Archive of Our Own

Gaining back memories from forgetting literally everything was rough, to say the least. Every time Grace would remember something, it made his chest hurt a little more. Reality had not been kind to him.

The first time a really harsh memory returned was when he and Rocky were in the don’t-go-crazy room. The moment Rocky asked if Grace had a mate,tears instantly started falling. That had freaked the alien out a bit before Grace got the chance to explain that it wasn’t a bad memory.

“Y-yeah, Rocky,” Grace coughed while rubbing his eyes. “I have a fiancé.”

“Need word,” Rocky hummed as he focused his attention on the human.

“What? Fiancé?” Grace nodded at the alien’s chirp and faux nod. “It’s the step right before marriage. Like when we ask to be someone’s mate, we have to wait to have a ceremony to confirm becoming mates.”

“Oooh. Understand,” Rocky trilled as he sank back into his ‘loafed’ position. “We have. Exchange special stone and wait long time until exchange of carapace.” He finished while pointing back to the overlapping circles on his arm.

“Us, too. I didn’t get the chance to finish the actual ‘mating ceremony’ with Tom,” Grace sighed as he slumped against the xenonite ball. “I got pulled away to work on the astrophage crisis before we could. Now I’m here.”

Rocky let out a low humming in solidarity as he leaned back against the human’s weight.

Grace couldn’t believe that he had forgotten a whole dang fiancé! The hurt he normally felt at memories multiplied greatly at the thought of that.

*~*~*

“Holy fudge sticks!” Grace shouted as he quickly sat up from where he was leaning against Rocky’s ball once more.

“What?! What happen Grace, question?!” Rocky flinched at the suddenly raised volume and interruption Grace had caused.

“That’s my mate!” He shouted and quickly paused the movie he’d put on to watch with Rocky. “That one!” He pointed to the stocky, blonde on the screen.

“Grace mate on light sense moving picture, question?” Rocky asked excitedly.

“Yes! Yes, Tom’s an actor! He’s in a bunch of movies!” Grace’s smile was nearly blinding as he stared at the screen.

“Is wonderful! Grace mate famous!” Rocky waved two of his hands excitedly.

“He is,” Grace laughed as he sat back down,waiting for them to calm back down before pressing play and watching with much more enthusiasm.

*~*~*

So, the disaster of a fishing trip ended up bringing back a lot more memories. Memories that had him crying just as much as he was over the burns on his arms, chest, and back.

Floods of memories pouring in about his twin brother. Another very important person he’d forgotten about. The pain and blood reminded him of all the times he’d watched and seen his brother get thrown around on movie sets. And even more from their childhood.

His brother was the stuntman for his fiancé. And apparently that’s how he met said fiancé. On a movie set Colt had brought him to.

“You’re never gonna believe this, Rock,” Grace sniffled, talking to Rocky’s unmoving body as he slowly worked with the breeding tanks. “I have a brother. You know the movies with my fiancé in them? Yeah, all those stunts were done by my brother and not Tom.”

He turned to look back at the alien and sighed before going to sit next to him while he waited for the next generation to breed.

“That crazy adrenaline junkie is the reason Tommy and I met.” He winced as he slowly leaned back against the warm xenonite.

*~*~*

After Rocky woke up and Grace worked through all the emotions that came with it, he explained the taumeoba.

Rocky slowly bounced in excitement before getting even more excited when he was told about Grace’s memories of his brother.

That was when Grace figured out that it was extremely rare- almost nonexistent at this point- to have two pebbles from the same egg. So for Rocky to figure out that Grace had a twin was beyond baffling. Especially when Grace pulled up Colt’s Wiki page so the alien could see what he looked like. 

Never in recorded history had any Eridians ever looked identical, so Rocky had been half convinced that Grace had only shown him a picture of himself before the human explained that identical multiples weren’t all that uncommon on Earth.

“Human species crazy crazy crazy, statement.” Rocky was standing completely still as he looked at the side by side comparison Grace had made with his and Colt’s pictures.

Grace could only snort at that.

*~*~*

Grace’s paranoid brain had insisted that every breeder tank be wrapped and enclosed in multiple layers of varying materials. He didn’t want to risk a single chance of those little buggers escaping and eating their fuel. He didn’t want either of them to be stranded.

So after exchanging the tanks and astrophage, Grace and Rocky split off to go back to their home planets with a very emotional goodbye.

Grace spent the next week- after charting a course home- editing and adding the video footage from Mary’s blackboxes into folders with the personal logs he made.vHe definitely did not want anyone to see how he behaved after he first woke up. He’d gone so far as to study ressearch to find a way to erase the footage from Mary herself completely so no one even had the chance to see it if he made it back. 

“So, I’m on my way. These beetles should get there about one Earth year before me. Hopefully you’ll have the taumeoba on its way to Venus by then. I just have one request.” Grace looked away for a moment and took a deep breath. “I don’t know if they’ll still be waiting, but… but could you tell Colt, Jody, and Tom that I’m coming home? I know it’s been over twenty-five years for them, and I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but I still feel like Tom should know what happened. I won’t be mad if he moved on… I would never expect anyone to wait on someone they already thought was dead… but can you tell him anyways?”

Grace let out a wet cough and chuckle before waving his hand in front of his face.

“Anywho… This is Doctor Captain Ryland Grace signing off for the last time. I’ll see you soon.” He gave the camera a watery smile and a wave before turning it off and quickly loading the last file onto the beetles before putting the breeder tanks in and saluting them as they launched out of the Hail Mary and sped away from him.

Grace took another deep breath before heading up to the cockpit and checking the cameras. He let out a pleased sigh and nodded as he made his way back to the dormitory. 

He had a long four years ahead of him, may as well use it to learn as much as he can.

*~*~*

The beetles arrived twenty-five years after the Hail Mary left Earth, slipping into the solar system quietly enough that nobody noticed at first. There was no dramatic streak across the sky or burst of light announcing that humanity’s last desperate gamble had finally answered them. Four tiny spacecrafts crossed into the system carrying something more valuable than anything ever discovered by humanity, and for several hours they existed as nothing more than unexpected signals appearing on equipment that had spent decades listening for something most people no longer truly believed would come.

The Petrova Task Force had changed in those twenty-five years. People had retired, many died, governments had reorganized entire departments that once existed solely because the Sun was slowly dimming, and a generation of scientists had built their careers studying astrophage and the consequences of a crisis that had never really ended. The Vat was still there, though enough of it had been rebuilt and repurposed that Dr. Ryland Grace probably would have complained it barely counted as the same place anymore.

The tracking systems were still listening, though.

They had never stopped.

So when one of those systems received an automated identification response using codes that had not been transmitted in more than two decades, the technician watching the overnight feed stared at her screen long enough for the program to repeat itself before she finally called her supervisor.

Within minutes, people were scrambling.

Someone called Dimitri Komorov. Dr. Lamai woke to her phone ringing beside her bed. Messages went out to a few surviving senior members of the old Task Force who could reasonably be reached, and by the end of the week the ship was filling with people who had not occupied the same room in years. Jets, helicopters, and boats carried more people onto the ship than it had in the last two years combined.

Outside those walls, the world continued normally.

Inside, humanity learned that the Hail Mary had answered.

All four beetles were recovered and intact.

The first downloaded files were almost entirely scientific, exactly what everyone had expected them to send if the mission succeeded. Astrophage data, Tau Ceti measurements, and pages of calculations appeared one after another while researchers gathered behind screens and tried to understand twenty-five years of waiting in a matter of hours.

Then one word began appearing everywhere.

Taumoeba.

The organism had a rather large folder of its own, followed by enough instructions to make the purpose obvious before anyone even finished reading them. Taumoeba consumed astrophage.

Earth had a solution.

The Sun could recover.

For several minutes, professionalism simply disappeared.

Applause erupted. Some started crying near the back of the room. Two researchers hugged hard enough to nearly knock over a chair. Lamai covered her mouth and stared at the data while Dimitri fell back into his. Even Lokken had a shine over her eyes.

They had succeeded.

After twenty-five years of living beneath a slowly dimming Sun and telling themselves that three people had gone farther than any human being in history so the rest of them might have a chance, they finally knew the sacrifice had worked.

Then they began opening the mission records.

That was where the celebration stopped.

The first crew-status file was small.

Too small.

Lamai opened it expecting normal medical information.

Instead she found two names.

COMMANDER YAO LI-JIE — DECEASED

ENGINEER OLESYA ILYUKHINA — DECEASED

For a moment, she simply stared.

“What?” Dimitri asked as he was the first to notice her expression.

