Chapter Text
Twenty years on Erid had given Grace a home more than just a refuge.
He had friends here. True friends, family even—Rocky and Adrian’s new home was built against the dome, spilling out of one side of the perimeter like a human child’s bubble-wand producing bubbles on bubbles on even more bubbles that intertwined in a messy labyrinth of human and Eridian spaces. Rocky and Adrian were even talking about having children, with Grace as a clutch-parent (a very close godparent, in Grace’s best approximation). He hadn’t ever found such deep connections on Earth, he’d admitted, thought he frequently missed his cat and his students. He had so much love to give and Erid had gladly provided him a place for it to take root.
Rocky couldn’t speak to who Grace had been on Earth, but he knew his dear friend flourished when he was surrounded by camaraderie and respect. Who wouldn’t? He came alive in such a special, resonating way when he taught young Eridians. He collaborated eagerly with every type of scientist, anthropologist, linguist, or any other specialist that Erid could throw at him—he’d even managed to inspire several new fashion trends via a couple of bickering designers over the years whom he’d named Bert and Ernie.
But Rocky saw the cost, beyond even what Grace complained about (and the human could complain like it was a competitive sport). Gravity ground his joints and spine into creaks and groans, it pulled at his skin and dug deep wrinkles and sags into his face. He relied on a cane to walk, which pained his elbow and shoulder with each step as he hunched into a hard limp. His lungs couldn’t keep up with his needs and he was frequently left gasping into a specially designed device that delivered an Eridian-approximation of what humans called albuterol. Grace’s original inhaler had melted during an incident on the way to Erid, the original medicine long since used up, but they’d done an excellent job of replicating the device and a half-decent job of synthesizing the medicine. It just wasn’t enough.
Grace complained, often and loudly, about all of these issues and more. He always said he was getting old, though 58 was hardly old even by human standards.
The failings he didn’t complain about, Rocky assumed he either couldn’t identify or refused to acknowledge through sheer stubbornness. Rocky felt the latter was preferable, but the former more likely.
Grace was losing his words, the ones he had worked so hard to remember and then eventually master. He would be bowed over his pipe organ—barreling head-first into a tangent during a lesson, or with students poised and ready to answer his famous ‘lightning round’ questions—when his fingers would suddenly hover uncertainly above the keys, the silence stretching on and on until he found a workaround of a word he’d used so often before.
Or he would blend the tones strangely, nonsensically, until they were recognizable only to Rocky, who knew what Grace wanted to say even when he mashed up ‘soil’ and ‘belt’ instead of the name for one of Erid’s deep-sea creatures. Rocky saw where the overlap was coming from, usually. Some of the notes were similar. Sometimes. Grace hadn’t made such odd mistakes since his first few years on Erid, but they were becoming more and more common.
And now these gaps were drifting into his own native language of English as well.
“You’d love the sound of it, the wind doing—doing the thing with the—” he was saying now, making a vague, jittering gesture with one of his hands while directing his eyes up and to the left as he often did when he was reminiscing.
”Doing what?” Rocky prompted.
”What?”
”The wind doing what to what?”
“The wind in the…the leaves, Rocky, it…” Grace said now, as if it were obvious what he meant. He seemed annoyed at being drawn out of a moment only he knew. But Erid didn’t have trees or leaves, and Rocky didn’t know what English word was supposed to fit here. “They—“
Grace frowned slightly, then a little deeper, the lines on his face like trenches now compared to how they’d looked years ago on the Hail Mary.
”They, you know…whisp?” he said, then shook his head in frustration. “Ugh, you know what I mean!”
But Rocky didn’t.
”Whisp!” Grace said again, making the vague gesture again, searching for the word he wanted again.
Erid’s top human biology specialist had been given the human name Bones by Grace, way back during its first physical examination aboard the Hail Mary upon arriving at Erid. This was back when Bones was just a curious recent graduate, unsure if they wanted to pursue biology or medicine. But once they met Grace, their career was decided with no small amount of enthusiasm.
