Chapter Text
It's so hard to move,
The wounds are countless.
But a star burns in my chest.
April will die,
But will be reborn once again
To remain forever this time...
-
How many human on Grace ship, Question?
Ryland sighs. He knew it was coming, and honestly, he should be greatful for his own circumstance after hearing the fate of Rocky's crew.
"There," he hesitates, takes his glasses off to wipe them, as if it'll be easier to talk about if he can't quite see, "there were three, and now..."
Rocky humms and he, of course, has to shove his glasses right back on his face so he can read the words as they appear on the translation software.
One. Question?
"Uh, I don't know." Ryland leans forward in his chair, "Our engineer, our version of you, basically. She's still alive in there, but I can't... she won't wake up. So... for now, it's only me, I guess."
Only us.
"Correction." It makes him smile, repeating the motion Rocky was making with his two anterior arms.
"Only us."
-
They spend most days together. Which, as soon as Ryland thinks it, he realises is a severe understatement.
The literal only time they spend apart is the brief hours they do their respective ship maintenance, eating, and when he checks on Illyukhina.
They don't even sleep apart, given that Ryland is a massive pushover and, apparently, is extremely susceptible to alien puppy eyes. Even from aliens that don't have eyes.
So, now he practically lives in the tunnel.
He doesn't mind it, really. The strangness of it is kind of doing a pretty job at distracting him from the sheer dread of his situation. And he's greatful to actually talk to someone sentient for the first time in weeks, even if it does have to be run through a preprogrammed voice module.
And Rocky's kind of growing on him, all things considered.
It's one of those rare moments he's not doing anything in particular, just idly spinning around in his lab chair and prodding the bruised wound of his mind in some vague hope it would produce a memory, when Mary almost startles him out of his seat.
Movement detected.
Ryland blinks up at the cealing in confusion.
Movement detected.
Mary says again, that impassive, engineered to be calming voice that really only irks him further. He straightens up in his chair. She hadn't bothered announcing anything since the arrival of the tunnel - so something new must be happening out there.
He wonders, briefly as he walks over to the airlock, what Rocky'd made him this time. It was moving - so he supposed an automated robot, maybe.
He opens the door and -
"Hi Grace."
His jaw drops open, and the words fall out of his mouth before he can really process what he's seeing.
"You're in a ball."
"So Rocky no die in Grace atmosphere!" They hadn't quite gotten around to communicating tone through the translator, but Rocky made it work. The jazz hands certainly helped, "I come up."
"Oh, yup. You are coming up."
And up he does.
Rolling around his, admittedly, messy ship and offering his opinion on everything.
"Why this room so messy." And yup, the translator apparently did not need any modifications because he could hear the judgement right there, "Disgust. Disgust. Disgust."
And okay, rude.
He'd tried, that first week, to keep clean. Back when he'd still had hope that the engineer would wake up. He'd sat vigil by her bedside, waiting and waiting.
He couldn't remember her name at first- Olesya Illyukhina, he'd find flashing on the screen affixed to her bed, status: invalid - but when he looked at her he felt... warm, hopeful, scared.
Not scared of her, but scared he'd have to hold another funeral. Scared she would never wake up and he'd be alone out here.
Just like with their captain, the memories were gone, but the love stayed.
Eventually, though, he'd- well, it had become painful. To just sit, and watch, and pray. Every involuntary twitch of her muscles would send him into a cycle of exitement and then crushing disappointment.
He'd learned to limit himself to just an hour or two a day - or, per sleep cycle, anyway.
And then he'd arrived at Tao Ceti, and he'd met Rocky, and things had kind of slipped away from him.
He'd sort of stopped expecting Illyukhina to wake up, even if he kept visiting her. There wasn't really any point to keeping to conventional standards of cleanliness.
And now, this.
As nice as it is to have company, Grace is reminded irritatingly of his ex-girlfriend as Rocky tears apart his space, bemoaning the mess, and generally just taking over.
