A Place We Can’t Go Back To
rated g | 1k words | Project Hail Mary | Ryland Grace x Reader
Just a few months away from arriving at Erid, Rocky discovers an archive containing more media from Earth. While Grace happily loses himself in research papers, documentaries, and increasingly questionable internet videos, Y/N finds herself overwhelmed by memories of the life she left behind. For the first time in years, Earth doesn't feel millions of kilometers away.
✧ MASTERLIST
TAGS: project hail mary, ryland grace, sci-fi fanfic, angst, flirting, ryland grace x femme y/n, ryland grace x y/n, fluff
NOTE: Sorry I disappeared for a bit! College has been keeping me busy lately, but I'm finally back and writing silly little project hail mary fics again. Thank you for all the love on my previous stories—it genuinely means a lot. 💖 Now, back to our regularly scheduled Ryland Grace brainrot. Enjoy!
“Question.” Grace immediately regretted looking up.
Whenever Rocky started a sentence with that tone, it usually meant one of three things: one, Rocky had made a scientific discovery. Two, Rocky had accidentally broken something. Three, Rocky had found something deeply concerning about human behavior.
“What’s up?” Grace asked, not looking away from his laptop.
“Why does Hail Mary contain seventy-eight thousand videos of creature with hair?”
Grace froze. Slowly, he turned around in his chair.
“…What?”
Across the lab, Rocky sat in front of a monitor displaying what looked like an old Earth media archive. Rows upon rows of files filled the screen.
Movies. Songs. Television shows. Images. Videos. And apparently… cats.
“Rocky, where did you find that?”
“Archive directory,” Rocky clicked his claws against the keyboard. “Rocky searched for educational materials. Rocky found creature with hair.”
Y/N glanced up from the maintenance panel she was working on. “You found the entertainment archive?” she asked.
Grace immediately abandoned his work. “Oh my God.”
He stared at the laptop he had originally given Rocky for basic system monitoring, now apparently repurposed into a gateway to human history.
Scrolling.
There were so many files.
Far more than he remembered authorizing for personal storage.
“Rocky,” he said slowly, “why are there… this many categories?”
“Organization attempt,” Rocky replied proudly. “Rocky sorted by ‘funny’, ‘confusing’, and ‘emotionally distressing’.”
Grace blinked. “…Emotionally distressing?”
“Yes.”
“That feels like a bad sign.”
Y/N walked over now, wiping her hands on a cloth.
“What did you click on first?” she asked.
“Random selection,” Rocky answered immediately. Grace winced. “That’s worse.”
Y/N leaned over the screen. At first, she was smiling.
Then she wasn’t.
Because the archive wasn’t just cats.
It was everything.
Old Earth lectures.
Street footage.
Music videos.
News clips.
People laughing in places she had never been but somehow remembered anyway.
Grace noticed it first.
The way her hands stopped moving. The way her expression softened without her meaning to let it.
“Hey,” Grace said a little more carefully, “you okay?”
Y/N didn’t answer right away. She was watching something now.
A simple clip.
Rain hitting a window. A city street at night, headlights reflecting on wet pavement. People walking past without looking at the camera.
Ordinary. Completely unimportant, and somehow unbearable.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
Silence settled over the lab. Even Rocky stopped clicking.
Grace shifted slightly in his chair. “…You recognize it?”
Y/N nodded slowly. “I think so.” Her voice was softer now.
“Not this exact place. But… places like it.”
Rocky tilted slightly. “Explain emotional reaction.”
“I don’t know how,” she admitted—and that might have been the most honest thing she had said all week.
Grace looked back at the screen.
Rain. That was it.
Just rain.
And yet his chest felt oddly tight.
“…Huh,” he murmured.
And for once, he didn’t try to fix it. They spent the next few hours going through files.
At first, it was funny.
Rocky discovered memes.
Grace nearly had a breakdown trying to explain vines.
Y/N laughed at a cooking video from decades ago, shaking her head like she couldn’t believe people used to function like that.
For a while, it was just chaos.
Light.
Normal in a way nothing on the Hail Mary had been for years.
Then Rocky opened a folder labeled “everyday life.”
And the tone shifted.
A street corner. A bus arriving. A family arguing in a kitchen. Someone tying their shoes. A dog barking at nothing.
Grace stopped talking.
Y/N leaned closer to the screen.
Rocky went unusually quiet.
It wasn’t impressive; that was the problem. It was too normal.
Like Earth hadn’t been a mission objective or a problem to solve or a place they were trying to save—
Just a place where things happened.
“I forgot what silence like that sounded like,” she said quietly.
Grace didn’t respond immediately because he had too many thoughts and none of them had a proper scientific structure.
Finally, he said, “It’s just ambient noise.”
Y/N glanced at him. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I mean.”
“I miss it.” she added, softer.
She didn’t specify what “it” was. She didn’t need to.
“…Yeah,” Grace said.
A beat.
“I get that.”
And something about that felt heavier than anything they had fixed on the ship so far.
Hours passed.
The archive kept going.
But Y/N got quieter. Less laughing, less commenting, more just… watching.
Grace noticed. He noticed everything now, apparently.
Rocky kept browsing like nothing had changed, occasionally making comments that were either insightful or deeply unhelpful.
But Grace was watching her more than the screen.
The way her shoulders slowly tensed. The way she blinked a little slower. The way she stayed on one file longer than necessary. Eventually, she stopped clicking entirely. She just sat there.
Watching a looping clip of a crowded street.
And Grace realized something uncomfortable. She wasn’t just nostalgic—she was homesick.
He cleared his throat.
“You want to stop?” he asked gently.
Y/N didn’t answer right away. Then, quietly: “No.”
But she didn’t sound sure.
Later, when Rocky had moved on to another folder and Grace pretended to be distracted by system diagnostics, Y/N stayed behind at the screen.
Just her.
Just Earth.
Grace didn’t move at first, then walked over slowly. Sat down beside her without saying anything.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Y/N said, barely above a whisper: “Do you think we’ll remember it right?”
“Earth?”
She nodded.
“Probably not,” he admitted.
Then, quieter: “But we’ll remember it together.”
Y/N exhaled—not a laugh, not quite a sigh, but something in between. And for a long time after that, they just watched the archive. Not because it was interesting anymore, but because it felt like proof that something like that had existed at all.
The stars outside kept moving. The ship kept flying. And for the first time in a long time, Earth didn’t feel like something behind them.
Just something they were still carrying.
