Chapter Text
Even in the years to come, when Grace was asked, he could never fully describe the feeling of being among the stars.
It filled him with joy, it filled him with dread. The understanding that you were infinitesimal, an overwhelming juxtaposition of importance, and the knowledge that no one would ever hear if you screamed.
But, through all of this, at least he had Rocky with him.
The communication device, or the ‘Rocky-phone,’ as he had taken to calling it, was a lifeline for Grace in those months.
His days started like this:
Grace would be woken from his fitful, memory ridden sleep by an insistent chirping that only ceased when he actually had to get himself out of bed to answer the noise.
“Grace! Grace! Grace! Grace! Grace sleeps too long long long. Must wake up, talk to Rocky.”
His responses would always come in the form of a half asleep, fake annoyance at being woken up disguising the daily relief he feels at the sound of the Eridian alarm system. It was a reminder of his home of twenty years, only now the daily wake up calls from the boulder-like creature at his door were replaced by the sound of his increasingly high pitched voice.
“Hey Rock, what’s up buddy?”
Rocky relayed tales of Erid, stories of Elysia and how his family were living life, continuing on without him. Sometimes it hurt, hearing about how the Eridians were able to just keep going like he hadn’t ever been there, but he didn’t blame them at all. Grace had learnt a long time ago that the world didn’t stop when he was hurt.
It made him think, being alone on the Hail Mary, made him think harder than he had in years.
On Erid, there was always something to adjust to, and although he felt as though he belonged there more than anywhere else in the universe for two decades, it was never truly his.
So he thought, for hours on end.
When he was young, Ryland Grace never really knew what he wanted to be.
Teachers told him that he had the brains to go wherever he wanted, do whatever he pleased academically.
It was almost by accident that he had ended up in science, molecular biology was an even longer shot.
Learning had always come to him easily, knowledge being acquired without much effort at all on his part. Grace had never got exactly straight A’s in school, pretty close to it but his tendency to walk into exams high as a teenager brought his average down slightly. Grace didn’t remember much from his teenage years, the whirlwind of adolescent development left behind in a mosaic of late nights, illicit hookups and even more illicit drugs.
It was a side that no one he knew as an adult ever got to hear and he had worked hard to keep it that way.
The Doctor Ryland Grace who had penned a dissertation in molecular biology, and the Mr Grace who taught 8th grade at Grover Cleveland Middle School, didn’t know teenage Ryland.
This was because they fell into the ‘after.’
Most of Ryland’s life fell into the ‘after’, and honestly, he barely thought of the ‘before’ anymore.
Before his life was torn apart. Before he graduated high school, and before the grief. He hardly recognised the version of Ryland, who, at nineteen figured his time was better spent on couches and backyards with a drink in his hand and a girl -or boy, he’d never really minded- in his lap, than accepting any of the offers the Ivy League colleges had sent his way.
Until one night he came home to silence.
It wasn’t his fault, police officers and therapists had told him as much when it happened, a car ran a red light into them on their way home from a baseball game. His mother, father, and little brother Johnny on this Earth one moment and gone the next.
There was nothing he could have done, they said. They told him in hospital rooms, in lawyers offices, at funerals and on his doorstep holding casseroles until he’d stopped returning their calls, and stopped answering anyone at all.
And he knew they were right, deep down in the logical part of his brain that would offer him an unjust way out of the guilt he felt. Not being in the car with them hurt, the three of them leaving him alone hurt worse.
Being alone at nineteen was hard. Grieving alone at nineteen was harder.
He lived in that house for a year. College semesters arrived and passed without him attending.
His childhood home was surrounded in memories and laughter that only existed in echoes. His mind was fast asleep, his will to live not far behind it.
His friends did not visit, eventually no one did.
Eventually, one day, there was a knock on his door. The door with the height markings on the side, Grace always a little taller than Johnny, swung open to reveal an older woman. Tall, dark and business-like, she entered his dingy house with barely a glance at the dust settled over everything, at the shutters drawn across the living room.
