slowly above a compact workstation while he manipulated them with practiced precision. Shoulder-length dark hair had been half tied back, though several loose strands had escaped and now framed a face sharpened by concentration. His jaw was covered in neatly trimmed dark stubble, giving him a perpetually thoughtful appearance, while his dark eyes remained fixed on the floating diagrams before him.

Only after several seconds did Ryland notice the arm. Or rather… the lack of one. Where the man's left arm should have been rested an intricately engineered prosthetic unlike anything Ryland had ever seen. Metal fingers moved with astonishing fluidity, rotating virtual components and adjusting microscopic details as naturally as flesh ever could. Whoever had designed it possessed extraordinary skill.

The stranger hadn't noticed him waking. Ryland simply watched. His exhausted mind tried desperately to assemble reality into something coherent. Neither the room, the technology, nor the man was familiar. He couldn't even convince himself that this was a hospital. Hospitals didn't usually appear after people were eaten by monsters.

"...Am I dead?”

The question escaped before he consciously decided to ask it. The stranger looked up immediately. Their eyes met across the room. He had remarkably calm eyes. They instinctively examined him instead of reacting emotionally. Ryland had met people like that before—engineers, mechanics, technicians—the kind of people whose first instinct when confronted with catastrophe was to ask how it worked before asking why it happened.

"No," the man said. His voice was slightly gravely, soothing the rough edges in Ryland’s mind.

Ryland blinked. "...Really?"

The answer came just as evenly. "Yes."

Ryland searched the stranger's face for any hint of uncertainty and found none. "Are you sure?"

The man sighed softly, setting the holographic schematic aside before swiveling his chair to face the bed completely. "I'm pretty confident."

Something inside Ryland finally gave way. His vision blurred before he even realized tears had begun gathering in his eyes. One slipped silently down his cheek, followed by another. He didn't sob. His breathing didn't hitch. He simply cried with the exhausted resignation of someone who had prepared himself for death so thoroughly that survival felt almost incomprehensible.

He wasn't supposed to be here. He'd accepted that. He'd mourned himself long before the submarine ever crashed. Every dive into the blood ocean had carried the understanding that one day he simply wouldn't come back. Every sample he'd collected had been another bargain with fate. Somewhere along the line, he'd stopped believing there would be a future waiting for him.

And yet, here he was— alive, still breathing, and still capable of feeling warmth. God, he wanted to live. He hadn't realized how fiercely until someone had somehow given him another chance.

The tears continued falling unchecked until a sharp pain suddenly exploded behind his eyes. Ryland gasped. The headache arrived with breathtaking speed, driving itself through his skull like a spike. His vision swam. Bright lights became unbearable. Every heartbeat seemed to echo painfully behind his forehead.

His trembling hand lifted weakly toward his temple before collapsing halfway there. The stranger was already moving. He crossed the room with quiet efficiency, every motion practiced and unhurried. There was no panic in his expression, no frantic rushing. Instead, he approached the bedside monitor, studied several readings in a single glance, and immediately reached for the medication pump connected to Ryland's IV.

"Headache?" he asked.

Ryland squeezed his eyes shut and managed a strained nod. "Yeah..."

The stranger adjusted several settings before pressing a button. Cool medication flowed through the IV. Within seconds, the crushing pressure began retreating. Ryland let out a slow breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Every muscle in his body seemed to melt into the mattress beneath him.

"Thank you," Ryland said.

The stranger merely nodded. Then, just as quietly as he'd arrived, he checked the remaining monitors, adjusted another sensor attached to Ryland's chest, documented something on a handheld tablet, and returned to his workstation.

Ryland watched him go. He didn’t seem like a cold person. There was kindness in what he did. It simply wasn't expressed through excessive conversation. His care revealed itself through competence instead. He anticipated problems before they became emergencies. He adjusted the blankets that had slipped crooked, checked IV lines with absentminded precision, and made certain Ryland remained comfortable without drawing attention to the effort. He wasn't unfriendly. He was simply… economical.

Every word carried purpose while everything else seemed unnecessary. Ryland had known engineers like that before.

"So..." he ventured after several minutes of peaceful silence. "Where am I?"

Without looking away from the schematic he was repairing, the stranger answered. "The Mary."

Ryland frowned thoughtfully. "What's that?"

"Our ship."

"...Ship?"

"Mhm."

Ryland waited. Surely there would be additional context, but there wasn't. He smiled despite himself. "...You're not very talkative."

"No."

Another pause. Ryland tilted his head. "That's it?"

This time, the stranger finally looked over his shoulder. "Yep."

Ryland couldn't help laughing. It wasn't loud. Just a tired, incredulous little chuckle that surprised even himself. "I don't even know your name."

The stranger set down his tablet. "Simon."

"Simon, what?"

"Fischer."

Ryland repeated it quietly to himself. "Nice to meet you, Simon Fischer."

Simon inclined his head once. "You too."

That appeared to conclude the conversation. Simon returned immediately to his engineering diagrams. Ryland stared at him for another moment before smiling helplessly. He honestly couldn't decide whether Simon was charming or infuriating.

The answer arrived several hours later in the form of an enormous blue alien carrying lunch. By this point, Ryland had reluctantly accepted three impossible truths. First, he was alive. Second, he was aboard a spacecraft called the Mary. And now, third, aliens existed.

The enormous blue figure entered with remarkable care despite being nearly large enough to fill the doorway. A tray balanced delicately between massive claws carried water, food, and what looked suspiciously like fresh fruit.

"Hi," Ryland said weakly.

"Greetings, friend, statement," it said through a computerized translator. “I am Adrian.”

Ryland blinked. Then slowly looked toward Simon. Simon merely shrugged without looking up from the circuit board spread across his lap. "You get used to it."

"I... somehow doubt that," Ryland replied.

Adrian's translator emitted a pleasant chime. "Friend Simon also expressed disbelief, statement."

Simon snorted quietly. "For like, a week."

"Longer, correction."

Simon sighed dramatically. “I hate you.”

"So friend Simon claims daily, observation."

Ryland watched the exchange with growing fascination. There was affection hidden beneath the banter. Adrian clearly enjoyed teasing Simon, while Simon's exasperation lacked any genuine irritation. It was like two people who had spent enough time together to learn exactly which buttons to press. Ryland wondered how long these two have been wandering in space for.

Adrian set the tray beside Ryland's bed before glancing knowingly toward Simon. "Friend notices friend Simon quiet, observation."

"I have," Ryland admitted.

Adrian's translator chimed again. "Do not worry. Friend Simon requires... warming period."

"I can hear you," Simon grumbled.

"I know."

Simon pinched the bridge of his nose. "I wasn't that bad."

"You attempted repair translator before introducing self."

"It sounded broken."

"It functioned correctly."

"It sounded weird."

"It sounded Eridian."

Simon looked toward Ryland with an expression that hovered somewhere between long-suffering and amused. "See what I deal with?"

Ryland laughed through his oxygen mask, warm enough that Simon blinked in surprise. For the briefest instant, something softened in Simon's face, a tiny flicker of satisfaction that vanished almost before Ryland could register it. Adrian, naturally, noticed immediately.

"Friend Simon possesses humor once comfortable, statement."

"I'm still here."

"Correct."

Ryland smiled. Somehow, against every expectation he'd had upon waking, this strange little crew already felt a little less intimidating than before.

By the time the stranger finally drifted back to sleep, the medical bay had settled into a comfortable silence. The only sounds left were the gentle rhythm of the heart monitor and the soft hiss of oxygen flowing through the mask resting over his face. Every few seconds, another quiet beep echoed through the room, reassuring Simon that the impossible stranger he'd dragged out of a rusted submarine was, somehow, continuing to improve.

Simon lingered beside the bed longer than he intended. He studied the monitor one last time, habitually checking each number even though nothing had changed since his last assessment. Heart rate was still elevated but no longer alarming. Oxygen saturation continued climbing with supplemental support. Blood pressure had stabilized after several rounds of fluids. None of it made much sense from an engineering standpoint.

By every calculation he'd made while examining that submarine, the man should have suffered irreversible brain damage long before Adrian detected a heartbeat. Instead, he was sleeping peacefully beneath clean blankets, his blond hair spread across the pillow where Simon had carefully brushed it away from his face earlier. Simon had stopped trying to understand impossible several months ago.

Quietly collecting his datapad, he slipped from the room without disturbing the sleeping scientist. The medical bay door whispered shut behind him, leaving the man alone beneath Armando's watchful monitors.

Adrian was already waiting in the corridor. The towering Eridian had transformed part of the hallway into a temporary laboratory. Portable analyzers surrounded him in a semicircle, each quietly humming as it processed the strange crimson samples recovered from the submarine. Transparent containment chambers floated within magnetic restraints while dozens of holographic displays layered themselves across the air, displaying molecular structures, chemical compositions, and biological scans far beyond Simon's understanding.

Adrian moved calmly between them, adjusting instruments with practiced precision before looking up as Simon approached. "Friend sleeping, question?"

Simon nodded, rubbing tiredly at the back of his neck. "Finally. Poor guy looked like he was trying to stay awake just to make sense of everything."

"Healing requires sleep, statement."

"I know."

Simon leaned against the opposite wall and folded his arms. Only now that the man was asleep did the adrenaline begin leaving his system, replaced by the heavy exhaustion that always followed prolonged repairs. He let out a long breath before gesturing toward Adrian's growing collection of data. "So... what've you found?"

Without another word, Adrian tapped several controls built into one of the analyzers. New holograms materialized between them, replacing biological scans with files recovered from the submarine's damaged computer systems. Many sections remained corrupted beyond recovery, entire pages fractured into unreadable fragments, but enough information had survived to begin assembling an identity.

"Recovered computer partially functional, statement. Significant damage. However, identification successful."

Simon straightened. "You know who he is?"

Adrian enlarged the first recovered document. "Doctor Ryland Grace."

Simon quietly repeated the name beneath his breath. "Ryland Grace..."

It fit him somehow. Simon couldn't explain why. Maybe because the name sounded gentle in much the same way the man himself did. Even unconscious, there had been something remarkably peaceful about him beneath all that dried blood.

Another file replaced the first. "Molecular biologist."

Simon gave a small nod. "That explains the equipment."

His thoughts drifted back to the submarine's cockpit. Every available surface had been occupied by scientific instruments rather than survival supplies. Microscopes had been secured more carefully than emergency rations. Sample containers had been organized with meticulous precision despite the obvious panic of the crash. Even while facing death, Dr. Grace had apparently been more concerned about protecting his research than himself.

Scientists. Simon would never understand them.

Adrian dismissed the inventory and opened another recovered record. "Primary residence listed as Filament Station."

