Chapter Text
Grace still doesn't know what to make of the Hail Mary's newest addition. The man is weird. Not bad weird. Mostly just... quiet. For example, he won't explain how he lost his arm, and he refuses to tell them his name. Oh, and Grace is starting to suspect he's from an alternate timeline. There's that.
Following their whirlwind first contact with the stranger, Grace and Rocky decided that yes, it would be difficult, but they had an obligation to keep him. The alternative was leaving him for dead, so it wasn't really a choice at all. However, his presence on the Hail Mary complicates things.
Specifically, it complicates Grace's calculated plans for starvation.
"Hey," Grace says, unsure if he should be speaking softly to avoid startling the stranger or speaking normally to avoid making him feel babied.
The man looks up from his bowl of Taumoeba slurry. They're sitting on their respective beds across from each other in the dormitory. Rocky is off in the lab, working on one of his mechanical projects and pretending he can't hear the humans eating.
"We need to talk about the food situation," Grace continues, trying to keep his tone even. "I didn't bring it up before because you were still getting settled, but..." He trails off.
"What?" the stranger prompts, brow furrowing.
Grace has spent the last three days working out how to break the news that the two of them are probably going to starve to death. Actually, Grace was already probably going to starve to death. Now that there's another mouth to feed, it's an inevitability.
"I told you about the slurry already." Grace raises his bowl of goop in a sort of "cheers" gesture. "About how I ran out of real food a while back, and now it's just the stuff they pumped into my stomach on the trip here."
"Yeah," he says. "And you mix it with the alien algae stuff from that planet. Adrian."
Grace is pleased he remembers. "Yeah, exactly!"
Unimpressed by Grace's enthusiasm, the man asks, "What about it?"
"Well, there's... not enough of it." Grace scrapes his spoon around his bowl, gathering the last dregs of slurry for one final bite. "I mean, there's plenty of Taumoeba—we can breed more of that in tanks, easy. But the coma substance is where the nutrients come from."
The man frowns. "How much is there?"
"Not enough for the two of us to make it to Erid," Grace says. "Not without extreme rationing, which is pretty dangerous. And there's no guarantee that the Eridians will be able to help us once we get there, either. They'll need time to figure out how to synthesize..."
Grace trails off when he realizes the stranger is staring at him. It's one of the most intense stares he's ever been on the receiving end of. The man's eyes dart down to the empty bowl in Grace's hands, then back up. There's something analytical about the glance. Calculating.
Then the intensity evaporates, and Grace wonders if he was just seeing things.
"That's fine," the man says. "Do what you need to do."
"I—what?"
He's looking down at his own bowl again, avoiding eye contact. "Figure out how much you need to survive the trip, and if there's any to spare, I'll make it work."
Grace blinks once, twice. "You'll... make it work?"
"Yeah. Whatever you leave me, I'll ration it out on my own for as long as I can."
Grace shakes his head. "No, no, that's not—we're not doing that. We'll split it evenly, or according to our body masses, or something."
"You can't be serious," he states, finally looking up again. "You just said there's not enough for both of us to survive, and I'm the stowaway."
"You're not a stowaway," Grace says. "And I'm not going to just let you starve. We need to at least try to make it to Erid together."
The man is staring at him again, this time in disbelief. "You don't even know me."
Grace's brows pull down in the center. "I'd still like to avoid jettisoning your corpse out the airlock, if possible."
The man mutters a curse under his breath and sets his bowl aside on the bed. "So you'd rather us both be dead? With no one to get Rocky home and cure his star?"
Again, Grace is pleasantly surprised that the man was paying attention when he explained their mission after he woke from his Armando-induced coma. Grace wasn't sure how much of it would stick, considering the newcomer had been in such awful shape.
A low trill echoes through the wall from the next room: "New human has point."
"Rocky," Grace scolds, "if you want to be part of the conversation, you need to come in here and make it clear you're listening. Otherwise it's eavesdropping."
"I always listening," he chimes, emerging from the xenonite tunnel to the lab. The laptop resting on the end of Grace's bed picks up his words this time and spits out the translation in his robot voice.
