Chapter Text
here and now (home)
“Phrosie. Euphrosyne. Phrooosie…it’s time to get up.”
“Mmmprhghmm,” my daemon groans eloquently from her little nest in my pillows.
I poke her gently in the side. We’ve gained enough weight back in the past couple years that I can barely feel her ribs anymore. She bats her scarred paw at me lazily.
“Come on, it’s I+ℓ ℓ already,” I say. “I can’t make the bed while you’re on it.”
She whistles something profane in her best approximation of Eridian. (We only found out after arriving on Erid that Rocky has an even worse sailor mouth than Phrosie does when he isn’t speaking our pidgin. Her vocabulary’s been unrecoverable ever since.) “M’still tired. Go drink some coffee or something so I can wake up.”
I tsk at her and start making the bed anyways. “See, this is what happens when you and Adrian stay up too late yapping about like, interplanetary comparative biomechanics. What was it last night, more animal locomotion?”
Phrosie huffs as I whoomp our quilt above the bed and finally hops down so I can smooth it over the top sheet. “Yeah. Still wanna get our exosuits iterated towards swimming in Erid’s oceans.”
“You know you two are crazy, right? Like, we’ve already got our own beach in the Biodome,” I remind her as I pop open the fridge for a breakfast vitamin shake. I have some leftover meburger from yesterday, but I’ll save that for lunch. “Nice, non-boiling water. I can barely get you out of there most days.”
She yawns. “This is for scientific progress. Developing better exosuits that can handle more extreme temperatures means more Eridian scientists can tromp around on the ocean floor and study its recovery from the Astrophage temperature drop.”
“And the fact that you’d get to splash around in those crazy bioluminescent algae waves has nothing to do with it, right?” I say skeptically between gulps. Ooh, the citrusy flavour on these vitamin shakes is really coming along. I’ll have to mix some of this with the ethanol my chemistry team’s brewing up next time we have a party – where better than a beach house to drink Erid’s first margarita?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Phrosie says primly. The little liar – if anything, she’s more popular here than I am. As if helping save Erid and being an alien wasn’t enough, my and Phrosie’s appearance has made the fields of Dust research and particle physics (and quantum physics, to Rocky’s chagrin) absolutely explode on Erid. Apparently, finding out that their galactic neighbours manifest sentience in the form of a physically-separate animal familiar instead of an innate subsonic emanation has been almost a bigger shock for the science thrums than the whole ‘all life and consciousness probably originated from Adrian’ thing. Phrosie and I are the walking, talking epicenter of several dozen ongoing Eridian scientific revolutions. It’s pretty neat.
My little revolutionary is busy slipping on her magnet-shoes and trotting up the xenonite strips inlaid in our walls to approach Armando from above. Its robot arms go nuts trying to poke at her overhead and she dodges, cackling. I have to jump between them and the chessboard to keep the carefully-set pieces from getting knocked around. (Sure, Rocky’s perfect memory would let him recall where all the pieces from our ongoing game supposedly belong, but I don’t know if I trust that rascal not to creatively reinterpret the board to his advantage.)
Speaking of rascals, a pounding on the door distracts all of us from what’s quickly turning into a too-literal Super Smash game. I can already feel faint tendrils of soulsong dancing along my skin. Armando points helpfully towards the noise as Phrosie detaches from her magnet shoes and immediately drops from the ceiling onto my shoulders.
“Oof, jeez, you gotta stop doing that! We’re in 2g’s here, you’re a lot heavier!” I complain, resettling her around my shoulders like a stole.
She just snickers as I schlep her abominable sixteen-pound weight (well, on Erid, anyways) down to the door and yank it open before a certain engineer can decide to just let himself in.
“Finally!” Rocky warbles from the stairstep. A warm pulse of soulsong ripples through us. I can’t help but grin at the sight of him, even though we see each other literally all the time. I grin a lot these days. “Why you♫ take so long, question?”
“Grace had to eat,” sighs Phrosie, as if I hadn’t been the one who woke her up from her lie-in this morning.
“Gross,” Rocky says, wriggling his carapace in an exaggerated pantomime of disgust.
I poke Phrosie in the nose over my shoulder. “Yeah, gross, Phrosie. Don’t talk about that kind of thing in polite company.”
She snorts and jumps from my shoulder to land neatly atop Rocky’s carapace, in the warm spot his vents make on his exosuit. Still her favourite place to be. “He’s not polite company!”
“True true true!” Rocky reaches up with one arm to gently rub between Phrosie’s ears as we make our way down the sandy xenonite steps. “I am very impolite. Example: I wait till now to say Grace forgot to close door like Grace promise to do.”
Without another word, he skitters off down to the beach like a five-legged spider with Phrosie snickering on his head. Jeez, you get separated one time and your daemon ditches you to hang out with your best friend (not that she doesn’t have the same complaint every time Rocky and I go off to play one-sided Marco Polo while she’s napping).
I stick my tongue out at them – giving all the work to the guy with thumbs, as usual – and turn back to pull my house door shut.
By the time I join my best friend and my daemon down on the shore, they’re already goofing off in the waves. (This is why I never bother tying my shoes in the Biodome, even though Rocky’s convinced it makes me even more likely to trip than usual. I always end up taking them off when we inevitably start playing around in the surf.)
“Hey, can we talk about the rock collection a little bit?” I say, not bothering to pitch my voice louder even though Phrosie and Rocky are splashing around in the water meters away. He can always hear me, and she is me.
“‘Cause it’s awesome, you know, that you’re filling the terrarium with all our favourite things–” Colourful geodes, a house, Armando, artwork, home media screens from the Don’t Go Crazy room, a freaking beach – Rocky even built us a tree to climb, for god’s sake. Erid doesn’t even have trees. I’m definitely gonna get spoiled in here. “–but like, I’m running out of places to display the rocks you all find us in the house.”
