Archive of Our Own

4,792 EARTH DAYS / V∀VIℓ+ ERIDIAN DAYS INTO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

"Are we recording, question?"

"Yeah, you know the drill." Grace laughs and eases back into the sleeping nook of angular xenonite. It's less 'easing back' than 'wriggling in' lately; their injuries from the fishing trip on Adrian have seen Rocky get more anxious about sleeping close and Grace get less claustrophobic about a 300kg-ish rock creature sitting six inches above his ribcage. In his case, the fact that said rock creature is now notably less than his prior recorded weight has a lot to do with it. Not even the translated friction of wriggling on burns is enough to counteract the near-opioid relief of seeing Rocky, scarred but alive, the moment he opens his eyes. "You talk, it'll capture, I'll get the whole thing even if I drop off. We can…" He stifles a groan as he gets his pillows situated. "…handle word additions as needed. Or later."

Grace's body is one line of ache even with every soft surface in the ship pressed into a cocoon, so he thinks his odds of missing Rocky's cultural exchange here are slim to none even if he weren't so curious. Rocky has to be feeling similarly, though when Grace imagines the combination pain/body horror of losing a significant portion of his dermis, having key organs and bone structures so close to the surface it feels like a wrong step could spill them out into the air… he thinks about literally anything else as fast as he can. Suffice to say they are simultaneously both the coolest and most breakable guys in the universe right now, and while their triumph in reintroducing predation to astrophage's previously unopposed interstellar expansionist kick deserves all the party it got, it maybe also deserves one to two weeks of minimal movement.

A new clock is running now that the astrophage crisis clock has zeroed, the 'Days We Can Reasonably Allocate to Recovery Before the Fates of Our Species Require Our Separation and Multi-year Solitary Sojourns Home' clock (pithier name pending). With very little scientific ground to cover that won't offer a tantalizing but doomed glimpse into a lifetime of study neither of them will get to pursue, they're taking some risks. They're elaborating on some of the stuff they pushed past each other under the catch-all conversation stopper of "it's a cultural thing."

Even so, they sit in silence for an uncharacteristically long moment after Grace gives Rocky the floor.

"You don't have to get into it if it's, you know, an eating-level taboo," Grace reminds Rocky. "Obviously I want to snoop into every part of your life, especially because you were so cagey about Adrian, but, really, if it's…"

He trails off, trying to figure out how he would explain or even suggest some of the human 'well that's not technically cool but I guess if you love each other' romantic analogues, on a scale from "teacher-student thing but it was in college so it's just Diet Unethical" to "got married in Vegas while blackout drunk and found we could still hang." While he thinks, Rocky eases into what Grace thinks of as his True Loaf Pose and sub-vocalizes just outside of speaking notes. Humming to himself. He didn't do that when they first met, and Grace wonders how this little human quirk, this fingerprint he's left on his friend, will be seen when he's home. He hopes it's with affection. That's what Grace feels when he takes the cue to wait for Rocky to get his thoughts in order.

"I make assumption," Rocky begins. "♬♯! Do not say the thing about human anatomy, it is stupid stupid!" Grace laughs. "—but it is true. Seems… erroneous assumption, now. I assume because ♩♪̷♫♪♬♬ not mentioned, and situation with previous mate disrupt by evil Mark—"

"Okay, he's not actually evil, he works for the Forest Service or something—" Grace feels compelled to say even as Rocky talks over him.

"—♩♪̷♫♪♬♬ not discuss means ♩♪̷♫♪♬♬ private, maybe ♩♪̷♫♪♬♬ problem due to relative human lifespan—"

"Sorry, holdup, I'm not getting the main word you're saying, that—" He clears his throat and attempts the notes instead of wriggling back out for the laptop-cludge. "—'♩♪̷♫♪♬♬'. What is that?"

Rocky thinks about this. "Need a word. Difficult word. Culture-romance word. Inclination. Unchanging inclination."

"'Orientation'? As in sexual or romantic orientation? A desire set that makes a person an outlier but can't be changed?"

Oh boy. Grace hasn't had reason to speculate on what kind of 5D-chess-level orientation-based exclusions might exist on Erid, which is a little wild, because even as a biologist he knows the social is predicated on its exclusions— but 'the social' right now is the two of them clinging to each other on a level past co-dependency verging on clinical symbiosis, sooo. He's speculating now, though. Rock homophobia? Grace is a middle school teacher from San Francisco, so his career has to some extent prepared him to establish a safe space under any and all conditions including active gunfire, but 'on a planet where I can't survive' is a logistical challenge he's glad he won't be facing.

Rocky spikes an annoyed hiss out of the audible spectrum. "No. Like… direction, but not preference. No choice. The always no choice."

"No choice?" Grace's brows draw together. "Uh, there's 'fate,' as in like, a situation that was always going to be?"

"Close but not," Rocky says. "Like that, but good. Happy happy happy. Love."

It hits Grace so completely out of left field he cracks up. "You don't mean cynosure?"

"How can I know what don't mean with one word. Stupid! Context." He lays down an emphatic stomp. "Synonyms!"

"Oh, jeez. I didn't think this would come up, what a weird…" But Rocky looks very serious and, to be fair, Grace had wheedled for the get-together story apparently related to this. He wracks his brain. "'Cynosure' started as a term in navigation, I think on the ocean? It meant you were following the light of a very bright star to maintain direction on a 'course', like you said, only it started to be used for this idea of…" He waves his hands vaguely. "…a fated relationship. Or the pull towards it— it became interchangeable, replaced a lot of compound words like 'heart's-bearing' and 'love-reckoning' and 'soulmate', and even weirder stuff like 'cardial direction'. That last one's not gonna translate but it's an unforgivable pun, trust me."

Rocky is scrunched forward over his forelegs and cants his body in the way Grace thinks of as his Single Eyebrow Raise, which only makes him laugh again.

"Why Grace laugh, question?" Rocky asks, his tap-tap emphasis very immediate on xenonite so close to his skin.

"Well, cynosure is like horoscopes—" Grace starts, but Christ, horoscopes have also just never come up. "I need a word. It's a culture thing, something based on primitive science and history but still engaged with in modern times, like a pop culture thing?" He trails off, because the Single Eyebrow Raise has gained the bowed-leg posture of sadness Grace associates with grief in Rocky. "Sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that you… What's with the look, Rock?"

"Cynosure Grace's relativity," Rocky says in a near-monotone. "Sad sad sad."

Grace's whole face scrunches at that. "What? No, Rocky, I thought you got that relativity is a thing that seems fake but is very real—"

"Cynosure Grace's relativity, statement," Rocky repeats. "Quiet. Listen."