Over the past year of traveling together, Grace and Rocky's comprehension of each other's languages has improved significantly, but with the addition of their newest roommate, the translator—and Rocky's anglicized grammar—had to make a comeback.
"Not my fault human memory so bad, forget Rocky hear entire ship even when not in room."
"Don't be rude," Grace says. "And don't say he has a point." He turns back to the stranger. "I'm not going to deprive you of food for my own benefit."
"It's not for your own benefit." The man points at Rocky. "It's for his whole planet."
Rocky hums in agreement. "I not like plan either. Not want new human to starve. But Grace only one who can pilot. Only one who can plot course. Grace most important crew member."
"That's not—" he stammers. "I don't like that."
"Doesn't matter what you like," the newcomer says. "It's true. I'm expendable. You're not."
Expendable. Grace hates that word.
"We're not doing that," he repeats, firmer this time. "We'll figure something out." When the newcomer just stares, Grace points at the unfinished bowl of slurry next to him. "Eat that. You're still recovering from your injuries."
Begrudgingly, he picks up the bowl and resumes eating. Grace hopes it's not just because he thinks it'll be his last full meal for a while.
...
It only takes another two days for Simon to get bored of recovery and insist on making himself useful. It happens when he overhears Rocky and Grace discussing the Hail Mary's water reclaimer, which piques his interest. The only reason it stands out from the rest of the endless science-y shit they talk about is because Simon actually knows a thing or two about water reclaimers.
"It's processing about half of what it should," Grace says.
Simon lurks at the entrance to the lab, watching without climbing fully through the hatch. Grace and Rocky are seated next to each other in a corner of the room, separated by a layer of the glass-like material that makes up Rocky's tunnels. Xenonite, Grace calls it.
Rocky says something in reply, but the translation software isn't running on any nearby computers, so Simon hears only the alien's strange trills and a double-tap on a hard surface. He knows from observation that this means Rocky just asked a question.
"I don't know," Grace admits.
Rocky says something else, this time without the interrogative double-tap.
Grace blows out a long breath. "I wish you could, but the parts would melt in your atmosphere."
Rocky stamps his foot once. Not a question, just regular frustration. He sings a few notes.
"You know I'm not questioning your skills, bud. I just don't want to go messing with it when neither of us really knows how it works."
Rocky clicks his claws together and hums. Grace straightens up on his stool and twists around to face the hatch to the dormitory. When his eyes land on Simon, he tilts his head curiously.
"What," Simon says.
"Hold on." Grace fumbles for one of his laptops where it rests on a nearby table.
As he boots up the translation software, Simon climbs into the room and approaches the pair cautiously. "Did he say something about me?"
"Just that we should see if you can help us," Grace says. "Go ahead, Rock."
"Confirm: New human come from space station, question? Station has life support, question?"
"Uh, yeah," Simon says. "Do you need me to take a look at your water reclaimer?"
Grace blinks, then turns to Rocky and says, "You should've mentioned earlier that he was listening."
Rocky ignores this and tilts his carapce toward Simon. "New human can fix, question?"
"Maybe," he says, not wanting to promise anything. "Does it use reverse osmosis or vacuum?"
Grace stares at him. "Uh."
"God, you're lucky I'm here," Simon mutters. "Just show me where it is. I'll see what I can do."
So that's how he ends up lying on his side, reaching into the inner workings of the Hail Mary via a panel in the dormitory wall. The opening is right along the floor, an incredibly inconvenient place to store such a piece of equipment, and Simon isn't afraid to let Grace know that.
"Sorry," Grace says, wincing. He's sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Simon. "I doubt they expected us to have to work on it at all. This mission was supposed to end more than a year ago; they didn't build the Hail Mary to last forever."
"Nothing's built to last forever," Simon mutters, "but people should have the common sense to build things so they're easy to fix."
"Agree," Rocky says from his spot behind the xenonite.
"Take it up with NASA," Grace grumbles.
"What, question?" Rocky asks, at the same time Simon says, "Who's NASA?"
Grace puts a hand over his face and lets out an agonized sigh. "Sometimes I forget that I'm the alien to you guys."
"Human memory bad," Rocky says.
