A BloodyMary (Iron Lung (2026) and Project Hail Mary (2026)) fic.
Rating: Mature Relationship: The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)/Ryland Grace Additional Tags: Search and Rescue, Grumpy/Sunshine, Eventual Happy Ending, mutations, miscommunications, hurt/comfort, gore, additional tags to be added Chapters: 11 of ? (ongoing)
Summary:
Rocky and Grace are on their way to AT-5. As you might imagine, there are some space ships in the area. How weird is that!
Chapter 11 (snippet)
"Well, see, because, for one thing." Grace pressed his forehead to his arm, looking in at the empty cockpit, the chair disengaged ahead of him. "I'm not very good at it."
Rocky trilled next to him, agreeing, shifting back and forth in the body-formed suit.
"Love the vote of confidence, buddy."
They looked at each other. Grace understood that Rocky didn't see the same way he did. He didn't have eyes. He used echolocation, all that, but Rocky was also so good at turning to him, mirroring his reactions, that Grace smiled anyways at the reassurance.
"But." Grace clicked his tongue. "Hey. We gotta try. Right?"
Right.
Grace did a little one-two-three drum on the wall, then clapped his hands as he ducked into the cockpit. The pilot seat was engaged. He still winced anyways as everything lit up around him and the chair molded up against his backside. He resisted the urge to arch away from it and, instead, found the straps to buckle himself in.
"Safety first," he said cheerily, hiding his dread. "Okay. Alllllright. Let's. Mm. Let's not crash into the, uh." He gestured ahead of them without looking.
Alien space craft, statement, Rocky supplied helpfully, to which Grace snapped a finger and said, "Yep. Exactly that."
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson, Jonathan Byers & Steve Harrington, Tommy Hagan & Steve Harrington
Characters: Steve Harrington, Eddie Munson, Billy Hargrove, Tommy Hagan, Jonathan Byers, Original Characters, Corroded Coffin (Strangers Things), Jim "Chief" Hopper
Tags: Cowboy AU, Cowboy Hats, cattle rustling, Outlaw Eddie Munson, Ranch Hand Billy Hargrove, Rich Steve Harrington, First Time, Blow Job, Anal, Good Boy, Surprises, Gunshot Wounds, Alcohol, Smoking
Summary:
The first time Steve has ever been on a cattle run for his father, traveling all the way to Texas, he soon learned what Billy Hargrove was all about. And he was hooked. Even through the sweltering heat, being with Billy made sense.
But the Harrington name draws attention, and soon enough Steve finds himself at the mercy of an outlaw and his gang, cattle rustlers with a penchant for ropes. Can Steve escape Eddie Munson and his gang? More importantly, as they get closer, does he even want to?
It's Been A While: A Disjointed Guide to Explore the Apocalypse
Rated: T
26,743 words
By: WaldosAkimbo
Art by: @goingsteddi3
Steve Harrington is out in California visiting an uncle on his mother's behalf and it is boring. And he's being sad. And Robin's tired of it. So, when his cousin says he's going to be playing in a Battle of the Bands in town, he tags along, only to catch sight of one Eddie Munson and his band. And it's heart eyes at first insult. But, of course there's bad blood between Steve's cousin and Eddie and they leave on not great terms.
Only for the world to rip open and for people to start changing into these crazy monsters with teeth.
Now Steve's just trying to get home. Along the way, he picks up souvenirs from the creature's he's defeated, a couple of scars, and, oh yeah. One Eddie Munson, who's really hoping to find his uncle in all this mess. It's a small world after all....
Pairings: Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Characters: Steve Harrington, Eddie Munson, Corroded Coffin (Stranger Things), Robin Buckley, Dustin Henderson
Tags: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, but make the zombies demogorgons, brief mention of Steve Harrington's Parents, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt Steve Harrington, Hurt Eddie Munson, Minor Original Character(s), Flashbacks, pills used briefly, The Party Loves Steve Harrington
Trigger Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence
“I’m not in school,” Steve answered immediately, not like it was a sore subject, which it was not. “But, yeah. A little basketball in high school.” That seemed to delight the stranger, who pumped his fist in victory, jangling a few buttons on a faded denim vest. “And swimming, which you didn’t even guess.”
“Damn,” the stranger said and smirked, leaning back on his arm again. “What’re you doing here, Basketballer. This is, and by no means do I mean to judge a book by its cover—”
“You do, though,” Steve pointed out.
