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Ryland Grace remembers the first time he cleared his search history.
He had been nine with his very first laptop: an advance birthday gift for his upcoming “double-digit milestone”. He’d begged and begged his parents for one, and luckily, they were easy to relent. After all, he wasn’t some sort of rebellious deviant with an angsty preteen phase that most of his classmates had been going through; as a matter of fact, he was the opposite, uniform below the knees, hair combed tight against his scalp. Nonetheless, when he shakily hit the infamous ‘ERASE’ button with his heart in his throat, he felt like the worst person on earth. There weren’t even satisfactory answers to be found: every casual opinion piece had been contradictory, and every academic paper had words too big for him to fully comprehend.
“Transgender proclivities in nature examples”, he had searched.
Nothing unanimous. Nothing to make him feel better about being the 0.8% of American youth that hated every inch of themselves; their knobby knees, their small hands, their widening chest, the softening of cheeks, the hips, the roundness, the smoothness, the increasing fleeting glances from men in public -
It was disgusting. And isolating.
It didn’t take long for his parents to notice, of course. They were a sharp, alert and blissfully secular pair that ultimately did want what was best for their child. His mother had once made an offhand remark about “missing her daughter’, but that idea had been quickly and sternly shut down by his father. Grace couldn’t have been more grateful. When he finally turned sixteen, he took his first pill to halt the quickening pains of puberty, and well, the rest was history.
That didn’t make the loneliness go away, though. He knew that people like him weren’t treated kindly in the industry of academia, and less so in the education sector. He’d pushed his background deep down into the recesses of childhood memory and became as close to “flawless” as he could: a self-made man comfortable in his skin, the perfect role model for impressionable students still figuring themselves out. Hell, even his ex didn’t know! They hadn’t lasted long enough to even explore the possibility of intimacy, not that Grace felt that he was missing anything. Still, the quiet, nagging sense of being the only one fighting a secret battle didn’t go away.
Nonetheless, he had given up any hope of alleviation, though he couldn’t tell if it was resignation or acceptance. He had himself, a monthly needle in his thigh to keep any distress at bay, and students that loved him.
Until, of course, he was blasted eons away from home into deep space in a spaceship equipped to sustain survival. Not living.
“Grace quiet many minutes. Grace feeling okay, question?”
It had been another painful, restless sleep. He had only laid down because the tremors in his hands prevented him from adeptly operating a microscope, and, well, it was either “go to bed” or face Rocky nagging in his sharp, whistling lilt that he was too stupid to do things when he was exhausted. Or, the third worse option of another “meal” of taumoeba (more of a dose than anything, really), nauseatingly chugged from a glass beaker.
“I’m okay, Rock,” he said blearily. “Just thinking.”
Rocky hummed. Grace had begun to recognize this diction as one of concern, having to rely less and less on the computer-generated translations on the journey to Erid.
“Thinking of what, question?”
He sighed. He knew, perhaps more than anyone in the universe, that Rocky cared. He cared so much more than Grace was comfortable with. He’d never been one for any sort of close companionship: as much as it was desired, to be known was something that didn’t quite sit well with him. After all, being known came with the mortifying ordeal of explaining everything that was wrong with him.
“Thinking of the things I miss eating on Earth,” he mused. It was a half-truth. Rocky could always hear when he was lying. “A double-stacked hamburger with extra pickles and mustard sounds heavenly right now.”
“Rocky know human hamburger! Hamburger no sufficient nutrients like taumoeba.”
“I know, but it tasted really good. Taste is very important for humans, it keeps things from being dreary. It makes eating fun.”
“Fun important for eating, question?”
Grace laughed. “Fun important for eating, statement. "If it wasn’t fun, I would never have started eating normally again.”
“... You do not eat normal?”
Yikes. Now he had to explain the concept of beauty standards to an alien.
“Sometimes, when humans want to look… good? To other humans? They eat less. So that other people will find them attractive. It makes it easier to find a mate.” Rocky rumbled in disagreement, and Grace found himself chuckling in tandem. Now that he had an actual reason to starve, it sounded ridiculous and trivial even to him. Why hadn’t he eaten his fill when he could?
“Humans stupid sometimes.”
“Yes. Humans are always finding new ways of being stupid. All the time.”
“Grace go eat now, command.”