Simon huffs a laugh and tries to cover it up by yanking a narrow tube out of the main body of the reclaimer.
Grace attempts to stifle a pained noise and doesn't quite succeed. "Uh, hey, guy? I really don't mean any offense, but—you do know what you're doing, right?"
Oh, right. Simon still hasn't told them his name.
After five days awake on the Hail Mary, he's pretty sure this is all real. Or he's dead. That could also be true. But it can't be heaven, because there aren't any trees and his body hurts all the time. More likely, this is hell, and it's just doling out eternal punishment in an extremely roundabout way. Either way, heaven or hell, alive or dead, it shouldn't matter if Simon tells them his name. But something keeps stopping him from doing so.
He just wants to be absolutely sure. He just wants to give these two strange creatures a little longer to mess up and show their cards. If one of them slips and calls him Simon without having been told that name, then he'll know this is all a trick. Or he's dead. He's not sure which would be preferable at this point.
Simon shrugs and reaches to unplug a cable. "This is pretty much what we had back on—" A zap from the wire, and he rears back, shaking his hand. "Fuck me!"
"Are you okay?" Grace asks hurriedly, leaning forward.
"Yeah," he says, pressing his fingers to his mouth. "Just a shock. I'm fine."
"Be more careful," Rocky suggests.
"Yeah, I got that," Simon snaps. He runs his hand through the front of his hair, scraping dark strands back from his forehead. It's been driving him crazy lately. He pilfered a rubber band from the lab yesterday, but he hasn't figured out how to make use of it with just one hand.
"Is your hair bothering you?" Grace blurts. "I could—"
Simon shoots a glare over his shoulder, daring Grace to finish his sentence. If he offers to cut it, or, God forbid, tie it back for him, he might scream.
"—find something to hold it back," Grace says, course-correcting. "Hold on."
He gets up from the floor and crosses the narrow length of the dormitory. Simon sits up to watch as Grace kneels and digs under one of the beds. It only takes a minute or so for him to return with a small mesh bag. He plops down beside Simon and dumps out the contents. A tangle of plastic hair clips and elastic ties clatter between them.
Grace gestures for Simon to take his pick.
Yeah, this is a really weird eternal punishment.
Simon hesitates, eyes darting from Grace to the offered supplies with suspicion. Out of all the colorful clips and ties, he eventually picks up a circle of gray fabric, thin and stretchy. He yanks it over his head and down around his neck before pulling it back up over his forehead, effectively pinning down his thick hair.
"Better?" Grace asks.
"Yeah," he mutters. "Thanks."
"Thank Specialist Ilyukhina. She's the one who packed this stuff." As Grace starts gathering the leftover hair supplies in the bag, he adds, "I bet she'd be happy someone's putting it to good—"
"Simon."
Grace drops a bright purple hair clip. "What?"
"That's my name," he says. "Simon."
"Oh." Grace takes a second to process this, then beams. "Ryland Grace."
Simon is momentarily dazed by Grace's smile. He takes in the stretch of his lips, the crinkles around his eyes, his glasses slipping down his nose. He looks away. "Yeah, I know."
"Right. I just—it seemed appropriate to say again."
"Rocky," Rocky says.
Despite himself, Simon feels the corner of his mouth quirk up. He immediately presses it back down into a flat line and says, "I got it, guys."
Grace turns and reaches for the laptop where it rests on the floor nearby. "Rocky, come up with an Eridian word for 'Simon.' I'll add it to the database."
"Ugh. Tired of name things. New human name have meaning, question?"
"Probably." Grace turns to ask Simon, "Do you know what your name means?"
He shakes his head. Maybe he was told once, but if so, he's forgotten it by now.
"I call new human ♪♫♫," says Rocky. "Is common name where I come from. Traditional."
"That works," Grace says. "Simon is kind of a traditional name for humans, too." He types something into the computer. "That wasn't so hard."
"Simon," Rocky repeats, and the computer spits out the translation. "Simon. Sounds okay, question?"
Grace mutters, "You never asked me if I liked the sound of my name."
Simon tells Rocky, "Can't really tell it apart from the other sounds you make. Sorry."