(Isn't that wonderful? He doesn't remember his mother's name, but Stacy making him get rid of his beloved orange pillows - no, that gets to stay burned into his memory. Great.)
"Will need much space for Rocky. And much less space for Grace."
Scratch that - he really, really reminded him of Stacy.
Irriting is putting it nicely, he muttered in his head as he hastily scooped up his disco ball before Rocky could flatten it.
He defaulted, as always when frustrated, to methods he found worked particularly well with twelve year olds.
Turns out, classroom management tricks work great with middle schoolers, grown adults in world crisis conference rooms, and extraterrestrial life alike.
Who'da thunk it?
"Rocky, my hand is up."
Rocky, who'd been trying to scale the walls and had subsequently slipped down due to the ball he had placed himself in, rolled over to him with a contrite, "Apology. Apology. Apology. Rocky new to ball."
"Look," he says, "we can't just show up in a spaceball unannounced and move into someone else's spaceship, right? There have to be boundaries."
"Boundaries." Rocky repeats after him, which seems like a good sign.
"We have one mission."
"Mission."
"But we are two, distinct, individuals." He moves his hands apart for emphasis.
"Individuals." Rocky repeats again, copying his hands.
Ryland does not trust that at all, so he continues.
"Working on our distinct, individual parts if that mission." He moves his hands away from each other again, "separately."
"Separately."
Ryland almost - almost thinks he's gotten through to him, then:
"Where's my bedroom?"
"Bedroom?!"
-
He ends up building Rocky that bedroom, flush against his bed for optimum sleep watching.
Great.
-
Inevitably, Rocky finds the medical wing.
Or, as he privately calls it on his worst days: the morgue.
And, okay, perhaps 'finds' isn't the right word.
Rocky, he's well learned by know, sees through echolocation. Pair that with an eidetic memory, and he'd probably had every square inch of this ship mentally mapped within his first hour aboard. Ryland has no doubt he knew exactly where and what this room contained.
Still, he'd not ventured in.
Not until he'd made himself a tool that let him 'see' what was on screens, anyways.
Ryland found him when he came to visit Illyukhina. She was lying there, as always, sunken cheeks getting worse by the day.
The little screen by her bed remained unchanged.
Olesya Illyukhina.
Status: Invalid
He pressed a shaking finger to her neck, a ritual that struck him with fear every time, and yet one he could not avoid. He had no idea what was wrong with her medical system, it was clearly keeping her alive, or at least slowing her deterioration.
For all he knew, she was brain dead and he'd been holding vigil for a breathing corpse.
He didn't know if the status would change, like it had for Yáo, or if he'd simply walk in here one day and his friend would be dead. And he wouldn't know it until he checked for himself.
As usual, he almost collapses in relief when he feels her sluggish heartbeat.
For now, he wasn't the only human out here. For now, he could still hang on to hope.
He dropped himself into the chair he'd tied to the ladder beside her bed. It teetered, slightly, but held his weight well enough.
When he took her hand, it was limp and clammy.
A bright laugh. An awful, joyful karaoke duet of a far too long song. A cheeky joke and a wink.
He'd been getting more of these, lately. Flashes of memories. Of the two of them, the rest of the team, Commander Yáo.
He'd known them, known her. Like, really known her. They weren't just strangers stranded together, they were friends. Good friends, from the snippits he'd managed to pull free from his tattered mind.
It only made waiting for the day her heart inevitably stopped all the worse.
There were times he'd just come here and sob.
Ugly, broken sobs for the unfairness of it all. Yáo gone, Illyukhina on her way out the proverbial door, and he honestly wasn't all that far behind. He was on a suicide mission in space, his memory was more swiss cheese than gouda, and his friend was dying in front of him.
It was honestly probably a waste of resources; how much water he was loosing to all his tears.
"Grace leak, Question?"