Simon frowned immediately. "Never heard of it."

"Neither had Adrian."

He waited. Nothing else came. Simon sighed. "You're doing that thing again."

"Which thing, question?"

"The dramatic pauses."

"They increase anticipation, statement."

"They're annoying."

"Sometimes same thing."

Simon rolled his eyes, earning what he had come to recognize as Adrian's equivalent of a grin before the Eridian continued. "Historical records... unusual."

That single word immediately put Simon on edge. "Unusual how?"

Rather than answering directly, Adrian expanded another collection of recovered files. They appeared to be astronomical charts—star maps, navigation records, observational logs. Simon leaned forward automatically. Then frowned.

The maps looked empty. Entire regions of space simply weren't there anymore. Familiar constellations had vanished. Neighboring stars that should have occupied fixed positions across the galaxy were absent entirely, leaving only enormous stretches of darkness. Simon stared at the projection for several long seconds before slowly looking back toward Adrian.

"Where are the stars?" he asked.

"Absent."

He gestured impatiently toward the map. "I mean, why are they absent?"

Another recovered document appeared beside the charts. This one contained translated journal entries written in Dr. Grace’s hurried handwriting. Simon skimmed the first few paragraphs before a repeated phrase immediately caught his attention.

"Following the Quiet Rapture..." His eyes narrowed. "What is the Quiet Rapture?"

"Unknown."

"It isn't explained?"

"No."

Simon continued reading. Every entry assumed the reader already understood the event. Remaining stations… Post-Rapture ecosystems… After the stars disappeared…

The words blurred together as an uncomfortable realization slowly began forming. "No..." He looked back toward Adrian. "No, that can't be right."

"The evidence suggests otherwise,” Adrian replied.

Simon jabbed a finger toward the holographic map. "Our stars are still here."

He pointed instinctively toward the nearest observation window, where distant suns still burned against the darkness outside the Mary. "They're dimming. That's the whole reason humanity built this mission. Astrophage is draining their energy, but they're still there."

"Correct."

"So how..." Simon's voice faltered.

His eyes drifted slowly back toward the medical bay, toward the sleeping scientist resting only a few meters away. Then back toward the empty star map. Finally, almost afraid to hear the answer, he looked at Adrian. "You think he's from our future."

The Eridian remained silent for only a moment before inclining his head. "Current evidence strongly supports that conclusion, statement."

Everything inside Simon seemed to freeze. He looked through the observation window again, this time seeing not the stars themselves but what they represented.

Earth.

Home.

Everyone he'd left behind.

Everyone had forced him aboard this ship because he happened to be the only engineer capable of keeping it alive. Slowly, his breathing became uneven. "If he's from our future..."

The sentence died halfway through. He already knew how it ended. The Mary had launched to stop stellar extinction. If Dr. Grace lived in a future where there were no stars left...

"Then we failed," Simon finished.

The words barely escaped above a whisper. He pushed himself away from the wall and began pacing the corridor, his boots echoing softly against the metal floor. His thoughts accelerated far faster than he could organize them.

"What if we never figured it out? What if Astrophage spread faster than anyone predicted? What if Earth collapsed before they found a solution? What if every sun just..."

He couldn't finish. The image alone was enough. A galaxy without stars and darkness stretching forever. Billions of lives reduced to scattered stations desperately clinging to whatever warmth remained. Simon pressed both hands against his face.

"We came all this way—" His voice cracked with exhausted frustration. "—and it still wasn't enough."

For several moments, Adrian simply watched him pace. Experience had taught the Eridian that interrupting Simon's spirals too early accomplished very little. The human engineer always needed a minute to race through every worst-case scenario before logic could catch up.

Eventually, Adrian spoke. "Friend Simon."

Simon stopped walking.

"You are assuming conclusion before collecting complete evidence, statement."

Simon lowered his hands. "What do you mean?"

Adrian gestured calmly toward the medical bay door. "We possess engineer."

Simon blinked. "...Yeah."

"We possess molecular biologist."

His massive hand shifted toward the crimson samples suspended inside the analyzers.

"Dr. Grace survived impossible environment while protecting biological research. Even while facing death, scientific specimens remained carefully secured. He prioritized knowledge above personal survival."

Simon remembered opening the submarine and seeing every sample container strapped carefully into place despite the chaos surrounding them.

Adrian folded his claws in front of himself. "Such individual unlikely abandon difficult problem, statement."

Simon slowly followed Adrian's gaze back toward the sleeping scientist beyond the wall. "So…?"

Adrian's translator chimed softly. "Recruit friend Grace."

Simon stared through the small observation window in the medical bay door. Dr. Grace remained peacefully asleep, completely unaware that two engineers were quietly discussing the fate of entire civilizations outside his room.

"He barely knows where he is," Simon added.

"He will," Adrian replied.

"He's still recovering."

"Healing progressing satisfactorily."

Simon hesitated before voicing the concern lingering quietly beneath everything else. "...What if he says no?"

Adrian tilted his head, genuinely puzzled by the question. "Why refuse?"

"I don't know." Simon shrugged weakly. "He doesn't know us."

"He knows friend Simon rescued him."

Another pause.

"He knows friend Simon cared for injuries."

Another.

"He cried because alive."

Simon looked away. Those quiet tears and the overwhelming relief on Dr. Grace’s face after realizing he hadn't died alone inside that impossible submarine had nearly broken Simon’s heart. He hadn't expected Adrian to notice, but he noticed everything.

The Eridian's voice softened. "Individuals who fight that desperately to continue living often choose help others continue living as well, statement."

Simon stood quietly for a long time, his eyes never leaving the sleeping scientist on the other side of the glass. Finally, after several thoughtful moments, he gave a slow nod. "We'll ask him."

"When appropriate."

"When he's strong enough."

Adrian inclined his head in agreement.

Until then, the three of them had something else to focus on. The blood samples rested quietly inside their containment chambers, holding secrets neither civilization yet understood. Somewhere within those crimson specimens, perhaps alongside the brilliant but exhausted molecular biologist sleeping only a few feet away, might lie the first real clue either universe had found.

For the first time since waking alone aboard the Mary, Simon found himself thinking something he hadn't allowed himself to believe in months: Humanity wasn't out of chances yet.

A week passed before Ryland finally managed to walk the length of the medical bay without assistance.

Well, calling it "walking" was generous. It was more accurately a slow negotiation between his determination and a body that no longer remembered how to support itself.

Months inside the Iron Lung had stolen more than his freedom. Confined to the pilot's chair for so long, with barely enough room to stretch his legs, his muscles had wasted away until even standing became an exhausting exercise. His balance felt foreign, his knees trembled beneath his own weight after only a few steps, and every movement left him breathing harder than he should have.

It frustrated him more than he cared to admit. Ryland had never been particularly athletic, but he'd been healthy. Before the Iron Lung, climbing stairs hadn't required planning. Carrying laboratory equipment hadn't left his arms shaking. Now, lifting a cup of water sometimes made his shoulder ache.

Each morning, Simon quietly appeared outside the medical bay with another carefully structured rehabilitation schedule. It was just enough walking to encourage recovery without pushing Ryland into collapse. Simon never hovered, never offered unnecessary encouragement, and never treated him like he was fragile. Instead, he simply walked beside him at whatever pace Ryland could manage, occasionally pointing out another handhold or suggesting they stop before exhaustion became dangerous.

Oddly enough, Ryland appreciated the practicality over sympathy.

Unfortunately, weakness wasn't the only problem. Three days after waking, Adrian had requested another series of scans. Then another. Then several more. The concern in the Eridian's posture had been impossible to miss. Simon noticed it too.

Finally, after nearly six hours of analysis, Adrian called both humans into the laboratory. Several holographic images floated above the workbench. Ryland immediately recognized his own muscle tissue displayed in impossible detail. None of it looked encouraging.

"The blood ocean produced biological alterations, statement," Adrian said.

Ryland frowned. "What kinds of alterations?"

Adrian enlarged one of the scans. "Foreign cellular integration."

Simon folded his arms. "In English?"

Adrian obediently simplified. "The blood changed friend Grace."

Silence settled over the room. Ryland instinctively looked down at himself. "Changed how, exactly?"

Instead of answering immediately, Adrian projected another image beside the first. This one displayed the surface layers of Ryland's skin. Dark branching patterns spread beneath it. They resembled roots growing through soil, threading themselves beneath muscle fibers before disappearing deeper into his body.

"The organism present within blood remains active," Adrian explained. "It no longer behaves entirely as foreign tissue."

Ryland’s stomach dropped. "You're telling me it’s becoming part of me?"

Simon spoke first. "Is it dangerous?"

"Unknown."

"Can we remove it?"

"Negative." Another scan appeared. "The integration extensive."

Ryland swallowed. "How much?"

Adrian didn't answer verbally. Instead, he handed Ryland a mirror. Only then did Ryland understand. He slowly pulled aside the loose collar of his hospital shirt. The scars covering his back no longer looked like ordinary scars. Dark crimson patterns branched across pale skin, weaving over his shoulder blades before climbing toward his neck. Others wrapped around his ribs and stretched across his shoulders, disappearing beneath the fabric over his chest like the roots of some impossible tree.

He stared silently. They were almost beautiful if he ignored what they represented. His fingers hesitated before gently brushing one of the branching marks. The skin felt warmer than the rest of him. Simon remained unusually quiet.

Ryland noticed. "You can say it."

Simon looked up. "Hm?"

"I look awful."

"No."

"Simon."

"You look different."

Ryland waited.

Simon seemed to consider his next words very carefully. "...Not awful."

For reasons Ryland couldn't explain, that actually helped.

Then, the burning started two days later.

At first it resembled ordinary soreness, the kind that followed physical therapy or overworked muscles. Ryland ignored it, but by afternoon, it had become sharper. By evening, it felt as though someone had poured molten metal directly into his veins.

He'd been making tea in the galley when it happened. The mug slipped from suddenly numb fingers. Ceramic shattered across the floor. Pain erupted through both arms simultaneously before racing into his shoulders and down his spine.

Ryland gasped. His knees gave out almost instantly. He barely managed to catch himself before collapsing completely. Every muscle locked. His vision blurred. He folded instinctively around himself, clutching both forearms against his chest as another wave of burning tore through his body.

It hurt. God, it hurt. It was deep and relentless, like his muscles themselves had caught fire beneath his skin.

He vaguely heard footsteps, then Simon's voice. "Grace."

Like always, his voice was never panicked. Simon dropped beside him without hesitation.

"Look at me," he said.

Ryland tried. Another wave struck before he managed it. His breathing became ragged. "I..."

Simon had already activated his communicator. "Adrian."

