The Depths

artist? writer? enjoyer? here regardless? • Josie • she/her • Infrequently active

[canetotheknees]

Taking a lot of creative liberties with this one and changing the meanings but Grace and Rocky with The Red Means I Love You and it's flashes of the fishing incident, the petrova line, and Grace going after Rockys ship. Granted someone may have if not definitely has beaten me to this but let me explain anyway

Cause my insides are red, and yours are too

Something showing they are both living creatures despite their differences

And the red on my face is matching you

Grace being pinned to the console and Rocky in the blairing red lights

And goodness, you're bleeding, what a wonderful feeling

Rocky dragging Grace and his hand leaving the burn mark signifying they are connected

You're down and you're pleading, my head is just reeling

Rocky panicking and then in stasis, Grace trying to understand what's happening

The red means I love you

The Petrova line outside

Tasting your blood means I love you

Grace seeing his arm and thinking about Rockys ship and deciding to go after it

The red means I love you

The Petrova line over Graces face / Rockys carapace

The red means I love you

The Petrova line fading as they reunite at Rockys ship

[melissamceagle]

my favorite thing to come from the phm fandom is low res rocky. like yes that's a circle with five legs that's my boy.

[canetotheknees]

You think that maybe back on Earth once everything comes out to the public 'Hail Mary Full of Grace' would become a saying of sorts outside of its religious roots. Meaning something along the lines of throwing everything you have at something with complete unwilling uncertainty of the likely unsuccessful outcome, but having the confidence to try and persevere through it all regardless, even when everything seems hopeless? to hold onto the things that got you this far even if it means sacrificing yourself for the greater good of it all?

[canetotheknees]

The creativity of the Project Hail Mary crossovers/AUs is downright impressive and hilarious, sure you have Fall Guy and the Goslingverse, but then theres The Martian, Iron Lung, Subnautica, Transformers, hell even TMNT, and so many more

And there is lore and reasons being written for how these are even happening, god I love it here. Some examples I've heard below the cut

Colt and Ryland are estranged twins that lose contact over the years due to Colts accident and Rylands career crashout and Colt doesn't hear what happened to Ryland until it's too late? Crazier things have happened.

Trying to desperately recover one guy from space only to later jettison another to save it leaving Mark to help the team in preparation and being torn subjecting someone to what was his fate for so long? Science says why not.

An entire group of space stations lost in an outer galaxy near Erid, an offshoot of the reality Grace is from where the beatles didn't make it and they were left trapped in the starless shadow of the astrophage? Sign me up for logic bending black holes I guess.

So Grace and Rocky go out to try and help other planatary systems with astrophage and find an entire palnet covered in water that sends Grace into a career bending spiral? What's one more planet to save.

Oh they blew up Antarctica and uncovered these giant sentient robots that are now being an intergalactic delivery service between Erid and Earth to help save the stars? Yeah sure let's have second contact.

ROTTMNT Leo gets seperated from everyone and launched into space through a portal that Mikey messes up and becomes a Blip hurtling towards Mary? I could make it make sense.

Links included for some the pieces that specifically inspired me to look at all these crossovers (minus Iron Lung because there is too much to pinpoint a specific post I saw)

[canetotheknees]

Do you think Grace would over time adopt the vulcan salute as a form of communication with Eridians because not only is he a massive nerd, as well as it having a meaningful message, but it reminds him of when him and Rocky were first communicating and the differences in their hands/digits

[canetotheknees]

Grace, hysterical, in zero gravity pointing a light at Rockys xenonite as he floats aimlessly like a disco ball while the poor rock scrambles around inside to beat the hell out him

[dead-cosmonauts-collector]

"sending people to their death" this "suicide mission" that EVERYONE IN PETROVA TASKFORCE WERE ALREADY ON A SUICIDE MISSION. the Stratt Vat was hundreds of miles away from any shoreline in case something went Terribly Wrong with Astrophage Experiments. every single member of the crew was there, sitting on a powder barrel with a fuse in one hand and a lighter in another and nothing more but blind trust in themselves and each others to not let flames touch wooden walls. one picogram off the charts, one nanosecond off calculations, – and all hope of humanity would've perished at sea, disintegrated without even a trail of smoke. invisible scythe of the reaper was near their necks at all times. grabs you by your shoulders shakes you violently do you see the vision

[petrova-line]

On the topic of Rocky's trauma, I think his return to Erid gets overshadowed by Grace's human body struggling on a new planet. Rocky wasn't the only Eridian on Blip-A; 22 other Eridians were on that ship.

He's just the one who came home.

I think Erid is eternally grateful for Rocky and Grace, but there's so many who will struggle to celebrate because of what they've lost. I think they have the right to be angry and Rocky grew more anxious about how he would be welcomed back as the Hail Mary got closer.

Imagine waiting for your mate to come home. Maybe you have pebbles together and they miss one of their parents. Like everyone else going to investigate the Tau Ceti System, your mate is one of the best scientists of your kind. There are risks, but you are confident and your mate was too. Your planet's best engineer is also on board to make sure the trip goes smoothly.

Decades go by—much longer than anyone thought. Some Eridians mourn their loved ones, but you hold out hope. Your mate is smart and capable and you're sure they're just working.

And then one day a ship (ungracefully) lands on Erid. It's one textured like you've never seen before and it has architecture your crystalline brain struggles to understand. Still, you expect your mate to come trotting out and everything will go back to how it was.