“I do, a little. But this is not your scene.”
Steve smirked back. He put both arms on the bar, holding his drink with both hands this time. He nodded, slowly, hunched over a little while someone was making an announcement that he wasn’t even pretending to pay attention to.
“Yeah. Not really, I guess. I’m out here visiting family.”
“Idaho.”
“What? No,” Steve said immediately and clicked his tongue when the stranger laughed again. “Indiana.”
“Close enough,” he said and sipped his beer, ever so slightly wiggling his shoulders in some sort’ve victory dance.
“So, you’re from around here, then?”
“Implant,” he said and Steve made a face that made the stranger laugh. “I mean, technically, I’m from the Midwest, but moved out here.”
“Oh. Idaho?” Steve asked and laughed with the stranger, who punched Steve’s shoulder.
“Okay, fair point. Fair point. So, anyways, Basketballer—”
“Steve,” he said and the stranger paused long enough to gesture at himself.
“Eddie. Pleasure. So, anyways, you’re vising for family, you’re dressed like you just got out of the PTA. You’re drinking goddamn Bud lite from a bottle.”
“It’s not good,” Steve pointed out and they laughed again. “No, man, I know. I know. It’s not for me. But, uh, I just didn’t wanna stay inside.”
“The weather has been fairly kind to us these past few days,” Eddie said thoughtfully and grinned. Impish. Steve had a strange thought of brushing his thumb along Eddie’s dimples. Steve also had random thoughts of, like, jumping off buildings and driving his car a million miles an hour, so it didn’t mean anything. Just a random thought. But he glanced at his beer bottle again just to be safe, to collect himself.
A BloodyMary (Iron Lung (2026) and Project Hail Mary (2026)) fic.
Rating: Mature Relationship: The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)/Ryland Grace Additional Tags: Search and Rescue, Grumpy/Sunshine, Eventual Happy Ending, mutations, miscommunications, hurt/comfort, gore, additional tags to be added Chapters: 12 of ? (ongoing)
Summary:
Grace! Grace, get in the ocean. Hurry, Grace.
Chapter 12 (snippet)
Grace lay on his back, bobbing slightly back upwards because of the air in his suit. He clicked his tongue as he found his feet back underneath him and, as ginger as a cat, set them down until they met the surface of. WORD. In his own mind, he blanked out the nothing and a mental screen popped up from his rigged translation software. Grace gasped, looking down at the waist-deep blood he was firmly standing in. He struggled to move one of his feet forward, sloshing around as he slowly shifted and set his foot down again where it plunged into free fall. Grace wheeled his arms and adjusted until he was standing on WORD.
"Fudge!"
Too close. Hated that. Grace twisted until he was more comfortable, one foot in front of the other, perched on WORD. It was a thin surface. Gripped his boots well enough. It swayed slightly when he shifted his weight and that definitely upset him. Grace wretched once and swallowed twice. C'mon, man, not in the suit. You're better than that. But he managed to hold it together as he stood in a tightrope walker's stance.
WORD.
<Branch.>
"Branch," he said aloud, his eyes widening. "It's a branch. It's a branch! From the tree!"
Good, Grace found one.
"AUGH!!" Grace turned and almost slipped again. He crashed to his knees instead and jabbed his hand down on the branch before he tossed his head back to the surface and scanned around to find Rocky perched nearby. He looked a little too much like a bloody tick, clinging to the branch. "Rocky! Sh—oh my god. I am—"
Grace very leaky again.
"—so glad to see you, oh my god. I thought you drowned!"
No. Rocky very buoyant.
"Not for nothing, buddy, but you're so heavy, I can't imagohmygod."
A BloodyMary (Iron Lung (2026) and Project Hail Mary (2026)) fic.
Rating: Mature Relationship: The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)/Ryland Grace Additional Tags: Search and Rescue, Grumpy/Sunshine, Eventual Happy Ending, mutations, miscommunications, hurt/comfort, additional tags to be added Chapters: 7 of ? (ongoing)
Summary: The Hail Mary is on it's way to Sector AT-11126. It's a long journey, and Grace and Rocky have to pass the time somehow.
Chapter 7 (snippet)
"Rock?"
Rocky is resting, statement, Rocky answered, his voice a little dull.
"Oh. Yeah. Am I both—"
Grace not bother. Grace can stay. Grace should stay.
