Chapter Text
Grace jolts back to consciousness on the floor.
Or well, he jolts back to consciousness on a floor. The texture of it is… off. Doesn't feel like it's supposed to, somehow.
His head is absolutely pounding, so he keeps his eyes screwed tightly shut as a groan slips out from between his lips. Slowly, he becomes aware that he's not so much lying on the a floor, as he is sprawled on it ungainly. His feet and knees are tangled together and facing one way, but his hips are twisted such that his upper body is turned the other way. One arm is then bent and trapped underneath himself, while the other is flopped out sideways.
As if he's a puppet that just had all its strings cut.
A very uncomfortable, achy, bruised puppet that just had all its strings cut.
"Dr Grace!? Dr Grace!? Can you hear me!? Fuck, please don't let me have killed you!"
Grace allows himself another pitiful moan as a hand lands on his right shoulder and gently pushes him properly onto his back. Another hand quickly shifts to cradle the side of his head as he's rolled, and then his necktie is being tugged at, the knot pulled down and loosened. The top button of his shirt is then–
Wait.
Why the heck is he wearing a tie!? He hasn't worn a tie for literal years. The Eridian concept of formal-wear is entirely different to humanity's, so he hasn't even owned one since he left Earth. Stratt used to occasionally order him to dress up a bit for meetings and conferences, but she'd usually let him get away with open collar business-casual. Before Stratt and the project, when he'd been a teacher, he'd worn a shirt and tie most week days. But that had been even longer ago and–
Wait.
Wait–!
Forget the stupid tie. Those were hands touching him! Human hands!
And–!
The voice! The words! They were human words in a human language! English words in fact, albeit pronounced with an odd lilting, musical sort of accent that has very round vowels and rolled Rs.
Harnessing the adrenaline from the bolt of panic that shoots through him like a live wire, Grace forces his eyes open. Bright, blinding sunlight is the first thing he manages to parse, and then that there's a guy leaning over him, kneeling and wearing his own look of utter panic.
Human. Human guy. Panicking human guy.
What the actual–!?
"Oh thank bloody god," the man sighs in pure relief as their eyes meet. "You scared the shit outta me mate!"
"Whaaa–!?" Grace manages to half gasp out. What?
Why is there another human on Erid!? How!?
….What!?
"Jesus fuckin' Christ," the man then laughs nervously, running one brown hand back through his hair. Which Grace suddenly notices is… green? A sort of faded sea-glass green textured with paler strands, like he'd bleached and dyed it weeks ago and half the colour has since washed out. "Of all the people to accidentally kill, you'd be like, one of the worst ever. I think. Probably. Shit, I'm doing this all really wrong."
…What?
He still feels like an Eridian hatchling is having their first ever drum lesson inside his skull, but Grace manages to get his hands underneath himself to push up into sitting upright. His fingers dig slightly into the soil and grass as he–
His brain short circuits again.
Wait… Wait! What!?
Soil. Grass.
What!?
The Eridian botanists haven't managed to create any plants that could survive in Earth's atmosphere yet. They've been trying – have been trying for over a decade now – but they haven't had much luck. So the few plants Grace does have in his dome are all propagations of what had been stored on the Hail Mary. Grace doesn't't mind; he likes his foggy, pebbled beach as it is.
As for soil… Well, in order to actually be soil and not just rock dust, it needs to contain a lot of dead plant and animal matter that has been broken down by insects and microbes. Careful experimentation has proved that Eridian microbes would do the job, but also that they left the soil so contaminated with heavy metals that nothing would then grow in it. Attempts to decontaminate it of said heavy metals without also rendering the soil dead and inert had repeatedly failed. Taumoeba got insta-killed by the nitrogen in breathable air. Which left them only with what bacterium they managed to uh, harvest from Grace's own solid waste (cough, his poop, cough). Then add in that there's currently a bit of a lack of dead matter for those microbes to actually act on and, uh–
Anyway, the point is, there's barely any soil in Grace's biodome. And there's certainly no grass.
So how are his fingers digging into it?
He tears his eyes away from the mysterious green-haired man and finally looks at his surroundings.