"Oh my gosh, Rocky!" He nearly fell out of his badly sequred chair, glancing down to see Rocky sitting in his ball on the floor surrounded by wires, metal plating, and his screen-to-sound translator. "What are you doing down there?"
Matter of fact, how did he even get down there? Ryland was literally sitting on a chair halfway up the long cylindrical room. Did Rocky toss himself in through the hatch? And how the heck were they going to get him out -?
"Rocky fix."
He blinks, train of thought puttering out, "You - what?"
"Is problem here. And here, and here." Rocky gestures at lines of code that appear on his tablet. Ryland can't read it from this far up, and he has no doubt he'd be just as lost up close, but Rocky certainly seems to grasp it, "I fix, mmh two days, engineer wake up."
He blinks again, harder this time.
"Wait - it will take you two days to fix or she'll wake up in two days?"
Something soars in his chest. It's probably elation, it feels alot like panic. Two days, two days, two days.
He's not alone, hadn't been for weeks, but in two days, Illyukhina could wake up.
She'd be okay! He wouldn't have to send another friend off into the stars! Ryland could barely hear Rocky's reply over the blood rushing in his ears.
"Is same thing." Rocky moves a bunch of wire, it does not look like something that should work, but he hears a chime from the ship that seems vaguely positive so he shoves his panic into a little box and kicks it down some mental stairs.
"It is not - Rocky."
"I fix, now." Rocky sounds exasperated, shifting side to side in mild annoyance, "Two days, wake up. Grace should spend two days cleaning."
"I - you." He wants to be irritated, but he's just so dang happy that he bursts into tears.
"Grace leak more. Question?" Rocky's carapace tilts up, in a way that Ryland has learned to interpret as directed concern, "Grace okay. Question? Grace not happy Rocky fix. Question?"
He sings a note, the translator doesn't pick it up, but Ryland recognises it as that panicked hum he'd released when Ryland had first explained 'sleep' to him.
"No," he sniffs, using one hand to wipe at his damp eyes, "No, I'm not sad - I'm just - I'm really happy, Rock. I'm really happy you can fix it."
"Oh, understand," Rocky turns back to his wires, "Grace leaky space blob, leak at sad, leak at happy. Leak, leak, leak. Is accurate discription."
He lets it slide, laughing along. Rocky isn't wrong, afterall.
"I guess I am." He smiles, "Hey, Rocky."
Rocky makes a tone that means he is listening attentively.
"Thank you."
-
Ryland, it should be noted, does not spend two days cleaning.
He mostly spends it trying to hastily repair all the wires he'd yanked out. Because he can't remember much, but he knows damn well Illyukhina will tear him a new one once she sees the state of her ship.
He looks at the corridor, mismatched metal kind of hanging on for dear life.
Yup.
He was so dead.
-
Rocky's repairs had gone off without a hitch, a spot of goodluck to compensate them for all their woes. He stood beside her bed, hanging on to the ladder with with one hand as he watched the sytems flick to life.
Already, with two days of proper nutrition and Armando working over time, Illyukhina was looking better. Less sallow in the cheeks, warmer hands, a stronger pulse.
Armando reaches towards her face.
And, regardless of his increasing fear for his livelihood, the sound of Illyukhina coughing as that god awful tube comes out her mouth, disgusting as it is, might be the single most beautiful thing Ryland has ever heard in his life.
Coughing means alive.
And alive is so, so good.
"Cognitive Assessment," Mary cuts through his silent celebration. He tries to bat Armando away from Illyukhina, but the robot is being persistent, "What is two plus two?"
Illyukhina makes a sound that must be a Russian swear word, smacks her lips, and scunches up her face.
"Cognitive Assessment. What is two plus two?"
"F-four." She says, voice rough from disuse and - oh, yup, Ryland is tearing up. She's okay! She's really okay and awake and alive. Ryland can't remember if he was religious, he doesn't think so, but he thanks whatever is out there for letting her live anyways.
When she opens her eyes, blinking harshly to try and clear four years of gunk - he knows the feeling - the first thing she does is turn to face him.