Grace was about to get up, froze, and sank back to where he'd been. He pulled his knees up to his chest again, blowing out over his mug. Rocky shifted his weight, leaning down on the side of his tunnel towards Grace. He tapped his hands idly, no pattern of refusal or interest. Boredom, maybe, but this didn't feel like that. Grace tapped his fingers on the mug, repeating the pattern, just to see if it got a reaction out of Rocky. They both stopped after a while.
"Do you wanna talk about it?"
What is "it"…question.
"Well." Grace was looking down at his hands, idly tracing the faint scars from the accident during their extraction above Adrian. They looped in a way that, when he wandered them with his eyes or dragged his thumb over them slow enough, felt meditative. "Something's eating you up, huh?"
Rocky not eaten. Carapace very healthy. He tapped his chest to prove a point. Then, maybe without thinking, since it was hard to tell his expression all the time, Rocky touched his arm again over the polished teal inlay. All vitals good. Healthy. Safer than soft squishy human body Grace have.
"Oh, well, c'mon," Grace said and laughed quietly through his nose. "You flatter me."
Is not meant to. Very true.
"No, yeah. I know." Grace forced himself not to argue the situation or over explain his joke. He opened his mouth, closed it, and decided to drink his mug, looking around the room to see if there was any clue as to what set off his friend's quiet melancholy. He thought of the crunch of dry ramen noodles, skittering over his brain for no reason and he sighed. "You miss home?"
Does Grace?
"I mean, which one?" he asked and he said it through a smile, obviously. Rocky twitched his shoulders left and right. Nervous. So, Grace waved his hand. "No, I do. I miss the dome. I miss the kids. The classroom. A lot. Man, I really, really do. Didn't expect to be up in this…y'know. Up here again. Away from—"
A BloodyMary (Iron Lung (2026) and Project Hail Mary (2026)) fic.
Rating: Mature Relationship: The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)/Ryland Grace Additional Tags: Search and Rescue, Grumpy/Sunshine, Eventual Happy Ending, mutations, miscommunications, hurt/comfort, additional tags to be added Chapters: 3 of ? (ongoing)
Summary: Back on Erid, Grace discusses the transmission from a strange moon and they have to decide just what they're going to do about it.
Chapter 3 (snippet)
Three months passed. Eridian months. How long was that compared to Earth? Well, Grace had come up with a rough calculation on the matter, taking into account various time dilation from his location in the universe now compared to, well, maybe from where he was born. But how long was that for this whole moon business with their cut-off screams and their reports to something called the See, Oh Eye or something or other? Sea? C? This is the trouble with transcripts. These were the real questions.
The signal died out shortly after it was sent, but the Eridians had recorded it and stretched it out, flayed it to the bones, and set each piece neatly in front of their scientists before they set it in front of Grace.
"I'm just saying." Grace was ambling around the room, casually tossing a little piece of soft, polished stone that Rocky had handed to him at some point. "If this thing is saying what we think it's saying, it's saying…something bad. Is what I'm saying."
Yes. Bad.
Adrian was a straight shooter. She didn't need to pace while Rocky scuttled around after Grace, occasionally mimicking him. It was never in mean spirits. It was his own way of coping, and he had taken a small chunk of the same type of stone and casually batted it back and forth, almost perfectly in-line with Grace.
"Right," Grace said, letting Adrian's statement settle, letting it breathe. He expected her to be a professional yapper, like Rocky — like him — but it seemed Rocky had found the perfect yin to his yang. Grace held the rock, caught in the xennonite grooves of his suit, and pointed in her general direction. "Right. Exactly, right. Right? So. Okay, people, the question at the end of the day is—"
Crew all dead.
"I mean." Grace winced. The Eridians didn't do facial expressions. But a shrug, a little scrape of their hands, a certain tap of their feet? Those said a million things. Adrian slowly shifted one of her primary legs to the left, the closest thing she had to a downward slope of a frown. "Yeah. Yes. Yeah, that's what we're…that's what we're going with. So. I just. I don't think…."
A BloodyMary (Iron Lung (2026) and Project Hail Mary (2026)) fic.
Rating: Mature Relationship: The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)/Ryland Grace Additional Tags: Search and Rescue, Grumpy/Sunshine, Eventual Happy Ending, mutations, miscommunications, hurt/comfort, gore, additional tags to be added Chapters: 7 of ? (ongoing)
Summary: The SM-8, unlike the submersibles piloted by those from Conviction Realization, was a scientific craft sent to AT-5. She went down into the blood ocean. She did not return.