Lamai didn’t answer immediately. She projected the document onto the screen.

He read the lines twice before his posture sank “Oh.”

The room around them gradually quieted as the information spread.

Nobody had really believed all three crew members would survive. The Hail Mary had never been designed around survival in the first place, years left plenty of room for terrible possibilities, but seeing the words was different from understanding them intellectually.

Yao was gone.

Ilyukhina was gone.

The file contained the cause in dry medical language. Both had died during the coma period before arrival, complications severe enough that Mary had been unable to save them.

There were no final conversations. No heroic last moments. They had simply never woken up.

“Grace woke up alone.” Lamai whispered with her head in her hands.

He had been forced onto that ship without saying goodbye to anyone he loved, put into a coma beside two people meant to help him save humanity, and when he opened his eyes at another star, both of them were already dead.

He was alone on a ship he didn’t even want to be on to begin with. They sat with that for several long minutes before someone eventually reminded them that there were thousands of files remaining.

The next major discovery managed to make everything even more impossible.

At first, the ‘Eridian Directory’ caused more confusion than excitement. One researcher assumed it referred to another organism Grace discovered somewhere in the Tau Ceti system. Another thought Grace had given a piece of equipment one of his ridiculous names.

Then somebody opened an image.

A creature stood on the other side of a transparent partition, roughly two feet tall when fully upright, with five legs radiating from a rough carapace and clawed limbs positioned around its body. The proportions were completely unlike anything on Earth, but the sweater, harness, tools, and carefully constructed environment around it made one thing obvious before anyone even reached the accompanying notes.

This was not an animal.

“What the hell is that?” Dimitri blinked a few times before slowly taking off his reading glasses.

Nobody answered until Lamai scrolled down.

40 ERIDANI: ROCKY - ERIDIAN ENGINEER

“He found aliens.” Dimitri continued staring at the screen for several seconds before dragging one hand down his face with an incredulous laugh. “No no. Of course he did.”

Lamai looked at him.

“It is Grace,” he said helplessly while waving toward the screen, as though that explained everything.

Several people laughed quietly, and because everyone in that room was still raw from reading Yao and Ilyukhina’s names, more than one laugh shifted back into tears.

The hours that followed were chaos. Scientists learned that intelligent extraterrestrial life existed, that Eridians came from a planet- dubbed Erid by Dr. Grace- orbiting 40 Eridani A, that Rocky had arrived at Tau Ceti because his own star was suffering from the same astrophage problem, that the poor alien’s crew suffered and died from something they couldn’t see, and that somehow Dr. Grace had built an entirely functional system of communication with an alien whose spoken language consisted of musical tones and whale song.

Pages upon pages of Grace attempting to understand Eridian behavior and Rocky being equally baffled by humans in return.

There was enough information in the beetles to occupy Earth for generations.

Then Lamai found the ‘personal’ file.

Grace had organized it more carefully than most of the scientific material, which Dimitri thought was deeply suspicious. Mary’s original recording logs were mixed with Grace’s own files, but there was an obvious gap at the beginning. Several days of visual recordings had been removed.

They knew why almost immediately. The medical data showed significant memory loss after Grace woke from his coma.

“He deleted the footage,” Lamai said.

“Only the recordings,” one of the analysts corrected without looking up from his own laptop, surrounded by a small group of other analysts. “The ship’s telemetry is completely intact from what we see over here.”

Dimitri frowned at the blank stretch of timestamps. “He did not want anyone to watch him like that.”

Lamai thought about the man they had known. “No.” He wouldn’t have. She added silently. Especially once she saw the note attached to the archive. Her hand stopped over the controls. “Dimitri.” Something in her voice brought him over.

The note was short.

ALL RECORDINGS MAY BE RELEASED AT TASK FORCE DISCRETION. PLEASE CONTACT COLTON GRACE SEAVERS, JODY MORENO-SEVAVERS, AND THOMAS ALEXANDER JOHNSON BEFORE PUBLIC RELEASE. THEY ARE MY FAMILY.

Dimitri read it once before his expression changed.

Twenty-four years earlier, Tom Ryder had finally told the world exactly what those three names meant to Ryland Grace. The photograph from Colt and Grace’s birthday had become one of the most recognizable images associated with Hail Mary.bTwo twins smiling beside one another, Jody tucked close to Colt and Tom’s arm wrapping around Grace’s back.

A brother.

A sister-in-law.

A fiancé.

The family none of them had known existed until a year after launch.

Lamai scrolled slightly farther. There was another line.

PLEASE LET THEM WATCH BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DOES.

For the first time that morning, nobody cared about extraterrestrial life.

*~*~*

Tom was sixty-one when the Petrova Task Force called him, and Ryland’s ring was still hanging from a chain around his neck.

Twenty-five years had changed almost everything else. His hair had silvered, lines had settled around his eyes and mouth, and his reflection bore less resemblance every year to the man standing beside Ryland in the photographs scattered around the house. The chain had changed three times over the decades, once after the original snapped while Tom was asleep and sent him into such immediate panic that Colt found him on his hands and knees beside the bed silently crying while searching through the carpet until Jody spotted the ring beneath the nightstand.

After that, Tom bought stronger chains.

The ring itself never changed.

Colt and Jody had aged beside him. Colt moved more carefully these days after spending most of his life willingly throwing his body at objects other people normally tried very hard not to hit. Jody wore reading glasses she constantly misplaced and regularly accused both men of hiding  despite the fact they were usually sitting on top of her head.

The three of them had moved into a bigger and nicer house, deciding that living together was easier regardless of how much time passed.

Life had continued because time stopped for no one.

Eventually they returned to work. There had been birthdays, Christmases, funerals, premieres, awards, retirements, and weddings belonging to other people. Tom never had one of his own. People stopped asking sometime in his forties, and by then the ring he still wore around his neck made any question and explanation unnecessary.

Ryland remained woven into the house anyway.There was a well cared for, vintage waffle maker in the kitchen Colt had bought twenty-five years too late because he once promised his brother he would find one. Jody still occasionally made tea the way Ryland liked it without realizing what she was doing until she reached for another mug. Tom owned every terrible science-fiction movie Grace had ever complained about, along with dozens released after the Hail Mary launch that he had collected purely because he knew Ryland would have hated them.

They had gotten old without him.

Ryland had not been allowed the chance. That was one of the thoughts Tom tried not to linger on.

So when his phone rang shortly after eight one morning and the woman on the other end introduced herself as calling from the Petrova Task Force, his first assumption was that it was confirmed the Ryland had died.

At this point, that was simply where the mind went.

Then she said the word beetles.

Tom’s hand tightened around the phone. Across the table, Colt looked up immediately. Jody noticed a moment later when Tom’s face lost whatever expression it had been wearing.

“I-I’m sorry,” Tom said, because he was certain he had misunderstood. “What did you say?”

The woman repeated herself.

The beetles had returned. They had a message specifically requesting that Colton Grace Seavers, Jody Moreno-Seavers and Thomas Alexander Johnson be contacted.

Tom stood too quickly, his chair scraping hard against the floor behind him.

“What?” Colt asked.

Tom couldn’t answer yet. The voice in his ear continued explaining that the data had only recently been recovered, that scientific verification was still ongoing and that the Task Force wanted to speak with them before any public announcement was made.

“Ryland?” Tom heard almost none of it as his voice cracked.

The woman went quiet for half a second. “Yes, sir.”

Tom closed his eyes. Somewhere impossibly far away, at some point after reaching Tau Ceti, Ryland had been alive long enough to record something and send it home.

That fact alone nearly took his knees out.

“When?” he managed. “When was the recording made?”

“We’re still converting the timing data, but the latest file appears to have been recorded approximately four years ago from Dr. Grace’s frame of reference.”

Colt was on his feet now.

“What happened?” He asked as he moved to stand by Tom.

“The beetles came back.” Tom answered as he finally looked at him.

Colt froze.

Jody’s mug slipped from her fingers and struck the table, tea spilling across the wood unnoticed.

For several seconds, none of them seemed capable of moving.

Then Colt whispered, “from our Ryland?”

Tom nodded. The Task Force offered to send someone to get them, and he initially refused before Jody took the phone away from him, listened for thirty seconds, then informed both men that none of them were driving anywhere in their current condition and accepted the offer herself.

*~*~*

Three hours later, the three of them sat inside a secure conference room with people they had only ever known through news footage, documentaries and the occasional social media post.

Dimitri Komorov and Dr. Panya Lamai

Dimitri looked at Colt with a somber expression, his eyes lingering just slightly too long on a face that still resembled Ryland’s despite the years.

