Chapter Text
Gray’s eyelids fluttered open to an assault of bright white lights above him. His vision slowly adjusted to the stark white of sickbay, and he wiggled his fingers and toes carefully. The biobed beneath him was soft, yet clinical. He felt… out of place. It was as if he was waking up after sleeping on a long shuttle flight to find himself in a new place, but instead of lines on his face from napping curled on a wrinkled shirt and open eyes at bustling crowds of new people, he was in the exact same place he had been when the anesthetic hypo hit his shoulder, in the same position, looking the exact same.
Instead of the world around him changing, the world inside Gray had.
He had wanted to be joined for so long, as a way to connect to his trill culture and to make a body that had caused him stress for so long into something he had an active role in. He had spent years preparing himself mentally for this moment, imagining what it would be like. But now that Gray was joined? He didn’t know what to feel. That was the scary part. It wasn’t how he had imagined it, not a giant influx of memories and rushing colors. Instead, everything just seemed as if it had shifted slightly, as if he was wearing a couple pairs of glasses on top of each other, each refocusing and tinting the world around him. Being joined was less a flood of remembered meetings and lost arguments all playing at once in the holoscreen that was his brain; it was more a warm presence in the back of his head, a reminder of past lives if he wanted to reach for them.
Tal had accepted him. He smiled at the realization. Gray was sure they would but still… there had been a small part of him -- the part he didn’t want Adira to worry about -- that questioned if he really was a worthy host, a host that joined out of necessity instead of years with the commission.
Gray reached out to the memories he felt in his head, the lives around him. They reached in return. He had always thought that the past hosts of a symbiote were fixed, sealed time that would come in handy if he needed to speak another language or fix a coil. But when Gray fell into his -- his! they were his too! -- memories of past hosts, Gray felt everything so vibrantly and alive.
Before now, Gray really had only had Adira to keep him company, the two partners in crime. And that was all he needed. But now, the presence of his past lives was a spark of caffeine in his brain, a blanket draped over his shoulders. He still had Adira -- he still needed Adira -- but he was able to feel more himself within this sea of others.
The nurse had waited a couple minutes to come into the operating area of sickbay after Gray woke up, giving the young trill a moment to himself. When she finally did come in, clad in the pocket-lined white uniform of the ship’s medical staff and carrying a holographic padd, Gray pushed himself hurriedly into a sitting position. He expected the motion to cause him to wince or feel somehow restricted -- a tradeoff, however temporary, for joining with Tal. Instead, Gray lazily pulled his legs into a criss-cross, answering the nurse’s questions easily, feeling oddly refreshed. There were no creak in his bones, no dull stomach ache. As the nurse gave him readouts of numbers he didn’t quite understand, Gray softly smiled, the thin blanket draped over him feeling like a curl of fluffy comfort in the realization -- both from his mind and the nurse’s words at the same time -- that he was safe.
Not only had the symbiote transfer worked, but it felt right. Being joined wasn’t like he had imagined in the stories he told himself before bed of a far off future, but nonetheless, he was Gray Tal.
When the nurse dismissed him, telling Gray to come back in a week to make sure everything was still working fine, he hopped off the biobed and padded softly to the door on the other side of sickbay. Still in the loose operating gown and bare feet, the trill came into the dimly lit waiting area with a bright face and messy hair to find their partner in a light sleep. Adira was still curled with their head resting on the back of the chair and mouth slightly open in even breathing. They clutched a folded piece of paper with a swirly drawing Gray couldn’t really make out on the front.
The waiting area was otherwise empty. It was 0400 hours, and it looked like Adira hadn’t left since they said goodbye to Gray the night before. Gray took a quick glance at sickbay behind him. Touching the button to close the door, he went over to Adira, sitting next to them. Gray remembered when he -- when Cara -- had been young and their mother would wake them up with a hand on the cheek and an old trill lullaby Gray realized he now knew by heart. Knowing Adira had gotten enough sleep, he gave them a few pokes, pushing Adira playfully as he hummed the lullaby. He wasn’t Cara, but he was still Tal.
Adira mumbled something Gray couldn’t quite understand, slowly raising their head. Seeing Gray, they smiled, sitting up straight in the small chair. Adira’s eyes were wide with hope and whispered dreams. They glanced up and down over Gray, smiling nervously as they spoke, “H-how do you feel? I… you look so confident” -- their eyes were darting between Gray and their own hands, as if trying to find the right thing to say in the space between them. Pushing back their messy hair, Adira offered the card they had been holding to Gray -- “I made this for you. It’s not my best work but I...”
Gray took the card as Adira trailed off. “It’s beautiful. Senna once sa-” he caught himself, looking down from his partner’s eyes to the card in his hands, “Sorry. You probably don’t want to hear about that.”
Adira shook their head, puttin a hand on Gray’s hand to force him to look at their face again. “No, I want you to tell me all about it. Just not maybe right now. I think I still need a little time to get used to Tal. But this squid is a part of you, and I couldn’t hate something that is that important to you. I know how much this means to you and I’m just happy to see how much more… yourself you look after… well, getting not just yourself up in that genius head of yours.”