-128,568 EARTH DAYS / -Vℓ∀λ∀VℓV ERIDIAN DAYS PRIOR TO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

In approximately 1665, Sir Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity by having an apple fall on his head. The (probably apocryphal) detail of the apple derailed Grace and Rocky's discussion for about an hour, Rocky looking for a line between Newton's discovery and the sketch Grace had given him of the Earth religions he was most (minimally) qualified to speak to when he explained the name of the Hail Mary. This made a little more sense when his explanation of Erid's conception of cynosure resumed.

About 1,379 Earth years earlier, beating humanity to the punch on a scientific idea in a way both satisfying and sort of inevitable given conditions on the planet, an Eridian scientific philosopher first articulated both the theory of gravity and a pillar of Eridian culture across thrums and collectives up to the present day:

Gravity is the first love which draws all things of Erid towards itself.

To all but the most unspiritual Eridians, gravity is a cynosure. It is an inexorable pull in the direction of a thing you shouldn't be parted from, of deep emotional, spiritual, and practical significance. If you never experience another cynosure that is alright, because all the proof you need that you are beloved is to trip and fall down. It's a platitude Eridians offer friends unlucky with mates, and a significant facet of the manifesto distributed by two radical anti-space-travel sects Rocky's version of the Hail Mary mission reckoned with ahead of launch.

Gravity is the first love you will ever know.

That speaks to the Ryland Grace who last experienced a transcendental moment watching astrophage dancing above an alien planet. It also makes him deeply embarrassed to give a gloss of humanity's idea of cynosure, which his analytical mind still isn't entirely willing to say is the same as the Eridian concept. He has to turn to Wikipedia to satisfy Rocky's desire for detail.

In Newton's time, cynosure was one of the grand romantic concepts, tied to Plato's conception of humans as split beings continually seeking their other half. When walking aimlessly in the world, your steps would inexorably lead you towards your soulmate. This is how Odysseus finally returned to Penelope, what brought Layla and Majnun's remains together after a lifetime separated, this draw to Lancelot the only force that could sunder Arthur and Guinevere, and what elevated the impossible love of far-wandering Krishna and anchored Radha to an aspect of divinity. The idea of automatic walking pointing every person in the direction of waiting love went beyond convergent cultural evolution or multiple discovery. It was accepted as universal for centuries; in both imperial Mali and Ming Dynasty China, a partner too frequently looking in a specific direction could be presented as legal evidence of infidelity. It was a lasting, compelling, apparently proven truth.

Like… astrology. Or the humoral theory of medicine. Or the existence of dragons— at least in Grace's mind.

-616 EARTH DAYS / -VIVVℓ ERIDIAN DAYS PRIOR TO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

"No, come on, just because I mentioned cancelling plans tonight doesn't mean I was volunteering for a detention period," Grace whinges as Vice Principal Vivienne Li looks down at him, unimpressed. "I was— Oh jeez, I am so behind on grading. That's why I cancelled, and it proves my dedication, and what kind of reward for that is—"

To his credit, he cuts off the whining as five kids trudge into his maximally fun classroom to serve what he feels is an outmoded and useless form of punishment.

"Wait— Rekha, Jamie, what gives?" he asks, interested despite himself. He looks back to Vivienne. "Jamie's dad will vapor lock if he finds out his kid got a detention. What the heck happened?"

"It's not worth re-litigating," Vivienne says, which means he will absolutely be re-litigating it with these kids for the next pointless hour. She smiles and pats the packed satchel slung on his desk. "Besides, you can grade here just as well as at home, right, Mr. Grace? This isn't supposed to be fun for them."

Yeah, okay, challenge accepted.

"Beanbag is Lava: Emotional Honesty Edition, you know the drill," he says, snapping the little knit Earth over to one of the kids he doesn't know with an underhand toss given force by a smack from his left hand. "Name, grade, why were you banished to my dungeon."

"Uh, I'm Avery," she says, tossing the beanbag between hands. "Seventh. I climbed on the table to see the fight and the table broke."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. A fight?" Grace gestures for Avery to toss the beanbag back and sends it towards Jamie. "What is this, my old middle school? What gives?"

Jamie looks sour as he catches the beanbag, so sour for a second that Grace wonders if he will violate the inviolable rule of Mr. Grace's Beanbag is Lava. Ultimately he wings it with unnecessary force at Rekha and says, "She started it."

"I did not start it!" Rekha snaps as she bobbles the beanbag to keep it from hitting the floor. "I only said Olivia was being stupid because, even if that was real, it's not for picking pizza or veggie burger—"

"Over to Olivia," Grace directs, and when Rekha makes the pass, he turns a sympathetic smile on the girl sitting hunched in her seat as she kneads the beanbag. "Hi, Olivia. Choice paralysis is a thing. Tough lunch?"

"I just saw a video about it, okay?" Olivia snaps, more at Rekha than him, so upset and so furiously stuffing her tears down under anger Grace can see how the emotion—mixed with Rekha's drive to be accurate in all things, if not kind—maybe touched something off. "I wanted to try it and see if anything happened! You're just pissed because you don't have a soulmate!"

Oh. Oh God. Not only is it this again, the fact that it's this means his day has a thematic through-line, and that more than anything makes his shoulders slump. Grace pulls it together for his kids, though. "Let me guess. You said you were going to go the direction you were pulled in the lunch line, Olivia, and then things got a little heated?"

"It's not real!" Rekha insists. "It's just random, or probably you already knew you wanted pizza and had to make it a thing, but either way it's dumb—"

Jamie jumps back in. "Soulmates are real. When my Mom and Dad got separated, Mom got back across the desert with it. The pizza thing's stupid, whatever, but don't act like you know everything when you don't!"

"I just wanted to try it! It's not that deep!" Olivia hisses.

"Junior, um, eighth grade," the last kid in the room says, raising his hand for lack of beanbag. "I also got up on a table and broke it on accident. Can I go?"

"No? Don't climb on tables? I'll get back to you and Avery, just, hang tight, let me—" Grace makes a gesture for calm with his hands and leans forward in his seat. "Let's take this down a notch. Olivia, you found a hypothesis you wanted to test, and it's okay to give it a try. Jamie has some evidence that compels him, and Rekha's got a healthy dose of skepticism. Nobody's in the wrong here, just… coming at the idea from different angles."

"Wrong angles!" Rekha insists. "It's not proven, it's just a thing people like the idea of, like, like— Bigfoot!"

