Glorified Red @glorified-red - Tumblr Blog

Apr 14

Come Back to Me (Ryland Grace x Reader)

summary: Waking up on the Hail Mary with 2 dead crewmates wasn't the easiest thing to process. It's no wonder your brain slipped into the darkness the surrounded your ship.

word count: 3,200~

warnings: dissociation, canon character death, pseudo-eulogy

who knew it would be Project Hail Mary that would get me out of my 3-year-long hiatus. I'm a little rusty so apologies for the lackluster writing. Hope you enjoy!

“Do you think we knew each other?” You asked softly, thumbing at the picture in your hand. It was creased and fraying from what you assumed was years of folding and unfolding. It was obvious how loved it was based on how close the creases were to tearing.

Your eyes traced the outline of the person captured in the photo, roaming over the features that mirrored yours but looked so foreign to your eyes. This couldn’t possibly be you, it seemed too…distant. You were wearing a hat and holding what seemed to be a patch with your name on it, next to the words Project Hail Mary. Your eyes creased with excitement in the photo, an emotion you hadn’t felt in quite some time.

I guess floating aimlessly in space will do that to you.

Six days ago, you woke up with your entire world light-years out of reach with no recollection of how you got here. The only clues that awaited you were the miscellaneous items in what seemed to be your duffle bag, and the man beside you who was just as clueless. It only took a few hours to stumble your way to a window and see the vast expanse of space in front of you. In another life maybe you would have felt joy—perhaps hope—but now, all you saw was a dark coffin surrounding you with tiny buds of stars for decoration.

It was suffocating for something so boundless.

“It seems likely,” you heard from beside you. You breathed in, grounding yourself back to the photo in your hands. “I mean, it would be weird if they stuck two strangers on a ship and never had them talk to one another beforehand.”

You briefly looked over at the man beside you. His hair was unkept and tousled from his hands frequently running through it; his eyes were a vibrant blue hidden behind a set of wired glasses, a striking difference to the current world around you full of dreary grays and fluorescent whites. He wore his space suit up to his waist and a science pun shirt. The duality was almost comical.

“Right,” you exhaled. “I guess I was just curious if we were…” you trailed off, unsure. You shrugged, looking over at the photo in his hands, which also showed himself—alone. “Friends?”

Grace puffed out a breath of air, his shoulders dropping slightly with the release. He did that often, you noticed, especially while writing or fiddling with things on the ship. He glanced over at you briefly before looking forward at the two body bags in front of you. His eyes flicked between the deceased pilot, Yao, and engineer, Ilyukhina. He was quiet while committing their faces to memory, even despite their hallowed cheeks and the decomposing tint of their skin.

You stood abruptly, your legs wobbling slightly at the sudden movement, muscles creaking as they adjusted to being used. Grace jolted from beside you, but stumbled to a stand too.

“Yao, I don’t know if I knew you, I don’t even know if we were friends,” you started, having no clue what to say. “But I’d like to think we were. I’m sure we had a few good laughs before all this, maybe a few drinks,” you choked on a laugh that came out like a sob. You could feel the burning behind your nose building. Your hands dropped to your thighs, lost on what to do, what to say.

Grace cleared his throat. “We must’ve known you,” he tried, “but we just don’t remember. You make a funny face in literally every picture.” He held up a photograph of Yao and what you both assumed was his son as he spoke.

He coughed down his own sadness as he carefully walked towards Yao’s body, gently placing the photo under his hands. “You must have been very smart and strong…”

“—and brave,” you supplied as Grace drifted off. He nodded, “And brave.”

The air was thick and heavy between you two. The silence on this ship seemed to pierce your ears and settle into your lungs until it was hard to breathe in. You stuttered in another shaky breath.

“Ilyukhina,” Grace started again, “First, I owe you three bags of vodka.”

You tried to chuckle at his humor, but found yourself letting out another pained sob, your eyebrows scrunching and eyes blinking back a wall of tears. The room blurred, and you were almost thankful you could no longer see the details of the bodies in front of you.

“You seem to have had a lot of friends. This picture of you, what looks like sneaking into the Kremlin…is…legendary.” He placed Ilyukhina’s photo into her skeletal-like hands.

You spoke up in a whisper. “I hope we shared a few drinks together at some point. You seem like a great person to be around. I wish,” you struggled, “I wish you were still here.”

You hated how hollow you sounded. For a eulogy, this sucked. It felt so impersonal. “You were both very loved, and you deserve much more than this.” You choked out the tail end of that sentence, your shoulders hitching with each shaky breath.

The sorrow behind Grace’s eyes matched your own, his bluey hues blurring with unshed tears. He walked back to your side, his hand gently resting on your shoulder. It was slow, deliberate, as if he was telegraphing his movement to avoid startling you.

“We will do our best to make sure that you don’t…” he began, stopping as fought back his own tears that were threatening to fall. He used his other hand to wipe at his face. “You know, that you didn’t…” His hand fell harshly, his head and body shaking with the movement. He was just as worn down and hopeless as you felt. It was visible from a mile away. He cleared his throat and straightened, swallowing down his grief.

