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They celebrated Christmas twice more on the Hail Mary.
The second time was still Rocky’s idea. He announced it after an earth year, in the middle of a routine inspection of the Hail Mary, with the same tone he used to announce engineering solutions.
“Grace,” he said. “It is Christmas.”
Grace looked up from his laptop. “Is it a routine thing?”
“Obviously, Rocky decides day. Today is Christmas.”A pause. “Grace has food, question?”
Grace had a little food. Not much — his supplies were thinning in ways he was trying not to think about too carefully — but enough for a small celebration. He found half a bag of Skittles he’d been rationing and a packet of crackers that had survived longer than expected.
Rocky built another tree. Smaller this time, more refined, like he’d been thinking about the structural improvements since the last one.
They sat on either side of the xenonite wall and Grace told Rocky about New Year’s, because it seemed like a natural continuation, and Rocky spent forty minutes explaining why the human calendar system was, in his words, funny but not on purpose.
The third time, Grace had almost nothing left.
He didn’t say that. He found a single remaining bag of M&Ms — the bottom of the last bag, maybe thirty candies — and divided them out on his side of the wall with the careful attention of a man doing something important.
Rocky had built a third tree, the best one yet, precise and elaborate, with the reflective pieces arranged in a pattern that Grace slowly realized was a map of Tau Ceti’s system.
“Rocky,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Is that—”
“Yes,” said Rocky. “Where we met.”
Grace looked at it for a long time.
“Merry Christmas, Rocky.”
“Merry Christmas, Grace.”
He ate the M&Ms one at a time, slowly, and didn’t tell Rocky it was the last food he had that wasn’t a nutritional brick. Rocky knew anyway. Rocky always knew. He didn’t say anything either, which was its own kind of kindness.
After that, Rocky stopped suggesting Christmas.
Grace didn’t have the energy for it, and he didn’t have the food, and some celebrations require a certain minimum of okay to pull off. He filed it away with other things he was saving for later — real coffee, a proper bed, the sea.
If there was a later.
-
There was.
Erid was amber and enormous and looked like nothing Grace had ever seen before, which was fine because his habitat smelled like the coast of California, which was the first thing that made him cry since he’d arrived — not dramatically, just a sudden overwhelming of the senses that he dealt with by sitting on the fake sand for a long time while Rocky waited nearby with the patient stillness of someone who understood that some things needed to be sat through.
The Eridian scientists had figured out how to feed him through a process that Grace found genuinely impressive. Once he could eat properly — once his body remembered what it was like to not be rationing everything — he started to feel like himself again. Slowly. In pieces.
He started teaching three months later.
-
The students were small and loud and intensely curious in the way that young things are when the universe is still entirely made of questions. They communicated in rapid musical clusters that his translator struggled to keep up with, and they had approximately no concept of sitting still, and they reminded Grace so strongly of seventh graders that he had to take a moment on the first day just to breathe through it.
He taught them the way he’d always taught — badly at first, then better, then with the kind of enthusiasm that is really just love with a lesson plan attached. He taught them about Earth science and Eridian science and the places where they overlapped, which were more numerous and stranger than either species had expected.
They called him something in Eridian that Rocky translated, with considerable satisfaction, as “the funny-shaped one who knows things.”
“That’s what my students called me on Earth too,” Grace said. “More or less.”
“Yes,” said Rocky. “Good title.”
-
Adrian watched all of this from a distance, at first.
Adrian was different from Rocky.
This was the first thing Grace understood about them — that the comparison was easy to make and completely wrong. Rocky was loud and curious and had the personal-space awareness of a very enthusiastic golden retriever. Adrian was quieter. More contained. They observed before they engaged, and when they engaged it was precise, considered, not a word or gesture wasted.
They were a better engineer than Rocky, which Rocky acknowledged freely and without embarrassment, which told Grace something important about both of them.
Adrian had designed the sea.
Grace knew this — Rocky had told him, when the Hail Mary still parked at Erid’s space station, Adrian builds your sea, wants to get right — but knowing it and standing on the shore and smelling the salt air and understanding that another Eridian had listened to Rocky’s descriptions and cared enough to get the smell right — that was different.
He’d tried to thank Adrian directly, early on. Adrian had made a short precise sound “it was an interesting engineering problem” and moved away, and Grace had understood that this was not coldness but just — the shape of them. Some people say important things sideways.
He didn’t push. He taught his students and walked his beach and had long conversations with Rocky about everything and nothing, and he let Adrian come to him in their own time.
They did, eventually. The way reserved people do — gradually and then all at once.
It started with questions about the sea. Small technical ones: had Grace found the salinity correct, was the wave frequency accurate, did the sand composition require adjustment. Grace answered them carefully and honestly, and Adrian listened with the focused attention of someone collecting data.
Then the questions became less technical.
What did Grace’s parents look like, question.