He sighed. There was no escaping it after all. He’d rather go back to bed, but he wanted Rocky to be able to rest too. And to stay up for minimally nineteen hours demanded consistent caloric intake, to keep his eyelids from drooping even if it felt like lead.
Arrival on Erid could not come soon enough.
---
Increasingly, Grace found himself examining his reflection in front of the warbling plastic mirror.
He was pale and emaciated, more than he had ever been on Earth. His eye sockets were sunken, his gums bloody, and his lips chapped.
But worst of all, his beard had stopped growing.
The stubble was barely visible - there was nothing left to shave even though the thinning hair on his head stubbornly grew like a weed. He couldn’t even risk shaving for the comforting sensation of it: his skin had grown paper-thin, and the scurvy would keep any cuts from closing. If an infection didn’t speed up his demise, the slow, painful blood-loss would. If he stared long enough, he could see his entire jaw rewiring itself, the bone losing its angles and reshaping into something rounder.
Softer.
He groaned, pressing his forehead onto the cold surface. He had been so fixated on saving the world that he hadn’t even thought once about missing his shots, but now that things were relatively settled, it was increasingly undeniable that his body was, for lack of a better word, reverting to default mode. And there was nothing he could do about it. Stratt herself hadn’t known, and even if she had, he wondered mournfully if she would’ve bothered packing a suicide-mission’s-worth of testosterone for someone who was more or less expendable.
The distress started small, from noticing his figure in fleeting reflections in the glass, to his voice beginning to crack when he laughed. He hated it: hated feeling helpless, hated being unable to walk around dressed in nothing but his sheets, hated hating himself. Yesterday, he had to set the cabin’s interior temperature lower just so that he could layer his clothing, much to Rocky’s chagrin of feeling cold. Guilt started seeping in alongside the sensation that his skin no longer belonged to him, and packaged with the starvation, Grace felt nothing short of absolutely miserable.
Time seemed to pass with centuries embedded into each second. The two of them were barely one year into the 11.9 Earth light years to Erid, and his sanity was already tearing at the seams. Sleep was worse than ever, and he’d taken to watching Rocky hibernate as both a coping mechanism and an escape. He knew Rocky was feeling the fatigue as well, given the fact that he was stuck in a bright, loud overstimulating alien spaceship; and he seemed to buy it whenever Grace offered to watch over his slumber.
That night, Grace thought of Yao and Ilyukhina.
Rocky was fast asleep, the segments on the top of his carapace lifting slightly with each rumbling breath. The translation computer was painfully silent, the warbling transmitter flat, as if connected to a corpse. It never got less disturbing watching his friend rest: if he stared at him for too long, the triangular burn scar on his arm would begin to hum with a psychosomatic agony, and he would feel the edges of panic building around his consciousness before he knew it. But as he leaned his temple against the warm xenonite ball, the anxiety slowly faded into something worse, something he hadn’t felt in an incredibly long time.
He closed his eyes, and inhaled the sterile air. Yao and Ilyukhina were probably eons away by now, their icy, crystalized bodies drifting tenderly through the pitch darkness. How comforting, he mused, to feel the vastness of space instead of suffocating in a spacesuit or rotting away in a dying ship. He imagined it must feel like a cold ocean, the air lapping away at their extremities, the stars reflecting in the whites of their eyes.
It wasn’t like they hadn’t left him completely without his resources; he’d finished Ilyukhina’s vodka, but his thoughts slowly drifted to the cocaine she probably stashed somewhere secret in her bunk cabinet. It would be nice to feel something again, and on an empty stomach, he knew the drug would be especially potent. Enough to-
No. Not quite.
It would still be painful, and he was already tired of throwing up the taumoeba. He imagined his nose bloody and his gums sore, the cold tremors racking through his body until his heart stammered to a stop. He shuddered. Some fates, no matter how quick, were not worth the suffering.
What about Yao?
He remembered his little speech back in the hangar on Earth, his eyes wrinkling at the corner when he smiled. How casually he had brought up his own death, as if it were the most rational thing to do. Grace imagined turning the little lump of cold, black metal over in his hands, and the click that would bring an instant quiet. Would Yao have done it for him, had they all succeeded in sending the Beetles back to Earth? Would his body be floating alongside the duo, invisible wings of stardust spreading from his back, his skin peeling back to release the endless cosmos that was his soul?
