Chapter Text
Ryland Grace has always considered himself a good teacher.
A great one, even, if you happen to ask him in a good mood. Because of this, you could say he knows a credible amount of information that others do not. You could even say this is why he was sent to space to save the stars.
Even on Erid, there are things he’s still able to teach even the most well-practiced scientists there, although he learns just as much from them as they do from him. He’s like their very own thesaurus for all things alien, and vice versa. (Along with the astrophage, of course.)
He taught them —The Eridians, not the astrophage— about human culture, about religion and history and the beautiful strangeness of it all. Food that they had tried and failed and occasional succeeded to recreate for him. Gardening, so that he could make his own food and trees with the leftover plants and seeds in the Hail Mary. Politics. Explained sexuality, gender, even attempted to unpack his own for a bit before he decided it wasn’t something he needed to handle.
Anything that he could think of he explained it in the best way he could, using Rocky and a computer as a translator. This exercise also helped him learn Eridian to the point of near fluency. He knows, he realized in his first few months, a lot more about Earth than he once thought. Taking a certain kind of pride in this, he always made sure to include a hefty dose of Earth studies along with the science that he taught.
However, there are still some things he doesn’t know and some times he will admit to being absolutely flabbergasted.
Like now, as the flowing water in his large mock-Earth enclosure laps red at the surface and bubbles froth in small spurts, growing bigger and bigger by the minute. He’s been absolutely transfixed for half an hour, since he first took notice of the strange happenings. His brow furrows.
What the fudge?
Water isn’t supposed to do that—— no, water simply does not do that. There is nothing the Eridians could have done to make this happen, and they wouldn’t have anyway since Grace hasn’t asked them to. Something is wrong, and he dreads to find out what. Grace stands as far away from the water as his curiosity will allow and squints at it in an attempt to see what exactly the heck is going on.
He can see a black clump surfacing in the water in the middle of all the red, bobbing very slightly up and down, like it’s being dragged against the sandy floor. It’s ominous and tangible and Grace’s fight or flight kicks in nearly full speed.
Obviously, he chooses to freeze; either out of morbid curiosity or stupidity. Strange. He’s always been a flight sort of person.
The waves ——just as strong as ever—— are pushing the cloudy spot of red with its tendrils of black closer and closer to shore, and the bubbles are gradually stopping. The trail of crimson it’s leaving behind is truly horrifying and he can’t help but think of blood.
He runs through possibilities in his mind, trying to see exactly or even generally what happened to cause this. There couldn’t have been a crack in the xenonite; he’d be able to smell the ammonia. Meaning nothing, no chemicals, could’ve spread into the water if there was no leak. Did a piece of Eridian fauna find its way through the two decontamination rooms separating the two atmospheres? Improbable. That section of the dome is kept under very tight surveillance. It’s also unlikely that this is just a system malfunction because——
“Oh my god. Oh my god.”
——Because there’s a body and no it’s not a body it’s hair, a tangled black mess of it, hair connected to a body that is in fact a body, a human body, a dead human body oh this is bad. This is very bad. Or good. Is this good? Another human? Is it human? His logical mind wants to question how. How anyone got in here. How did a human get here from Earth to Erid, how did a human get inside the enclosure, how did a human get in the water?
But the rest of him is staring at the blood. The stench of metal makes his nostrils burn. It has to be blood, right? Because there’s nothing else it could possibly be (if that’s a human), except there’s so much. There is so much blood and it’s pooling and staining the sand underneath the body, the body that is here, the human body that is here somehow. How is there so much blood if it was getting washed in the water all this time?
He wants to throw up. Probably could if he really felt like it, but he can’t because there’s a body in front of him and he doesn’t know how it got here.
Is this a hallucination? That might be it. Without human contact for so long he’s gone insane. Maybe the oxygen in his enclosure is too low or too high or something, and he’s imagining this… person. He remembers vaguely an article about the human brain being unable to make up a face it hasn’t seen before. He’d have to know someone to hallucinate them.
…Does he know this person?
It’s a full grown human, dark hair soaked in blood (the rest of them is, also, admittedly, soaked in blood), facedown in the sand, body curled into a position reminiscent of a dead beetle. Grace can see one arm but the other is either angled weird or just gone. The entire body is also entirely, completely soaked with blood, the smell of it making Grace gag. Even if Grace knew them, he wouldn’t be able to tell underneath the blood.
It feels like a sick prank, somehow. A human form made of xenonite, covered in what they hoped was ocean looking liquid. Except the Eridians wouldn’t do that, ever. They know not to do that. Right?