“We’ll do our best.”

⋘⋙

The next few weeks blurred together. Grace was quiet these days, as were you. The harrowing reality of your lives and the passing of two crewmates left much to be processed. You were like ghosts, passing through each other without much thought. His mind was noticeably preoccupied with equations, questions, and maps, while yours was…empty. Your brain seemed to disconnect not just your memories, but your ability to stay in the present and stay grounded into your body.

Even now, you could barely feel the marker between your fingertips without conscious effort. You stared blankly at the whiteboard on the desk in front of you. You heard the squeak of Grace’s marker, but it seemed distant despite being just across the room from you. You were supposed to be helping him, but it was hard when your body felt so heavy you couldn’t even twitch your finger if you wanted to. Your vision was fuzzy at the edges, your peripherals falling out of view.

Distantly, you knew this wasn’t good, but presently, you couldn’t form a coherent thought outside of why can’t I move my fingers. Your heart rate jumped—why can’t you move your body? You were starting to get scared. If your lungs weren’t breathing on autopilot, you’d be hyperventilating by now. You wanted to breathe deeper, you wanted to scream, you wanted to throw this marker against the wall—

Why couldn’t you?

The white of the board in front of you covered your vision, lines of black smudging into blobs in front of your unfocused eyes. It was like a thick layer of glass separated you from the rest of the world. Everything was hazy, your body numb.

Why don't you know what’s going on? You should know what was going on. You had a PhD for heaven’s sake—wait, you had a PhD? A PhD in what? How could you forget 7 of the most grueling years of your life?

“...calculations…11.9 light-years…means we’re close to—okay?”

Words filtered through your ears and jumbled around in your brain, muddled by the cloud that had sunk into your body. More words floated past you. It would be useless to try and grab them and make sense of them. Your body had shut down, and despite your best efforts, you couldn’t stop it.

You were scared.

You felt your body blink slowly, your eyelids heavy from the movement. It took conscious effort to keep your eyes from falling shut entirely, because if they did, what would keep you from succumbing to the darkness completely?

Why shouldn’t you? It was all around you, all-consuming, constantly taunting you every time you walked past a window. What difference would it make if you let it take you?

“—hear me?”

You knew it was Grace. It’s not like it could be anyone else. If you concentrated, you could hear the worry in his voice, hear the concern lacing his syllables. You felt your eyebrows scrunch together in the middle only to soften a second later as your muscles weighed down.

A blur of tan, red, and black ran past your vision—his hand, his watch. “—scaring me,” you heard his voice say. I'm scaring me, too, you thought.

You tried scrunching your eyebrows again, tried twitching your finger, tried telling him anything—saying anything. It didn’t work. You hand laid limp on the desk, your body barely sitting upright on its own.

You could hear the timbre of Grace’s voice in a steady stream but couldn’t focus for long enough to make out what he was saying. He was speaking a lot, and fast; he tended to do that a lot when he was nervous. You felt guilty for scaring him; you wanted nothing more than to tell him you were okay, but at this point you think that’d be a lie.

“—touch you? I… say something…understand—?”

His voice faded in and out, like a radio broadcast filtering through static. Then, your shoulders felt heavier, almost weighed down by something. You felt your body move slightly with the new weight, your head bobbing and hand titling. The gentle shaking did very little to dissipate the heaviness settling into your chest, nor the static filling your veins.

In a breath, the weight lifted, to be replaced by a set of hands on your cheeks. They were firm yet shaky, large enough to cover the sides of your face but gentle enough that you barely felt them. Your vision swirled until your view of whites turned into blues.

A pair of startled blue eyes met your gaze. Your eyes locked into his, outlining each shade of blue as they melted into one another—a dark ring of blue faded into vibrant, light hues, only to fade back into a set of black pupils. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, undoubtedly hanging from his ears instead.

You breathed a little deeper as your vision sharpened just an inch. From your peripherals, you could see his mouth moving before your ears registered that he was speaking to you. You should be concerned that you could barely understand much of anything around you other than his eyes. Those eyes squinted again, his eyebrows scrunching at the movement.

“—can you hear me?”

You caught the tail end of his last sentence.

I can hear you, you willed yourself to say. Frustration creeped into your skin when your lips didn’t follow the command your brain had sent. You tapped your finger instead—you tapped your finger. He must’ve noticed the movement because his eyes flickered down to where your hand lay limp on the desk.

“If you can hear me, can you tap your finger for me? Just tap it once for ‘yes.’ Can you do that?” He kept speaking, repeating the same instruction to you while holding your gaze between the palms of his hands. You tapped your finger in response, the movement subtle and jerky, but there regardless.

He breathed out in relief, a smile covering his face that didn’t quite reach his eyes yet. You watched as his eyes jumped between your finger and you.

“Okay! That’s great! That’s awesome, okay. You can hear me.” His ramblings of relief had the same effect on you. You were scared, but you felt safer knowing he was there, holding you together with his bare hands.

“Okay, okay, okay. Can you do one tap for ‘yes’ and two taps for ‘no’?” Your singular tap was met with another glowing smile in response.

