Work Text:
When Grace opens his eyes, he’s alone.
Why is he alone? Rocky always watches him sleep, is always there when he wakes up. He takes it very seriously. So why isn’t he there now? There’s a very bad feeling in the back of Grace’s mind, only growing stronger, that something terrible has happened.
But there are no alarms, no flashes of red. The lights are dim, and shadows crawl across the room. Everything feels almost unnaturally still.
Grace tries to sit up, but gets winded when his chest meets resistance. He’s restrained to the bed, he realizes, thick straps around every part of his body tying him down. He thrashes around, trying to get any kind of leverage, but the straps don’t give. Did the Hail Mary restrain him for some reason? A system error of some kind? Panicked, he calls for Mary to release him, but nothing happens. He doesn’t even get a response of ‘Unknown command’ or ‘Permission is not granted for this request’. Just complete silence.
He tries calling for Rocky instead. If he’s around somewhere, he’ll definitely help Grace get free, right? He always tries to help when Grace is upset, and the restraints are really, really upsetting him. When he blinks, he sees flashes of grass, a fence of barbed wire, hands pressing him down. He can’t do this again. He tries even harder to break free and only manages to hurt himself, pulling muscles and getting bruises from the tightness of the straps.
And still, Rocky doesn’t answer. “Rocky, please, where are you?” His voice is so weak, barely a whisper even though he was trying to yell. Rocky can hear his heart, can’t he? Why isn’t he rushing in, worried about what’s happening to Grace? A thought keeps nagging at him again and again: Rocky is always, always there when Grace wakes up. So what happened?
Does he just not care anymore? Or is he really gone? Injured or dead or far away where Grace can’t reach him?
“Whatever I did, I’m sorry…” Grace chokes the words out through tears. “You can hate me as long as you’re alive… Please don’t be gone, please give me a sign that you’re still here…”
Only the electronic hums of the ship answer him. If there’s even a chance that Rocky is still alive and can’t answer because he’s incapacitated, then Grace has to help him. But every pull against the straps seems to tighten them, constricting further like a hungry snake until Grace can hardly breathe anymore. His jerky movements aren't even voluntary at this point - he knows he's just hurting himself more with the struggle - but he's terrified, overcome with a desperate need to escape whatever is happening here.
“I don’t want to die!”
He feels dizzy. He squeezes his eyes shut, and then -
- they open.
The scenery stays the same - soft bed, dim lights, the metallic walls of the ship - but as Grace’s chest heaves, just on the edge of hyperventilation, he realizes that he can move. No more restraints. Even so, he lacks the energy and mental focus to go anywhere, his heart and breathing quick with panic. His ears are ringing badly, but he can feel some kind of vibration, a gentle sensation all the way down his left side.
Grace lifts a trembling hand and makes contact with something smooth and warm. When his brain's visual processing catches up, he realizes that it's Rocky in his xenonite suit, curled up next to him in the same place he was when Grace had fallen asleep.
Right. Nightmare.
He makes a clumsy grab for one of Rocky's hands, and Rocky moves to get a proper grip. The ringing in his ears starts to die down, allowing him to hear that the source of those vibrations he's feeling is Rocky singing to him. The movement and sound work in tandem to reassure Grace that yes, Rocky is here with him, alive and safe.
The first time Grace had woken up from a nightmare in front of Rocky was the night before their fishing mission on Adrian. The stress had given him a messed-up and chaotic dream about both of them dying in some kind of massive explosion, and he’d gasped awake with tears in his eyes. This, of course, caused Rocky to have a minor conniption about why Grace’s sleep had been interrupted and why he was acting like he was injured, which forced Grace to explain what he knew about dreams and nightmares. The slip back into teaching mode had been oddly comforting, allowing him to calm down using a suitable distraction.
Eridians don’t dream, so the whole idea didn’t make much sense to Rocky and he still doesn’t have a perfect grasp of what it means. He seems to have internalized it as sometimes Grace’s sleep upsets him for some reason but it’s not illness or danger, just weird leaky space blob emotions, and that’s good enough for both of them.
And since nothing can ever be easy for Grace, he’s been having nightmares way more frequently lately. Apparently, once the brain registers that danger has passed, the emotions from said danger come flooding in, demanding to be properly processed. So Grace sleeping poorly has just become another part of their routine, adding more fuel to Rocky’s insistence on watching him more closely every night. If ‘watching more closely’ means ‘non-negotiable cuddling until Grace finally goes to sleep’.
It had, of course, been awkward to have someone else in his bed, but only at first. Now, with Rocky’s steady presence to ground him, his friend dipping the mattress with his weight and humming calming vibrations into his skin, Grace couldn’t be more grateful.
