Chapter Text
Grace sighs at the countdown telling him how much longer until they reached Erid. There were a lot of seconds, minutes, hours in four years. He’s already spent too many of them thinking. About who he used to be and who he’s becoming.
Even with the relief of solving the astrophage problem, there were still a daunting amount of preparations to make.
The first trial of taumeoba-eating doesn’t go as swimmingly as he and Rocky had hoped. Grace tolerates it fine enough, until suddenly he doesn’t tolerate it at all. His body spends the next few days purging itself completely of the stuff. The subsequent dehydration and malaise was enough to skyrocket Grace’s anxiety about his imminent food dilemma.
He mopes about it for the entirety of his time out of commission. Rocky gets better at words of encouragement. He was also very wise. He tells Grace about all the things they can trial to make sure he has food. If not here, then on Erid where they’d have more help and more resources. It makes Grace feel a little lighter. Rocky may have been optimistic, but he wasn’t naively hopeful. If Rocky thinks there’s another way, then there usually probably is. One of them is bound to work. He had to believe that.
~
He and Rocky have been watching a lot of sunsets. It started as a way to relieve stress, but now it’s become somewhat of a little ritual they’ve got going. Today’s sunset is from Tuscany. It was one of the rare moments when all five of Rocky’s arms were relaxed; not toiling away at one of his magnificent creations, just holding the scope that helped him hear screens. Right now, he was completely immersed in the atmosphere that took Grace a frustrating amount of effort to rig onto the screens for them. It has him feeling weirdly sentimental.
He lay on the grating next to Rocky’s xenonite shell, always as close as possible. One knee is drawn up slightly. He props his head on an arm, following the sun on its slow arc below sea level. The sky is a shade of pinkish-orange that makes his heart twinge. Fragments of past sunsets elude him. The earthy scent of a summer breeze rushes through his mind and he doesn’t capture it in enough time to remember the way it feels. He can’t tell if they’re memories or if they’re from a dream.
Grace tosses the lava beanbag up, catches it when it comes back down. He’ll be okay. He had to be.
Sometimes in idle moments, he wonders when it happened. It, of course, being that he’s undergone major psychological rearrangement in the past few years. The shocking revelations came a lot more recently though. Things that never mattered to him on Earth are suddenly all he can think about. None of his relationships had ever gotten quite this intense; where he’s the center of someone’s universe, and someone is the center of his.
He’s never had anyone to watch over him while he sleeps. He’s never had someone who invents for him when he has any need at all. There’s never been someone who took an interest quite as rapt in the things he says. He’s never had someone as devoted to understanding him as the Hail Mary’s skilled engineer.
To be observed constantly, intimately, without the choice to hide or cover up has insisted profoundly that he trusts Rocky. And he does, utterly and completely. With his life.
He dreads, kind of selfishly, that when they reach Erid and Rocky is home, that Rocky won’t belong to him anymore. Not in the way that he does now; with shared space of fluorescent lit hallways and their adjacent xenonite tunnels, the companionable silence in hard work, and the partnership they’d forged in the middle of shy yet eager curiosity of one another.
He pushes it out of his mind, tries not to think about that right now. For the time being, he’s the luckiest human in space. He smiles to himself a lot about it, quietly smug.
He forgets the enormity of the universe. He forgets that he’s so far from home because here, he had already built one.
He stops checking the countdown. They’re about more than a year and half in and he still spends so much time thinking. Memories from his life before still come flooding back. Sometimes it’s in waves, other times it’s slow going.
He wasn’t meant to make it this far. Sometimes he wonders if he made it at all, if everything now was just a purgatory. Sitting by the porthole window helps, but most of the time, there’s nothing but star-speckled darkness for months on end.
He thinks about the people who volunteered for a lesser version of this fate. He thinks about the brave ones who gave up everything and lost more than that. He thinks about Rocky out here, alone, before Grace was even born. He thinks about all the time it took him to grow up, how Rocky was waiting all the while.