“You’re doing great,” he said, almost to himself as much as you. He was crouching down slightly to be eye-level with you. You distantly wondered if he was so good at this because of his past as a teacher—did he comfort his students frequently just like this? Was he used to making himself shorter, rambling words of encouragement, and plastering on a smile even when things were obviously not okay?

“Do you know what’s happening? Does this happen often to you?” he asked, only to backpaddle immediately after. “Nevermind, stupid question. How would you even know if this has happened to you before when we barely remember anything?”

You stared at him. “Right, sorry. Do you know what’s happening to you?”

You tapped twice. He nodded absent-mindedly, collecting his thoughts. You could see the gears shifted behind his eyes as he pieced together information. It was the same look he had every time you watched him calculate something you didn’t understand or fiddle around in the lab with tools you barely knew the name of. You were a commander, not a scientist.

Grace frowned. Okay, Focus.

“I think I might, but I don’t really know how to help.” He gnawed at his bottom lip as he thought. “Touch seemed to help.” His fingers shifted on your cheeks. “Did it help?”

You tapped once.

He nodded slowly, processing the new information. “I’m gonna squeeze your arms okay?” He waited for your affirmation before gently releasing his hands from your face. Your head bobbed slightly from not having his hands to prop you up, but you quickly jerked it back up, eyes blinking from the effort. Grace winced out a ‘sorry’ before squeezing the sides of your arms.

“Can you feel this?”

You nodded, your neck muscles having jolted awake moments prior. Grace seemed ecstatic at the new mode of communication, you might have even heard a ‘fantastic’ quietly fall from his lips. You squeezed your eyes shut and blinked them rapidly, trying to clear the fog from behind your eyes with little success.

“I know,” he said sympathetically while seeing your struggle, “but you’re doing great. Just focus on me okay?”

You nodded slightly, trying desperately to not fade back into the distant calls of numbness. Tendrils of paralysis licked at your skin only for Grace’s hands to chase them away with each hard squeeze. His hands traveled down your arms until he reached your hands. You let him take the marker out from between your fingers and set it down somewhere outside your field of vision.

He grasped onto your hands and gave them a squeeze. Your nerves sparked back to life from the heat of his palms. “Just focus on this. Focus on my touch and nothing else.”

He loosened his grip. “Can you squeeze my hands?” He squeezed. “Like this.”

He waited as you slowly processed his words, searching your eyes for any sign of recognition. Your gaze fell to your clasped hands. Your stomach flipped but settled under the weight of your next breath. You willed your fingers to move, calling each nerve that Grace brought back to life. You squeezed his hands weakly, but he beamed at you as if you achieved something far greater.

“You did it!” If anyone else had talked to you like this, you would have thought they were belittling, but Grace had a way of speaking that made you feel like you really were doing great things. You heard his genuine care and felt nothing but safe. “I just need you to come back to me completely, okay?”

Come back to me.

Your stomach flipped again, but you were too busy trying to squeeze his hands again that the feeling dispersed before you gave it a second thought. “Just keep squeezing my hands. Just like that.”

Moments passed of you squeezing his hands and him periodically snapping your attention back to him whenever you faded away too far. You swallowed, feeling the blood rush back into your veins and cool your skin.

“I think ‘m okay,” you mumbled, blinking away the last remnants of fog from your vision to look around the room. Your gaze swept over grayish-white panels and compartments until they landed back on Grace.

“You sure?” he asked hesitantly, “You’ve been pretty out of it for awhile.”

You nodded slowly, like gravity weighed against each movement tenfold. “Yea.” You creaked your legs back to life by moving them slightly against the stool you were on. “I’m back.”

Grace breathed out in relief. He pulled his hands away from you slowly, as if hesitating that without his touch to ground you, you’d fade away again. He wasn’t entirely wrong, and you ached for his warmth again, but you willed yourself to stay, even if it pained you with the effort it took to keep on trying.

“I don’t know what that was,” you said softly. “I’m sorry.”

He pulled up a stool to sit beside you. “Don’t apologize. Things like that are bound to happen given,” he cleared his throat, “our current situation.”

Your lip twitched upward in silent gratitude. You clenched your fists to get used to the feeling back in your hands again. “Thank you, anyway. You didn’t have to do all that.”

“I was happy to. I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

You nodded, smiling over at him. “Without hesitation.”

He breathed in deeply, his chest dramatically rising before falling back down again with his shoulders. “Dissociation,” he said. “That’s what that was. I’ve had a handful of students struggle with it.”

“What causes it?”

“Depends on the person.” He shrugged, looking around the room as he spoke. “It usually happens when your brain struggles to process overwhelming situations. It’s your brain’s way of protecting you from stress or trauma that might be too difficult to process at the moment.”

“Oh.”

Grace peered over at your deflated form. “I don’t blame you. This whole situation would be difficult for anyone to process. But at least now we know how to get you back.”

You met his gaze with a smile. “Hopefully we won’t need that information again.”

“It’s okay if we do. I’ll be here to bring you back any time.” He extended his pinkie in a silent promise. You took it with your own and he let you hold onto it for a while, just letting you come back into your body with him by your side.