Chapter Text
Have you ever been on a particularly dragging road trip across the country? The boring kind where there’s no scenic routes, just flat desert and stale pop on the radio. Or have you ever had a really chaotic travel experience where nothing went according to plan? Flight delayed, restaurant food poisoning, the whole nine yards? Like that one end-of-the-year weekend field trip I took with the kids from the middle school in San Francisco all the way to JPL in Los Angeles. One hundred middle-school-aged kids crammed into a Greyhound for four hundred miles isn’t for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. Overstimulating is a laughable understatement. Or have you ever had a really bad roommate? Not so bad as to have to kick them out of the place, but just bad enough to drive you mad? I’m talking dirty dishes, dirty laundry, up at odd hours blaring music, maybe even a rager and a smashed piece of furniture?
Okay, so combine the most boring trip you’ve been on with the most mentally-overwhelming trip you’ve been on. Now imagine you’re on that trip for three years with the worst roommate you’ve ever had. That’s about how the trip to the 40 Eridani system was. Or at least half of the trip until everything had become routine.
Don’t get me wrong, Rocky was my best friend in the whole galaxy— and that I mean that non-hyperbolically, since I’m officially Earth’s foremost expert on interstellar travel and the most experienced astronaut in Earth’s history. But, man, living with the guy put our friendship through some rocky patches. Heh.
The living quarters in the Hail Mary are teeny-tiny, smaller than some New York City closet-apartments. After all, the people who designed the Mary thought the crew would be awake and living in the space for a few months to a year before offing themselves, so they didn’t make it a forever dream home. It was a rush job, a very expensive and high-tech rough job, but still a rush job. As much as I missed Yáo and Ilyukhina and wished they were with me for all of this, I couldn’t imagine sharing a space this small with three people for a week, let alone a whole year— what were those engineers back on Earth thinking? I know, they were thinking about limited fuel and saving the planet, but how on Earth did they expect us to not strangle each other living like this? I was a single guy and an only child, I highly valued my personal space.
Rocky did not value personal space. You’d think that being confined to his own tunnels and atmospheric hamster-ball would create a solid divide between our two living spaces. You’d be wrong. Thanks to his modified ship arms he used to manipulate objects outside of his atmosphere, his things were everywhere. I thought he’d had a lot of belongings when he first moved in and they were still in bags, I knew now that that had only been the tip of the iceberg since he was fully unpacked. Maddeningly, there was no rhyme or reason to where he left his tools and projects. I could understand leaving an unfinished project out on a workbench to give your mind a break, sure— or even forgetting to put a tool back on the rack after you were done with it. But I found one of his little wrenches in one of my coffee mugs and a diagram he’d drafted for an experimental machine buried in my sock drawer.
I fished a xenonite screw out of my shoe and I’d had enough. “Rocky, why is your stuff everywhere?” I asked it to an empty room, but I knew he heard me. He came clanking through the open connection from the lab into the dormitory a moment later.
Rocky’s response came in his echoey chime, “I live here. Where else would stuff be, question?”
I hadn’t added a new term to the translation program/frequency analyzer in weeks, and I had long since outgrown the need to use a synthesized voice to understand Rocky. He understood English and I understood Eridianese. Well, just because we knew each other's languages didn’t mean we understood each other. Pedantic and petty arguments aplenty.
“No, I get that,” I clarified. “And you’re welcome to use the lab space and everything. But lab stuff stays in the lab. Our food stays here in the dorm. You don’t see me eating cereal out of the granulated cylinders.”
“Why, question?”
“Organization? Cleanliness?” I suggested.
He angled his brown, rocky body in a defiant stance. “Tools no make things dirty.”
“For organizational purposes, then. How do you even find anything in this mess?”
“I have good memory. Know where all things are.”
“Right.” Why bother sorting and storing things to find them better when he physically couldn’t forget where he’d left them last? “Well, for my sake, can you try to keep your things… I don’t know, close together? Not scattered around the entire ship? Your screwdrivers can go next to mine instead of in the drawer with the forks.”
“This no make sense.” He tapped a foot in thought, he did that a lot. After a moment of mulling it over, he chimed, “Understand. I will do. It is easy and makes Grace not complain.”
“Thank you,” I sighed. “It’s… it’s an Earth culture thing.”
“All humans are organized, question?”
“Well, no. I guess it’s a personal preference.”
“Grace have too many preferences. Organize things. Eat with tools. No talking while you are sleeping. Go into hiding without your accessories.”
We’d had this particular conversation before. It was weird and extremely difficult explaining the human taboo of “nakedness” to a person who didn’t wear clothes all the time and didn’t have any… external embarrassing bits. “I don’t care if you can’t ‘see,’ I don’t want you watching me get changed. That is an Earth culture thing.”
“All humans hide when they have no clothes, question?”
“Largely speaking, yes. I guess there are nudists— nevermind, not important,” I shook my head to clear the thought. “It’s like how Eridians eat in private. We… change clothes in private.”
“Understand. You help me with science equipment later, question? I need chemical analysis,” he scurried off without waiting for an answer, xenonite ball clunking around. Rocky ended conversations like that a lot. I couldn’t chalk that up to a cultural difference, though, I was bad at ending conversations, too.