Phrosie scampers out of the surf to twine her soaking-wet self around my ankles affectionately (this is another reason why I keep having to take my shoes off). “You can put our rocks wherever you want on the grounds, you know. Nobody’s gonna steal them. It’s a safe neighbourhood.”
“Oh, for sure, I just – you know, I like seeing the topography as it is.” I smile and stick my hands in my pockets, admiring the wavy brown-and-teal geology surrounding the shore. “It kinda looks like you, Rock.”
Rocky jumps up out of a wave. “Of course looks like me. My birth cluster is here. Is your♫ cluster too now – Grace♫Phrosie will have to get more ♭♩♩♬,” he teases, using an untranslatable Eridian word for the resonance qualities of the local stone, something as far from our comprehension as colours are to him.
He scrambles over the sand to us, adding, “We will keep bringing Grace♫Phrosie more rocks for collection anyway. Lots of colours good for human♫daemon. Grace will just have to use smart brain better to solve display problem.”
“Oh, so we’re fucked, then,” Phrosie says. She dodges neatly as I try to snatch her up and toss her back into the waves, cackling and weaving through Rocky’s legs to avoid me. He squeaks in laughter, lifting his carapace high.
She’s a red blur blending with the sand the same way Rocky matches the topography of his home. Distracted by fondness, I manage to trip over my bare feet and stumble onto Rocky, who catches me easily (Eridians are stupid strong). We all go down as one big tangle, vibrating with laughter and soulsong.
We end up plonking down in a knot together on the coarse-grained sand. My arm settles over Rocky’s carapace, his forelimbs bump against my knees, Phrosie drapes over both of us, and the water washes gently at my bare soles.
We stay like that for a while, under the pale foglight the Eridians created just for me. Behind the illuminated panels in Erid’s true atmosphere, I know the Biodome is wreathed in rainbows that nobody else can see. Rocky trills happily both aloud and in his soulsong, and Phrosie hums lazily in time. I smile, feeling something settle peacefully inside me as my daemon rests her muzzle against Rocky’s vents.
Eridians have no sense of the great taboo against touching others’ daemons. Their soulsongs are always meeting and resonating with one another, especially when they thrum; my pet theory is that it’s part of what makes them such a close-knit collectivist society.
But Rocky knows what it means to us when he and Phrosie touch. How much it means, that we can all be close together like this. And I know it’s just as important to him that we can all be here, bundled up on the beach together.
A small tingle runs under my skin from Rocky’s soulsong. I glance over to see him fiddling in the sand with two forelimbs, his old nervous tic. “What’s up, pal?”
Rocky’s voice slows and sinks an octave. “Grace♫Phrosie…news from engineering hive.” Phrosie lifts her head a little in curiosity. “Scientists are ready…to prepare Hail Mary for journey home.”
I feel myself do a tiny double-take at the words. For a moment, I literally don’t understand what he’s saying.
And neither does Phrosie, who’s half-dozing and mumbles, “Why’d we need Mary for getting back up the stairs? Grace isn’t that clum– Oh, shit.” She shoots bolt upright, scrabbling for one of Rocky’s arms to keep her balance, and turns to look wide-eyed up at me.
“You mean Earth,” I say a little hoarsely. My heartrate’s picked up enough that I can hear it as well as Rocky can. But it’s not fear – just surprise.
I keep waiting to be hit with the kind of panicked indecision that Phrosie and I always used to feel when faced with choices like this. But as I look down at her, surrounded like I am by the vibrations of our best friend’s soulsong, I realise we’re calm. We already know who we are and what we’ve chosen.
And Rocky knows us, too. There’s an upswell of hope thrilling its way through his soulsong, but he keeps his tone level when he says, “Grace♫Phrosie kept promise to Rocky. Saved me, saved Erid. Gave us everything. I need…I need to keep promise too. Promised Grace♫Phrosie go home.”
All the time in the world, I remember vowing to him, all those years ago as we watched the fog together on Mary. It all feels like such a gift – to have found Rocky, who knows us completely and will remember us perfectly even long after we’re gone. He’ll live for centuries, which is the least he deserves, and it makes me so darn glad. I don’t think Phrosie and I are scared of dying anymore, not now that we know someone who loves us will get to live on.
Suddenly Phrosie’s laughing, scrambling up Rocky’s carapace to dance on his head like she did the day he finally woke up after saving our life. “Now who needs to use their brain better? Need to keep your promise – you little dumbass, you already did!”
“Yeah,” I add wetly, leaking some extra saltwater onto the beach Rocky made us. He doesn’t seem to mind, though, considering how hard he returns the hug I give him. “What she said. We’re good, bud. It’s – we’re with you. We’re all together. That’s all that matters. You know?”
For once in his life, Rocky doesn’t seem able to speak. Or maybe he’s vocalising something happier and higher than we can hear. But it’s all right, because I can feel his warmth through the xenonite as we hug each other. Can feel his little hand on Phrosie’s head, and the embrace of his soulsong chorusing through to the core of me.
Later, I know Rocky’ll go meet Adrian as they leave the lab, and the two of them will pick up the latest issue of the Eridian audio drama series we’re all binging at my house in the evenings between Star Trek episodes. I’ll get to give my kids the first of the intro to relativity lessons I’m designing for the local education thrum, while Phrosie runs around in her exosuit on the Eridian side of our classroom wrangling thirty bouncy little aliens who are even more puckish than she is. I’ll fall asleep listening to the waves Adrian made for us with my daemon on my chest and our best friend watching over us.
We’re exactly where we’re meant to be. We’re all home.
…
“Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is / that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all.”