Chapter Text
Ryland Grace had always been a coward.
He was already half convinced it was one of these universal truths, like every action has an equal opposite reaction, all biological life requires water to survive, -apparently-, the Earth revolves around the sun, and Ryland Grace was a coward, there was nothing to change that, it had practically been written in the book of life. At least in his life.
Grace had never been the brave one, not when he was a kid or a scholar, much less while he was in the project and even less now. That title had always belonged to his brother, Colt, because despite having the same face, they couldn’t be any more different.
His brother was popular and cool, the action hero, ex-pilot turned into an experienced stunt double with an interesting life, parties to attend, people who liked him, while Grace didn’t have anybody, other than Colt himself. So it wasn’t difficult that after the accident and the Petrova line, Colt would put himself in the line of fire, while Grace hid away in his school, burying himself in papers and grades.
At first he thought they had only considered him for the Hail Mary investigation project because of his connection to his brother, but quickly he learned that they actually wanted him for him, for his brain and his thoughts. And a part of him couldn’t help but cling to the feeling of being useful, even if he was expendable.
But as useful and good as he felt being a scientist making the big discoveries, that still made him brave.
Grace remembered the day that he met the whole team for the project, Commander Yao, Engineer Ilyukhina, and Dubois, the scientist. He also met the backup team, Ryland had been halfway through his hellos when he came face to face with his brother in a space suit.
Colt G. Seavers was smiling like he won the lottery, when all Ryland could feel was dread.
His brother, while he worked in the astrophage, had landed himself the position of backup commander. The details were unimportant to him, because Grace had been inside the meetings talking about the details, he knew the plan like the back of his hand, and most importantly, he knew it was a one-way ticket.
“What are you doing?” Ryland asked, his voice clipped with worry.
His brother looked up at him, it was the first moment he had been able to catch his brother alone, they were inside the breakroom. It had been a complete coincidence, but Grace's body had moved before he could ever think about what he was doing.
“Drinking coffee?” His brother had the nerve to smile at him, raising his paper cup. “Familiar with it?”
Colt gave him a calm look, his shoulders hanging easily on his body, he never looked tense at all, one of the main differences anybody could spot by looking at them side to side. Because Ryland had always looked like the weight of the world was on top of his shoulders, he didn’t have the same power that Colt had to shake things off, like anxiety couldn’t touch him if he was getting on the nerves of somebody else.
He had always been like that, like he was unaffected by Grace's worry, by his concern, at least that was how he was on the outside now, with that unreadable expression as he drank his coffee like he had all the time in the world. But there had been a time when Grace had been able to read him better than that.
“What are you doing in Project Hail Mary?”
“Apparently I’m really compatible with the profile of an astronaut,” Colt said with a shrug of his shoulders, like he wasn’t saying something that was world-ending, didn’t offer any more information than that.
“It’s a suicide mission.”
Colt didn’t seem affected by the words, taking the cup to his lips in a relaxed manner. “It's the end of the world.”
He knew that, God, did he know that already.
He was one of the minds working on finding a possible solution, but still Colt had said it like he was just informing him, like it was another piece of harmless information, like the weather or the time.
And maybe Grace had always been too selfish too, because while he was okay with finding a solution, he was not as selfless to sacrifice his life for that solution, and he didn’t want his brother in space, not when he was the only thing that he still had left in his life.
It didn’t matter that they were not as close as they had been as children, that was just what happened when life got in the way, but still, he couldn’t just accept it.
“You are not coming back.”
Colt looked at him this time, and in his blue eyes it was clear that he already knew that. But he didn’t share the same desperation that Grace was feeling inside.
“I’m not even on the ship, Ry.” Colt said, this time softer, like he wanted to calm his brother. “I’m just backup.”
But there wasn’t anything to calm him down, not when he felt the cold dread in his stomach, because even a backup was too much of a risk.
Colt and he hadn’t been close in years, their contact had been reduced to celebratory texts and the rare phone call, they were practically strangers with the same face, but there was a time when Colt used to laugh at his side, a time where Ryland cheered on his brother at every competition and sport that he tried.
