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Grace was being… weird. Of course he has always been weird, but lately things are taking a turn. Since he came back for me and we started toward Erid, he doesn’t seem completely himself. I don’t know how else to explain it, but he SOUNDS wrong. He’s acting wrong too. He used to seek me out, stare at me. It was weird at first, but it became comforting after I’d thought I’d lost him. Now it’s like he hurts when he looks at me. That’s not the worst part, I hear something wrong inside of him.
I notice the most when he’s asleep. He taps the barrier between us three times and turns on his side, away from me, and I hear it. A rustling. Almost like his hair, but deeply wrong. It disturbs and worries me, even as he relaxes and his breathing evens out, I hear it catching on a solid surface in his lungs. It sounds almost like my vents, the air moving over something hard. It’s unnatural coming from him.
“Grace okay, question?” I ask as he wheezes his way through his morning routine. I try to keep the worry out of my voice. Luckily we don’t use the translation software anymore, as it picked up more of my nuances than Grace’s ears can probably hear.
“Yeah, bud, I’m fine. Why are you asking?” Grace says this in his normal tone, but the low whisper of whatever is taking over his lungs screams at me like the alarms on the ship when we were spinning out over Adrian. I feel a similar sensation of danger.
“Is… okay if not fine, Grace.” I say, again carefully. I don’t want to make him all defensive, like he normally gets when he feels vulnerable. “Is important to know if you are not fine.” I add, before returning to what I was doing. I’m almost scared that he’s going to admit to something being wrong. I truly hope I’m wrong. More than anything.
Grace doesn’t reply to me, but I hear him making a face that he’s never made at me before- I can’t parse it. I hope he decides to talk to me about it, that’s all I can do. I wish I could comfort him with more than words. I can hear him watching me but it hurts too much to acknowledge. He still isn’t speaking to me as much. He smiles, but it’s more like a grimace, like the apes he showed me on his laptop.
With every second that passes the object inside of him grows. Panic wracks through my body like thunder and I feel like collapsing as Grace coughs roughly in his sleep. He refuses to acknowledge it during the day, politely clearing his throat and making Armando bring him hot water. He’s in pain, I can hear it in the way his lungs and throat constrict. I’m trying to keep my frustration in check, I have a tendency to be loud when I’m angry. Or Scared. Or Both. It’s definitely both. He’s definitely not getting enough oxygen either. I can hear his lungs getting stiffer and weaker. His voice is thinner.
Grace wakes up and cries quietly into his pillow. I pretend like I don’t know he’s awake, I know he gets this way sometimes and I don’t want him to feel like he can’t show his emotions without me commenting on it. Once he has calmed down (as much as he’s going to) I tap my tunnel wall three times to signal that I know he’s awake and I’m on my way into the dormitory.
He moves quickly, removing some sort of object from his pillow and turning his pillow over.
“Morning, Rock!” He says fake cheerfully. He’s pretending to smile but I can still hear his eyebrows, drawn together and pulled down over his eyes, more of a frown than his signature pout is.
“What in your hand, question. Grace did not sleep with small object under pillow.” I’m tired of watching my friend in pain like this. I was going to wait and figure out how to talk to him tactfully but I can’t. Just as I predicted, he immediately becomes defensive.
“I told you, there’s nothing wrong with me! I don’t know why you keep insisting on not minding your own business!” He huffs angrily, but there’s no air behind it. He’s holding back tears, struggling and gasping around the formation in his lungs. My hearts ache to hear it.
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you. You don’t understand half of what I tell you, you’re just…you’re just a creepy, awkward alien!” He ends this statement by kicking his bunk as hard as he can and stalking away, every muscle in his body tensed. He’s already crying again, in his tiny bathroom stall. I’m left paralyzed in shock and a profound grief as I realize this isn’t something that he wants me to fix. I refuse to accept it.