His hand next to Rocky’s, always separated by the barrier, will never be a real touch. But the almost-contact always ends up sending him reeling anyway. He feels like such a teenager when his fingers tingle from the softness of it, the idea of it; the way it lingers there on his skin like a phantom.
There’s always a sheepish-slash-heartfelt embarrassment that fills his chest when this happens. He’s still human. He still wants things that humans want, no matter how much he tries to say he’s okay without.
He tries to make things easier on Rocky even though Rocky’s whole thing is fixing stuff. If he just told Rocky, Grace knows he’d find a way to make it better.
For some reason, he’d much rather walk it off—even if all the while his nerves ache with restless, unfulfilled want. He flexes his hand longingly. He goes to the lab, pulls on some gloves and checks on the breeder tanks. He ignores Rocky when he questions why he’s checking them for the third time today.
He turns over that night and thinks about how Rocky came to him the way dreams do; sudden and completely out of the blue. Grace will spend a lifetime parsing through and reconciling how he ended up here; how he never would’ve chosen to leave Earth and how the choice never belonged to him at all.
But there are some nights, like this one, when he’s in a wistful enough mood to find his silent suffering of the heart morbidly poetic. He also feels grateful, however complicated that may be. Grateful that it was Grace out there in space, alone, and that it was Rocky waiting for him.
Grateful that they survived together, even though there were holes in hulls, atmospheres pulling them down, and breaches in the breeder tanks.
It’s been just the two of them for so long. He’s lost track of the hours, the days, the years. He can’t remember when that stopped mattering. Rocky was with him, and experiencing the opposite of that—however long it’s been since those perilous months he spent searching for him, adrift amongst the stars—was the last thing that truly burned when he tried to think of things that still matter.
Having his life confined within Mary’s stark sterile walls was no easy thing to reckon with. He was getting stir-crazy. His screws were getting a little loose—he could feel it happening.
It’s undeniable. Grace realizes now that he doesn’t have a say in whether or not it turned into Something Else for him, because lately, with hindsight, he’s had the feeling that it always would. He’d woken up here on the Hail Mary alone, with the emptiness of his lonesome echoing back to him loudly.
By the time Rocky had found him, Grace was in despairing search for someone else—anyone else to reflect life and meaning and friendship back at him.
(He should’ve known that he wouldn’t have a well-adjusted response when he finally got it.)
All of his memories of his life before had become crinkled and chimerical, fading softly, quietly. Instead, his memories are replaced by more musical, life altering, survival-tinged moments, stored away in his mind where it was only him, only Rocky, only their shared burden of saving the world.
It’s desperate, it’s stubborn, and it’s resigned every time he puts his hand on the barrier. Every time he leans his body on the barrier. Every time he looks at the barrier. Rocky will respond in kind and Grace will imagine for a moment that the separation disappears. His eyes get distant with the daydream of it: a secret and the weight of him, presumably, being the only one who’s carrying it.
~
Grace squirms with the inherent discomfort he feels when there’s a problem he can’t do math about.
It feels equal parts biological as it does romantic. That’s what he was sticking to because it felt closest to how he felt, even if he doesn’t remember the feeling all that well in the first place. He accepts that he needs this if he’s going to survive—needs to be able to love someone more than he loves anything else if he’s going to make such a drastic change of plans, set a new course, start a whole new life somewhere.
One day lost among the sea of many, many others, Rocky shows him the suit he made for himself out of xenonite. Grace watches him move around in it, easier now, and he tells him how amazing he is.
Grace kneels and hugs his best friend for the first time. Rocky’s best friend, racked with sniffles and sobs at the mere touch, loses composure in five arms because he isn’t sure how else to tell him, isn’t sure how else to say ‘thank you for saving my life.’
They touch at every given opportunity afterwards. Rocky touches Grace’s face and takes his time observing everything about it. He removes his glasses under the one condition that Rocky doesn’t poke his eyes out. Rocky reluctantly promises. He flexes an arm, showing Rocky his muscles. Rocky doesn’t particularly care.
Grace has a poorly disguised eagerness to turn in a little earlier than usual. Rocky very accommodatingly is ready right then to watch him sleep.
