Chapter Text
Grace had begged Rocky not to go to Earth.
He knew humans. He had been failed by them in ways he couldn’t word\. They wouldn't be as welcoming to Eridians as Eridians had been to him. That was the truth of it. But it didn't matter to a bunch of rocks who had been reading up on humans using the database in the Hail Mary. Page after page, file after file. They had seen it for themselves, the studies: a lack of plants and nature did terrible things to the human psyche. They wanted to help. They had made up their minds.
It wouldn't be that bad, Grace told himself. In the four years he had been on Erid, they had made incredible progress on their ships. They could travel faster than humans ever could, since g force didn't affect them. No blackouts, no crushing weight, no blood pooling in their legs. The trip would only take about twelve Earth months, there and back. They already had volunteers, young Eridians eager to hear another star, another sky.
Rocky himself wouldn't go. He promised Adrian and Grace that much, and Rocky did not break promises. But humans had such short lifespans. A blink. A breath. He wanted to improve Grace's home however he could, even if Grace had told him it wasn't worth the risk. So the ship left.
The Eridians could not see how dark it was.
They knew humans were a colder species compared to them. That was fine. Expected. But this was something else entirely. Maybe they had received the wrong directions. Maybe they had gotten turned around and ended up in some lifeless star system by accident. That would make sense. It would explain why the journey felt wrong, why there were less stars the further they went out. It had taken them six months longer than planned just to reach the solar system.
Then they heard a heartbeat.
It was so faint and so far that even the Eridians almost missed it, but they did hear it, they heard it because there were no other sounds in the solar system to block it out. But there it was. On a moon labeled AT 5, a weak human heart was still pumping .
They had to cut him out.
He was trapped inside a twisted piece of metal, wreckage of some kind, tangled up with organic material that the Eridians would later learn was a tree. A tree. Somehow, impossibly, that organic thing was filling the thin atmosphere with just enough air for the human to survive, though barely. His chest rose and fell shallowly. His skin was cold to the touch. And they knew enough about humans to realise he was missing an arm.
They never found Earth.
At least, they found no signs of life anywhere else in the solar system. Just dust. silence. Just that one small heartbeat on an ocean moon.
The return trip took 11.3 months. The human stayed in a coma under observation the whole time, they were astronauts, not doctors, they did their best to stop the bleeding, his arm was cauterized, but it must have happened after the injury as he was soaked head to toe in blood.
When they arrived back on Erid, the crowd greeted them with cheers and questions. "How were the humans?" "What did you bring back?" Voices overlapping, eager, loud. Not a single Eridian mentioned the extra year they had been gone. No one asked what had taken so long.
The crew did not know what to say.
By all logic, Earth was gone.
They would talk to Adrian. They would figure something out. Adrian would tell them they missed it, and nobody would have to tell grace that, more than likely, the beetles had never made it to earth, and that his solar system was dead.