The response came almost instantly. "Arriving, statement."

Simon crouched beside him the entire time. He didn't bombard Ryland with questions, nor did he tell him everything would be okay. Instead, one steady hand rested carefully between Ryland's shoulder blades while the other supported his elbow, making certain he wouldn't collapse any farther. "Easy."

Ryland squeezed his eyes shut. "It burns..."

"We'll figure it out."

Simple. Matter-of-fact.

Adrian arrived moments later, carrying diagnostic equipment. The episode lasted nearly twelve minutes. Afterward, Ryland could barely stand. Simon quietly slipped beneath one arm, taking enough of his weight to guide him back toward the medical bay. Ryland leaned against him far more heavily than he intended. Simon never commented.

After the third collapse, Simon disappeared into the fabrication workshop. Ryland assumed he was repairing another section of the ship. Instead, Simon returned carrying blueprints, tools, and increasingly bizarre prototypes.

"What're you making?" Ryland asked one afternoon.

"Solutions."

"To?"

"You."

Ryland blinked. Then, a little offended, said, “Like fixing me?”

Simon clarified without looking up from the workbench. "Not fixing." A pause. "Helping."

The first invention appeared the following morning. Custom handrails now lined the medical bay corridor, positioned specifically where Ryland tended to lose his balance. The second arrived later that afternoon— lightweight forearm braces designed to stabilize aching joints without restricting movement. By week's end, Simon had somehow redesigned nearly half the ship.

Modified utensils with enlarged grips reduced strain on Ryland's hands during painful flare-ups. Folding support bars appeared beside workstations so he could stand without exhausting himself. Even the chairs throughout the common areas had quietly acquired additional supports, each adjusted precisely to compensate for his weakened back. None of them were elegant, but they worked perfectly.

Ryland eventually stopped asking when Simon found time to build everything. The answer was apparently whenever everyone else was asleep.

Several days later, Ryland wandered into the fabrication bay looking for Simon. Instead, he paused in the doorway. Adrian stood opposite Simon beside one of the fabrication units. Between them rested a sleek metallic forearm unlike anything Ryland had seen before. It was unmistakably a prosthetic.

Only, this one looked lighter than the one Simon currently wore. Gone was the thick industrial plating Simon had worn since Ryland met him. That prosthetic had clearly been designed for durability rather than comfort: heavy joints, reinforced steel, exposed servos capable of lifting engine components but not very ergonomic.

This one looked almost graceful. Smooth silver alloys curved naturally around the frame while intricate synthetic tendons disappeared beneath polished panels. It resembled something designed to move with the body rather than simply replace what had been lost. Simon stared at it in complete silence.

"You made this?" He asked Adrian.

Adrian inclined his head, almost in a nod. "Friend Simon performed substantial manual labor using outdated equipment, observation."

Simon glanced down at his existing prosthetic. "It still works."

"It also weighs approximately three times more than necessary." A pause. "You deserve better."

Ryland watched Simon freeze. For a long moment, nobody spoke. Then, without another word, Simon quietly released the locking mechanism securing his old prosthetic. Metal disengaged with a soft series of clicks. He set the worn limb carefully onto the workbench.

Adrian stepped forward. His enormous claws, despite their size, moved with extraordinary gentleness as he aligned the new prosthetic with the attachment point at Simon's shoulder. Tiny mechanical latches engaged one by one with quiet metallic clicks before the limb came alive, fingers flexing experimentally as Simon tested the controls.

He rotated his wrist, opened his hand, then closed it again. He lifted his arm. There didn’t seem to be any hesitation or lag. It moved as naturally as though it had always belonged there.

Simon simply stared at it. Ryland had become accustomed to Simon's reserved expressions over the past week. His face rarely betrayed much beyond mild annoyance, quiet concentration, or occasional amusement whenever Adrian deliberately tested his patience. Ryland had never seen this before.

It started almost imperceptibly. The corners of Simon's mouth lifted just enough to soften the hard lines usually resting around them. His eyes relaxed, the constant alertness fading as something warmer quietly settled over his features. Gratitude, disbelief, and relief all blended into a smile so small most people would have missed it entirely.

Ryland didn't because it transformed him. It wasn't merely that Simon looked happier. He looked lighter— younger. It was as though some invisible weight he'd carried for years had finally eased from his shoulders. For a brief moment, the guarded engineer disappeared, replaced by someone capable of accepting kindness without immediately trying to repay it.

It was, Ryland realized, the first genuine smile he'd seen from Simon Fischer. That tiny smile illuminated the room far more brightly than the fabrication bay's overhead lights ever could. Ryland found himself smiling, too. Simon finally looked like someone who believed, if only for a moment, that he deserved to be cared for.

In the days that followed, Simon discovered there were two versions of Dr. Ryland Grace.

The first was the one most people probably saw. He moved carefully through the Mary as though he were never entirely certain the floor would remain beneath his feet. Every loud noise made his shoulders tense. Every unfamiliar alarm pulled his attention toward the nearest exit before he consciously relaxed again. Even while recovering physically, there remained an unmistakable hesitation to everything he did, as though some part of him still expected every moment of peace to be temporary.

He smiled often enough, especially when Adrian proudly presented another breakthrough or one of Simon's mobility aids made daily life a little easier, but the smiles never quite reached his beautiful blue eyes. They were grateful smiles, the sort people wore because they wanted everyone else to know they were trying.

The second version only appeared when science entered the conversation.

Simon noticed it entirely by accident. He'd walked into one of the laboratories one afternoon, intending to replace a faulty environmental sensor. Adrian was occupied on the opposite side of the room, calibrating equipment, leaving Grace alone beside one of the blood samples recovered from the Iron Lung. Simon expected to announce himself, make the repair, and leave. Instead, he paused with his toolbox still hanging at his side.

Grace hadn't noticed him. The blond scientist stood bent over a holographic display, one hand absentmindedly supporting his chin while the other scribbled across a digital notebook faster than Simon could read them. Under the microscope floated another droplet of the strange crimson fluid, magnified thousands of times on the screen until individual cellular structures drifted lazily across the screen.

"No, that doesn't make sense," Grace murmured to himself.

His voice was quiet, almost conversational, as though another scientist stood beside him arguing the finer points of molecular biology. "If the mutation spread through direct contact, the degradation rate should've accelerated after the second generation..."

He frowned thoughtfully before scratching out an entire paragraph. "...Unless the blood isn't mutating." A pause. "...Unless it's adapting—" His eyes widened. "Oh!"

Another page appeared. "That would explain the structural consistency."

Simon remained standing in the doorway long after the environmental sensor had completely slipped his mind. He couldn't follow most of what Grace was saying. Cellular adaptation and protein structures might as well have been another language entirely. Simon understood machines, metal, and electrical systems, alongside the satisfying certainty that every problem had a physical cause and a physical solution. Biology seemed content to ignore such conveniences.

What Simon did understand was the change happening in front of him.

Grace had stopped shaking. The faint tremor that usually lived in his hands—the one Simon had quietly attributed to exhaustion, lingering neurological damage, or perhaps simply nerves—had disappeared completely. His breathing had settled into a slow, steady rhythm. Even the perpetual tension that seemed woven into his shoulders melted away as he lost himself in thought. He wasn't glancing toward exits anymore. He wasn't rubbing absentmindedly at the crimson scars climbing beneath his sleeves. Every ounce of his attention belonged to the microscopic universe floating beneath the lens.

For the first time since Simon had pulled him from the Iron Lung, Grace didn't look like a survivor. He looked exactly like what he was: a scientist.

The realization lingered with Simon long after he'd quietly replaced the broken sensor and slipped back into the hallway without interrupting.

Once he'd noticed it though, he couldn't stop noticing. Whenever Adrian mentioned blood samples, Grace straightened almost immediately. Whenever new data arrived from one of the analyzers, his eyes lit with unmistakable curiosity. Whenever Simon left copies of the Mary's original mission files outside the laboratory, Grace inevitably disappeared into them for hours at a time, quietly muttering observations under his breath while surrounding himself with handwritten notes.

Simon found himself catching fragments of those conversations more and more frequently.

"Astrophage consumes stellar energy, but it still obeys conservation principles..."

Another day: "— If these blood-ocean organisms evolved under complete stellar collapse, their metabolism might offer clues."

And later: "No, that reaction pathway would require a catalyst. Unless..."

Every sentence dissolved naturally into the next until Grace stopped speaking to anyone in particular. His thoughts simply spilled into the room, half-hypothesis and half-conversation with himself, each question leading to three more before the previous one had even been answered.

It fascinated Simon. He never understood science. Frankly, he was lucky if he understood one sentence out of every three. It fascinated him because science did something medicine couldn't for Grace. Pain medication eased his physical suffering, physical therapy slowly rebuilt wasted muscles, and sleep gave his exhausted body time to recover. But science gave Grace himself back.

It reached beneath the fear and the trauma and the months of isolation inside that rusted submarine and uncovered the man who had existed before all of it. Simon saw it every single time Grace became absorbed in a theory. His eyes brightened behind his glasses until they practically sparkled beneath the laboratory lights. His hands began sketching invisible diagrams through the air. Words spilled from him faster than he could organize them because there were simply too many ideas competing for attention.

Simon had seen machines restart after months of inactivity. Watching Ryland talk about biology reminded him strangely of that, as though something essential inside him had finally received power again.

One evening, nearly a month after Grace had awakened aboard the Mary, Simon wandered into the laboratory expecting to find it empty. Instead, Grace sat alone beneath the dimmed overhead lights, surrounded by enough notebooks to cover half the table. Adrian had apparently retired for the evening, leaving the laboratory unusually still except for the faint hum of analytical equipment quietly processing another batch of blood-ocean samples.

Grace wasn't writing anymore. He simply stared at one of Adrian's holographic molecular models, his fingers resting lightly against the edge of the table while his thoughts drifted somewhere Simon couldn't see.

Simon recognized that expression. It was the same one he'd worn countless times while staring at damaged engine schematics, waiting for his brain to notice the missing piece. Without saying anything, Simon crossed to the galley, prepared two mugs of tea, and returned to the laboratory. He placed one beside Grace. He blinked in surprise before looking up.

"Thanks,” he mumbled.

Simon nodded once before taking the seat across from him. For several minutes, they drank in comfortable silence. The quiet between them had changed over the past week. Early conversations had always carried an awkwardness born from unfamiliarity, each pause feeling like something that needed to be filled. Now the silence felt companionable. Neither man seemed obligated to speak simply because the other happened to be present.

Simon set his mug down. "Can you tell me about it?"

Grace looked up from the molecular model. "The mission?"

Simon shook his head. "The blood."