"Just wait," Grace says. "You'll be picking out individual chords in no time if you stick with us."
"Like I have a choice," Simon mumbles. He picks at his new headband before trailing his hand down the side of his neck. His fingers brush over the raised scar where his Eden tattoo used to be, and he catches Grace staring.
Oh. This might be his first good look at it, now that Simon's hair is out of the way.
Horrified, Grace asks, "What happened to your neck?"
Simon's hand comes up to cover the mess of blotchy ink and marred tissue. "Nothing," he growls. "Fuck off."
"Okay," Grace says, flinching back. "Sorry."
They sit like that in silence for a minute, Simon unable to continue his work with his hand on his neck, and Grace trying to keep his eyes averted.
It's Rocky who eventually breaks the silence. "Simon has burn like Grace."
"Rocky," Grace chides. Then, to Simon, "You don't have to tell us anything you don't want to."
"Wasn't gonna," he says, voice rough. Then, after a pause: "What does he mean, a burn like yours?"
"Oh, he's talking about these." Grace pushes up his right sleeve to reveal a strange triangle-ish burn mark on his forearm. Simon is about to ask what made it, but then Grace starts rolling up his left sleeve.
Simon's mouth falls open. It's the largest burn scar he's ever seen on a still-living person. Grace's skin is mottled and pink all around his arm.
As Simon stares, Grace traces his fingers over the textured patterns and explains, "I got them after our adventure at Planet Adrian."
"Grace save my life," Rocky says. "I go into his atmosphere, help him not get crush by centrifugal force. Eridians very hot compare to humans. Touch arm, leave mark. Grace safe, but oxygen cause fire in my radiator. He carry me back to dormitory airlock, open door to put me in my atmosphere or I die. Hot ammonia get out, burn Grace other arm."
"Hey, zero regrets," Grace says, smiling and setting his left hand over the triangular scar on his right arm, which Simon now understands is Rocky's handprint.
Rocky chirrups happily, then asks, "Simon burn have similar story, question?"
Simon turns away and lies back down to look at the water reclaimer again. "No."
He can practically feel the two of them exchange glances behind his back. Well, Grace would glance. Rocky doesn't have eyes.
They all remain silent for a minute while Simon examines the tube he pulled out of the reclaimer. After squinting one eye shut and trying to look through, he gives up and just puts the thing in his mouth. Grace makes another noise, but Simon ignores him. He tries blowing into the tube, and there's no airflow.
He removes it from his mouth and states, "It's clogged. Some kind of buildup."
"That's it?" Grace asks, clearly surprised by the simplicity of the diagnosis.
Simon sits up again and tilts his head from side to side, trying to relieve the crick in his neck. "It'll work for now if I clear the tube, but it'll need a new filter soon."
Grace winces. "I doubt the team thought to send any extras."
"I make new filter," Rocky announces. "Thinking machine has schematics, question?"
This seems to brighten Grace's mood. He sits up a little straighter and says, "I'll see what I can find."
Simon twists the water reclaimer tube between his fingers. "You got a pipe cleaner or wire or something?"
"I'm sure the lab has something," Grace says. "That, or—"
"I make small brush," Rocky says, bouncing his carapace a little.
Grace waves his hand at the alien. "Rocky make small brush." He sighs and leans back on his hands. "Now we just need to figure out the food situation, and we'll be all set."
There's a beat of silence before Rocky chimes, "Will be okay. Grace Rocky Simon solve food problem."
"You think so, bud?" Grace asks.
"Yes. New human Simon smart like Rocky, know machines."
Grace snorts. "Yeah, you're right." He tosses an amused look Simon's way. "I'm officially outnumbered by engineers."
Rocky makes a chirping noise that might actually be a laugh. "Grace look for pipe cleaner now. Simon teach Rocky about water reclaimer."
Grace heaves himself up from the floor. "Yeah, yeah," he says, but he's got a smile on his face as he turns and heads for the ladder.
As Grace begins his climb to the lab and Rocky spouts questions about the humans' life support system, Simon can't help the whisper of warmth blooming in his chest. These two are in danger of growing on him. It's really too bad he's going to have to kill them.