Chapter Text
It is a sunny afternoon – because I asked for it to be – when the call comes in.
I’ve just returned from a dip. I suspect my accompanying physios reported the trip so that whoever wanted to talk to me knew exactly how long to wait. I am literally leaving the shower as the phone rings – about to pick up on some prep material for a micro-thrum on relativistic physics. I pick up the old landline-style receiver to hear an unfamiliar voice say, “Hello. Undeserved- No! Already explained, must have permission. Undeserved- Yes, I trying to I ask it! Undeserved Forgiveness requested be notified when-”
“Yes,” I cut them off. “Yes, permission granted! What, now? Right now?”
“Acknowledge, access granted – Stop pulling or lever no unlock – Yes, now. Commencing cycle.”
I think they ask me a question, but I don’t hear it. I’m already heading out the door. Back in my living room, the receiver bounces on its functionless cord.
He’ll be coming from the cliff-side maintenance access to avoid the fans. I book it back to the beach.
I’m not even at the bottom of the steps yet when I catch sight of him. Gosh, that little dude can move when he wants to. He bounds towards me like this is Chariots of Fire, and – oh, he isn’t stopping. He bowls me right over. Erid’s flimsiest skittle ends up in the sand. The physios will love that.
Once I’m down, I don’t have the option to get up. He wraps all five limbs around me. I do my best to match him. “Hi, buddy, hey buddy,” I grin, while he gives his best impression of a limpet. “Hey. Did I ever miss you.”
“Rocky sorry," he frets. "I sorry."
“That’s okay. You only broke all my bones.”
He leans back, tilts and clicks at me. “Grace bones fine. Apology is for Hail Mary docking. Letting strangers take Grace away.”
Rocky helps me to sit, but he won’t release my hands.
I don’t remember much of our parting. I don’t envy him his eidetic recall on this one. What I do remember, however, is how many times he’s already said this. “No, Rocky,” I say, “I’m sorry. You were right. I was paranoid. I promise I’m not mad.”
“Not right. Rocky should have known better. Grace not paranoid, Grace traumatised.”
You can talk, I think.
And it’s true. Rocky has spent the last four years working around the clock to save the lives of everyone on Erid, myself included – myself in particular – and he hasn’t stopped long enough to let it hit him, but we’ve both been through Hell.
I have mulled this over almost as much as I’ve anticipated seeing him again. Rocky lost everything. He stayed that way for years. Then he found me, and he became my best friend, and then shortly thereafter my caretaker. He was never given a choice in that. He never faltered. He stayed by my side and he made sure I ate and he watched me sleep, and he designed and made robotic limbs for his ball so he could help Armando care for my reopening wounds and hold my hand when I didn’t know where I was, and he made a long-ranged radio communications array and exosuits so his people would be ready to receive me, and he read the dictionary out loud so he could give me a voice, and he wrote a treatise on how to synthesise everything needed to save a completely novel and complex organism from the brink of death. He did all that for me, and I haven’t even been able to reassure him that he didn’t do it wrong. Seeing him now, actually being able to come to him on my own two feet and having his first instinct be to cringe with regret, all I want is for him not to carry this any more. I want to let him go.
I tell him: “You were exactly right. Rocky, things are so much better now. Heck, they’re more than better; they’re good. I’m good. Listen to this –” I break his grip to spread my arms wide, gesturing at the world his people made for me – “You did this! Isn’t that amazing? Listen! I’m going to have a life here!”
Rocky warbles, “Grace.” And then he takes a little step away from me.
He folds his arms into himself. He shuffles around on the spot, turning until he’s made a full circle. Then he curls up into a ball and sits on the ground.
Then Rocky starts to cry.
I have never seen him do this. He has described it to me before. I know it happened after he lost his crew on the Blip A. Watson approached it once, but only fleetingly; it was nothing like this. This is a blaring and gut-wrenching drone that crescendos until it completely eclipses my rational brain with an insistence that something is wrong, wrong, wrong, and needs to and can never be fixed. I clap my hands over my ears. I yell, “Rocky, Rock! What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“Rocky was lying,” Rocky howls. “I lied the whole time. Kept saying Grace would be okay. Didn’t know.” For a few seconds he is working too hard on wailing to be able to speak. Then he finds the breath to intone: “Rocky fault Grace had to come to Erid. Rocky did everything to fix. Never never never wanted to hurt you. Didn’t know what to do.” Rocky cries, “I was all alone.”
