Chapter Text
When Grace is six years old he receives his soulmate’s first lost item. It’s a strange hollow cylinder, similar to a pencil, semi-translucent and blotchy brown. It looks like glass, but it can’t be; Grace has dropped it several times in his clumsy enthusiasm, and hasn't broken nor chiped. He is absolutely overjoyed by the fact that he finally has a soulmate, even if he has no idea what the object actually is. His parents are mostly just relieved that their son has stopped crying over not having a soulmate.
Grace goes to class the next day and shows everyone his soulmate’s strange object. He tells them it’s a pencil cover, something to make pencils look nicer. The classroom stares at him strangely, and his teacher gives him a look of pity, Grace in his young enthusiasm doesn't notice, too enamored with the object in his hands.
His bullies catch wind of it quickly. Grace is a weak kid, an easy target. They rip the cylinder from his hands and throw it to the ground. The cylinder doesn’t break, but something inside Grace does. He feels small, insignificant. He cries to his parents about what happened, but his father only tells him he was stupid for taking something precious to school, where things are always lost or stolen.
Grace drags himself to his room, whimpering softly. He doesn’t know where to keep something so important without losing it. In the end, he places the cylinder inside a shoebox. He doesn’t have anything better.
Grace is twelve when the second object from his soulmate arrives.
One morning he wakes to find the strangest thing sitting on his pillow. For a second, he wonders if he lost a tooth and this is some bizarre version of the tooth fairy, but that’s impossible. Which means it came from his soulmate.
He jumps around the room in excitement.
It’s a small figure, around the size of his fist, mostly turquoise with brown spots that somehow blend together beautifully. It looks like a mix between a crab and a spider, five limbs attached to a rounded carapace that spikes upward. The material almost looks 3D-printed, though Grace has never seen anything quite like it before.
It’s gorgeous.
The figure immediately becomes Grace’s most precious possession. He tells no one about it because he wants it to be his and his alone. He keeps it on his nightstand because he wants to fall asleep looking at it and wake up to the sight of something his soulmate once touched. Whenever someone strange comes to the house or his parents visit his room, Grace puts the figure into the shoe box.
With it comes a realization: his soulmate must be an artist, someone who loves arthropods and strange little creatures.
That realization quietly shapes Grace’s future.
He studies biology in school, always choosing every science elective he can. Eventually he discovers that molecular biology fascinates him even more. Sometimes he thinks, distantly, that he owes his soulmate everything. Without them, he might never have found what he loves.
Turquoise becomes Grace’s favorite color.
Grace is eighteen, living in his tiny student apartment after starting college early, when the next item appears.
The box itself is the first thing that catches his attention. It’s made from the same strange material as the cylinder his soulmate sent years ago. Grace turns it over carefully in his hands, marveling at it before opening it.
The lid is covered in strange mathematical symbols.
Inside is, frankly, junk.
At least that’s the only word Grace can think of for the bizarre collection of trinkets, rocks, and crystals filling the box. Nothing looks functional, yet Grace loves every single piece anyway.
One crystal in particular catches his attention. It’s transparent with flat sides, though it isn’t any polyhedron he recognizes. A hexagonal prism sits at its center, and the whole thing glimmers beautifully in the light.
The next day, Grace visits one of those tiny crystal shops with incense smoke thick enough to choke. He asks the woman behind the counter if she has a way for him to wear the crystal safely.
The woman is older, dressed entirely in blue, her hair pulled into a tight bun. Her sharp green eyes settle on the crystal the moment he places it on the counter.
“Otherworldly,” she murmurs as she touches it briefly . “Your soulmate is unlike anyone else. Just like this gem.”
Grace freezes.
He never told her it came from his soulmate.
Still, he leaves the shop wearing a spiraling wire pendant that cradles the crystal safely without altering it. The word otherworldly lingers in his mind the whole walk home.
It feels right.
From then on, Grace never takes the pendant off. It stays tucked beneath his shirt, resting close to his heart. The junk box becomes the new shoe box and the upgrade heals something within him.
At twenty-four, he receives another figurine.
This one is smaller and rounder than the first, almost its complete opposite. Grace finds that oddly amusing and terribly endearing. It’s mostly brown, but three of its limbs are tipped with the same bright turquoise.
The figurine becomes his little companion while he works on his thesis in the research lab.
By now Grace has a few friends, enough people around him that he feels comfortable showing off the gifts from his soulmate. They coo over the little crab-like figure, fascinated by its curious design.
For once, life is good.
When Grace turns thirty, life reaches its lowest point.
His thesis about water not being necessary for life is treated like a joke by the scientific community. No one gives him a chance. Linda, his girlfriend, cheats on him with Mark—her soulmate. Objectively, Grace knows it never would have worked; they weren’t each other’s soulmates. But the silent treatment and her sudden disappearance still hurt deeply. He spends days crying, trying desperately to understand where he went wrong. He wonders if something is fundamentally broken inside him. Maybe he doesn’t really have a soulmate. Maybe he’s simply meant to end up alone, because not even his parents love him, he hasn’t spoken to them in four years.
Eventually, Grace becomes a teacher because he has nowhere else to go, nothing else to, the best he can do is to put his science knowledge to work.
After his first day teaching, he returns to his tiny apartment exhausted, only to find another gift waiting for him.
It’s a scale model of a solar system. Not Earth’s solar system, but something entirely alien round metal shiny balls connect by thinn wires and metal rods, ridiculously resistant and pretty. There are a few parts that look bent Grace doesn't care.
Grace cries the moment he sees it. Because he does have a soulmate. Someone out there likes the same things he does. Someone out there exists.
The gift gives him hope.
So Grace throws himself into teaching. He teaches his students about space with colorful models and impossible enthusiasm. He takes control of his life again, and for the first time in years, it feels good to make a difference in the world, even if it’s only through children who leave his classroom loving science just a little more than before.
At thirty-two, Grace is a well-established teacher in his community. The kids adore him. He holds the unofficial title of coolest science teacher in the school, and nobody fails his class.
Life is genuinely becoming good.
Then Eva Stratt appears.
The Petrova crisis drags Grace into becoming the right hand of the most powerful woman on Earth. The pressure is unbearable, and the number of people they fuck over in the process is catastrophic. Part of Grace would rather stay in his classroom teaching children about planets and cells.
But another part of him is enthralled. Astrophage is everything he ever dreamed science could be.
And then it happens.
“Dr. Ryland Grace, you have to go as the Hail Mary’s scientist.”
“I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” Grace jokes weakly, voice trembling around the words.
“You have three hours to decide.”
“I… I don’t want to go. I’m not made for that.”
“Yes, you are. You have the coma gene and are the leading expert in astrophage. Apprehend him.” Her eyes are cold.
“No—NO! I’m not gonna go!” They chase him. Karl included. That betrayal hurts far more than Linda’s ever did.
They force him to the ground.
“Don’t worry,” Stratt says, holding up a syringe. “By the time you wake up, you won’t remember any of this and will do your job right”
“You’re murdering me,” Grace sobs into the pavement, salt tears soaking into the ground.