Chapter Text
Doctor Ryland Grace was used to waiting, but that didn’t mean he was a patient man.
Mary had entered Earth’s solar system – His Home System! – less then 3 hours ago, and already Grace has instructed Mary to start scanning frequencies to contact Earth.
He knew, logically, that they most likely wouldn’t have a tangible connection to communicate until at least Mars, thanks to the Eridian engineers buffing up the technology, but he was so ready to hear a human voice that Grace couldn’t sit still.
It had been hard, deciding to leave Erid, and risk the trip back home. It had taken almost 2 full years of hemming and hawing to even consider it seriously.
In the end, it had been Adrian approaching Grace alone, without Rocky for once, that helped the human make up his mind.
Adrian started the conversation with stating bluntly that they had sent Rocky out to do task as the talk the two of them are about to have would upset the little eridian too much.
The long end of the short of it was basically Grace was dying. Again. And a lot quicker than any of them could have predicted.
Despite the dome he lived in and the advanced engineering that had gone into it to provide Grace with everything opposite the planet provided to it inhabitants, it still wasn’t enough. The gravity was still crushing him, grinding his bones down into dust, and the food slurry paired with the cloned meat food weren’t doing enough to support his body.
He had years left at the most, a few months at minimum.
When Rocky was eventually told that Grace would be leaving and the reasons why, he had been surprisingly understanding, only a few insults had been hurled about. The only condition was that Grace just needed to hold out till the last possible moment before the point of no return so he could build them a way to communicate.
The last possible moment never came because as Rocky would say; “♫♪ Rocky smarter then squishy, leaky, human. Grace dumb, dumb, dumb. ♪ ”
Rocky and his team of Eridians created something Grace couldn’t even begin to describe– Dammit Jim, he was a scientist, not an engineer! – that would allow Grace (once he was finally on Earth and no longer traveling at light speed) to be able to send messages and videos to Erid. And once they received it and responded, Grace would get them back in just over a week.
The Fishermen of Tau Ceti, the Savours of the Stars, could now become Intergalactic Pen Pals!
And so off Grace set, packed with more food and more fuel than he would ever need that it could last him another trip to Erid and back again.
And now Grace sits, Bored! “Hey Mary, anything yet?”
“As mentioned, mere hours ago. Dr Grace, there is no frequencies yet, and as predicted by you on the way here, there won’t be for at least a few weeks minimum as we slow down.”
Grace is pretty sure when fixing Mary for the trip home, Rocky figure out how to access Mary’s code and altered it to be a lot sassier then originally designed.
“I know,” Grace sighs, “But you’ve got everything turned to the max and will definitely alert me the second something even hints to a blip on the scanners, right?”
“Dr Grace, do you doubt me?”
Scratch that, Grace is 100% sure Rocky figured out how to make Mary a whole lot sassier then originally designed.
“Sorry Mary!” Grace yells, making a (useless) hasty retreat from the cockpit, all while knowing Mary is located everywhere in the ship.
Days pass in the same way it has done for the last 4 years; Grace waking up, eating, spending time in the don’t go crazy room, eating again, snooping through the piles of pirated information Strat gave him, eating, asking Mary “are we there yet?”, and sleeping again.
But with the mundane routine, there is a bubbling electricity of excitement lurking underneath his skin that he hasn’t felt in a long time.
The loud and sudden chorus of ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ blasts through the ship, startling Grace so badly that he headbutts the microscope he was using, causing his nose to start bleeding, and in trying to over correct himself, Grace launches himself out of the chair and onto the floor, banging his shins on the hard metal benchtop as he does so.
“What in the cheese and crackers is going on Mary!?" Grace practically screams to be heard over the lines ‘Upside Inside Out! She’s Livin’ la Vida Loca’.
Just as abruptly, the music cuts off, leaving the flailing human’s ears ringing. “Blip-A detected.”
Everything pauses for a moment in Grace’s mind, like a record scratch sound effect.
‘Rocky’s here?’ was the first coherent thought, before he realised just how dumb that was.
He scrambles to his feet, blood still dripping down his face, that he doesn’t care about at the moment, and runs (hobbles) to the cockpit to get a look at whatever Mary has just detected.
“Pilot Detected.”
There is a dot on the scanner, just in view, and coming closer on what looks like a straight shot to the left side of his ship.
Grace wiggles in the chair to lean over the arm rest to get a view out the window and every rational thought or hypothesis on what it could have been rapidly disappears.
“Mary shields Up! Aim the missiles!” Grace shrieks, frantically searching for a place to hide.
