❝ 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐤𝐞 ❞ R.G ( Project Hail Mary ) pairing dr. ryland grace & younger! reader 🪽.
synopsis 𖥧 turns out that Ryland is not the only living organism in the Hail Mary, he's just the only one that's awake. he's never been good at phrasing questions, it seems.
content 𖥧 i belive i made the reader gn, please lmk if i missed anything!!
💬 : guys i am not okay, this movie changed me. everyone go thank ell ( @radioshepard ) for his amazing layout triggering my aesthetic curiosity and getting me to watch the movie
PART OF THE : STOP CRYING YOUR HEART OUT SERIES !!
He doesn't mean to ask it.
It's been maybe an hour since he woke up. Maybe two. Time is meaningless when your brain is scrambled eggs and your body feels like it was put through a trash compactor. He's been wandering the Hail Mary in a daze, touching walls, opening drawers, staring at screens that blur and swim before his eyes.
He found the cockpit by accident. Stumbled into it like a drunk, his hands dragging along the bulkheads, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps. The chairs are empty. The displays are dark. The stars outside are steady and uncaring.
He stands in the middle of the room, turns in a slow circle, and feels the walls closing in.
"How many awake people are on this ship?"
His voice cracks. He sounds like a child asking for his mother in a dark room. He didn't mean for it to come out that weak. He didn't mean to ask at all. The question just… fell out. Like a scream you don't realize you're screaming until your throat hurts.
The ship's voice is calm. Robotic. Indifferent.
"Listing awake personnel aboard the Hail Mary. Dr. Ryland Grace. End of list."
He blinks.
"What?"
The ship does not repeat itself. It answered. It's done.
"No." he says. "No, that's not… there must be others. There must be- there must be other people."
"Awake personnel: Dr. Ryland Grace. End of list."
It starts small.
A sound. A noise he didn't know he could make. It comes from somewhere deep in his chest—a keening, animal wail that builds and builds until it tears out of his throat.
"NO!"
He kicks the pilot's chair. The impact shoots up his bare foot—he's still in the hospital gown, still barefoot, still wearing the stupid fucking medical bracelet with his name on it—and the pain makes him angrier.
He kicks it again. And again. And again.
"NO NO NO NO NO!"
His fists join in. He punches the back of the chair. Then the armrest. Then the display screen, which flickers and glitches and shows him his own reflection: a wild-eyed, hollow-cheeked stranger with matted hair and tears already streaming down his face.
He grabs the chair and shakes it. Shakes it like he can wake it up, like he can force it to give him a different answer. The chair doesn't move. It's bolted to the floor. He is shaking nothing but himself.
"YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME!"
He's screaming at the universe now. At God, if there is one. At the empty stars. At the ship. At the ghosts of the crew he doesn't remember.
"YOU CAN'T JUST LEAVE ME HERE! YOU CAN'T JUST... just…"
His voice breaks. He drops to his knees. The floor is cold metal against his thin gown. He slams his palm against it once, twice, three times.
"I didn't ask for this," he sobs. "I didn't want this. I didn't sign up for this. I'm just a teacher. I teach middle school. I'm nobody. I can't do this alone."
He's crying so hard he can barely breathe. Snot and tears mix on his face. His chest heaves. He curls forward, pressing his forehead to the cold floor, and screams into the metal.
"I CAN'T DO THIS ALONE!"
He pounds his fists against the floor. He kicks his heels against the deck plates. He is throwing a tantrum like a child—a full-body, snotty, ugly, desperate tantrum. He doesn't care how he looks. There's no one to see. There's no one to judge. There's no one.
"I HATE YOU!"
He doesn't know who he's yelling at. The universe. Stratt, whoever that is. The people who put him here. Himself. Himself most of all.
"I HATE YOU, RYLAND! YOU PATHETIC, USELESS, COWARDLY PIECE OF SHIT! YOU COULDN'T EVEN REMEMBER HOW YOU GOT HERE! YOU'RE GOING TO DIE ALONE IN A METAL COFFIN AND NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU BECAUSE YOU'RE A NOBODY! A NOBODY WHO TEACHES MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE TO KIDS WHO DON'T EVEN LISTEN!"