The question seemed to stop time. Grace’s hand froze halfway back toward his tea. His eyes searched Simon's face with cautious uncertainty, as though trying to decide whether he'd heard correctly. "The blood?"

Simon nodded. "You never talk about the submarine."

Ryland's gaze immediately dropped.

Simon sighed, his voice softening. "You change the subject every time someone asks about the submarine."

Silence stretched between them. Simon didn't press, but after another moment he continued quietly. "But every time you start talking about the blood—" He searched for words that felt accurate. "...you look different."

Ryland frowned. "Different how?"

"You stop looking scared."

The scientist's expression softened with unmistakable surprise. Simon hadn't intended to say quite that much. He found himself continuing anyway. "You stop shaking."

Grace glanced instinctively toward his own hands.

Simon continued. "You breathe normally."

Another pause. "And..." He hesitated. "You smile."

Grace stared at him with those big blue eyes. Simon shifted slightly beneath the unexpected attention.

"So..." He gestured awkwardly toward the blood sample rotating above the table. "Can you tell me about it?"

For several long seconds, Grace didn't answer. Then, almost shyly, he asked, "You really want to hear me ramble about cellular biology?"

"I asked, didn't I?"

A tiny laugh escaped Grace before he adjusted his glasses. "You know, most people regret asking after about five minutes."

Simon leaned back comfortably in his chair. "I repair fusion engines for fun."

Grace smiled, his voice softening before saying, “Fair point."

The scientist reached for one of his notebooks. "So..." He opened it to a page absolutely covered in diagrams. "The first thing you need to understand is that calling it a blood ocean is technically misleading."

Simon frowned immediately. "It isn't blood?"

"Oh, it's definitely blood." Grace waved one hand enthusiastically. "It's just so much more complicated than that."

What followed was less a conversation and more an avalanche. Two hours disappeared almost without Simon noticing. Grace spoke about specialized cellular structures capable of surviving independently outside a host organism. He explained evolutionary pressures unique to oceans composed entirely of biological material, theories regarding mutation pathways Adrian had already begun observing, and the remarkable possibility that entire ecosystems had developed around living blood rather than water. Every explanation naturally led into another question, which sparked another theory, which required another diagram hastily sketched across the nearest notebook.

Simon followed for approximately thirty percent of the explanation. He understood enough to ask questions. "So the cells are communicating?"

Grace immediately launched into another explanation. "Not exactly, but that's actually a really interesting question..."

Simon learned several things. Mostly, biology still refused to behave sensibly. Still, he listened because even if the science didn’t make sense, Grace did.

The more he explained, the brighter he became. His hands moved constantly while he talked, sketching invisible molecules through the air. His glasses slipped lower down his nose until Simon quietly pointed it out, earning an absentminded "Oh," before Grace pushed them back into place without ever interrupting his train of thought. Every new discovery filled him with the same childlike excitement Simon imagined astronomers felt when finding a new galaxy.

At some point, Simon realized he had stopped watching the holograms entirely. Instead, he watched the easy smile settle naturally across Grace’s face, watched his eyes shine with genuine wonder, and watched a man who had spent months imprisoned inside a steel coffin remember, if only for an evening, what it felt like to love what he did.

Nearly two and a half hours later, Grace finally paused long enough to realize the clock. His eyes widened. "I've been talking for over two hours."

Simon looked at the timer on the laboratory wall. "Two hours and fourteen minutes."

Grace groaned softly and buried his face in both hands. "I'm so sorry."

Simon frowned. "What for?"

"I've been rambling."

Simon’s voice was neutral as he spoke. "I didn't mind."

Grace slowly lowered his hands. "...Really?"

Simon met his eyes. "You look happier."

The words settled gently between them. Grace didn't answer immediately. Instead, he looked down at the notebook still lying open before him. When he finally spoke, his voice had become almost impossibly quiet. "I forgot I used to get excited about things."

Simon looked at him for a long moment before sliding the now-forgotten mug of tea back into Ryland's hands. "Then keep talking."

Ryland looked up. "About science?"

“About anything,” Simon added. "It seems good at helping you find your way back."

Ryland's smile this time was small. "So long as you're willing to listen, big guy."

Simon picked up his own mug, looking up at Ryland from the top of the rim. "I'll listen, Angel."

Simon absolutely adored the flustered expression of Ryland’s now red face.

That became another quiet ritual aboard the Mary. Whenever nightmares lingered too long behind Grace’s eyes, Simon never asked what he'd dreamed. Whenever memories of the Iron Lung threatened to pull him somewhere dark, Simon never demanded explanations he clearly wasn't ready to give. Instead, he'd nod toward the nearest microscope, blood sample, or notebook and ask the simplest question he could think of.

“What're you working on today?"

Every single time, Grace’s shoulders relaxed. His breathing steadied, and the trembling faded from his hands. And slowly, patiently, explanation by explanation, Simon watched science stitch together the pieces of a man who had once believed he would die alone beneath an ocean of blood.

Ryland had expected the work to feel intimidating. Instead, it felt strangely... familiar.

None of the science resembled the laboratories he'd once worked in. Nothing about an alien spacecraft built from impossible alloys or a giant blue extraterrestrial engineer could ever become ordinary, but because curiosity itself hadn't changed. A question was still a question. A mystery still demanded to be solved. Cells still behaved according to rules that could be observed, challenged, and eventually understood.

That realization settled over him gradually during his first few weeks aboard the Mary. Simon spread the original mission files across the conference table one morning, explaining everything humanity had discovered about the organism consuming stellar energy. Astrophage. Their best hope. Their greatest threat. Ryland spent the next several hours reading until diagrams, equations, and observations blurred together into one enormous puzzle.

When he finally looked up, Simon and Adrian were both watching him.

"What?" Ryland asked.

Simon leaned against the bulkhead with his arms folded. "You've been muttering for forty-five minutes."

"I have?"

"You've also covered half the table in notes."

Ryland blinked. He looked down. At some point, he'd apparently commandeered nearly every spare sheet of paper within reach. Molecular pathways covered one page. Evolutionary trees occupied another. The margins of Simon's engineering schematics now contained hastily scribbled hypotheses linking Astrophage metabolism to several oddities Adrian had observed inside the blood-ocean samples.

"Oh." A sheepish smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "I... kind of forgot you were both still here."

"I noticed," Simon replied.

There wasn't the slightest trace of irritation in his voice. If anything, Ryland thought he heard amusement. Simon rarely allowed emotion to escape in large quantities. Everything about the engineer seemed carefully measured, from the number of words he spoke to the way he carried himself through the ship. Even his smiles appeared reluctant, as though they had to fight through years of habit before reaching his face.

But Ryland was beginning to learn the tiny tells: the almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of Simon's mouth, the way his shoulders relaxed whenever conversation became comfortable, and the softness that quietly settled into his dark eyes whenever he listened instead of spoke. Simon wasn't difficult to read because he lacked emotion. He was difficult to read because every emotion arrived quietly.

Ryland found himself watching for them anyway.

Overtime, their work settled into a similar rhythm. Simon understood machines with an intuition Ryland had only ever seen in the very best engineers. Ryland could describe a piece of equipment that existed only in his imagination—a containment chamber capable of isolating microscopic Astrophage colonies while exposing them to controlled wavelengths of light—and Simon would stare thoughtfully at the sketch for a minute before disappearing into engineering.

Three days later, the device existed.

Grace’s mouth gaped open, his voice heigthening in pitch as he said, "You just made it?!"

Simon glanced up from tightening the final bolt, his brow raised. "You designed it."

"I drew circles and arrows!"

"They were informative."

Grace laughed. "I think that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said about my diagrams."

Across the fabrication bay, Adrian let out a pleased series of musical clicks. "Friend Simon translating impossible ideas into possible machines. Friend Grace creating impossible ideas. Efficient partnership, observation."

Simon shrugged as though building technology that humanity had never imagined was somehow ordinary. Ryland was beginning to suspect Simon genuinely believed it was. Likewise, Simon eventually accepted that biology operated according to laws completely separate from engineering.

The first few explanations ended exactly the same way— Ryland would enthusiastically launch into protein synthesis or microbial adaptation, and Simon would listen with remarkable concentration. Five minutes later, he'd blink once and admit, completely deadpan, "I understood maybe four of those words."

Ryland laughed so hard he nearly spilled a tray of samples. "You could've stopped me."

"I was hoping it'd start making sense."

"It didn't?"

"No."

"Any of it?"

Simon considered. "I know what proteins are."

"That's honestly better than I expected."

Neither of them noticed Adrian quietly recording the exchange.

Eventually, the mission slowly stopped belonging to individuals. Successes no longer carried a single name attached to them. When Adrian discovered microscopic structural changes inside the blood-ocean samples, Ryland spent three sleepless nights constructing a theory to explain them.

Simon, still confused out of his mind, said, "So you need a microscope that can survive direct Astrophage exposure."

Ryland blinked. "...Yes."

"I can build that."

Adrian manufactured an alloy capable of surviving conditions that should have reduced ordinary metals to slag. A week later, Grace confirmed his hypothesis. The report bore all three names. By then, that simply felt right.

The trio’s friendship announced itself through smaller moments than scientific breakthroughs ever could. Ryland developed an unfortunate habit of falling asleep wherever research happened to leave him. Once, embarrassingly, he'd fallen asleep halfway through explaining enzyme kinetics to Adrian while still sitting upright in a chair. Every single time, he woke beneath a blanket.

The first morning, he assumed he'd wrapped himself in it before drifting off. The second time seemed like coincidence. By the fourth, he knew Simon was taking care of him. Simon never mentioned it. Ryland never thanked him. The blankets simply kept appearing.

Eventually, Ryland started smiling whenever he found one. Simon pretended not to notice.

Meals became another quiet battle. Research possessed an alarming ability to erase entire afternoons from Ryland’s awareness. One experiment became two. One observation demanded another. Before he realized it, breakfast had become dinner again. Simon solved the problem with characteristic efficiency.

The engineer simply began arriving. Ryland would be peering into a microscope, completely absorbed in the strange behavior of a mutated cell culture, when a plate would quietly appear beside him. He wouldn't even look up anymore.

"Thanks," he mumbled, not really paying attention

Simon grumbled. "Eat."

"I will."

Simon remained standing there.

Ryland sighed dramatically. "You're not leaving, are you?"

"No."

"You're incredibly stubborn."

"I've been called worse."

Ryland smiled despite himself before finally setting the microscope aside. He suspected Simon counted that as victory.

Simon, unfortunately, proved just as hopeless, only in the opposite direction. Machines always came first. If something aboard the Mary malfunctioned, Simon would continue repairing it long after exhaustion should have forced him to stop. Ryland found him one evening asleep beneath an open maintenance panel with a wrench still clutched loosely in his hand.

