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It started with Home Alone.
Grace had been cycling through the mental health chamber’s movie library looking for something to run in the background while he updated his Taumoeba notes — something familiar, something that didn’t require attention — when his finger landed on it without really thinking.
He hadn’t watched it in years. He hadn’t let himself.
He put it on anyway.
Rocky noticed within four minutes.
“Grace,” he said, from behind the xenonite wall. “Grace is not working.”
“I’m working.”
“Grace is looking at the screen.”
“I’m multitasking.”
“What is on screen, question?”
Grace glanced up. On the screen, eight-year-old Kevin McCallister was discovering he had the house to himself and making a face that communicated pure, uncomplicated joy.
“It’s a movie,” Grace said. “About a kid who gets left behind by his family and has to defend his house from burglars.”
A long pause.
“Alone,” Rocky repeated slowly. “Family leave. Burglars come.”
“Yeah.”
“This is a good movie, question?”
“It’s a Christmas movie. The Christmas movie, actually. There are four of them.”
“What is Christmas, question?”
Grace opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the screen for a moment, where Kevin was now running through a department store in absolute chaos.
“Watch first,” he said. “I’ll explain after.”
Rocky watched with the focused intensity he brought to everything, which meant a continuous stream of engineering commentary that Grace had mostly learned to receive as ambient noise, except when it was too good to ignore.
“Kevin plan is good,” Rocky announced, twenty minutes in. “Resource use. Efficiency.”
“He’s eight.”
“Erid children at eight cycle also make good plans.”
“He drops an iron on a man’s face, Rocky.”
“Effective,” said Rocky, with complete approval.
By the second film, Rocky had developed a comprehensive critique of the Wet Bandits as a case study in repeated tactical failure — same mistake, different house, bad learning — and Grace had long since abandoned any pretense of working on his notes.
By the third film, Rocky went quiet during the ending. The family reunion. The particular relief of people finding their way back to each other.
Grace didn’t comment on it. He understood.
“Is recurring theme,” Rocky said finally, when the credits rolled. “Alone. Family gone. Find way back.”
“Yeah,” said Grace. “That’s kind of what it’s always about.”
“Humans make holiday movie about being alone,” Rocky said slowly, working it out, “so they remember to not be alone.”
Grace looked at the screen for a moment.
“I never thought about it like that,” he said. “But yeah. I think that’s exactly it.”
“Eridians also have this. Different story. Same shape.” A pause. “What is holiday, question? Christmas. Explain.”
Grace explained Christmas badly, then better, then with increasing enthusiasm as the explanation developed its own momentum, which was how all his best explanations went.
“It’s a winter holiday. Northern hemisphere winter, anyway — the southern hemisphere does it in summer, which has always felt fundamentally wrong to me. It’s about a lot of things depending on who you ask, but mostly it’s about being together. Family. Food. Gifts.”
“Gift,” said Rocky. “Know word. Give thing to person you love.”
“Exactly. You give gifts, you eat too much, you spend time together even when it’s a little annoying because the being-together is the whole point.” Grace leaned back in his chair. “When I was a kid my dad would read the board game instructions out loud before we played. Every single year. Same games, same instructions. My mom always pretended she’d forgotten how to play so he could read them again.”
“Why, question?”
Grace smiled. “Because he liked it. Because it was his thing.” He paused. “That’s kind of what Christmas is. Everyone’s thing. You do it every year.”
“Grace celebrate Christmas, question?”
The question landed quietly between them.
“I used to,” Grace said. “When my parents were alive.”
He told it simply, the way you tell things when you’re far enough from home that being careful with them doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore.
His mother’s kitchen. A smell he could never quite reconstruct no matter how many times he tried. His father and the board game instructions. The last Christmas he’d spent with them he was twenty-three and complained, mildly, about the drive home from college. He hadn’t known. Nobody ever knows.
They’d been on their way to his graduation when the accident happened. He’d been standing in a gown in May sunshine when someone found him in the crowd.
After that he’d let Christmas become December 25th. A day that passed. It was easier.
Rocky listened without interrupting, which was unusual enough that Grace noticed.
“Grace parents,” Rocky said carefully, when Grace finished. “Gone before Grace did great thing.”
“Yeah.”
“They do not know Grace saves everyone.”
“No.”
Rocky was quiet. “Rocky crew. Twenty-two. All gone.” He pressed a claw gently against the xenonite wall. “Rocky also has people who do not know what happened after.”
Grace looked at him.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I know you do.”
“Grief is heavy thing,” Rocky said. “Not gone ever. But can put down sometimes. Pick up again later.” He tilted slightly. “Grace parents. Rocky thinks they are proud. This is Rocky’s opinion. Rocky is usually correct.”
Grace laughed, and it came out slightly uneven at the edges. “They would have been so confused by all of this.”