There had been a time they were close, in the same four walls under the same covers, telling each other stories to no end. They had been all each other had for a while, but Colt had always been the social guy, the one that didn’t have an issue talking to strangers and inviting people into his life. But Grace had lost everything already, and now he was losing his brother.
And now they were standing face to face, but they may have been in another galaxy by how far they felt.
“Why did you say yes?” Ryland asked, soft and sacred.
“How could I say no?” Colt said simply, tired and resigned.
Saying no sounded like the easiest thing, Ryland knew it, there was no way he could ever say yes to that mission, and he couldn’t understand the selfness of his brother, he had grew up by his side, even after they were people that loved him on earth, a fulfilling job, still he chose the possibility of dying for a cause there was no way to know if could work or not.
It made him feel even worse about himself.
So he did what he always did in those moments, he buried himself in work, getting all the details straight, working in his lab, barely talking to anybody outside the work. He and Colt didn’t talk again while they were both busy working on their own things.
And Grace couldn’t help but have the feeling that conversation was going to be the last one they were going to have. Especially after the explosion managed to kill the two scientists and the commander.
Because that meant his brother was going to space, it was not a distant possibility anymore, it was the truth, the fact was that he would never see his brother again, that he would perish in space in something that Grace helped build, probably starving away thousands of light-years away from him. How could he ever wash that blood off his hands?
Still, when they asked him to join his brother and be the head scientist of the mission, he said no.
Not even when he was the only choice, despite all the rational arguments, he simply couldn’t, so Ryland did what he always did; he ran.
It felt like he had been running his whole life long as he tried to escape, and maybe he should have appreciated it the last time he saw the blue of the sky, or the green grass underneath his feet, or the soft wind that moved his hair.
Being chased down and pushed to the ground had to be one of the most traumatic experiences of his life, knowing that if they caught him, he was dead, he would never get to see earth again, never see the fog again, his kids, his parent’s tomb, he didn’t know how many things he would miss until he was fighting to get the people out of him on the ground.
The only familiar face in the crowd was his own, he didn’t even get to see his brother's eyes before they drugged him because the guy was looking at him with his sunglasses on, his face vacant of expression.
And still Grace called out for him, begging him on the floor, raw and desperate.
But there was no empathy, no pity.
Not that he deserved any of it, he was a coward after all that needed to be drugged to save the world because he couldn’t board the ship on his own conviction.
But Ryland had never aspired to much, not the fame, not the worship that came with being a hero like his brother, he had only wanted to live his quiet life to the end of the earth.
When Ryland Grace woke up inside the Hail Mary, disoriented and scared, he got the feeling that he always felt like that. Like the disgust inside of him was part of his natural state. A bitter taste that he could never wash away.
The first weeks were rough.
It came with waking up from a year-long coma, not even remembering his name or what he was doing there, rough was an understatement, he had been devastated, completely out of his element. Still, he used those days to get familiar with the ship, with himself, trying to get his scrambled memories back in the right order, but he didn’t have a single clue of where they were supposed to go.
It was especially hard when Grace realised he had woken up alone, with an unconscious body and a dead one, the image had been nauseating, but it seemed like Ilyukhina, from what he learned from photos and documents, had passed away at some point in their travels, and Grace was left alone with the person still in a coma that looked just like him.
It freaked him out in the first days, a part of him was half convinced that it was his own body and he was already dead, just stuck in a weird limbo between heaven and hell, not that he believed in either of those. But those days did make him wonder if there was something past this lifetime.
Not that he had ever been a realiusgous persona, always had found more comfort in everything he could explain, that’s what had made him fall in love with science in the first place. But maybe it was the fact that he was being faced with his own mortality that made him wonder.
The memories were slow, but they came.
He was a teacher, and while he didn’t understand much about why a middle school teacher would be in space, he knew that much, and that he was smart, smart enough that he was apparently the leading scientist in the whole ship. But the most important part that came to his memory was the mysterious person with his same face.
His twin brother.
Still, he didn’t think he managed to feel happy about the whole ordeal, it was just as devastating to think that the only other living person in the ship was his own blood, and yet still he felt so alone. It was almost like he was just waiting for the moment Armando, the medical robot as he named him, to inform him that his brother had passed away.