He looked young. He probably was many years younger than Ryland. Simon carried the lines of someone who had spent years working long hours around unforgiving machinery, but asleep, the constant vigilance disappeared. The furrow between his brows smoothed away, and his shoulders relaxed. For the first time, Ryland realized just how tired Simon always seemed.

He crouched beside him, his voice soft. "Simon."

A sleepy grunt.

"You've been working for eighteen hours."

"Probably."

"That's not a normal answer."

Another grunt.

Ryland smiled softly. "It can wait."

Simon opened one eye. "You sure?"

"The ship hasn't exploded yet."

“...Good point."

Ryland held out a hand. "Come on."

Simon accepted it without thinking. Only after standing did either of them realize Simon hadn't hesitated.

Movie nights also somehow became a tradition after Adrian declared that "cultural education improves friendship." Ryland suspected Adrian simply enjoyed watching humans argue over films. Simon claimed not to care what they watched. Ryland quickly discovered this was a lie. Simon absolutely had opinions, but he simply disguised them beneath deadpan observations.

"That explosion violates at least six laws of physics," Simon once said.

"It's an action movie."

"Exactly."

Music inevitably followed. Ryland sang. Loudly, poorly, and with unwavering confidence. Simon pinched the bridge of his nose.

"You missed every note," he said, looking up at Ryland.

"I hit several!" Ryland gawked.

Adrian immediately sided with Ryland. "Friend Grace producing morale. Adrian like melody"

"He's just producing noise, Adrian."

"Noise increasing morale. After all, Adrian speak in melodies"

Ryland pointed triumphantly toward Adrian. "See?"

Simon sighed. "I've been outvoted."

Several weeks later, while Simon recalibrated the joints of his prosthetic in engineering, Ryland finally asked the question he'd quietly wondered about since waking aboard the ship.

"Your arm."

Simon looked up. "What about it?"

"You…” Ryland hesitated, rubbing the back of his neck. “You don't have to tell me if you'd rather not."

The engineer studied the exposed mechanical shoulder for a moment. He shook his head. "Industrial accident." Simon adjusted one of the locking mechanisms. "Wrong place." Another click. "Wrong second."

Ryland’s face scrunched in sympathy. "I'm sorry, Simon," he said.

Simon shrugged. Life moved on, and Ryland never asked what machine had taken it. Never asked whether Simon blamed himself. Never asked how long rehabilitation had taken. The answer Simon had offered was enough.

He still handed Simon heavy equipment without thinking twice and still forgot Simon even had a prosthetic until the engineer occasionally removed it for maintenance. If Simon noticed, he never said anything. But over the following weeks, Ryland began seeing tiny smiles appear more often.

The first mutation happened on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. Ryland would spend years wishing it hadn't.

He was alone when it began. It began so quietly that, at first, he thought he was simply tired. He had been in one of the smaller laboratories for most of the afternoon, comparing Adrian's latest analysis of the blood-ocean samples against several Astrophage cultures they'd successfully isolated over the previous week. The room hummed with familiar life: filtration systems cycling softly behind the walls, holographic displays rotating molecular structures in slow, graceful spirals, and analytical instruments quietly recording data with the patient precision only machines seemed capable of maintaining forever.

It should have been comforting.

Science usually was.

He'd even caught himself smiling an hour earlier after finally identifying a metabolic pathway that appeared to overlap between the mutated blood cells and one of Astrophage's stranger energy-transfer proteins. The discovery wasn't complete—not even close—but it was enough to make his brain race happily ahead of the evidence.

For the first time in months, he'd forgotten everything else. The Iron Lung, the blood, the nightmares. They'd all faded into the background beneath the simple joy of solving a problem.

Then his forearm burned. Ryland frowned. The sensation wasn't entirely unfamiliar. Ever since waking aboard the Mary, he'd experienced brief episodes of deep, aching heat beneath his skin. Adrian believed they were connected to whatever changes the blood-ocean organism had triggered in his body. Usually, they lasted only a few minutes before disappearing again.

He absentmindedly rubbed at the inside of his wrist while continuing to study a molecular model suspended above the table. Adrian had warned him that lingering effects from prolonged exposure to the blood ocean were still poorly understood. Episodes of burning weren't uncommon anymore. Most lasted a few minutes before fading into a dull ache.

This one didn't fade. Instead, it spread. The heat crawled beneath his skin with unsettling purpose, slipping through his arm and across his shoulder until it settled heavily against the base of his neck. It wasn't the sharp pain of a cut or bruise. It felt deeper than that—as though something inside his body had awakened and begun rearranging itself one slow heartbeat at a time.

Ryland stopped writing. "...That's new."

His voice sounded oddly small inside the laboratory. He flexed his fingers. The joints felt stiff. A tiny pressure built beneath each fingernail, strange enough that he frowned and lifted his hand closer to the light. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then—

Crack.

The sound was almost inaudible.

His thumbnail shifted, just enough that he wondered if he'd imagined it. Then it happened again. The pale edge of the nail extended another fraction of an inch before narrowing into a sharper point. Rylan stared. His brain refused to process what his eyes insisted they were seeing.

"No," he whispered.

Another nail followed. The change wasn't violent. That almost made it worse. There was no explosion of pain, no sudden transformation. It was patient. His body moved with the quiet certainty of something following instructions written long before he had ever arrived aboard the Mary.

One by one, his fingernails lengthened into dark, elegant points. Ryland stumbled backward. The stool behind him clattered onto the floor. The sound echoed through the laboratory, startling enough that he almost expected someone to answer. No one did.

He looked down again. His hands no longer looked entirely like his own. The burning intensified. It swept beneath his skin in another slow wave, and this time he watched it happen. Thin crimson lines surfaced beneath the flesh of his wrist, branching outward with unnerving grace. They spread across the backs of his hands before disappearing beneath his sleeves, moving like roots beneath clear water. Existing scars darkened until they looked freshly carved, climbing higher along his forearms in intricate patterns that seemed almost... alive.

Ryland pulse lurched. "No..." His voice cracked. "No, no, no—"

He backed into the nearest counter hard enough to rattle several pieces of laboratory equipment. Glass sample tubes chimed softly together. He barely heard them. Pressure bloomed along his jaw next. His teeth ached like something inside the bone itself was slowly stretching.

Instinctively, he touched one of his canines. It caught against his fingertip— longer and sharper. His stomach dropped. The room suddenly felt much too bright. He turned toward one of Adrian's polished instrument housings, using the reflective surface as an improvised mirror.

For a heartbeat, he didn't recognize the man staring back. His blond hair still framed his face in familiar waves. His glasses still sat crookedly across the bridge of his nose. His eyes looked terrified. Dark crimson scars climbed from beneath the collar of his shirt toward his jaw in delicate branching patterns. His lips parted in another shaky breath, revealing canines that no longer belonged in a human mouth.

He looked...

The endless pressure pressing against steel shocked his brain. He was suddenly seeing blood coating every surface. The certainty that he would die before anyone even learned his name came rushing back. Months inside the Iron Lung came rushing back with suffocating force.

He had survived all of that. He had escaped! And now his own body was becoming another prison.

His breathing hitched. Air reached his lungs, but somehow it never felt like enough. His chest tightened until each breath seemed to stop halfway down. His heartbeat hammered painfully against his ribs. The laboratory blurred around the edges.

"I'm..." he began.

He couldn't finish. His voice dissolved beneath another desperate inhale. His knees buckled. The floor met him hard enough to sting, but the impact barely registered. He folded instinctively into himself, arms wrapped tightly around his torso as if holding himself together could somehow stop whatever was happening beneath his skin.

Hot tears spilled onto the floor. Fear overwhelmed language entirely. He couldn't think, couldn't organize the panic into coherent thoughts. Only fragments.

It's happening.

I'm changing.

I don't know how to stop.

Simon...

The name surfaced before he even realized he'd been thinking about him. Ryland squeezed his eyes shut. What if Simon saw this? What if the next time the engineer looked at him, he didn't see Ryland Grace anymore? What if he saw...

Something else?

The laboratory door hissed open. "Friend Grace?"

Adrian.

Ryland couldn't answer. Another sob caught painfully in his throat.

Heavy footsteps crossed the room with surprising speed before stopping beside him. Adrian didn't crowd him. The Eridian simply lowered himself to the floor beside Ryland, enormous enough that his presence filled the room without feeling overwhelming. One broad blue claw rested gently between Ryland’s shoulders—not restraining him, not trying to fix him, merely reminding him that someone else was there. Someone steady. Someone safe.

"Look at Adrian."

Ryland shook his head violently. "I..." Another ragged breath. "I can't..."

"You can."

The translator's voice never rose. It remained exactly the same calm, measured cadence Adrian always used, as immovable as bedrock.

"Breathe with Adrian."

Ryland tried. His lungs refused. Another attempt. This one caught halfway. Again. Adrian demonstrated each slow inhale, each deliberate exhale, waiting patiently for Ryland to follow. No urgency crept into his movements. No frustration entered his voice.

Little by little, Ryland’s breathing began matching the rhythm beside him. The panic loosened one broken breath at a time. The burning beneath his skin dulled, and the violent trembling eased until it became little more than exhausted shivering. Minutes slipped quietly past.

Eventually, Adrian angled a reflective panel toward him. "Observe," he said.

Ryland hesitated before forcing himself to look. His fingers trembled as he lifted one hand. The claws were gone, and his nails had returned to their ordinary shape. He touched one of his teeth. Normal. The crimson patterns had retreated beneath his skin, leaving only the familiar network of scars that had become part of him since the Iron Lung.

He should have felt relief. Instead, fresh tears blurred his vision.

Adrian tilted his head.

"The mutation has receded," he said.

Ryland nodded weakly. "I know."

"Then why continued sadness?"

He stared at his own reflection for several seconds before answering. "I'm..." He swallowed. "I'm scared."

"Of future mutation?"

Ryland shook his head. The answer surprised even him. "No."

His fingers tightened around each other. "I'm scared of what Simon will think."

The words came out almost too quietly to hear. "If he ever sees me like that..." His throat tightened again. "I know he won't yell. I know he won't be cruel."

A humorless laugh escaped him. "That's almost worse."

Adrian waited. Ryland looked down at his hands. "I've seen the way he looks at people."

His voice softened. "He sees the good in them." Another tear slipped down his cheek. "What if one day he looks at me… and doesn't?"

When Adrian spoke, his tone from the translator was softened. "Friend Simon has seen deepest parts of hell."

Ryland looked up.