Neither mentioned it. Nobody attempted small talk afterward.

They sat facing a large screen while the only other person in the room, Dr. Lamai, explained what had been confirmed so far. The beetles contained the astrophage predator. Grace had successfully bred the taumeoba to tolerate enough nitrogen to survive on Venus. The models suggested introducing it to the astrophage population would allow the Sun to begin recovering.

“He did it,” Colt whispered.

Lamai smiled sadly. “Yes.”

Tom reached for the ring around his neck.

Then her expression changed. “There are some things we thought you should hear from us before you see the footage.”

Jody’s hand immediately tightened around Colt’s.

“What?”

Lamai glanced briefly toward Dimitri before continuing. “Commander Yao and Engineer Ilyukhina died during the journey.”

“They didn’t make it to Tau Ceti?” Colt questioned quietly.

“No.” Lamai slowly explained the coma complications, giving them only the information they actually needed. Neither Yao nor Ilyukhina had awakened.

Grace had.

Alone.

“Oh, Ry,” Jody whispered shakily.

The room stayed quiet for a while.

Eventually Dimitri cleared his throat. “There is other thing.”

Tom looked up.

“Grace found aliens.” And Dimitri smiled.

Silence.

“P-pardon?” Jody finally spoke.

“Aliens,” Dimitri repeated and held up half enthused jazz hands.

“Ryland… found aliens.” Tom looked between him and Lamai with wide eyes in sheer bewilderment.

“Yes.”

Colt made a strangled sound that started as disbelief and ended in a laugh. “Of course he fucking did.”

“Is what I said.” Dimitri’s smile finally appeared. 

Jody started laughing through the tears still on her cheeks, and even Tom managed a small sound before pressing his palms against his eyes.

Of course Ryland found aliens. Apparently being kidnapped and drugged onto a suicide mission to another star had still not been sufficiently ridiculous enough.

“We have footage.” Lamai turned toward the screen. “He wanted you all to be the first to watch.

“Show us.” Colt said immediately as he sucked in a quick breath.

The screen lit. For the first time in twenty-five years, they watched Ryland Grace. Tom forgot every instruction his body had ever learned about breathing. The image quality was brutally clear. Ryland walked through the Hail Mary in clothes Tom had never seen before, strangely more buff than he remembered and with some scruff along his jaw. He looked exhausted, occasionally confused and irritated in the familiar way Tom could recognize even after decades.

But he was alive.

Colt made a tiny sound beside him while Jody reached for his hand.

The earliest days were missing exactly as Lamai had warned them. Grace had scrubbed those recordings from the archive, leaving the footage beginning only once his memories had begun returning and his condition had stabilized.

Tom was grateful, but he hated knowing there had been something Ryland thought they needed protection from.

The first recordings were mostly nonsense. Grace talking to Mary. Grace muttering to himself because it seems that multiple years of coma induced interstellar travel and literal amnesia had not cured him of that particular habit.

Then the alien ship appeared. They watched Grace scramble and scream and try to get away before communicating back and forth. They watched the clumsiest man they knew do space walks to communicate. Watched as his big brain connected dots they would’ve never thought of.

Then came some footage from one of the Hail Mary cameras of the tunnel again, though this time with a clear wall.

And that was the alien.

All three of them stared at the little rock-like alien crawling into the frame. It was grainy from the distance, but it was a cute(?) little thing.

Grace screamed.

Colt barked out a laugh at that while Jody snorted and covered her mouth. Even Tom laughed, startled by the sound coming out of his own mouth as Ryland stumbled backward from the first extraterrestrial intelligence humanity had ever encountered.

The laughter didn’t last.

Not because anything bad happened.

Because the footage kept going, and slowly, piece by piece, they began seeing what Ryland had remembered.

Lamai opened one of the ship logs recorded in the don’t-go-crazy room.

“Grace have mate, question?” Rocky asked.

Grace froze.

Tom did too.

Tears filled Ryland’s eyes so quickly that Rocky visibly startled.

“Oh,” Jody breathed.

Grace scrubbed both hands over his face.

“Y-yeah, Rocky. I have a fiancé.”

Tom leaned forward. Both hands covered his face before he even realized he’d moved. Twenty-four years of people treating his relationship with Ryland as something that had ended the moment the Hail Mary launched disappeared beneath one sentence.

I have a fiancé.

Not had.

Have.

Grace explained engagement to Rocky. Explained the ceremony that was supposed to come afterward.

“I didn’t get the chance to finish the actual ‘mating ceremony’ with Tom,” Ryland said, slumped against Rocky’s xenonite ball. “I got pulled away to work on the astrophage crisis before we could. Now I’m here.”

Tom’s shoulders shook, and Colt reached across and rested a hand against his shoulder.

The next clip came from the two space dwellers watching an old movie. Tom recognized himself onscreen before Grace did.

Then Grace suddenly shot upright.

“Holy fudge sticks!”

Colt laughed wetly.

“That’s my mate!”

Ryland pointed at the screen with an expression so bright that for a moment he looked exactly like the man Tom remembered.

“That one!”

Rocky trilled excitedly.

“Yes! Yes, Tom’s an actor! He’s in a bunch of movies!”

Grace was smiling.

Proud.

That hurt worse than the tears had. Tom pressed the ring against his lips.

They had to take a break when they heard Rocky offer to refuel the Hail Mary so Grace could go home. It took a long while for them to calm down after that.

Then the next memories belonged to Colt.

Grace walked- burned and exhausted- beside Rocky’s unmoving body after the fishing disaster, working on the breeding tanks while talking simply because silence hurt too much.

“You’re never gonna believe this, Rock,” Grace sniffled. “I have a brother. You know the movies with my fiancé in them? Yeah, all those stunts were done by my brother and not Tom.”

Colt’s face fell.

“That crazy adrenaline junkie is the reason Tommy and I met.”

“Fuck.” Colt lowered his head. For years, he had carried the knowledge that he had been the one to bring Ryland onto that movie set, the one who had introduced his twin to Tom and accidentally set the rest of their lives in motion. And there was Ryland, twelve light-years away, half-dead and speaking to an unconscious alien, remembering Colt as the reason he had met the man he planned to marry.

Jody tightened her hold on him.

And from there, it didn’t stop.

The longer they watched, the more often the three of them appeared. Tom in movies Grace showed Rocky. Colt whenever Grace did something dangerous enough to immediately realize his brother would call him an idiot.Jody in stories about her tea compared to the Hail Mary’s coffee despite the aliens' hang-up around food, all still relevant to him even after being launched to another star.

They were everywhere. Not physically. They had never gotten the chance to be. But Grace had taken them with him anyway. He had awoken without his name, his history or a single memory of the people waiting on Earth, and one by one they had come back.

Tom.

Colt.

Jody.

Home.

By the time Lamai finally paused the selected footage, none of the three looked remotely composed.

Jody’s cheeks were wet.

Colt had stopped bothering to wipe his tears away.

Tom still had Ryland’s ring closed inside his fist. For years he had wondered whether Ryland remembered him at the end. Now he knew there had not been an end. And even before knowing that, Ryland had remembered everything.

“There is one more recording we’d like to show you before you decide what to do next.” Lamai looked between them.

“Personal?” Tom lifted his head. Something in her expression made his stomach twist.

“Yes.”

She opened the file.

Ryland appeared onscreen again. He looked tired. He also looked happy.

“So, I’m on my way.”

Nobody moved.

Tom stopped breathing.

“These beetles should get there about one Earth year before me. Hopefully you’ll have the Taumoeba on its way to Venus by then. I just have one request.”

Ryland looked away from the camera and took a deep breath. “I don’t know if they’ll still be waiting, but… but could you tell Colt, Jody, and Tom that I’m coming home?”

Jody whimpered and Colt made a broken sound, but Tom couldn’t make one at all.

Coming home.

The words simply stopped behaving like language.

“I know it’s been over twenty-five years for them, and I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but I still feel like Tom should know.”

Tom’s entire body began shaking.

“I won’t be mad if he moved on. I would never expect anyone to wait on someone they already thought was dead… but can you tell him anyways?”

“I’m here.” The words escaped Tom before he meant to speak.

Grace wiped at his eyes, laughed wetly and waved one hand in front of his face.

“Anywho… This is Doctor Captain Ryland Grace signing off for the last time. I’ll see you soon.”

Soon.

Tom broke. Twenty-five years, and Ryland said soon.

Grace gave the camera a watery smile, lifted one hand in a small wave and shut the recording off.