“Grace?”
He jumped. The computer had started up again. Rocky was awake, and lifted his limbs in a catlike stretch.
“Good morning, buddy,” Grace said, with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “That was a long nap, huh?”
His friend remained silent.
“Rocky?”
“Grace unhappy.”
Grace forced a laugh. It came out sharper than he would’ve liked. “I’m not unhappy, Rock. Just-”
“Grace lie a lot these past moons,” Rocky mumbled. “No leaking. But heartbeat very fast. Wake Rocky up.”
He rubbed his hand over his face (smooth, too smooth) and sighed heavily. “I’m so sorry. I can watch you over the intercom next time in my quarters, just-”
“No, no, no,” Rocky whistled, rolling his xenonite ball closer until it pressed up against his thigh. “Why Grace unhappy, question? Hungry, question?”
“I ate while you were sleeping,” he said, the excuse sounding pathetic even to his own ears. There was no fooling Rocky, he could definitely hear his stomach acids churning. He’d even once pointed out the sound of Grace’s trembling, citing the fact that the beakers would clink when he lifted them to his lips.
“Depression, question?”
What?
Against his better judgement, Grace chuckled. His ribs hurt.
“Where in the world did you learn that word?”
“Portable Human Thinking Device!” Rocky exclaimed. “I learn about all human illnesses there. Is also called disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, classified under DSM-5 published in 2013 Earth years, when human lose interest in many-”
“Yes, yes, Rocky,” Grace says, feeling an odd sense of regret in giving his friend access to information about all the things that made him dysfunctional. It felt way too intimate, like a bridge that was being built just to burn. “I don’t have it, it’s just- being up here so long can make a human go crazy.”
“Because taumoeba taste bad, question?”
Grace shrugged, noncommittal. “Among other things.”
“Rocky fix. How, question?”
He smiled, feeling his lips crack. “I don’t think you can fix this one, buddy.”
Rocky whistled his version of a sigh. “Rocky do not like sad-Grace. Sad, sad, sad.”
“I don’t like sad-me either.”
Before his friend could respond, Grace heaved himself onto his feet. This was not a conversation he was willing to have with any human, much less a species that had no understanding of the concept of gender. Having to say anything out loud would be like clawing a brick out of his brain and smashing it open: it would make the matter tangible, and there would be no picking it back up. No hope for recovery or dignity of any sort.
Rocky’s ball barreled towards his ankles, hitting the back of his knees. Ow.
“Grace talk to Rocky-friend. Rocky fix. Fix with Grace, together.” He bumps two of his arms together in a musical thud. “A lot of time to talk.”
He felt a lump forming in his throat.
Time. There was too much of it. Too much waiting, too much thinking, too many mashed potato days blending into each other until he was aware of nothing but his body becoming what he feared most.
“I can’t talk about it, Rock, I can’t-” he choked, hurtling his way into the cabin bathroom. He needed space to think. His jacket, half-fallen, caught on one of the ropes he tied around to navigate, and slipped off his shoulders. In the reflection, Grace finally caught sight of himself for the first time that day, his eyes red and leaking, and his chest… bulging. Lines of white fabric pushed outwards from under his armpits. A raw, frightening, animal-like moan clawed its way out of his throat before he realized it came from him.
“Grace. Grace come back-”
He slammed the folding door in Rocky’s face, buried his head in his hands, and wept.
Everything came crashing down at once, and Grace realized he couldn’t stop the scream that tore through him, shoulders drawn tight with sobs. Vaguely, he was aware of Rocky calling for him from beyond the threshold, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. His nails dug hard into his arms, now devoid of musculature and any form of masculinity he could call his own. Bile pooled at the back of his throat and he retched dryly, drool dripping from between his clenched teeth.
“Gracegracegrace, come out, come out, COMMAND-”
He slammed his body against the door to block it, curling into a fetal position. He couldn’t do this. Not anymore. He couldn’t keep up the charade of being okay all the time, of being a functional scientist, a person. He was an air-wasting, resource-consuming anomaly at best, and an absolute freak of nature at worst. Through heaving breaths, he imagined cold, black metal pressed under his chin, the immediate relief it would bring-
The door blew off its hinges, and Grace instinctively raised his hands to block the shards of plastic.
“Grace! Grace bleeding!”