“Yes,” Rocky agreed. “But proud.” Delivered with complete Eridian certainty — not comfort but fact, not up for debate. “Grace’s mother. Grace’s father. They see Grace. They are proud.”
Grace pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes.
“Thanks, Rocky.”
“Yes,” said Rocky. Then, with a decisive shift in tone: “Grace says Christmas has food, question?”
“Yeah.”
“And decoration, question?”
“Yeah.”
“Then,” said Rocky, “we should do Christmas.”
Grace stared at him. “We should do Christmas?”
“Yes. Rocky decides. We do Christmas now.”
“Rocky, we don’t have — I don’t have any Christmas food, or decorations, or—”
“Rocky will make decoration. Grace find food.” A pause. “Grace has supplies, question? Check supplies.”
“I know what’s in my supplies, Rocky, I’ve been living off them for—”
“Check,” Rocky said firmly.
Grace checked.
He found it at the very back of the cache, behind the spare sample containers he’d been looking for three days ago: a bag of Skittles and some other junk food, and — tucked carefully into the corner, sealed and pressurized for space travel — a flat bag of beer.
There was a note.
Small. Handwritten. In handwriting he recognized immediately.
For the road. Sorry I couldn’t do more. — C
Grace sat on the floor.
Carl.
Carl, who had been sitting in a car outside Grover Cleveland Middle, had not shaken his hand at their first meeting. Who had driven him places after that and waited outside doors and tossed aluminum foil and M&Ms into a cart like they were just two people running errands, cracking jokes the whole way down the aisle. Who had laughed at Grace’s jokes and thrown some back.
Who had stood above him in the grass while Grace looked up and said please — actually said please, Carl — and had looked down and said you’re gonna do great.
Sorry I couldn’t do more.
Grace turned the sealed beer bag over in his hands. The material caught the ship’s light. Outside the windows, stars moved past in the dark.
“More,” he said quietly. “Sure, Carl.”
He almost put it back.
Then he didn’t.
-
He came back out with everything in his arms.
“Grace found food,” Rocky observed, from behind the xenonite wall. He had, in Grace’s absence, constructed something from wire and xenonite offcuts and small reflective pieces that was geometric and precise and utterly alien in shape and was nevertheless, unmistakably, a tree. It caught the ship’s light and scattered it across the ceiling in small bright fragments.
Grace stopped. Looked at it.
“Rocky,” he said. “That’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” said Rocky. “Rocky is good at things.”
“Of course you are.”
Grace set everything out — his side and Rocky’s side, Grace with Skittles and M&Ms, Rocky with compressed Eridian provisions that Grace had always privately thought looked like gravel but which Rocky consumed with considerable dignity. He held up the beer bag.
“Someone packed this for me,” he said. “A friend. Sort of.”
“Sort of,” Rocky repeated. “Complicated friend.”
“Yeah.” Grace looked at the bag for a moment. Thought about a note in small handwriting. Thought about grass and a fence and the way someone looks when they’ve already made their decision and are waiting for it to be over. “He was good to me. And then when it mattered — he just stood there.”
Rocky pressed a claw to the wall. His quiet gesture.
“Rocky is sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
“Is not fine. But Grace will carry it fine.” A pause. “Grace drink the beer, question? For Christmas.”
Grace looked at the sealed bag. Then at the little tree throwing fragments of light across the ceiling. Then at Rocky, balanced on three legs on the other side of the xenonite wall, wearing the patient expression of someone who had decided Christmas was happening and was simply waiting for Grace to catch up.
He thought: I’ll probably forgive you eventually, Carl. Just not yet.
He held up the beer.
“Yeah,” he said. “For Christmas.”
He raised it toward the wall.
“Merry Christmas, Rocky.”
Rocky raised a claw. “Merry Christmas, Grace.”
Grace drank. Rocky ate his gravel. The little geometric tree scattered light across the ceiling of the Hail Mary, and some Christmas songs played in the background, and outside the windows the space was filled with dark, and none of them were Christmas, and all of them were.
Later, when the food was gone and the beer was most of the way gone and Rocky had settled into a sleep cycle, Grace sat alone with the light moving slowly on the ceiling.
He thought about his mother’s kitchen.
He thought about his father and the board game instructions.
He thought about twenty-two Eridians who had left home and hadn’t made it back.
He thought about Carl, who had packed a bag of beer and written sorry in small letters and meant it, probably, in whatever incomplete way a person can mean something they did anyway. He picked up the note. Read it once more. Put it in his pocket instead of throwing it away, which told him something about where he actually was with it.
He raised the bag toward the ceiling — toward the scattered light, toward the stars, toward nothing in particular and everything it contained.
“Merry Christmas,” he said quietly.
Grace looked at the little tree throwing light across the ceiling of a ship going somewhere impossible, and thought that his parents would have had approximately one million questions about all of this, and would have loved every single answer.
“Merry Christmas.” he said, to nobody and everybody.