Work Text:
“What doing, question,” Rocky’s voice emanates from a speaker helpfully placed on the corner of the ceiling.
“Hmm?” Grace replies, typing furiously on his laptop. “I’m going through our sequencing data.
“No. What doing with hand, question.” Rocky clarifies from his xenonite ball, tapping the side of it. Pointing. He’s pointing.
“I’m not doing- Oh,” Grace finds that he is doing something with his hand. In fact, he’s not using it to type at all. He’s got one hand on the keyboard and the other has slowly crept up to his eyes, worrying at his eyelashes.
Not just worrying. Picking. There’s a tiny pile of eyelashes that have floated down onto the corner of his laptop. Shit.
“What. Doing. Question,” Rocky’s voice is insistent now. Frustrated. Grace is frustrating him.
“I’m just- It’s nothing, Rocky, really. Just. Human stuff,” Grace stutters through his response and brushes the eyelashes onto the floor. Probably not the best choice from a hygiene standpoint, but Grace is so suddenly filled with a sense of shame that it’s all he can do.
“What human stuff, question.” Rocky rolls his xenonite ball closer to the desk, like he’s inspecting Grace. “Removal of parts.”
It occurs to Grace that Rocky is actually inspecting the lashes on the ground, however small they might be. Suddenly, his modulated voice is a lot more frantic.
“Parts gone forever. Dead. Dead. Dead,” Rocky rolls himself around, panicked.
“No, not removal of parts,” Grace turns himself around to face Rocky. “I didn’t remove anything. They just sort of- well, I did remove something. Somethings. But they’ll grow back. Okay?” This answer seems to quell whatever has Rocky so freaked out. Grace wonders vaguely if Eridians ever shed.
“Grace remove parts. Parts grow back. Why, question,”
“Why grow back? They just do. Something to do with keratin and-” Grace begins, rubbing idly at his eye.
“No,” Rocky interrupts. “Why Grace remove, question.”
Oh.
Oh.
Now that’s a hard one. Grace isn’t sure he has the answer himself.
“I don’t know, Rock. I just do,” Grace shrugs. “Like I said, human stuff.”
“No make sense,” Rocky chitters, “Human remove hair. Hair grow back. Why remove if grow back. Humans no make sense. Inefficient.”
“A lot of stuff humans do doesn’t make sense,” Grace agrees. “Listen, let’s drop it for now and get back to coding, alright?”
“Yes yes yes,” Rocky rolls back a few paces and turns to his tablet.
Success.
-------
It happens again a few hours later, when they’re nearing the tail end of their data analysis debugging.
“Grace remove parts, statement,” Rocky says, almost as if to no one.
“What? No I’m not,” Grace answers automatically before he realizes his hand is back up at his eyelid. He realizes suddenly that the past few pinpricks of pain he’d ignored had come from himself.
“Grace remove parts. Parts gone. No more.”
Shit.
“Shit,” Grace exclaims, standing up and dashing towards his small bathroom. Rocky follows until the doorway, long conversations about personal space and privacy keeping him from coming any closer.
Rocky’s right. Grace’s top eyelid is essentially free of eyelashes now, as well as red and irritated.
“Damn it,” Grace rubs his eye.
“Swear word why, question,” Rocky asks, rocking from side to side outside of the bathroom entrance.
“Because eyelashes are important. They keep dust and debris out of your eye.” Not that there was a particularly large amount of dust on the Hail Mary.
“Stupid Grace. Why remove, question,”
“I didn’t- I don’t know,” Grace slumps forward, leaning against the tiny sink in his only bathroom about the ship. “I don’t know, Rocky. I didn’t even know I was doing it.” How can he stop what he doesn’t understand?
“Grace leave bathroom. Rocky fix,” Rocky says, this time his voice transmitting from a shitty little speaker in the bathroom that Grace had fought long and hard to keep out.
“You can’t just fix this, Rocky. It doesn’t work like that. It’s a problem with my brain,” Grace shudders slightly. He grips the sink tighter.
Rocky is silent for a moment before he speaks.
“Rocky and Grace fix together, question.” He asks, voice conveying a surprising amount of earnest for a computer modulated set of tones. He’s still rocking from side to side, a behavior Grace has come to understand as self soothing. Grace wonders if it’s possible.
“Rocky and Grace fix together, statement,” Grace lets out a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding.
------
The plan starts with a whiteboard, like it always does.
Grace remove parts.
