Chapter Text
Grace never truly believed in soulmates.
Well, he did by proxy. He knew people who had managed to find their match, or had been a witness himself to some very unusual sights that could only be explained with ‘soulmate shenanigans’. Even the news sometimes told of a strange case, making him remember that, oh right, they exist!
Though that didn't mean he actively believed in the whole 'matching perfectly' spiel some scientists or other companies tried to insist on to boost the sales of their gadgets or products, supposed to facilitate soulmate matching.
The popularity of the app 'Soulmatch' had been catastrophic for teenagers. Mix hormones and gullible children together, and there sprang too many cases of ‘harmless’ pranks or relentless mockery, challenges and 'bets' at school that talked about meeting their fated on the phone, through an app. Who thought it would be a good idea? It always went wrong somehow.
One of the small letdowns of being on the ground level of the building he was teaching in was that he was one of the first people to be called, or the first to see, a fight break out outside.
The amount of wrestling he had to break out because two kids got "matched" or with someone else's boy/girlfriend had skyrocketed since the arrival of the Soulmatch app, the algorithm preferring matching people based on proximity and contact number over the usual random contact from miles away. This had made schools have to organise meetings with the parents to try and persuade them to make their children uninstall the app. They've gone that far! Over soulmates! A rare and almost uncatalogued phenomenon, more popular in fiction and legends than in real life! And that was even before puberty! Grace sometimes gave a silent prayer to all high school and college teachers, conveying all of his heartfelt condolences and sympathy.
During those meetings, some parents looked sheepish, some smacked their gum to his face, others rolled their eyes and said to let the power of love do its work. Grace had looked at the kid's bluish face after getting beaten up (and beating up the other kid still waiting in the corridor) and wondered if love truly looked this violent.
Well, if he had a say in that matter, he would say that soulmates were more of a different indifference. Because the harsh truth about soulmates was that there was no such thing as pretty letters printed on one's wrist or a romantic colour filter appearing before your eyes once you meet your fated one. People certainly fantasised about having identifying marks to make it easier to distinguish their other half from the mass of nine billion people, but the reality was much more boring (probably also why Soulmatch became one of the top trending hashtags for months): there were no actual telltale signs or notice papers slapped onto someone’s forehead to differentiate one another from the crowd. It was only a matter of a hit-or-miss opportunity.
Well, of course, there were always some lucky bastards who managed to find their loved ones as soon as they reached adulthood, but it was such a low and small percentage that it was pathetically laughable. And all of that because most of the fated pairs simply didn’t find each other during their whole lives! They might have seen each other, smiled or even exchanged a few 'hello, how are you? I'm fine thank you' without realising they were soulmates, because as heartcrushing, depressing, and down-to-earth as it was, soulmate bonding took time.
Oh yes, all this talk about a bond so strong it was close to unbreakable truly existed: being able to feel through the bond, to understand one another until they became one… all of that was true and very much real. The hard pill to swallow, though, was that this sort of bond took time to be created, to form, to latch and to evolve until it strengthened enough to be near indestructible.
It took years, decades to cultivate. Most of the first days, or even months, were about fumbling around with new things added to their bodies, or weird things happening around each other. Discreet but disconcerting and sometimes even worrying: a shadow that shifted, a sparkle at one's corner of the eye, a mole that shouldn't have been there, etc. etc. etc. It didn't even happen on one common time basis. They could be teens when the first appearance of a soul bond happened, or they could be in their thirties. There had even been a tearful event in which two old people, nearing their nineties, had met at the hospital. The snap had been instantaneous. Their love had been bitterly short, but burnt brightly all the same.
Souls were unpredictable like that.
Though tell that to kids with stars in their eyes and a wish to either feel superior to others by having what others didn’t, or because they truly believed in the tales of true love. Grace had to pinch the bridge of his nose with his nails until it hurt to try and keep his smile on, even when kids spat out some nonsense about love and eternal fate at the tender age of twelve. It was sweet and cute, truly! …until the kids started to insult one another, each swearing more vicious than the last. Not to mention damage control the next day when the rumour reached the whole school and each class took a side in the drama.
All of that to say, he didn't see soulmates as inherently bad, but he thought people put too much emphasis on them rather than living their lives. And if people looked at the numbers and charts, they would see that a very small percentage of real people got matched and actually realised the fact. And only then, would love start to bloom or something.
Grace had only shrugged at all of that and went on with his life.