It had been like a miracle when Rocky appeared in his life.
The months with Rocky could be considered the highlight of his life now, the one thing that kept him going when sometimes he felt like giving up, but they had each other now, still, there was a protective part of him that was incapable of allowing Rocky into the medical bay. Rocky had to know there was somebody else in the ship alive, he could see through walls after all, but he knew that the person was not awake.
Some nights Grace sat in front of his brother wondering if he would ever wake up. It was almost funny the way he had never wanted to be there, he didn’t want to be in space on that mission, and yet here he was, alive, breathing and moving, while Colt, who had signed up, chasing after being the hero like he always was, was out cold.
Grace needed to stop crying each time he sat next to Colt’s body.
Wondering how long the ship would support his unconscious body, because while the ship was built for three, the coma was not meant ot last this long, and if Colt didn’t wake up soon, he was never going to, Armando was not able to maintain the coma indefinitely. While he was no medical doctor, Grace knew enough to know that the chances of his brother ever waking up were slim.
It was unfair.
“Why, second Grace, question.” Rocky asked one night, they were quietly sitting in the ship.
“Oh.” Grace fumbled with the thing in his hand as he turned to look away from Rocky. “That’s- my twin.”
Rocky didn’t usually ask, despite his curious nature and inability to keep his thoughts to himself, Rocky had managed to keep the questions about Colt to himself until that night. Maybe there was something so haunted in Grace’s eyes that he had to ask.
“Don’t understand that word.” Despite the cold way the robotic voice spoke, Grace was able to hear the softness in the tunes that Rocky sang.
“We are identical.”
He never put too much thought into the fact that they had the same face before the Hail Mary, he and Colt never had much in common other than a childhood together under the same roof, but they had lived lives so different that they had stopped looking similar, Colt was bigger, with well-trained muscles all over his body, the only glasses he ever wore were sunglasses even inside, his skin had more color by standing under the sun, and his whole body had a more relaxed vibe that Ryland never managed to in his life.
But now he couldn’t help but think how they did look identical now, since the ship had given him muscles in his sleep so they wouldn’t atrophie. So now they had a similar build, and since Colt was sleeping, his face was relaxed and bare, it was like looking in a mirror, but in an uncanny way, because Ryland still was unable to see himself in that face.
“Family. Question.” Rocky asked, and Grace realised he had left his answer far too vague, since Rocky didn’t know much about human biology other than the few comments he had made.
“Yeah, he is my brother.”
“So Grace not alone.”
That statement broke somehting in him, because Grace had never been alone, not once in his life, not even in the womb. He had always had Colt in his life, sometimes he felt like a ghost, barely a person, but still, he was there, even if they never reached out. But it was different now, that he was faced with the chance that he would truly be completely alone.
Because, yes he had Rocky by his side, and he had grown to love him with all his heart, the best friend he could ask for, but they couldn’t even breathe the same air; each other’s atmosphere would kill them, and they couldn’t even touch each other. And while he loved having somebody to talk to he missed another body, another person, the human touch of somebody that could punch him with mad or hug him when happy.
And now he would never have any of that.
“I think I’m- He-” His words broke in the middle of the sentence, he could feel the familiar sting of tears in his eyes. It took him a while to be able to finish his sentence. “I don’t think he is going to wake up, buddy.”
And that thinking was what moved him to make the choices he took.
When faced with the chance of going back home or helping Rocky, the choice was simple.
He chose the person that had almost died to help him, the one that had accompanied him every day, Rocky had become his best friend, not only because he was the only choice available, but because he had grown a real friendship with Rocky. There was nothing on earth waiting for him, nothing that he would miss more than the first genuine connection that he ever made.
The route to Erid was calmer, at least he felt that way after he had sent the taumeba to Earth. He had done his mission, and he had done it well. Ryland couldn’t help but feel a slight pride in himself for all he had achieved.
“Grace! Grace!” Rocky’s voice came from some point of the ship, and even in the robotic voice, Grace was able to pinpoint a level of urgency in the way his friend was shouting his name.