His voice echoes off the walls. The ship is silent. The stars are silent. The universe is silent.
He is alone.
He is so alone.
"I'm the only person alive in this god damn ship," he whispers, his voice raw and broken. "The only living organism in this entire fucking metal tomb. I'm going to talk to myself until I go insane and then I'm going to die and my corpse is going to float through space forever and no one will ever-"
"Number of living organisms aboard the Hail Mary: two."
The voice is the same. Calm. Indifferent. Robotic.
It might as well have set off a bomb.
Ryland's head snaps up. His eyes are red, swollen, wild. His breath catches in his chest. His entire body goes rigid.
"What?"
"Number of living organisms aboard the Hail Mary: two."
He doesn't move. Doesn't breathe. His brain is short-circuiting, trying to process words that don't make sense.
"That's… that's not…"
"Number of living organisms aboard the Hail Mary: two."
"SHUT UP!" he screams. "STOP LYING TO ME!"
But the ship doesn't lie. He knows this. The ship's computer doesn't have the capacity for deception. It reports data. Cold, hard, unfeeling data.
Two.
Two living organisms.
Him and…
"Show me," he chokes out. "Show me the other one. Visual. Holographic. Whatever you have. SHOW ME. SHOW. ME!"
The holographic display flickers to life. It projects a diagram of the ship, a wireframe rendering of the Hail Mary in all her glory. And there, in the crew quarters section, is a blinking dot.
A bed compartment. Closed. Still sealed in its wall cradle.
He stares at it for thirty seconds. Maybe longer. Time has stopped. The universe has contracted to a single point of light on a holographic display.
A bed compartment. Closed.
He saw two open beds. The ones with the bodies. He was so focused on the horror of the dead that he didn't count the walls. He didn't realize that three beds were visible from his waking room… and that there were four total.
Four beds.
Four crew members.
Two dead. One alive (him). And one…
"Oh god." he breathes. "Oh god oh god oh god."
He is on his feet before he makes the conscious decision to stand. His legs are shaking. His vision is blurred with tears. He doesn't care.
He runs.
The hospital gown flaps around his thighs. His bare feet slap against the metal deck plates. He doesn't know where he's going, the hologram showed him the location but his brain is too fried to process it, so he just runs in the direction of the crew quarters, trusting his body to remember what his mind cannot.
He skids around a corner. His shoulder catches a doorframe and he stumbles, nearly falls, catches himself on the wall and keeps going. The pain doesn't register. Nothing registers except the blinking dot on the hologram, the promise of another heartbeat, another set of lungs, another living soul in this godforsaken metal tube.
"Please be alive," he gasps as he runs. "Please please please please please."
He doesn't know who he's begging. The universe that just abandoned him. The God he isn't sure he believes in. The ship. Himself. It doesn't matter. He begs anyway.
"Please be real. Please not be a glitch. Please not be a rat or a piece of meat or a fucking computer error. Please be a person. Please be alive. Please please please."
He reaches the crew quarters. Slides to a stop so fast his bare feet squeak on the metal. He looks at the wall where the beds are housed.
Three open compartments. Two of them reading 'deceased' on the tiny bity screen that marks their current state in stasis. One open compartment that is his, the sheets still rumpled from his own waking.
And one closed compartment.
Sealed. Silent. Intact.
He stares at it.
"Oh my god," he whispers. "Oh my god, you're real. You're actually real."
He finds the tool in a maintenance locker three corridors over. It's a manual crank, a long metal rod with a handle and a specialized head designed to fit the emergency release valves on the bed compartments. He doesn't remember learning about it. His hands remember for him.
He runs back. His lungs are burning. His legs are jelly. He is crying and sweating and shaking and he doesn't care.
He fits the crank into the release valve. Turns it. Nothing happens.