The name given to them by Grace inevitably made some discussions confusing, particularly regarding Grace’s skeletal system, which was becoming more and more relevant as the years went on.
Grace’s bones, according to Bones, were now significantly denser and more fragile than ever. Tiny fractures were riddled throughout its touch-scans. (This was when Bones would gently touch hundreds of tiny tubes, which were mounted against a xenonite barrier that Grace leaned against, in order to listen closely to what was inside. Grace wryly called it its acupuncture treatment in English, but there wasn’t an Eridian equivalent of that strange procedure, so Bones went with touch-scan.) The pain, according to Bones, had to be building, but Grace complained the same as ever, no more, no less…except for the times it gasped, trying to find its breath when it accidentally moved one suboptimal way or another. The gasps were horrifying when Bones first witnessed them: Grace’s lungs spasmed, its heart rate spiked, and its muscles seized up, sometimes making everything worse, sometimes making Grace dizzy and in danger of falling. The gasps were less horrifying now if only because they, unfortunately, weren’t a surprise anymore, and Bones understood that Grace would recover and their med-bot could catch it in a fall.
But the recovery always took longer now, and Bones was watching the strain that Grace’s heart and lungs were enduring with each passing cycle on Erid. The albuterol-substitution was refilled constantly, and its use wasn’t always enough for anyone’s comfort…they could only watch, helpless, as Grace employed the inhaler again and again, still panting, coughing, and wheezing even while its heart rate soared under the effect of the steroid. Grace clutched its chest at times, stopping in its tracks as it walked the distance across the expansive dome.
Dread creeped into Bones’s own carapace as time went on and the patterns fell into place.
The second time Grace lost his grip on his cane, Adrian huffed through his radiator in exasperation. Grace huffed back in annoyance, but at the last second tried to mask it as a laugh.
”2G, everything falls so fast,” he quipped, as if this wasn’t the norm after twenty years, then involuntarily groaned as he bent over to retrieve his trusty walking aid. He paused in an awkward hunch, his breath hitching.
“Grace…” Adrian began.
”Don’t start,” Grace snapped as he forced himself back upright. He busied himself at his desk, not quite breathing and refusing to sit. He swayed until he froze unnaturally.
”Rocky is worried—“
”Is your English…stopping?”
”Is yours?” Adrian shot back. That wasn’t how Grace would have phrased that sentiment a few years ago. The human frowned hard, gripping the curved handle of his cane with tight, swollen knuckles. His breathing had returned to normal.
”That’s not fair…” he muttered.
”Not fair or not true?”
Grace said nothing. His light-sensing orbs were directed at the desk instead of Adrian, an angry line forming in the skin over each.
“Do you trust me?” Adrian finally asked after a long silence, his notes carefully neutral but with an undertone of comfort.
Grace grunted in a layered way that Adrian could piece together after many years. There was anger behind it—closer to frustration, actually, and not necessarily directed at Adrian—but also a lingering positive sentiment (which was directed his way).
Adrian hadn’t come to this level of communication with Grace easily. He had been one of the first casual acquaintances that Grace had made on Erid, and at first they’d both compared each other too closely to Rocky, not yet realizing how different they both were to Rocky but in complementary ways to each other. Grace was somehow equally passive and enthusiastic, and also prone to being overtaken by waves of conflicting emotions; Rocky was as snarky as he was determined, and nowadays he was quickly affected by any mood around him; and Adrian lacked patience for petty bullshit or outside influence—he was seemingly stoic, but could stand any test of time if the end result was compelling. That’s when he felt deep changes within him that he couldn’t quite express to others. He was a thorough learner, though not a particularly quick study, and someone that Grace would eventually turn to when even Rocky missed the finer points in his complex feelings in the universe.
It took almost a full Earth year of forced, frequently uncomfortable interaction before they’d found their rhythm together, but once they had started building whatever this unique quality was between them, they’d become precious to each other.