Jamie looks ready to pop off. Grace steps in again quickly. "False equivalence, Rekha. There are so many things in our world that seemed crazy but turned out to be true. Remember the history of plate tectonics?" He girds himself to say the next part. "There's more data in the record to support the theory of cynosure than cryptids, and it's worth keeping that in mind, especially with things that are… subjective, or drawn from lived experience."

"I want her to say she's sorry," Jamie demands.

"I'm not doing that," Rekha says. "Olivia kicked me."

"Wait, what?"

"Yeah," Avery says to Grace like it was obvious, "that's why people got on tables."

In the middle of this, Grace nearly takes the beanbag to the nose because of a quick toss from Olivia, probably a diversion. "Mr. Grace, do you think soulmates are real?"

Five pairs of eyes pin him in place sitting on the edge of his desk.

There's no way she can know his cancelled plans for tonight were a Tinder date. She can't know it was with a guy who didn't have any compasses or coded messages in his bio, but at the last minute requested they meet at a park instead of their planned restaurant so he could, "see which direction things were going at the top 😉". Grace has obviously never confided in any of his students how mortifying it is to find out somebody's a "cardial direction" truther because she's been watching you trip over all the stuff you helped her move into your apartment, and (three months in!) finally decided that when you course correct, it isn't towards her. That it's really frustrating as a man in his mid-thirties to be so conscious of his own feet just because he wants… something. He doesn't even know what. It doesn't have to be Ultimate Love. He kind of just wants someone to spend time with. It's impossible for Olivia or Jamie or Rekha to know this, but the longer he's silent, the more they'll draw their own conclusions, and he doesn't want to end up as a Tiktok saga or something.

"That's a challenging and, uh, often personal question." He offers a thin smile and a shrug. "I'm your science teacher. You know me. I'll always want more data, and want to question some of the accepted principles—what constitutes 'unconscious movement', how do two bodies acting under this force affect direction, what's with excluded variations in romantic desire and number of partners—" Eyes are glazing, okay. "—but, on its face, the idea that people who would be good for each other will, on a long enough timeline, find each other? It's… a nice thought."

Kids are smart. They can do really stupid stuff, but the average parent vastly underestimates how much the kids in their life pick up what they're putting down. Nobody likes his answer, but they knew he wasn't going to outright pick sides, so it's down to interpretation. Jamie sits back in a huff. Rekha preens. Avery and Junior are watching the clock.

"I think so too, Mr. Grace," Olivia says. "That's why I wanted to try it. But… I also kinda wanted pizza."

He laughs. "That's an explicable phenomena if there ever was one, but, seriously: don't kick Rekha."

Rekha looks indignant. "I kicked her back. Harder!"

"You kicked me because you suck," Jamie says, but drops it when Grace gives them all a look.

"Again, no more fighting, no more climbing on tables—what are you all, five?—but let's keep thinking about this stuff!" Adult mediation done and wisdom dispensed, his mind zips towards anything more interesting. He claps, stands, and goes to the whiteboard, punching the button to get his projector booted on the way. "One thing the idea of cynosure did was get people moving around even when lack of food and the dangers of travel usually kept early humans close to home." He pivots on his heel and wings the Earth beanbag back into the group. "Think fast! What's the average walking speed of an able-bodied adult?"

4,792 EARTH DAYS / V∀VIℓ+ ERIDIAN DAYS INTO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

"Time is key," Rocky cuts in on Grace's reminiscence. "Humans have very short time to cover distances. That cynosure happen ever, amaze."

"So, what, Eridians do thousand mile, hundred year marches for love?" Grace asks.

Rocky shudders with his version of laughter. "When there is skill issue. I find Adrian on third medium continent in seventeen Earth years." He does a proud stance momentarily, limbs clacking together. "Calculate route with many many recordings of directional indicators aggregate, analyze. Big math. Adrian impress impress impress. Easy mate."

"You're taking a copy of this home so Adrian can hear you call them easy," Grace teases him, nestling under his blanket to cover the fact he did lean up in interest at the mention of Rocky applying experimental methodology to the situation. "That's your romantic story? I thought you were going to tell me about an Eridian gap year, being young and wild and braving the unboiling sea to find true love. Don't get me wrong, I wanna see the spreadsheet, but—"

"Three years was spreadsheet. Was hard— Adrian also moving, first walk traditional like Grace say. I not blame them." He shuffles a bit, maybe irritated or bashful? "Went many places, try many things, make many friends just walking while I gather data."

Grace grins through a surge of fondness. He can imagine Adrian telling Rocky about all the incredible things they saw while Rocky was crunching numbers, Rocky maybe thinking of his lowest points in the lab, beating his carapace against a wall. Grace is starting to remember having those kinds of dates. He raises a hand from his quilt to press to the xenonite and gets a press in return.

"Even without no thoughts walking," Rocky continues, voice all reflective low harmonies under the computer translation, "was nice time. Is cultural thing to do first time. Other Eridians host in home, give food, you just follow cynosure. Some Eridians, yes, take hundreds of Earth years and more following."

"I… I guess that does negate anything I was gonna say about relative use of time," Grace concedes. "Humans who really believe in it might spend years backpacking, but otherwise looking for a relationship is…"

He tapers off there, realizing he doesn't have a conclusion to the thought. Rocky taps the barrier between them to sharpen his view of Grace. He clears his throat and tries to do his friend the favor of explaining, even if every word makes him feel worse.

"…it's something you have to make time for. I think, though cultures vary across Earth, mine prioritized spending years of study and experience like that on finding a career. And I did that! I studied and worked for most of my life on that, didn't put time into anything else, and then…" He flares his fingers out and mimics the sound of an explosion. "Denmark."

"Grace forget Denmark, statement," Rocky insists with some aggravation. "Denmark so over. Grace find better job as school teacher anyway. But… really no time spent on cynosure, question? For 'most of life', question?"

"I've never experienced cynosure," Grace says with firmness he learned to present on every date where it came up. When Rocky starts to give him Single Eyebrow Raise again he holds his hands palms up. "Nuh-uh, dude. I mean it. I didn't spend seventeen years on it, but I did my time experimenting. I never had a consistent direction of 'automatic movement' or even a statistically significant amount of looking one way or another. Any drift in casual, day-to-day experimentation could always be explained: turned out I was accidentally following a noise, or a smell, or I saw light reflecting off water or something."

"Grace stupid, question?" Rocky asks with no heat, just his sort of pitchy resignation. "Grace consider all directions, question?"

