rated g | 900 words | project hail mary | Ryland Grace x Reader
It was a late “night” on the spaceship when they passed through a binary star system. Y/N thinks it’s beautiful. Grace, on the other hand, gets excited and proceeds to scientifically explain everything in great detail.
note: HIII!! I would like to thank everyone who liked my first-ever fanfic posted here. It only motivated me to post more fanfics hehe. So here's another fluff oneshot. Enjoy!! <3
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The ship was quiet, with the lights dim and Rocky sleeping. Despite being awake for twenty-four hours already, Y/N can't seem to fall asleep.
There were 'days' like this on the ship—when space felt more like home than Earth ever did. Not that Earth had really felt like home for either of them to begin with.
Y/N gets up from her mattress and sees Rocky and Grace, asleep, next to each other.
Grace had promised Rocky that he would watch him sleep, but twenty-four hours of nonstop testing in the lab had clearly knocked the scientist out.
She chuckles softly and heads out of the dormitory to the washroom. Just as she was about to step inside, she catches sight of something outside the cupola window in the lab.
Something beautiful.
She changes direction immediately, drifting instead toward the glass. Y/N sits down on the floor and just stares.
"A star system.." Y/N whispered to herself, resting her head lightly against the window.
She thinks about the time she, Grace, and Rocky have spent together on the ship—three years of waking life, though it sometimes feels like much longer in all the ways that actually matter.
Lab experiments, EVA missions, games, teasing, stories told by Rocky, and slowly learning each other’s worlds had become her entire reality without her even noticing.
Grace and Y/N had chosen to save Rocky instead of going back to Earth two years ago. At the time, it felt like something they both would regret in the future.
Now, neither of them could imagine choosing differently.
The distance to Erid wasn’t measured in light-years anymore. Just time. A few months. Maybe less.
After everything, the stars didn’t feel far anymore.
Just… quiet.
-
Grace wasn’t supposed to be awake. That was the first problem.
The second problem was that he had already left his dormitory, walked through two corridors, and ended up in the lab without any clear reason other than the fact that his brain had decided sleep was a suggestion and not a requirement.
The lab lights were dimmed.
Quiet.
Grace pauses when he notices her.
Y/N.
Sitting under the cupola window.
Not working. Not fixing. Not talking.
Just… there.
He doesn’t say anything at first. He should—He knows he should. Instead, he leans slightly against the doorway of the lab and just watches her.
There's a star system outside the window.
Distant. Calm. Indifferent in the way only space can be.
Grace realizes, vaguely, that he has stopped thinking about whatever excuse brought him here. That is mildly concerning. Even more concerning is the fact that he doesn’t really want to fix it.
He shifts slightly, making the floor creak under his Converse.
Y/N turns her head a little, just enough to acknowledge him.
"You're staring." She says.
"I am observing." Grace corrects automatically.
"That's the same thing."
"No, it isn't."
She hums softly, like she's not interested in arguing tonight. And that was unusual for Grace. Most of the time, she argues back. That should make him relieved—instead, it makes him feel... uncertain.
Grace steps into the lab properly now, slowly. He looks up at the cupola window, sitting down a short distance away from her without fully deciding to.
The stars are doing what stars always do.
Nothing.
Everything.
"...Couldn't sleep?" He asks.
Y/N doesn't look away from the glass. "Couldn't stop thinking."
“That is statistically inefficient,” he says.
A faint pause. Then she lets out a soft breath that might be a laugh if you squint at it.
“Yeah,” she replies. “I’ve noticed.”
Silence settles between them again.
Grace finds himself looking at her instead of the stars.
Her eyes.
The soft glow of the star system reflected on her skin.
'God you look so beautiful right now.' Grace thinks to himself, making the corner of his mouth curve up a little.
He shouldn’t be thinking that.
But he is.
Outside the cupola, the star system drifts slowly across the glass. Beautiful in a way that makes him feel slightly irrelevant.
"It looks like it's breathing." She says quietly.
Grace follows her gaze. "It is not." He replies.
"I know."
Another pause. Then, softer:
"But it feels like it is."
Grace opens his mouth to correct her again, but stops. Closes it—he doesn't have a better answer.
He leans back slightly, resting his hands on the floor behind him.
The lab feels too big suddenly, or maybe he just feels too small.
Y/N is still watching the stars.
Still calm.
Still completely unaware of what she was doing to the internal stability of Ryland Grace's entire thought process.
He should leave—that would be the logical choice. He does not move. Instead, he says the first thing his brain offers him.
"It's a binary system."
Y/N sighs immediately. "I knew you were going to ruin it."
"I am not ruining it."
"That's different."
"It really isn't."
Grace looks back at the window, and the stars continue their slow orbit. Beautiful. Predictable. Completely indifferent to the fact that two humans are sitting here pretending they are not affected by them.
"...It does look like dancing." He admits, quieter now.
Y/N turns her head slightly towards him. "Yeah." This time, she doesn't argue.
And Grace realizes, with an almost inconvenient clarity—he didn’t come here to observe the stars.
He came because she was already looking at them alone.
As you might know, the sky is due to get a new star any time now, in a few months at most.
What is happening?
The recurrent nova T Coronae Borealis, by far the brightest one known, is a star* in the northern constellation Corona Borealis that, once every 80 years or so, increases in brightness from completely invisible by naked eye to among the ~100 brightest in the night sky. This increase is called a nova, from the Latin word for new, as it looks like a new star has appeared.
Where can i see it from?
Basically all human inhabited latitudes, all except the far south. In the northern latitudes, however it is visible the entire night, while near and below the equator you will need to 'catch' it at the right time of night, which in August and September is just after sunset.
How will it look?
Let's not get your hopes up too high. It will, at the brightest, reach a magnitude around 2 at most, so about as bright as the north star, relatively unremarkable and completely unnoticeable as unique to someone who doesn't know where to look.
But still, it's the most visible sudden change to the relatively fixed pattern of the heavens any of us will live to see, so you should still go give it a look.
Where is it?
Currently, the constellation is best visible about 1 or 2 hours after sunset. You will need to be relatively far away from light pollution, so at least a couple dozen stars are clearly visible. While learning the constellations, and finding the star by orienting via those is imho half the fun, you could use one of many sky map apps and websites to tell you the star's location.
If it didn't happen yet, there should be nothing visible at that location. However, if there is, congrats! You just did an astronomy™ :3
It will appear in the circle next to the star labeled ε
Why is this happening?
Most stars spend most of their lives in a stable, hydrogen fusing state. However, when hydrogen in their cores begins to run out, they switch to helium fusion, which makes them swell up to enormous sizes, turn red due to lower surface temperature, and are thus called red giants. After this helium runs out, the star will (in most cases) throw off the inflated outer layers, while its hot, dense core shrinks and keeps on glowing due to how hot it is, while not actually doing any fusion and not producing any new energy. Those are called white dwarfs, and because they don't fuse, aren't technically stars at all, therefore the asterisk in the first sentence of this post.
The T-CrBo system is a red giant and white dwarf binary, where the red giant has grown so big, that the parts of it closest to its partner aren't gravitationally bound to it anymore. Therefore, the gas falls and accumulates on the white dwarf's surface (which otherwise has no hydrogen on its own), untill a critical point is reached where the pressure of the gas causes it to all fuse at once, resulting in a huge thermonuclear explosion bright enough to be seen from over 2500 light years.
The explosion however, isn't big enough to blow the dwarf apart, and it starts accumulating new matter from its partner right away.
Because of this, it with re-explodes every 8 decades, and it is due to go any day now.
