𑣲 Ryland Grace .ᐟ.ᐟ

Three weeks ago, Ryland could’ve told anyone the temperature of astrophage, the tensile strength of the Hail Mary's hull plating, the exact half life of hope in a man who has already watched two people die on this ship and knows, mathematically, that he's next. Three weeks ago, he still had the energy to be scared properly, the adrenaline, the shaking hands, all the fear supposed to come with. Yet tonight, if you could even call it night, he just feels hollowed out. Sanded down to the grain and just… left there.

He's strapped into the observation blister with the lights turned all the way off because it's easier to look at the stars that way, and because it’s harder to see Yao's and Ilyukhina's bunk, which are still made up down the corridor with a neatness that feels obscene, like the ship is still waiting for them to come back from somewhere they never went. He's run the fuel numbers, he’s run the astrophage numbers, he’s run the numbers on how long one very tired middle school science teacher can keep a spacecraft functioning alone before something breaks that he doesn't know how to fix, and every version of the equation ends the same way: not enough time, not enough hands, not enough him.

He presses his palms together without deciding to. It's such a strange gesture for his own hands to make that he almost laughs.

“This is stupid,” he tells the stars, and his voice comes out smaller than he means it to. “I have never, ever, once in my adult life prayed to anything, and the one time I try it, it's from a few light-years away, to an audience of absolutely nobody, because I've officially run out of anybody else to ask.” His voice cracks and he swallows hard.

The stars don't answer. Obviously. He didn't expect them to.

“But if there's— if there’s anybody,” he says anyway, and the last word cracks right down the middle. “Any god. Any version of one, any religion, I genuinely do not care whose. I will take whoever's on call tonight. I— I can't hold a sun up by myself. I can't save a planet by myself. I have tried, and tried, and I am not enough, and I’m asking— , no I’m begging, please. Please send something. Please send anyone.”

He lets his head fall back against the seat, wrung out, embarrassed at himself in the specific way you can only be embarrassed when you're certain no one heard, embarrassed because he almost started crying. Nothing happens for so long he starts breathing normally again.

Then the ship groans.

It isn't a sound he recognises, it’s not the scrubbers, not the reactor, none of the hundred small noises he's learned to sleep through. It's lower than that, a note that seems to climb up through the deck plating and settle somewhere close, and every light in the corridor turns on and dims at once, then warms gold instead of white.

Ryland unclips so fast the strap burns a line across his palm.

He doesn't remember crossing to the main viewport. He remembers arriving there, hand flat on the glass, and he remembers, with a clarity he will never manage to explain, looking directly into an eye the size of a continent.

It doesn't fit inside the window. It doesn't fit inside the concept of a window, or a sky, or any amount of space one single thing is supposed to be allowed to take up, it's… simply there, filling the dark where stars used to be, iris deep and old and colored like something he can’t quite name, and it is looking at him… not at the ship, at him.

He doesn't scream, surprisingly. What comes out is smaller and worse than a scream, and his legs give out under him without asking permission first. He hits the deck hard enough to feel it tomorrow, if there's even a tomorrow, and scrambles backward on his hands until his spine finds a support strut.

“Nope,” he hears himself say, from somewhere well outside his own body. “No, no, I take it back, whatever I said, I withdraw the request, please, please stop—.”

The eye blinks. Slow as a tectonic drift. Nothing about it suggests it's going anywhere.

For a stretch of time he loses the ability to measure, it simply is vast, patient, wrapped around the Hail Mary like the ship is something small enough to be cupped in a hand he can't see the rest of. He drags himself, shaking, from window to window, unable to stop looking even as every instinct he owns screams at him to hide, and every window shows him something different: a curve that might be a shoulder, flecked with stars, a drift of hair, or light, or both at once trailing for what might be a thousand kilometres into the void… Something that might be fingers resting against the hull so lightly he shouldn't be able to feel it. Once, in the gap between one shifting curve of them and the next, he catches what looks unmistakably like a scatter of entire galaxies, small and slow-turning, caught somewhere in the dark of them like more freckles.

It's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen in his life. It is also, less romantically, actively dismantling every idea he's ever had about scale, about self, about fucking anything at this point.

“Okay,” he croaks, to all of it, to the colorful vastness eclipsing half his window. “Okay, I take it back, you can go, I withdraw—“

The thing doesn't go. But it starts, very slowly, to fold.

Not shrink, fold, the way a piece of origami reverses a mistake, edges drawing inward, the endless spill of hair and shoulder and eye gathering close instead of scattered across half the visible sky. It takes long enough that his fear has time to curdle into something stranger and quieter, the specific dread of watching something enormous become something he's going to have to face without a hundred thousand kilometers of merciful distance between them.

By the time it stops folding, there's a person drifting just outside the airlock window.

Person-shaped, at least… Tall as a doorway would be if there were a doorway out here in the vacuum, floating as easily as if space were water and they’d simply always known how to swim in it. Their hair moves the way it moved when it was the size of a solar flare, unbothered by physics. A thin band crosses their brow, set with something that catches the ship's running lights and gives them back warmer than they arrived. Under their skin there's a low glow, and their eyes, when they find his through the little round window, hold none of the eye's terrible vastness. They're warm, amused even, in a way that suggests they can see exactly how close he is to being sick and finds it more endearing than alarming.

They lift one hand, slow, deliberate, giving him every chance to flinch away before they press their palm flat to the glass.

He shouldn't be able to hear anything through hull plating, yet he hears them anyway, unhurried and arriving somewhere behind his sternum instead of through his ears.

You called. I came as gently as I know how to arrive. I'm sorry for the fear. Smallness is a kindness I had to learn.

His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again, uselessly.

“You can't— you're not—“ He gestures at them, at the window, at the entirety of the last ten minutes, like his hand can do the work his sentences have abandoned. “I-I've been awake thirty-one hours. I've been breathing my own recycled air for three weeks straight… I am one hundred percent hallucinating an entire person made of—“ He stops. “What even are you made of?”

Something moves through their expression that might be starlight, might be laughter, might be both. He scrubs a hand down his face, and when he looks again they’re still there, patient, glowing softly against the darkness like they have nowhere else in the entire universe they’d rather be floating tonight.

I felt what you carried, when you called. The two you lost. You have been alone with that grief for longer than one person should have to hold anything.

He goes very still. “That's— you can't just—“ And he swallows hard. “That's not fair. You can't just say things like that to a guy who's already having the week I'm having.”