The screen went black.

For several seconds, Tom stared at his own reflection. Graying hair. Wrinkles. Twenty-five years carved into a face Ryland would remember differently.

His hand pulled instinctively on the ring. “He’s coming home.” Tom looked at Colt and Jody, eyes burning.

Jody nodded as a very wobbly smile appeared on her face. “He’s coming home.”

Colt started laughing. Then crying harder. “My brother’s coming home.”

Tom reached for him at the same moment Colt reached back, and suddenly they were wrapped around each other again exactly as they had been twenty-five years earlier on pavement beneath a disappearing rocket trail.

Only this time the direction had changed.

Ryland wasn’t leaving.

He was coming back.

Jody wrapped both arms around them while the other two people around the table quietly looked away and gave them what privacy a room with witnesses could manage.

“He remembered me.” Tom muttered as he buried his face against Colt’s shoulder. “He remembered.”

“All of us.” Colt sniffled as he squeezed them tighter.

Tom closed his eyes. Twenty-four years earlier, he had promised a man who would never read the words that he would keep his ring and keep his promise.

He had.

And, between the stars, Ryland Grace was coming home expecting nothing.

“How long?” Tom asked after eventually lifting his head.

“Based on the trajectory data Dr. Grace sent, a little under one year.” Lamai answered and wiped beneath one eye.

“One year.” Colt let out another broken laugh.

After decades, one year was nothing.

Tom looked at the dark screen where Ryland’s face had been moments earlier and curled his fingers around the ring.

“Okay.” His voice trembled. “Okay, Rylie.” Tom could wait.

Lamai then asked if theyhad the time to watch more of the footage Grace had sent.

*~*~*

Six months later, the Petrova Task Force released the Hail Mary footage.

Not all of it.

Even with Grace’s permission to release the recordings at their discretion, there were hours upon hours of footage between Mary’s cameras, Grace’s personal logs, scientific recordings and transcribed files from the Eridian ship. Some contained information the public had absolutely no reason to see, others were hours of Grace performing experiments that only a handful of scientists on Earth could understand, and a surprising amount consisted of nothing more interesting than empty rooms or Grace and Rocky taking turns sleeping.

The Task Force and Grace’s family spent months sorting through everything.

They catalogued the scientific discoveries first, cross-referenced Grace’s logs with Mary’s logs, translated the portions of Rocky’s language Grace hadn’t already annotated and pieced together a chronological record of what had happened after the Hail Mary reached Tau Ceti. Yao and Ilyukhina’s deaths were documented carefully, as was the gap Grace had deliberately created at the beginning of Mary’s visual archive. Nobody attempted to recover what he had erased. Whatever those first days had contained, Grace had made his wishes clear by removing them before sending the beetles home, and after everything that had already been taken from him, the Task Force decided he was entitled to keep something for himself.

What remained was still extraordinary.

There was the first detection of the Blip-A.

Grace realizing it was a ship.

The first attempts at communication.

The tunnel.

Humanity’s first confirmed encounter with intelligent extraterrestrial life had somehow involved Ryland Grace screaming and scrambling backward when a two-foot-tall Eridian crawled into view, followed not long afterward by the two of them attempting to communicate using mathematics, science, and increasingly ridiculous puppet shows.

There were clips of Grace teaching Rocky English while Rocky taught him about Erid and xenonite. Recordings of Grace laughing so hard at one of Rocky’s misunderstandings that he had to wipe tears from his eyes. Rocky building things with an ease that repeatedly left Grace staring in offended disbelief.

There were arguments.

Experiments.

Failures.

The discovery of Taumoeba in Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line.

The excitement afterward.

Then came Adrian.

The footage from the fishing trip was among the hardest material the Task Force debated releasing, but Grace had specifically included it- not erased it like he had the first part of his trip- and there was no honest way to tell the story of Tau Ceti without showing how close both of them had come to dying while trying to save the stars. 

Humanity watched Grace nearly kill himself retrieving Taumoeba, watched Rocky save him, and later watched Grace drag his burning body through the Hail Mary while desperately trying to keep his friend alive,then as Grace’s entire left side got blasted while putting him back.

The archive showed everything Grace had decided Earth was allowed to see.

Including the memories. The Task Force had debated those more than anything else. Ultimately, they remained.

Grace had included them, and Tom, Colt and Jody had already given their blessing after being allowed to review the final compilation before publication.

So at precisely noon e.s.t., the Petrova Task Force’s official website changed. A new hyperlink box appeared front and center as soon as the website was opened.

The internet barely lasted four minutes after a social media post linked the archive directly.

Clips escaped the Task Force website almost immediately. Screen recordings appeared on every social platform before most people had finished watching the first official video. News stations abandoned scheduled programming. Scientists began livestreaming themselves reacting to the data while other people skipped directly to the alien because apparently the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence had done absolutely nothing to improve humanity’s collective attention span.

Within an hour, Rocky had fan accounts.

Within two, people were selling plushies and stickers.

By three, #DOCTORCAPTAINRYLANDGRACE was trending worldwide.

So was #ROCKY.

So was #GRACEISCOMINGHOME.

But the clips that spread fastest weren’t necessarily the spectacular ones. They were the human ones.

Grace crying when Rocky asked if he had a mate.

“I have a fiancé.”

Grace recognizing Tom in an old movie and nearly shouting himself hoarse.

“That’s my mate!”

An injured Grace talking to an unconscious Rocky and suddenly remembering that somewhere on Earth he had a twin brother.

Grace explaining Colt.

Grace talking about Jody.

Grace mentioning them casually afterward, over and over, until people began compiling every occurrence into videos of their own citing how soft he was about them.

The world had spent twenty-four years knowing how much Tom, Colt and Jody missed Ryland Grace. Now, for the first time, they get to see how much Ryland Grace had missed them back.

Tom watched almost none of the internet reaction. He had already seen the footage. He had watched every second the Task Force intended to release and several hours they ultimately decided not to include. He didn’t need to watch strangers discover the moment Ryland remembered him. He didn’t need to see millions of people react to the expression on Grace’s face when he recognized Tom on a screen.

Instead, sometime that afternoon, Tom walked outside.

The garden had become Jody’s project years ago, although all three of them worked on it now.vCold resistant flowers and bushes crowded the beds along the back of the house, and Tom wandered between them until he found a patch still bright beneath the afternoon sun.

He crouched slowly, knees complaining in a way they certainly hadn’t twenty-five years ago, and pulled the chain over his head.

The ring settled into his palm as Tom looked at it for a long moment.

More than twenty-five years.

He had worn it through every one of them.

He carefully arranged the chain among the flowers, letting the little gold ring rest against the petals before taking out his phone. It took several attempts before he found an angle he liked with the sunlight reflecting off the slightly scuffed metal, mostly because his hands had started shaking somewhere around the third picture.

Tom opened his social media, attached the photograph and stared at the caption box.

Twenty-four years earlier, he had written an entire paragraph because the world hadn’t known who Ryland was to him.

Today, everybody knew. More importantly, Ryland was finally coming back to read it himself. So he typed six words.

He stared at them for several seconds.

Then he posted.

The post spread even faster than the footage.

By the time the Hail Mary entered the outer edge of Earth’s communication range, Ryland Grace had stopped pretending the return trip was going well.

Technically, the ship was somewhat okay. Just minor dents and dings from stray space debris.

That was the important part.

The Hail Mary had survived four more years of travel with remarkably few problems considering everything it had been through at Tau Ceti, and the modifications Rocky had made before they separated had held up beautifully. The engines were still operating within acceptable parameters, the astrophage reserves remained sufficient for the final approach, life support was functioning and Mary continued announcing every minor systems irregularity with the same calm voice that had followed Grace across more empty space than any human being had ever willingly experienced.

Grace himself was another matter.

Food had become a problem much earlier than he wanted to admit.

He had calculated everything carefully before leaving Tau Ceti. Of course he had. He had counted remaining meal packs and coma slurry, estimated caloric requirements, factored in his reduced activity during the long return journey and then added what he thought was a reasonable safety margin because after everything that had happened, Ryland Grace had absolutely no intention of being defeated by simple math.

Unfortunately, human bodies were,as Rocky said multiple times, awful and inefficient.

Some of the meal packs had spoiled faster than expected. Others had become questionable enough that Grace had eventually decided food poisoning in interstellar space was not worth the extra calories. There had been a few stretches where the recycling systems performed less efficiently than predicted and required more physical work than he’d accounted for, and Grace had discovered firsthand that “reasonable safety margin” became a much less comforting phrase when there was nobody else aboard to argue with the numbers.