"Okay, don't freak out." He says, one hand out like he's trying to calm a frightened kitten.
He is suddenly, acutely aware of how strange this is going to seem to her. It had taken him weeks to remember his own name, let alone his crew - for whom his current recollection of was spotty at best.
If Illyukhina had any of the same memory issues as he did, she'd be waking up alone, trapped, with some strange man she didn't know.
Oh, heck. He was going to come off so creepy.
He tries to make his voice as non-threatening as possible, "My name is Ryland Grace and -"
"I know who you are." She cuts him off as she slowly pushes herself up to a seated position.
"You do? You do!" He almost bends in half and falls right off the ladder in relief. "that's great, whew. So you remember everything?"
"Of course." She looks at him again. Eyes sharp. "Why you think I wouldn't?"
"Well, uh, because - um, I.. didn't." He rubs the back of his head with the hand not currently anchoring him to the wall, "don't. Uh, I know my name, and about astrophage. I used to teach, I think."
"Da, school teacher." She tilts her head, concern obvious in her dark eyes, "Then, leading expert in astrophage."
Her mass of brown hair falls around her as she speaks - Armando casually coming in and snipping at it while she did. She was taking the robot with scissors thing much better than he had. But then, he probably would have been calmer if he remembered any of his training.
He blinks as he processes her words.
The leading expert in astrophage. He'd figured he was involved in the project, had to have been to have ended up on this mission. But the leading expert.
Darn.
"Thats uh... that's a big career leap."
"You are smart." She shrugs. Armando hands her a pouch of water, which she takes with all the casual inattention of a celebrity being passed a coke.
He isn't sure if the compliment makes him blush, or if it was the matter-of-fact way she said it. Like it was a universal truth. Sure, he'd come to the conclusion that his brain was above average, at the very least, but hearing someone else say it felt different.
If he wasn't hanging on to a ladder with one hand and covering his reddening face with the other, he'd have probably hugged her.
He coughs, hesitates, wills the blush away from his cheeks.
She'd looking at him with an amused little grin. He gets the feeling that this is not unusual in their dynamic.
He's like eighty percent sure he knows the answer, but he still hesitates just a little when he asks, "We... were we friends? We were, right?"
Now, she smiles properly, "Da. Five years, we are close."
He feels himself matching her smile on instinct, "oh, oh, I thought so. I felt... sad, when I couldn't wake you. I missed you before I remembered you, how weird is that?"
He's talking too much, he knows he is. He can feel his mouth going and he's telling it to stop, but his mouth has rebelled against his authority, and so just keeps going.
Illyukhina just smiles. Five years they'd been friends, she'd said. He considers that maybe she's used to it.
"Not so much, human brain is strange." Then, she pauses, water pouch yanked away from her mouth. "Could not wake me?"
"Oh. Uh, right." He fidgets, "there was something wrong with the code, I couldn't get Armando - the robot, arm thing, to get you up. It's been, maybe three weeks?"
She swears, a string of Russian curses he has absolutely no hope of replicating - not that he would. He watches her tongue her front teeth, eyes darting to the side, then swallow harshly, "Yáo?"
He can't bring himself to say it, slowly shaking his head in answer instead.
She swears again. For a moment it looks like she's about to cry, but, showing far more composure than he had when he'd initially woken up, she managed to pull herself together with a few harsh nods.
"How did you wake me, then?" She asks after a beat of silence.
"I had... well, I didn't."
"I thought..."
"No - um, well, brace yourself." He sighs, there really is no easy way to tell someone you've met an alien, and that the alien saved your life, and that he's right upstairs, "He's excited to meet you."
"Who - ?"
"Hello Grace friend! I am Rocky."
-
Olesya had been informed, upon volunterring for the Hail Mary Project, that it was unlikely to work.
Nearly every component of this plan had an astronomical chance of going very wrong, very quickly. Any single failure could then lead to a cascade of disasters that would see the entire project null and void before they even reached Tao Ceti.
