Chapter Text
He wakes with dirt under his fingernails.
Well, he supposes he must’ve woken with it under his fingernails. He doesn’t notice until several days (?) after he woke up and it probably didn’t get under his fingernails between now and then. Turns out space is really, really clean until you start littering the contents of your death-ship everywhere.
It took him a while to notice. He had slightly bigger problems on his mind, such as: being in space millions of miles from home with the corpses of people he can’t even remember but who, he assumes, must’ve been his friends due to the cavern of anguish that opens up in his chest every time he thinks about them. Or maybe the anguish-cavern is on account of being stranded millions of miles from Earth. Alone. It’s sort of hard to tell which.
When he does notice the dirt, he’s somewhere between halfway and three-quarters done with the first bag of vodka. He’s been very busy judiciously working his way through it over the past few days, partly because he’s terrified of the hangover that is certainly waiting for him once he stops.
“Weird,” he mumbles when he’s done examining the fingernails, letting his hand flop down by his side, feeling it fall too rapidly in the unnatural gravity.
He curls up on his side and waits to fall into the inky blankness of sleep.
He is oddly hesitant to wash the dirt out from under his nails after he’s done throwing up. Yeah, the hangover was about as bad as he thought it would be.
It’s not like he’d ever not wash his hands after vomiting up a sludge of dried ramen chunks and booze and spray cheese (he’d like to send his compliments to whoever on the mission team decided to pack that delicacy).
But still. It feels like losing something, watching the flecks of dirt go down the drain.
“Gardener?” he writes on his whiteboard.
He’s in the Don’t Go Crazy Room, as he’s started calling it. Or, not started. He’s been calling it that for a while, presumably since the mission’s psychology consultant jokingly called it that during a design meeting. But he’s only just remembered that that’s what he’s called it the whole time.
Day and night don’t have much meaning in the vast emptiness of his life but it must be the latter since Mary keeps nattering at him about healthy sleep schedules.
He’s clicking through the simulations on a tablet, the interstellar suicide mission version of channel surfing. A sunset over a mountain lake, nighttime in a cozy kitchen, a sunny afternoon in Central Park. He’s only been to New York City once, for the last biology conference he went to before his career flamed out, right around the time he and Linda broke up; she spent her days sulking in art museums and he skipped poster sessions and keynote speakers to wander around the waterfront. They got into an argument right in the middle of Times Square that ended with her yelling at him and Grace running off in a random direction and getting desperately lost. It had been miserable. He wishes he could do it again.
He lands on a simulation of a prairie. Hulking bison graze, dotting the scene. A breezy day, he thinks, even though he can’t feel anything besides the cool, sterile air circulation of the ship that will someday be his coffin. The grass sways. His breath catches. He tastes dirt in his mouth, dry grass, salt. His hands clench the fabric of his jumpsuit.
He fumbles for the tablet, nearly knocking it off the platform and into the screen below, clicking random buttons until the screens flicker to a new simulation, an underwater snorkeling scene complete with branching masses of coral and brightly colored fish darting around.
He curls up on his side, thinking about the scratch of dead wintery grass against his palms, and weeps.
Maybe he’s from the middle of nowhere. Maybe that’s why he had dirt under his fingernails. Maybe that’s why the prairie grasses sent him into a tailspin so violent that it triggered Mary’s panic attack protocol, which wouldn’t shut off until he finally caved and did some breathing exercises with her. He refuses to admit that it actually helped.
That must be it. He must be from the countryside, somewhere.
The City Mouse and the Country Mouse. He thinks his dad used to read that to him when he was little. Or maybe he just always wished he would.
He’s from San Francisco.
The most rural place he’s ever lived is the one semester he spent in a hippie co-op right off campus in Palo Alto before he realized communal living really, really wasn’t for him, no matter how broke he was.
He crosses off, “Gardener?”. He crosses off, “Country boy?”
Below it reads, “Dirt under fingernails?” in bright red Expo.
“Something’s wrong,” he says into the quiet of the ship.
“Do you require assistance Dr. Grace?”
He pulls his knees tighter into his chest, curling up as tightly as he can against the bulkhead. The ship’s reply is the only answer to his plea.
Maybe he likes to rock climb? Maybe he's super outdoorsy? Maybe he spent his last day on Earth, like, summiting a mountain or something?
But if he spends more than three seconds thinking about clinging to a cliff face, he gets kind of queasy. He doesn't even bother to write that hypothesis down on the white board.
“There was dirt under my fingernails when I woke up,” he tells Rocky even though he knows Rocky doesn’t have half those words in his vocabulary.
He doesn’t know why it matters so much to him. But it does. It does.
“No understand,” the translator spits out at him.
“Me neither, buddy. Me neither.”