He rationed.

Then rationed harder.

By the final months, meals had become something he scheduled rather than something he felt hungry for, using a disgusting mixture of edible taumeoba and coma slurry.

His body had adapted to being hungry so gradually that it almost stopped registering as a sensation. What remained was the weakness. The trembling when he stood.vThe way his vision darkened around the edges if he moved too fast. The constant ache in muscles that had once become stronger under the Hail Mary’s increased gravity and were now being steadily consumed because his body needed energy from somewhere. His scars peeling open and the loss of a few teeth had somehow become the most terrifying thing to occur after his vitamin levels depleted to a severely low margin.

His clothes hung strangely on him.

Grace tried not to look too closely.

He had stopped shaving a month ago because standing in front of a mirror long enough to do it felt like an unnecessary expenditure of energy, and the beard he’d once complained about had gone gray in patches he was fairly sure hadn’t existed when he left Earth. His hair had gotten ridiculous. He kept it pushed back with a makeshift headband most days because cutting it required concentration and effort and because there was something deeply insulting about surviving Tau Ceti only to accidentally cut his ear with scissors a month from home.

The ladders were the worst part.

Once, moving between the Hail Mary’s compartments had been automatic. Up to the control room. Down to the laboratory. Back to the dormitory. His hands and feet had learned the rungs so thoroughly that he could probably climb them and navigate the whole ship blindfolded.

Now every transition became a decision.

Was whatever he needed downstairs worth the return trip? Could it wait? Did he really need another slurry mixture right now, or could he grab two the next time he went?

Eventually Grace moved most of what he needed closer to the control room.

His quilt migrated first.

Then multiple pouches of water.

Slurry mixture containers.

Medical supplies.

A laptop.

Several pieces of Rocky’s xenonite that Grace didn’t need for any practical purpose but refused to store farther away anyway.

His entire life gradually condensed around the pilot chair until there were days he left it only when Mary’s systems required something physical from him or to use the bathroom.

Grace told himself it was efficient.

Mary had other opinions.

“Muscle mass below recommended level.”

“I know, Mary.”

“Body mass below recommended level.”

“Acknowledged, Mary.”

“Current nutrition intake insufficient.”

Grace closed his eyes without lifting his head from the chair. “Hey, Mary?”

“Yes, Dr. Grace?”

“You have been telling me that for months.”

“Current nutrition intake remains insufficient.”

“Fantastic… thank you, Mary.”

“You are welcome, Dr. Grace.”

Grace opened one eye. He could never tell whether Mary was capable of sarcasm. He suspected not. But there were definitely moments.

Most days blurred together now. He checked trajectory calculations obsessively even though they barely changed, ran diagnostics he didn’t need to run and reread papers he had written years earlier but never been able to send. Sometimes he talked to Rocky despite knowing he could not possibly hear him. Those conversations were usually the worst before going to sleep.

Then his thoughts inevitably drifted farther. Grace had spent four years trying not to imagine what waited for him there because every version hurt differently.

Maybe Colt was alive.

Maybe he wasn’t.

Maybe Jody was.

Maybe Tom-

Grace usually stopped there. Twenty-six years was an obscene amount of time. He understood that intellectually. He had done the math so often it had become meaningless.

Relativistic travel had given him only 8 years while Earth received twenty-six, which meant the three people living inside his memories had experienced more than two decades without him.

They had gotten older.

He hadn’t.

Not in the same way.

Grace could picture Colt exactly as he had last seen him in person years before the launch. Could picture Jody rolling her eyes at something stupid one of them said. Could picture Tom lying beside him on a Sunday morning, before he had to go back to San Francisco for school on Monday, with his hair sticking up and one hand reaching blindly across the bed for Grace because opening his eyes before coffee was beneath him.

Those versions wouldn’t exist anymore. Grace knew that. He just didn’t know what had replaced them.

Sometimes he wondered whether the beetles had made it. That fear remained despite every calculation telling him they should have arrived a year earlier.

Maybe Earth had received them. Maybe the Taumoeba was already spreading through Venus. Maybe the Sun was beginning to recover.

Maybe Tom had watched the final log. That particular thought was dangerous. Grace had learned not to follow it too far. He hoped they had lived. That mattered more than anything else. He hoped Colt had kept doing ridiculous stunts until age finally forced him to stop. He hoped Jody made every movie she wanted. He hoped Tom-

Grace swallowed and stared through the cockpit window at the impossible twinkling black stretching ahead of him.

He hoped Tom had been happy. Even if that happiness had needed to happen without him. Especially then.

“Dr. Grace.”

Grace barely reacted. “Yes, Mary?”

“Hail Mary has entered projected communication range with Earth.” For several seconds, Grace did not understand the sentence. His eyes remained fixed ahead.

Mary waited.

Grace blinked.

“What?”

“Hail Mary has entered projected communication range with Earth.”

His heart stopped. Not literally… well… maybe. Who knows at this point. He sat upright so quickly that the cockpit tilted. Grace caught the armrest before he slid sideways, breathing hard while black spots crowded the edges of his vision.

“Communication range?”

“Yes, Dr. Grace.”

His mouth went dry. It was ridiculous. He had known this was coming. He had been calculating this exact point for months. He had watched the distance decrease until the numbers felt permanently etched behind his eyes. And somehow hearing Mary say it made everything real in a way none of those calculations had.

Earth was close enough to hear him.

Grace stared at the communications console. His hands began shaking. “No, no, don’t do that.” The shaking continued, shifting the hastily wrapped bandages covering his entire left arm.

“Okay,” he whispered as he pushed himself to stand and immediately regretted it. His knees nearly gave out before he managed to brace one hand against the console. “Okay. Sitting it is.” He sat back down. So standing was not required to operate a radio. Excellent discovery, Dr. Grace.

Grace weakly pulled the communication panel toward him and stared at controls he had used hundreds of times. “What frequency?”

Mary answered, but Grace entered it wrong. The console rejected the command.

“Dang it.” He tried again.

Wrong button.

“Come oooon.” His breathing had become embarrassingly fast. He knew this system. He had communicated with an alien spacecraft using less information than this, and yet suddenly his fingers couldn’t remember what they were supposed to do.

Because real human people were on the other side.

Grace hadn’t heard another human voice that wasn’t a recording in years. The thought hit him so hard he had to stop. The last voices he’d heard were the ones that sent him away. He looked down at his hands. They were trembling badly enough that he had tp curl them into fists to stop it.

“Grace,” he whispered to himself. “You talked to an alien. You figured out an alien language. You found another planet with life on it. You flew into the fudging atmosphere on a ship that was not made for that.” His throat tightened.

“You can send a dang radio message.” He tried again. This time the console accepted the command.

A small indicator turned green.

TRANSMISSION READY

Grace stared at it. He had thought about this moment for four years. Sometimes he had imagined something clever.

Hail Mary calling Earth. Miss me?

Sometimes he imagined something scientific and dignified.

This is Doctor Captain Ryland Grace aboard the Hail Mary. Mission accomplished.

Once, during a particularly lonely week, he had rehearsed an entire speech.

Now none of it existed.

His finger hovered above the transmitter, and Grace suddenly wished Rocky were there. Rocky would call him stupid, then probably say something annoyingly simple.

Talk.

Grace pressed the button as static filled the speakers. His heartbeat hammered in his ears.

“This is…” His voice cracked. “This is Doctor Captain Ryland Grace aboard the Hail Mary. I’m-” His breath hitched. He looked down quickly, blinking hard when the controls blurred.

“I’m almost home,” his voice shook badly enough that there was no hiding it anymore. He stopped caring. “I don’t know if the beetles made it. I don’t know… if anybody’s monitoring this frequency anymore, but… this is the Hail Mary… can anyone hear me?” 

Grace released the transmitter and immediately regretted it.

The cockpit went quiet except for the low hum of the ship and the faint static spilling from the speakers, and suddenly the minutes between speaking and getting an answer felt infinitely longer than the four years he had already spent coming home. He knew how this worked. He knew the distance involved, knew exactly how long his signal would take to reach Earth and how long any response would take to return. If his hands had been steadier, he could have calculated the delay down to the millisecond and probably occupied himself by watching the timer tick toward the earliest possible reply.

Instead, he sat there staring at the console like he could somehow bully radio waves into moving faster.

His pulse thudded painfully in his ears.

Maybe nobody had heard him.

Maybe he had entered the wrong frequency after all.

Maybe the transmitter had been damaged at some point during the last four years and Mary simply hadn’t detected it because, of course, the one system he needed most would be the one thing the ship decided to lie about.