She'd put herself into that induced coma, knowing she might never wake.
It was a pleasant surprise to see Ryland Grace alive, anxious as ever, and an equally devastating blow to learn that Commander Yáo was not.
And then, an alien fell out of the sky.
"Rocky!" Grace admonishes, climbing down from the ladder to go help the alien, who seemed discombobulated in his glass ball at the base of the room, "How many times have I told you not just jump down, do you know how hard it is to haul you out of here?"
"Grace tell Rocky three times. Rocky want meet new human."
"And we were coming up to see you, bud."
"Too slow, Rocky want meet now."
"Oh my gosh."
Somehow, it is Grace's abject refusal to swear, even under the effects of apparent amnesia and a literal sentient alien, that breaks Olesya out of her stunned silence.
"What the fuck?"
"No understand," The alien, Rocky, she assumes, turns his faceless body to Grace, "What mean?"
"Uhh..." He looks incredibly startled, looking up at her for help, which only confirmed her suspicion that Grace had, in fact, gone through all of this - waking up not knowing where he was, meeting an alien, this - without cursing.
Mad man.
"It is explicitive." She says after a moment of them both just staring at her. It feels like an outerbody experience. She is explaining 'fuck' to an alien, this is her life, "It is considered rude, in Grace's culture. In mine, more used to emphasise emotion."
"Oh," Rocky says, with a robotic voice undercut by a musical humming, like the whalesong her mother used to put on to help them sleep, "Understand, Eridian say ♩♬♫♪♩."
The last bit is a clear musical note, not translated by whatever software Grace has put together.
She is... fairly impressed, she knows he is not an engineer, nor a linguist, and yet in less than three weeks - she can have an intelligent conversation with an alien.
Grace looks spectacularlly put out, muttering something about having to input that. Then he pinches his nose, and breaths a heavy sigh.
It is such a teacher move that it makes her laugh a little.
"Rocky," he says, sweeping a hand to the rock creature, "Meet Olesya Illyukhina, materials specialist of the Hail Mary. Illyukhina, meet Rocky, engineer of blip-A."
She tilts her head slightly. Blip-A was a strange name for a ship, unless - oh, he'd just given Rocky's ship the name registered in the Hail Mary's anomoly detection system.
Olesya raises an eyebrow at Grace, who seems to know exactly what she's judging him for, given his sheepish shrug.
Rocky, for his part, seems entirely unconcerend with the uncreative nature of his ship's name.
"Hello, ♬♩♬♭♭." He trills, which she takes as her name in his language.
"Hey! How come her name is so nice!" Grace cuts in.
"♫♩♫♭♭, engineer. Grace, no engineer."
She listens for Rocky's melodic voice under the computer generated speaking feature. Grace's name is a short little grunt of a sound. It makes her giggle again.
He spins to her, one finger pointed out with a little smile pulling at his lips, even as he feigns offence.
"This is discrimination. We are not bonding by making fun of me."
"But so easy!" Rocky chirps, which sets off a round of offended skwaking from Grace and another fit of giggles in her.
"Yes, Grace." She chimes in, smiling at him as she swings her legs over the edge of the bed. Her muscles feel steady, stronger than ever, even as her chest wheezes as she manouvers herself around. "It is easy."
-
After witnessing the almighty hilarity of Grace using some sort of makeshift pully system to get Rocky out of the cylindrical room - Olesya helpfully waits until Rocky is safely out of the hatch before suggesting that they could have just turned off the centrifuge, to much groaning and musical laughter - the boys give her a minute to gather her bearings.
Well, Grace all but drags Rocky, who she is not entirely sure is a boy, off. She shoots him a grateful look over Rocky's head as she ventures towards the crew lodgings.
There are ropes and cords tied in criss-crossing patterns everywhere, and she has to duck and weave her way across the entire ship. It is a harsh reminder that, as qualified as he was for the science portion of this mission, Ryland Grace was not an astronaut.