I throw my own tantrum, despite the struggle I had gone through to keep myself calm before. I go to throw the laptop he gave me at the wall, and a thought occurs to me. Before I follow up on it, I check on him. He’s examining the strange object over the sink in his bathroom. His fingers brush against it, reverently. The resulting sound sends shudders through me. It’s a crystal formation from Erid. It’s shaped like what I now know to be a flower from his world, a tulip, I think.
The thing Grace coughed out… I looked closer… it is covered in the fluid that flows through his veins. It echoes back at me sickeningly where it trickles down the delicate crystal structure. It had come from his lungs and scraped its way out. I need to figure this out. I need to fix it. The fear and anxiety I’m feeling is so overwhelming, it’s hard to leave Grace even when he’s awake. I want to perch on his shoulder and never leave him. He’s so frail. I am so scared. I don’t know what to say to him. I say things I’d normally say. Definitely not what I want to say.
Grace is still ignoring me, ignoring this. He goes about his daily tasks, speaks to me when necessary, but it seems like he wants to say more and he won’t. I can tell that he’s suppressing his pain as much as he can, I hear the tension creaking in his body like pliers that need oiled. When he sleeps, I start my research. I feel like I’m falling apart as I follow the links. My worst fears are confirmed; he’s dying, and it’s my fault.
I sit next to Grace in my xenonite ball. I refuse to let him avoid this discussion, now that I know how to fix what’s happening to him. Every shuddering breath he takes brings me closer to just waking him up to get it over with. I restrain myself from it. He wakes with rough coughs that shake his body, and he breathes raggedly in their wake. He takes far longer than normal to open his eyes.
“What do you want?” He rasps at me, his eyes still closed, making no move to get up.
“I know what’s wrong with you-“ I start. He doesn’t let me finish my sentence before he’s standing up to avoid me again.
“Stop! This isn’t something you can fix!” He’s moving to storm past me, but I block his path. He rolls his eyes, but sits back down defeatedly. “Look,” he sighs, and it gets caught in his chest, causing another round of horrible, grating coughs to contort his body. He has tears running down his face when he finally catches his breath to speak, “I know you mean well, but this is something I have to deal with myself. I checked, Armando has the treatment. It won’t be easy, but it’ll fix my lungs and things will be better for both of us.” He’s got his eyes closed again, and that look, from before. Paired with his voice, I can tell it’s guilt now. My hearts simultaneously break.
The treatment he’s talking about would mean his emotions, his feelings, and especially his feelings for me, would be permanently excised from him. I can’t let that happen. At the same time, I can’t tell him what to do, that would make me no better than the Earth that sent him here. He looks at me brokenly, like he’s considering something. He shakes his head and lays back down.
“I’ve got the procedure scheduled for overnight tonight, so I can watch you sleep today.” I don’t respond. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again if he goes through with this. Sure he’s weird, and volatile, and he believes not having these feelings would make him feel better but… without his feelings what would I be? I would be stuck in the dark, like before. Before I had a concept of the dark. He introduced me to the dark when he brought light to me. I’m shaking and spiraling now. I remember the rattle of my crew’s carapaces, the weak and hollow whistle of air over their vents as they settled in to sleep for the last time. He lies in front of me, wheezing painfully as I imagine all of his sounds stopping like theirs had. He opens his eyes and looks at me again.
“Are you even going to respond to any of that?” He sounds wounded, I just want to fix it. I rattle. I am panicking again. I can’t speak, I have no way to avoid him. I can’t just close my eyes to this the way he can. I can’t focus, but at the same time it’s all I can do. He becomes alert, sitting up in a way that sounds physically painful.
“Rock? Are you with me bud?” He’s concerned, leaning forward toward me. “You alright?” I want to answer him, I just can’t find my way back from where I am. He’s got tears in his eyes, this time not from the cough. He takes a ragged breath, trying not to panic. He thinks for a minute, before leaning into my ball and tapping the surface three times near one of my claws. I tap back. He attempts to sigh in relief, but it comes out as a gag as he spits up another crystal shard.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I hear myself say distantly. Grace straightens up. We share a quiet moment, remembering the last time I said that, when he was trying to be brave for me the first time. Before either of us knew the lengths we’d go to to protect each other.