It was his science teacher, Ms Reymond.
She offered brief condolences, then a proposition.
She had found him an opening. Biology at Harvard. She had remembered him after he left school, and he remembered her by the red pen corrections and after class encouragement that this was where his potential lay, if only he worked a little bit harder.
Ms Reymond herself was a biology professor, and when Grace listed her as a reference, the academics recognised her name and had kept his application.
Grace would always be grateful for that day. Even now, sitting onboard a ship hurtling through outer space, he truly believed she saved his life. The unexpected meeting that day offered him a way out from the darkness, a possibility for a future provided with the knowledge that someone cared. Someone remembered him, and remembered him beyond his grief.
Grace started at Harvard that year.
Ms Reymond passed away shortly after.
When he got the news this time, however, it didn’t stop him. It hurt and left him lonely, but it also made him realise something.
No mortality was guaranteed, and Grace would rather live his life choosing every one of his decisions in detail than waiting for a reason to stop.
He built a career on his own after that.
People came into his life and left. He was good at making friends, less so at keeping them. He had brief lovers, roommates and colleagues. He learned to keep joy in his heart and move facing forward, looking for others who needed a Ms Reymond or just someone to know that they were being thought of.
And he was good. He was really good at his job.
He graduated from Harvard with honors, earned his doctorate in molecular biology and built a name for himself. He had wild theories, and a fire to prove them. He penned his infamous dissertation detailing how water was not necessary for evolution, and was outcast from academic circles. But he knew who he was, and knew what he stood for. So it wasn’t until that infamous UNESCO conference where he called the leading scholar a ‘staggering waste of carbon’ (which he still stood by) where he ever thought there was an inkling that any of this might end. Leaving academia disgraced knocked him down, he couldn’t lie.
However, it didn’t stop him.
He pictured Ms Reymond, watchful and caring, a woman who had an entire career before turning to teaching.
So that’s what he did.
Entering the classroom felt like entering his most authentic self. In the science room he found exactly who he wanted to be, all that he wanted to do. He loved the kids, loved watching their eyes light up, and the knowledge that it was he who was responsible for it. They created a life for him, and for the first time in a long time, Grace felt as though he was truly alive.
Then he met Eva Stratt.
It had been twenty years since Stratt made the decision that sent him alone into space, plus God knew how many more with the time dilation, and Ryland Grace was yet to make up his mind about her. Even as the days passed, weeks that turned into months of calculation and redirections as he kept the Hail Mary 2 on path to Earth, balancing in his mind the woman who had been the centre of his world for two years, with the one who kidnapped and drugged him. Alone on the ship she sent him on, the one that had crashed and rebuilt to the point where he now could no longer recognise the Mary he set off in, Grace remembered her.
She was a soldier and his soulmate, platonically bound to him by the Petrova taskforce and a love for the world.
There was Eva Stratt, the one who tore him from his life and threw him headfirst into a wild fever dream that eventually had become his life of the last twenty years.
Eva Stratt who challenged his knowledge without remorse or sympathy, and led an illegal mission that ruthlessly bypassed international laws.
The leader, decision maker, and the self proclaimed ‘world’s whipping boy.’
But he also knew an Eva Stratt who loved humanity more than anything else, and would do whatever it took to preserve that without apology.
He found an Eva Stratt who was entirely focused, who carried her heart deep inside of her, but it was a heart that held within it the truest love he’d ever seen.
Ryland Grace’s life stopped when he met her.
He was a hurtling wheel that had turned with great speed up until the day she entered his classroom.
The pair of them were alone out there, surrounded by people they commanded on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Just two people tasked with the unimaginable burden of saving all of humanity, without ever letting humanity know that it was in need of saving. They were a team, a unit in the way that Grace hadn’t known in a long time, perhaps ever before.
She was strong, an enigma to everyone aboard that boat. Eva Stratt was singularly determined, seeing nothing as an obstacle in the way of saving Earth from the Astrophage.
