Chapter 1: can you hear me?
Ship: Ryland Grace x Simon (the Convict)
Project Hail Mary x Iron Lung
Genre: Hurt Comfort / Angst with Happy Ending
Summary: Ryland Grace and Rocky are steadily making their way to Erid until the Hail Mary suddenly receives an incoming communications signal.
"Umā¦you don't have to shout. Promise." Swallowing back the tightness in his throat, Grace spoke into the armed microphone from Mary's system. "Canā¦can you hear me?"
Or: Against the impossible, Ryland Grace finds a needle in the proverbial galactic haystack.
Now, he was always one for ambience and the dramatic flair, which was why foggy weather called to him so dearly. But what he missed currently was the steady downpour, dousing the world in that shimmery sheen of crystalline water. Something about the atmospheric temperatures dropping one or two degrees and the slow lull of droning against window panes tugged at his heartstrings.
As he sat watching Rocky, resting on his xenonite suspensions, Grace thought the sound of the rain would be nice.
And sure, he could power up the immersia room, and toggle on one of the million videos of rainfall that Stratt had loaded into Mary's databaseābut it wouldn't be the same.
It would be darn close, for sure. But there wouldn't be the rolling grey clouds overhead, or the breeze shifting the scent of rain along the horizon. It would just be a beautiful replica from all sides, something he could see but never touch.
This wasn't a helpful turn of though, he told himself, trying to force his thoughts away from things he couldn't have. There were a lot of those these days.
He wished he hadn't finished all of Ilyukhina's vodka. Now would've been a good time for a sipā¦or full on drink. Perhaps the whole pouch, really.
Sighing deeply, Grace decided to pull himself up to the cockpit and monitor their trajectory for now. Rocky still had a few hours to his sleep cycle and he would have time to kill until the small Eridian eventually started to boot back up. Anything would beat the self-pity, and nothing chased away the deprecation like watching space go by.
Two years in, and four leftāthe journey to Erid was certainly going to be long, only made better by knowing that: one, there was an end destination; and two, Grace now had a best friend to do this together with.
And to be fair, when Rocky was awake, there was a rarely a spare thought to what Grace missed from Earth and his old life. He was on a space ship, making his way across their galaxy, to a new planet with new life to meet. Whatever he left behind on Earth, the scientist in him had to agree it was a fair exchange. But in these quiet moments, when Rocky entered his stasis, and the only things left to accompany Grace were Armando and the Hail Mary's internal system, it was hard for Grace not to miss the little things. His arm chair, the ficus in the corner by his living room window, the paper garlands he hand crafted for his classroom ceiling, and of course...the people in those classrooms.
Grace had been somewhat of an introvert on Earthāand even now, he did enjoy the moments to himself. But if he'd known there would be hours where he missed peopling and with the nearest human nearly 11 light-years away, four years by travel due to wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey stuff (aka his favorite special theory of relativity), then he might have put in more of an effort toā¦
Well he didn't know what. Socialize more? Maybe? Even that didn't sound right.