Grace frowned and reached toward the controls before stopping himself.

“No. Don’t touch it,” he muttered. “You’ll make it worse.” His hand fell back into his lap, and for once he actually listened to his own advice.

Mary gave him the estimated response window without being asked. Grace thanked her automatically, then immediately started counting anyway. He tried distracting himself with the approach trajectory again, checked the Hail Mary’s remaining astrophage reserve twice, took three tiny sips from a water pouch and even forced down several mouthfuls of the disgusting slurry sitting beside his chair, but none of it worked. Every few seconds his eyes slid back toward the communication panel.

Eventually the earliest possible reply window opened.

Grace straightened while looking back at the speaker, but nothing happened.

Thirty seconds passed.

Then another.

His stomach twisted.

“Come on.” A few tears fell as Grace swallowed. “Come on, Earth.”

The console chimed and every functional muscle in his body locked at once.

For half a second, Grace simply stared at the incoming signal indicator as though he had forgotten what it meant, then his hand shot toward the controls so quickly that his fingers slipped across the panel. Mary routed the transmission automatically before he could embarrass himself further.

Static cracked through the cockpit speakers.

Then a voice followed.

A human voice.

“ Dr. Captain Grace, this is NASA Deep Space Communications, Houston.” Grace stopped breathing as he listened. The voice belonged to a woman, calm and clear despite the slight distortion from the transmission. There was a tiny pause before she continued, just long enough for Grace to hear the emotion hiding beneath the professional cadence. “Hail Mary, we read you loud and clear.”

Grace’s face crumpled as his hand flew over his mouth, a sound escaped him that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

The woman continued, still carefully composed. “Dr. Grace, all four Beetles arrived safely approximately one year ago. The Taumoeba samples were recovered successfully, cultivation has been established, and deployment operations around Venus are currently underway. Preliminary solar recovery projections are positive.”

Grace squeezed his eyes shut. The beetles had made it. All four of them and the Taumoeba in them. Earth had it, and the Sun was going to recover.

For years, those had been nothing more than numbers on a screen and possibilities Grace refused to let himself believe too strongly because he had learned what happened when you trusted the universe to be kind.

Now someone on Earth was telling him it had worked.

He lowered his hand from his mouth, but his fingers immediately curled into the edge of the quilt pooled over his lap.

The transmission continued.

“We have received the Hail Mary’s automatic telemetry transmission and confirmed your current trajectory. Recovery teams have been preparing for your arrival since the beetles were recovered, and based on your present approach, Hail Mary is approximately seven days from rendezvous.”

Seven days.

Grace had known that. Of course he had. He’d calculated it himself, but hearing another person say it made his chest hurt.

The woman hesitated again, and this time the pause was long enough that the careful professionalism in her voice slipped slightly when she spoke.

“Dr. Grace, it is very good to hear your voice.”

Grace broke. There was no warning and absolutely no dignity involved. One second he was sitting upright in the pilot chair trying desperately to behave like a competent astronaut returning from humanity’s first interstellar mission, and the next a sob tore out of him hard enough to fold him forward. Both hands covered his face as his shoulders started shaking, tears spilling between his fingers before he had any chance of stopping them.

A person.

A real person.

Talking to him.

“There’s a person, Mary.” Grace laughed through another sob, the sound wet and broken as he looked up at Mary’s speaker. “A real live person!”

Mary remained silent.

Grace dragged one hand down his face and stared back down to the communications speaker as if the voice might disappear if he looked away too long.

“There’s actually a person,” he repeated after calming down enough to actually speak coherent words. “Houston, this is Hail Mary.”  His voice sounded awful as he started another transmission. Grace cleared his throat and tried again. “Sorry. I, uh-”

His breath caught before he could finish. He released the button, covered his mouth and cried for several more seconds, trying unsuccessfully to get himself back under control before pressing the transmitter again.

“I haven’t talked to another human being in a really long time.” The sentence came out much smaller than he intended. He looked down at his hands before continuing. “I thought I was prepared for this.

“I was not.” A weak laugh slipped out of him. He leaned back into the pilot chair and scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand. “So, um… I might need a minute.” He released the transmitter again.

Grace had imagined this moment hundreds of times during the trip home. But it looked like th real version involved crying into the microphone because a stranger on Earth said hello. He couldn’t even bring himself to be embarrassed.

The next transmission arrived a while later.

“Copy that, Hail Mary.” The same woman. Her voice was still professional, but there was no hiding the emotion anymore. “Take all the time you need, Dr. Grace. We’re here.”

Grace’s breath caught again.

We’re here.

Two words.

That was all.

For nearly four years, here had meant the Hail Mary.

Now Earth was answering him. Grace leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the edge of the console, laughing weakly through the tears still falling down his face.

“Okay,” he whispered, even though the transmitter wasn’t on. His hand curled around one of the little pieces of xenonite lying beside the controls. “Okay.”

Seven days.

Grace closed his eyes and let himself cry until the shaking finally began to ease. For the first time in years, he wasn’t talking into silence.

“Well.” Inhale and slow exhale. “I guess I should start with my conditions. Cause I’m definitely gonna need some help…since I will not be able to make it through re-entry in the… condition I’m in. I for sure have at least… beriberi with scurvy on top of that. I hope you’re prepared to deal with me.” He let out a very unprofessional chuckle while shaking his head. “But it’ll be nice to see… living humans again.”

Grace released the transmitter with a weak smile still tugging at the corner of his mouth, although it faded fairly quickly when he considered how awful that sentence probably sounded to whoever was sitting on the other end. He could almost imagine the room in Houston now, filled with people who had presumably spent the last year preparing for his return based on whatever information the beetles had carried back with them. There were probably engineers monitoring the Hail Mary’s telemetry, doctors waiting to hear exactly what condition its single remaining crew member was in, and probably at least one unfortunate person frantically writing down ‘beriberi, scurvy, severely malnourished’ while wondering how the man they were supposed to recover in seven days had managed to keep himself alive with what little supplies was on board to begin with.

The response arrived, and Grace could hear the difference in the woman’s voice almost immediately. She was still controlled, every word spoken with the deliberate clarity expected from someone communicating with a spacecraft, but the warmth underneath it had deepened into something more concerned. “Hail Mary, Houston. Understood, Dr. Grace. We’re already coordinating medical support for your recovery, and we have physicians standing by who will begin reviewing anything you’re able to transmit. We’re going to need as complete an assessment of your current condition as possible, but I want to make one thing very clear before we go any further. You will not be expected to manage reentry or recovery alone. We have been preparing for several arrival scenarios since the beetles were recovered, including one in which you are unable to move under your own power, and we will walk you through every stage of your approach as you get closer.”

Grace’s eyes closed before she had even finished. He hadn’t realized until that moment how thoroughly he had assumed the final week would work exactly like the last several years. Something would go wrong, Grace would figure it out. Something needed repairing, Grace would drag himself down a ladder and repair it. He had become so accustomed to being the only person available to solve his problems that the idea of reaching a point where someone else could simply take over felt almost unnatural.

The woman paused briefly before continuing, and this time the professional cadence slipped enough for Grace to hear the person underneath it. “You’ve done enough on your own, Dr. Grace. From this point forward, if something changes, or if there is anything about your condition that you think might be relevant, tell us. You do not need to save your energy for getting yourself through recovery. Your job for the next seven days is to keep yourself as stable as possible and let us get you the rest of the way home.”

“Oh, you really gotta stop… saying things like that,” Grace muttered as his eyes burned again. Thankfully, the transmitter wasn’t active, so Houston was spared the increasingly embarrassing emotional commentary of a man who had seemingly become incapable of hearing the word home without crying.

He scrubbed both hands over his face and reached for the transmitter once he trusted his voice again. “Copy that, Houston... I can give you the highlights now, but it’s… gonna be a pretty long list. I’m severely underweight, and…I don’t know exactly how much because I stopped checking… when watching the number go down started feeling counterproductive… I’m almost positive about the beriberi and scurvy… I’m weak enough that I’m spending most of my time in the cockpit because… the ladders are getting difficult, and standing too fast… makes my vision go black around the edges. I’ve got several wounds where old… scar tissue has started breaking down, a few missing teeth, and I’m pretty… sure my body is currently being held together by sheer spite and stubbornness alone at this point.” He chuckled quietly and released the transmitter before he reached for the laptop tucked between the side of the pilot chair and a bundle of medical supplies. The movement pulled unpleasantly on his arm, but Grace managed to drag the computer onto his lap without having to stand. It took longer than he would have liked for the screen to wake, and even longer for him to navigate through the folders because his fingers kept missing keys whenever the tremor worsened.