She knew everything about him, the only one on Earth to understand every detail of his past.
Grace wasn’t sure that he knew anything about her life at all, nothing of the ins and outs of her mind, the one who went further than anyone else, operating beyond the limitations of her dictatorial immunity, she took the brunt of the pain head-on, facing the repercussions of morality in order to achieve the only goal, succeed in serving her devotion to Earth’s existence.
They were never in love. It was never even a thought between the pair. They relied on each other, were the only ones in the world who could, as for two years Grace watched her command an impossible mission, found himself second in command as he tried to help her as she carried the weight of an entire planet on her shoulders.
Until the day it all fell apart.
Although he was angry, for many years, bitter and furious at Stratt aboard the Hail Mary the first time, in the back of his mind, Grace could always understand why she’d done it.
As he figured out later, he wasn’t entirely angry with her, he was grieving. Suffering the loss of a life he would never get to see out. For Eva Stratt, the Hail Mary was the only ending for her. She’d told him once that she expected to spend the rest of her life in jail after the Petrova Taskforce completed its mission.
Now he was here, months from reaching Earth onboard a version of Mary that didn’t really feel like his own, and he didn’t know what had become of Eva Stratt.
Grace didn’t know what to expect when he landed. The only reassurance that Earth had received his information was the Eridian scientists telling him they detected a large star getting warmer, from the location of his solar system.
He tried not to think about it all. Not his past, not the concerns in the back of his mind telling him he would never make it, that he would be stuck in space, alone forever.
Grace filled his waking hours with movement.
The new Hail Mary was kitted out with enough food to last multiple people many years. Not only had his ‘meburgers’ been made in excess and stored in a series of clear Xenodite containers, but the Eridians had supplied him with a large quantity of seeds and small plants they included in their diet as a parting gift. Grace couldn’t eat them, they weren’t safe for him to digest, however, they thought he should bring something, a gift from the scientists of one planet to another. The plants survived off of water, the same as on Earth, and they had grown quite large under Grace’s careful tending.
He started yoga.
Grace had never done such a thing on Earth, or in the time he spent on Erid, but the remains of Yao and Olesya’s possessions had commingled, but stayed on the ship for their return home, and among them Grace had found a number of CDs and a guided yoga book, complete with diagrams. Some of his belongings must have been among them too, because he found a collection of his favourite music that he’d had with him aboard the Petrova ship. His CD player, however, had not found its way to him on the journey.
But the pictures were helpful, and eventually he felt himself getting stronger, along with the complicated positions that the figure on the page described.
Rock thought it was hilarious when he told him.
“Why Grace learns to upside down, question. Eridians much more advanced, have many legs all can yoga.” the Erdidan explained through the Rocky phone.
“I mean that’s not really how it works buddy, but-”
“I yoga very well, all legs can yoga.”
He changed the subject, but now every time he did his routine, Grace couldn’t help but describe yoga as a verb.
His second hobby was astronomy. A seemingly simple task when surrounded by stars at all times, but he was deeper in space than any other person had ever been. Trying to map stars without a clear reference point was difficult, but it kept him occupied for hours at a time, and gave him another excuse to talk to Rocky. The Eridians hadn’t mapped this far into deep space either, but the combined knowledge of the two scientists helped distract Grace from the loneliness.
It was his biggest fear about returning to Earth. He didn’t know what he would find when he landed, unsure if the place he left would be at all like what he would return to. Grace didn’t know if he could handle that, honestly.
He tried not to be too honest with himself, these days. Didn’t allow himself to think that he was out here by himself, and had been by himself for the better part of his life.
Maybe getting back to Earth would be just the same. He wasn’t sure if there was someone there for him. No one ever stayed long enough for him to find out, anyhow.
But he kept going, kept directing himself towards the planet he’d once called home, in the hopes that there would be a person upon it who would allow him to call Earth home once again.
It wasn't far now.