"Holy–" he starts to curse, cutting himself off as his eyes go wide. Because this is not his dome on Erid.
He's sprawled on the edge of a playing field. A run down school playing field, by the looks of it. The central green expanse is marked out for football, the characteristic Y-shaped goal posts standing proudly at either end despite their paint being chipped and flaking. There's also a set of old blue plastic bleachers just off to his left, and a crumbling red running track passing just behind him. The sun is bright and warm above him, hanging in a vibrant blue sky that's dotted sparsely with fluffy cumulous clouds.
He realises he can hear traffic noises in the distance. Car engines and horns and one brief peel of an ambulance siren.
"Where the heck am I!?" he gasps out.
"Uh," the green-haired man winces. "We're in uh… San Francisco? I think?"
Grace's head whips back around so fast, his neck cracks.
"…What? But I can't be in–!"
"Yeah I know," the man chuckles hysterically again. He looks just as stressed out and confused as Grace feels. Which. Not reassuring. "I just… bloody woke up here. Well, not here here. I was in an Airbnb down in San Jose this morning, in bed with a guy who dumped me like, twenty-five soddin' years ago. Which was a right brain-melter, I tell you. And– fuck, get to the bloody point Aled! Sorry, I'm Aled. I did already tell you that, but that was before I started asking you about astrophage and the Hail Mary and you went and had a seizure on me so I'm not sure if you remember. Ah bollocks, I've gone off on another tangent!"
Grace hears himself make a whistling noise which he knows Rocky would understand as I'm so confused and anxious right now. Rocky clearly isn't here, but the green-haired man – Aled apparently – must get the gist too, because he winces again and starts flapping his hands awkwardly.
"Right, sorry, yeah," Aled says after gulping in an shuddery deep breath. "I'm usually better at stringing sentences together than this this, but… I'll uh, I'll try and start at the beginning. Um, this is probably going to sound nuts but I… I remember the Hail Mary launching in 2026. Then I lived for another two decades or so until I was killed in a prison riot in the south of France. Or well, I think I was killed? But then the next thing I know, I'm waking up here in the States and it's 2021 again!"
Grace's mouth opens. Then closes again. And opens again.
"…What?" he rasps. Because– What?
Aled groans and turns until he's sat on the grass next to Grace rather than kneeling. He then brings his knees up and drops his heads into his hands, his whole body trembling slightly.
"I don't know what's happening," the man warbles pathetically in that musical lilt of his. "Please tell me you know what astrophage is now?"
"The microorganisms that form Petrova Lines," Grace immediately rattles off. "The space dots. They're a single-cell extra-terrestrial solar parasite and they were slowly causing various stars throughout the galaxy to dim and cool."
He's not sure what reaction to those words he was expecting from the weird man sitting next to him, but it wasn't for him to burst into messy, hiccuping sobs. Grace feels like he's having an out of body experience as he tentatively rests a hand on the guy's back. The touch jolts up his arm, heat shooting from his palm straight to his brain, and oh god. This is the first time he's touched another human being in almost thirty years, isn't it!?
Tears prickle along his own eyelashes almost immediately.
Holy mother of–!
"Sorry," Aled gasps wetly. "Fuck, sorry. It's just– I was starting to think I was going insane. No-one else seems to remember what I do. I mean, everyone seems to have realised the sun's dimming and they've sent that first probe up, uh… what's it called?"
"Arclight," Grace supplies faintly.
(He's touching another person. Him. Grace. He's touching another human being–)
"Yeah, that. It launched about a month and a half ago, but I couldn't find anything online anywhere about astrophage or the Hail Mary or any of the shit that came afterwards!"
Grace… has absolutely no idea what to say. None at all. His brain feels like it's turned to mush and is leaking out of his ears.
"We're in San Francisco. In 2021," he eventually manages to mumble.
"Apparently."
"…How?"
"Fuck if I know mate," Aled hiccups wetly through another crazed laugh.
Grace gives up trying to understand literally any of what's happening and flops back down into the grass on his back. Far above him, the clouds float on by.
(And somewhere beyond them, is Rocky.)