“I should probably make this easier on the doctors,” he murmured before opening a blank document and began typing.

He started with the things he could remember without checking anything: approximate daily caloric intake, the slurry taumeoba mixture he had been living on, how much water he consumed, the vitaminss he knew he had exhausted and roughly when he had run out of them.From there he moved into symptoms, listing the fatigue, muscle weakness, dizziness, intermittent numbness, poor wound healing, bleeding gums, and lost teeth. He added the condition of the burns from Adrian, which had healed years ago but were now splitting in several places as his nutritional status deteriorated, then included every available medication and supplement he had taken recently along with the increasingly pathetic inventory of what remained aboard.

The process was strangely comforting. This was something Grace understood. Observe a problem, collect data, organize the variables and give the information to someone more qualified when the problem involved a human body rather than a microorganism.

Halfway through entering the dates, Grace suddenly stopped typing.

“Oh!” He nearly dropped the laptop off his knees in his excitement and had to catch it against his stomach. “Armando!”

The medical robot remained in the dormitory, which was unfortunate because Grace had absolutely no intention of climbing down there just to point accusingly at it, but the data Armando had collected was already saved to Mary’s archive. Grace abandoned the document long enough to dig through the ship files, muttering under his breath while folders opened and closed across the screen until he finally found what he was looking for.

“Ha!”

A medical report appeared.

Grace leaned closer.

About a month earlier, when his symptoms had become concerning enough that even Grace could no longer convincingly describe them as probably okay-ish, he had activated Armando and let the medical robot perform what examinations it was capable of.The robot had taken a blood sample as part of the assessment and run the onboard analysis available to it, storing both the raw results and its interpretation in Grace’s medical file. He had almost forgotten about it.

Grace attached the entire history of everything Armando has recorded since he woke up.

“There you go,” he murmured while scanning the data. “Actual evidence that I’m falling apart… Doctors love that.”

He added the bloodwork to the medical packet along with all of  Armando’s various assessments from since he woke up, then included records of his weight and muscle-mass decline before he could change his mind about letting strangers see those particular numbers. Houston had asked for everything, and if there was one situation where vanity became objectively stupid, being severely malnourished aboard an interstellar spacecraft probably qualified.

By the time he finished, the file contained several years of medical history that somebody on Earth should be able to get a reasonably terrifying picture of what they were dealing with.

Grace routed the packet through the communication system and pressed the transmitter again. “Houston, Hail Mary… I’m sending a medical file now. It should have… my current symptom list and everything Armando has recorded.”

He hesitated, realizing there was a very real possibility nobody on Earth remembered what Armando was.

“Armando is the medical robot onboard,” he explained with a nervous chuckle. “About a month ago things started getting… bad enough that I let him do a full assessment, and he took a small blood draw… His testing capabilities are pretty limited compared to whatever you probably have… down there now, but I included the raw results along with his analysis… so your doctors should have something physical to look at instead of relying entirely… on me saying, ‘Hey, I think I have scurvy.’ It’s a month old, which isn’t ideal, and I’m definitely worse now… but it should give you a starting reference.”

Grace looked over the document one more time before sending the final portion of the packet. “I also included everything I’ve been… eating and the supplies I still have available.”

His finger lifted from the transmitter, and for the first time since making contact, Grace found himself waiting for a response without quite as much panic twisting inside his chest. Someone was going to receive those files. Actual doctors were going to look at his bloodwork and examine the numbers he had been watching deteriorate for the last year. He didn’t have to diagnose himself anymore or make decisions based on half-remembered medical information and whatever Armando could manage with equipment designed primarily to keep three astronauts alive during a much shorter mission.

The answer eventually crackled through the speakers. “Hail Mary, Houston. Medical packet received. We have Armando’s report. Our medical team is reviewing them now.” The woman paused, and when she continued,  the relief in her voice was obvious enough that Grace could picture her turning toward a group of doctors somewhere beyond the microphone. “Dr. Grace, they want me to tell you that sending the raw blood data is extremely helpful.”

Grace gave the empty cockpit a tired little salute. “Copy that.” He almost released the transmitter before remembering she couldn’t see him. “Sorry. I saluted you. Apparently four years alone has… damaged my understanding of how radios work.”

There was a longer delay before Houston’s answer reached him, but when it did, the woman was laughing softly enough that the sound immediately put another lump in Grace’s throat. “Salute acknowledged, Hail Mary.”

Grace laughed too, pressing the heel of his hand against one eye as the stupid thing started watering again.

The controller let the small moment settle before her voice softened. “And Dr. Grace, your medical team would also like me to remind you that none of this is something you need to apologize for or try to make sound less serious. We know you’ve been managing this alone for a very long time. You don’t have to anymore. There are a lot of people down here working on getting you home safely.”

Grace stared down at the laptop resting across his painfully thin legs, the screen still showing rows of medical information he had spent so long trying to interpret by himself. Somewhere on Earth, people were reading those same numbers now. Doctors were looking at his blood. Engineers were watching his ship's data. And someone had acknowledged his ridiculous invisible salute. It was such an ordinary kind of human cooperation that it hurt almost as badly as hearing another voice for the first time.

“Thank you,” he finally transmitted, and his voice wavered despite everything he did to stop it. “Seriously. I know this is your job and everything, but…” Grace swallowed as his vision blurred again. “Thank you… f-for talking to me.”

When Houston answered, the woman had to clear her throat before she spoke. “Dr. Grace, I think I can safely speak for everyone in this room when I say you do not have to thank us for that.” Her voice trembled slightly before she recovered, although not enough to hide it completely. “There are people here who have spent most of their careers hoping someone would eventually sit in this chair and hear your voice. Some of them worked on the original Hail Mary Project. Some were children when you launched. We’ve been watching for your approach every day since the beetles told us you were coming home.”

Grace’s lips parted slightly.

The woman drew another breath. “So if you want to talk, Dr. Captain Grace, then talk. Tell us about the ship. Tell us what you did today. Complain about anything. You can tell us absolutely nothing important at all if that’s what you feel like doing.” A tiny laugh slipped through the transmission before her voice softened again. “There are plenty of people down here who would be very happy just to listen.”

Grace looked around the cockpit that had contained almost every word he’d spoken for years. For so long, talking had meant speaking to Mary because silence was worse, narrating experiments to himself, rambling at an alien who was light-years away, or telling an empty ship about people he hoped were still alive.

Now someone had invited him to talk simply because they wanted to hear him.

Grace pressed the transmitter again, his smile wobbling as another tear slipped down his cheek.

“Well,” he sniffled, “you’re probably gonna regret offering that, Houston… I taught middle schoolers. I can talk for a really long time.”

The response took time to travel back to him, giving him long enough to close the laptop and tuck it in beside him.

“We’ve got time, Dr. Grace.”

Grace laughed softly and curled deeper beneath his quilt while one hand remained close to the transmitter.

Grace glanced down at himself a moment later, and another thought occurred to him that seemed considerably more important now that he was going to see actual, physical people in seven days. He lifted one arm experimentally, sniffed, and immediately recoiled from himself.

“Oh, gosh.”

Four years aboard a spaceship had changed his standards considerably. The slow water filtration had made showers increasingly infrequent even before his health began deteriorating, and during the last few months the combination of exhaustion, open wounds and the simple difficulty of getting himself through the ship had reduced personal hygiene to whatever Grace could manage with a cloth while sitting down. His sense of smell had been badly damaged when he got blasted by the super heated ammonia of Rocky’s atmosphere so he was almost nose-blind to himself, but that did not mean everyone else would be similarly blessed.

He pressed the transmitter again. “Actually, Houston, one more thing… This is less medically important and more of a professional courtesy to whoever gets assigned.. the unfortunate job of physically retrieving me.” Grace glanced down at his shirt, which had survived far longer than any shirt should reasonably be expected to survive. “Please forewarn them that I probably smell really bad… Like, really bad. I haven’t exactly had the energy or resources to maintain normal… human hygiene standards lately,and… I would like it officially entered into the record that I… apologized greatly in advance.”

By the time Houston’s response arrived,mGrace had almost drifted off beneath his quilt. The sound of the transmission startled his eyes open, and the controller’s voice came through with enough amusement that he could tell that his warning had been shared with more than one person. “Copy that, Hail Mary. Your warning has been entered into the record. Recovery personnel have been advised that the first human to return from another star system may be somewhat fragrant.”