"And worse." The Eridian folded his upper claws neatly behind his back. "He knows suffering. He also knows kindness. He will still see friend Grace." Adrian paused thoughtfully. "Likely continue loving friend Grace."

Ryland’s eyes widened. "...What?"

"So long as friend Grace does not develop overwhelming desire to consume friend Simon."

Despite everything—

Despite the tears—

Despite the lingering ache beneath his skin—

Despite the fear still curling painfully in his chest—

A startled, breathless sound escaped him that was almost a laugh. His face immediately flushed.

"I..." He buried his face in both hands. "I hate you."

"I receive this feedback frequently."

Ryland couldn't even summon the energy to argue.

Later that night, alone in his quarters, he sat on the edge of his bed with the lights dimmed, turning his hands over again and again beneath the soft glow. Normal, for now.

His thoughts drifted inevitably toward Simon, toward the quiet afternoon when Simon had removed his prosthetic to recalibrate its joints, exposing the scars where flesh gave way to polished metal. Simon had spoken about losing his arm with remarkable simplicity.

Industrial accident.

Wrong place.

Wrong second.

Ryland had never looked at Simon differently afterward. The prosthetic had become, in his mind, as unremarkable as Simon's dark hair or the calluses on his remaining hand. It was simply part of the man he had come to know. Yet when Ryland imagined Simon looking at him with claws instead of fingernails and crimson scars spreading across his skin, his certainty evaporated.

Logically, he knew Simon wasn't shallow. He knew Simon judged people by the choices they made, not the bodies they inhabited. He believed that with all his heart. He just wasn't sure he believed that kindness could extend to himself.

That frightened him more than the mutation ever had.

It didn’t happen all at once.

Grace had been quiet for most of the day, which in itself was unusual. Simon had learned not to press during those moments, but there was something different in the way Grace was looking at him now. Simon noticed the shift but didn’t comment on it.

“You’re thinking too loud,” Simon said after a moment, not looking at him.

Grace let out something that might have been a laugh if it had more air behind it.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “Yeah, I am.”

That, too, was new. Silence settled again, but this time it didn’t feel restful. It felt like something approaching. Grace stared at the ceiling for a long time before speaking.

“I need to tell you something,” he said.

Simon finally looked at him then. Something in Grace’s expression made him stop moving entirely.

“Okay,” Simon said simply.

Grace swallowed. “It’s not about science,” he added, almost like an apology.

Simon gave a small nod. “Alright.”

And then Grace began. He spoke slowly at first, like each word had weight. He didn’t have the carefree nature he usually had when explaining a concept, but the carefulness of someone deciding how much of themselves could be said out loud without falling apart in the process.

He told Simon about Filament Station, about how he hadn’t been chosen because he volunteered, but because there had been no real choice at all. The words “necessary personnel” had been used in place of consent, as though language could soften coercion into something acceptable. He remembered the moment he realized he wasn’t going on a mission so much as being assigned to it.

Simon didn’t interrupt. He didn’t even shift in his seat. He just listened.

Grace’s voice tightened as he continued, describing surveillance systems that never fully turned off, eyes that were always watching, recordings that never stopped capturing, even during sleep cycles that were never quite restful. He spoke about being sealed into the Iron Lung with the understanding that no one would be coming down to check if he was alright unless there was data to retrieve.

Every dive, he said, felt like a negotiation between usefulness and survival. Every return, a surprise. Every failure to resurface… expected.

“I wasn’t supposed to come back,” Grace admitted quietly at one point, staring somewhere just above Simon’s shoulder. “I think part of them always assumed I wouldn’t. That was the trade. I go down. I bring back samples. And if I don’t—” He stopped, exhaled shakily. “Then it means the data was worth it anyway.”

His hands had begun to tremble slightly. Simon still didn’t speak.

“I kept thinking,” Grace continued, voice thinning, “that at some point it would stop feeling like that. That I’d get used to it. But you don’t really get used to being disposable. You just… get quieter about it.”

There was a long pause after that. When he finally finished, it wasn’t with resolution. It was with exhaustion.

“I don’t think they hated me,” he added softly. “That’s the worst part. I think they just decided I was worth less than what I could bring back.”

Silence swallowed the room whole. Even the monitors seemed quieter. Ryland stopped talking. His gaze dropped to his hands, waiting— bracing.

Simon didn’t respond immediately. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t try to reframe it. He simply shifted his chair closer. Then, very slowly, like he was giving Grace every possible chance to pull away, he reached out and took his hand. Solid, present, and real.

Grace’s breath caught as if his body had forgotten how to continue for a moment. Then something cracked in him. His shoulders dropped, and his fingers tightened around Simon’s hand like it was the first stable thing he’d touched in years. The tears flooded down his face in hot, steady streams.

When he finally calmed enough to breathe again, Simon didn’t let go. Instead, he spoke quietly. “…Can I show you something?”

Grace blinked at him through lingering tears. Simon could’ve sworn his eyes looked like a beautiful ocean back on earth. Then, after a moment, Ryland nodded.

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Okay.”

Simon led him to the navigation deck, which was dimmer than the medical bay, lit mostly by console glow and the faint blue wash of distant systems. Simon led him without explanation, moving with the same quiet certainty he brought to everything else on the ship. Grace followed slowly, still a little unsteady on his feet, still holding onto the aftermath of what he had just said.

When the doors opened into the observation corridor, Grace stopped walking entirely. The universe stretched out beyond the glass. Not empty or dead. Truly, purely alive.

Stars scattered across impossible distances, burning in quiet defiance against the dark. Some were dimmer than others, faint flickers instead of roaring suns, but they were still there. Still existing. Still refusing to vanish completely.

Grace walked forward like he wasn’t entirely sure he was allowed to. Then he pressed his hand to the glass. His forehead followed a moment later. For the first time since Simon had met him, the scientist in him didn’t take over. There were no calculations or immediate analysis. Raw and unfiltered wonder filled his eyes. Simon watched him for a moment before speaking softly.

“The Quiet Rapture,” he said. “Adrian showed me your journal entries. How the stars and planets vanished.”

Grace didn’t look away from the stars. His voice came out barely above a whisper. “I didn’t think I’d ever see them again.”

Simon hesitated, then added, “I wanted to show you sooner. But every time I tried, you were either asleep or—” he paused, glancing at Grace’s absorbed expression, “—completely consumed by the lab work.”

That earned a faint, almost embarrassed huff of breath from Grace, though his eyes stayed fixed outside.

After a moment, he asked quietly, “Do you have plants?”

Simon blinked. Then, despite himself, he smiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “Actually… yeah, we do.”

The greenhouse was small compared to everything else on the Mary, but it was alive in a way the rest of the ship couldn’t quite replicate. Rows of carefully maintained vegetation stretched beneath soft artificial lighting, leaves shifting gently in the controlled airflow. It smelled faintly of soil and growth and something that felt uncomfortably like Earth.

Grace stepped inside and immediately went still. “Oh my—”

He stopped walking entirely. His eyes moved across everything at once, like he couldn’t decide where to look first. Leaves, stems, and small flowering plants are tucked into hydroponic systems. Even the faint rustle of growth seemed to overwhelm him.

“This is—” he started, then stopped, then laughed once in disbelief. “This is real.”

Simon stayed just behind him, watching quietly. Grace moved forward slowly, like approaching something sacred. He reached out hesitantly, fingers hovering just above a leaf before finally making contact. The moment he did, something in his expression broke completely. His breath caught.

Then he dropped to his knees. He pressed his hand fully into the foliage, cupping a leaf with the kind of care usually reserved for something fragile enough to disappear if held too tightly. His shoulders shook once. Then again.

And then he started crying. Again, sobs came in waves, uneven and overwhelming, as though something inside him had finally found a place to spill out without restraint. He bent forward slightly, forehead nearly touching the plants as he held onto them like they were proof of something he hadn’t dared believe existed anymore.

Simon didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward and pulled him into a hug. It wasn’t careful in the way his earlier touch had been. It was anchoring. Grace clutched at him instinctively, hands gripping Simon’s forearms as if making sure he was real while his body slowly folded into the steady pressure of Simon’s chest. He trembled there for a long moment, breathing unevenly as the greenhouse lights hummed softly around them.

Eventually, the sobbing slowed. Grace stayed there, leaning into Simon like he had nowhere else to go. And that was when he noticed it.

Simon was smiling. Just a small, almost imperceptible curve at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t loud or practiced or given to anyone else. It was quiet enough that it might have gone unnoticed if Ryland hadn’t been pressed so close. It was the most beautiful thing Ryland had seen in a very long time.

Ryland didn’t realize when it shifted until it was too late. It happened in small, almost invisible increments, like temperature changing so slowly you only notice once you’re already warm. Simon is still Simon in every outward sense: quiet, economical with words, and efficient in motion. He checks systems, fixes problems, and adjusts with the same steady patience he applies to everything else. He doesn’t fill silence for its own sake. He doesn’t try to be anything other than what the situation requires.

And that, Ryland slowly comes to understand, is exactly why he feels safe here.

Simon is always there in that same way. When Ryland woke disoriented, Simon was there. When pain spikes and the world blurs at the edges, Simon was there adjusting medication without making a spectacle of it. When Ryland tried to speak and lost the thread halfway through, Simon waited without impatience. When Ryland went quiet, Simon simply let it exist beside him.

He never promises recovery like it’s guaranteed. He never tells Ryland things will be fine in a way that feels dishonest. He doesn’t offer comfort as a performance. He just… shows up. Every time.

Ryland understood something that made his chest feel strangely tight. Simon Fischer is not trying to be anything impressive. He’s just consistent. Simon is the thing that stays.

And Ryland, with no warning at all, realizes that might be the most dangerous kind of person to fall for. There is nothing loud about it, no moment of impact. Only the undeniable understanding that somewhere along the way, without either of them naming it, Simon has become the one constant Ryland unconsciously relies on.

And worse, Simon doesn’t even seem to know it.

Simon realizes it later than Grace does.

Not because he doesn’t understand what love is. He’s seen it in small, ordinary ways his whole life: people staying late for each other, sharing meals without being asked, fixing things that didn’t strictly need fixing just so someone else wouldn’t have to worry about them. He recognizes it the way an engineer recognizes structural failure before it becomes visible. It’s quiet, inevitabe, once the pattern is complete.

He refuses to name it for a long time anyway because naming it would require admitting something else first. That Dr. Ryland Grace— that bright, talkative, endlessly curious angel—deserves more than him. More than a man who speaks in short sentences when he has the energy for them. More than someone who is better with machinery than with feelings. More than someone who still sometimes wakes up expecting silence to mean abandonment.