“You’re declining,” Adrian said simply. “I’ve looked into Earth logs and I’m sure you know just as well as I that you should not be declining at this rate at this age.”
Grace was very, very still, staring at the desk.
”Something is wrong,” Adrian tried again. He knew Grace understood what had been said, but sometimes simple was better when it came to grasping what was next.
There was an interminable silence. Finally, finally, Grace whispered, his voice catching painfully,
”Something is wrong…”
Adrian let the words linger between them, then offered: “Bones thinks it’s heavy metal exposure.”
Grace grunted again, a less complex acknowledgment this time.
”We just can’t mitigate it all,” Adrian continued gently. “It’s everywhere. It’s Erid.”
Grace always went on the defensive when it came to the level of care that Eridians had offered their alien friend. ‘I owe my life to Erid,’ he’d say. ‘Earth sent me to my death,’ was what he would never say when the topic came up about sending him back. Adrian couldn’t begin to imagine the scope of betrayal Grace had faced from his home planet after devoting every waking hour, every stress hormone, every spare neuron to its survival…only to be arrested, drugged, and scuttled away on a suicide mission without even his memories. Without any understanding. Betrayed by the people he still loved and missed on a molecular level. Though Erid’s council members had always weighed the ethics of keeping an alien who couldn’t fully thrive here, they had long ago decided that it was ultimately Grace’s decision. Few people knew of Grace being forced on his mission, but those who did would not allow him to suffer his consent to be stripped away again. This sentiment was honorable, but increasingly difficult as they considered the matter of consent for someone who might one day lose their faculties entirely.
”Humans don’t live as long as Eridians,” Grace offered weakly, a common phrase over the years.
”But you’re not finished,” Adrian offered back. When Grace opened his mouth to protest, he continued: “You have so much more inside you to commune with the universe.” That was where Adrian’s own concern lay…not what Grace could offer as a legacy, what he could teach, not even what comfort he could offer Rocky for a little while longer, but rather what Ryland Grace could still experience as a part of the universe. What would it mean for him to return to his home with all that he’d taken in as a star-trekking soul?
“I don’t understand…”
“Eh, I’m the spiritual type,” Adrian waved away, as if that could encompass everything he wanted to say. It was far too much and certainly not important to Grace right now in his half-state, despite the curiosity he’d shown in the past. “You don’t have to understand my love and hope for you,” (and by all the forces in these realms did Adrian have love and hope for Grace), “but you must understand that Rocky needs more time with you. And you need more time with him. It won’t ever be enough, but you both need to have more than what Erid can give you two now. More time and more you.”
Grace swallowed, his throat bobbing in that weird way Adrian knew was as normal as it was fascinating.
“More me?”
”Rustling in the trees, Grace,” Adrian insisted, calling on the Eridian word they’d settled on long ago to indicate aerated agitation in exposed vegetation, however rare it was on Erid. “It’s a part of your biology. You need it, and Rocky needs to hear it himself, and the universe could provide it again if you give it the chance.”
There was a long moment in which Grace consulted with himself and Adrian held his own private thrum with the universe, the frequencies too high for Grace to hear. He didn’t really believe in such things as mental energy transference to someone outside of a true thrum, but he tried to direct some of the forward-moving energy toward Grace anyway. Grace had mentioned several times in the past how an Earth creature called a cat could hum at a certain frequency and inexplicably offer healing for creatures around it. Maybe he could conjure something like that.
”Rustling…” Grace finally said.
“Hey, buddy,” Grace said, propping the end of his cane against the xenonite wall and holding the other end against his chest.
Even outside of the med-bay, in just a typical one-on-one conference area, Rocky recognized this unspoken invitation for the medical trick Bones had discovered long ago. He reached forward and touched the wall where the cane was. Grace only ever offered this deep view into himself if requested by medical professionals, or on the very rare occasion that Rocky, in a panicked state, pleaded to listen to Grace’s heartbeat.
”Do you have a moment to talk about my lord and savior, Earth?”