Turns harder. Still nothing.
"Come ON," he snarls. "COME ON!"
His hands are shaking too badly. He drops the crank. It clatters to the floor and rolls under one of the open beds. He drops to his knees, fishes it out, bangs his head on the bed frame on the way up, sees stars, ignores them.
Second try. He fits the crank. He takes a breath. He forces his hands to stop shaking by sheer force of will.
He turns.
The mechanism groans. Metal scrapes against metal. Hydraulics hiss. The sealed compartment begins to slide open, inch by inch, like a drawer being pulled from a wall.
"Come on come on come ON." he chants.
The compartment opens.
And there you are.
You are so small.
That's his first thought. Not "young" yet—just small. Curled slightly on your side, wrapped in medical sensors and tubing, your chest rising and falling in a slow, mechanical rhythm. The breathing tube in your throat moves with each cycle of the ventilator. IV lines snake into your arms. A heart monitor beeps softly, steadily, impossibly.
Alive.
You are alive.
He reaches out. His hand is shaking so badly he has to use his other hand to steady it. His fingertips touch your forehead.
Warm.
Not the cold, waxy skin of the dead. Not the room-temperature emptiness of a corpse. Warm. Living warmth. Human warmth.
He bursts into tears.
Not the angry, screaming tears of the tantrum. Not the desperate, pleading tears of the sprint. These are different. These are relief tears: gut-wrenching, body-shaking sobs that come from somewhere so deep he didn't know he had that much water in him.
"Oh thank god," he weeps. "Oh thank god thank god thank god."
He drops the crank. It clatters again. He doesn't care. He sinks to his knees beside your open compartment and presses his forehead against the edge of your bed and cries.
And then, through the tears, he looks at you.
Really looks.
Your face is smooth. Unlined. No crows feet, no worry lines, no grey in your hair. Your skin is young. The kind of young that hasn't been worn down by decades of disappointment and debt and dead-end jobs. Your hands are small. Your fingernails are chewed.
"Oh," he breathes. "Oh no."
He looks at your face again. Really looks. And does the math.
"How old are you?" he whispers to your sleeping form. "How old are you, kid?"
You don't answer. Of course you don't answer. You're in a coma. You can't hear him. You can't comfort him. You can't tell him that you're actually thirty-five and you just have good skin.
But he knows. Some deep, primal part of his brain, the part that's been a teacher for fifteen years, the part that has looked at thousands of young faces—knows.
You are twenty. Maybe nineteen. Maybe even eighteen.
You are a child.
You are a child in a metal coffin hurtling toward certain death, and you are the only other living person on this ship, and you are in a coma, and he doesn't remember how to wake you up, and if he does it wrong he could kill you, and you are a child, and—
He vomits.
Not dramatically. Just leans over and throws up on the floor beside your compartment. His stomach empties itself of the nothing that was in it. He heaves and heaves until there's nothing left, and then he sits back, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and looks at you again.
"I'm so sorry," he whispers. "I'm so sorry you're here. I'm so sorry you're stuck with me. I'm so sorry I'm the only one who came for you."
He reaches out and takes your hand. It's small in his. Small and warm and limp and alive.
"I'm not going to let you die," he says. "I don't know how I'm going to do that. I don't know anything. I'm a coward and a failure and I can't remember my own name half the time. But I'm not going to let you die. Do you hear me? I'm not going to let you die."
He says it like a promise. Like a vow. Like the only truth he has left.
He doesn't leave your side for the first six hours.
He sits on the floor beside your open compartment, your hand still in his, and he watches your chest rise and fall. He counts your breaths. He watches the heart monitor. He memorizes the rhythm of your life so that he will know immediately if something changes.
He talks to you. He can't stop talking.
"My name is Ryland. I don't know if I told you that. I don't know if you already know. I don't know if we met before the coma. I don't remember anything. Isn't that stupid? I'm on a spaceship hurtling toward another star and I don't remember how I got here or why I'm here or who any of the dead people were. I'm a mess. I'm a complete disaster."