Simon tells himself it isn’t complicated. It’s just logic. Ryland is warmth and motion and words that spill over each other like he’s afraid there won’t be enough time to say them all. He fills rooms without trying to. Even when he’s tired, even when he’s hurt, there’s something about him that pulls attention like gravity. Simon, by comparison, is a controlled output. Minimal waste. Functional presence.

He keeps the distance he thinks is appropriate. At least, he tries to. It doesn’t work. Ryland doesn’t respond to distance the way Simon expects people to. He doesn’t take offense. He doesn’t retreat. He merely softens around it, works with it, like he’s learning the shape of Simon’s silence and deciding it’s still worth staying close to.

Simon starts noticing things he absolutely does not want to notice. Whenever he’s the one who initiates contact—rare, accidental moments where he has to reach past Ryland to adjust a monitor or pass something across a narrow space—Ryland reacts like it matters. Like Simon choosing proximity instead of avoiding it is something significant enough to register on his face. His cheeks color almost immediately, subtle but unmistakable, and he goes slightly quieter in a way that somehow makes Simon more aware of him, not less.

It’s worse when Ryland is talking. Ryland always talks about samples, about theories, about anything his mind catches onto in the moment. He’ll be mid-sentence, fully immersed in some cascading explanation of biological structure or impossible space conditions, when he notices Simon watching him, and he just… stops for half a beat. The awareness of being observed changes the rhythm of his thoughts, his blue eyes widening. Then he continues anyway, a little more self-conscious, as if Simon’s attention has weight.

Simon, without fail, feels it happen in his own body. A slow heat was creeping up his neck and ears, going warm before he could stop it. His focus narrows down until it’s just Ryland’s face, Ryland’s voice, Ryland’s eyes… those impossibly blue eyes that never seem to decide whether they’re observing the universe or inviting it in. He always tells himself to look away. Every time he doesn’t, something inside him shifts just slightly out of alignment.

Adrian notices first, of course. Adrian notices everything.

It starts small: “Friend Simon, why heart rate increase when Grace enters room?”

Simon nearly drops a tool.

“It doesn’t,” he says, his voice a little too sharp.

“Incorrect.”

“It does not—”

“Monitored data suggests elevated baseline physiological response,” Adrian continues calmly, as though he is not casually dismantling Simon’s entire denial system. “Correlation consistent with how Adrian feel for mate, statement.”

Simon stares at him. “I’m working.”

“With elevated heart rate.”

“I’m fine.”

Adrian accepts this with the same patience he applies to malfunctioning equipment that clearly isn’t going to fix itself but must be allowed to pretend for a while. Then he moves on. Unfortunately, he does not move on permanently.

Now Adrian has expanded his research.

“Friend Grace,” Adrian later announces, “why smile becomes different around engineer Simon?”

Ryland almost chokes on his drink. “I—what?”

“Observed variation. Statistically significant.”

“That’s not— I don’t— I just smile normally—!”

“Incorrect.”

Simon quietly leaves the room. Neither of them ever answers Adrian directly, which only seems to make the Eridian more confident in his conclusions. He begins timing interactions, logging proximity events, and noting tone changes. It becomes less like observation and more like harassment with spreadsheets.

It gets worse.

“Friend Simon,” Adrian says one day without preamble, “why do you stare at Grace when he is speaking and then pretend not to?”

Simon grits his teeth. “I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

“Evidence suggests otherwise.”

Simon considers unplugging something important.

Across the ship, Ryland starts getting similar commentary.

“Friend Grace, emotional output increases when engineer present.”

Ryland squeaks. “I’m not— I don’t— that’s not—”

“Data indicates otherwise.”

Ryland begins avoiding Adrian entirely, which does nothing to stop him. Eventually, Adrian’s tone shifts into something almost conversationally unbearable.

“It is statistically inefficient to deny mutual attachment,” he informs them both separately. “Recommend resolution.”

Neither of them responds. To Adrian, that seems like encouragement. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Simon finally understands the problem. It isn’t that he doesn’t know what he feels. It’s that he’s already there. It’s been long past recognition and denial, already orbiting something he’s been pretending he isn’t falling toward. And worse, Ryland is doing the same thing. Just in a louder, brighter, far more obvious way that Simon is increasingly terrified to acknowledge.

What finally disrupts Adrian’s increasingly enthusiastic attempts at orchestrating their emotional lives isn’t confrontation or denial or even exhaustion. It’s a discovery.

It happens in pieces, as most important things do aboard the Mary, until suddenly everything changes shape.

Grace is the one who notices it first. He’s in the lab late, still riding the aftershocks of another breakthrough in the Astrophage data. At first, it’s just a pattern that doesn’t belong, something tucked between known variables like an error in a beautifully balanced equation. Then it stops looking like an error and starts looking like an answer.

When the realization finally settles in, it doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like silence. It means the crisis they’ve been orbiting for so long, the reason either of them are here at all, has an end state— a solvable one.

They do solve it. Astrophage is understood. The mechanism behind the dying stars stops being an unknowable horror and becomes something they can actually work with. And just like that, the Mary is no longer a last hope drifting through extinction. It becomes a success, a future.

The ship doesn’t celebrate immediately. There’s too much disbelief for that. Too many years of assuming failure had already been written into the structure of things. But eventually, the truth settles in anyway. Humanity will not end here. For the first time since launch, neither Simon nor Grace is essential in the same way.

The survival pressure that defined every conversation, every task, every waking thought… loosens, and neither of them knows what to do with the space it leaves behind. It’s Ryland who laughs first, one evening after they confirm the final model.

“I’ve spent so long trying to save everybody else,” he says, almost disbelieving it, staring at the console like it might contradict him if he looks away.

Simon is quiet for a long moment. Then, honestly, “So have I.”

And for a while after that, things change in a way neither of them can quite name. The ship becomes less urgent. Their movements are less frantic. Even Adrian, for once, seems momentarily unsure of what comes next.

They still work. Still refine. Still ensure the solution holds. But the edge of desperation is gone, replaced by something quieter, almost disorienting in its simplicity. Existence without imminent collapse. It takes time to learn how to live inside that.

Eventually, Adrian asks if Simon and Grace would like to go to Erid, the planet he’s originally from. The two were quick to agree. On one of those quieter days of travel, Grace finds himself standing at the observation deck alone. The stars outside are still fading, but they are no longer a countdown. There’s a plan now. They are no longer watching inevitability happen. They are watching a system they can repair.

He’s staring out when Simon arrives behind him. He doesn’t speak immediately. He rarely does when things feel too fragile for interruption.

After a moment, he asks, “You okay?”

Grace lets out a breath that almost turns into a laugh.

“Yeah,” he says. Then, softer, “Actually, yeah. I think I am.”

Silence stretches between them, comfortable in a way it hasn’t been before. Then Grace’s expression shifts, like he’s deciding whether the moment is finally safe enough to say something he’s been carrying for too long.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says.

Simon’s attention sharpens immediately, but he doesn’t interrupt.

Grace exhales again, slower this time. “I’ve been… changing.”

That gets Simon’s full focus. Grace hesitates, then continues, voice quieter.

“The exposure from the samples. From the early dives. I didn’t fully understand it at first. I thought it was just stress, or fatigue, or hallucination-adjacent symptoms from isolation. But it isn’t.”

He finally looks at Simon, and Simon sees a shift in how Grace holds himself. Under the surface, something is wrong in a way that has been waiting to be named. Grace raises his hands and lets it happen.

The transformation is not violent. It is controlled yet still profoundly unsettling. His fingers lengthen first, joints reshaping with a soft, unnatural fluidity until they end in curved, claw-like extensions. Dark, root-like veins spread beneath the skin of his forearms, branching upward in slow, organic patterns that pulse faintly as if they are not just markings but something alive beneath the surface. The structure of his arms changes subtly as well, muscle and tissue reorganizing in ways that should not be possible without breaking everything apart first. From under those blond locks of hair arose golden, fan-like ears.

Ryland’s breathing becomes shallow, like he is bracing for rejection before it arrives.

“I can control it now,” he says quickly, too quickly. “Mostly. I just… I-I thought you should know what I am. What I’ve been dealing with.”

He looks terrified. For a moment, Simon just stares. Then he steps forward. Grace flinches slightly, already beginning to pull back, but Simon reaches him first—

And pulls him into a hug.

There’s no hesitation, just arms around him, holding him firmly as if refusing to let him fracture further into himself. Grace goes rigid immediately, frozen in shock, as though his body doesn’t know how to process being held instead of studied or feared.

Then slowly, like something deep in him finally realizing it doesn’t need to fight anymore, he breaks. The tension collapses. The control slips, and Ryland wraps his arms around Simon’s shoulders like they’re the only stable surface left in the universe, his mutated hands trembling as the sharp edges of them press carefully against fabric instead of skin. His breath stutters once, then again, before it turns into something unsteady and human and completely uncontained.

He buries his face against Simon’s shoulder and cries. Simon doesn’t let go. God only knows how long Ryland’s been holding onto this secret for. Simon’s heart wrenched in his chest, raising his hand to the back of Ryland’s neck and carding through the short strands of hair.

Eventually, Grace’s shaking slows. When he finally speaks, his voice is muffled against Simon’s shoulder. “What are you thinking?”

Simon doesn’t answer immediately.

“For a while,” he says quietly, “I thought fixing things was all I was good for.”

Grace gives a small, broken laugh. “You fixed me.”

Simon finally pulls back just enough to look at him properly.

“No,” he says. Then, he runs the backs of his fingers against Ryland’s face. “You were never broken, Angel.”

Ryland’s expression shifts at the nickname, only for his face to flush. “You just reminded me I wasn’t either.”

Simon doesn’t move at first. For a moment, everything in him goes very still, like his body has decided it can only process so much reality at once and has chosen this second, this exact second, to stop interfering. Ryland is close enough that Simon can feel his breath. Close enough that there’s no room left for uncertainty, or analysis, or the careful distance they’ve both been pretending was still intact.

Then Ryland closes the gap. It isn’t sudden. It isn’t hesitant either. It’s simply the natural continuation of everything that has been happening between them since the moment Simon first pulled him out of that impossible metal coffin in space. Like every quiet moment, every glance held too long, every shared silence was always moving toward this without either of them naming it.

The kiss is careful in the way something sacred is careful. Ryland’s hand comes up first, hovering for a fraction of a second like he still doesn’t entirely trust that he’s allowed this, before settling against Simon’s cheek with a kind of relieved certainty. Simon meets him there immediately, steady as gravity, like he has always been meant to be exactly this close.

It feels heavier than anything either of them has ever experienced. Ryland exhales into it like something inside him has finally stopped bracing for impact. His fingers curl slightly against Simon’s sleeve, reminding himself this is real, that Simon is real, that none of this will disappear the moment he stops looking directly at it.