I lean over and pull him into the tightest hug I can. He’s heavy as anything and I’m only a flimsy human, so I end up mostly just covering his body with my own, feeling his cries as tremors diffusing through me. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. You’re home now, buddy, and Adrian is here, and so am I, and we love you. I love you very much. It’s over now. We’re going to be alright.”
Topanga says progress doesn’t happen all at once. They also say it’s often in the little things. They once told me that the biggest shift they celebrated in the concealed observation chamber in those initial weeks was not when I ambulated unassisted for the first time, or slept through the night, but when I candidly told a nutritionist my newest smoothie tasted like crap. They marked this as the beginning of the end of the fawn response – ‘fawn’ as in ‘possibly the most humiliating of the four human responses to threat’, that ‘fawn’ – which was something I hadn’t even realised I’d been doing until after it stopped.
When things get better you often don’t notice them in the moment, because the signals are mundane, and they only accumulate over a long, long time. ‘Recovery’ doesn’t really announce itself as what it is. It just leaves you standing somewhere you once didn't believe you would reach.
I never did get to watch Rocky dig his special hole. But we’re together when I break into the Skittles.
I didn’t pick the day in advance, but I know when it arrives. My teeth have stopped wiggling in their sockets. The bad news is this means I’m finally ready for implants to replace the ones I've lost. I've already been through enough medical procedures here to last a lifetime. The good news is I can now handle the glucose-starch matrix that gives Skittles their wonderful chewiness.
Once the decision is made, I clap my hands together and rock on my heels.
I sort them into colours first and then pour them all back into the bag. I pull out a red one (any human who has eaten Skittles before, sour or otherwise, can attest that the red ones are the best), squish it beneath two slides, and examine at it under my microscope. I portion off a few of each flavour to set aside for the nutritionists, on the long shot they might be about to synthesise more one day. Then Adrian tells me to take it outside.
Adrian is taking my kitchen apart and I am in the way. Additionally, the behaviour I’m exhibiting – something between Pavlovian slavishness and outright worship of a snack – is verging on ‘too disgust to be tolerable to any sane person in earshot’. So Rocky and I bring the Skittles to our regular haunt – the beach.
Rocky has been wanting to test out a tactile glove he’s designed for the XEVA suit. Its multifaceted surface is coated with a velvety rubber-like material which smooths the hard edges between microscopic plates. What this ‘test’ practically looks like is me, with my head in the lap he makes, and Rocky singing softly while he strokes my hair, while I do the Eridian equivalent of a number two in reverse.
There is a joke here somewhere – which I do not try to voice – about giving a dog its best day ever before putting it to sleep. I can’t imagine it’ll land. I beam up at him instead and simply say, “That feels nice.”
“Glad is nice for Grace,” he complains. “Rocky try to focus and sense tiny soft fibres, but Adrian making big racket.”
I know he doesn’t really mind it. He loves being near to Adrian under any circumstance. He just also loves the opportunity to act like a grouch.
What Adrian is actually doing, by the way, besides making a racket, is supervising upgrades to the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of my habitat. The Eridians use underground tunnels which connect the dome exterior to my house to the new classroom and other meeting and maintenance facilities down at the beach, and they want me to be able to access them. They also are installing a new gym down there somewhere. This all boils down to mobility issues; the stairs to my house are very picturesque and a good excuse to break a sweat, but when I’m fatigued, they’re an accident waiting to happen. Continuing to rely on my current mobility device (Adrian) is not a sustainable plan (they have a life). Adrian and I agreed the least invasive place to install a little elevator in my house is in the kitchen unit.
I have tried to speak to both Adrian and Rocky about further alterations, proposed with the long-term future of the dome in mind, but neither of them will have it.
I’m not going to be around forever. I want this awesome, improbable structure to have a purpose beyond myself.
Rocky outright refuses to discuss things like this and starts throwing his weight around if I try to push it. Adrian is more subtle; they deflect, deftly switching to a new topic. But Watson – sensitive, scrupulous Watson – has suggested a kind of walk-in museum exhibit dedicated to humanity, to me. They envision somewhere young Eridians can visit some day without suits and get to know what it was like for me here – where I can teach them, even if I’m gone, a little bit about what I came from.