He liked the position he was in. He was a teacher. He had kids. His bike. His apartment. He wasn’t broke, didn’t truly fly high but enough not to lack anything…
Or so he thought.
Sadly, Eva Stratt came in and swept him to Project Hail Mary.
Those were both the best and worst days of his life.
The quiet and steady balance he'd slowly constructed as a school teacher was wrung out of his feet, and suddenly he was back to finding new things, theorising, experimenting, the delectable feeling of manipulating fragile, small samples. The jubilation of what... discovering a new alien cell? And the impending doom that was the astrophage! Then breed said astrophage! Make friends with Carl, have... friendly(?) conversations with Stratt, have some meetings with the highest dignitaries of the whole world and train a crew about to launch themselves light-years away from Earth.
It had been exhilarating and fun. As much as a frozen icecubicle Stratt was, she had still been a steady constant by his side. Carl had also reawakened the childish part of him, which a teacher shouldn’t exhibit, but who could stop a leading scientist of a big project such as the Hail Mary? The whole staff had known him, he had been on good terms with almost everyone…
Had… Been…
Until the explosion.
A decision, three hours, sedated, smacked to the ground by three guards, out of light and booted out of Earth to die off-screen.
Yep.
Marvellous.
At that point, he had completely forgotten about the concept of soulmates.
Mostly because he had forgotten most of his memories after he woke up, also maybe because he had been approaching Tau Ceti and met another spaceship there that didn't look like human-made.
(Probably also because there weren't any kids asking him if pheromones truly existed and if they could use them to attract their soulmates if they concentrated enough, 'like a fart' a kid had asked very seriously during class. You could hear a pin drop. Nobody laughed, those little gremlins had waited with bated breath for Grace to say something along the lines of 'yeah sure, fart your way to your soulmate' or something. What did the Internet teach those kids these days, seriously?! And he wasn't even that old, he'd used that same Internet for his own research! School had unfortunately been a bad influence on him, making him almost weary of the term 'soulmate' because it most likely meant that another fight had broken out while he was trying to drink his coffee and eat his pre-made salad tupperware for lunch.)
The point was, he had other things to worry about: Rocky arriving on board. Approaching Adrian the planet. Getting this fishing hook out and about the Mary. Nearly crashing on the planet after the gravity pulled them too close to the surface. Analysis and breeding Taumoeba while nervously (and despairingly) looking at Rocky's still form. Going back to Earth. Not going back to Earth. Meet back with Rocky and then go towards Erid with a sense of loss he shouldn't have felt in the first place, while he sent the Beetles out.
Then finally he got to breathe a bit and peruse the Mary's database so he could try and fill in most of the blanks inside his memories. Their journey back to Erid would take years, he had enough time to try and recover even the littlest part of himself, though most of them had been irrevocably lost. Like a contract he didn't ask for. Trade a part of his life and identity for the life of others. It didn't feel like a fair trade, but what could he do other than nod and look the other way?
The answer was nothing. So he swallowed back his tears, put a huge messy cross on the whiteboard before ragingly wiping everything he'd written over his own story. Instead of wondering who he had been, he'd promised he'd strive to focus on who he is now.
Still, the sweet, sweet temptation of knowing more of Earth had beckoned him all the same. It didn't help (and it did in some other ways) that Rocky was naturally curious and always excitedly chattered whenever Grace talked about human customs. They would look at photos and videos on the Mary terminal sometimes for hours, both of them marveling at humans’ ingenuity (and dumbness).
That was when he recalled the subject of soulmates.
Rocky had been fascinated by this new trait, asking about the scientific part of how soulmates worked and how it differed from Eridians' mating. Grace had been unable to provide most answers, mostly because even the specialists in that area were as clueless as Rocky and just mostly said, "It happens," hoping people would guilelessly gobble it down. They did.
At some point, he had thought Rocky could have been Grace's soulmate.
He'd looked at the Eridian and the way they perfectly matched, a link immediately forming and tethering as soon as they met. It wouldn't have been the weirdest thing he'd ever stumbled upon during his life.
Yet he finally batted the idea away. If anything, Rocky was his platonic soulmate. Even after months of cohabitation en route towards Erid, their camaraderie never went any further, in a metaphorical sense. He had read that as time passed by, soulmates who unknowingly matched would slowly develop this mental link everyone hoped for, and Grace never felt it spark to life. He just shrugged it off. Not that it would stop him from loving Rocky all the same, chemicals and fate could jump off a roof with his best regards.
And so they continued their way to Rocky's planet without too many worries.
That was. Until small things started to happen.
