There's an odd calmness about losing all your memories.

Grace knew that well. Waking up aboard the Hail Mary with only a vague recollection of earth, his scientific knowledge, and hardly anything else definitely counted as 'losing all your memories'.. and yeah, admittedly, for a while--a very long while--he was desperate to get them back. By any means possible. Which may or may not have resulted in a thought of very experimental and rudimentary shock therapy.

Thankfully, he wasn't all alone to do it. You, just like him, had survived the artificial coma despite also losing all your memories. Maybe in another world, another timeline, you'd have died along with the rest of the crew and left him all alone in the void of space to figure himself out, but he tried not to think about it to hard. As long as you were with him, and he was with you, nothing too bad could happen.

Besides, the most important was that you remembered the basics. Which you both did! Sun is dying, astrophage thingy, gotta save the world, blah blah blah... Easy. The second most important was remembering everything you needed to know to save the world. Which you did too. All the rest was just fluff. Fluff that left a gaping hole in your identities, yeah, but still just fluff. Or at least, thats what Grace tried to convince himself of.

It would come back, from time to time, the occasional flash of a memory. A name, a place, a vision blurred by time like teardrops on paper. Water, slipping through both of your minds. It was hard to grasp onto anything tangible when nothing was around to help you remember.

You'd piece together what came to you on your respective whiteboards. Large mind maps, filled with whichever scraps you found, or whatever questions you had. Grace had pinned up all the kids drawings he had found, and the few pictures of himself. You had done sensibly the same, grasping onto the straws of your past identity. And the same reoccuring questions showed up on both of your boards: Who was I? Who am I?

The latest innovation in terms of memory finding was, surprisingly, icebreakers. It had started as a joke, a random comment about how you barely knew yourselves, but quickly turned into a system. You’d cut scraps of paper into uneven rectangles, scribble questions onto them, and shuffle them into a small stack like a makeshift deck. Draw a card, ask the question, let the other answer honestly. No overthinking, no skipping unless it really led nowhere. The hope was just to... Spark something. A word, a feeling, a flicker of recognition like sunlight reaching through a forest.

Sometimes, it worked in strange ways. A question about favorite food might leave one of you staring off into space, chasing the phantom taste of something sweet or salty you couldn’t quite name. Other times, the answers came too easily, slipping out with a certainty that felt foreign, almost suspicious. Still, there was nothing to do but keep going. And when no memories returned, you made yourself new ones. Threads of the present intertwining with ones of the past.

From the middle of the table, Grace picked up another card. "So, Uh..." He scrunched his nose up as he read it. "What's your dream country to visit?"