"Are there secret directions known only to Eridians?" Grace shoots back. "Yeah, Rocky, I considered all directions. Nothing. So, you know, while I acknowledge centuries of tradition and anecdotal evidence and stuff around it, I couldn't verify it, so I… didn't believe in it." He amends. "I don't believe in it on Earth. I'm willing to acknowledge that it does seem more feasible on Erid, and I'm even more open to it as a phenomena if it's like some weird, genetic memory evidence for the panspermia hypothesis—"

"Cynosure Grace's relativity, statement statement statement," Rocky repeats. "But Grace stupid now from no sleep. Talk more later."

"Good night to you, too, Rock," Grace mutters, but when he asks Mary to hit the lights and positions himself to try sleeping, no dice.

He gives it the old college try. He especially works to slow and pace his breathing for Rocky's sake, so he can shift his focus from Grace going to sleep and do whatever he's going to do during, Grace's basically correct sounds background noise. Sometimes when he's done that, just controlling his breath helps him slip away.

But… he can't this time. He's kind of worked up. He's had his lack of 'pull' not taken seriously by plenty of people big into it, but for Rocky to cast it aside with so much confidence rubs him the wrong way. They fit together so well otherwise. As colleagues, as friends, as marooned 'heroes' using each other to stay sane. It unearths these little memories of teaching and the wall he would run into sometimes with parents. He'd offer advice based on spending most of each week with their kid and wanting to see that kid do well, then be told it was unrealistic or he didn't know what he was talking about, and back when he used to argue, when he had the energy for that, he'd inevitably run into: 'you don't have children, so you don't understand.' It was the same thing with married friends— never put that pointedly, just an unexpected barrier he'd glimpse between how he and they lived. Grace would spend a whole night chatting with a couple who'd then turn to each other and talk apparently only with their eyes. He'd know they had the experience of something, were part of something, that he fundamentally wasn't; that was setting aside the four couples he knew who specifically told cynosure meet-cute stories.

Aside from the literal xenonite keeping their atmospheres from killing each other, he and Rocky hadn't seemed to have any walls left between them.

His breath hitches as he hears Stratt in his head, the recovered memory still panic-inducing, saying, you don't even have a dog—

"Grace stop fake sleep start real sleep now, statement," Rocky cuts in, exasperated.

Grace scrubs his hand over his face, works his knuckles into his swollen eyes, sucks in a shaking breath. Makes himself sound sure when he lies and says, "Yeah, yeah, I am."

4,818 EARTH DAYS / V∀V+λℓ ERIDIAN DAYS INTO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

If there's more to the story of Rocky and Adrian's apparently fated meeting, Grace doesn't get it, the both of them subsequently consumed by taumoeba packing and disentangling their ships. Their lives. Rocky has to put a lot of effort into getting the Hail Mary and Blip-A reconnected and his heaps of luggage moved back over. They have one more cultural jam session on xenophobia/philia in human scifi entertainment that Grace tried to forestall but, through the machinations of fate and Rocky watching FarScape in the Don't Go Crazy Room, he had to concede to discussing. It goes well, all things considered. If Rocky did make some pointed, borderline sarcastic comments that Grace's clearly disintegrating brain wanted to construe as loaded, well, see the above disintegration. Four years on his own getting back to Earth on top of all this is going to make him really interesting.

(He's blaming Rocky's ready answer to one of the open questions that's always plagued him about cynosure: monogamy. Grace had just been wondering about Adrian and Rocky reuniting after so long apart and alone! Rocky answered with a non-answer, pure incredulity, hadn't he said first time when explaining cultural support of cynosure? Going on a trip for a second time when you had a 'cynosure thrum' was the frivolous thing to do. Rocky had made a dismissive flattening gesture with three limbs, his Big Eyeroll. "Cynosure strongest at physical maturity. Generational cycle ongoing, obvious obvious. Let Eridian with soft joints do walking."

It was such a well-intentioned question for how much it haunted him! He kept thinking about an Eridian of vague description, Adrian, turning away from waiting at the Eridian space elevator and towards someone new. About Rocky marooned in space, able to walk as much as he wanted in the Blip-A, but going absolutely nowhere.

Not helpful thoughts. Not any of his business! Just disintegration.)

Grace drifts in zero G on his ship while Rocky's away, trying to let his muscles relax, bad nights of sleep and physical recovery plaguing him with aches. He adjusts the float using the xenonite tunnels that replaced his rope lines throughout the corridors. He idly studies an open electrical panel in front of him, the labels in Simplified Chinese and Cyrillic and Roman alphabets kept short so it all fits. There is no up like this, not really, but there is a way he wants to be oriented in spite of that, and it bothers him when he spins too far around.

"Hey Mary?" he blurts. "What's the relationship of Blip-A to the aft transit corridor breaker panel?"

"Blip-A is directly adjacent to the aft transit corridor breaker panel at a distance of 0.8 kilometers."

In front. If spatial directions had any meaning, Blip-A would be in front of this panel from Grace's point of view. In front of him…

…which of course he knew because the panel is on the same side of the ship as the airlock. Duh.

It's good that he has preparations for both their return journeys to focus on. He can forget about weird moments like this, and that last cultural conversation, and work harder at trying to forget another part of their conversation on cynosure that keeps ringing in his head.

Grace consider all directions, question?

So, the thing is, yes… and no. Unless your soulmate is a commercial pilot or a miner, there are two directions you discard when thinking about cynosure: up and down. So Grace discarded them. Only now he can't stop thinking about them, the ready way Rocky asked, like his precise crystalline mind was one step ahead, again, but he could wait for Grace to catch up.

Grace had a dream last night. He dreamed that when he was a kid, his parents got him a telescope. Nothing fancy, just the sort of thing a layman could splash out a bit on at Christmas, re-giftable if worst came to worst. Grace dreamed of this, and remembered that he got into studying science thinking he might become an astronomer because he all but wore the thing out. Next Christmas brought him an upgrade his parents took him to a hobby shop to pick out for himself. He used it night and day to look at different objects, and even without it often found himself looking up to pick out constellations.

In the dream were snatches of older memory. Little things that suggested his parents may or may not have gotten him the telescope because he had the habit of watching the sky before— but the telescope, an Orion Celestron C-4.5 with the deluxe accessory package, is verifiable in the archived internet Stratt sent with him, and this dream of an idea of a habit is not.

(It's wishful thinking. Grace isn't stupid or self-ignorant enough not to know that part of his deep-seated aggravation with the cultural fixation on cynosure is that he hasn't felt it. Building calluses on your heart doesn't change the fact of the friction. Telling yourself you're fine outside doesn't erase your hand prints on windows.)

