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It’s been a few days.
Too many days.
“Grace needs to sleep, statement.” Rocky is saying, skittering around Ryland with a frightful sort of urgency. “Sleep sleep sleep.”
Ryland hums some sort of vague agreement, but makes no actual moves to do so. He stays hovering in the bedroom doorway, arms crossed high over his chest, glasses dangling from one ear and dangerously close to falling off entirely. It’s hard to look away from the man currently occupying his bed. He doesn’t want to look away. If he looks away then this stranger, this miracle, might disappear, and Ryland will be left alone again with only the bitter dredges of too much time spent awake–
Rocky knocks into Ryland’s legs.
Ryland lurches forward, slapping a palm to the doorframe and just barely stopping himself from faceplanting into it.
“Rocky come on, we talked about–”
“Sleep sleep sleep!” Rocky says again, more insistent than before.
“I–” Ryland starts, then stops.
He swallows.
His throat is so dry.
Ryland’s eyes flick to Rocky for a brief moment. It’s hardly even long enough to really be considered a moment. Then he’s looking back at the man in his bed, eyes racking down the silhouetted lines of a body that’s covered with a quilt. He’s breathing much better than when Ryland first brought him here. Still shallow, but it’s not the gasping things from before. It’s more steady. More even. More like a person, and less like a fish who’d just been yanked out of the tide they’d been happily swimming in for years.
“...what if he wakes up?” Ryland asks softly.
This strange man was so terrified before his exhaustion took him.
Wild eyed.
Feral, almost.
He’d clung so tightly to Ryland that he'd left bruises behind. Bruises that are still buried beneath Ryland’s skin. They hurt to touch, ache all the way down to his bones, but there’s a macabre sort of delight that Ryland takes with them. They’re dark, mottled, little pockets of the night sky on his skin, proof that at least some aspects of this whole situation was real, that something touched Ryland and held the frick on, that it wasn’t just some insomnia driven fever dream of his.
Even if it felt like one.
“Rocky watch you both sleep,” Rocky says. “If Not-Grace wake up before Grace, I take care of him for you. Then Grace can go back to watching Not-Grace sleep.”
Ryland rolls his bottom lip between his teeth, still hesitant and unsure.
“I don't know, Rock, I–watching two people–”
It’s not that.
Not really.
It’s just.
Ryland wants to be there when this strange man wakes. He needs to be there. He was there for all the rest of it. Pulling him from the salt water of his little artificial ocean. Limping along the shoreline and back up to the house with the man struggling and fighting him every step of the way. Hauling this stranger’s near unconscious form into the bathroom, then–after he had gone completely unconscious–the bathtub, not even bothering to plug the drain as he turned the water on. Ryland just let it run, not wanting this man to sit in the blood and gore and viscera Ryland was frantically trying to scrub off of him. And then there was…well. Ryland has never had a particularly strong stomach, and he’s not quite sure how he managed to make it through the entirety of cleaning and wrapping the empty socket where an arm had obviously once been before retching into the bathroom sink.
If Ryland’s stranger manages to not die of infection or septic shot it’d be nothing short of divine intervention, honestly.
He is nowhere near out of the woods yet, and Ryland is terrified.
Yeah, he’s a doctor, but he’s not that kind of doctor.
There’s only so much Ryland can do before he doesn’t know what he’s doing at all, and to be perfectly honest they passed that line the moment Ryland found himself hauling a hauntingly beautiful man out of the ocean.
“I could ask Adrian to come watch sleep also, question?”
Ryland kind of hates how the idea makes him feel better.
“Well, if it's not too much of an ask–”
“I go check.” Rocky says, excited. “Rocky sure Adrian won't mind.”
And then Rocky is gone, off to get Adrian.
It loosens the vice around Ryland’s heart.
He really does need sleep. He can admit that, even if he doesn’t want to. He hasn’t gotten much these past few days, hardly anything more than snatches of cat naps on his couch. Ryland had been too worked up to sleep. Too worried to shut his brain off. Was still too worked up and worried, but his body was teetering dangerously close to making him sleep anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d passed out from exhaustion but, well.
He supposes it would be in everyone's best interest if he didn’t do that.
Ryland lets out a breath, then slowly, hesitantly, moves further into the room until he’s perching awkwardly on the edge of the bed.
This strange man that Ryland pulled from the sea doesn’t react.
His eyes stay closed.
His chest continues rising and falling in that shallow steadiness while the near invisible slits on the side of his neck twitch in time to each inhale and exhale.
Gills.
Ryland has no other word for them.
And they seem to be working overtime to make up for what his stranger’s lungs were lacking in.
Ryland reaches out.
He hovers a hand over those almost entirely unremarkable indented lines that were nestled perfectly parallel to the artery, then redirects his course to brush a stray lock of hair from his stranger’s face and tuck it behind his ear. Ryland hovers there for a moment, then slowly ghosts his fingertips along the man’s brow, coming to a stop at the mangled mess of skin along the ridge of his cheek.
Ryland doesn't know how this odd man got here.
Adrian doesn't know either.
And Rocky certainly doesn’t know.
They’re just as confused as Ryland is.
Because he shouldn't be here, and even if that weren't true, even if there were some feasible way for another human to be on Erid, clawing his way out of an artificial ocean in a sealed off biome isn’t…
Ryland shakes his head.
He is here, and that’s what matters.
Ryland’s stranger lets out a soft sigh, head lolling to rest more comfortably in Ryland’s palm.
But still, he does not wake.
“I…know you don’t know me. And I don't know you, but. Um.” Ryland sweeps his thumb underneath his stranger’s eye. The shadows there are dark and deep, looking far more like the bruises on Ryland’s arm than just the result of sleepless nights. “I’d really like you to not die, so. You know.”
Ryland drags his thumb a little lower, over the sharp angle of his jaw, stopping just above a slitted gill.
“If you wanna wake up soon that’d be pretty cool.” Ryland finishes softly.
His stranger, of course, does not answer.
“No pressure.” Ryland whispers.