Chapter Text
Instinctually, he sucked in a breath as the airlock hissed open. Not that it would really do anything in the event of an undesired depressurization but still. It had been a really, really long time since opening an airlock without an EVA suit meant anything but certain death. He glanced back at the modified suit, lying in a heap on the stone shelf where he’d left it, shedding it once the engineers had brought the airlock to a human-compatible atmosphere like a lizard sheds its skin. He could hear his heart pounding in his ears and he knew Rocky could too but telling his nervous system “hey, stop that,” still didn’t work no matter how many times he’d tried it.
“Grace?” Rocky trilled questioningly.
“I’m fine,” he choked out.
“Yes, Grace so fine, that’s why Grace have eyes closed like vision-perceiving at Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“That was one time,” he muttered, opening his eyes nonetheless— he hadn’t even realized he’d closed them— and oh. Wow. “It’s blue,” he breathed. He turned back to the engineers, all outfitted in their own xenonite balls. “The sky is blue!”
He couldn’t stop himself from laughing, tears coming to his eyes unbidden. The engineers chittered, elated by his joy, claws tapping at the bottoms of their enclosures excitedly.
“Go, go, go. Grace explore,” Rocky said, softly nudging the back of Grace’s thigh with one xenonite-clad leg. Rocky was gentle with him these days— always so gentle, after watching him fall dozens of times when he’d been relearning how to walk.
“Um,” he hesitated, blinking dazedly at the undulation of the waves. A gentle breeze—a breeze!—brushed his face. It smelled like salt. Or maybe that was just his tears; it was hard to tell by that point.
“Human Friend Grace find new nest inadequate, question?” Adrian asked in their official capacity as lead engineer.
“No, no of course not. God, it’s so—.” He wiped at the tears on his face with the sleeve of his sweater. Tendrils of soft white clouds drifted across the vast expanse of blue. How could he explain the concept of ‘undeserving’ to a people who’d given him so much and asked for so little in return?
“Come, come, come. Grace Rocky tour Grace new home!” Rocky announced before marching off into the biodome. The sound of xenonite on rock was well familiar to him by now, but once the stone gave to sand, the muted crunch crunch crunch of Rocky’s steps… Grace braced himself and followed, down the tunnel and out into the artificial sunshine.
He squinted his eyes against light, bringing a hand to his forehead, a makeshift visor as his eyes adjusted. He’d have to ask them to bring his hat down from Mary because there was sun now. Actual, honest to God, sun. Okay, artificial sun, technically, but it felt real on his skin, warm in the way he remembered a chilly spring day being warm, just a little edge of heat that pooled around him whenever the breeze stopped.
Closer to the water, Rocky skittered in circles, uncoordinated on the sand but delighted nonetheless. The texture of the sand was coarse, the kind of sand mixed with a healthy dose of pebbles. It reminded him of the beach trips they used to take to his grandpa’s cabin in Maine—the plane ride across the country thrilling, seemingly a universe away from the Bay Area—up until his grandpa died and they never went to that beach again.
“Grace like?” Rocky asked, dancing away from the waves as they threatened to dampen his legs. “Come, come, Grace try ocean. Grace will love, weird leaky wet just like Grace.”
He laughed and then laughed some more because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like this. He’d always wanted a brother, someone to make those trips from California to Maine—across the known reaches of his universe—a little less lonely. Life had a funny way of giving him what he wanted.
God, there was so much space.
Without thinking, he took off at a sprint down the beach. The sand gave way under his shoes and forced him to catch himself, so unused to shifting ground after so long in space and then in a subterranean hospital. His arms pumped wildly. His lungs heaved with exertion but it was the good kind of strain, the pure kind, not the panting that came from trying to walk across his hospital room under the watchful gaze of a team or Eridian doctors, not the struggle to catch his breath on the way from his bed to the bathroom while he was dying of starvation aboard the Hail Mary. He felt cleansed, the burn in his muscles scrubbing him raw. He felt hopeful, a sensation so sudden and so jarring that he hadn’t realized he’d lost hope a long, long time ago.
With a whirl, he flopped backward onto the sand, eliciting an uproar in the Eridians trailing behind him. Had running always been this hard? He was still new to gravity after so long and he was finding that he loved it. He loved being tethered to the earth by something greater than himself.
He laughed, giddy and breathless and so overjoyed he thought he might throw up. Was that normal? Last time he checked, happiness didn’t usually make humans nauseous but then again it was along time since he’d been around another human. Or been happy, for that matter. Man, there was something seriously wrong with him.
“Grace! Grace Grace Grace Grace Grace!” he heard Rocky exclaim. He craned his neck up as far as he could starfished across the sand. Rocky trotted across towards him like a clumsy, ungainly horse. Watching him, watching the fog (fog!) meandering around the bottom of the cliffs, Grace’s heart was so full he thought it would crowd out every organ in his chest.
Yup, happiness was definitely making him nauseous. Cool.
“Stupid Grace, straining stupid fragile human body, going to break frail little limbs like stupid idiot,” Rocky muttered as he approached. Grace was sure he’d save his most creative swearing for when he was undoubtedly within Grace’s limited range of hearing.
“Hey, pal,” he called, raising an arm as if he needed to make space for Rocky when there was so much space around them in every direction. Rocky tucked himself against Grace’s side nonetheless, folding his legs underneath him. Grace had compared it to a cat loafing once and only once. Now, he wrapped an arm around Rocky, both of them falling towards each other in the sand. Rocky was a spot of warmth in the cool air and Grace pressed his cheek against the xenonite.
“Good leaking, question?” His vents puffed with fluttering rapidity, clouding the top of his suit with steam.
“Good leaking, statement,” he managed to say, voice shakily dancing on the edge of a sob.
The other Eridians hung back at a respectful distance but Grace knew they were still well within earshot. Privacy on Erid, he’d learned, was mostly a polite illusion.
“Rocky, this is… it’s too much.”
Rocky wriggled back and forth, his approximation of shaking ‘no’. “Is not enough.”
Grace opened his mouth to reply.
“No arguments from Grace. Facts only from Rocky.”
“Okay,” Grace sniffled. He dragged the edge of his sleeve under his nose. Rocky bravely pretended he didn’t notice. “Okay.”
Even as the tears stung his eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to close them. Through sheen of Rocky’s suit, he watched the swirling fog, the sunlight refracting through the xenonite in a thousand unnameable colors.