Then the body moves, twitches like it’s an instinct, and Grace nearly jumps out of his own skin. Adrenaline drops onto him like a piano or maybe an anvil, and his hands start to tremble with so many conflicted emotions.
So it’s alive. That changes things, slightly and yet completely. Instead of a dead body somehow appearing in the simulated waves of his enclosure, it’s a living, breathing human that’s managed to do so. He sees the blood again, in a new light, in the light of that is someone who is currently alive and has lost that absolutely horrific amount of blood, and chokes down a layer of bile. What do you even do to get that injured? What happened to them?
Grace can’t move. He’s frozen and panicked and confused and scared, so scared, and he stays completely entirely still, back straight, like the body might attack him somehow, until he hears the familiar noises of xenonite on sand and musical chords. Rocky. Thank goodness.
“Grace okay, question? No danger? Rocky heard noise—“
Grace realizes that he had, in the last few minutes, screamed. Loudly. Which makes sense, but he’d really thought he’d remember doing that. He’s having trouble remembering a lot of things right now, apparently, such as how exactly a human can suddenly appear in an airtight space in a faux ocean eleven light years away from Earth. He’s about to point the body out to Rocky, but the Eridian had already seen it, depending on how he had stopped, frozen, in his tracks, and pointed one of his front arms.
“What is that, question?” There’s a tinge of horror and maybe panic in Rocky’s shaky tone, and Grace soundly agrees. He’d give anything to be able to explain it. But if Rocky can see them…
Grace steps forward tentatively, as if testing the metaphorical waters of is this thing going to attack me, and then does it again. He can feel goose flesh rising as he’s ten feet away from the body curled up on the shore, then nine. The closer he gets the more the person’s (human person’s) breathing gets a little more pronounced, chest rising and falling in a jagged impression of sleep. “It’s a. Er. A human? I think?” He ignores Rocky’s many, many, many frantic follow-up questions after that and instead focuses on staying upright and not passing out as he moves closer.
He stops a foot or so away from the lump on the grass and crouches down to level it. Jeez. It’s even worse up close, somehow. Along with being covered in an inconceivable amount of blood, the person seems to still be actively bleeding. Heavily. So heavily, in fact…
With the blood loss combined with the amount of time spent in the water, they might not make it. Heck, he’s surprised they’re still alive right now.
They might not make it.
Rocky must have come to the same exact conclusion because the his ball is rolling back and forth on the sand in a manner not unlike very fast pacing, his trilling getting higher and higher pitched. “Get human to robot. Get human to robot.” Grace can tell, distantly and all too closely, that he means Armando. Also that in between the panicked statements Rocky sounds like he may be calling for Adrian, for backup.
Grace just gets the human in his arms —His first human contact in a decade, he can’t help but shiver a little— and the guy is bleeding, without an arm, and almost certainly dying, and he just braces his poor old back to lift this dude up.
It isn’t until his tear falls on the body’s face that he realizes he’s been crying. He’s not surprised. Not only is this entire scenario a little on the traumatic side, but he hasn’t been able to touch a living creature since Rocky saved his life a few years ago. His fingers curls where they’re pressed into the body’s knee, getting another grasp on just how real this situation is. The full gravity of it still probably hasn’t hit him, but the way his pulse is thudding sure as hell shows he gets some part of it.
Until he quickly realizes that lifting the body was a bad idea (or just maybe the best one) because the it shudders, arm twitching.
He very stupidly drops them from where his hands had been hovering a foot if the ground, and a low groan escapes the person below him. Their mouth opens, and they hack and sputter and cough until they’re doubled into their side and an entire stomach content’s worth of blood exits their mouth. It’s disgusting but it shows that they’re alive and any sign is a good sign.
“Uh. Um,” he says in a rather desperate attempt to converse, and then a pair of dark eyes snap to meet his. They’re bloodshot, something to be expected, and are barely open, but they widen ever so slightly when they lock onto Grace, and he can swear he sees tears welling up, same as him. Their mouth opens, blood still pooled at the corners, and a hoarse, pained noise is all that comes out. Grace is awash with relief , relief that this person is alive and well enough to wake, that their gag reflex or even digestive system work enough for them to vomit, that they seem to be actually, undoubtedly human.
He’s about to try for communication again, maybe this time with something other than ‘um’, when the body shudders once more and collapses against the sand, against his legs, once more.
Rocky is pressing his xenonite ball against the back of his legs, making impatient chitters and scolding Grace to get human to robot.
It’s all he can do to lift the person, getting blood all over himself and dripping it positively everywhere he walks, and get them to Armando as soon as his legs will allow.