I like that idea, but it isn’t what I ultimately want. Maybe temporarily. Maybe, if I’m lucky, the museum will never have a chance, and I’ll still be around when the airlocks are cycled, the dome is pressurised – or pressurised again – and my old habitat is used to welcome Earth’s first proper ambassadors onto Erid. I like believing that future humans could have this Little Earth, a place to stretch their legs after light-years in space. I imagine them learning how I was treated here and knowing they’ll be looked after; having a weight taken off their shoulders; maybe even meeting Rocky and Adrian; maybe even loving them like I did.
Again, I do not bring it up to Rocky. I think it might be years before we can talk about this. We'll get there one day.
Instead, I say, “Adrian is making me a lovely gym to get big muscles in so I can beat you at arm wrestling.”
“Nice try,” he chirps, patting a claw against my temple. “Rocky have five arms; Grace barely have two. Grace never win.”
“We’ll see about that.” I grab at one of his idle hands and try to force it up and back down into the sand. Before he cottons on to what I’m doing, his limb is completely rigid, absolutely fixed in space. Then it magically yields and starts going where I want.
He churrs. “No problem. My big mate will only put little pebble weights in you exercise room. Then will wipe floor with you.”
“What are you talking about? Adrian loves me.”
“Uh oh, is true. No luck for Rocky. Adrian likes Grace very much.”
Rocky hums thoughtfully. He frees his ‘wrestling’ arm to take it to my hair, fiddling on both sides of my head at once. “Is good,” he muses. “Rocky worried a little.” He explains, “Adrian not always like strange things.”
From what I know of Adrian, I wouldn’t put it that way. I think Adrian isn’t comfortable with what they don’t understand, and for good reason. Maybe they also have a low tolerance for whimsy. But they make generous allowances for me, because I’m squishy and cute.
I tell Rocky as much. He overlooks my sincere review to ask, “Who called Grace cute, question? Adrian, question? Rocky will have word with it. Don’t want Grace to get warped self-image.”
I grin. Then I remember: speaking of Adrian – “Oh, Rocky. Have you chosen your stone yet?”
“…Yes,” Rocky lowers his tone to a whisper to match mine. I think he lowers his pitch a bit too. “Not going to do exchange of carapace material this time. Have confirmed Adrian desired gem. Need to travel to harvest. Is important cultural place, also has personal significance to Rocky and Adrian romance. But is far.”
Rocky is planning, as I understand it, on asking Adrian to do the Eridian equivalent of renewing their vows. It’s very important to him and definitely worth taking a trip for, in my opinion.
“You guys can leave me alone for a few days,” I reassure him. “I promise I won’t trash the place.”
“Yes,” he admonishes, “Grace will trash. Without supervision, Grace will spend all time making experiments in locations that are not lab. Grace will damage expensive habitat and impair sensory organs by observing computer too long.”
I chuckle; he’s not wrong.
“Grace,” Rocky says. “I want Grace to come. To the cultural place.”
“Oh.”
Here is one of the many things I’ve learned about Union Eridianese since I first proclaimed myself fluent in the language. When Rocky – or anyone else, for that matter – describes himself with pronouns instead of his own name, he’s talking about something that’s important to how he sees himself. The sentence is more than a subject-verb-object description; it’s personal. This is a quirk I overlooked for a long time. What it means in general is that I’ve been coming across as deeply, perhaps uncomfortably emphatic in almost every conversation I’ve ever had with an Eridian. What it means in this context is: he really wants me to come with him.
It wouldn’t be pleasant, but I suppose we could make it work. There’ve already been a couple first passes at a Grace-mobile. It’s going to look something like a xenonite Smart car with too many polygons tacked on, and, somehow, not be on wheels at all. Don’t look at me – Rocky’s the engineer. I’m just going to drive the thing.
Rocky continues, with his voice pitched even lower, “Want to discuss Grace Rocky future.”
I tilt my head up to look at him. “That sounds ominous.”
“No, no. Apology. Didn’t say it right. I want Rocky future with Adrian to include Grace.”
It isn’t a surprise to hear that, but hearing it still has an effect. I feel my heart do a little shimmy. I reach up to find one of the hands in my hair and give it a squeeze.
Rocky performs the quick exhaustion of vents that equates to a sigh.
“I want that too,” I assure him. “What’s wrong?”
He struggles to find the answer at first. “Rocky doesn’t know. Everything good now. Still worry. That is problem.”
“It’s okay to be anxious about the future, buddy.”
“Not anxious. No threat. Something different,” he says. He tilts his carapace away. I imagine, if he had a face, he would be looking to the ocean with an air of mystery.
I sit up so I can turn to face him. “You can be anxious without a threat, you know. That’s kind of the point.”