He laughs. It's a broken, hollow sound.
"You're going to wake up and you're going to be so disappointed. You're going to look at me and think, 'This is the guy who's supposed to save us? This blubbering middle-aged weirdo in a hospital gown?' And you'd be right. You'd be completely right. I'm nobody. I'm just a teacher. I teach science to kids who don't care. I grade papers and eat microwave dinners and go to bed at nine-thirty. I'm not a hero. I'm not an astronaut. I'm not anything."
He squeezes your hand.
"But I'm here. And you're here. And I'm not going to let anything bad happen to you. I don't know how I'm going to keep that promise, but I'm going to keep it. Okay? Okay."
He falls silent. The ship hums around him. The ventilator breathes for you. The heart monitor beeps.
He cries again. Quietly this time. He leans his head against the edge of your bed and lets the tears fall.
He is not alone.
He is not alone.
He is not alone.
Over the next hour, he forces himself to think.
He can't wake you. He knows that much. Somewhere in the scrambled mess of his amnesiac brain is a memory, a lecture, maybe, or a training module, about the dangers of manually interrupting a medically induced coma. The brain is delicate. The chemical balance is precise. Waking someone too quickly can cause seizures. Strokes. Brain damage. Death.
He will not kill you.
He will not be the reason the only other living person on this ship dies.
So he waits.
He combs through the ship's computer for a manual. He searches the medical bay. He goes through the deceased crew members' belongings—feeling like a thief, feeling like a grave robber—looking for anything that might tell him how to safely wake you.
He doesn't find anything. Not yet.
He goes back to your compartment. He sits beside you. He holds your hand.
"I'm going to figure this out," he tells you. "I'm going to remember, or I'm going to find a manual, or I'm going to figure it out myself. I'm a scientist. That's what I do. I figure things out. I'm not going to let you sleep forever. I promise."
He looks at your young face. At your childish pajamas. At the IV lines and the breathing tube and the heart monitor.
"I promise," he whispers again.
And in the quiet of the ship, with your hand in his and your heart beating softly in the darkness, Ryland Grace makes a silent vow:
He will not fail you.
He has failed everyone else: his students, his crew, himself. But he will not fail you.
He can't.
You're all he has left.
The days that follow are a blur of terror and tedium.
He sleeps on the floor beside your compartment, using a rolled-up blanket as a pillow. He eats his meals there, sitting cross-legged, talking to you between bites. He reads aloud from the ship's manuals—not because he understands them, but because he wants you to hear a human voice.
"Chapter four," he reads, "maintenance of the astrophage fuel containment units. The primary containment vessel is constructed of a titanium-tungsten alloy rated to withstand temperatures of…"
He stops.
"This is incredibly boring. I'm sorry. If you can hear me, I'm sorry. I'll read you something else tomorrow. Something with pictures."
He reads you the ingredient list from a packet of space-food macaroni. He reads you the ship's emergency protocols. He reads you the labels from the vodka bottles in Yao's personal stash.
"This one is from Russia," he says, holding up a bottle. "I can't read Russian. It probably says something cool like 'May you live in interesting times' or 'Drink me and forget your problems.' I'm going to drink it and forget my problems. Don't tell anyone."
He drinks. He cries. He holds your hand. He talks.
"I'm scared," he admits, late one night. "I'm so scared. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I'm strong enough. I don't know if I'm smart enough. I don't know anything anymore."
He looks at your sleeping face.
"But I'm not going to give up. Not while you're here. You're the reason I'm still trying. You know that? You're the only reason I haven't crawled into an airlock and opened the door. You're the only reason I'm still here."
He presses his forehead to your hand.
"So you have to wake up. Okay? You have to wake up so I'm not alone anymore. You have to wake up so I have someone to do this for. You have to wake up so I don't have to be brave by myself."
He cries.
The ship hums.
The stars watch.
And somewhere, deep in the darkness of your chemically-induced sleep, maybe—just maybe—you hear him.