He pulled Adira’s head into his hands, softly kissing their forehead, “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
---
As they came back to Gray’s quarters together, Adira was still holding his hand as automatic door closed behind them. Gray followed Adira’s lead to the small bed in the middle of the room, the two sitting so close to each other that they were making one indent in the fluffy cover.
“Honey, this hospital gown is really not the peak of fashion or comfort, so if you let go of my hand, I can change into something else really quick.”
Adira nodded, obliging the request. Gray got up, grabbing a replicated pair of sweatpants and an old t-shirt from a theater program for youth on the generation ship the two had been in a few years ago. Adira kicked off their shoes: Adira and Gray spent enough time in each other’s quarters to feel just as comfortable in each other’s spaces as their own.
While Gray disappeared into the attached bathroom, Adira began to speak again, loud enough so he could hear, but voice still betraying a touch of insecurity. It was sometimes easier to articulate their emotions when they couldn’t see the other person; it allowed them to feel a lack of judgement that the logically knew Gray would never hold for them. “When you went in that operating room, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again. Or if I did, it wouldn’t be you. It was irrational, but even after we had talked about it, even after I had done some of my own research, I wondered if maybe Tal wouldn’t accept you for whatever reason, maybe because you…” -- they wrung their hands out -- “I know it’s not logical, but you know I never really got along with that vulcan kid at school. I think when you came out of sickbay, a part of me was still surprised and… I never want to be scared like that again. Not about you.”
Gray stepped out of the bathroom, now dressed but still barefoot. (Both Adira and Gray preferred to go barefoot or in just socks. It was just more comfortable, an attempt to make the sleek foreign walls of a generation ship without any parents or siblings feel like a cozy planetside home. And they liked to annoy the ship’s officers by racing each other to the mess hall in the morning without shoes on.)
He had put in his earrings again too. Neither Adira or Gray really had much they could call their own on the ship, so his earrings provided a sort of reminder of what was his own, what he had gone through to get here: he had them before he came to the generation ship, before his parents died, before he was Gray.
“Adira… it won’t happen again. I was worried too. I’ll always be by your side, no matter what happens,” Gray said, voice faltering as he walked over to his bed again.
And he would be. No matter what happened.
The last few days had been rough on Gray, even if he hadn’t shown it. He had wanted to be joined for so long, and hadn’t really considered how Adira would react. It wasn’t that Gray didn’t include Adira in his future, it was just that… he had been so occupied with his own hopes around being joined, he kind of just assumed Adira and he would just be on the same page automatically. They always had been, always had been the only two on the generation ship to understand each other. And Gray was going to put in the work to make sure they were still on the same page, but it was still a little disappointing to him that he hadn’t anticipated this.
Adira smiled, pulling up their legs to lean back on the pillows and Gray’s oddly-patterned stuffed flying fish (apparently it was native to trill, but Adira refused to look up the species so they could continue to argue with Gray about the utterly alien stuffed animal). Gray followed suit, leaning himself against Adria. The human put an arm around Gray and the two nestled together, “How do you feel?”
“Good. I mean… it’s a lot. But good. It feels comforting, knowing I have the memories of the past hosts, but it’s kind of overwhelming. Sometimes I’m not sure where Jovar starts and Kasha ends, or exactly where Gray is. But I’m sure I’ll figure it out -- we’lll figure it out together. Also, I’m pretty sure I can play the cello now. That’s weird.”
“You’ll have to play for me someday,” Adira laughed, playing with Gray’s hair. They admired his confidence in the future, and even though they had enough vulnerable late night talks to know it wasn’t always real, his confidence gave Adira some hope themselves. Their lives had always been in flux, and it was hard to feel like they would be able to figure anything out about their future, but Gray provided some stability.
“And you’ll have to dance along for me someday.”
“Hey!” Adira hit Gray playfully with a pillow, “You know I can’t dance.”
“I guess I’ll just have to teach you then,” he tossed the pillow back at Adira.
After a moment of silence, Adira spoke again, voice quiet, “Can I count your spots?”
Gray giggled, “Only if you tell me how many you find.”
They sat like that for a while, both in their own world, but together. Taking a breath, Adira asked, “Can you tell me what you were going to earlier? When I fist woke up and gave you the card? The story about Senna?”
“I thought you wanted a little more time to get used to this whole squid-in-your-boyfriend’s-belly thing,” Gray teased, smiling up at Adira.
Adira shrugged, “Yea. It’s definitely still weird. But I want to hear about everything. Because it’s important to you, and I love hearing you tell stories.”
A soft blush crept on Gray’s cheeks. He told them the story, and then continued. The time Madela spent a week outside in the cold rain because she was too scared to ask for her brother’s tarp, how Cara’s first kiss was just like theirs, how Kasha first got the symbiote. It was comforting to process the new memories together. Adira felt like the moment when they first were able to work with the older physics students at school: the pieces of their life were slowly falling together, like when they had first started dating Gray. And one day Adira would know everything the symbiote remembered, even if it wasn’t Gray who told them.