Anyway, undergraduate studies introduced him to his true scientific love of molecular biology, but he kept a hand in with astronomy. He found he didn't mind living in three to five story walk-up apartments if that gave him roof access. He stayed on niche astronomy listservs, like the one that incidentally made him one of the first aware of the Petrova Line, and he never missed a meteor shower if he could help it. He took his breaks and lunches on the roof of Grover Cleveland Middle when he could, and pointed out Jupiter and Venus to students on the days they were bright enough to be seen on the way back to class. He liked to look up. He liked to go up. When Rocky later grants his wish and invites him aboard his ship, Grace clambers aboard as best he can in the chunky xenonite suit, following the alien angles of Blip-A up, with his neck craned up, catching bright Tau Ceti light refracted in rainbows through the structure, and he remembers looking up—

-51 EARTH DAYS / -Iℓλ∀ ERIDIAN DAYS PRIOR TO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

"We're not soulmates," Stratt says to him as they stand on the deck of the aircraft carrier above the throng of their colleagues at the supply launch party.

"I, I wasn't—" Grace sputters as he gestures between them. What he means to say is, no, obviously not, I was just headed up for some air and happened to see you, and I didn't want you to be alone if you didn't actually want to be, but of course what comes out is, "That's, I mean— What? Who thought that?"

"Many people have," she says. She doesn't say it as a brag. She says it like she says most things, like there's a law of physics only she knew about but which is nevertheless absolute, and she's resigned to filling you in. It's the same way she handled the damn intellectual property suit. "It is a documented phenomenon in psychology: Authority-inflected Cynosure Distortion. When people are uncertain and exposed to a more competent, confident, or powerful figure, they perceive previously absent directional adjustment towards them which can be misconstrued as romantic."

"I know," Grace insists. He fidgets with his glasses. "I worked in a middle school, trust me, I know. Every honor student and bully had a following of… So no, I didn't think we were— no."

"Good," Stratt says.

Grace laughs to himself, breath coming out in translucent puffs. "God, can you imagine?"

"I prefer not to," Stratt says. He blinks, and thinks she is smiling very slightly.

He's overthought his whole life since the disastrous UNESCO conference. Less so in class, because in an 'overthinking your life and every move you make' contest, middle schoolers will destroy you every time. But outside of it? He questions choices that aren't choices. He questions why he picks one cookie over another at holiday parties, or why he automatically bends to pick up a dime off the sidewalk. To his knowledge he hasn't wandered aimlessly in a way cynosure would tug on for years.

But for once, he doesn't want to overthink it. Grace thinks that maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

The next thing Stratt tells him is that she doesn't need people. That the comradery below is good but not for her. Then she sings and breaks his heart, not because of thwarted expectations or sudden tragic affection, but because Ryland Grace is a guy who on a basic level wants people to be okay. He wants them to be happy; "them" in the abstract, people he doesn't care for and people he will never meet, and his few friends in specific, always. Despite everything, to the final moment, he still believes he and Stratt are—in their way—friends.

Eva Stratt is not okay on a level way above his pay grade, but he's been nothing if not under-qualified for everything so far and it's been mostly working out. It would be nice, neat even, for Stratt's unshakeable conviction to blind her for once, rather than the people caught in her orbit. For the crisis to pass and Grace to find her with two coffees wherever she is, with ease that belies his appearance as an uncertain, wheel-spinning coward.

But there is no cynosure between them. When Grace runs for his life in a blind panic, his path doesn't loop towards her in involuntary backtracks. He runs as far and as fast as he can in a direct line away, climbing counters and barricades and hellbent on getting his feet and hands in chainlink like he thinks when he hits the razor wire at the top he'll just leap for it and rise away. He keeps looking up even as he's driven to the ground. Grace has never been religious but probably it's like an atheist starting the Lord's Prayer during a plane crash. Someone up there, anyone, past the miserable rainbow against a still-overcast sky, someone please—

4,857 EARTH DAYS / V∀λλλλ ERIDIAN DAYS INTO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

His goodbye with Rocky was easily the best he's ever gotten. Grace is a "see you later" guy. He doesn't make big exits. Mostly he looks down late, gets out of his own head when the moment's passed, and finds himself alone. It was good to have finality for once. Another of the many, many gifts his Eridian friend gave him.

Grace is thinking about that as he weighs up a decision he's already made.

"Grace mistake Rocky for table again," Rocky grouses in the footage he's watching, tapping under Grace's coffee mug where it sits on top of his xenonite ball. Grace leans into frame and grabs it before the hard tapping can slosh the contents out.

"You're convenient, Rock, sorry! Always right there when I turn around."

This is one of the video journals Grace prepped to send home before Rocky told him he didn't have to die. Grace worked on them for something to do while Rocky slept, applying basic skills he picked up editing class recordings during Covid to a very pirated version of Adobe Premiere, trying to create a useful narrative out of Mary's footage but mostly, he can admit to himself, goofing off. Everything else they did was so high stakes. It was nice to have the pretense of doing something useful to let him unwind. The room footage cuts to what he thinks of as the Vlog Camera as his past self updates Earth.

"'Underfoot' is an understatement," he says in the past, clearly enjoying his own wordplay. "I can't turn a corner without tripping over him. I mean, this is a small space, obviously, but it's like every time I go anywhere…"

He got cute here, spliced in some more lab and control compartment camera footage of Rocky being a constant knee-height hazard for laughs. The first submission for Tau Ceti's Funniest Home Videos. There was a lot to work with. The Hail Mary is not a big ship, but it's big enough that their slapstick routines were notable by their frequency.

Grace thinks, on review, he would've had less of a problem if he didn't pivot himself towards Rocky all the time. Especially when he's clearly not thinking about it.

In two clips Rocky has put himself in a corner with the obvious aim of minimizing collisions. Grace watches from the present as they talk and he records, paces, gestures. Barks his shins on a ball he had 70% of the square footage of the compartment to avoid. Laughs. Gets laughed at. They're better in zero G, Rocky drifting safely through his hamster tunnels and Grace hopeless at orienting his body but moving well enough, at least as far as avoiding collisions. The xenonite tunnels gave him more grab points. They keep pace with each other; Rocky, who should be speedier with his extra limbs and alien locomotion, moves forward just a moment before Grace grabs the place he'd just been to arrest his momentum or push off again.

Who would I die for? his whiteboard asked when he went to erase it and do the math.

He knew. But his returned memories also tell him he shouldn't, that he should panic, cry, throw up if he's feeling spicy, definitely stall like he is now, eating up precious moments of Rocky's life watching cringe compilations.

(Incidentally, Grace thinks that by trying to document everything about their mission to save the stars and editing for relevance, he's made his own condensed version of a three-year spreadsheet aggregating and analyzing data to indicate a clear trend. Good going, him. They can fistbump if he makes it. If they make it, God willing, Adrian can laugh at them both.)