"Something is wrong," he says to no one in particular, hauling himself up to the control room.
Up is down and down is up and Ryland Grace is not supposed to be here. Something has been wrong since the beginning. Something has been wrong since before the beginning.
He clicks through screen after screen, switching from one control panel to the next, making his way around the command capsule. He has no idea what he's looking for until he finds a tab labelled Mission Logs.
He freezes, hand hovering over the screen, like he's listening for something, for someone. But there's just the constant background hum of the Hail Mary, the soft distant clicking of Rocky doing something with xenonite downstairs, Grace's own breath coming in heavy short bursts.
Coward, a voice inside his head says. The word feels like a blow to his back.
He clicks, scrolls backwards with shaking fingers through hundreds of daily logs until he reaches the very first one. He opens it—half-convinced his pounding heart is going to burst his arteries—before he can stop himself.
It's data. Entirely data. Pre-launch stats, info about the launch itself, trajectories and orbits and fuel usage and life-support system read-outs. Health data. The vitals taken from his and Yao's and Ilyukhina's coma systems as they were put under. Blood pressure and breaths per minute and blood oxygen saturation and metabolic panels and drug infusion rates. Heart rate. Three neat little charts: two of them starting at 95ish beats per minute and then plummeting to a nice, steady 55 as the drug saturation increased.
But not the third chart, though. Not Grace's chart. His is a straight line. His heart was beating slow, slow, slow before they even put him into a coma.
His hands are clammy. There was dirt under his fingernails when he woke up.
Something is very, very wrong.
He shoves the screen away from him. It bumps into the screen next to it with a disproportionate clatter.
"Grace is okay, question?" he hears Rocky call from downstairs, voice raised to account for his tiny human hearing range.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine," he calls back. He presses himself firmly against the command chair, bringing his arms around his middle. "I'm fine. Just, uh, bumped into a computer screen on accident."
Over the ragged sound of his breathing, he hears Rocky happily chirping, "Good, good. Clumsy humans."
He holds himself tighter, feeling his blood pounding in the back of his eyeballs.
You're a coward, a voice inside his head says. It sounds suspiciously like Stratt.
Why dirt? The more he remembers about himself, the less it makes sense.
Sterile labs and Class-1 clean rooms and fluorescent-lit conference rooms and the communal showers on the aircraft carrier (yuck). That’s what he remembers from the months leading up to the Hail Mary’s launch. He has some vague recollections of the makeshift accommodations he barely found himself using, bare walls and empty shelves and a stiff mattress dressed in clean white sheets. He never had time to sleep; he barely even unpacked the belongings Stratt’s minions had brought him from his apartment.
He doesn’t remember how he ended up on the ship instead of… literally anyone else who was more qualified. But he doubts the answer would change his question:
Why dirt?
“Something’s wrong,” he hears himself say out loud, feeling his body bolt upright and away from the milling machine.
It’s easy to ignore most of the time. There's a lot of work to do--they have two planets to save, after all--and he spends the downtime while experiments are incubating checking the ship's controls, picking his things up off the floor so Rocky will stop running over them in his ball, and getting to know the literal alien that shares his ship.
But sometimes, it’s like a jolt runs through him, like he’s accidentally touched the scalding handle of a pot with rice burnt to the bottom, like he’s missed a step at the bottom of the stairs and nearly fallen. He jerks away from the sensation.
“What Grace break this time, question?” Rocky asks from his perch in the tunnel.
Grace shakes himself, blinking hard until reality snaps back into place. “Nothing, nothing.”
“Good, good. Do not want repeat of multi-dimensional printer incident, statement,” Rocky replies, hands fiddling with a part of said aforementioned printer.
But Grace still can’t shake the feeling. Something is wrong. He just doesn’t know what.
Overgrown grass tall in the empty lot where the Sears used to be. Grass growing along the sides of the highway. Grass poking up between the cracks in concrete. Scraggly grass interspersed with patches of dirt at the height of drought-ridden California summer. Sitting in the goal tearing up fistfuls of grass and daydreaming, forgetting he’s supposed to be playing goalie.
He thinks his last memory before the Hail Mary launch has something to do with grass. But why? Why? He has no clue what the heck that could mean.
“Something‘s wrong,” he says to the xenonite barrier when he’s sure Rocky is asleep.
He erases, "Always muscles?" from the whiteboard because the answer is no. Definitely not.
He's not sure how he knows-- it's not like he's found any definitive proof. But he knows. He just knows.
His body feels wrong. It feels wrong. Like he’s living in a ghost’s body. Or maybe like he's a ghost living in another person’s body. He can't explain it.