Parts important.
Grace not notice.
And, at Rocky’s insistence,
Stupid Grace.
“Okay, so we’ve got the facts down. Well, the facts plus one very untrue opinion,” Grace turns around from the whiteboard to face Rocky. “Hey, what are you making?”
“Rocky make model,” Rocky replies, furiously threading xenonite fibers together. “Make model of Grace brain. Fix brain.”
“Can you see my brain? Wait, never mind, we don’t need a model.”
“We yes need a model,”
“We don’t- Okay, you work on your model, but talk to me too,” Grace compromises. Rocky chitters happily in response. “So, we’ve got an unconscious behavior that we need to mitigate. Any ideas?”
Rocky stops working on what Grace can only describe as spheres-connected-by-lines model and looks up.
“Grace have problem here,” Rocky points to one of the lines and- Oh. He’s made neurons, with little firing lines between them. Someday, Grace will remember to ask Rocky how in the Hell he knows what a neuron is. “Incorrect behavior. We need to-” He snaps one of the wires and swiftly connects it to a different xenonite-neuron.
“Rewire. You want to rewire my brain,” Grace sits down and puts his head in his hands for a minute. How many times has he heard this before? But, he trusts Rocky. Maybe this time will be different. “How?”
“Rocky help behavior,” Rocky answers him, his voice modular warping slightly at *behavior.* “Rocky remind you. Watch Grace all time. Good good good.”
“No, not good good good,” Grace sighs. “You can’t just watch me twenty-four-seven.” He wonders for a moment if that will translate well. Probably not. “You can’t watch me all the time. I need privacy, remember?”
“Rocky remember. Watch only for two/three days. Rewire brain. Watch all done.” Rocky seems immensely pleased with himself. “Grace fixed.”
----
It takes a full day for Grace to agree to the plan, with caveats. No watching him in the bathroom, that’s a big one, and at least an hour of private time for every twenty-four hour period. Rocky agrees happily, and the experiment begins.
It might have taken a day for Grace to come to terms with the plan, but it only takes a few hours before Rocky is alerting.
“Grace Grace Grace! Removing parts!” He yells as much as he’s able to through the voice modulator.
Grace jolts, then hastily pulls his hand away from his eyes. Shit, he was about to pick, wasn’t he? He hadn’t even noticed his own hand creeping closer and closer to his eyelashes, practically seeking out something that didn’t feel quite right.
It happens again a few hours later while they’re typing up instruction manuals for the xenonite breeder tanks.
“Grace removing parts! Grace stop!” Rocky exclaims, and Grace does. He’s surprised at how often it seems to happen when someone is actually keeping track.
The pattern follows for the rest of the day. Grace gets into the zone of working and, at some point, Rocky jolts him out of his trance before he can pick off any more eyelashes. By the end of the day cycle, Grace is exhausted, and Rocky seems a little tired too. He must be, having spent the whole day watching Grace like a hawk.
By day two, nothing has improved. Having logged all occurrences, they estimate Grace picks at his eyelashes every four hours, particularly when engaged in menial work. Instead of decreasing, the rate starts increasing, and Grace is starting to feel like a bug trapped under a magnifying glass.
“Okay, we need to stop,” Grace finally sighs, scrubbing his face with his hands. “I can’t do it anymore. This is making things worse.”
“Why worse, question.” Rocky asks.
“Hell if I know,” Grace laughs in frustration, then lets his head fall forward and bonk lightly against his desk. “If I could answer all your questions, I’d know how to stop it already.”
“Rocky understand,” Rocky rolls towards Grace.
“You do?”
“Grace not stupid. Brain stupid,” Rocky declares, and all Grace can do is laugh.
“Brain stupid indeed.”
------
It takes another few days before Grace is ready to talk about it again, and since then, his picking has gotten slightly more manageable. Something about the stress, maybe, or the sudden lack thereof.
“Hey, Rock?” Grace calls out from the lab,”
“Yes yes yes. Rocky here. Hello friend Grace,” Rocky chitters, rolling from his dedicated lab space to Grace’s.
“Listen. I’m sorry you couldn’t- you know. Fix me,” Grace says, voice wobbling only the tiniest bit. “I know you tried.”
“Is okay,” Rocky chirps.
“It is?” Grace frowns. It is?
“Rocky still love Grace, even if Grace remove parts,” Rocky says, then deftly rolls back to his lab.
All Grace can do, once again, is laugh.