Out of the corner of hir eye, Grace can see the dot on the scanner pause, as if hesitating. Terrified, Grace turns his full attention to the dot.
“There are no shields or missiles on board, Dr Grace.” That’s what Grace forgot to get the Eridians to add, protection!
The dot begins to move forward again. As if it heard Mary say they were unprotected. But that’s impossible, because for starters, sound doesn’t travel in space, obviously, and secondly, why would a bomb be sentient...?
“Oh Fudge, oh-” Grace cuts off with a hum of ‘♪♪♫’! Because while Grace may not swear in human words out of habit, he sure as all heck picked up a lot of Eridian swear words from Rocky, thanks to echolalia, who swore like a sailor once the immediate threat of his world was out of the way. “Brace for impact Mary!”
Mary of course didn’t need to brace, but Grace cowered low into his chair, knees tucked to his chin and hands over his head and waited…
And waited…
And. Waited…
‘What the heck, how long does it take to blow up and die in space am I right -?
A knocking sound shock Grace out of his thoughts and in his curiosity, Grace forgot about his foetal position and turned to look out the window once more.
“Hey Mary?”
“Yes, Dr Grace?”
“Am I getting enough oxygen?”
“Yes, Dr Grace.”
“Oh, okay.” Grace could feel a bubble of hysterical laughter bubble up in his chest, and he raise his left hand to give the Blip-A a dopey wave and the Blip-A waved back.
Blip-A was by all outward appearances, a human woman. Tall, imposing, and glowing with a yellow-orange haze making her floating form look almost ethereal with her yellow hair haloed around her.
She wore a slight smirk with a raised eyebrow, paired with a thick blue suit covered in small red and yellow details. Blip-A had on no bulk EVA helmet and no gear that would be able to propel her forward at the speed she had been going in order to get to him.
He watched her mouth ‘door?’, eyebrow going higher as if to emphasise the question she was asking.
Grace nodded dumbly and pointed into the ship, “I mean, we have an airlock that way?”
Blip-A nodded and mouthed, ‘feet (? Meet?) you there’ and moved out of view.
Grace continued to move dumbly, walking through the ship, not 100% sure he was actually conscious or hallucinating.
Upon reaching the airlock, he could see the glowing Blip-A was already there, looking almost impatient at being kept waiting.
Grace presses a button, and within seconds, the door to space opened, Blip-A stepped in, the door to space closed, and the Airlock cycled then binged like a microwave announcing it was ready.
The human hesitated before opening the door, suddenly faced with the very real prospect of contact with another humanoid creature for the first time in decades.
‘Shoot, maybe I should have brushed my hair to make a good impression?’
Grace, despite his years in space, still looked to be in his early to mid-30s, just the same as he did when he was first packed up and sent into space. But his hair has defiantly grown despite his lack of aging, messy and unruly, looking almost like a rat’s nest.
“You gonna let me in or what cowboy!” Blip-A joked through the door with a distinct American accent, crossing her arms over her chest.
Grace hurriedly pressed the button and stepped back a few paces, catching a glimpse of his face in the reflection of the window, and cringing bodily.
He had worried about the wrong thing, it wasn’t his hair letting him down, it was the blood still dripping down his face making him look straight out of a slasher movie.
The scientist yanked the hem of his worn-out t-shirt to scrub as mush off his face as he could while the Blip-A stepped through the door and glanced around the area.
“Nice place you got here cowboy, you wan’a tell me what you’re doing all the way out here?”
Grace just stared. The Blip-A was definitely humanoid, or at the very least, an actual human, and the Blip-A was saying the first non-robotic English words Grace had heard in…a while...
It’s been so gosh darn long since Grace had been close to anything human, that, embarrassingly, Grace could feel a great big fat sob claw its way out of his throat and echo around the ship in a load wail.
His vision blurred in seconds to the point he couldn’t even see her anymore and his body began to tremble so badly he could feel himself falling into a crumpled heap on the floor.
The fall never came because Grace was caught.
Grace was being held.
Grace was being hugged.
Grace was being hugged for the first time in so many years that the sobs and shudders came quicker, and faster, and harder, and his hands clawed greedily at the suit she wore trying desperately to grip onto her, to pull himself closer into her lap, to soak up as much of it as his touch-starved-self had been neglected all this time.
“Hey, come now, it's okay. I got you, your safe.” The Blip-A repeated over and over again. “Your safe. I’m Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, I’m going to take you home now. It’s okay.”