The engineer steps out dragging an alien creature behind him. Those are the only two on the ship.

You learn it was a error with how the ship was made and it's fuel was stored. They try and explain relativity to you, but you don't understand and even if you did, your mind is too clouded by grief to be anything but angry.

Angry that your mate is never coming home; angry that so many other lives were lost, some being the mates and relatives of your friends; angry that you have an answer and angry that you don't understand it; angry at closure; angry that you will never have bodies to bury.

Angry that you will mourn for the rest of your life that the Eridian you loved the most won't watch you sleep, but the engineer who should have fixed this gets two.

[canetotheknees]

Everyone talking about Ryland 'making self discoveries of a lifetime in space' Grace, I want to hear more about the people who WATCHED Ryland Grace and went 'man, maybe this guy and the rock are onto something??'

[canetotheknees]

How is anyone doing Simon character study without getting whiplash

One minute I'm looking at tree root systems and cell structures, then dipping over to deep sea creatures and mutations, then a peak at skin grafts and healing, all while Simon 'Markiplier' Iron Lung is staring me down

[cotton-glass]

Rocky has a mother of pearl inlay on one of his back legs!!

Source

[canetotheknees]

Simon being dragged out of the blood ocean and put under one of those science class showers that just unleashes an ungodly amount of water all at once while being simultaneously blasted in the face by the eye washer

[therosielord]

Project Hail Mary is a buddy comedy sci fi adventure but we all need to appreciate the fact that before the book starts, Rocky has been living in a completely different genre. Rocky has been in a fucking Alien style psychological space survival horror for nearly 50 years. Rocky went to space with a huge crew, exploring farther than anyone from his planet ever had, and then all at once every member of his crew *except him* got horrifically sick and died for no apparent reason. And then Rocky sat in this huge spaceship, built for a crew of 23, now empty and eerily silent, for FIFTY YEARS.

Grace had a hard enough time waking up and finding his dead crew mates, and he only had to deal with that for a couple weeks before meeting Rocky. He didn’t remember who they were at first. He didn’t watch them die. Rocky basically survived a horrific space plague, watching helplessly as his crew mates - his FRIENDS - died around him, and then spent 50 years in silence. Rocky was the final girl of the Blip-A except after his horror movie was over he was just stuck there, in this huge ship that had become an empty mausoleum, for decades. With no one to watch him sleep.

Obviously Rocky gets his happy ending after he and his new best friend save the stars and return to Erid, but I can’t help thinking about the absolute genre whiplash Rocky received going from the events before meeting Grace into the events of the book. It’s honestly a miracle that he wasn’t a raving madman (madrock???) by the time Grace showed up at Tau Ceti. It’s easy to imagine another version of the story where Grace meets Rocky and finds a vicious, terrified, angry animal, with no idea that this violent beast used to be a person, that his mind has completely broken after nearly half a century of horror and grief and solitary confinement in space.

Anyway I sure hope they have good therapists on Erid.

[starrose17]

So movie!Grace is terrified of elevators, and in the book Eridians get to space by an elevator.

Grace is gonna get to Erid, and after everything he's survived, everyone he's saved, everything he's accomplished, half starved to death, he's gonna stand there in his Eridian EVA suit and see the biggest, longest, tallest elevator in the universe and just nope the fuck out.

[canetotheknees]

Grace kicking and screaming while Rocky drags his ass towards the elevator after spending so long waiting and trying to be kind but he has waited YEARS to get back to his planet and he is NOT waiting any longer because the leaky idiot has an irrational fear or elevators and all the Eridians below are hearing this over comms wondering what the FUCK is going on

Grace is okay in the end but Rocky will never let him live this down

[canetotheknees]

Simon during his recovery coughing up into his hand a mess of blood with a small extremely juvenile version of the eel in a sort of shark egg sack and turning to Grace and Rocky fucking horrified frozen as they share the exact same mortified shock look at him, between each other, and back to him again

[canetotheknees]

Give me a story about the kids Ryland Grace left behind being absolutely distraught that the one reliable figure in their lives that brought them hope in a world that was unbeknownst to them dying. Seeing him leaving class early one day, someone saying they saw him being taken away by a lot of people while using a hall pass. Expecting him to return, to send a letter, anything to let them know he is coming back. Someone who cared about them so greatly, so dearly, like his own kids, just disappearing never feels right, it never starts to either, anytime he is asked about it's ignored, the teachers and all the adults in their lives have no answers and blatantly refuse to even acknowledge what happened as if even mentioning his name is like acid on their tongues.

The kids never forget him, they get together and talk about him, forming a sort of support group together. Desperately searching their school, their town, the streets they saw him bike to school, the stores he bought his students rewards from, scrapping over the internet for even an ounce of an answer. They search day and night, walking, biking, making posters, but they are just kids.

They weren't meant to deal with this kind of grief.

This kind of loss.

They are kids.

They were his kids.

[canetotheknees]

Based off of your post about Unus Anus and BloodyMary, I'm now thinking of an AU where Simon becomes a botanist on the Hail Mary and the whole "It's a lime! I love limes!" "Its an orange. Very unripe orange." Scene ensues.

Oh no or they're swimming an Grace starts the gongoozler bit but Simon has a panic attack because he does not deal well with water creatures. Whoops.

The concept of Grace trying to understand Simons mutations (in the eel/fish context, though I love the plant mutations) and his whiteboard contains several theories of possible future issues, including the MerMer, a discarded drawing that has been left up to try lighten the mood