Rocky’s singing continues, a long tangle of comforting notes that seem directly designed for comfort. The translator isn’t picking any of it up, but some of it is in the shape of words that Grace recognizes. ‘Love’. ‘Safe’. ‘Together’. They pierce through the lingering anxiety and settle peacefully over the otherwise quiet room. The rhythm, Grace realizes, is timed to the approximate rate he should be breathing at, so he follows it the best he can. In and out, in and out, until everything feels less overwhelming.
With the panic subsiding, Grace can see that nothing seems to be wrong. The ship is fine, Rocky seems fine, Grace himself is fine… relatively speaking. Still, he’s compelled to ask in a hoarse voice, “Rocky, you’re okay, right?” He turns over to his side so he can see Rocky better and have easier access to touch him.
Rocky makes a concerned noise and shuffles closer so that Grace can hold him easier. “Yes. Rocky and Grace both safe, no danger.”
With that confirmation, and with Rocky held solidly in his arms, Grace can finally start to relax. “Good… I haven’t had a nightmare that bad in a long time. Sorry if I scared you.”
“Not scared. Grace nightmares are common.” Rocky taps Grace’s arm in a little one-two rhythm that he picked up from listening to Grace’s heartbeat all the time. His made-up Eridian word for ‘nightmare’ is a haphazard mashup of the words for ‘scary’, ‘sleep’, and ‘hallucination’. “But… worried. Worse than usual. What Grace dream about, question?”
Grace really doesn’t want to dwell on it too much, but he is begrudgingly aware that talking about these things helps. “I, um, I needed your help, so I was calling for you, but you didn’t answer. I thought maybe something happened to you, or… that you were leaving me alone on purpose…” He glosses over the part about being restrained, not yet willing to explain exactly why that would cause him so much panic.
“On purpose, question?” He sounds a little bit offended, and Grace winces. “Human brain stupid. Rocky not leaving Grace for any reason.”
“I know that, buddy, but dreams aren’t very reasonable.” Grace doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of hearing Rocky throw around those affirmations like he does. I’ll never leave you, I want to help you, I’m here for you, we’ll be safe and happy together. He wonders if that habit of Rocky’s is natural or if he developed it for Grace’s sake. “I didn’t dream about it because I’m worried that it’ll happen… it’s just that I would be really, really sad if it did.”
Rocky makes a chirping sound that doesn’t have a direct translation but is strongly associated with the general meaning of ‘the human is being dumb again’. “Grace worry lots about thing that will not happen. Silly. Brain poorly designed.” He raises one hand to tap Grace’s head gently. “Rocky always here whether Grace believe or not.”
Again, Rocky treats it like it’s so easy, like it’s a given, and Grace is once again taken aback by it. He wants to make the same promises to Rocky, but it’s hard, knowing that he’ll die before Rocky does no matter what either of them do. There is one thing he can promise, though. “It’s the same for me, Rocky. I’d never leave you on purpose, either.” He’d once had the option to return safely to Earth, but it would have meant leaving Rocky behind. He could never have made that choice.
“Obvious,” answers Rocky, but in a tone that suggests he’s very happy to hear it. One of the flaws that they both share is being very bad at accepting promises and compliments. “Grace sleep more now. Not enough.” As a way to emphasize this point, Rocky shifts them both around so that he’s holding Grace in their usual sleep-cuddling position, which immediately makes Grace feel more tired. He’s kind of like Pavlov’s dog, but trained to fall asleep with hugs instead of salivating at a bell.
It is, Grace thinks, kind of unfair that Rocky can do this to him so easily. He resists it just a little. “I don’t know, Rocky, I don’t want to have another dream like that.”
“Grace is safe. No matter what dream, will be okay because Rocky will be here when Grace wake up.” And again, for emphasis, he holds Grace a little tighter, taking away all of the tiny amount of willpower Grace was using to stay awake.
Rocky taps Grace’s arm three times, their usual pattern. Three taps says ‘I’m here’, the way they’d done when they’d first met and when they’d almost died. But Grace also remembers something his students used to say sometimes, one of those young people things that he didn’t know where they got it from: three squeezes means ‘I love you’. It had something to do with showing love differently when saying the words out loud is difficult.
Grace taps three times back as his eyes fall shut once again. I love you too.
The second time around, he dreams of being on a beach, laying in the sand as the fog rolls in. It’s unlike any beach he’s ever seen before - there’s something distinctly unearthly about the scenery - but it’s beautiful and it’s just the right temperature and it feels like home. Rocky’s there, too, sitting right by his side and going on about something sweet that Adrian did the other day.
It’s a future that hasn’t quite come into focus yet, but it’s a possibility. It’s a future that Grace desperately wants to be a part of.
Grace asks, “Will all of this be real someday?”
Without need of a translator, Rocky answers, “I’ll make sure of it.”
And Grace smiles, because he knows how much Rocky means it.