The corollary question he asks himself, in the spirit of being thorough and emerging from decades of concerted anti-cynosure thought, is natural: would I do it if he were just my best and only friend? Grace knows the answer to that, too. "Just." How long had he spent wishing he had just a best and only friend? Inside him is a lonely lifetime he ignored as weight everyone has to carry in some form, but now it's fuel, and really it wouldn't matter if he was charting a course towards a friend or a soulmate because either way it's where he needs to be.

It's just icing on the cake. Or a twist of the knife. Or a fail-safe.

"Okay, class, we have a hypothesis," Grace mumbles to himself as he straps into the pilot's seat. "The next step after formulating our hypothesis is…?"

Grace knows the Mary's manual piloting system cold after all the practice before 'going fishing' on Adrian. It's knowledge and muscle memory he'll probably lose quickly once the need for him to pilot anything, knock on wood (impossible), is a thing of the past. For now the joystick is an extension of his hand, and the exact weight of trigger-pull needed to goose the spin drive for micro-adjustment aches in his knuckles like incipient arthritis. It's the closest he's been in a long time to unconscious movement. It's that thought that makes him do it the first time— that and Rocky saying, gravity is the first love.

Rocky was an astronaut late to combustion who didn't know about relativity or radiation and went to space anyway. Grace was a rationalist who put cynosure in the same category as homeopathy and now stops thinking when he flies.

He closes his eyes and stops looking.

Two things always happen when he does this. The first, because his brain is broken in general but also in very specific ways, is he hears the late Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi saying, Use the Force, Luke! The second is he immediately checks his course correction against what he plotted on Mary's computer and finds no discrepancy.

Eyes shut, data-blind, he's always headed towards Rocky.

4,913 EARTH DAYS / V∀++∀V ERIDIAN DAYS INTO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

They meet again in darkness. There are pinpricks all around, of course, dimming stars with their cooling satellites, but all of it is just a little too distant to touch the incredible architecture of the colossal Blip-A or the pressure-friendly curves of the tiny Hail Mary. The only real light is what Grace brings with him when he leaps to bridge the distance between the ships.

Every inch of tether material on the Mary is clipped to Grace's waist. Some of it's a direct line back. Some of it's tied to a cargo net around Rocky's painstakingly restored ball, a separate line Grace will tow in if—as he hopes against but planned for—Rocky doesn't come when he knocks even with the heaviest wrench. That's kind of what the wrench is for, and it's entirely why he's carrying a vacuum-proofed drill with diamond-tip bits. It's going to be real touch-and-go if Grace has to breach the Blip-A to get Rocky out, but he has the tether length to search the bulk of the ship without re-clipping and he won't need to search long.

But Rocky does come when he calls. Grace can feel the moment he turns into the straight-shot corridor to the Blip-A's airlock.

"I believe," Grace wheezes into his helmet. It doesn't matter that he's in his EVA suit and outside the airlock. It doesn't matter that he's afloat in darkness that is also terrible silence. His hand and his faceplate contact the transparent, resinous xenonite and he knows Rocky can hear him. His eyes are watering from helmet lamp reflections as much as relief. "I found you again. I believe."

Rocky is in bad shape. He's been working too hard for too long, Grace can see the signs of it all over him, but he can also see him assume an unmistakable pose of smug vindication: Shit-Eating Grin. Grace overflows with adrenaline-sick, besotted, giddy laughter. Rocky presses against Grace from the other side of the xenonite.

Grace shakes all over. He can't help but think of a compass with its needle pegged to north, trembling from the minute fluctuations in the magnetic fields guiding it and the hand holding it. He gets it. He's in on the secret, now. It's nothing, should be nothing, against the prospect of a long death by starvation on the way to a world hostile to his form of life, but Ryland Grace has come a long way from where he was born to find his home, and he is subject to the euphoria as much as he is subject to physics.

Of course the first thing Rocky says when they're aboard the Hail Mary again is, "Grace could have found Rocky without cynosure."

"Okay, awesome, welcome back peer review— I did do this whole thing with the Petrovascope and the lesser propulsion systems, slicing quadrants of space to search and get my initial bearings, yeah," Grace says, "but having internal course-correction saved a lot on fuel."

"Having cynosure, statement." Rocky turns the limb with Adrian's mark to show the other side. "Having soulmate, statement."

There's a new, rounded rectangular inlay on that side. It's made of some sort of layered material cut at an angle to expose the varied thicknesses, textures, and colors that make up the piece— because it's not one piece. It was cut out as one a lifetime ago, the six-inch circular sample of the Hail Mary's hull Grace excised and threw to Rocky so the airlock bridge could be made. So they could finally meet. There's charred exterior aluminum, the fish scale pink-silver weave of Nextel ceramic cloth, industrial yellow Kevlar, filament-thin golden sheets of insulation alloys, irregular polyurethane foam, even a sliver of the black plexiglass astrophage suspension layer, all of it sealed over and polished. It reminds Grace of a pearl cut laterally to show the rings of nacre. When he takes off his glasses to scrub tears from his eyes, he recognizes the inlay's odd shape, too.

"Know long time," Rocky says, but surprisingly not with a gloating cadence. "Since Adrian-planet and accident. Damage to body, smoke, pain, alarms, bad gravity, material disintegration… impossible to navigate Grace ship. Still, I find you. Make you safe."

Grace's hand circles the print of Rocky's hand burned into his skin at about the same place on his arm the new inlay is on the Eridian. "We said goodbye."

"Grace not born in Erid gravity," Rocky offers by way of explanation. "Not born in Rocky gravity."

"Do you know how many kids I've had to promise that first love isn't the only love?" Grace asks, rhetorically, as he mops at his face.

"You found me," Rocky reassures him.

"Yeah," Grace says. "I found you, and you found me, but, uh, what do you say we stick close for awhile? I… think that's what soulmates are supposed to do."

"Statement."

Grace sits so he can press his side to the xenonite and feel the slight conducted warmth of Rocky doing the same. "That's what soulmates are supposed to do, statement."

6,611 EARTH DAYS / λ∀∀+Vλ ERIDIAN DAYS INTO JOINT OPERATION "HAIL MARY"

Rocky laughed at him a lot at first, bumbling around the ship as he dictated rough draft whitepapers to Mary, claiming it was for exercise even though he never went far from wherever Rocky sat tinkering.