“I… didn’t think you’d understand.” He looks down as he says it, that guilty look back again. “Rock my idea of uh, love, isn’t necessarily the definition everyone uses.” I try to encourage him with my body language. “The idea of dating and sex isn’t Gross to me but they’re not something I want either… when I love someone, it’s just love. I just want to be close and stay close and never let go. The last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable, but I love you. So, so much.” He levels his gaze at me, his thoughts having gained momentum. He leans in to rest his forehead against the xenonite between us.
For the second time in what feels like 5 minutes, I feel like I’m being torn limb from limb.
My whole body begins to vibrate with it. I decide I am no longer confining myself to the special human-Eridian language I’ve been using to speak to him. This is something important, and I don’t care if I have to explain it to him several times. In fact, I will happily explain it, unprompted, whenever I have the thought.
“I love you too.” I answer, threading in tones and harmonies that carry the meaning of how much he means to me. He splutters, in a strange way, and chokes out another flower, but I can hear the crystal formation in his lungs dissolving away like it was never there. He seems to understand, breaking out in a grin. This just makes me more excited, it’s been so long since he’s smiled at me. He’s very quickly overwhelmed with it, sobbing. It’s the loudest and healthiest and happiest he’s been in so long. I harmonize with him.
“Love… Joy… Friendship?” Grace asks, curiosity weeding its way into the hope and happiness flavoring his tears. I nod my carapace, not something I would have done before. Part of my brain drifts back to the concept of light. I can’t shake something he said to me though, it had devastated me. I need to know if he was being honest.
“When you called me a creepy alien weirdo or whatever, did you mean that?” Sadness creeps into my tone with this, low and reedy. I still don’t switch back to the old way of speaking. I might just be being mean because what he said still hurts me.
He slumps back against my ball, wincing as he remembers what happened.
“I was uh… It’s a human thing, sometimes when we don’t want our… leaving to hurt someone we care about, we say cruel things to push them away. It’s a way to protect ourselves from things like grief. I’m sorry, Rocky. I just didn’t want it to hurt as much for you when I got the treatment.” At that, he gets up and goes to his computer, the one that controls Armando. “I have to unschedule that now.” He says, for my benefit. “I don’t think you’re a creepy alien. Maybe a little awkward, but it’s not bad, it’s something I love about you. Not to mention, I’m not the best judge of what constitutes as awkward either.” He laughs, it twinkles through me, as he settles back on the ground with me. “I have a question, though.” He turns til he’s looking straight at me. “When you shut down earlier, what was that?”
I take admittedly longer to answer that. I don’t know how to phrase it in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a maniac. “I don’t completely know. When I was listening to you struggle for breath and talk about getting a treatment to rip out a part of yourself, it reminded me of my-my crew.” I feel the panic again, but it seems like Grace can see it too, as he scooches closer and seems to be searching for something. His hand finds the flexible xenonite panel and he reaches through it towards me. I grab his hand, feeling the steady thrum of his heart calms me. “It scared me, to think of you being so sick and desperate. It took my mind to a place where all I could think about was what would happen to me if you did that, the loneliness that would come with the absence of your vibrancy.”
Grace squeezes my hand harder, tears forming in his eyes as he stares at me.
“Oh Rocky… you really do love me don’t you?” He giggles, cutting the tension of my admission.
“I really, really do, Grace.” I intentionally say his name in a new and more tender way, to convey that we are indeed something new and more tender to each other. “And you love me?” I ask tentatively, scared that now that his problem is solved he may change his mind.
“Yeah, love love love you, bud.” He’s crying again, gentle tears as he relaxes against the xenonite even further. I need him closer. I’m going to fix that next.