Grace had answered that one sitting on the beach, looking at the too-slow waves, and Adrian had sat beside him — not close, but present — and listened to the whole thing without moving.
After that they were something. Grace wasn’t sure what the Eridian word was. He wasn’t sure there was one. But Adrian started appearing when Grace taught, watching from the back of the room with the quiet attention of someone who found the whole thing genuinely interesting, and sometimes after class they would all three sit together on the beach — Grace in his chair, Rocky folded into his comfortable configuration, Adrian precise and still — and talk about nothing important until the amber sky darkened.
It felt, Grace thought, like something he hadn’t had in a very long time.
It felt like family.
-
Rocky brought it up on an ordinary day.
Grace was reviewing lesson plans. Adrian was working on something structural nearby, occasionally making small sounds of either satisfaction or frustration that Grace had learned to distinguish. Rocky was ostensibly helping but was mostly offering opinions that Adrian was ignoring with practiced patience.
“Grace,” Rocky said.
“Mm.”
“Rocky has been thinking.”
“Always dangerous.”
“Yes,” A pause. “Rocky thinks it is time for Christmas.”
Grace looked up.
Rocky was watching him with the steady attention he used when he’d already made a decision and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
“Rocky,” Grace said. “We’re on Erid. I don’t have—”
“Adrian,” Rocky said, turning to his mate, “Grace says Christmas needs food. Can we get food for him, question.”
Adrian stopped working. Looked at Rocky. Looked at Grace.
“What food, question,” Adrian said.
“Skittles,” Rocky said immediately. “M&Ms. Crackers. Beer in sealed bag. Rocky has comprehensive list.”
“You have been planning this,” Grace said.
“Yes,” said Rocky, without embarrassment. “Rocky has been planning for some time. Also—” he disappeared briefly into his workshop and returned with something Grace recognized immediately despite the Eridian materials, despite the different geometry, despite the three years that had passed since he’d last seen one.
A tree. Made from wire and xenonite and small reflective pieces arranged in the pattern of Tau Ceti’s system.
Grace stared at it.
“Rocky kept it,” he said.
“Rocky keeps important things,” Rocky said simply.
Adrian sourced the food through means Grace didn’t entirely follow but was grateful for — the Eridian equivalent of a supply request, apparently, which moved with surprising speed once Rocky had explained the purpose.
The Eridians had produced something approximating junk food — M&Ms, Skittles, crackers — none of them exactly right, but close enough that Grace found he didn’t mind. The beer came in a sealed bag, pressurized correctly, with a note from the procurement scientist that translated to “we are not sure what this is for but we hope it helps.”
They set up on the beach.
Rocky placed the tree where the light would catch it best, which it did, scattering fragments of reflection across the sand and into the slow amber air. Grace arranged the food on a flat rock that served as a table.
Adrian observed all of this with their usual quiet attention and then, without being asked, added something — a small structure beside the tree, geometric and precise, made from the same materials but in a different style. Complementary. Adjacent.
“Adrian made decoration,” Rocky said, with audible satisfaction.
“Is different style,” Adrian said. “Erid style. Both together.”
Grace looked at the two structures side by side, Rocky’s and Adrian’s, familiar and alien and together.
“It’s perfect,” he said.
Adrian made the short sound that he’d learned meant something between adequate and I’m glad and sat down beside the tree with the careful precision of someone trying out a new position and finding it acceptable.
Grace opened the beer. Rocky raised a claw. Adrian, after a moment’s consideration, raised one too.
“Merry Christmas,” Grace said.
“Merry Christmas, Grace,” said Rocky.
Adrian was quiet for a moment.
“Rocky taught me this,” they said carefully, in the slightly formal way they still sometimes used when speaking to him. “Merry Christmas, Grace.”
Grace looked at them — Rocky, exuberant and certain, Adrian precise and earnest, the two trees side by side on alien sand under an amber sky — and felt something shift quietly into place. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just the soft internal click of something that had been looking for where it belonged finally finding it.
He thought about his mother’s kitchen. His father and the board game instructions. The last Christmas, the drive, the May sunshine.
He thought about Skittles rationed on a xenonite wall. A map of Tau Ceti made from reflective scraps. Merry Christmas, Grace. One time, two times, three times, across the dark.
He thought: I never dreamed of a Christmas like this.
“Every year,” he said.
Rocky tilted. “Question?”
“We should do this every year,” Grace said. “All three of us.”
Rocky made the sound that meant, obviously, this was always the plan—Grace is slow sometimes, but gets there eventually.
Adrian made the sound Grace had learned, over careful months of listening, meant yes.
The little trees scattered light across the beach.
Erid had no sun to set, no natural light to paint the sky. Just the long, familiar dark. But here, on this small stretch of sand, there was light — made carefully, made on purpose, made for him.
Grace drank his beer, and ate his Skittles, and was home.