Grace snorted so hard he started coughing.

“Somewhat fragrant is generous.”

“We’re trying to preserve your dignity, Dr. Grace.”

“Little late for that, Houston.” Grace found himself smiling long after his transmission ended.

The days that followed passed faster than he expected, largely because Grace slept through an alarming percentage of them.

The medical team sent their first recommendations several hours after receiving Armando’s bloodwork, carefully working within the pathetic collection of ‘food’, supplements, and medications Grace still had available. They were cautious about changing too much too quickly given how malnourished and dehydrated he had become, but Grace followed their instructions with the reluctant obedience of someone who knew enough biology to understand why they were being careful while simultaneously possessing the personality of a former scientist who deeply resented being told when to eat.

Houston checked on him constantly.

At first the delay between transmissions made every conversation feel slightly awkward, with Grace asking a question and occasionally forgetting what he had asked by the time the response arrived. As the Hail Mary closed the distance, however, the pauses shortened enough that the conversations gradually began resembling actual conversations rather than letters being read aloud across space. Grace learned the controller’s name, then the names of several other people rotating through communications. He met members of his medical team entirely through their voices, and was firmly informed that if he used the phrase I’m probably fine one more time after sending them bloodwork proving otherwise, they were going to start ignoring his opinion altogether.

Grace liked them.

That realization crept up on him.

He liked hearing different voices. He liked when somebody laughed in the background after he said something stupid. He liked waking from a three-hour nap and finding a message waiting for him instead of an empty communication queue. He liked being asked how he had slept and whether he had eaten, even though the answer to the first question was increasingly a lot and the answer to the second was usually yes, stop asking.

Mostly, Grace talked. Houston had told him he could, and that was all the permission he needed. He told them about Rocky, although they probably already knew most of the important parts from the beetles if the Task Force had actually decided to make them public. He filled in little things that hadn’t made it into the official logs, like Rocky’s complete inability to understand the concept of pets. He complained about the Hail Mary then apologized to Mary immediately afterward because he had developed a strange emotional attachment to a spaceship, too.

Sometimes Houston talked back.

They told him little things about Earth.

Nothing overwhelming at first.

The weather in Houston.

What someone had done that day.

A controller mentioned that astrophage-related dimming had already begun reversing enough to produce measurable changes, and Grace cried so hard at that one that they temporarily abandoned the conversation until he could breathe normally again.

The world outside the Hail Mary slowly became real through pieces small enough for him to handle, but Grace still hadn’t asked about Tom, Colt or Jody. He didn’t think he could physically handle any information if it included anything even remotely bad.

The medical team became more concerned as the days passed, though they tried not to let it show whenever they spoke directly to him. His wounds along his old burns still refused to close, and his body seemed to have decided that the best possible response to approaching Earth was to sleep through as much of the journey as physically possible.

Grace could hardly argue with it.

He slept six hours, woke long enough to eat and talk to Houston, then fell asleep for another four. Sometimes he woke with no memory of deciding to sleep at all with the quilt pulled halfway over his chest. Once he woke to Mary informing him that Houston had attempted contact twice while he was unconscious for ten hours, which resulted in an extremely concerned medical interrogation when he finally responded and an offended Grace insisting that there was a significant difference between unconscious and taking a nap.

Seven days became three, and three became two almost without him noticing.

By then Earth had grown from an idea into something tangible through the Hail Mary’s window. Grace spent long stretches simply staring at the imagery whenever he was awake, studying a planet he had seen millions of times before as though he had never seen it at all. He cried the first he was able to distinguish blue, white, and small bits of green completely, then denied crying when Houston asked why his communication suddenly dropped.

They did not believe his excuses.

The final twenty-four hours were different.

The communication delay had become short enough that Houston’s responses came almost instantly, and the Hail Mary was surrounded by increasingly busy transmissions as recovery teams coordinated its approach.vGrace understood only pieces of what was happening outside his ship, but he understood enough to know there were a lot of things involved and far more people than he had imagined dedicating an enormous amount of effort to retrieving one extremely tired science teacher from a spaceship.

His job, as Houston repeatedly reminded him, was very small.

Follow the approach instructions and keep Mary oriented correctly.

By the time Mary announced that she was entering the final rendezvous sequence, Grace had slept another six hours and still felt as though he could close his eyes for six more. The acceleration changes were becoming gentler as they matched the planned recovery trajectory, and every movement Grace made seemed to require more concentration than it had the day before.cHe remained strapped into the pilot chair with the quilt tucked around his waist, one hand resting near the controls and the other loosely holding one of Rocky’s xenonite puppets.

“Houston, Hail Mary,” he said after checking the approach numbers for the third time. “I should be able to keep her pointed… where you need her. Mary can handle most of it, and I can make small… corrections if something drifts, but I should probably tell you… now, that there’s absolutely no way I’m getting down to the airlock.”

There was no joke attached to that admission.

Grace looked toward the ladder leading away from the control room and felt exhausted just imagining it. Even in reduced gravity, his arms no longer had the strength he trusted to control a descent, and the idea of trying to navigate the ladder while his body transitioned toward weightlessness seemed like an excellent way to break his neck within sight of Earth.

“I mean it,” he added quietly. “I might be able to move the ship in the right direction… for you, but I can barely get out of this chair without my legs… giving out. If whoever’s coming to get me needs me at the airlock… I’m not gonna make it there.”

The answer came quickly now.

“Hail Mary, Houston. Understood. Dr. Grace, do not attempt to reach the airlock.”

Grace’s shoulders loosened slightly.

The controller continued in the same calm voice that had become so familiar over the past week. “Your recovery team is aware of your condition, and the plan does not require you to meet them anywhere. Once docking is confirmed, remain secured in the control room. They are coming to you.”

Grace stared at the speaker as something warm and painful spread through his chest. “Coming to me?”

“They’re coming to you,” she repeated, gentler this time. “You just keep Mary steady for us until we tell you otherwise, and after that you are officially relieved of responsibility. No ladders, no airlock and absolutely no trying to make their job easier. They know where you are.”

A tired smile spread across Grace’s face. “Okay. I can do that.”

The next stretch passed in a blur of numbers, instructions and increasingly small corrections. Grace kept the ship aligned while Mary handled most of the actual work, occasionally nudging the controls when Houston requested an adjustment and otherwise trying very hard not to interfere with people who clearly knew what they were doing.At some point the last traces of acceleration faded, and Grace felt the familiar shift as his body became weightless against the restraints.

The quilt began floating away from his lap.

Grace caught one edge before it could drift too far and tucked it awkwardly beneath the harness, watching one of his water pouches slowly rise from beside the chair. His stomach rolled unpleasantly at the transition, but even that seemed distant beneath the exhaustion pressing behind his eyes.

“Zero gravity,” he murmured.

Mary confirmed it.

Grace smiled faintly and tightened his fingers around Rocky’s xenonite puppet before it could float away too.

Somewhere outside the Hail Mary, people were coming to get him.

Actual people.

Grace had spent the entire week imagining that moment, and now that it was finally here his body had apparently decided staying conscious for it was optional.

“Dr. Grace,” Houston said through the speaker, close enough now that the response felt almost immediate. “You do not need to stay awake for us.”

Grace blinked slowly.

“I wanna.”

His voice was slurred with exhaustion.

A tiny pause followed.

“We know.”

Grace smiled without opening his eyes all the way. He let out a slow breath and tried humming. His head had begun tilting against the side of the pilot chair, the makeshift headband barely keeping his overgrown hair from floating around his face while the little xenonite puppet remained trapped securely between his fingers.

He had made it twelve light-years.

He could stay awake a few more minutes.

Probably.

Grace’s breathing slowed as the cockpit blurred. He forced his eyes open once more, but this time they only stayed that way for a few seconds before exhaustion pulled them closed again.

He heard Houston say something through the speakers, although the words had become too soft and distant for his tired brain to follow. Mary answered with some automated status report. Grace hummed another few notes beneath his breath and tried to remind himself that he wanted to be awake when the recovery team arrived.

Then a new sound reached him.

Faint at first.

Metallic.

Somewhere far from the control room, in the direction of the airlock, something clanged against the Hail Mary.

Grace’s eyes fluttered beneath his lids.

There was another noise, followed by a muffled series of vibrations traveling through the structure of the ship. It sounded almost like something being secured, then the distant clamoring of movement where there hadn’t been movement in years.

People.

Grace tried to open his eyes. He really did. A tiny smile pulled at his mouth instead as the humming finally stopped.

Then Dr. Captain Ryland Grace fell asleep.