Actually, they weren't even really worth mentioning. It happened only two to three times at best, but each time they managed to scare him out of his skin, so much so that he couldn't help but notice it.
.
It started on a random day in the Mary.
He had been trying to track the days in a report log even after sending the video feeds in the Beetle, just so he could keep a feeling of rationality. Remaining stuck inside a small ship where light never shone, except for artificial LED lamps, had a way to wriggle in his mind and his thoughts. Humans were made for change. No matter how small, the lack of day and nighttime had been progressively weighing on Grace's mind. Who knew he would miss waking up at the crack of dawn out of his bed to greet disgruntled kids at 7:30 AM sharp? But on the spaceship, he could sleep however long he wanted, and it never changed a thing. He could even ask Mary to change the time at which to turn on and off the lights whenever he pleased, messing with his sleep schedule so that he could stay awake for 20h, or sleep for 18h. It had been convenient at first, but then the reality of it had been utterly depressing.
And so he had tried to keep up with dates, but even that had the negative effect of making him look at the dozen upon dozen of lines he'd drawn to signify the days passing by. It took up pages of his notepad and after reaching the five-hundredth, he just... tore the page and set it on fire with a small blowtorch from the lab equipment (who the hell thought it intelligent to carry a flammable object inside a spaceship?).
Of course, his reckless behaviour had triggered a ton of alarms all over the spaceship, the Mary's lights turning a vivid red with warnings blasting everywhere. Grace had to holler above everyone else that he had it under control! (he didn't) before the problem was resolved. All that remained was a charred notebook, days that didn't make sense anymore, and a bruised ego. And an admonishing Rocky.
Following this, he'd moped inside his bedroom for the rest of the day (banned from his own lab. Since when had Rocky been in command of his ship? Not that he'll resent the Eridian for that, but he did complain about it to Mary, who stayed conveniently silent, even when he called out to her, whining).
Bored out of his mind, he’d begun to doodle a bit. Then tried to solve some math equations but it only managed to keep him focused for an hour. Then he was back to being bored. He needed a real challenge, but everything was in his lab…
“Oh shoot, where did I put my pen…” Grace mumbled.
He had been sure he had put it behind his ear. A terrible habit indeed, as it made his glasses unstable on his nose and he never tried to appropriately put them back, even when they slid over his nose and on top of his mouth.
He sighed and decided, “That’s it, I’m coming back!” he’d exclaimed, certain that Rocky heard him across the ship, clapping his hands on his thighs and stomping back to his lab, not Rocky’s.
Thankfully, his grounding didn't last long and soon enough, he was back to bickering with Rocky.
It was during one of those times, as they waved around excitedly in front of the newly blank and shiny whiteboard, that it happened.
It was when he put a hand inside his pants pockets and immediately, his skin touched something... moist.
He inhaled sharply, his eyes widening, and he immediately retracted his hand, staring in horror at the red he saw coating his skin. Rocky had fallen subitly silent as he watched with mounting horror his fingers, fat droplets of red liquid running down his fingers, staining his palm and back of his hands as if he'd just thrust his hand in a bucket of... goo...
Against his better judgment and before he could even think about it, he brought his hand to his nose and took a tentative sniff, grimacing and coughing from the stench of iron so potent it made his eyes water and skin unconsciously stinging like a placebo effect.
"Grace alright, Grace why stop, question!" Rocky demanded, unsettled by Grace freezing on the spot and stopping his argument mid-sentence.
The mechanical voice of the translator seemed to reboot Grace's brain and the reality of... red liquid that smelled like iron and had the consistency of blood came rushing to his mind. He couldn't help it, he screamed. A small and short yell of fear, waving his hand like a madman and droplets flying everywhere on his clothes and around him. Rocky's thrills turned frantic as well while he hopped on his feet several times, flailing with his arms, looking like he wanted to tear his hand apart in his growing panic.
"Grace! Grace!" Rocky was saying, along with a garble of noises that the translator couldn't pick up.
Meanwhile, Grace's mind was a series of static noise as he went cross-eyed looking at his reddened hand that kept on dripping everywhere, but also inside his sleeves. He almost swore once, as he was wearing his favourite white cardigan and he didn't want to either burn or throw away this particular cloth if it ended up contaminated. He glared upwards, towards where he thought Mary was, perplexed when she didn’t start sounding the alarm, but then the implication of it made him blanch even more.