Simon’s hand rises slowly, hesitates for half a heartbeat, then settles at Ryland’s jaw with a gentleness that feels almost unfamiliar even to him. His other rests on the small of Ryland’s back, causing the blond man to shiver.

The kiss deepened almost imperceptibly. Neither of them could bear to let it end quite yet. It unfolded with the same quiet patience that had defined everything between them from the beginning. Months of unspoken affection, stolen glances across laboratories, shared victories, sleepless nights spent saving worlds, and silent comfort offered without expectation all seemed to gather into this single, fragile moment. It felt less like crossing a line than finally arriving somewhere they had both been walking toward without realizing it.

Ryland's lips trembled faintly against Simon's, and Simon felt it—not as nervousness alone, but as relief. Relief so profound it seemed to soften every careful wall Ryland had built around himself. The scientist leaned into him with growing confidence, his forehead brushing Simon's for the briefest instant before their mouths found each other again, as though they had already begun memorizing the shape of one another.

Simon answered with the same quiet certainty that defined everything else he did. His thumb swept gently across Ryland's cheekbone, brushing away the lingering dampness left behind by earlier tears. The gesture was almost unbearably tender. He wasn't trying to reassure him with words anymore. He simply wanted Ryland to feel what Simon himself had struggled for so long to express: that he was here, that he wasn't leaving, and that every broken part Ryland feared Simon might recoil from only made Simon want to hold him closer.

The hand resting against the small of Ryland's back drew him in by scarcely an inch, but it was enough for Ryland to melt against him completely. A quiet shiver ran through him from the unfamiliar comfort of being held without expectation, without judgment, without anyone asking him to prove his worth first. He fit there with surprising ease, like he'd been carrying the weight of entire galaxies alone for so long that he'd forgotten another person could help bear it.

Ryland let out the softest, most contented sigh, the sound barely more than a breath between them. Simon felt it against his lips and realized, with startling clarity, that this was the first time he'd ever kissed someone who wasn't asking anything of him. There were no demands or conditions hidden inside the touch. There was no fear that one wrong move would shatter everything they'd built. There was trust offered freely, accepted just as freely.

For someone who had spent his life fixing machines, Simon found himself overwhelmed by the realization that people were nothing like engines. They could not be repaired with tools or calculations or careful engineering, but they could be loved.

Sometimes, that was enough.

When they finally separated, it wasn't because they wanted to. It happened naturally, their foreheads coming to rest together as they shared the same quiet breath. Neither hurried to fill the silence. They simply stood there, smiling in that private, almost disbelieving way people do when reality has quietly become kinder than they ever imagined it could be.

Ryland's blue eyes searched Simon's face, bright with wonder, and Simon found himself smiling without realizing he'd started. It was small, almost shy by anyone else's standards, but for Simon it felt enormous. Ryland noticed immediately.

"There it is," he whispered, his voice thick with affection.

Simon blinked. "What?"

Ryland reached up, his fingertips brushing lightly along Simon's jaw as though committing it to memory. "That smile."

Now it was Simon’s turn to look embarrassed.

"I think," Ryland said softly, his own smile growing impossibly warmer, "I've been waiting to see that one."

Simon had spent years believing the stars were the most beautiful things the universe had to offer. Standing there with Ryland Grace wrapped safely in his arms, he quietly decided the universe had been hiding its best view all along.

Erid is not gentle in the way Earth is gentle. It is not curated, domesticated, or softened for human comfort. It does not pretend to be anything other than what it is: a living, breathing world that continues whether or not anyone is there to notice it. But it is kind, in its own way.

The air carries a thin mineral sweetness that clings to everything it touches, like the planet has spent a long time learning how to sustain visitors without altering itself for them. The sky shifts in layered gradients: deep blues fractured with pale, drifting bands of atmospheric haze that move slowly enough to make time feel less like something passing and more like something unfolding. The light here never feels harsh. Even at its brightest, it seems filtered through something patient.

Simon notices it in small ways. Ryland stops looking over his shoulder every few seconds, as if expecting something to fail. He begins walking outside without immediately cataloguing exits, distances, or escape vectors. He sometimes pauses just to look at the horizon without trying to name what he’s seeing.

The scientist is still there and always will be, but there is something quieter beneath him now. Something that no longer feels like it is waiting for collapse.

Simon notices himself changing, too. He lets conversations end without forcing them into efficiency. He finds himself standing beside Ryland longer than necessary, simply because neither of them seems interested in moving first. And Simon—despite every instinct he’s ever had about keeping distance—stops pretending he doesn’t notice any of it.

Erid itself feels like an exhale after too many years of holding breath. Wide plains stretch under skies that never quite settle into one color. Forests move with a slow, deliberate rhythm, as though the trees themselves are aware of being observed. Water here is unusually clear, almost luminous, reflecting the sky in a way that makes it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Even the wind feels structured, like it has patterns rather than direction.

It is a place that does not rush anything. Which, for two men who spent most of their lives surviving urgency, is disorienting in the best possible way.

Adrian notices immediately, of course.

“Behavioral stabilization observed in human pair,” he announces one afternoon, far too pleased with himself.

Simon doesn’t even look up from the equipment he is calibrating. “Don’t start.”

“Commencing observational commentary regardless.”

Ryland, stepping into the lab behind Simon, pauses mid-step. “I feel like I walked into a conclusion I wasn’t consulted on.”

“You are correct,” Adrian replies warmly. “Conclusion: mutual attachment confirmed.”

The word lands in the room like a dropped instrument.

Ryland’s entire face goes red in an instant. “I—what—no—wait—”

Simon slowly sets his tool down.

“Adrian,” he says carefully.

The Eridian continues unabashed. “Designation updated. Friend Simon and Friend Grace identified as compatible pair-mates.”

“That is not—” Ryland starts again, voice cracking slightly, “—that is not a formal classification—”

“It is observational,” Adrian insists.

“It’s incorrect,” Simon mutters.

“It is consistent,” Adrian replies, far too confidently.

Ryland looks at Simon. Simon looks at the console. Neither of them corrects the fact that neither of them actually denied it properly.

A beat passes. Then another.

Ryland makes a sound that is somewhere between a protest and a laugh. “I feel like I’m being scientifically bullied.”

“You are,” Adrian agrees. “With approval.”

Simon presses two fingers to his temple. Ryland gives up entirely and laughs, head tipping back slightly as the tension drains out of him in a way Simon still isn’t used to seeing without the weight of survival pressing behind it.

It is not long after that when Adrian brings someone else to them.

Simon notices the shift first. Adrian’s presence on Erid is always large in a way that makes subtlety impossible, but this time, there is something almost anticipatory in the way he moves through the settlement, like he is introducing an idea before he introduces a person.

Ryland notices it too, of course, because Ryland notices everything that involves Adrian being weirdly excited. Simon is in the middle of reviewing a structural scan when Adrian appears at the lab entrance.

“Friend Simon. Friend Grace,” Adrian announces, tone unmistakably pleased. “Introducing Rocky.”

Ryland glances up. “Rocky?”

A new figure steps into view behind Adrian. Broad-bodied but smaller than Adrian, he is unmistakably of his species, with a grounded, deliberate stance that makes him look like part of the landscape rather than a visitor to it. His skin carries the soft, shifting tones typical of Eridian biology. They are muted, adaptive hues that catch the light like granite. He moves with calm certainty, the kind that comes from a life spent in environments that demand patience rather than urgency.

He takes in Simon first, then Ryland. Then he tilts his head slightly, acknowledging them with a quiet, melodic cadence that carries meaning even before Adrian translates it.

Adrian makes a pleased sound. “Rocky is my mate.”

Ryland’s face softens. “Awww. Nice to meet you!”

Simon just stares at him. Rocky’s coloration shifts faintly in what Simon is learning to recognize as amusement. He responds in his own flowing, layered vocalizations, tones that rise and fall like water moving through stone.

Adrian translates immediately, almost proudly. “He says hello, as well. He says he has observed you both extensively through Adrian’s commentary.”

Ryland slowly turns his head toward Adrian. “You’ve been discussing us in detail.”

Adrian pauses, then replies without hesitation. “Yes.”

Simon exhales once through his nose. “Of course you have.”

Rocky’s tones shift again, lighter this time. Adrian interprets again, smooth as ever.

“He says you are… ‘the ones who behave like gravitational anomalies around each other.’”

Ryland’s expression flickers. “That’s not—”

“Accurate?” Adrian supplies helpfully.

“Helpful,” Simon corrects flatly.

Adrian continues as if no one spoke. “You two are now mates.”

There is a beat of absolute silence. Ryland slowly turns his head toward Simon. Simon slowly turns his head toward Ryland. Neither of them speaks, because speaking would require acknowledging what exactly was just implied in a room where no one is emotionally prepared for Eridian classification systems.

Rocky shifts slightly, watching them with quiet, patient interest. He produces a short string of melodic tones.

Adrian translates again. “He says: ‘Ah. This explains the tension patterns.’”

Ryland manages, carefully, “He can see that?”

Rocky tilts his head. Another set of tones.

Adrian nods. “Yes. Emotional resonance is perceptible in close social groups.”

Simon closes his eyes for half a second.

“I miss anonymity,” he mutters.

Ryland lets out a quiet, helpless laugh. “We are in deep space. How are we not anonymous?”

Simon opens one eye, looks at him, then says very dryly, “Because we are being scientifically profiled by your friend’s wife. Husband?”

Adrian looks delighted at the phrasing. “Clarification: Rocky is my mate.”

Rocky emits a soft, amused sound.

Ryland rubs his face with one hand. “I feel like I walked into a species-wide conspiracy.”

Adrian steps forward slightly, fully committed now. “Observation: strong mutual attachment indicators present.”

Simon immediately says, “No.”

Ryland adds, “We are not—”

Simon cuts in again, quieter but firmer, “Don’t finish that sentence.”

Ryland stops. Rocky watches this exchange, then produces a thoughtful, layered tone that Adrian translates more slowly this time.

“He says,” Adrian begins, “that you are not classified, but you are… established.”

Ryland’s face goes red again so quickly it’s almost impressive. Simon looks like he is considering walking directly into a bulkhead.

Adrian, entirely unbothered, continues. “Conclusion updated.”

Simon says immediately, “No.”

Adrian replies, “Secondary confirmation acquired.”

Ryland gives up and laughs, covering his face with one hand.

Rocky tilts his head again, studying them with quiet satisfaction. “Yes,” Adrian translates. “This aligns with prior observations.”

And somehow, despite everything, Ryland laughs again as the universe has finally decided to be ridiculous in a way that doesn’t hurt.

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