An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Alright gang, we’re going in.
Title: The means to an end.
Chapter: 1. An end in itself. (Prologue)
Fandom: Project Hail Mary / Iron Lung. (Gen BloodyMary)
Warnings: Gore / violence / body horror (in later chapters)
Relationships: Grace & Rocky & Simon. Everyone is going in the friendship wiggler, whether they like it or not. It’s just gonna be a bumpy ride.
Summary:
He was expendable, because he had to be, and they had spent him on one last roll of an unthinkable chance. Whatever the outcome was, there wasn’t supposed to be an *afterwards*.
It turns out that afterwards has problems all of its own. There’s an impossible wound torn into space, leaking the dying entropy of a broken universe; bloodwork nightmares are pouring out of the Hail Mary’s walls, wreathed in the ghostlight of half-spoken guilt; and something that turns physics into fever dream is stirring just behind that failing veil.
Ryland Grace is having a midlife crisis on the shoulders of giants. Simon absolutely, definitely should not be alive, let alone *here*. Rocky doesn’t even have cultural touchstones for any of this.
But they may be the only ones who can do anything about it.