Almost tripping over Rocky's hamster ball and ignoring his furious hums, he rushed towards the bathroom and thrust his hand under the water spray, watching despondently as the water turned reddish, staining the sides of the sink as well. Rocky barrelled into his side not ten seconds after, making him stumble. Thankfully, his hand had come clear and he only had time to throw up his arm, his elbow taking the brunt of his fall, before Rocky was passing his small pen-convertor into his face, searching for any injury his Eridian sense wouldn't pick up.
"I'm fine! I'm fine, I'm sorry! Or, I think I am... God you're heavy, please get up, I can't breathe-" he squealed, trying to push Rocky away.
The Eridian froze and then stumbled out of Grace's body. "Everything alright, question! Grace scream and wriggle!"
Looking at the side, he could see that Rocky had managed to follow him, pushing the translator with him as he caught up with Grace's mad dash towards the bathroom. It now lay like a dead fish on the floor, in the corridor, yet the voice managed to look panicked.
"I did not-" he began, pointing with a finger, but he immediately froze when he used his still-wet hand.
Thankfully, the water had done most of the job removing the liquid from his hand, but there remained a few stubborn stains that made his skin look irritated. He blanched and scrambled to stand up while Rocky let out another deep and long thrill that could very well be translated with a frustrated sigh from any human mouth.
"I touched blood. Lots of it," he supplied tonelessly, looking at his hand as if it was... ah, alien.
There was a pause in Rocky's string of noises and then a tentative: "Blood inside humans, question?"
"It's not mine," he immediately said, shaking his head.
Still, he did a cursory check of his whole body, making sure to try to sense if he sensed any sudden pain, but he felt perfectly fine. He even slapped his other hand onto his forehead, but aside from the red of his cheeks from the panic he had just felt, he didn't feel feverish. Hell, he could even do a small jog across the Mary just fine (he probably would more often if things weren't cluttered everywhere, threatening to spill over at the smallest brush of his body. He missed exercising sometimes other than his small workout routine, crammed in his bedroom and body wedged between the bed and the wall).
"There was blood on my hand. God. I think that’s not blood. But it felt like it, when I..." he trailed off when his eyes fell onto his pocket.
His pants were nice. He had foregone the EVA suit a long time ago after leaving Tau Ceti, preferring comfier clothes. Right now, it was a beige pair of pants. A bit used at the knees and thin on the back from too much sitting around, but he liked them! The awareness of his legs tripled instantly as his eyes fell, his skin becoming oversensitive at the brush of fabric against him. The sides of his hipbones, where his pockets were, seemed to burn. But no matter what his mind conjured, all the more grotesque than the other, his eyes showed and proved to him that there was nothing. There was no stain in his pants that could suggest an injury, or even a vial he was mindlessly carrying around and suddenly breaking when he moved too much, spilling its liquid everywhere on him.
The fabric was spotless. Still beige, comfortable, soft to the touch, if not for the hypersensitivity of his skin. His pants were harmless.
And yet, it felt like he was carrying a nuclear bomb all of a sudden.
"Uh, Rocky, did I dream any of it?" he muttered.
Rocky perked up and did an Eridian rendition of 'tilting one's head to the side in sign of confusion'.
"Rocky not see anything. Grace not sleep, no dream, statement," he said in the end.
"Yeah... Reassuring..." He snorted. "I, uh... I'm going to the lab for a sec."
"Grace came from lab! Of course come back to lab after run away!" Rocky answered like Grace was an idiot.
Perhaps he was, he thought as he grimly marched towards the lab, his hand burning.
They did some quick test samples.
Turned out it truly was blood.
Human blood.
Grace should have been more than a little freaked out, but his scientist mind was dumbfounded by the discovery instead, sitting mouth agape and looking at his microscope as if willing it to show him something other than human blood cells. Because that was impossible.
After seeing the results, he had scrambled to get out of his clothes, looking and patting his whole body down with mounting dread, but his body was fine. His body was still in top shape, he didn't feel any pain, and even Armando told him he didn't have anything life-threatening at the moment.
So how could blood have made its way inside his pant pocket!?
He even turned it inside out, and wow, there was a lot of blood staining the interior fabric, but it hadn't... leaked! The tissue had absorbed it all, but it didn’t go anywhere else! The skin of his thighs had been spotless, not even a small bloody stain! And yet as soon as he put his finger back in, he had to suppress a shiver of disgust as his fingerpads made contact with the viscuousity of the liquid.
Rocky had even tried to stretch a limb through his barrier and put it inside the pocket, but the xenonite barrier had remained clean.