“Grace.” He sounds like I’m starting to frustrate him. “Point is threat. Crew dying, ship exploding, Eridians abducting human for moving light image probe making. Threat make anxiety. No anxiety without threat.”
I’m old hat at this by now. “What do you think ‘anxiety’ means, bud?”
Rocky defines ‘fear’.
I’m surprised at him. I know for a fact that we’ve talked about this. “Remember PTSD?”
“Yes. This when Grace remember threat and think it here now.”
“Yeah, Rock. Remember threat and think it’s here now. Think it hasn’t gone away even though it has. Maybe not in mind; sometimes just in body.”
Rocky says, “…Oh.”
I tell him, “That’s the ‘disorder’ part of the anxiety disorder.”
“Mm. Mm.” He clicks his fingers absently as he processes this. “Understand now. Thought understand. Not understand. Mm.”
I reach out and absently pat his side. I imagine he doesn’t understand, not really, because that has taken me years, and I’m still not fully there yet.
I brace myself to keep a straight face when I hear him say ‘Rocky has PTSD’.
But Rocky doesn’t say anything. Instead he gets up and vents his air bladders, loudly.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I say cautiously. I worry he’s going to start crying again. I don’t want to have made him cry.
“Rocky want to go home now,” he informs me.
Oh. Relief and disappointment surface in unison. “Okay, bud. I get it.”
Rocky starts walking away down the beach. He must be very deep in his own head. He didn’t even rub his arm goodbye.
I look at my feet. Some of my Skittles fell in between the grainy pebbles when I sat up. I start to pick them out.
Rocky calls, “Grace coming, question?”
I glance up with a jolt. I’d like to, but – “I don’t know if I can. I might not be up to getting in the transfer unit right now.” Also, what would I do when we arrived?
Double also, I’m busy. Watson and I have booked out a meeting room this afternoon for some sensory mapping. They’re going to strap me to a chair, wire me up with an EEG, and flash lights at me from different angles until I go blind. The idea is to teach Eridians about place and grid cells. I choose not to mention this because I don’t want to prove Rocky right about the kinds of things I get up to when his back is turned.
Rocky skitters right back up to me and pokes me in the forehead – gently, but enough to displace my glasses a bit. “Grace stupid today, question? Never never going in transfer unit again! Firm statement. And is not necessary. Grace house already inside biodome.”
I blink for a second, mulling that over. I say, “…Okay. I’m coming.”
I pull my Skittles together; he pulls me up; I fall in stride with him.
Halfway to the house, Rocky comes to a stop. He says, “Stay there,” and walks ahead, about ten feet away from me.
“Walk to Rocky,” he orders. I do. He clicks at me.
“Walk back.”
I do that too. I say, “Okay, should I recite the alphabet backwards now?”
He covers the distance between us in a trot. I’ve pleased him somehow. When he reaches me, he chirps, “Proprioception is better. Just noticed. Grace walking in straight line.”
I look down. “Oh, yeah. So I am.”
In my first days exploring the new habitat, I had a coltish habit of stumbling around, unable to intuit how to line up my feet. It was one of the many side effects of my malnutrition – a motor and sensory disconnect which manifested more prominently when given the space to do so. It’s easier to see how bad it was now that I’ve returned to a baseline understanding of how my body lies in space. Another one of those little things you sense more strongly in its absence.
"Good," Rocky says. He makes jazz hands. "Good good good. Final symptoms improving."
"Yeah," I say. "Sheesh, you worry too much. I told you I’d be fine."
He gives me the old Eridian side-eye. "…I no make comment because we celebrating today."
"Think that counts as making a comment, bud."
“Grace quiet now. Hold hand," he commands. I do.
As he supports me up the narrow steps to my house, I ask “Rocky, what means ‘home’, question?”
He vents a little. This time it’s abrupt, more like a scoff than a sigh. “Building where family is.” He pre-empts me: “Family is social unit closest members. Children, parents, life partners - mates.”
“Yep. Got it.” Rocky has no offspring and his parents live far away. But my home is here, and Adrian is in my kitchen.
“Grace language frustrating,” he mutters. “Five years, human years, still no understand. Think understand then no understand. Like PTSD.”
You’re telling me. “That’s alright. Lots of time to learn now in Grace Rocky future. And, not to brag, but you have the best English teacher on Erid!”
“Is corny joke,” he complains. Then, as if talking to himself: “Lots of time.” He presses into my side.