"If Grace body not belong to Grace, belong to who, question?" Rocky asks him when Grace tries to explain the sensation under the cover of artificial night. It was easier to talk about these things when he could pretend Rocky couldn't see him.
But that isn’t exactly right. It isn’t exactly wrong either. He doesn’t know. Whenever he thinks about it, about that terrifying pit of wrongness lining the bottom of his insides, he’s never felt more hollowed out.
So he just tries not to think about it.
How do you explain dreams to an alien?
He isn’t sure but he’s got to get a handle on that fast. Rocky has barely accepted crying as a human biological response—it’s so weird and foreign to him—and the limitless circumstances that bring humans to tears. How is Grace supposed to explain why he woke up sobbing when he doesn’t even know himself?
“Distress, question? Distress? Grace is distress, question? Respond, Grace. Status update, request. Why Grace is distress, question?” Rocky asks as he skitters back and forth in the tunnels surrounding Grace’s bed. “What is problem, question? Rocky will fix.”
He knows Rocky gets worried sometimes. Heck, Grace gets it. Rocky was so alone that it sometimes brings Grace to tears to think about it. Grace is the first sentient being he’s interacted with for longer than Grace’s entire life span; it would be pretty upsetting if he kicked the bucket.
He tries to remind himself of this, but his entire body is still shaking. His mouth tastes like tears and dirt.
“Can you shut up!” he snaps.
Rocky stills. He makes a low, keening noise that reminds Grace of a crying dog. Grace puts his head in his hands. He tugs at his hair the same way he was tugging at the grass in his dream.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“Accepted. Apology, also.”
He breathes hard through his nose, trying to get himself under control but his lungs keep hitching, unable to draw in enough air, and his brain sets off every primordial alarm bell in his body. God, he’s being such an a-hole and Rocky doesn’t deserve that but he can’t— he can’t—
In the dream, they were holding him down. Face in the dirt. Hands scrabbling, fingers catching on rocks and grass. He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, rubbing tears and snot off his face.
He hears the hesitant tap, tap, tap, of rock on xenonite as Rocky approaches the barrier. He steels himself to be sociable like a normal human being but, ultimately Rocky doesn’t say anything. Instead, he presses a hand to the barrier between them, and fills the room with a sound like a purring cat. Grace feels the humming resonate through him, deep into his bones, until his heart finally slows back into sleep.
Something is wrong.
Grace pulls up the static version of Google that has been downloaded to the ship's laptops. The Google doodle is forever stuck on cheerful drawing of smiling teapots and dancing pastries celebrating International Scone Day.
"Spacecraft ghosts," he types into the search bar.
A trailer for a Netflix miniseries that looks really, really bad. An ESA webpage about satellites abandoned in the atmosphere. A reddit thread asking for sci-fi books about ghosts in space. He wonders how many of those commenters are still alive.
He clicks back to the dancing scones, stares at the blinking cursor.
"Can spaceships be haunted?" he types. He hits enter.
Before the results can load, Rocky comes careening up the tunnels.
He slams the laptop lid closed. He’s being ridiculous. He shakes himself. The Hail Mary isn’t haunted.
But if it was—
If the Hail Mary was haunted…
He doesn’t know if he’d be the haunted or the ghost.
He shoves himself away from the microscope so violently that he bruises his hip on the opposite lab bench.
"I'm not supposed to be here," he gasps.
Unseen, life from Adrian squirms under the microscope.
Rocky chirps in confusion until Grace catches his breath enough to wave away his concerns with a shakily flippant, "Never mind."
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he groans on the medical table, lights flashing through his eyelids, no amount of adrenaline making it possible to keep his eyes open.
Sirens wailing. His wrist throbbing. An agonized, begging screech. Rocky saved him. Rocky is dying.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he groans as an oxygen mask is fitted over his face. Or maybe he just thinks it really, really hard.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Grace says, coffee steam hot and damp as it drifts up from his mug and curls onto his face.
“Then where are you supposed to be?” asks Stratt in his dreams.
Grace remembers.
He tries to forget again until Rocky’s done showing him the Blip-A. Rocky, who’s so proud of the engineering marvel that is his ship and rightfully so, who bounces up and down as he shows Grace each nook and cranny. Rocky, Grace’s best friend in the whole universe. Only friend. Rocky, who Grace never would’ve met if it weren’t for the tragedy of his cowardice.
He tries to forget so he can enjoy this—he’s in an alien spaceship, like, come on— but he can’t. The pit opening up inside his chest won’t let him.
And then he remembers there was still dirt under his nails when he woke up.
At least he doesn’t remember that tidbit until he’s back on the Hail Mary. Throwing up in the xenonite suit really would’ve sucked.
He's not supposed to be here.
It's what he's been saying the whole time.
And, well. Now he knows he was right.