They had compared his bloodied finger and Rocky's spotless barrier silently, at a loss for words.
Then, it had hit him, and he exclaimed with a surprised little oh!, eyes widening in wonder and astonishment.
These kinds of strange things, unexplainable yet very present in one’s life, could only be the result of a soulmate!
He had heard tales of people ending up bewildered and lost whenever something almost fantastical and magical happened. He had even heard of a pair sometimes matching their movements or something. The story went along the line: if they concentrated enough, they could push their soulmate to mimic their movements. They had managed to master it, forming a sort of Morse code with their hands to communicate easily over kilometres, which had won them a few years of TV celebrity. When interviewed, they had said they hadn't understood what was happening to their bodies at first, thinking themselves going crazy or developing a disease each time their limbs moved against their will. Until one day, one of the pair had tried some sort of ASL signs on a whim and had been scared out of their skin when their body had answered back. And the rest was history.
Was that what Grace was experiencing? Soulmate shenanigan?
He burst out laughing incredulously.
He had spent his whole life ignoring soulmates, simply because he hadn't put too much importance on a fated pair when he had been happy with his life as a teacher (granted, as a scholar, he had had a few questions of his own, and as a microbiologist, he had indulged in a few silly experiments, but those drives had quickly dulled over the years). But now, in a spaceship that was supposed to kill him at the end of the day, now that he was en route with another alien and sealed his fate, accepting the fact he wouldn't see Earth ever again, now he was getting signs of his soulmate?
Was that even possible? Like, he was light-years away from Earth, time dilation and all. Could the link between two people be so strong that it could travel that far? Did that mean that Earth was still striving? Was his soulmate even human?
Well. He looked down again at his microscope.
At least the blood was human, so that probably meant his soulmate had human blood?
So Earth was... Alive and well?
He felt tears building in his eyes, and he furiously blinked them away. No way he would begin to think back about Earth. He had put a cross on this planet and yet...
Was fate this cruel that they would reveal a soulmate to him when he couldn't meet them? Star-crossed lovers or something? He had seen a few cheesy romances about that kind of trope. He had reluctantly admitted it had a certain dreamy appeal.
That didn't mean he wanted to have any part of it!
But... Earth was alive. So his soulmate was... well?
As soon as this thought crossed his mind, he paled drastically.
Oh no, this was human blood!
Did that mean that his soulmate was in danger? What did that blood mean? How even did that soulmate link work?! Did that mean he could receive a chunk of his soulmate's body whenever needed? Whenever they were in peril? Whenever they wanted?
What did that even mean???
Were they injured? Did they want Grace injured?!
Why send blood of all things?!
The most dumb thing someone 'sent' their soulmate something was either a middle finger (the soulmate gesture mimic pair), random curses (the case of soulmates hearing each other’s thoughts) or something silly (like those that could change their appearance to match their soulmates’), not straight up blood!
Oh god, was his soulmate part of the mafia, and they had sent him blood as a way to say fuck you for not being here or something?
Wait, was it even possible? The identity of a soulmate was never truly revealed. Most of the time, the pair had to work together to figure out each other's names. If he took the example of the pair of soulmates that spoke with hand movements, they had quickly spelt out their names in ASL and an address to meet. His soulmate couldn't know that he was Ryland Grace, Earth's "hero" (he hated that word) launched (against his will) in the Hail Mary on a suicide mission, right?
Then what else?
Was his soulmate trying to tell him they were dying?
Were they threatening him somehow for something he hadn't technically done?!
Grace almost passed out, hyperventilating in panic, while Rocky violently poked him to try to wake him up.
.
.
.
On the other side of the universe, a man was confusedly holding onto a pen.
It shone and glimmered under the light, as good as new.
What was the C.O.I thinking? Were they trying to mock him? To psycho-torture him by reminding him he had nothing: no food, no water, no light, nothing that mattered, except for a new, shiny pen?
He still looked at his smudged fingers, darkened by the wet and slimy tube of… grease… rolled with a piece of paper he had been using to update his map.
He shrugged, pen in hand.
If they thought he would give up with just a few mockeries, they underestimated him.
He would use that pen, even just as a final middle finger to them, if it was the last thing he'd do.
He went back to his terminal, gritting his teeth.
He clenched the lever with all his remaining strength, cursing that damn speaker to hell and back.
He stabbed the pen inside the manual in his anger.
It never broke.
He continued to use it, and even after drawing a map that took up all of his side wall, it never ran out of ink.
He continued to use it.
Until the bitter end.
.
.
.