Grace was up on his feet in an instant, running to where Rocky was. “Yeah, Rocky?”
He was expecting something in the distance, maybe a planet or a star that Rocky was trying to show him, but he didn’t expect what the next words would be.
“There is a ship!”
I mean, he knew aliens were real, he was standing next to one- hell, to Rocky, he was an alien, just as unfamiliar. It wasn’t that crazy to imagine there was more intelligent life in the vast universe, and Grace was already making the questions in his head to know where the ship had come from, and if maybe they needed to prepare an escape route in case they weren’t as friendly as Rocky.
But the second Grace’s eyes found the ship Rocky was talking about, he forgot how to breathe.
The ship was human-made.
There was no other way to describe it, it was rudimentary at best, but there was something about it that reminded him of a submarine immediately, but that onlybrought him more questions than any type of answers. Especially when Rocky informed him that the ship was making a signal that confirmed Grace that the ones inside the weird ship were humans.
... --- ...
Morse code, the universal distress signal back on Earth, he would be surprised if any other race had come to the same signal, it seemed impossible, but just as impossible as another human that far away from Earth. Grace was years away, there was no way they would have sent another ship. It didn’t make any sense.
“We need to help them.” The words escaped his lips before he was able to think about the how.
Lucky for him, Rocky was really smart and able to think on his feet, he was able to make another tunnel so Grace could put on his space suit and walk to the other ship to make contact with the ship floating in space, just like he had done with Rocky the first time they met.
It made him awfully nervous, but at the same time he couldn’t help but feel excited as he walked through the tunnel, even with his helmet, because while he knew Rocky was able to fill the tunnel with oxygen, he felt better having another layer protecting him. After all, he did know how humans could be, and they would probably be terrified if they saw a human walking in their direction without any type of protection.
Still, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw as he approached the unknown ship; the place where the door should be was welded from the outside.
Grace had to go back to the Mary to talk to Rocky, it took him a full hour to be able to open up the ship. And the second he was able to enter, he realized how small it actually was, he couldn’t imagine being in space for who knew how long in that cramped space. It would drive him mad.
It wasn’t long until he realised there wasn’t a crew inside, but a single unconscious body on the floor of the ship. And Grace had to fight the urge to puke, because the man was covered in what he could only assume was dried blood, and for a second Grace was glad he had taken his spacesuit because he wasn’t sure he had wanted to smell the rotting body.
But it took him a couple of seconds to realise it wasn’t a corpse what he was looking at, and his body moved faster than his thoughts as he realised that there was the slow movement of his chest rising and falling. The man was alive.
It took effort for him to carry -more like drag- the body back to the Hail Mary, Grace definitely needed to work out more, because he was struggling as he moved through the tunnel slowly. Grace tried not to think too much as he moved, but he couldn’t help but wonder what the heck could have happened to that man.
There was too much blood covering him, but it didn’t seem to be his own, or at least not all of it, if he had lost that much blood, he would not be alive, especially since the man was missing an arm. The blood lost would have killed him, but here he was breathing. Still, there was no time for his scientific questions as he needed to take the man to Armando so he could check what was wrong with him.
The hours passed slowly, Grace could see even Rocky seemed to be concerned, keeping his hands busy while Grace focused on looking at the ship the stranger had traveled, because the more he looked at it, the less he understood it.
Grace really hoped the man would wake up soon, because he needed answers, of course, he also wanted to have another person to talk to, but that seemed less important than satisfying his curiosity.
“Eye movement detected.”
When the robotic voice spoke, Grace practically raced to the medical bay to check in on their new addition to the team.
But the mysterious man was still covered in blood, lying motionless in the bed, his steady up and down of his chest being the only sign that he was even alive. And Ryland stood there looking at him for long seconds, wondering if he had imagined the voice.
Until his eyes moved as a habit to the bed where Colt was, feeling his heart drop to his stomach when he noticed that the bed was empty.
Colt was standing, leaning against the wall, trying to collect his thoughts or catch his breath, doubling over himself with labored breaths. When he looked up, Grace saw a vibrant blue looking back at him.
Colt was awake.