Chapter 8 (snippet)
"What's that?"
The two women lean over the visual spread, tinted yellow on the screen. They ignore a small bubble of red that has popped in the lower left corner. They had spotted it earlier. A small amount of blood. Neither of them seemed to have any open cuts, but they decided it was only an accident and, after a sample for the sake of maintaining their status as Scientists under the C.O.I., they conclude once again it was human blood. B+. Elle's, then. She had apologized at the time, and they left it at that.
Once the image has solidified, Elsie thumbs a button, freezing it so it isn't immediately chewed up in the archive. The two study the walls of the cavern, luminously large, rounded. Some sort've silt on the ground floor. They've never run into anything remotely biological, besides the blood itself, which hasn't coagulated at the surface or on their equipment. Occasionally, they'll discover pockets of flesh and maneuver the ship to collect as much of it as they can for later dissections. The most jarring items they've found, of course, are the old Iron Lungs, abandoned at the bottom of the ocean after it's operator has suffocated or one of the welds failed and they imploded. They were tasked with transferring any survivable data from their black boxes and leaving the rest to the ocean. Garbage, corroded metal was no use to the C.O.I.
"It's nothing," Elsie says, unconvinced.
"It's a f—"
"It's not a face," she says, firmer. They stare at it and it stares back. Elsie crosses her arms, just like Elle, studying the grainy footage, enough shadows to cast doubt. She's released the button on the console and the image starts to fade, recorded in the computer if they want to see it again. She doesn't. "It's not a face," she repeats and returns to her chair. "We should continue down the tunnel."
Elle chews at her thumb until she tastes the unmistakable metal tang of blood, then quickly pulls her thumb free. She's chewed off a hangnail and torn the skin. She tsks at her self and wipes her thumb off on the green line of canvas that stripes the middle of her uniform.
A BloodyMary (Iron Lung (2026) and Project Hail Mary (2026)) fic.
Rating: Mature Relationship: The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)/Ryland Grace Additional Tags: Search and Rescue, Grumpy/Sunshine, Eventual Happy Ending, mutations, miscommunications, hurt/comfort, additional tags to be added Chapters: 5 of ? (ongoing)
Summary: Presumably, Grace is going to leave to get to that blood moon. It's gonna happen any second now. Any....any second now. C'mon, Grace! You can do it!
Chapter 5 (snippet)
Rocky started to roll a little towards the door. There was a hesitation in his usual bouncy exuberance. Maybe he was a little hurt that Grace still didn't feel comfortable having Rocky - and sometimes Adrian - come watch him sleep. It wasn't even that. He was fine with that, now. Sometimes. A lot of the time, actually. Sometimes, a man just needs some alone time and he doesn't have to explain himself.
Grace was absolutely distracting himself. And Rocky felt a little left out. That was it.
"No, no. No, that's okay, hey. Don't go," Grace said, reaching for him. "You wanna stay tonight? We'll head out to the launch tomorrow in the morning?"
And Rocky chirped before he could hide his eagerness. He skittered back to Grace, bumping him hard enough he stumbled a little and had to hold onto Rocky to stay upright, but it was fine. They laughed together. They headed back to his house together. Grace made some more marshmallows before Adrian came into the dome to join them, sitting around his campfire while the low mist dissipated in the evening and they watched the moons and the stars together. Adrian sang for them. And Grace fell asleep against his friend, trying not to worry too much about the crushing panic snapping at the back of his ribcage. Nobody was going to drug him. Nobody was making him. He chose. He chose this. He wanted this. He wanted.
He was okay.
He was okay.
He was okay.
-
HE WAS NOT OKAY!
Also? Also!! Beeping in his headset was so not helpful?? Who decides beeping is the solution to a recorded medical event - PANIC! ATTACK!
A recommended sedation dose of—
"DON'T YOU DARE!" Grace screamed at a pitch that would seem impossible, except there it was. Squeaky high. Perfectly pitched to grate. Persistent, even, as he held a long, horrible note as they rattled out of the atmosphere. Rocky was chirping next to him, snapped into place so he was perfectly snug, and fine, apparently. Whatever he was saying. Something. He was saying something! Probably!