Rocky stopped laughing when the medical assessment algorithms tipped from recommending activity to sustain muscular health to bedrest for conservation of calories. He started a sort of intense vigil Grace is trying not to think of as 'deathbed.' No more projects. No more media. He would wonder how Rocky could stand it, except Eridians seem evolutionarily and culturally compelled towards heroic levels of patience, even his excitable friend. At his most worried Rocky can't seem to do anything but sit over him with one arm reared back towards the rest of the bunk compartment in the hostile, scorpion-strike pose Grace remembers from when they first startled each other. Maybe secretary bird would be a more apt comparison? Grace has no doubt that if he was under threat from anything other than his metabolism, Rocky would stomp it into chunky salsa.

They're only two weeks out from orbit of Erid. It might as well be a century.

"Why do you have smile expression, question?" Rocky asks the next time Grace finds his eyes open.

Grace doesn't remember falling asleep, and sometimes has unsettling bouts of numbness all over his body, so he offers the articulate response of, "Huh?"

"While sleeping," Rocky says, starting to gesture with the limb that was curled for attack and then dropping it in favor of another. "You have smile expression. Good dream, question?"

Grace and Rocky have been theorizing about dreams in between hopelessly scouring soil samples for traces of Earth flora obliterated by exposure to vacuum during the Mary's taumoeba leak (Rocky) and trying not to measure various parts of his body slimmed almost to the bone by rationing (Grace). Eridians don't seem to have dreams. Grace hypothesizes that they do, but like the other homeostatic processes the Eridian body handles during their intense sleep periods, they serve their function and are purged before wakefulness imprints them forever in that crazy good long-term memory. Rocky's theory centers on a concept of externalized mental processing conducted in 'thrums,' but he can't demonstrate for obvious reasons. In the interests of better defining a dream, he prods Grace for descriptions of his on waking. It's supposedly scientific, but over the last two months has gained a manic edge, like he wants to know what's so compelling about dreaming that Grace keeps slipping away into them instead of pushing his failing body to do something productive, like hitting the 3D printer with a hard drive full of livestock gene sequences until they get a Star Trek replicator.

"Don't remember," Grace tries.

"Remember better," Rocky's synthesized voice demands, but Grace hears the chords under it and translates it himself closer to, [Use your brain better,] with sub-tones of exasperation, fondness, and fear.

He's asked a few times if they can try foregoing the software. Rocky is at a comparable level of interpretation with his human sounds. But Rocky is also miserably insistent on making sure every useful tool is active in case Grace's condition suddenly worsens, and no amount of immersive language practice is apparently worth misunderstanding Mary while the ship uses Armando to, say, intubate him. Spoilsport.

"I think…" Grace mumbles as he grasps for the thin memory, "I was on my bike."

He definitely was. There's a phantom feeling of power in his wasted legs like he just dismounted after a good, long ride.

"To where, question?"

No idea. Probably to work, and probably pants-less, if his brain is playing the hits. "Hmm. The bridge. I've told you about the bridge, right?"

"Height 227 meters, length 2,737 meters, suspension cables in tension 27,572 galvanized human iron-carbon alloy 'steel' wires, 500 suspenders organized in 250 pairs with spacing 15.24 meters," Rocky recites, recall as perfect as ever, as he digs around in his tool bandolier for something. It's his Golden Gate Bridge model. For all it's made of silvery alien xenonite it looks just like a souvenir. "Painted color name 'International Orange.' For fog."

Rocky's color descriptions always have subtones of disbelief that make Grace laugh. He can't quite come up with that energy now, though, so he smiles, and unlike the phantom burn in his legs his face does feel familiar in that muscle configuration, a slight ache like he's been dopily smiling to himself for hours.

"I was going to the bridge," Grace imagines, "because… you wanted to see it." His smile widens as he embellishes. "You were in a bike trailer, with your own helmet."

God, that's a good image. Rocky strapped into one of those ridiculous things made for dogs or kids, but with a xenonite canopy, a hot pink bike helmet clipped in place on top, criticizing the disorderly flow of traffic along State Route 1…

"Grace!" Rocky calls in the real world.

"I'm awake," Grace insists even as his eyes flutter shut, "I'm awake…"

Minutes or maybe hours later, a strange sensation creeps up on him. Heat, the borderline intolerable temperature of a heating pad turned up to max, not focused on a specific muscle ache but shifting over him with a sensation like thick, gummy cellophane on the few places his bare skin isn't covered up by layers of clothing and quilt. He opens his eyes to find Rocky attempting the first Eridian-Human cuddle as a solo enterprise, the concentrated weight of his carapace sitting on the mattress pad at an angle, his limbs extending awkwardly over Grace. Grace's smile widens— easily, because he was doing it again, in his sleep— and he offers his assistance in the form of octopus clinging he hasn't been able to indulge in for years. Rocky slides a limb under his pillow that does wonders for the ache in his neck, two over his side, one trapped by angle against the mattress but curled pleasantly against his stomach. Grace hooks a leg over the remaining one and leaves Rocky to sort out making that comfortable for himself.

"You finished it," Grace slurs into his pillow, reaching to loop his thin arms over Rocky's new, flexible xenonite EVA suit.

"No. Umbilical to ball atmosphere exchange, more rigid panels than want, insufficient insulation…"

When Rocky speaks this close Grace's whole body vibrates with it. He's been ambiently miserable for coming up on ten Earth months. The sensation, the heat, the proximity, it's almost too much. Tears start to streak down his poorly-shaven cheeks.

"Crying!" Rocky realizes. "Heat bleed too much, bad bad bad."

He goes to roll away but Grace exerts what little strength he has and keeps them entangled.

[Per—fect,] Grace whistles, flat and halting, but sincere. The computer translates him into Rocky's voice, which does finally wring a laugh out of him. "Awesome work. Heat is good. It's all…"

Good. It's all good. He's dying, but it is all, everything happening to him right now, totally good. Better than he's ever had it.

"I used to think it was really, uh… insufficient," he says. "Cynosure, the mechanism of cynosure. It's… there are animals on Earth that respond conclusively to, to specific pheromone triggers, dermal electrical conduction, intrinsic location-related life cycle… stuff… Like salmon?"

"What fish have to do with this," Rocky says, and with two gentle taps to Grace's stomach with his pinned limb for lack of other options, adds, "question?"

Grace slides his face off his pillow to rub his cheek against Rocky's new suit, damp scruff making strange scratchy sounds Rocky shimmies to see-hear-feel. "Um. Salmon. What was… Right. I just mean, there's no confirmation mechanism to cynosure. The pull is some proof, but there's no, what am I trying to say here… finish line? Humans don't finally get to their soulmate and turn red and grow big fangs."

