Kinda going insane imagining the Taumoeba Xenonite debacle never happening, Grace making it back to Earth and just. never being the same.
He finally gets the hero’s treatment. He’s suddenly humanity’s biggest celebrity in a world that never really knew him. Now he doesn’t know it right back, it’s aged 30+ years in his absence and is unrecognizable.
The pods with the Taumoeba and the tapes of Rocky and Grace’s time together get to earth before he does. When he lands Stratt is waiting for him, aged nearly beyond his recognition. There’s interviews, statements, ceremonies, suddenly every world leader on earth wants to meet him. He rejoins the Project to help get the Taumoeba where it needs to go and actually save the planet, Stratt and her team of new, young scientists (including a handful of his former students) tell him you’ve done enough, but he can’t just sit back. What else is he supposed to do?
He lets Stratt know he forgives her, which she coldly appreciates. They’re friends, to an extent. They try to be. How can you really be friends with the man you tried to murder? Even after the vindication his return gives her—that she made the right choice in doing what she did—every time she looks at him she can see the tears in his eyes as her men held him down and dragged him to what they all believed to be his death.
There’s a statue of him and Rocky.
Stratt shows him. There’s a few, actually, scattered across the earth. This one is in San Francisco, where he lived. It depicts all three of the Hail Mary crew, with himself in the center, one hand over his heart like a patron saint, the other holding onto one of Rocky’s. He stares at the lifeless Rocky molded in brass it for a long time.
He imagines Rocky back on Erid and wonders if they made a statue for them, too. He wonders if Rocky is thinking about him too. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to sleep again without Rocky watching him, because it hasn’t been going too well so far. There’s a Rocky-shaped imprint on him that he has to look at and reckon with every single day.
He’d probably make friends out of his new colleagues and former students, now suddenly his own age, because he’s Ryland Grace and he just can’t help it.
He didn’t really connect with his peers before. Now, though the world is desperate to know the man who saved them all, he connects with them even less. The only one he ever felt connected to is now so far away from him he might as well be dead.
He is so deeply changed from the journey to a home he no longer recognizes that he wonders if it’s really home at all.
Rocky was home.