God, that poor man trying to navigate zero-G for the first time. All alone, without a clue why every cell in his body was protesting the orientation of his everything. She winced just imagining it.
The crew quarters, like everything else, was in gentle disarray.
One bed, in the right-most corner, was stripped bare, for some reason. The one one on the left was tidy, but clearly lived-in and rumpled - it was also pulled and flush against a clear barrier of the substance she'd come to learn was xennonite.
It was easy to guess which bed Grace occupied.
She supposed that left the middle bed for her.
The plastic coma suit is quickly deposited on the covers, along with the various electrode pads still pressed to her skin. She walks to the showers in nothing but a light sports bra and panties, too tired, suddenly, to care to look for a towel to wrap herself in.
The only thing she bothered to bring with her was a pair of pyjamas.
Luckily, in the shower stalls, a stack of fresh towels had been left for her. She made a mental note to thank Grace for that later.
She flicks on the tap.
The water is hot.
Olesya did not expect them to waste resources and actually agree to giving them the hot water she requested, but then, Stratt always cared about them far more than she wanted them to believe. The mountains of copyright material on the ship was proof enough of that.
The soap is neutral and unoffensive, and she doesn't mind at all as she rubs it over herself, getting clean as quickly as she can.
Almost five years in a coma, but Olesya is so tired. It had been creeping up on her since the moment Grace had helped her out of that medical room, and standing under the hot water now, the adrenaline was finally rushing out of her.
She shuts the water off with a pleased hum.
The towels are soft and, by now, she is hardly surprised at the consideration. It is in a pleasent mental state of fog and sleepiness that she dries herself off.
Things are not perfect, but they are better than most projections had predicted.
Two out of three. Her heart ached for Commander Yáo, but, for the sake of the human race, she was so greatful that Grace had been one of them. She and Yáo had sat in on enough of Grace's lessons to understand how much they would need him when it came to actually solving the astrophage issue.
She swallows harshly as Yáo's smiling face flashed through her mind.
Soft pyjama shorts are slipped up her legs, followed by a massive sleep shirts she'd stolen from one of her sister's ex-boyfriends.
She is so ready to just collapse in her bed when she walks back into the crew quarters, only to be met with the sight of a very sheepish looking Grace and - upon second glance - Rocky, out of his ball, behind the xennonite barrier.
"Um." Grace say, and is then immediately cut off by Rocky.
"Rocky watch Illyukhina sleep!"
She turns to Grace for an explanation, because the man - rock creature - said that far too casually.
"It's a cultural thing," Grace offers with a shrug, "Eridian's can't wake up, you know, when they sleep. So they watch each other, for saftey."
He's looking at her with big, pleading, puppydog eyes, like he's begging her to understand some silent message. There's more to this story, she can tell, but Grace is not that good at communicating through his eyes.
Rocky, from what she can glean through his alien body language, looks almost... anxious.
She cannot quite bring herself to protest further. Nodding slowly and making her way towards the left-most bed next to the glass barrier.
Rocky chirps something that is not translated by the software. It seems a happy sound, something like relief. He scutters over to the closest point he can reach.
"I will sleep," She says slowly, climbing into the bed and kicking her way under the covers, "You can watch."
"Illyukhina sleep." Rocky agrees, "Rocky Grace keep safe."
Grace is staring over at Rocky with an emotion that is maybe just short of bursting into tears. Whatever the rest of the story is, she thinks, it cannot be a pleasant one.
Her heart clenches and Olesya abruptly realises she is feeling maternal towards a rock.
The thought makes her giggle slightly, even as she burrows into her pillow.
Saving the world, their worlds, can wait for tommorrow. Tonight, Olesya fades out under the watchful eyes of new friends and old.
-
She dreams of mountains. Cold, crisp air that she will never feel again.
The faces of her family, kisses pressed to her cheeks. Wishing her well.
She will not remember when she wakes, but the feeling remains.