"What," Rocky says, no question taps.

Grace shakes with suppressed laughter. "Just for instance. Always thought that was kind of fff… messed up. But! I'm formulating a theory."

Rocky seems encouraged by that. He flexes one of the arms around Grace to loosen the material at the end and gets enough articulation in the xenonite for his three fingers to rub at the nape of Grace's neck. "New theory time, yes, good."

"I think," Grace murmurs, "that's necessary because of sapience. Irrefutable confirmation works for animals, but for thinking people, I think it'd be… too much. No room for uncertainty, for, like… fruitful voids. Space to take the useful part of cynosure, the 'here is a good match', and then… build a relationship. On purpose."

Rocky considers this. Then he says, "Interesting, but you are not specialist in field. Would want review by subject matter expert. Psychology, sociology, salmon."

"Wooow." Grace mimics Rocky's teasing pitch by dragging the word out. "I'm gathering so much data, though."

He doesn't realize he's smiling again, drifting and smiling, until Rocky says in a monotone, sad rumble, "No smiling. No making peace with it."

"Is that what I'm doing?" Grace realizes as he asks the question is rhetorical. Actually, past tense. "Huh."

Rocky's tone sharpens. "Not okay."

Grace shakes his head, then, slowly nods. Then he's gone again.

I+I∀+ ERIDIAN DAYS INTO THE REST OF THEIR LIVES

Grace loves fog, and ocean waves, and the susurrus of shifting sand. This makes his biodome a sort of audio-visual nightmare for Eridians, as the support team routinely complains about in maintenance thrums. Adrian, always a voice of reason in professional (and personal) disputes, points out that the unintentional privacy this creates for Erid's only human—and frequent research fixation—is a net good.

Rocky doesn't seem to notice. He always finds Grace wherever he is on the walk back to his home from the classroom cove.

[You're turning your face down and to the northwest,] Rocky observes one afternoon as they sit by the shoreline, notes of teasing in his otherwise conversational delivery.

"What?" Grace looks over at him with a frown. He almost doesn't catch himself glancing away towards the leaning arch of rock he thinks of as the Big Gate. "I'm… I dunno, maybe?"

[All your mates after me are going to be lazy lazy lazy,] Rocky teases. [Sooo easy to find your mate when they're famous, no challenge, no journey of growth—]

"—hey, you just made a spreadsheet—"

['I traveled three months to find the space elevator audible from across the continent. Then I went up!' That is what your next mate will sound like.]

"You are so rude to this hypothetical person." Grace feels Rocky tap his shoulder, realizes it's drifted into a hunch around his ears. He makes an effort to relax. "Sorry, old habit. I believe, the theory is conclusively proven, I told you! It's just… There's really gonna be more? And us being stationary, isn't, you know, some major cultural issue?"

[I forget you know nothing because your meat brain hates accruing and retaining knowledge,] Rocky says. [Don't make brat expression, I've told you this. Three in harmony makes a cynosure thrum. Some move as units. We'll stay in place. Regardless, individuals will accrete. Usually cynosure thrums of the same size move towards merging, like eggs, but being fixed will ease individual additions and pull other harmonious cynosure thrums towards us—]

"Like gravity increasing based on increasing object mass," Grace concludes. "'Individuals will accrete,' what a way to say that. Words of great romantic promise?"

Rocky shifts into an indulgent pose that Grace is teaching himself not to flinch from. Maybe something he could call Heartbreakingly Tender Look. [Grace from now on will only be more loved. Science says so.]

Grace tips towards Rocky and Rocky pushes up, catching and supporting him as he curls close, the thinner xenonite of the close-fit suit conducting more heat in a way that's always so nice in the biodome's artificial weather. Adrian pushes Grace to use language to articulate his feelings. Any language, spoken or sung or whistled or played on the excellent language instrument Rocky made him for articulate teaching, and that's good for Grace to practice, definitely. But there's also a reason Adrian is Rocky's mate and not Grace's. Rocky accepts the wordless turn to physical affection with patient amusement that's infectious. Grace holds his scary space spider tighter and laughs at himself.

"What's to the northwest other than the sea?" he asks.

[Crevasses. Next mate will… not be total loser if crossed them.]

"I bet they're going to be way cooler than you," Grace says, putting on a wistful tone as he sighs hard enough to fog Rocky's suit for a moment, "and purple."

[Purple is not real, and if it was real, I would be purple, because I am handsome handsome handsome,] Rocky jokes as he pushes into Grace's center of mass and bowls him over into the sand. He pins him with two limbs and Grace can see he's happy even as he plays at annoyance. He can also see the moment Rocky remembers he has a weight advantage because he leans into the pin and adds, [Good Grace accepts more love is coming. Even if there was no Crevasse-Strider—]

"—now you're imagining them too cool, let's rein in the expectations, here—"

[—no Rocky, no Adrian,] Rocky continues, [there would be Grace, and that is good at baseline, proven.]

Grace's glasses are askew and his ears are burning, but he doesn't put up a fight, he's smiling too hard to be taken seriously. "Proven?"

[We perfected Earth gravity,] Rocky points out.

As Grace had a long time ago on the Hail Mary, Rocky plucks at Grace's cardigan sleeve to lift his arm, then drops it. Good old ~9.81 m/s² acts on him. Grace turns the arm to gather another handful of sand. It's Erid's version, no microscopic shell and bone fragments, but more tiny, glittering specks of crystal. It flows out through his fingers when he raises them, answering the facsimile call of a gravity over ten light years away. A delicate balance of atmospheric positioning and bleeding edge engineering— and that is its own wordless expression, every piece of the costly biodome that allows him to live, appreciation and love of its own kind. It spares him from something Adrian has already assured him Eridian cynosure-focused philosophers are convening thrums about: the fact that Erid's gravity acts on him with almost intolerable force.

There is someone coming from the northwest. There is Rocky, pressing him down here and now. There is Adrian below, alienated by but patient with how their long journeys warped them, and Stratt afar, who did not draw him in but instead threw him with all humanity's hope and force exactly where he needed to be. But even if none of them had ever been, there was always the first pull, the first love, that held him from the moment he failed to take a baby step to the day he was tackled and sedated. That held him even when all he did was look up and away.

"I think if I had known Eridian cynosure theory, that would've been enough," Grace allows. It's as close as he can get to saying it was always enough. It's more than anyone lost to the feeling of gravity in death has. "I would have been content. At least been on fewer apps."

[No apps now,] Rocky assures him with grave solemnity that makes Grace smile. He raises a hand and lets it fall to shade his eyes.

"And I'm more than content, Rock," he says, and is.