Paint the Sky with Stars
Series Metadata
Listing Series
-
I Thought Love was a Kind of Emptiness by Anonymous
Fandoms: Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary - All Media Types, Project Hail Mary (2026), Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
14 Jun 2026
Tags
Summary
Grace’s short history of relationships taught him that maybe he was just childish. Maybe he just— maybe he didn’t want a relationship. Maybe he just wanted a best friend who wouldn't leave him when they got married. That he was the one that was the problem.
Adults had sex. That was a fact of life. They fell in love and love meant sex and that was just how it was. If you didn’t want to have sex then you weren’t really in love. Sure sex didn’t equate to love— people had flings all the time— but romance and sex were the kind of things that went together. So Grace had just— accepted the words of his girlfriends. That maybe he just never actually loved them the way he thought he did. Maybe he just liked them and tied the thought of romance to it so that he could monopolize their time. That all just came together so maybe he actually was just leading these women on. All of them gave him everything he needed in a relationship but he’d never been able to be what they needed. Wasn’t that selfish? Wasn’t that cruel?
Alternatively: Grace is alloromantic asexual. This is traumatizing in many ways. Not for Rocky though. Rocky's perfectly okay with being in love and never having sex.
Series
- Part 1 of Paint the Sky with Stars