He feels a heated limb reach for him through the xenonite membrane, forcefully yanking his hand off his face. He was bleeding, he realised distantly. He’d grabbed his shoulders too hard. Not like it could get infected in an environment such as this, there was absolutely nothing to be concerned about. Everything was just fine. Just fine. As long as he could stay curled up on the floor forever, everything would be peachy until he reached Erid.
“Rocky call Armando! Armando help!”
“Rocky,” he slurred through phlegm, “I’m okay, I-”
He heard a loud beep followed by a mechanical whirl, and felt two robotic limbs reaching under his arms, dragging him to his feet. Beneath him, he felt Rocky’s ball pressing against the small of his back, hurtling him towards the medical bay. Before he could process it, he felt a tiny prick in the corner of his neck, and his face grew warm, vision fading into a beautiful aurora of colours.
---
Grace woke up restrained.
His tongue felt like sandpaper in his parched mouth, and when he tried to brush an eyelash out of his eye, he found that he couldn’t move.
He wiggled his toes, and felt skin rubbing against each other. Alright, no spinal damage. He moved his fingers, balled his hands into fists, touched each finger to his thumb. Motor response was good. So why couldn’t he move?
“Four-point restraints in order,” Armando’s cold, objective voice cut through the ringing in his ears. Had he asked that question aloud? “Ryland Grace, code grey. Pulse has stabilized. Removing restraints now. Please stay in your bunk and refrain from standing up until the Haloperidol has been flushed from your bloodstream.”
“Oookay.” His voice sounded slurry.
A rattling near his left ear. Something brown and teal entered his peripheral vision.
“Grace! Grace awake, question?”
“Yeah buddy,” he croaked. “I’m alright. That’s twice you’ve saved me now.”
“Grace stupid and soft. Need saving. Rocky happy to save. You sleep for many hours!”
“... how many?”
“Seventeen Earth hours,” Rocky grumbled. A hiss of plastic retracting into the bunk cut him off, and Grace found himself suddenly able to sit. He flexed his elbow, and found that plasters covered the outer side of his forearm. Shame flooded his consciousness, quick as a tidal wave.
“I’m.. sorry about all of that, Rocky. I didn’t mean-”
“All okay! Panic sometimes part of human self-preservation.”
Grace smiled, genuine this time. They sat in a heavy silence, until Rocky nudged at his bare foot hanging from the bunk.
“Grace tell Rocky what happened, command. Rocky and Grace fix it together.”
We do have a lot of time, he thought painfully. Might as well let his friend play therapist. If not for his own sake, then Rocky’s. He knew he wouldn’t be able to bear it if he saw Rocky himself suffering the same way that he was. He would have wanted to help too.
“Rocky, uh. Hmm. I- do you know what being transgender is?”
Rocky thought for a long moment. “Many sources. No objective definition.”
“Well, in human culture, your reproductive organ determines how you dress, how you speak, and how people treat you. I was born with the wrong one. So people treated me… in a different way.”
Rocky chirps quietly. “Rocky know Grace do not have large fifth vestigial limb. That is bothersome, question?”
He felt himself flushing red.
"That's- well. That’s one way you can put it. Back on Earth, I take medication, hormones actually, right here, intravenously” he taps the side of his thigh. “Here, I don’t have those meds. Slowly, I will look like… how I used to look. And people will treat me differently again. That makes me very upset.”
Rocky was quiet for an uncomfortably long time. He seemed to be pacing back and forth in the xenonite sphere, his claws clicking together.
“Eridians do not have this- gender, question? Statement. Yes. Eridians do not have different reproductive organs. Rocky will not treat Grace different even with no medication. Adrian will not treat Grace different.” He scuttles closer, pressing his triangular hand against the panel gently. “If Grace say Grace is male, then Grace is male. Simple.”
His vision blurred. He made it sound so simple. So much weight in those words, more than he could ever express.
“Grace? Grace sad again? Why sad? Grace is male, human male, very handsome male-”
“Rocky,” he choked, pressing his hand against his. “I’m very happy. Thank you.”
Rocky hummed. “Erid is not Earth. No need for human binaries. You are still friend.”
“You’re my best friend, Rocky. Thank you.”
“Yes. Rocky Grace best friends. Now Grace must drink water, command. Too much leakage.”
For the first time in ages, Ryland Grace laughed, and complied.