They lay together. Grace has a hand around one of three arms touching him, holding him close—one on his face, one on his shoulder, and the other on his rib. The comfortable warmth emanating from Rocky is so very soothing. His eyes close when Rocky speaks. It’s the most reverberating, most relaxing sensation to feel the vibration ripple through him.
Grace feels exceedingly sleepy. It’s a Herculean effort to stay awake. They’d gone over basic biology stuff together in the past, but now that they can be a little more hands on, they’d both had a lot more questions. Rocky especially had questions. Grace can hear the tinge of annoyance in Rocky’s voice when his responses start to devolve into sleep-slurred murmurs.
Grace feels brave at the strangest of times. He lets his fingers trail the markings on Rocky’s body while he falls asleep, and Rocky quietly sings him the song of what they mean.
Grace dreams of colossal green planets and Petrova lines and curiously gentle touches.
~
The first year on Erid is one he doesn’t think he’ll survive. He sleeps on the med bed. An Armando-monitored IV keeps him hydrated. He’s sick with practically every Victorian malnutrition related illness you can think of. Rocky is by his side all the while. Grace, in his rare lucid moments, feels guilty. Rocky had spent an entire human lifetime in space, and still he was here with this fragile, almost permanently broken human, and he was patient and calm and nurturing about it.
Being looked after by Rocky is the specialist privilege. Adrian is the luckiest Eridian. Having Rocky is like having everything. For so many years, Grace had everything. Nowadays it felt like he was living on borrowed time. He still had Rocky on borrowed time.
He loved feeling whole when they were together. It was the only time he’d ever felt like something. It was the only time he felt like he was doing something worthwhile. Grace sleeps and sleeps and sleeps the days away. He wakes up just enough sometimes to realize that there’s another Eridian in the room, wearing a xenonite suit, talking with Rocky. Woah. He’s never seen another one before.
These Eridians often had more markings on their bodies than Rocky. He wonders if that’s like having a doctorate or something. The conversations are always too complex for him to follow, but Rocky tells him later that they are here to help, that he’ll be okay.
The Eridians were working on something. Every now and then, Rocky will bring him some sort of mysterious sludge and make him eat it. It reminded him an awful lot of coma slurry. The first few times, it makes him hurl and Grace has to cry through the terrible taste.
They keep trying.
Every time he brings it to him after that, it tastes a little different. The taste becomes slightly more tolerable with each passing day, and astonishingly, he starts to feel full afterwards.
Rocky takes braille-like notes on his pad, asks him thorough questions about why he didn’t like this batch. Grace answers sleepily, tries not to nitpick things like the consistency or the chunks that’s sometimes in it. Most of his complaints concern the taste. The taste can’t be horrible if he’s going to try to keep this stuff down. Rocky is going to disappear to the lab again. It’ll probably be hours before he’s back with something new for him to try.
He’s so diligent and hardworking and smart. Whatever was happening in those Eridian labs, Grace realized that it was Rocky telling the others what to do. Rocky was the only one who knew what Grace needed nutritionally and medically. He didn’t have the skills to help Grace himself, so he went out and gathered people who did.
“Thanks, Rock.” He says, voice rough with disuse. Maybe if it sounded enough like a voice that wasn’t his own, he’d feel brave enough to tell him he loved him. He doesn’t feel very brave right now.
“Friend Grace.” Rocky makes a warm trilling sound that washes over Grace and comforts him down to the skin of his bones. He stays put for a moment and taps, always in threes. Rocky’s ‘looking’ at him.
Grace’s heart skips. He was kinda becoming one of Pavlov’s dogs whenever he heard that tapping. He grins, small and lopsided and so, so sleepy from the painkillers and everything else Armando was administering through his IV line.
“You be okay.” Rocky says. “Sleep more, I return soon to watch.”
Grace thinks that he has to be okay. He needs more time. He needs to know a life with Rocky that doesn’t have them hard-pressed for survival. No amount of time with Rocky would ever be enough, but everything up to now especially was painfully, terribly too little.
Rocky leaves. Grace cries a little as he drifts off again. He’ll be okay.